Poor sweet dog.
To his credit, he understood immediately that he’d done something wrong.
“Fuck!” He flung her hand away as though it had burned him. “I shouldn’t have done that. You’re just a kid.”
Gary leaned back in his seat and covered his eyes with his hand. He had to go, he said. Living with Claudia had become impossible. He said other things too, but years later, those were the words she’d remember: Living with you has become impossible. He didn’t say, and she didn’t ask, what exactly she had done.
When he threw away her hand, she didn’t know what to do with it. Keep it, she wanted to tell him. I don’t want it anymore.
Gary talked and talked, more words than she’d ever heard him speak, as though he’d been saving them up for months. He would miss her, but she had to understand that it was only temporary. In three years, when she turned sixteen, he would come back for her. Claudia didn’t ask what he would do with her then. Adopt her? Marry her?
In the end they swapped seats; Gary drove back to the trailer in silence, having used up all his words. Claudia stared out the window, her left hand in her pocket. It felt different from the other one, as though she’d been sitting on it for a while and starved it of blood.
Really, it was nothing. What occurred in the front seat of the Falcon was so minor that there wasn’t even a word for it. Claudia wasn’t raped or assaulted; she was only messed with. Worse had been done to young girls all over the world, on every day of every year for as long as people had kept track of days or years.
It was nothing at all.
She never saw Gary Cain again. He quit his job at the body shop and—she found out later—set off on a cross-country motorcycle trip, and when she turned sixteen he didn’t come back for her. She didn’t want him to, and yet some part of her was sure he’d remember. By then she was desperate to be elsewhere, but she understood that no rescue was forthcoming. If she wanted to get out of Clayburn, she would have to do it herself.
WITH GARY GONE, THE TRAILER SEEMED SPACIOUS. THE JUNK he’d left behind—fetid sneakers, random motorcycle parts, a few sweaty ball caps—Deb hauled to the dump. She agonized over the waterbed, but in the end decided to keep it. （She’d injured her back at work, and for the rest of her life would struggle with chronic pain.） These chores completed, she called the caseworker.
The new fosters, Dylan and Daryl, were identical twins. Taking two at once set a dangerous precedent, though at the time this wasn’t apparent; the boys were so alike that they seemed to count as only one. Each morning, after Deb left for work, Claudia fed them and coaxed them into school clothes. In the afternoon she did the same things in reverse.
The twins lived in the trailer for just over a year, until their mother got out of jail. By then Deb had gotten used to the chaos （also, probably, the extra money）， so they got Troy and Danielle.
Childcare is exhausting, even for a child. With two or sometimes three fosters to keep track of, Claudia’s life changed dramatically. She’d already stopped going to the body shop. Now Justine found a new best friend, a girl in her own grade. After school, while Justine and Lori smoked cigarettes at the reservoir or returned merchandise to L.L.Bean, Claudia was stuck in the trailer, waiting for the fosters to return. In that time and place, no one thought twice about letting kids walk home alone from the bus stop. That no child was ever abducted was probably a question of supply and demand. In Clayburn, unsupervised kids were everywhere. You couldn’t give them away.
The fosters came home ravenous. They all qualified for free school lunches （ground beef in a variety of disgusting configurations—sloppy Joes, meat loaf, shit on a shingle）， but by three p.m. were hungry again. Claudia’s first task, always, was to feed them. Their favorite treat was a delicacy of her own creation, known as Cheesy Ramen.
Many years later, married to a man who reviewed restaurants for a living, she learned that there was a term for this type of cooking, the recipes printed on cereal boxes and soup can labels, featuring name-brand ingredients （“1/4 c. Durkee French Fried Onion Rings”）。 These creations—processed foods in fanciful combinations—were referred to, snottily, as vernacular cuisine. But Cheesy Ramen didn’t come from a recipe; it was Claudia’s own invention. Cheesy Ramen hatched from her brain like Pallas Athena, the baby daughter of Zeus. This happened early in the Reagan era, when Maine foster families received, as part of their food-stamp benefits, a monthly allocation of government-surplus cheese. The free cheese came in giant blocks and tasted vaguely like cheddar. Its color was bright orange, its texture smoothly plasticated. Mixed with milk and shiny yellow margarine, it melted almost instantly into a thick sauce for ramen noodles, which cost ten cents per brick and could be boiled up four at a time in a spaghetti pot.