Fat Girl, Terrestrial: A Novel

Fourteen: Darren Crenshaw Has a Sister

107 That night at dinner, my mother talked about the PTA meeting that had been devoted to discussing Darren Crenshaw ’s disappearance. We had a hearty meal, the product of my mother’s gratitude that tragedy had struck someone else: country fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, baby peas, Parker House rolls, and apple slump for dessert, and my mother heaped our plates with food, even mine, trying to weigh us down, keep us from drifting out the door, out of her life, into someone else’s, someone who might not feed us at all. She was trying to keep her family from floating off to an irretrievable distance and to reassure herself that such things simply did not happen to people who ate lovingly prepared meals together every night. It was painful to love my mother, but I did so deeply at this moment, despite my certainty that I’d be back to skimpy K rations very soon. fourteen Darren Crenshaw Has a Sister 108 Mrs. Crenshaw had been at the PTA meeting and weepily relayed the details of Darren’s alleged abduction. Only upon hearing this did it really dawn on me that Darren Crenshaw had parents, a sister even! It had never occurred to me that there were people in the world who might love Darren, who did not see when they looked at him a bothersome squirrel they wanted to trap and release in a remote woodland area. Obie passed his roll under the table, placed it on my knee, but I was kicking my feet and it slid from my leg and landed between my mother’s green Evan Picone pumps. It took her a dainty forkful of peas and one of potatoes before she moved her feet enough to feel the roll, and I watched her face and could tell she was tapping it with her toe, trying discreetly to discern what it was. Then she bent and slipped an arm under the table and picked it up, and Obie and I were utterly flummoxed when she smiled at us before getting up to deposit it in the trash. Food smuggling usually carried with it a stiff sentence, a week’s worth of chilly silence and a dinner menu filled, punitively, with organ meats, Brussels sprouts, rhubarb, and at night when she wound my limp locks around spongy pink rollers, she tautly yanked every handful of hair until my scalp smarted like it had been stung by a thousand bees. And I would lay my dead nettle head on the pillow and tighten my muscles so fiercely I was sure I’d be smaller in the morning, compact and lovely and able to slip slenderly into the organdy dresses and plaid jumpers and stirrup pants I’d never been runty enough to wear, clothes moldering in my mother’s hope-against-hope chest, now dusty with dejection, relegated to the basement, rarely opened. But tonight she was smiling and spooning potatoes onto everyone’s plate, so 109 we knew Kingdom Come was in the grip of a serious mystery . For a brief time after, my mother saw virtue in substantiality and before I left for school each morning, she’d zip up my coat and touch my cheek, just like any mother. I decided I wanted to meet Darren Crenshaw’s parents, his sister, to see the people who lived with him every day, maybe get a gander at the scene of the supposed crime. The interview with Detective Doolittle was gnawing at me, and I thought someone who had eaten taco crunch and red velvet cake across from Darren at the lunch table and had watched on the playground as he slung pebbles at sparrows (not a crack shot, fortunately) might be better equipped to sniff out his whereabouts and get to the bottom of his disappearance. The police and his parents believed he’d been abducted from his bedroom one afternoon (though they found the window in his room locked from the inside), but I thought it was more likely he’d just lost his acorns and gone AWOL, looking for a new community he could menace afresh. You could tell Ronnie Moody’s long-suffering austerity was beginning to grate on Darren’s nerves, and I knew his inability to get the goat of the black boy or giant girl made it difficult for him to look himself in...