Orphan Train(17)
I look over at Dutchy, and he looks back at me. Mrs. Scatcherd knows as little as we do about whether we’ll be chosen by people who will treat us with kindness. We are headed toward the unknown, and we have no choice but to sit quietly in our hard seats and let ourselves be taken there.
Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011
Walking back to the car, Molly sees Jack through the windshield, eyes closed, grooving out to a song she can’t hear.
“Hey,” she says loudly, opening the passenger door.
He opens his eyes and yanks the buds out of his ears. “How’d it go?”
She shakes her head and climbs in. Hard to believe she was only in there for twenty minutes. “Vivian’s an odd one. Fifty hours! My God.”
“But it’s going to work out?”
“I guess so. We made a plan to start on Monday.”
Jack pats her leg. “Awesome. You’ll knock out those hours in no time.”
“Let’s not count our chickens.”
She’s always doing this, crabbily countering his enthusiasm, but it’s become something of a routine. She’ll tell him, “I’m nothing like you, Jack. I’m bitchy and spiteful,” but is secretly relieved when he laughs it off. He has an optimistic certainty that she’s a good person at her core. And if he has this faith in her, then she must be all right, right?
“Just keep telling yourself—better than juvie,” he says.
“Are you sure about that? It’d probably be easier to serve my time and get it over with.”
“Except for that small problem of having a record.”
She shrugs. “That’d be kind of badass, though, don’t you think?”
“Really, Moll?” he says with a sigh, turning the ignition key.
She smiles to let him know she’s kidding. Sort of. “‘Better than juvie.’ That would make a good tattoo.” She points to her arm. “Right here across my bicep, in twenty-point script.”
“Don’t even joke,” he says.
DINA PLUNKS THE SKILLET OF HAMBURGER HELPER ON THE TRIVET in the middle of the table and sits heavily in her chair. “Oof. I’m exhausted.”
“Tough day at work, huh, babe?” Ralph says, as he always does, though Dina never asks him about his day. Maybe plumbing isn’t as exciting as being a police dispatcher in thrill-a-minute Spruce Harbor. “Molly, hand me your plate.”
“My back is killing me from that crappy chair they make me sit in,” Dina says. “I swear if I went to a chiropractor, I’d have a lawsuit.”
Molly gives her plate to Ralph and he drops some casserole on it. Molly has learned to pick around the meat—even in a dish like this, where you can hardly tell what’s what and it’s all mixed together—because Dina refuses to acknowledge that she’s a vegetarian.
Dina listens to conservative talk radio, belongs to a fundamentalist Christian church, and has a “Guns don’t kill people—abortion clinics do” bumper sticker on her car. She and Molly are about as opposite as it is possible to be, which would be fine if Dina didn’t take Molly’s choices as a personal affront. Dina is constantly rolling her eyes, muttering under her breath about Molly’s various infractions—didn’t put away her laundry, left a bowl in the sink, can’t be bothered to make her bed—all of which are part and parcel of the liberal agenda that’s ruining this country. Molly knows she should ignore these comments—“water off a duck’s back,” Ralph says—but they irk her. She’s overly sensitive to them, like a tuning fork pitched too high. It’s all part of Dina’s unwavering message: Be grateful. Dress like a normal person. Don’t have opinions. Eat the food that’s put in front of you.
Molly can’t quite figure out how Ralph fits into all of this. She knows he and Dina met in high school, followed a predictable football player/ cheerleader story arc, and have been together ever since, but she can’t tell if Ralph actually buys Dina’s party line or just toes it to make his life easier. Sometimes she sees a glimmer of independence—a raised eyebrow, a carefully worded, possibly ironic observation, like, “Well, we can’t make a decision on that till the boss gets home.”
Still—all things considered, Molly knows she has it pretty good: her own room in a tidy house, employed and sober foster parents, a decent high school, a nice boyfriend. She isn’t expected to take care of a passel of kids, as she was at one of the places she lived, or clean up after fifteen dirty cats, as she was at another. In the past nine years she’s been in over a dozen foster homes, some for as little as a week. She’s been spanked with a spatula, slapped across the face, made to sleep on an unheated sun porch in the winter, taught to roll a joint by a foster father, fed lies for the social worker. She got her tatt illegally at sixteen from a twenty-three-year-old friend of the Bangor family, an “ink expert-in-training,” as he called himself, who was just starting out and did it for free—or, well . . . sort of. She wasn’t so attached to her virginity anyway.