for little Jimmy to go to nursery school, he was so excited to be taking the big boy school bus. He would jump with joy off the curb when he would see the blue bus pulling up to take him home. One early afternoon Brian Hansen’s wallet had fallen into the footwell. He noticed it when he was in the parking lot, about to pull up to the waiting kids. He bent down to retrieve it. He was driving so slowly. He thought he could take his eyes off the road for just a second. But Jimmy was little and his bones were greensticks. They were no match for a school bus, even a small one, even a slow one.
Lang was at ShopRite buying fruit snacks and juice boxes. Big Jimmy was in a meeting about police logistics for the upcoming summer festival. Chloe was in ninth grade math, dreaming of a tuna sandwich she was about to eat for lunch.
Had Uncle Kenny not broken Burt’s back, Burt would have been driving the blue bus as he had been driving it for thirteen years. Burt would have never taken his eyes off the road. But Kenny did break Burt’s back. And with Burt out of action, the town had hired an out-of-towner with “very good credentials” to drive over the little ones to and fro.
Afterward, Burt didn’t care how bad his back was. Though big Jimmy said it was one fucking day too late, Burt stuck a syringe of cortisone into his thigh three times a week and got behind the wheel of the bus until the town gently retired him, because every time he went over a pothole, he cried out in such anguish that the little kids shrieked in terror. Fryeburg had to either repair the town’s potholes or golden-shake Burt’s hand. The second option was cheaper.
On Jimmy’s tombstone: “THE LORD GIVETH AND THE LORD TAKETH AWAY.”
Other repercussions: three years ago, Mason comforted Chloe by taking her hand one summer night and becoming her boyfriend.
Still other repercussions: instead of Barcelona, Chloe was headed to an orphanage in Latvia. Damn Uncle Kenny to all hell.
After it happened, Lang did not come out of her house for five months. Then she bought a sewing machine, learned how to stitch herself bright new clothes and staggered on. She bought a heat-gun and heat-cured paints and took up painting lifesize dolls, the height of a small girl, or perhaps a boy. She made fifty of them, and then sold them on consignment, immersing herself instead in gardening with Chloe. The money from the fifty dolls was still dribbling in. And now Lang was giving some of it to Chloe to go to Latvia to search for another lifesize boy.
YOU HAD TO GIVE IT TO HER. LANG TRIED. BY HERSELF SHE took Chloe to apply for a passport. Turned out both parents had to be physically present to sign the application. Chloe, of course, knew why her mother would prefer her father not come, but said nothing.
With Jimmy in tow, Lang quickly filled out the application form while Chloe, bored and hungry and anxious because her mother was anxious, tried to distract her father. The scene would’ve been funny if her mother wasn’t so stressed out. Her dad, bless him, was barely paying attention to the words Lang was writing down, but when it came time to sign, he moved Lang’s hand away from the paper so he could sign his name by the X at the bottom, and casually glanced over the document.
“Mother,” he said, “why are you so careless? You’re as bad as the incompetents in the school records department. Look, you’ve misspelled her name.” He turned to the postal clerk. “Dave, get us another application. My wife here doesn’t know her own daughter’s name.”
“Sure thing, chief.”
“Thanks, buddy. Careful this time,” Jimmy told Lang. “Want me to do it?”
“No, your handwriting is terrible. I’ll do it.”
“At least I know how to spell.”
“Who can tell? No one can read it.”
He watched her.
Lang gestured to Chloe, who once again tried to distract her father with idle chatter about the upcoming prom, graduation, her dress, a limo, a chaperone. Lang said her pen was running out of ink; could Jimmy go get her another?
He went, but as soon as he returned, he peered over the top of her rounded shoulder.
“Lang! You did it again. What’s the matter with you? I don’t know what’s wrong with your mother today, Chloe. Dave, sorry, I need one more application.”
Lang sighed and straightened up from the counter. Chloe stepped away. She made eye contact with Dave and shook her head, as if to signal him to wait, but also to scram because all kinds of crap was about to go down inside the peaceful Fryeburg post office on a weekday afternoon.
Lang placed her hand on her husband’s chest, on Chloe’s father, Jimmy Devine. “Jimmy,” she said mildly. “Wait.”
He waited.
“I didn’t misspell it, Jimmy,” Lang said. “Look.”
She thrust Chloe’s birth certificate into his face. Jimmy stared, perplexed. Plain as noon, printed in black, with a raised seal from the state of Maine confirming the official nature of the words was “Divine.” Preceded by “Chloe Lin.”
Jimmy understood nothing. “For eighteen years you knew the registrar’s office misspelled our kid’s name and you never told me?”
“Oh well.” Lang patted him. “Nothing we can do about it now. Let’s sign and go.”
“Nothing we can do about it?” he bellowed. “Of course there’s something we can do about it.”
“Not in time for her to get her passport for Europe.”
“She can’t have a passport with her name misspelled in it, Mother,” Jimmy said in his best no-arguments-will-be-entertained chief-of-police voice. “A passport is good for ten years. But a mistake like this is forever. No.”
“Jimmy.”
“No! I said we will fix it and we will fix it.”
Lang did not raise her voice. “It’s not misspelled, Jimmy,” she said. “That’s what I told the lady to write.”
“What lady?” He was dumbfounded.
“The lady at the hospital who came to take the baby’s name for the birth certificate. I told her to write Divine.”
“Well, the idiot clearly didn’t hear you correctly. She needs to be fired. Chloe is not going to have the wrong name on her passport because of a typo.”
“It’s not a typo, Jimmy. I spelled it out for her. I told her to write D-I-V-I-N-E.”
There was commotion at the post office. A man was taping a box shut, the plastic ripping off loudly. The metal door to the postmaster’s quarters slammed, a phone trilled, somebody laughed.
Jimmy was mute.
“It’s not a typo,” Lang repeated. “I wanted her to be Chloe Divine.”
“You
