Chapter 12 – Our little home
The school bell echoed in the narrow hallways of Peach Creek High School, announcing to the whole world that the weekend had officially begun. Within fragments of a second following the rapid clanging of the bell, hollow wooden doors pushed open and eager students flooded the corridors, braced for the release of what had been a long week for essentially everyone.
Eddy and Ed strolled out of their remedial math class, Eddy sporting his signature school-induced scowl and Ed as giddy as ever. They found it rather difficult to navigate the confines of the packed hallway, especially considering how short Eddy was.
"Weekend is here Eddy!" Ed shouted out in his normal, happy-go-lucky way, "Huge monster movie marathon on Saturday, all night long a-ha-ha"
"I don't get how you can watch those things all day, Lumpy!" Eddy exclaimed, throwing his stubby arms up, "the same thing happens in them over and over, and I'm pretty sure that stuff rots your brain…whatever is left of it…"
"Mind melting for Ed!" Ed shouted while gripping his rather flat head. Eddy simply shook his head and the two made their way into the April sunshine as they pushed open the glass doors that lead to the bus-circle in the front of the school. The strong odor of diesel fuel curled along the oil-stained asphalt and whipped around in the late-spring wind, with the chorus of airbrakes releasing from the buses like a choir on high. It was most definitely Friday, with every last kid in Peach Creek cramming themselves onto the yellow buses, eager as anything to get the hell out of there. There was nothing but anarchy and chaos, with bodies pushed upon bodies and backpacks smacking each other in fits of anger. Pencils were known to fly on occasions, and it is reported that some kids were lost in the vast crowds swarming the buses on some Fridays, never to be found again. For these reasons, Double D typically avoided the crowds entirely by walking home instead, using the time to enjoy the quiet civility of suburban life. Ed and Eddy, however, were far too lazy for any of those formalities, and instead decided that the bus was the perfect mode of transportation to save them fifteen minutes of walking. That is, until Eddy could get his brother's car to actually run (and until he could successfully pass the driving test for that matter).
"Geez, it's like a madhouse out here, Lumpy…" Eddy said as he and Ed attempted to wade through the girthy crowd surrounding their bus home, Bus # 33.
Eddy peered with his squinted eyes into one of the glimmering windows of the bus, the reflections of sunlight nearly blinding him. He saw the faint glimpse of a round head with prickly hair surrounding it, astonished to say the least.
"Hey Ed, is that Jonny on the bus…?" he asked, tugging on his friend's jacket-sleeve.
Ed also squinted his eyes and looked toward the window which Eddy had pointed at. Staring through sunlight was no problem for Ed, he considered staring at the sun to be a regular pastime. He too saw the round, bulbous head and the innocent grin of Jonny, the only person on the bus at that point. The folding bus doors and not even been opened yet, but there sat Jonny just as happy as ever.
"How the hell did baldy get on that thing already!" Eddy said, angrily stomping the ground. "It's not fair, he should have to wait like the rest of us!"
Finally one loud air brake sounded out and the folding doors of the bus opened up with force and vigor, the diesel smell now mingling with the dry-rotted rubber and cracked vinyl of the seats. Ed and Eddy were some distance away from the door, with the sea of people beginning to pile on.
"This sucks Ed, we need to get on there to get the good seat in the back! Hey Lumpy…" Eddy said, pulling his friend down and whispering into his ear, "Let em have one of your famous crowd pleasers…" as a smile creeped across his face.
"Sure thing Eddy!" Ed shouted out. He puffed up his chest, patted his feet a few times, and proceeded to let out the most righteous and holy burp ever produced from a human soul. It reverberated and echoed off the brick walls of the school and formed a huge gap in the crowd as people proceeded to pinch their noses and cover their face. It was as effective as a tear-gas container, and Eddy and Ed marched proudly up to the black steps of the bus and climbed on board.
"Oh hey there guys! Happy Friday, huh?" Jonny said to them with a wave, his signature happy mood shining through.
"Oh, uh, tell me something baldy, how did you get on here so early!" Eddy asked him, pointing his finger directly into Jonny's poor chest.
"Oh it's not because of me, Eddy; it's because of Plank. You see, he has massive crowd anxiety, so I showed the bus driver a note and I'm allowed to get on five minutes before the bell rings. Pretty cool, huh?" Jonny said, ending with a smile.
Eddy simply stared at him for a few seconds, blinking a few times and just a blank expression on his face. His eye twitched up and down slightly, and Ed swiped his hand in front of his face. Eventually Ed just picked up Eddy and put him under his arm.
"Ookie dokie let's sit you down mister…" Ed said as he walked back to the back of the bus and sat Eddy down next to him. Eddy simply sat in his comatose position, until finally he was slapped by Ed and snapped out of his state.
While the two Eds had been huddling around bus #33, the three Kanker sisters circumnavigated the growing crowd, choosing instead to walk home. As they came out of those heavy glass doors which sat perched in-front of the schoolhouse, Lee stretched her arms out and embraced the quiet dignity of the warm spring air.
"Ahh, would you just feel this beautiful day, girls…?" she said, taking in a deep breath with a heavily, relaxed sigh following.
"Oh put your arms down, Lee. Nobody wants to smell you after a long day of school…" May said, pinching her nose and waving her arm.
"Don't be jealous of my perfume, May…, not everyone can be as lovely as me all the time…" Lee said with a complete air of sarcasm, flapping her hand out in an uppity fashion.
"Don't you mean mom's perfume…?" Marie responded, chuckling lightly behind her left hand. May slowly caught on to what she said and started chuckling along with her sister.
"What was that…?" Lee darted around, staring down the two sisters with her hidden eyes.
"Oh nothing, nothing…" Marie answered, pushing her bangs slightly with her hand.
The girls came upon the growing crowd that surrounded the buses, and they steered clear of whatever was happening around them. Lee prodded her sisters to the periphery of the gathering and they slowly dipped around the outliers. May caught the faintest glimpse of Ed, and she silently smirked, hiding her girlish crush with her right hand and a blush of her cheeks. Her crush on "Big Ed" was one which only the pages of her diary understood very well. She scribbled for hours on end about what could be, if it could be. Page after page would be filled up with little hearts with the word Ed concealed within them. She held his image within her own heart as well, and she understood that it was likely nothing more than schoolgirl fantasy. But a girl can dream, right? If only for a moment…
As they came around the far edges of the crowd and towards the school parking lot, a familiar sound rang out: a jarring yet soft car horn. It beeped at them for three or four times before May finally looked up the slight hill and saw that, perched at the edge of the parking lot, was that gold-colored Lincoln and that gracious old man standing behind the wheel, pressing his hand to the sound the horn once more.
"Look, Opa's here!" she said, grabbing at the backpacks of both her sisters, forcing the trio to turn their heads and wave in unison. Huge smiles sprang across the face of all three girls.
The old man slowly got out of the car, and he left the door open while he turned to them and gave a hearty wave in return. The three sisters hurried their way up the slight hill and walked around the hood of the car to greet their beloved grandpa. Each took their turn to give him a very warm embrace.
"Opa, it's been so long! I missed you soo much!" May said to him as she wrapped her arms around his waist and rested her ear against his chest.
"Little May…" he warmly responded as he patted her back and placed the most innocent kiss onto her head, "You know Opa missed you just as much! And my how you've grown…, how you've all grown into such little women! Each one of you carry that little bit of your mother, she was such a beautiful young woman as well…"
A warm smile creeped across his wrinkled face as he surveyed the three ladies before him. It had been only a few months since his last visit, but my how he missed having them around him constantly. Nothing made that old heart of his beat right than seeing such young and innocent eyes. He knew that they had been through so much, and yet still come out of it intact. He felt so awful for their situation but knew that he could do everything in his power to make it better.
"Opa, so great to see ya again! Seems like forever since you were here…" Lee said, embracing him with a warm hug and rubbing his frail back. She was tall enough to reach his shoulder, and so he patted his hand on her shoulders and smiled into her eyes, though he could barely see them.
"Lee, you've become quite the woman since I saw you last…you're every bit of your father though… you're a spitting image of him if there ever was one. But you still have your mother's beauty, and never forget that…" he patted her once more and kissed her forehead. She blushed awkwardly, turning around to make sure no one was looking, before she returned his affection by kissing his soft cheek.
Marie approached him quietly and wrapped her arms tight around his torso, resting her head on his little-bit of a belly, and felt safer than she had felt in a very long time.
"Hello Marie…" he kindly said as he hugged her in return. "I'm glad to see that you're doing so well. You look more and more like your mother every time I see you…before long I won't be able to tell you apart…"
Marie blushed lightly and playfully smacked his arm. "Oh Opa, you always say that…" she then left the embrace and the three girls began taking their backpacks off.
"Okay girls, go ahead and get in so we can get going…" he said, carefully climbing back into the driver's seat and closing the door behind him.
Lee quickly darted around to her two sisters and in one fluid motion cried out "shotgun!"
"Aww crap, she always gets shotgun…!" May fussed as she crossed her arms.
"Oh quit your whining and get in the back…" Marie told her as she pulled the latch to the rear diver side door and climbed in, putting her backpack on the floorboard in front of her.
"Girls, girls…settle down…we're all going to the same place, now aren't we…?" he said, clicking his seatbelt in.
"Sorry Opa…" the three girls said, nearly in unison. Lee closed the passenger door behind her and clicked her seatbelt secure, followed by May. With all the doors shut, Opa proceeded to crank his old Lincoln over and slap his shifter into reverse. He glanced over his shoulders, squinting his little eyes to make sure no one was going past as he backed out of his position and drove off, going up to the stop-sign which ended the road that lead down to the old high school. Lee immediately fiddled with the radio knobs before she found the local pop station, which the girls listened to with joy. Opa didn't mind, because he couldn't really hear the music that well anyway.
"You girls should consider yourselves lucky that you get the luxury of fighting over seats like this…" he said, flicking his turn signal on and slowing down at the stop sign. "When I was your age back in the old country, I had to hitch a ride on the back of my uncle's rickety hay-truck just to get into town to go to school. One time it snowed so hard that the truck couldn't make it, so I had to throw on my field boots and trudge through the snow for ten miles just to make it to school. My feet were so numb by the time I made it to the school house that I couldn't feel them until noon… we all had soaking feet so we dried out our socks on the radiator in the room…"
"Ooh here we go again…" Lee said, playfully rolling her eyes. "The old walking-to-school-in-the-snow stories…"
"It's all true, Lee. We had no such thing as snow days. You were expected to get up and go, no matter what condition it was. You girls take all your fancy things for granted, but for us it was really important…"
"Opa, why didn't you just stay home if the snow was that bad…?" Marie asked.
"It was too important for us, little Marie…" he responded, waiting for a car to sweep past so he could turn right and head towards the stop-light up the street, leaving the school grounds. "Our parents valued education a great deal. As farming people, not many in our family were educated. My father saw education as a means to the future…a way to find a better life off of the farm. He wanted me to be successful in life, to do more than he had done. So we woke up early, scrubbed ourselves, and hiked to school every day. You all are so used to everything being easy, but we had to put in an awful lot of work for what we got. I would get up every morning at four to milk the cows and stack hay with my uncle. Then I would scrub myself and get dressed for school. By nine o'clock I would be doing mathematics and learning history, and it was so much better than mending the fields with my father. You girls need to treat your schooling as important, because it's your way to a better life. I had mine cut short, and I never stopped being angry about that."
"We understand, Opa. We do our best!" May said, a little more remorseful after hearing her grandfather's story.
"Of course you do, May. You all do so well, you make me and your mother very proud. And when your grandma was still alive, she was very proud of you too…" he said smiling.
The girls tuned back into the radio and sang along to a song that came on, Opa simply focused on the road and muttering various obscenities in Dutch under his breath. As he turned right at the stop-light and kept going in that direction, the girls got a little confused.
"Ain't we goin' home, Opa…?" Lee said, the puzzled look on her face.
"Yeah Opa,…" Marie chimed in "…why are we going this way…?"
"Well what good is a Friday afternoon without any pizza…?" he said, smiling back at the girls. Their faces immediately lit up and May started doing a little happy-dance back in her seat.
"Pizza!" May cried out it happiness as she high-fived Marie.
"Thank you so much Opa, you're the best!" Marie told him, rubbing his arm from the back seat.
"Oh you girls are quite welcome. Me and your mom called and ordered it before I left to pick you up. We have to go pick it up now."
After a few minutes of driving and idle chatter, the car pulled up into the local Pizza Hut parking lot and Opa climbed out and walking into the store. A few seconds later he exited with two large pizza boxes and a bag of bread-sticks on top. Lee quickly got out and took the boxes from him and went back to the car, placing the pizza boxes on her lap. Opa got back into the driver's seat and backed the car out of the parking lot and back onto the road, destined for the Kanker trailer. Lee felt the warmth across her lap, absorbed by her thick jeans. All three girls were heavily drawn to the crisp odor emanating from the boxes, May practically drooling from the backseat.
Eventually the old Lincoln pulled up to the trailer, and the girls were quite stunned as they heard the gravel crackle and pop under the tires. They thought they might have pulled up to the wrong trailer at first, it looked so different. The rust coloration that had once trimmed the skirts of the trailer were now painted a lovely soft blue. The antenna that had been bent and broken under decades of rust and wind was now replaced with a vertical aluminum shaft pointing like a solid arrow. The creaking and half-rotted steps were now replaced with fresh timber, stained a deep walnut color and waterproofed to be sure. Even the front door was painted a solid coat of white, and as Ms. Kanker stepped out in her robe to see her family pull up, Marie even noticed that the screen door no longer sounded like a herd of bats flying off into the moonlight. There were rows of tulips planted in a newly-dug flower bed surrounding the trailer, lined with a tiny white fence. Colors of orange, and red, and white popped along the grey gravel and brought such a fresh burst of life into that trailer. All three girls had their jaws drop as they got out of the car, their mother smiling along with her daughters' shock.
"Different, huh…?" Ms. Kanker asked, sipping from her mug of coffee and crossing her arms.
"It's like a whole new house, ma…" Lee said, straddling the pizza boxes in her hands.
"Your Opa got here really early this morning, just after you all left for school. He just walked around shaking his head the whole morning, so I finally gave in and sent him to Lowe's for a few things. He came back with basically everything…" she said, chuckling after another sip of her coffee.
"They had a great sale on outdoor paint, so I figured "why the hell not?" Then I saw the antenna, and the wood for the steps…I figured I had a few hours, so I basically did everything…and the tulips…" he said, stepping up to the edge of the trailer and cupping one of the orange tulips in his hand, "I remember loving when these popped up as a boy, in the old country… there would be fields of them outside our farm. We boys would go pick them for the girls we liked. We'd fight over the orange ones, because that was the color of the Dutch. We'd keep them in our back pockets, then at school we'd go up to the girl we liked, kiss her hand, and show her the tulip. If she liked it, we'd put it in her hair, behind her ear. The orange tulip meant that you secretly liked her; if you were already together, you would bring her a red one…" he bent over into the flower bed, admiring the lustrous glow of that particular orange tulip. His eyes watered slightly as his mind transported him to a time and place where nothing in the entire world mattered more than impressing that one girl in his school.
"I remember I had picked the perfect tulip for her, and when I gave it to her, she gave me the longest hug I had ever had as a boy. Nothing ever seemed so innocent as that day, holding hands and walking through the city. I've brought it back a million times in my mind…"
The girls stood ooing and awing at their poor grandpa as he took those careful steps down memory lane. Eventually Lee got a little tired of holding those warm boxes, and May was growing impatient for some food. Opa stood up from his daydream and walked up the steps, holding the door open for Lee and the two other girls to come in behind her.
When the girls walked in, their shock was continued as they walked in. The house was completely spotless, inside and out. The linoleum floor of the kitchen was polished to a shine, and every appliance had been wiped of any dirt that had ever been there. The carpet had been shampooed and the couch and chairs had all been shampooed as well. The rackety old air conditioner had been upgraded to a super-quiet one, sleek and pearly white. The coffee table, which used to be adorned with hundreds of little scratches, dings, and ring-marks had been polished down and re-varnished in a beautiful cherry finish. A couple vanilla scented candles completed the picture, and the house had never looked better. The TV in the background, which had always showed a fuzzy picture at best (since the antenna had been broken for years, the family had to make do with badly constructed rabbit-ears on top of the set) now showed a crystal-clear picture. As Lee walked over to the coffee-table and sat down the pizza boxes, she was utterly amazed at everything.
"Ma, I don't know what to say, but wow…" she said, putting her hands on her hips.
"I know, it's great, isn't it? While your Opa was busy fixing up the outside, I figured I could get to work on the inside. I rarely get these kind of days off, so I used the most of it. I broke out the Pine-Sol, the Scrubbin' Bubbles, and even the Old English. If it had something to clean, I was cleanin' it today." She chuckled as she carefully sat down on her now clean sofa.
"Look at the TV May…" Marie said, walking with her sister over to the set. "You can actually see what's going on now…"
"I know, it's so pretty…" May responded, staring into the station broadcasting the evening news.
"Alright girls, get yourself somethin' to eat while it's around. There's plenty for everybody…" Ms. Kanker announced as she grabbed some plates out of the cupboard in the kitchen and passed them around. Opa grabbed himself a few slices of pepperoni and sat down in the large recliner-chair, while Ms. Kanker poured him a glass of Coke and handed it to him.
"Thank you there, Barbara dear…" he said, taking a sip from the cool glass and setting it down on a coaster next to him.
"Of course Dad, you've done so much today, you deserve a little pampering…" she said as she grabbed herself a few slices and a breadstick.
The girls all filled their plates and sat around the TV, scrolling through all the channels they now got. Before, with the mangled rabbit-ears, they only picked up a handful of static-filled stations. Now with the new antenna, they got over thirty channels and all just as clear as they could be. Opa smiled at Ms. Kanker, and the two watched as the girls lit up with happiness as they munched on their pizza and watched the TV.
"Thank you so much Opa, you're the absolute best!" Marie said, taking a nibble at her pizza slice.
"You girls are quite welcome, you deserve to come home to a nice house, not the old rickety trailer that was here this morning…" he chuckled, pleased with all the hard work his old hands had done.
The family sat and enjoyed their evening. After pizza, Opa broke out a huge tub of ice-cream and they all enjoyed heaping bowels of sundaes. The girls talked about their day at school, and Opa shared lots of stories about his time as a boy. He also filled in the girls about how Detroit was doing these days, and how he was tired of living there in that huge house all by himself. After the ice-cream was happily consumed, May got the boardgames out and they all played a few rounds of Monopoly, with Lee usually being the grand victor. There was nothing but laughs and good-times in that trailer as darkness grew over the trailer park, and that was a significant change. The living room light created a vibrant glow in the darkness as the crickets happily chirped away.