Flowering Judas(122)

The girl looked down at Penny’s half-full garbage bag. “Two hours,” she said.

“What?” Penny said.

“Two hours,” the girl said. “Leave it here and come back in two hours. I can’t be any faster than that.”

“Oh,” Penny said. “Yes.” She fingered the plastic of the bag. Could she really do this? It felt extravagant in a bad way, paying somebody else to do your laundry. On the other hand, she hated doing laundry. She hated even more sitting in the laundromat waiting for the laundry to be done. The girl was just standing there, chewing gum. Penny had to do something.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll be back in two hours.”

The girl handed her a plain slip of paper and a ballpoint pen. “Put your name and number on this,” she said. “That’s just in case I have to call you. I’ve never had to call anybody all the time I’ve been here, but that’s what I’m supposed to do. Get you to write your name and number.”

Penny wrote down her name and number. She passed the little slip of paper back to the girl. Then she just wanted to be out of there. She left the laundromat and went back across the parking lot to her car. She didn’t like this parking lot, and she didn’t like this shopping center. Too many of the stores were out of business.

Penny turned the car’s engine on. She turned the air conditioning on. She turned the radio on. She needed to get up and get out of there, but she had no idea where to go. Usually, when she felt like this, she went in to school. Today, she didn’t want to be there.

She had just about decided that she was going crazy in some novel and definitely peculiar way when the radio station she was listening to went to the news, and she was faced with Althy Michaelman yet again.

“Sources that cannot be named inside the Mattatuck Police Department,” the announcer said, “tell us that police are proceeding on the assumption that the two deaths discovered this morning are linked to the disappearance and death of Chester Morton, a local man who…”

Penny sat up straight in the driver’s seat. That didn’t make sense, did it? How could those two deaths be related to Chester Morton? How could anything be related to Chester Morton?

Penny looked out the windshield into the parking lot. It was empty. It really was. Two crazed yabbos from the trailer park or the welfare office weren’t going to come running in to mug her if she got out of the car.

She got out of the car, went around to the trunk, and opened it. She was still carrying most of her stuff. She hadn’t thought to unpack it just because she finally had a room she could count on.

She rummaged through the files of papers she kept in the back of the trunk space—really, all her “stuff” was paperwork from teaching; she owned practically nothing she wouldn’t be able to throw out if she ever decided to give it all up to join the roller derby.

She asked herself what had made her think of the roller derby, and then she found it, the file she kept on Haydee Michaelman. Penny kept files on all her students. It was the only way she could keep track of whether or not they were making progress.

She found the first of the papers Haydee had written, the personal narrative, and looked through it. It was all about her mother getting pregnant at sixteen. Penny looked some more and found the copy of the journal entry where Haydee had written about being taken into foster care. She had been six at the time. Penny read through it. Then she took the two papers, closed the trunk, and got back into the driver’s seat of the car.

She put the papers out across the dashboard. She leaned forward and read the journal entry.

For me, the really hard thing about the way I grew up isn’t the stuff that happened so much. It’s that I never seem to feel the way people expect me to feel. When the social workers came and took me away, it was traumatic. I cried for days. But it’s not what I really remember. It’s not what scared me the most. That was a couple of days earlier, when the social workers took my baby brother away. They took him first, and then they came back for me. And I knew they were going to come back. I knew when they took him that I was going to be next, and for that whole week I hid in my closet at night because I was afraid I was going to wake up and be snatched.

Penny rubbed the side of her nose with her finger. Althy Michaelman was sixteen when she had her first child, but she must have been thirty-four when she had Haydee, and forty or close to it when she had this baby brother. And there was something else, too, in some of the other journal entries, something about older brothers Haydee didn’t know because she’d never met them.