What Comes After by Steve Watkins Page A

Dad,

You would have been proud of me last night. I flattened the tires on a disgusting P of the P.
    I did homework, exercised on the floor, and spent hours looking out the tiny window at the barn and the goats. Book must have been the one to milk them, and from the sounds of things — the bleating and complaining — the girls weren’t happy about it. I bet they wondered where I was, and why I wasn’t there, and why brick-handed Book pulled so mean and hard on their teats.
    I couldn’t let myself think about that too much, though, so I started reading the new book Mrs. Roosevelt had assigned,
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
It was pretty depressing. The heroine, Janie Starks, marries a man who is nice to her at first but then gets jealous and won’t let her hang out on their front porch and visit with anyone. When she finally finds a man she truly loves, the guy gambles away their money. Then there’s a hurricane, and a flood. Then Janie’s man gets bitten by a rabid dog, so she has to shoot him. The man, not the dog. It breaks her heart.
    It was a short novel for all that, and after I finished reading, I lay on the floor with my legs up on the bed and cried until my eyes ached. I felt as if my insides had been hollowed out.
    Aunt Sue finally let me out Monday morning for school. We didn’t speak. She acted as if nothing had happened, but I was seething again by then, determined to do something. I had seen stacks of papers — mostly bills — balanced on a spindly table in the downstairs hall. I waited until she left for work that night, then rifled through until I found the paperwork for the truck. There were loan documents and payment forms and an authorization letter from a lawyer who I assumed must be the guardian, or estate lawyer, or something.
    I skipped the bus after school the next day and hiked into Craven, which was a regular Mayberry, with wide streets downtown, an old Belk department store, smelly diners, offices with striped awnings. The guardian’s office was wedged between two taller buildings, and had a redbrick facade, just like everything else in Craven. The ceilings were so low and there was so much dark wood paneling that it could have been the inside of a log cabin. I waited half an hour before the secretary walked me back to see the lawyer. His name was Mr. Trask, and he looked like a beaver. His black suit coat even stuck out in the back like a big beaver’s tail when he stood up to greet me.
    I introduced myself, or started to.
    “Oh, I know who you are, Miss Wight,” he said, easing himself back into his black chair. “I have heard from your aunt. All about the situation.”
    “‘The situation’?” I wondered if Aunt Sue had already told him what I’d done to the Tundra — if that’s the situation he meant.
    “Yes,” he said. “And what brings you here today?”
    I sat in a straight-backed chair. “I came to talk about the truck.”
    Mr. Trask blinked several times, as if adjusting to the dim light. “If you’re asking whether your aunt had approval for the purchase of the truck from the estate — a forty-percent down payment — then the answer is yes.” He pulled a folder from a desk drawer and thumbed through the papers. “Miss Allen needed reliable transportation to care for you at her farm. It was a reasonable use of the estate funds. She will be responsible for making her own monthly payments on the balance.”
    “But shouldn’t I get to have a say in what she buys, since it’s my dad’s money?” I asked.
    Mr. Trask blinked again. “You aunt is your legal guardian. If she chooses to consult with you, that’s her decision. She did consult with me — about the purchase of the truck, and about the other purchases as well.”
    “But why did you approve those?”
    “Quality of life,” he said, with what I assumed was an attempt at a smile. His mouth seemed to rise a little on his face. “
Your
quality of life,” he added.
    “But I don’t need any of that