Chapter 40

Jackie was usually the one to pick up the mail at the Gravengood house, but she hadn’t had to do it all through the holiday vacation: Bree had been running for the mailbox as soon as the mailman drew into sight. Now that school had just gotten back into session, it meant that the chore was Jackie’s again.

Unlike Bree, she wasn’t making a mad rush to the mailbox, but she wasn’t slow about it either. Of course she leafed through the day’s take as she brought it inside. There was a letter there from Congressman Lawton and even as she saw it her hands started to shake. There was only one thing this could be, but it was either good news or bad news. Which was it?

She more than glanced at the letter, she held it in her hands with great temptation – it would answer a lot of questions . . . but really, it was Bree’s to open. No, she decided with great reluctance, I’d better leave it for her, but still . . .

Should she call Bree at school? Maybe even take the letter over there?

No, she decided after only a moment’s consideration. If it’s bad news, maybe it’s better if she was home to get it.

It was only a couple hours, but the waiting was going to be pure hell . . .

There was only one thing to do, and that was to go out to the shop, and work on a sign to try and get her mind off the letter. Not that it was going to be easy; whichever way this letter went it was going to change things, that was for sure.

There was another thing she could do. She knew Mark was working in his office over at Clark Plywood this afternoon, and that he wasn’t expecting to be very busy. She called him up and told him a letter had arrived from Congressman Lawson, and to be home when Bree was expected.

“Any idea what it says?” he asked.

“No, and I’m worried about what happens, either way.”

“I’ll be there,” he promised. “Cripe, now you’ve got me nervous, too.”

Both of them were sitting in the living room when Bree got home, trying not to look too anxious, and probably failing. “Hi, Bree,” Jackie called when Bree came in the back door. “How was school?”

“Oh, OK,” she replied. “Was there any mail for me?”

Jackie took a deep breath and willed herself to stay calm as she replied as nonchalantly as she could manage, “There’s one for you on the kitchen table.”

Jackie and Mark were already getting up when they heard Bree gasp. Oh, my God! Oh my God oh my GodohmyGod. . .”

“What does it say?” Mark replied from the doorway.

“I can’t bear to open it,” she shook her head. “My God, my God. . .”

“Maybe you better.”

“Oh, God, I can’t bear to look,” she replied, taking a table knife from the kitchen drawer and slitting open the envelope. She opened it gingerly, took a quick look inside, then gave out a huge yell: “OH MY GOD! I MADE IT! I got the nomination!”

Fortunately there was a kitchen chair close at hand, for Bree collapsed into it. Mark and Jackie came over to look, and even Perky came by to see what had disturbed his nap. Bree took a deep breath and began to read out loud.

Dear Ms. Gravengood:

This letter is to inform you that I have nominated you for appointment to the US Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colorado. Your application led the list of some highly qualified applicants, and I am proud to make this selection.

I have informed the Academy of my nomination. You should be receiving an information packet in the mail from them shortly with details of how to get medical and other testing required by the Academy, and other things they will need to know in order to decide on your appointment. You should complete all their requirements as soon as possible.

Should you decide to decline the nomination, please inform my office immediately, so I can make arrangements for the nomination of an alternate candidate.

Your application was one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen for a request for a nomination for an appointment to a service academy. I believe you will do well there, and wish you success in your endeavors. If I can be of assistance in any of the details, please let my office know.

Congratulations on your nomination,

Elmer F. Lawton

Representative, Michigan 22nd District

“So what are you going to do today?” Bob Frankovich asked his wife a couple of months later on a Saturday late in February.

“Oh, Misty and I are going shopping down in Camden,” Linda told him. “We’re going to celebrate her eighteenth birthday in style.”

Bob rolled his eyes. “Well, good luck and good shopping,” he replied, trying to sound as if he cared.

“Oh, I expect we’ll buy plenty to celebrate.”

A few minutes later Bob heard the motor for the garage door opener. Good, he thought. They’re gone, and probably will be gone for several hours. This shouldn’t take anywhere near that long, but I’d better get busy.

This was the day Bob had been looking forward to for years. Over a dozen at least, maybe more than that. He hadn’t known exactly when it was coming up until about a year and a half ago when Rusty had disappeared, and that had helped him make up his mind.

Even now Bob couldn’t make up his mind when he realized that he’d screwed up big time in marrying Linda. It had come slowly, a little bit at a time, but even a dozen years ago he knew that it had been a hell of a big mistake and had screwed up his life beyond belief. Linda hadn’t seemed that overbearing in the early years, but sometime after there were three kids in the house he’d realized it was all bad. By then, he couldn’t leave without having to cough up more money than he made in alimony and child support payments. As the kids got older, the situation had worsened; Linda treated the two girls like spoiled princesses, while he and Rusty were mostly treated like scum. He knew that Rusty had privately called his mother “The Queen” and his sisters “The Princesses,” and that he resented them.

There had been times that he’d tried to balance out things a little, more for Rusty’s sake rather than for his own, but for the most part it hadn’t taken. Even the suggestion of a little bit fairer treatment between the siblings had brought screeching, fighting, swearing, and a total freeze on marital relations.

Bob had struggled against the tide as much as he could, but he’d long since realized that it was hopeless. It had taken Rusty’s escape a year and a half before to bring him to his senses; it wasn’t time just then to make an escape, but he could pick out the date when it was: the day Misty turned eighteen. Today.

With all the kids over eighteen, Linda wouldn’t be able to hold child support payments over his head. Since she didn’t work, she probably could hit him for a large alimony, but, he’d realized, you can’t get blood from a turnip. He wasn’t intending to get a divorce, not at all; if Linda wanted a divorce, that was up to her. Either way, it wouldn’t bother him. He’d long since made up his mind to not get involved with a woman again, except maybe one paid for by the hour – the experience of nearly a quarter of a century had totally soured him on the idea of marriage.

He turned to a few phone calls he had to make. He’d had nineteen months to plan for what he was about to do, and he’d been serious about his plans to make his leaving the bitterest possible experience for Linda, and to settle a few other scores along the way.

His initial efforts at setting up payback had even been further back than that; he’d been the one to tip off Derrick’s family about Bethany and Linda, and that had worked out even better than he’d expected. Bethany was having to pay for that; like her mother, she’d never expected to have to work for a living, and she was finding it very hard to do at the Taco Bell. He couldn’t understand why she was still there; she was a college graduate, after all, and should have been able to do better, but the defeat had really overwhelmed her.

He had, of course set up the deal with Shay Archer, just by putting in a word where it was needed and then staying out of the way, and that had been icing on the cake. Shay was back in town this winter, he knew, and he also knew that under Linda’s urging Bethany had taken another run at him, only to get brushed off like so much sawdust. Good for Shay.

Slapping Misty down had been a little harder, but the girl had helped out his plans by getting mixed up with that Lethbridge character, who was now doing time in the state pen. His plans had gotten severely messed up when Lethbridge had been let out of jail early last spring; he’d made sure by various means that stories of Misty’s running around had gotten to him while he’d been in the slammer. Bob’s intent had been that Misty would be hiding out with Bethany when he was set free, which would have made her even more miserable and have given him a little freer hand. Things had worked out all right, mostly because that Gravengood girl had stood her ground when Walt found Misty. Bob didn’t want the shit beaten out of Misty, after all; he wanted her hurt more deeply than that, and it seemed likely this would be better, anyway.

It took a few minutes to get the credit cards cancelled – it was amazing how many Linda had, all with big balances on them, of course. Living on a budget was something else she had never understood; she didn’t know where the money came from, how it got there. It had taken hours of working overtime at the plant whenever he could get it, standing at the machine when he could have been doing something else, and sometimes working second jobs in the evening to try and keep up while slowly slipping behind. Any suggestion to try and hold down the spending was met with disdain by the Queen, especially if it involved spending money on the Princesses. Well, enough of that; Linda was going to be very surprised when her credit cards didn’t work on this shopping expedition.

Worse was to come. Bob had always been the one to keep the family books, to make the payments, to try and make ends meet. Over a year before, he’d transferred the mailing address on his bills to a post office box, so Linda wouldn’t see what was coming in and going out. Not long after that, he’d quit making house payments, turning the money to cash and stuffing it in a safe deposit box. He’d been making minimum payments on the credit cards for a year; anything over that went to the safe deposit box, too. It had been six months since he’d made a car payment on Linda’s or Misty’s car; some very demanding letters from the finance company had been showing up in the post office box to join the foreclosure notice on the house that had shown up the other day. He hadn’t made any credit card payments in a while, either, and those letters were getting nasty, too. All of them were collected in a box out in the car; he’d leave them on the kitchen table as a final present for Linda.

By hook and by crook, he’d been able to quite legally collect a little over twenty thousand dollars in cash; all of it was out in his car, an old clunker that had been long paid for. After all, the Queen didn’t seem to think he deserved any better. Everything else he planned on taking with him was in the car, too – not very much, just clothes and not too many of them; he didn’t want many memories of the agonizing two decades he’d spent here. Life was too short to look back on that shit. He wasn’t going to be sorry to leave.

Well, there were a couple things he had to be sorry about. He really hated to just dump his job; after all, Clark Plywood had treated him well over the years, and at least deserved to be given notice, but it wasn’t something he’d dared to do under the circumstances. Oh, well, that was a minor downside; the money from his cashed-out 401K was in his stash in the car, too. It wasn’t very much; too much had to be diverted over the years to trying to keep up with the bills, but now every green dollar would help him get through the next few months.

There wasn’t much left to do, now. There were a few vital records he needed to take from the desk, but he’d collected them into a single folder over the past months, and they’d find a new home in some dumpster somewhere. Along with all the trouble from bill collections and foreclosures, Linda was going to have some real fun with the IRS over that. It wasn’t any of his concern now, not any more.

A final mental check. He hadn’t kept any records, any notes, nothing Linda could find that could give her any hint of what he had planned. The pile of notices and bills was stacked on the kitchen table, along with his house key; the best he could figure there was nothing else to do. Time to blow this pop stand, he thought.

A few minutes later he was out on the state road, heading over toward Three Pines and on to the west. He didn’t figure he’d get much for the car selling it to some used car dealer in Minneapolis, but then, it wasn’t worth much of anything, anyway, and at least selling it there would leave a little bit of a false trail. He didn’t have any idea where he was going – that was part of the plan – with one exception: through a lot of work on the computers at the library, he’d managed to turn up the fact that Rusty was at Edwards Air Force Base in California. That made him happy; he doubted Rusty had actually been gung-ho enough to be a Marine. He needed to make contact with Rusty to let him know what happened, and maybe, if Rusty acted like he could keep a secret, work out a way to make contact in the future. Or, maybe not; it would have to depend.

But after Edwards – well, California was big, and it had to be warmer than Spearfish Lake. If that didn’t work out, there were plenty of other places to try, and plenty of time to work out what to do with himself. The rest of his life, after all.

On Saturday morning a couple of weeks later Howie heard the mailman come to the front porch, and heard the top bang on the mail box. As he’d half expected, over the last few months there had been some mild interest from several colleges in his playing football for them, but not much.

He’d known for years that most scholarships went to kids from bigger schools, where they got more media coverage. A big-time scholarship to some place like the University of Michigan – well they weren’t going to reach out to a place like Spearfish Lake, even if he were the reincarnation of Bart Starr or Doug Flutie. But some little private school . . . it was a possibility. Maybe not a big, full-ride scholarship, but even a partial scholarship would help a lot.

His family was a little strapped with Jack in college already, and that was even with Jack having a good academic scholarship from the Donna Clark Foundation here in Spearfish Lake. That had come about as kind of a fluke, and the Clark Foundation wasn’t known for giving athletic scholarships. Howie’s grades, while they were good, better than he’d had as a freshman, better than they’d been before he’d set up the study group with his friends, but he didn’t expect anyone to give him a full-ride academic scholarship.

He hadn’t told his friends, but in recent weeks he’d been giving some thought to going down to the community college outside Camden and living at home, just to save some money. Autumn was going to get good support from her family – there was a family scholarship fund from her grandmother – but that wasn’t going to help him any.

Probably a lot more of nothing, he thought about the mail delivery he’d just heard. Maybe he ought to call up Autumn; maybe they could go somewhere and do something. Somewhere during his thinking he found the energy to go out and check the mailbox – there might be something interesting there, even though it probably was more of the usual junk mail.

It was cold on the porch, and he was dressed for the inside, so he didn’t stay there long on the cold February day. He was back inside before he started to leaf through the mail. A couple of bills, a lot of junk ads . . . and a letter from Meriwether College. He didn’t think too much about it; he got letters every couple days from colleges that would like him to think about attending there, but most of them were the same junk mail and they never mentioned football. He all but trashed it, but then the thought crossed his mind that Meriwether was where Lyle Angarrack and Ashley Keilhorn attended. Lyle had had a couple good years as the kicker there; they weren’t a big football school, at least from what he knew from Lyle. In the back of his mind it struck him as a possibility; maybe a walk-on there could be somehow turned into a scholarship.

It was probably nothing; he opened the letter not expecting much of anything. There was the usual informational stuff, the kind of thing everybody got. But there was a letter, too . . .

“Holy shit!” he yelled – so loud his mother heard it.

“Howie?” she asked from the kitchen. “Is something the matter?”

“A half ride!” he exclaimed. “A half-ride scholarship offer from Meriwether College.”

“I never heard of it,” she said. “Is it around here?”

“No, downstate, not far from where Jack and Vixen go. Maybe fifty miles away. Lyle Angarrack and Ashley Keilhorn go there!”

“Lyle? Oh, that big kicker who was a senior when you were a sophomore. Ashley held for him, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I never expected this. I mean, never!”

His mother took the letter and read it over. “It looks like the real deal to me,” she commented. “Maybe you’d better find out a little more about it.”

There was a phone number to call in the letter, but since it was Saturday all he got was an answering machine. Worked up now, Howie wondered how he could get hold of Lyle; his mother finally had to suggest that he give Lyle’s parents a call.

Five minutes later Howie was talking to Lyle, who was studying in his dorm room. “Lyle,” he said, “I just got a letter from Meriwether offering me a scholarship. Do you think this is the real deal?”

“I’m sure it would be,” Lyle told him. “Coach is a straight shooter. We had a quarterback last year who couldn’t hit the ground with his hat, let alone pass a football. I talked you up to Coach all season as a guy with a strong arm who didn’t get intercepted often and could run if it got to be necessary. I even gave him a couple game DVDs. I guess I finally got through to him.”

“Holy crap. Thanks, Lyle! I mean, thanks! Is the team down there any good?”

“Not really,” Lyle told him. “It’s strictly a small-bore league, but the school would like to see a little better record than we’ve managed. There are some other holes to fill, but we definitely could use a quarterback with an arm. I better tell you, though, they expect athletes to learn something, they don’t cut any slack on that.”

“That’s fine. I don’t want to go to college to be a dumb jock. If I’m going to go to the trouble I want to be able to say I’ve learned something.”

“It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to check the place out, talk to Coach,” Lyle told him.

“Good thought. Thanks, Lyle. I mean, thanks lots. I’ll be seeing you in a few days. I don’t know when for sure, maybe toward the end of the week.”

They talked for a couple more minutes about the college, and Howie inquired after Ashley, of course; she was sitting right in the room with Lyle, studying as well.

“Well, is it real?” his mother asked when he hung up the phone.

“Must be,” Howie said. “Apparently Lyle has been politicking for me. I want to go down there for a college visit just about as soon as I can.”

“That’s good,” his mother said. “Maybe we can rig it around so you could drive my car. That’s a long way to go in a Jeep. And maybe you could spend the night with Jack and Vixen.”

“Yeah, we’ll work something out,” he said, picking up the phone again. “I’ve got to call Autumn.”

Autumn, of course, was thrilled to hear the news. “Howie, that’s wonderful,” she said. “If it works out it could solve a lot of problems. Why don’t you come over here? We can look at the website together.”

“Sure, I’ll be right over.”

A few minutes later Howie braked the Jeep to a stop in front of Autumn’s house. When he got inside, the living room computer was already on the Meriwether College website, and they went through the site together thoroughly. From what Howie could make out of it, it seemed to be a good school, and there were several options of things to study. Now that the college was starting to be real, he could get serious about that question.

“The hell of it is,” Autumn said, “they just don’t have anything to do with medical stuff, or nursing, or being a paramedic,” she said. “That makes it not so good for me.”

“Yeah, well, we can’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Howie said. “Southern isn’t far away, and they have all that stuff.”

“Yeah, but if I did it, I’d be following in Summer’s footsteps again. Even getting into nursing is a little close to what she decided to do, and it turns out she doesn’t like nursing all that well.”

“Well, maybe there’s somewhere else close,” Howie suggested. “Let’s look.”

Nothing was decided that afternoon, but when it was over with Autumn had a short list of places to investigate a little more thoroughly. “It’s more than we could do in a day of looking,” she said. “But what would you say to our making a college visit down there together? We could spend a couple days at it, and the school gives us time off for college visits.”

“Sounds like a plan,” he agreed. “The only thing is that I want to talk to this coach at Meriwether to make sure I read this correctly, that it’s a real offer and not a come-on, but I can do that Monday.”

“Works for me. Maybe I should call Summer and tell her they may have visitors.”

“Do it. You know, if this turns out to be what it looks like, it may solve a lot of problems for both of us. We’ve spent years trying to figure out what we’re going to do when we get out of high school, and now there’s a good chance we know.”

“We still don’t know what we’re going to study.”

“True,” he smiled. “But I’ll bet that we’ll have a lot better idea about it this time next week.”

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