“Miss Patterson,” I say. Boy, she gets around.
“Imogen,” Mom clarifies. “I haven’t thought about her in a coon’s age,” she tries out Miss Piper’s vernacular, making herself—and me—chuckle. It doesn’t sound right coming from her. She lost any backcountry dialect she may have had the day she left it.
“Sweetest lil’ ol’ gal,” Miss Piper says, sorting through her outmoded filing system once again. “P, P, P…Patterson. She brings me a few treasures every now and again. But mostly relics I have no use for, like that rocking chair she tried to shove off on me, along with a guitar. I told her if it don’t come with strings or vinyl, take it down the street to Smokey. That ol’ auctioneer’ll take anything.”
Mom and I outstare the index card, waiting for Miss Piper to set it down in front of us on the counter. I don’t really know what I’m looking for other than an Ibanez.
“That’s it!” Mom squeals. “That’s Mason’s. See how it’s worn in the top corner, just above the strings and sound hole?”
It is beat up, the color there washed out in comparison to the rest of the guitar.
“That’s because he used it like a beatbox, a drum, in that corner. It was the coolest thing I ever saw. He could play bass, lead, rhythm, and drums on that one instrument. And he could do it all at the same time. The original one-instrument, one-man band. I never could get it down,” Mom says with admiration.
I know what she’s talking about. I’ve YouTube’d “percussive acoustic guitar,” still trying to get it down myself.
Ding-dong! Goes the door. We aren’t the only ones on a hunt.
“Don’t ask me who I sold it to the second time. If you’re that curious, help yourself to the filing system. And good luck with that!” Miss Piper moves on to the next customer.
Mom and I look at the card catalog, then to each other. Impossible.
Our safest bet, “Let’s focus on the Bootleg guitar,” Mom says.
“Why would Miss Patterson have Mason’s Ibanez?” I ask, as we gravitate toward the vinyl bins, impossible not to focus on it.
Mom flips over the Polaroid that’s stapled to the index card and reads the date of purchase. A few months after Mason’s death, “I’d imagine Miss Patterson was pawning it for Maisy,” she says. “Money had to be tight after Mason died.”
Mason sold his handmade, one-of-a-kind guitar—actually two-of-a-kind, considering its twin—to pay bills, to make sure Shelby had what she needed as a preemie. And Maisy sold the run-of-the-mill Ibanez he was able to squeeze out of the deal—the guitar he played for Shelby when she was a baby, with the rare and skillful blemishes of percussive acoustic guitar—for drugs? If he bought it for $40, she couldn’t have got more than $20 for it. She should’ve kept it for Shelby.
“I doubt it hurt her feelings, getting rid of it,” Mom adds. “After the band broke up, she lost all interest in music.”
My mother won’t have it. Music is one of her triggers, Shelby once said.
After extending our gratitude to Miss Piper, and escaping her fat watchcat, we continue the hunt in Mom’s Subaru.
I drive. Mom reclines in the passenger seat, her night shift and our day trip imploring rest.
She clutches to her chest two gently-used but essential vinyl records—the intimate Bon Iver’s “For Emma” and the pulverizing White Stripes’ “Elephant.”
I used up too much hunting time deliberating over which two would mean the most to her, when I know that any two from me would mean the world to her. Put that in your Porsche’s tailpipe, van den Berg.
Let her sleep. She’s not far from it. “You and Mason Lynn were friends?” I finally ask what I wanted to at Miss Piper’s store.
“Oh, yeah. What we came through together with you kids, it must have been similar to the bond that soldiers of war experience. Nothing romantic, but just as intimate,” her sapped voice answers through closed eyes.
“What about Maisy?”
“I guess that was the start of Maisy’s troubles. She got hooked on painkillers after the birth. Started out innocently enough in the hospital, but she never quit. From the way Mason talked, it sounded like postpartum depression.” Mom clears her throat, raspy at best. “Although, none of us could have known that then. She just couldn’t handle being around the baby.”
“Shelby. She didn’t want her?” I can’t imagine anyone not wanting her.
“According to Mason, Maisy was the reason they kept her, kept the pregnancy. He had a lot of guilt about that, not being as supportive…on board…at first. Pregnancy is life-changing enough at any age, son, let alone at seventeen. That’s how old they were.”
One year younger than Shelby and me. “I can’t imagine having a child right now.”
“Good. Don’t imagine it. And remember that the next time you’re alone with a girl.”
“‘All it takes is once,’” I mouth her words. She and Pop may not be married anymore, but their talking points on the birds and bees are united. Let her sleep. But I can’t. They say a tired, fuzzy brain is more creative. It seems to be more forthcoming too. She’s never said this much. Then again, I never gave her the chance. “So, Mason stayed in the NICU with Shelby the way you did with me?” Some bootlegger.
“He had to. Maisy wasn’t or couldn’t be there.” Mom shrugs, eyes still closed. “When they released you and Shelby from the NICU, he spent the next three months between his house and ours. Splitting his time trying to nurse Maisy back to herself and to give Shelby what she needed.”
“Shelby stayed with us?”
“In your room, which was the nursery then, for three months until Mason felt comfortable enough to take her home. And until your father started getting jealous.”
In my room. Shelby? The image not quite so wholesome, considering the two of us aren’t newborns anymore. “Pop. Jealous?” If he was the jealous type, how could he let Mom go so easily.
“He did have a point. She was theirs to take care of. I wasn’t their nanny, he said. I didn’t mind. She wasn’t any more trouble than you.” She pats my knee before gravity retires her limp arm to the console. “And I had learned so much in that NICU. It was fun, rewarding, to carry it out at home.”
With my birth, another dream began. It was my fault she left. But she’s happy, I remind the prick on my shoulder.
“Mason and I probably did spend too much time together,” she says through a lingering yawn. “We had a lot in common between two preemies and music.”
“You never wanted to be in the band?” Last question, I promise. I would’ve wanted to be in the band.
“He never asked. The band was over by then, anyhow. Besides, I played well enough, but my songwriting could give your father’s dancing a run for its money.” She chortles. “You never saw anyone more awful at stringing words together than me.”
The last Friday in September arrived like puberty: sudden and unimpressive.
The capstone of my life, an honest-to-goodness campus tour, garnered no ceremony other than tradition. Yep, my mother’s back in rehab, a month and a half since her last checking in and checking out three days later.
Over his special breakfast of scrambled eggs and biscuits smothered in milk gravy, Grandpa said, “Now dontcha go lettin’ it ruin yer tour, Shelby Lynn, honey.”
“Oh, I won’t,” I said. And I meant it, my mother’s shenanigans reinforcing my desire to escape.
If only the tour came with a promise, I would have shouted it from the rooftops. A premature good riddance! But the only thing that can come of this campus tour—giving to a dream a palpable experience—is my wanting college more than ever.
Running has taught me to embrace the pressure of competition. Even so, college acceptance is a contest I cannot bear to lose. Tell no one. The less people who know, how I might fail—the recipient of a VIP tour ultimately denied admission—the better.
I thought about telling Ace. But with the exception of awkward glances at school since our kiss that never happened, I haven
’t seen him. Saturday morning runs replaced with Saturday cross country meets, I doubt he would have shown up to run with me anyway.
Destiny dropped me at the bus station in Sigogglin after an impromptu makeover, where the two of us exchanged clothes and she transformed my hair and face in less than half an hour. No butterfly am I, but with a mild and tasteful application, she completely metamorphosed my features.
Eyes, cheekbones, and lips popped—even on my round face—making me look lively, engaging, a few years older than I am. My wild and wiry hair tamed into soft, shiny overlapping segments that lay casually across my shoulders and down the middle of my back. The knit sweater, jeggings, and boots—not exactly hand-me-downs but on loan, all a bit long considering Destiny’s height—fit and felt like no other hand-me-down I am accustomed to. Lines and contours, definitive origin and end points, what a difference being made up makes.
“Now, that girl…” Destiny gaped at the girl in the mirror, proud of her creation “…she is just Shelby.”
I gaped, too. The girl in the mirror gaped back at me. “How? Where did you learn to do this?” The girl in the mirror asked, unsure if she fancied the difference. Counterfeit. Is being made up make-believe?
“Raelynn’s been giving me pointers,” Destiny said. “It’s her thing. Makeup and hair. She wants out of here, too. Y’all have more in common than you think.”
Jitters run through me the way I imagine electricity runs through a wire. Can you want something too much? Is that why I feel like I could throw up.
In my lofty aspirations of college, I never made it beyond country girl makes good in the city. Now in the city, I can’t shake the feeling that reality never lives up to fantasy.
Nothing here is gray. It is brilliant. The sun smiles. Birds sing. Squirrels scamper. A tree trail, two miles of over forty native species, circles campus. Eight hundred urban acres of meticulously landscaped greenery somehow coalesces with aesthetic brick, mortar, steel, and glass, as if the earth sprouted it that way.
No wonder my mother says Appalachia got left behind. It did.
This is progress. People even carry themselves differently here. Backpacks slung about shoulders, steps light, faces untroubled, voices carry hope. Smack dab in the middle of goal-driven learning, tests, deadlines, and expectations, there is a sense of irrepressible freedom. More so than the lawn and brick and mortar, they enthrall me. How did they do it? What odds did they overcome in getting here?
The library. The libraries! There are fifteen on one campus. They have so many books, they separate them by subject—Education Library, Law Library, Science Library, and so on. If only I had a phone to take pictures, Grandpa would enjoy seeing this. He could spend hours, days, weeks, months in the libraries alone, his hands and eyes carefully inspecting an endless catalog of books.
Although who would want to live in the pages of books when living on campus. There’s so much to do, so much to see, so much to experience. Opportunity here must be inexhaustible.
Ace. His mother lives in Lexington. He could live here. Why wouldn’t he? And what is he doing in my fantasy turned reality! The way I treat certain never-read-again books, I do myself a favor and shelve thoughts of Ace Copper.
My current company assists with that feat. As he guides me in and out of residence halls, classrooms, and commons areas, Grayson is not dark or moody or mysterious. He is open, engaging, and insightful. Going into his junior year, he is majoring in Sociology with an emphasis in political sociology. He boggles my mind with talk of philosophy and philanthropy. Things I never considered courses of study.
Wrapping up my tour before sending me off to the meet and greet, he does so with ceremony and cheesiness with an all-I-can-eat buffet at “Champions Kitchen”—the campus dining hall is as ambitious as the campus grounds. Sprawling, colorful, made-to-order, and built around the concept of “breaking bread,” it is stocked with “the freshest local ingredients.”
Campus dining? It looks to me like fine dining. With the waste alone, Miss Patterson could feed a lot of mouths in her soup kitchen.
Grayson is inclusive too, extending to me an invite to the recurring Friday Happy Hour at his dorm. “It’s nonalcoholic,” he says rather paternally, keeping in mind my age.
A stipulation of dorm living, I presume. My Poke County peers would not approve. A party without mind-altering substances is no party at all. Maybe that is because life here is worth living without purposely skewing reality.
“Maybe,” I say, keeping in mind the carrot. I am not here to socialize.
Go to the party! I hear Destiny—WWDD—from a hundred miles away.
My meet and greet with the assistant track coach is okay, at best. The moment she introduces herself as Coach Payne, I let go of the secret hope that the meeting might come with an official offer.
Despite the name, Coach Payne is cordial. She entertains my running portfolio—a handmade scrapbook of ribbons and newspaper clippings. She has done her homework. She knows my times, at which invitationals I have medaled, and how I have ranked at postseason meets.
She is informative. Few runners receive full scholarships. More receive partial scholarships. I should rely as heavily on academics as I do running to afford college.
She is encouraging, impressed with my performance, considering that I come from neither a “super region” nor a “power program.”
Coach Payne likes this. I have room for improvement. With the proper coaching, I can be developed. Underdeveloped high school athletes can produce “big jumps” at the collegiate level. Not only does this benefit the runner and the team, it underscores the coach’s knack for recruiting.
Being the underdog might pay off?
Stay healthy, she cautions. Injury is quick to make a recruiter think twice. She is busy. Practice awaits. So much for knocking off early. A good reminder of the work and sacrifice required of the college athlete.
“Good meeting you, Lynn.” Coach Payne shakes my hand, grip as firm as her name, bringing to an end our meet and greet.
Does she think my first name is Lynn? Or is the coach in her accustomed to surnames in differentiating same names and tracking ubiquitous rankings? Either way, she can call me whatever she likes. Even Shelby Lynn.
“The pleasure is all mine, I assure you. Thank you so much for your time.” I bow and nod, and maybe curtsy, backing my way out of her office.
A few moments later, “Hey, Lynn,” her voice trails after me down the hallway, rich with afterthought.
“Yes, ma’am…” I reply, rich with hope.
“How would you like to attend practice?”
“Run?” Too hopeful?
“It’s against the rules. But you’re welcome to observe.”
Observe. “Yes. Please. I’d love to.”
In a lounge-like area, more students congregate than I had expected. Is this happy hour or rush hour? The wallflower in me retreats, back literally to the wall nearest the door, taking to task WWDD.
Why would anyone do it? Socializing among people I have known all my life is painful enough. Why would I attempt it among strangers! A bus station full of cellphone-using, book-reading, conversation-avoiding passengers is pretty darn appealing right about now.
As I turn to run, a familiar voice stops me.
“Take your boots off. Stay a while.” Grayson’s arm swoops protectively and platonically around my shoulder. Around as a brother would do, not over like a boyfriend.
“Hi!” I whisper-shout, relieved to recognize one face.
“I got you,” he says, circling us around the chattering room to an intimate circle in the back.
“This is Shelby. The girl I was telling y’all about,” he informs the party of four.
He talks about me? He says “y’all”? My grammar books cite the contraction as unacceptable in formal English. If it is good enough for Grayson and his college friends, it is good enough for me.
“Classic name,” a good-looking guy—standing next to another good-looking g
uy—says. “My family races thoroughbreds. We have a Shelby too. You know, like the car.”
Grayson and I share a glance and a chuckle, possibly the first I’ve ever been a part of an inside joke.
“Question is, are you as fast as the name?” the second good-looking guy interjects with a playful smile. “Grayson said you had a meet and greet with the track coach.”
I nod, tongue-tied at the warm reception.
“How’d it go?” Grayson fills the silence, encouraging me to say something. Anything!
“They are so fast,” I hear my own voice, a dry croak nonetheless.
“Tell me about it,” the third in line in the party of four joins the conversation. She is as good-looking as the guys.
Is that a prerequisite for college too?
“I write for the student newspaper,” she continues. “I did a feature on the women’s cross country team last year. From my seat in the air-conditioned team van, I hyperventilated just watching them!” She gives a self-deprecating replay, giving laughter to the group.
Indulging in humor, overcome with nerves—I am socializing! I rein it in, grasping for something relevant and inclusive to say. “Is the running analogous to the studying? From high school to college?”
“Classic comparison,” the first good-looking guy uses the complimentary adjective yet again. “The work is harder, faster, yes. But you don’t spend as much time in class as you do in high school, which means you have more free time to get the work done.”
“Unless…” the last good-looking guy seamlessly finds his mark in the dialogue “…you major in basket weaving, like career student here.” He points to the playful and second good-looking guy.
“The weaving of baskets is as old as the history of humankind,” career student says, surely quoting from a class synopsis. “And the art of securing another year’s tuition by making one for mummy—the perfect Mother’s Day gift, should any of you delinquents care—is as new as my avant-garde design.”
Just Shelby Page 7