Page 34 of A Happy Catastrophe

“Oh, honey,” I say.

“So I don’t want to tell them I’m sorry. Because I’m not. But everybody is mad at me, and Grady said I’m an idiot and he’s the one who told on me, and now I don’t want to go to the after-school program anymore because I hate everybody there, and Grady told everybody that I’m a stealer, and even Laramie got mad at me because everybody found out.”

“Okay,” I say. “We’re going to fix this.” I leave the kitchen and go out into the hallway, heading to Patrick’s studio.

“No, no, no! Don’t bother Patrick!” Fritzie calls after me. “Please! Patrick is too sad!”

She grabs onto the hem of my shirt. “Don’t go in there. He’s painting all the sad stuff, and we have to let him get the sad stuff out, because then he can paint good.”

“Did he tell you that?” I ask her.

“Well, no, but I told him that. I went in there one day because I needed some peanut butter, but the jar was too tight, and he said I shouldn’t come in and bother him when he’s painting, and I said I needed him to open the peanut butter jar, and then I said to him, ‘You should think about happy things, like about when I came to live at your house with you, or maybe you could paint about Marnie. Or taking Bedford for a walk. Any of those things would be good!’ And he said he can’t do that, and I said maybe it’s because the sad stuff needs to come out first. Then he said I needed to leave him alone. And he opened the peanut butter jar and then I left, and I heard him lock the door.”

I tell her it’s all going to be fine. I say she should go brush her teeth, and that I am going to go get Patrick, sad or not, and that then we are all three of us going to the school to work things out.

And after we get the school theft stuff figured out—well, then I’m going to have to figure out what is going on with Patrick.

My phone rings just then in my pocket, and I look down and see that it’s from my mom. Because of course everything always happens at once. There must be a tear in the fabric of the universe somewhere that lets everything tumble in all at the same time. But I can’t talk to her now.

A few minutes later, there’s a text from her.

Marnie, your father sat on the couch THE ENTIRE WEEKEND watching movies on his computer. Words he spoke to me = 2. Words I spoke to him = 250,487 approximately. Words I intend to speak to him today = 0.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

PATRICK

They have to go to the principal’s office, which is the worst.

Just the words principal’s office make Patrick shudder. He’d spent a fair amount of time in one of those back in Barnaby Falls, Wyoming, for petty crimes and misdemeanors he always seemed to be accused of committing in elementary school. Funny how he’d managed to push memories of all those incidents out of his head, and funny how they all come tumbling back when he walks into Brooklyn Kind School, an imposing brick building with high ceilings and checkered tile floors and that school smell, an indefinable mix of white paste, cafeteria vegetable soup, and sweaty children.

The woman at the front desk of the school, somebody named Maybelle, says, “Well, y’all are just gonna have to go wait in the principal’s office,” and that’s when he feels his insides curdle up.

Maybelle looks at him and says with a laugh, “Oh, honey? Did I just scare the daylights out of you? You turned about four shades whiter than you were when you came in here.”

He feels himself stiffen. Here it is, just as he feared: some stranger commenting on his appearance. But then Marnie touches his arm, and he calms down. Even though Maybelle was technically mentioning his appearance, he realizes that she wasn’t talking about his scars—she was joking about him having to see the principal. That’s all. He can be charming about that, can’t he?

Why, yes he can, and he will.

Because something else has occurred to him. This meeting, this situation, is bigger than anything about him. Fritzie was attempting to right some injustice she’d seen, and he is here to defend her. Sure, maybe she’d gone about it in a clumsy way—certainly she shouldn’t take money meant for the book fair—but as he looks over at her, sitting up straight on the wooden chair in the principal’s office while they wait, trying to be brave but fidgeting and squirming around in her seat, licking her lips the way she does when she’s nervous, he feels a little bit sad for humanity. Yet another little human being is about to learn the cold fact that no good deed goes unpunished.

Poor little duck, he thinks, as he watches her. She’s wearing blue-and-green leggings that have little gold stars on them and a long yellowish sweatshirt that says GRRL POWER on it, and her fine brown hair is a shade too long and might be still tangled from sleep; he’d heard her and Marnie discussing that it might be time to get it cut, but obviously whoever thought it was time now had lost—and he sees that her little face is so pale and skinny, like his, and her eyes look a little red-rimmed and scared. Yet she’s thrusting that chin up in the air. Defiant.

She feels him looking at her, and he pats the chair next to him, and she scoots over and sits beside him. Leans on him, actually, in a way she hardly ever does. She’s all angles and fidgety action, this one, and if she touches anybody, it’s likely to be Marnie. And where is Marnie, anyway? He can hear her out in the other office, chatting with Maybelle. Buttering up the opposition perhaps. Laying on the charm.

“It’s going to be okay,” he whispers to Fritzie, patting her arm. “I’ve got a master plan for how we can win this one. We are going into battle together against the overlords who might try to stop us. If necessary, we will invoke Buddhism and Jesus and the Preamble to the US Constitution and the King James Bible and the Kindness Doctrine, even if we have to write the Kindness Doctrine because life doesn’t really have one.”

She giggles a little. Good, he thinks.

Then his adversary, the principal—who goes by the intimidating name of Annie just to throw people off—comes rushing in, apologizing. She’s a woman of about forty, with long, straight black hair parted in the middle, and she’s wearing jeans and a harried look, and the first thing she does is stop by Fritzie’s chair and give her a hug.

“Oh, honey, we have got to figure something out to make this okay,” she says. Then she turns to Patrick and says, “So you’re her father, I gather. And what a sweet, empathetic little soul you’re raising!”

He can feel his face flush. So this is the way they’re going to play it, disarm him first. He knows that full disclosure requires that he say something about how he’s only been in Fritzie’s life for two months, hardly the formative years, and he’s hardly raising her. But he doesn’t, because Annie winks at him and he can see that she knows it already. She says, “And you—so new to her life, too! What a gift she is!” And she smiles, shakes his hand, decidedly not reacting to the fact that his hand has scars and dry skin and is a mess.

“Now!” she says, and claps her hands. “Let’s all sit down and figure out together how to fix this and make it right.”

Then she plops herself down across from them in a ratty old armchair and, leaning forward, gets to the first point, which is that what Fritzie did was out of such a sweet desire to help another child, and how that is exactly the kind of spirit needed in the world and it is so good to see, especially from a little girl who is new to the school but who has already made so many friends and whose teachers think the world of her.

o;Oh, honey,” I say.

“So I don’t want to tell them I’m sorry. Because I’m not. But everybody is mad at me, and Grady said I’m an idiot and he’s the one who told on me, and now I don’t want to go to the after-school program anymore because I hate everybody there, and Grady told everybody that I’m a stealer, and even Laramie got mad at me because everybody found out.”

“Okay,” I say. “We’re going to fix this.” I leave the kitchen and go out into the hallway, heading to Patrick’s studio.

“No, no, no! Don’t bother Patrick!” Fritzie calls after me. “Please! Patrick is too sad!”

She grabs onto the hem of my shirt. “Don’t go in there. He’s painting all the sad stuff, and we have to let him get the sad stuff out, because then he can paint good.”

“Did he tell you that?” I ask her.

“Well, no, but I told him that. I went in there one day because I needed some peanut butter, but the jar was too tight, and he said I shouldn’t come in and bother him when he’s painting, and I said I needed him to open the peanut butter jar, and then I said to him, ‘You should think about happy things, like about when I came to live at your house with you, or maybe you could paint about Marnie. Or taking Bedford for a walk. Any of those things would be good!’ And he said he can’t do that, and I said maybe it’s because the sad stuff needs to come out first. Then he said I needed to leave him alone. And he opened the peanut butter jar and then I left, and I heard him lock the door.”

I tell her it’s all going to be fine. I say she should go brush her teeth, and that I am going to go get Patrick, sad or not, and that then we are all three of us going to the school to work things out.

And after we get the school theft stuff figured out—well, then I’m going to have to figure out what is going on with Patrick.

My phone rings just then in my pocket, and I look down and see that it’s from my mom. Because of course everything always happens at once. There must be a tear in the fabric of the universe somewhere that lets everything tumble in all at the same time. But I can’t talk to her now.

A few minutes later, there’s a text from her.

Marnie, your father sat on the couch THE ENTIRE WEEKEND watching movies on his computer. Words he spoke to me = 2. Words I spoke to him = 250,487 approximately. Words I intend to speak to him today = 0.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

PATRICK

They have to go to the principal’s office, which is the worst.

Just the words principal’s office make Patrick shudder. He’d spent a fair amount of time in one of those back in Barnaby Falls, Wyoming, for petty crimes and misdemeanors he always seemed to be accused of committing in elementary school. Funny how he’d managed to push memories of all those incidents out of his head, and funny how they all come tumbling back when he walks into Brooklyn Kind School, an imposing brick building with high ceilings and checkered tile floors and that school smell, an indefinable mix of white paste, cafeteria vegetable soup, and sweaty children.

The woman at the front desk of the school, somebody named Maybelle, says, “Well, y’all are just gonna have to go wait in the principal’s office,” and that’s when he feels his insides curdle up.

Maybelle looks at him and says with a laugh, “Oh, honey? Did I just scare the daylights out of you? You turned about four shades whiter than you were when you came in here.”

He feels himself stiffen. Here it is, just as he feared: some stranger commenting on his appearance. But then Marnie touches his arm, and he calms down. Even though Maybelle was technically mentioning his appearance, he realizes that she wasn’t talking about his scars—she was joking about him having to see the principal. That’s all. He can be charming about that, can’t he?

Why, yes he can, and he will.

Because something else has occurred to him. This meeting, this situation, is bigger than anything about him. Fritzie was attempting to right some injustice she’d seen, and he is here to defend her. Sure, maybe she’d gone about it in a clumsy way—certainly she shouldn’t take money meant for the book fair—but as he looks over at her, sitting up straight on the wooden chair in the principal’s office while they wait, trying to be brave but fidgeting and squirming around in her seat, licking her lips the way she does when she’s nervous, he feels a little bit sad for humanity. Yet another little human being is about to learn the cold fact that no good deed goes unpunished.

Poor little duck, he thinks, as he watches her. She’s wearing blue-and-green leggings that have little gold stars on them and a long yellowish sweatshirt that says GRRL POWER on it, and her fine brown hair is a shade too long and might be still tangled from sleep; he’d heard her and Marnie discussing that it might be time to get it cut, but obviously whoever thought it was time now had lost—and he sees that her little face is so pale and skinny, like his, and her eyes look a little red-rimmed and scared. Yet she’s thrusting that chin up in the air. Defiant.

She feels him looking at her, and he pats the chair next to him, and she scoots over and sits beside him. Leans on him, actually, in a way she hardly ever does. She’s all angles and fidgety action, this one, and if she touches anybody, it’s likely to be Marnie. And where is Marnie, anyway? He can hear her out in the other office, chatting with Maybelle. Buttering up the opposition perhaps. Laying on the charm.

“It’s going to be okay,” he whispers to Fritzie, patting her arm. “I’ve got a master plan for how we can win this one. We are going into battle together against the overlords who might try to stop us. If necessary, we will invoke Buddhism and Jesus and the Preamble to the US Constitution and the King James Bible and the Kindness Doctrine, even if we have to write the Kindness Doctrine because life doesn’t really have one.”

She giggles a little. Good, he thinks.

Then his adversary, the principal—who goes by the intimidating name of Annie just to throw people off—comes rushing in, apologizing. She’s a woman of about forty, with long, straight black hair parted in the middle, and she’s wearing jeans and a harried look, and the first thing she does is stop by Fritzie’s chair and give her a hug.

“Oh, honey, we have got to figure something out to make this okay,” she says. Then she turns to Patrick and says, “So you’re her father, I gather. And what a sweet, empathetic little soul you’re raising!”

He can feel his face flush. So this is the way they’re going to play it, disarm him first. He knows that full disclosure requires that he say something about how he’s only been in Fritzie’s life for two months, hardly the formative years, and he’s hardly raising her. But he doesn’t, because Annie winks at him and he can see that she knows it already. She says, “And you—so new to her life, too! What a gift she is!” And she smiles, shakes his hand, decidedly not reacting to the fact that his hand has scars and dry skin and is a mess.

“Now!” she says, and claps her hands. “Let’s all sit down and figure out together how to fix this and make it right.”

Then she plops herself down across from them in a ratty old armchair and, leaning forward, gets to the first point, which is that what Fritzie did was out of such a sweet desire to help another child, and how that is exactly the kind of spirit needed in the world and it is so good to see, especially from a little girl who is new to the school but who has already made so many friends and whose teachers think the world of her.

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