Free The Scar Boys by Len Vlahos Page B

her, but we all thought of her as Mrs. Mac anyway—woke up one morning with a pain in her back and a bloated feeling in her belly. Thinking she’d eaten something bad, or maybe tweaked a muscle, she did her best to muddle through the discomfort—going to work at the post office, picking Richie up after school, keeping the house clean, and resting when she could find the time. The hectic schedule of a suburban mom managed to hide, in very plain sight, her growing sense of fatigue. Richie’s dad used his magical hands to massage her back, but that only seemed to make it worse, whatever
it
was.
    Then one morning, Mrs. Mac woke up to find that the pain in her back had subsided, that it had faded to an echo of pain, there but not there. She figured she was on themend. Three days later Mr. Mac came home to find his wife in bed with chills, aches, and fever, barely able to acknowledge his presence. Four weeks later, she was dead.
    The pain in her back, Richie and his dad would later learn, was from a cantaloupe-sized, cancerous tumor pressing against her kidney. If Mrs. Mac had tended to it before it burst, the doctor explained, she might have had a chance. Once that softball of poisoned pus ruptured, and the cancer infected her kidneys, liver, and pancreas, it was game over. They tried surgery, but it was too late. Richie’s mom died on the operating room table. There can never be a silver lining when something like that happens, but Mrs. Mac’s absence did forge a bond between Richie and his dad that was unique among my friends, and I guess that counts for something.
    “You did what?” Mr. Mac’s head was still under the sink, and it was getting weird having a conversation with his butt.
    “We bought a van. A Ford, sir. It’s in the driveway.”
    “You bought it? A Ford?” Mr. Mac finally backed away from his work. “What the hell’dya do that for?”
    “It was a great deal, Mr. Mac,” Johnny chimed in. “Only 40,000 miles and the engine sounds real good.” Mr. Mac looked at Johnny, then at the rest of us.
    “Where’s the girl?” We knew he meant Cheyenne.
    “Not here, sir.”
    “Cars and shit are for boys,” Cheyenne had said when we invited her along. “I’m going to treat myself to something ‘girly’ today.” None of us knew what that meant, so when we caught up with her later we were surprised to find her crying and hiding her hands behind her back. Johnny coaxed her arms free and we found ourselves staring at two-and-a-half-inch long, pink-polished, buffed nails protruding from each finger—faux extensions of the real thing. “I can’t even make a fist,” Cheyenne sobbed. It took Richie and an acetylene torch forty-five minutes to remove them. How he didn’t burn her hands to a crisp, I’ll never know.
    Mr. Mac sized us up and shook his head. “All right, let’s go have a look.”
    In the McGills’ driveway was a 1976 Ford Econoline van. It was powder blue, with two or three rust spots along the running boards. Inside were bucket seats finished in black vinyl, with a hard bench in the back that was flanked on each side by smallish windows. The spacious cargo area in the rear was more than enough room for the drums, guitars, amplifiers, and luggage we were going to bring on tour.
    We’d found the van through an ad in the
Pennysaver
. “Cargo van. Runs good. $1300.” Simple, direct, and the right price. Johnny called the number, and before we knew it we were forking over what was left of the band fund to an older black woman in a fine blue dress. She told us herhusband had “used the van for his flooring business, God rest his soul,” and that “he never drove it, as the good Lord is my witness, more than thirty-five miles per hour.” For some reason, we believed her.
    I bit my cuticles—a nasty habit I’d picked up from a need to keep my fingernails short for the guitar—while Mr. Mac rooted around under the hood of the Econoline.
    “Start it up,” he called to Richie, who did