Little Mercies. Heather Gudenkauf

some of her father’s friend-girls thought she was a pest, always in the way, but not Connie. She always made a point to invite Jenny on their outings even when it was clear that her father wanted Jenny to skedaddle.

      For about six months, Connie and her father had been inseparable and Jenny thought that they actually might get married. Though she never said anything to her father, Jenny imagined being the flower girl in their wedding and living together in Connie’s tidy little house. Unfortunately, their relationship ended as all her father’s relationships did. Badly.

      “No,” her father had said when Jenny worried out loud that she was the one who had driven Connie away. He pulled her into a tight hug. “It has nothing to do with you. It just didn’t work out.” Jenny remembered stiffening against her father’s embrace, not quite believing him.

      A few days after Connie left, Jenny discovered the real reason for her departure. She tumbled out of bed and padded out of her little room into her father’s bedroom to wake him up for work. She found him in bed intertwined with a slim, pale-skinned woman with curly hair that fell down her naked back. The room smelled of sweat and beer and of something that Jenny knew had to do with being naked and in bed. She tripped out of the room and ran to the bathroom, slammed the door and locked it. She turned on the shower and sat on the lid of the toilet and cried.

      But still, Jenny found herself looking for Connie’s face among crowds of people, hoping to see her again if even for a minute.

      Jenny stepped in between her father and the tattooed woman who were talking about how it was too bad that they were both leaving Benton tonight on different buses. Jenny tugged on her father’s sleeve, but on and on they went.

      “Hey, Jenny Penny,” her father finally said, dragging his eyes away from the woman. “Why don’t you see if you can find our seats on the bus?” He handed her a ticket and his heavy duffel bag.

      Jenny had never been on such a big bus before. School buses and city buses, certainly. But this enormous silver-and-blue bus with the sleek dog on the side was very different from her typical modes of transportation. The mustard-yellow school bus that squealed, groaned and belched black smoke when it picked her up on the corner of Fremont Street just down the road from their last apartment, always smelled vaguely of peanut butter sandwiches and body odor.

      This bus was three times as big as the motel room they left behind and smelled, Jenny realized happily, breathing in deeply, like nothing. Jenny, setting her book bag and her father’s duffel bag in the aisle, slid into one of the high-backed seats that was covered in peacock-blue fabric and looked out the window. Her father was still outside talking to the lady with the tattooed arm, so she turned her attention to her immediate surroundings and stepped out into the aisle that intersected the two halves of the bus.

      Jenny, surprised that so many people had somewhere to go at midnight on a Monday, surveyed the passengers already seated on the bus: a woman with skin the color of cinnamon and a hopeful smile, a sad-eyed woman with four children, three of which needed a tissue, a man in a black suit and red tie already slumped in sleep. And to her dismay, the frowning old woman in the red-and-pink sundress. Before the woman could notice her, Jenny, clutching the book bag and duffel, dashed to the rear of the bus and plunked into the last seat on the right and waited for her father. From behind the high-backed seat, Jenny watched as the final cluster of passengers boarded the bus. There was a dazed-looking grandmotherly type with sugar-spun white hair, a blissfully happy-looking young man holding the hand of a pretty girl wearing jeans and a diaphanous bridal veil, and a stooped elderly man with thick glasses and an intricately carved wooden cane. Jenny pressed her nose against the cool, tinted window to see if her father was still talking to the tattoo lady. She was still there, leaning against the brick building, illuminated beneath the parking lot lights, but there was no sign of her father.

      The bus was steadily filling with people and, despite her reluctance, Jenny was beginning to feel excited about the trip. The prospect of her father having a steady, well-paying job meant that there would be no more mortifying trips to the food pantry, no more of the teacher’s helper who scanned her lunch ticket at school and slipped bags of Goldfish Crackers and baggies of carrot sticks into her locker each day. No more collecting and rationing foodstuff for when her father was having one of his bad spells.

      As the passengers embarked, Jenny braced herself for being kicked out of her seat, relegated to sitting next to the frowning woman or the old woman with hair so white that Jenny had to wonder what had frightened her so badly that it would turn her hair that color. To her surprise, no one tried to rouse her from her seat and she began to relax a bit.

      “Good evening, folks,” the driver said into the loudspeaker, his voice booming throughout the bus. “Please find your seats and we’ll be on our way.” Jenny squirmed in her seat and considered getting off the bus to go and find her father, who was probably in the bathroom or, more likely, talking to another woman. Jenny arranged her book bag and her father’s duffel carefully across the blue plush seats so as to cause no question that these seats were taken. As she looked out the window she suddenly caught a glimpse of her father, head down, walking quickly around the corner of the bus station and out of sight. Jenny sighed. She had no idea what her father was up to, but it was becoming very clear that they were not going anywhere today. With a huff that blew the bangs off her forehead, Jenny made the decision to get off the bus and rejoin her father.

      Jenny stood and hooked her book bag around her shoulder and was halfway bent over to retrieve the duffel when out of the corner of her eye she saw a tall, weedy, ponytailed man turn the corner just behind her father. She straightened and watched in disbelief as her father emerged from behind the other side of the bus station casting furtive glances over his shoulder. Two more men appeared and her father stopped short, hands up in placation as they circled around him, fingers poking at his chest. Jenny’s first instinct was to rush off the bus and to her father’s side but found that she couldn’t move, could barely breathe. The meanest looking of the men, barrel-chested and shaped like a fire hydrant, grabbed her father’s face between his thick fingers, causing his lips to pucker as if preparing for a kiss.

      Just as the bus rumbled to life, the hum of its engine vibrating in her ears, Jenny tried to call out, “Wait,” but words stuck drily in the back of her throat. The bus lurched forward and, off balance, Jenny fell back into her seat just as sirens filled the air. Immediately she slouched low in her seat. Her father hated the police and didn’t hesitate to share his distrust with Jenny. “See the cops coming,” he would say, “go the other direction.”

      “Why?” Jenny would probe.

      Her father would just shake his head. “Best they don’t find you. You don’t want to end up in foster care again, do you?”

      Jenny most definitely did not want to be sent off to a foster family again. Not that it had anything to do with her father. Her stint in foster care was just before she came to live with her father. No, that was her mother’s doing. And the man who stole her mother away from her. Foster care was an experience that she didn’t want to relive, though she was only four at the time and had only scant recollections. Snapshots of half-formed memories that she tried to blink away.

      Through the rear window, she saw her father lifted roughly to his feet by a police officer. She could see that he was speaking earnestly to the officer, bobbing his head frantically toward the departing bus. She should holler out to the bus driver to stop. That she needed to get off. Instead, Jenny stayed silent, turned her head the other way, just like her father told her to when it came to the police, and hunkered down in her seat, last row, right side. She pulled her book bag onto her lap, leaned forward and pressed her cheek into the seat in front of her, now damp with her tears, and watched as the buildings, the houses, the streets of Benton sped past.

       Chapter 5

      I awake with a start. The room is too bright, the light streaming across my face much too warm for six in the morning, even though it’s the middle of July and the hottest summer on record in more than a decade. “Adam,” I say, looking over at my husband who, jaw slack in sleep, is snoring.