Orphan Train

mumbles.
    “Whatever. Those illegals are all the same, aren’t they?”
    Deep breath, stay cool, get through dinner. “If you say so.”
    “I do say so.”
    “Hey, now, ladies, that’s enough.” Ralph is smiling, but it’s a worried grimace; he
     knows Molly is pissed. He’s always making excuses—“She didn’t mean nothing by it,”
     “She’s yanking your chain”—when Dina does things like intone “the Tribe has spoken”
     when Molly expresses an opinion. “You need to stop taking yourself so seriously, little
     girl,” Dina said when Molly asked her to knock it off. “If you can’t laugh at yourself,
     you’re going to have a very hard life.”
    So Molly moves her mouth muscles into a smile, picks up her plate, thanks Dina for
     dinner. She says she’s got a lot of homework, and Ralph says he’ll clean up the kitchen.
     Dina says it’s time for some trash TV.
    “Housewives of Spruce Harbor,” Ralph says. “When are we going to see that?”
    “Maybe Terry Gallant could be in it. Show that yearbook photo of her in her tiara,
     cut to her washing floors.” Dina cackles. “I’d watch that one for sure!”

Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011
    For the past few weeks in Molly’s American History class they’ve been studying the Wabanaki Indians, a confederacy of five Algonquian-speaking tribes,
     including the Penobscot, that live near the North Atlantic coast. Maine, Mr. Reed
     tells them, is the only state in the nation that requires schools to teach Native
     American culture and history. They’ve read Native narratives and contrasting contemporaneous
     viewpoints and taken a field trip to The Abbe, the Indian museum in Bar Harbor, and
     now they have to do a research report on the subject worth a third of their final
     grade.
    For this assignment they’re supposed to focus on a concept called “portaging.” In
     the old days the Wabanakis had to carry their canoes and everything else they possessed
     across land from one water body to the next, so they had to think carefully about
     what to keep and what to discard. They learned to travel light. Mr. Reed tells students
     they have to interview someone—a mother or father or grandparent—about their own portages,
     the moments in their lives when they’ve had to take a journey, literal or metaphorical.
     They’ll use tape recorders and conduct what he calls “oral histories,” asking the
     person questions, transcribing the answers, and putting it together in chronological
     order as a narrative. The questions on the assignment sheet are: What did you choose to bring with you to the next place? What did you leave behind?
     What insights did you gain about what’s important?
    Molly’s kind of into the idea of the project, but she doesn’t want to interview Ralph
     or—God forbid—Dina.
    Jack? Too young.
    Terry? She’d never agree to it.
    The social worker, Lori? Ick, no.
    So that leaves Vivian. Molly has gleaned some things about her—that she’s adopted,
     that she grew up in the Midwest and inherited the family business from her well-off
     parents, that she and her husband expanded it and eventually sold it for the kind
     of profit that allowed them to retire to a mansion in Maine. Most of all, that she’s
     really, really old. Maybe it’ll be a stretch to find drama in Vivian’s portage—a happy,
     stable life does not an interesting story make, right? But even the rich have their
     problems, or so Molly’s heard. It will be her task to extract them. If, that is, she
     can convince Vivian to talk to her.
    M OLLY ’ S OWN CHILDHOOD MEMORIES ARE SCANT AND PARTIAL . S HE remembers that the TV in the living room seemed to be on all the time and that the
     trailer smelled of cigarette smoke and the cat’s litterbox and mildew. She remembers
     her mother lying on the couch chain-smoking with the shades drawn before she left
     for her job at the Mini-Mart. She remembers foraging for food—cold hot dogs and toast—when
     her mother wasn’t home, and sometimes when she was. She remembers the giant puddle
     of melting snow just outside the door of the trailer, so large that she had to jump
     across it from the top step to get to dry ground.
    And there are other, better, memories: making fried eggs with her dad, turning them
     over with a large black plastic spatula. “Not so fast, Molly Molasses,” he’d say.
     “Easy. Otherwise the eggs’ll go splat.” Going to St. Anne’s Church on Easter and choosing
     a