The Patron Saint of Butterflies (17 page)

After about an hour, however, I catch a glimpse of some houses. And although they are set back against the highway and not in a neighborhood, they still have yards and flowers in the front and in the back of one, a kid swinging on a tire. I crane my neck as we pass the kid on the swing and I want to ask Nana Pete to stop so I can get out and ask the kid his name and where he goes to school and how he likes living where he does, but of course I can’t. Then there are some big
buildings—a tan one with bright red letters that spell out SHOP RITE, and a smaller one that reads RITE AID. People are hurrying in and out of both stores, their arms full of packages. I wonder what sorts of things they have purchased, and how much money they spent. What do things like toothpaste or soap cost, anyway? Finally we pass a whole line of stores, all connected together in one straight line. I read as fast as I can, but they pass by in a blur and the only one I can make out is ROY’S PIZZA. I sit back in my seat, feeling impatient and hungry.

“Nana Pete?” I ask finally.

“Yes, sugar?”

“What does a Big Mac taste like?”

“A Big—” Nana Pete looks confused.

“Dr. Pannetta said something about Benny having a craving for a Big Mac,” I press. “Are they that good?”

“Oh my Lord, darlin’, you’ve never had a Big Mac, have you?” She looks into the rearview mirror. “How ’bout you, Mouse?” I glance back at Agnes. She doesn’t move. “No, of course you wouldn’t have if Honey here hasn’t.” Nana Pete smacks both of her hands against the steering wheel. “Well, that, my fellow travelers, is the first business of the day.” She veers widely off the road, toward a green sign that says HARRISBURG. In a few minutes, we are sitting behind four other cars in a line outside a brown, squat building with a gigantic yellow
M
on the roof. “This here is called the McDonald’s drive-through,” Nana Pete says, looking more excited than I’ve seen her in days. “McDonald’s is the official home of the Big Mac.”

“What is it, exactly?” I ask. “A Big Mac, I mean?”

Nana Pete rubs her hands together. “A Big Mac, darlin’, is
just about one of the worst things you can put into your body. It’s also one of the most delicious, which is why I make it a point to have at least three a month.” She sighs. “Two greasy hamburgers layered between three hamburger buns, slathered with ketchup and cheese and special sauce. Oh Lord, when you wash it all down with some french fries and an icy cold Coca-Cola, you’ll think you died and went to heaven.”

My stomach gurgles with excitement. “Man,” I breathe. “It sounds amazing. Can I get two?”

“Of course!” Nana Pete claps her hands together. “Get three if you want! It’s your first Big Mac!” She looks over the seat at Agnes. “How ’bout you, Mouse? You want to try one?” Agnes bites her lip and stares out the window. The car in front of Nana Pete finally drives away and she pulls up in front of a flat board covered with pictures of hamburgers. Then she starts talking into it! I almost fall out of the car when a girl’s voice shoots back at her, repeating her order.

“Holy cow, Agnes, can you see this?” She cuts her eyes at me and looks away again. I glance down at Benny, who is still drifting in and out of a light sleep. I feel sorry that he is missing all of this. Nana Pete pulls up to a window, where another girl is waiting to give her our food, and then places the brown, oily bags in the front, between us.

The immediate aroma when I open the bag hits me like a fist. A combination of salt and warm cheese fills the car as I unwrap a small, dense package sitting on top.

It’s better than I could have imagined, warm and slightly peppery with the tang of cheese in the background. I think I can taste a pickle, too, and maybe mustard. I close my eyes as I chew.

“
Eh?
” Nana Pete says, watching me. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“Mmmm,” I answer. “Even better than I thought it would be.” I turn around, placing the bag on the floor next to Agnes and raise my eyebrows. “You gotta try this, Ags. Don’t let it get cold.”

But she only turns her head, affixing her gaze to another blurry patch of green outside, and reaches up around her throat for her consecration beads.

Nana Pete makes her way through a sandwich quickly, while I start on my second Big Mac. We share an enormous red paper sleeve of french fries and a gigantic Coke, and by the time I sip the last of it, I’m about ready to pass out.

“You must have a tapeworm in there, Honey,” Nana Pete laughs. She says that on every visit, surprised all over again that I eat so much. “Boy, you can eat a
lot
.”

“Actually, I don’t feel so good,” I say, unbuttoning the top of my jeans.

Nana Pete laughs. “That’s the thing about McDonald’s. The joy of it is so fleeting and then you have to pay the price.”

“Just like sin,” says Agnes from the back.

I start to turn around and then think better of it. She’s going to be like this for a while.

We’re just going to have to wait it out.

AGNES

I try hard to make Benny as comfortable as possible, arranging the blankets around him tightly and putting his head on my lap, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He just sleeps. The nervous feeling in my stomach isn’t letting up. I still can’t believe I allowed Nana Pete and Honey to talk me into this madness. And all because of the Regulation Room. What did Nana Pete call it? Child abuse! How absurd is that? She doesn’t understand. Well, of course she wouldn’t. She’s not a Believer. She doesn’t get how much we all
need
that kind of discipline, or the type of people we would turn into without it. We’d be … well, heathens.

The sun is low in the sky, which means morning prayers have probably just ended. I am too frightened to look out the window at everything. It’s too big, too scary. Instead, I pull on my consecration beads around my neck, close my eyes, and start chanting. The next thing I know, Honey’s talking about something called a Big Mac. I will my stomach pangs to go away, offering up each growl and twist in my groin for the horrible way I treated Benny, as the two of them slobber away at their food up front. It is no easy task, as the faint odor of the Big Macs lingers long afterward inside the car. It smells delicious and nauseating at the same time. When I’m sure Honey and Nana Pete aren’t looking, I tighten my waist belt one more time in an attempt to constrict my hunger, but the only thing it seems to be doing is making it harder to breathe.

Then, just as we pass a sign for Gettysburg, Honey asks Nana Pete if she can turn on the radio.

“Sure you can.” Nana Pete leans forward to click on the silver dial. “You just fiddle with those knobs down there until you find something you like.”

I know Honey can feel my eyes boring into the back of her neck as she starts pushing the buttons, but she just purses her lips and keeps pushing. Finally she stops as a woman’s voice comes over the radio. It is the strangest voice I have ever heard, simple and unadorned, but the words she is singing, about God being a slob like the rest of us, are shocking.

“Turn it off!” I scream. “Turn it off, Honey, before we go to hell!”

Honey jumps forward in the seat, clearly startled, but blocks the silver buttons with her hand, as if I have already reached over the seat and am trying to turn it off. “No!” she says. “I want to listen to it!”

I lean over and stuff two of my fingers into Benny’s ears. He doesn’t move. “This is exactly why we’re not allowed to listen to music!” I scream. “It’s blasphemy! Turn it off! Now!”

Nana Pete is watching me carefully in the mirror. She leans over and touches Honey’s wrist. “Turn it off,” she says softly. “Just for now, darlin’.”

Honey gives me a dark look and punches the off button hard with her index finger. “Happy now?” I don’t answer. She turns to look at me. “Blasphemy? You seriously think God’s going to send us to hell if we listen to music?”

“That lady was saying God was a slob!” I shake my head side to side, as if trying to empty the words out. “It’s as bad as breaking the third commandment!”

“Which one is that again?” Nana Pete asks.

“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” Honey recites scornfully.

“It’s true!” I yell. “God could never be a slob! He’s perfect!”

“What’s interesting to me,” Nana Pete says, “is that your idea of perfect seems so off-kilter.”

I blink twice. “No, it’s not.”

“But it is,” Nana Pete says gently. “If God was perfect in every way, as you say he is, then that must mean that he is all loving and forgiving, right?” I nod carefully. “So how could he send people to hell for listening to music?” she asks. “Wouldn’t that go against everything that love and forgiveness are all about?”

I open my mouth and then shut it. “He’s not gonna send the people who listen to
good
music to hell,” I finally reply.

“And what’s good music?” Nana Pete asks. I don’t answer. “Tell me, Mouse.”

“Stuff that, you know, gives glory to him. Like the music Emmanuel plays on the piano.”

Honey groans and bangs her head off the seat. “Agnes. If the only music people were allowed to listen to in this world is that boring, horrible stuff he plays, people would go nuts!”

“People who are writing stuff about God being a slob are already nuts,” I retort.

“And doomed, I guess,” Honey says, rolling her eyes.

“Yes. They’re definitely doomed.”

No one says anything for a minute. Then Honey turns around, as if someone has flipped a switch in her back. “Do
you really want to go through the rest of your life thinking like a robot?”

I turn my head. “No,” I say calmly. “I want to go through the rest of my life thinking like a saint.”

“But you’re not a saint!” Honey roars. “Even the saints, when they were alive, busy leading their lives, weren’t saints, you moron! And you have to be
dead
for at least a hundred years before you can even
be
a saint! Is that what you want, Agnes? You want to live a life full of restrictions and punishments and whippings so that when you die—a
hundred
years after you die—someone will call you a
saint
?”

I stare at the cuticles on Benny’s good fingers, white and curved like small crescent moons. “If that’s what God requires of us, I do.” My voice is shaky. “It’s not up to us to question his ways.”

Honey’s face, bright with perspiration, deflates like a pink balloon. “Man, you sound just like Emmanuel,” she says, turning back around slowly.

I stare at the back of her neck. “Thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Well, then you’re an idiot. It was meant to be an insult.”

My mouth feels cold. “I don’t even remember asking for your opinion.”

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I won’t be offering it anymore.”

Just outside of Emmitsburg, Maryland, Nana Pete pulls into a wide parking lot and parks the car in front of a building that says WAL-MART.

“What’re we doing?” Honey asks. Nana Pete opens the door and stretches.

“Y’all are going to need a few necessities for the rest of the trip. And there ain’t nothin’ you can’t find in a Wal-Mart.”

Wal-Mart is so big inside that for a moment when we step through yet another set of automatic doors, I wonder if it is an actual city disguised as a store. The smell of stale popcorn hangs in the air and people are everywhere, pushing carts filled with blue jeans and coffee and sneakers across the shiny white floor. We arrange Benny in the back of one of the carts, piled on top of his blankets, and push him through the aisles.

“This place is awesome!” Honey says.

Nana Pete leads us down an aisle filled with backpacks and chooses three of them in different colors. “Fill ’em up,” she says, handing me a dark blue one edged in silver. “Toothpaste, soap, hairbrushes, whatever. Throw in anything you see that you think you might need in the next few days or so.” She points to a larger section of the store behind the backpacks, filled with shoes. “I’m going to go look at some sneakers. Right over there. Come over when you’re done.”

I push Benny down the large aisle across from the backpacks while Honey walks in front of us. One side is filled with hundreds of different types of toothpaste; the other is a sea of multicolored toothbrushes.

“I guess we’ll need toothpaste,” I say quietly.

Honey scans the shelves quickly and grabs a box of Orange Mango Anticavity Fluoride paste. She grabs a neon-yellow toothbrush and tosses it carelessly in her bag. “I’ll be in the next aisle,” she says over her shoulder. “We need shampoo.”

I take my time, deliberating for a while between two
toothpastes called Vanilla Mint, and Superwhitening. The Vanilla Mint is bound to taste better, but will the Super-whitening make my teeth look better? Are my teeth not white enough? I can’t decide. Finally, I hold them both up in front of Benny. “Which one, Benny?”

Benny points to the Vanilla Mint with a shaky finger.

I smile. “Good. That’s the one I wanted, too.”

We do the same thing with several toothbrushes before settling on a light purple one with blue stripes running down the bristles for me and a blue one with a lightning bolt across the stem for Benny. I didn’t know toothbrushes came in colors other than white. Benny points and nods his head again, instead of answering. I wonder if the anesthesia in the hospital has made it hard for him to talk.

The next aisle has so many different kinds of shampoos that I start to feel light-headed looking at all of them. There are bright green bottles with names like Clarifying Fruit Acid Rinse and square purple ones called Coconut-Freesia Detangler. Honey has already thrown two bottles in her bag.

“I’ll be right over there with Nana Pete,” she says, pointing. Nana Pete is in view at the end of the aisle, trying to cram her feet into a pair of blue shoes. Honey looks back over her shoulder. “There’s hair ties and stuff, too, at the end of the aisle. Make sure you get a few.”

Benny stares through the slats of the shopping cart, examining the rows of hair ornaments, while I start uncapping and smelling the different shampoos. I am beginning to feel as giddy as a bumblebee flying from flower to flower. They all smell so delicious! I settle finally on a bottle of Mandarin-Mint Deep Conditioning Shampoo for dry, undernourished hair.
It has promised to transform my dull, lackluster locks into a shiny, bouncy head of hair. I am just about to put it in the cart when, at the very bottom of the shelf, I notice a small, clear bottle filled with orange liquid. As I kneel down to look more closely, the inside of my lungs compress, as if filling with water. The little teardrop sticker says Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo. It’s the only shampoo we have ever used at Mount Blessing. My heart pangs for Mom, who, just two weeks earlier, soaped up my hair in the sink when I was too sick to take a shower.