The Butterfly Effect by Rachel Mans McKenny

Author:Rachel Mans McKenny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Even after living at the motel for so long, the room hadn’t gotten any homier. In those moments between closing her eyes and unconsciousness, Greta wondered whether, if her father had still been alive, she would have returned home to live with him through this saga. After Martha left, the three of them moved into a trailer and got a cat. Greta tried to convince herself she never missed their old house, an old clapboard thing with dingy curtains and rolling carpets. The trailer was newer, and while there was a certain chemical stringency in the air originally, weeks of waffles, frozen pizzas, and deodorant quickly wore it out.

The neighboring trailers had window boxes of daisies and kids riding tricycles in the alleys. If location were everything, their trailer had it all. Close enough to the railroad tracks to have the omnipresent white noise. Walking distance from the metalworking shop where their father plied his trade, and the last stop on/first stop off the bus route to the high school. The cat Greta could have lived without, but it wandered into the trailer court on the day they moved in and survived until the week before her father died, like it knew its reason for being there had ended. Moving from having their own rooms to sharing was easy in retrospect, though tough at the time. Their old house hadn’t been large, but it had space enough to keep their interests separate. Danny’s music sounded louder in a smaller space, so he had to join garage bands with his friends who had garages. Greta’s bug collection could remain as long as she kept only dead specimens.

If Dad had been alive when Danny had his aneurysm, she wouldn’t have come home at all. Or she might have come and left again. Found the money somehow and fled. Instead, she had scratchy sheets and ex-boyfriend woes and the constant weight of the unknown in her brother’s skull. She couldn’t parent a brother. Her father had barely parented, or he did so with such a light touch that their choices seemed recklessly independent to her now. Perhaps she could notice now the feather-light influence her father had on their college choices and afterschool activities. It wasn’t that their father was distant; he was close. He never left the house after work and waited up for them when they went out.

Once, she had snuck out to the state park at night to walk in the woods, only to return home to her father waiting in the threadbare recliner in the front room, his stubble visibly longer than at dinnertime. He grew facial hair like a chia pet—vigorous and thick and weedy. He had to shave twice daily to prevent a full beard. That night, when she got home, he hadn’t said anything to her, hadn’t mentioned time or curfews, only acknowledged her presence and gone to bed.

Few insects demonstrated paternal care, but Greta remembered one from a research expedition to Montana during her second year.

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