The Lost Husband (15 page)

She shrugged and looked up to meet my gaze. “He deserved it.”

And right there, I believed her.

She stood up, and I put my arm around her shoulders. “Come on, ladybug,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

In the car on the ride back, I knew that we were waist-deep in a teachable moment. Except I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be teaching.

“Abby, you can’t just hit people when they’re rude to you,” I said. “That’s not how we treat people. Hitting is never okay.”

Abby didn’t say anything. She was still working on her lollipop.

“Who is this kid, anyway?” I asked.

“His name is Jackie Chan. He was held back last year.”

I paused. “His name is
Jackie Chan
?”

Abby shrugged. “That’s what he says.”

“What do the teachers call him?”

“Jimmy Gaveski.”

“And he’s teasing you?”

Abby shrugged.

“What is he teasing you about?”

Abby just gave me a look. We both knew what he was teasing her about.

“Did you talk to your teacher?” I asked.

“She said that if she didn’t see him do it, she couldn’t discipline him.”

“And?”

“And she never saw him do it because he’s very sneaky.”

“What does he do?”

“He calls me ‘Limper.’ ”

Oh, God
. “How would he even notice that?” I demanded, more to the universe than to Abby.

“I think he’s paying close attention,” Abby said.

I took a breath. “What do you say?”

“I say, ‘Incorrect! I am not limping! I just have a little trouble walking.’ ”

My knuckles were white on the wheel, but I kept my voice level. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“Because you’d freak out.”

“No! I wouldn’t!”

“Like you’re doing right now.”

“I am not freaking out right now,” I said. “If you want to see freaking out, I will show you freaking out!”

“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to see it.”

“I’m going to talk to your teacher tomorrow morning before school.”

Abby shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “But she can’t really do anything.”

“We’ll see about that,” I said, just as we pulled through Jean’s gate.

O’Connor was tinkering with the tractor, and Abby rolled down the window as we slowed to a stop near him.

“O’Connor!” she shouted.

“Hey, Mamacita,” he said without looking up.

“Got him in the solar plexus!”

Now he looked up. “Nice work!”

“And then he peed in his pants!”

The glee in her voice was disturbing to me, but clearly not to O’Connor.

“You know what you can call him now?” O’Connor said.

Abby shook her head.

“PeePants,” O’Connor said.

Abby laughed first, then quieted. “But I’ll only do that,” she said, “if he calls me something mean first.”

“That’s fair,” O’Connor said.

When Abby opened the car door to step out, the goats surrounded her. I wasn’t sure in that moment if I should punish her by sending her to her room for the afternoon or just let it all slide. I stopped her at the running board and said, “Abby?”

She turned back. “Yes?”

“You are not allowed to hit that boy again,” I said. “Don’t let Jimmy Gaveski’s bad behavior change who you are.”

Abby sighed back at me with a weariness beyond her years and said, “Okay, Mom. I’ll really try not to.”

“And Abby?” I said.

“Yes?”

“Way to stand up for yourself.”

Abby was right about her teacher. She really couldn’t do much. It was her first year of teaching, for one thing, and she looked like she was about fourteen years old, for another. She was overburdened as it was and hardly equipped to monitor every conversation the children had. I got the feeling during our emergency next-morning meeting that the teacher was on Abby’s side—but she really wasn’t much of an ally.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Moran,” she said as she walked me toward the door. “She’s not the first gawky child to be teased.”

I spun toward her. “She’s not
gawky
!” I said. “She has an injury.” I gave that a second to sink in, then I went on, “From the same car wreck that killed her father.”

The teacher’s eyes went wide.

“We’ve done years of physical therapy, and she’s worked harder to get where she is than Jimmy Gaveski will ever work in his whole life, and so the last thing on earth she deserves is some pudgy little bastard with a martial-arts complex taking out his self-esteem issues on her without even one adult stepping in.”

It had come out more forcefully than I’d intended.

“I’m sorry,” the teacher said, and she looked like she meant it. “Of course.”

“So if you wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on her,” I said then, “I’d appreciate it.”

“I will,” the teacher said, and the true sympathy on her face
made me feel, on the drive home afterward, like she might even actually do it.

“She might,” Jean said that night after the kids were in bed as we discussed the matter and washed dinner dishes. “Or she might not.”

“Well, it can’t hurt to ask.”

“No,” Jean agreed.

“I have to do something,” I went on. “Just because O’Connor’s a brute doesn’t mean Abby should be.”

There was a creak on the floorboards then, and we both turned to see O’Connor standing just outside the screen door. He coughed.

I looked down.

“You’re still here?” Jean asked.

“Just finishing up a few things,” he said.

“Coffee?” Jean offered, glancing at me with a maybe-he-didn’t-hear-you shrug. Before I knew it, he was standing beside me with a cup, making sure I knew he had heard me.

“It’s not a bad thing for her to know how to defend herself,” O’Connor said then, looking right at me.

“No,” I said, keeping my eyes on the sink full of dishes. “On the other hand, I don’t want her beating people up.”

“That kid PeePants was asking for it,” O’Connor said.

The way he flat out refused to consider any nuances of the situation made me glare at him. “Violence doesn’t make things better,” I said. “It just always makes things worse.”

“You have to stand up to bullies,” he said.

“I just want that kid out of the school,” I said.

“Not going to happen,” O’Connor said. “Where would they even send him?”

“Maybe I’ll take Abby out of school,” I said then. “Maybe I’ll homeschool her.”

“And who would milk my goats?” Jean asked.

“They’re pretty smart,” I said. “They could probably milk themselves.”

“The point is,” O’Connor said, “Abby handled it. She did fine.”

“But she shouldn’t have to!” I said.

“Maybe not,” O’Connor said with a shrug.

“What does it do to her self-esteem to be called Limper?” I said.

O’Connor tilted his head. “What does it do to beat the crap out of the kid who said it?”

I wasn’t really sure. The only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to see this boy change her. He didn’t have the right to do that. “I don’t know,” I said. “And I don’t really want to find out.”

“I’m betting you won’t find out,” O’Connor said. “It’ll be months before that kid even teases his own shadow.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said as the screen door slapped closed behind him. “I really do.”

And he
was
right. For about three weeks.

Abby confirmed, every day after school under intense questioning, that PeePants Gaveski was no longer teasing her, or even speaking to her.

“Promise me,” I said.

“I promise,” she said. “He just sits under the bleachers.”

“You’d tell me if he bothered you, right?”

“Yes,” she promised.

Even after he stopped hiding under the bleachers, he didn’t talk to her.

“He glares at me a lot,” she said. “But he doesn’t tease me.”

After a while I backed off. I figured she’d let me know if something happened. I was tired of hovering over the topic so obsessively. I was tired of this kid PeePants’s constant presence in our minds. I didn’t want to go looking for trouble. I just let the idea of him float away.

And then Abby got sent home for using the
f
-word.

On the drive home, catching her eyes in the rearview mirror, I said, “I didn’t even know you knew the
f
-word.”

“O’Connor taught it to me,” Abby said.

“Did he?” I said. “Did he tell you what it means?”

“No,” Abby said. “He just said it’s the worst of the worst.”

“It’s a bad one,” I said.

“He said I wasn’t allowed to hit PeePants Gaveski with my fists anymore, but that I could hit him with my words.”

“Did he?”

Abby nodded. “Words are powerful,” she explained.

“I agree,” I said. “What was it exactly that you said to PeePants?”

Abby sat up a little straighter. Her voice was plain. “I said, ‘Back the fuck off.’ ”

I shook my head. “What?”

She shrugged. “Except I said it very menacingly.”

“Did O’Connor teach you the word
‘menacingly,’
too?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“And what did PeePants do when you said these words to him?”

“Well,” Abby said, “he backed the fuck off. Or at least he started to. Then the teacher swooped in and took me to the office.”

“And you said this because he was teasing you?”

She nodded, with one small correction: “Taunting.”

“What was he doing?”

“He kept saying, over and over, ‘Limper, Limper! Now you are a blimper.’ ”

“That’s the stupidest taunt I’ve ever heard,” I said. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know,” Abby said.

“Did he get in trouble, too?”

“No. Just me.”

“Why just you?”

Abby was gazing out the window. “I guess because
‘fuck’
is a bad word, but
‘blimper’
isn’t.”

Where had the teacher been? Why was
Abby
getting sent to the principal’s office? Is bad language worse than picking on a kid with an almost imperceptible limp? Was this the kind of world we had to live in?

Abby had been thinking about it, too. “Also,” she said, “I think he might be kind of mad because Limper has not caught on as a nickname for me the way PeePants has caught on for him. Lots of people are calling him PeePants now.”

“And what are they calling you?”

She shrugged. “Just Abby.”

After a bit she said, “Are you mad at me?”

“No, babe,” I said. “I’m mad at O’Connor for teaching you that word. And I’m mad at your teacher for not protecting you. And I’m mad at that little asshole Jimmy Gaveski. But I’m not mad at you.”

“Mom?” Abby said.

“What?” I said.

“I think
‘asshole’
might be a bad word, too.”

Chapter 13
 

Abby getting picked on was not something I knew how to handle. It had never happened before. I’d always worried about it happening, and dreaded the idea, and fretted over what I would do, but I’d never actually had to do anything.

Now that the moment was here, there didn’t appear to be much I
could
do. Even if I’d figured out a solution, there would have been no way to put it into practice. We were at the mercy of the teachers and administrators, not to mention budget cuts and limitations. Despite several meetings with the principal and the teacher and the PE coaches, it just didn’t seem to be physically possible to monitor this kid’s behavior toward Abby at all times—which was exactly what I wanted to do. She was under strict instructions to report any further teasing to the teachers, but what exactly the teachers were going to do about it remained unclear.

I wasn’t sure what to do, either, other than completely reverse my policy on how much people at school should know about
Abby’s health. The teachers now had photocopied packets, complete with diagrams and photographs, that summed up her medical history. They’d all met with me to discuss every nuance of Abby’s triumphs and challenges. I had even offered to come and explain all about it to the class—an offer that was politely rejected.

“Don’t you think it would have helped?” I demanded of O’Connor one day in late March on the drive back from the farmers’ market. Jean was still insisting that he come with me, even after several weeks, but I wasn’t totally sure why. It wasn’t rocket science. And Jessica Boone had not been back to the market, much to my relief.

“You’re not ready to go it alone,” Jean had said with finality. “O’Connor will keep you company.”

And so here we were again, driving back from another uneventful trip. I didn’t need him, it was true. But I did enjoy having him around. I never would have asked for him to be there, and maybe Jean knew that, but I was glad she made him go.

Even though, of course, he made me crazy. Like the way he thought he knew what to do about Abby. After I told him about how badly I wanted to go to school every day at recess and stand on the playground giving that kid the hairy eyeball, O’Connor said, “It’s a wonder you haven’t literally exploded from worry.”

“You don’t have kids,” I said. “You can’t understand.”

“I don’t have kids,” he said, “but I have loved ones. I understand that.”

“It’s not the same,” I said.

“Sure it is,” he said. “Love is love.”