All the Ugly and Wonderful Things(81)

On the day we got the news that Kellen had pled guilty, we found out what happened to his assets. There wouldn’t be any restitution. No “making that bastard pay.” Kellen had already signed everything over to Wavy: his house, his business, his bank account, plus half-a-dozen vehicles, including a 1956 Harley-Davidson Panhead.

It stuck in my mother’s craw for a long time. She wanted revenge, but no one had to force him to do it. I think that’s why she went on trying to get revenge against Wavy. Mom insisted everything had to be sold and the money put in a trust for Wavy, which Mom would control. Kellen’s business partner bought out his share, Mom found a buyer for the house and some of the vehicles. She wouldn’t even let Wavy go to the house and retrieve anything of Kellen’s. Wavy didn’t argue. Nothing belongs to you, she always said.

When Mom found a buyer for the motorcycles, though, Wavy put her foot down. In the middle of our driveway, as Mom tried to leave for the lawyer’s office to sign the paperwork.

“Mine!” Wavy screamed it until my mother gave in. How could she do anything else, with Wavy standing in front of our house, shrieking that one word at the top of her lungs over and over, until the neighbors came out and stared? Wavy got to keep the Panhead. A mechanic from the motorcycle shop in Garringer delivered it and wheeled it into a corner of the garage. Wavy and Kellen’s helmets were in the saddlebag.

Watching her run her hand over the gas tank, the mechanic said, “Maybe she’ll ride it someday,” but her feet didn’t even touch the ground on either side of the bike. I knew she’d let it rust on rotten tires before she let someone besides Kellen ride it. Still, she kept the chrome polished and changed the oil. Every once in a while, we’d hear the sound of its engine, started and revved a few times in the empty garage before she turned it off. It took her whole body weight to kick start it, but she could do it. Once a year, a mechanic from the local bike shop came to give it a tune-up. Wavy wasn’t allowed to pay for that out of her trust fund, so she got an after-school job doing typing.

That, though, that all came after the worst of the circus had ended. The real circus was the lawyers and reporters and total strangers invading our house. Like Wavy and Donal’s paternal grandmother, who’d never met them, but wanted them to come live with her in South Carolina.

If it had been up to Dad, he would have let them go. He and Mom fought all the time. About the money spent, about Mom’s obsession with the dead-end investigation into Aunt Val’s murder, and the endless trips to Powell. About Wavy and her behavior. The sneaking out, the not eating, the not talking, and the strange surprises that made their way into our house, like a baby raccoon living in Wavy’s laundry hamper for a month. All the things that had sent Wavy to live with Grandma in the first place, but Grandma wasn’t an option anymore.

The whole thing upset Dad’s schedule. When Mom was in Powell, he was supposedly making sure we had dinner and went to school. It turned out to be harder than it looked when Mom did it, and we mostly took care of ourselves.

“This is destroying our family,” Dad said about once a week.

Mom’s response was always, “They are part of our family.”

“Look at what it’s doing to your daughters and tell me that.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what it was doing to us, but my grades the first quarter of my sophomore year were awful. Leslie even got a C in Geometry that quarter. Those first few months it was so stressful, sharing space with Donal, who was shell-shocked, and Wavy, who was actively hostile.

At school everyone wanted to know about my aunt and uncle. Were they really drug dealers? Were they murdered? I avoided those questions as much as I could. That was how I made friends with Angela, who had, it seemed like a thousand years ago, come to our house with her sister Jana and read Forever out loud. She wasn’t in my circle, too pretty and popular, but in the locker room, changing for PE class, when the other girls quizzed me, Angela said, “Leave her alone. It’s none of your business.” When she saw me alone in the cafeteria, she would gesture for me to sit with her friends.

Whatever it did to Leslie and me, the circus tore Mom and Dad apart. On our neat little suburban street, mine were the first parents I knew to get divorced.

The last thing Dad said to us as a family was, “I can’t do this anymore.” He should have said, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” because he could have kept doing it. Leslie and I did. It wasn’t like he offered to take us with him when he moved out.

Ironically, he left just as the circus was winding down.

Two guys, one in a suit and one with a big black medical case, showed up with legal papers to get a blood sample from Donal. Leslie and I were teenaged and indignant, saying, “They can’t do that, can they?”

It turned out they could, because Sean Quinn had filed for custody, claiming he—not Liam—was Donal’s father. The evidence had been there the whole time. Aunt Val had always said that Donal’s birthday was January 21, but his birth certificate said March 21. Liam couldn’t have been his father, because he was in jail when Aunt Val got pregnant.

Some judge we never met decided Donal should be with Sean.

The last night of the circus that was our lives, a lawyer came to pick up Donal, because Sean Quinn was a coward. He wasn’t brave enough to face Wavy and watch her hug Donal good-bye. She shook all over, while Donal cried and tried to comfort her.