Crab Orchard Review, Vol. 15, No. 1

Jamey Gennahad to sweep and throw out the garbage from the classrooms and pickup the garbage around the perimeter. Aileen gave them exactly therespect they were due. Her parents had worked hard all their lives, andso had she. She’d already done her share of hard labor. Growing up ona farm in the Midwest, she’d walked beans and baled hay, washed tenthousand dishes, and had to pay her own way through college, wasstill paying, in fact.She didn’t have to take Josie to treatment today, but she did wantto get home, it was her free day. Josie was basically finished withtreatment, had graduated, only had to go once a week to her talkgroup. Today was Aileen’s day to go home, sit down, read a new book,and relax.The meetings at Kaiser: an endless diatribe from a bunch ofunhappy spoiled teenagers. One day, a girl’s mother stopped at the mallwith her daughter before coming in a half-hour late to the meeting.Then Josie and she had to sit through the girl pulling neck-scarves andsweaters out of the Abercrombie and Fitch bag. Another kid in thegroup didn’t even have a bike. Aileen, who had an extra bike at home,offered to bring it in. But that kid never made it. They put him downin some hell-hole of a rehab place, where kids tried to jump the wall,get on BART, and run away. Aileen and her husband worried that Josiewould relapse and get put in Diamond Ranch. Or that she, too, wouldrun away.Today on the way home, in the middle of the traffic circlethere was a pale yellow dog with black spots on his forehead, lying flaton his belly, ready to pounce, holding a short, slant-eyed billygoat inits place. Aileen knew the goats were shipped in for a couple of weeksa year to crop the tall grasses on the high steep hillsides next to themiddle/high school campus. She liked seeing them there in the middleof the suburban city while waiting in traffic on her way to work inthe mornings—a herd of a hundred or so goats munching away onthe grass that grew on the hillsides leading into the valley where herschool was located.While Aileen was growing up, her father had raised cattle andmilk cows on their farm in Iowa, but during the past few years, heowned a small herd of goats. There was a market for them back in herhometown where the packing plant had re-opened.Aileen had taken Josie to visit her father’s farm in Iowa a coupleof times, the last time when Josie was eight. She was already fourteen14 u Crab Orchard Review