I tried to read from my notes but the sentences were incomplete, scrambled. “Don’t worry about your notes,” Vanessa said. “They aren’t as important as the textbook.”
“What textbook?” I said.
“The textbook,” Vanessa said. She laughed as if I were being funny. I tensed because I wasn’t.
“I don’t have a textbook,” I said.
“Sure you do!” She held up the thick picture book I’d used to memorize titles and artists.
“Oh that,” I said. “I looked at that.”
“You looked at it? You didn’t read it?”
I stared at her. I didn’t understand. This was a class on music and art. We’d been given CDs with music to listen to, and a book with pictures of art to look at. It hadn’t occurred to me to read the art book any more than it had to read the CDs.
“I thought we were just supposed to look at the pictures.” This sounded stupid when said aloud.
“So when the syllabus assigned pages fifty through eighty-five, you didn’t think you had to read anything?”
“I looked at the pictures,” I said again. It sounded worse the second time.
Vanessa began thumbing through the book, which suddenly looked very much like a textbook.
“That’s your problem then,” she said. “You have to read the textbook.” As she said this, her voice lilted with sarcasm, as if this blunder, after everything else—after joking about the Holocaust and glancing at her test—was too much and she was done with me. She said it was time for me to go; she had to study for another class. I picked up my notebook and left.
“Read the textbook” turned out to be excellent advice. On the next exam I scored a B, and by the end of the semester I was pulling A’s. It was a miracle and I interpreted it as such. I continued to study until two or three A.M. each night, believing it was the price I had to pay to earn God’s support. I did well in my history class, better in English, and best of all in music theory. A full-tuition scholarship was unlikely, but I could maybe get half.
During the final lecture in Western Civ, the professor announced that so many students had failed the first exam, he’d decided to drop it altogether. And poof. My failing grade was gone. I wanted to punch the air, give Vanessa a high five. Then I remembered that she didn’t sit with me anymore.
When the semester ended I returned to Buck’s Peak. In a few weeks BYU would post grades; then I’d know if I could return in the fall.
I filled my journals with promises that I would stay out of the junkyard. I needed money—Dad would have said I was broker than the Ten Commandments—so I went to get my old job back at Stokes. I turned up at the busiest hour in the afternoon, when I knew they’d be understaffed, and sure enough, the manager was bagging groceries when I found him. I asked if he’d like me to do that, and he looked at me for all of three seconds, then lifted his apron over his head and handed it to me. The assistant manager gave me a wink: she was the one who’d suggested I ask during the rush. There was something about Stokes—about its straight, clean aisles and the warm people who worked there—that made me feel calm and happy. It’s a strange thing to say about a grocery store, but it felt like home.
Dad was waiting for me when I came through the back door. He saw the apron and said, “You’re working for me this summer.”
“I’m working at Stokes,” I said.
“Think you’re too good to scrap?” His voice was raised. “This is your family. You belong here.”
Dad’s face was haggard, his eyes bloodshot. He’d had a spectacularly bad winter. In the fall, he’d invested a large sum of money in new construction equipment—an excavator, a man lift and a welding trailer. Now it was spring and all of it was gone. Luke had accidentally lit the welding trailer on fire, burning it to the ground; the man lift had come off a trailer because someone—I never asked who—hadn’t secured it properly; and the excavator had joined the scrap heap when Shawn, pulling it on an enormous trailer, had taken a corner too fast and rolled truck and trailer both. With the luck of the damned, Shawn had crawled from the wreckage, although he’d hit his head and couldn’t remember the days before the accident. Truck, trailer and excavator were totaled.
Dad’s determination was etched into his face. It was in his voice, in the harshness of it. He had to win this standoff. He’d convinced himself that if I was on the crew, there’d be fewer accidents, fewer setbacks. “You’re slower than tar running uphill,” he’d told me a dozen times. “But you get the job done without smashing anything.”