by Tawni O'Dell
She walked over to the kitchen table still covered with last night’s dinner dishes and straddled a chair.
“You’re so fucking stupid, Harley. Ashlee really likes you.”
“She doesn’t even know me.”
“She’s known you her whole life.”
“I’m not talking about riding the same bus.”
I heard the chair legs drag across the tile. She came up beside me again and I automatically stepped away. Her body had the power to repel mine without touching it. We were like the wrong ends of magnets.
Add chicken broth and cannellini beans, I read off Callie’s recipe card. Be sure to rinse and drain beans first.
“How do you think people get to know each other?” Amber asked me, her voice sounding almost pleading. “You think God’s just going to drop a woman in your lap? You’re going to wake up one day and there’s going to be some smart, beautiful virgin living down the road who works five jobs and has a thing for loser headcases?”
“What are cannellini beans?”
“That’s probably what you’re always mumbling about in your sleep,” she murmured.
“What?” I said.
Her eyes darted in my direction, then she walked back to the table and started clearing it with a determination she usually reserved for channel surfing.
She clattered the two plates into the sink. Neither one of us had been home for dinner the night before. I spotted a piece of crumpled notebook paper on the top plate. It had to be Misty’s. It was licked clean.
I opened up the note and showed it to Amber.
ESME SES THE BABYS WILL BE DEFEKTIV.
Amber crinkled her nose. “What is that supposed to mean?”
I shrugged.
“That little Esme gets on my nerves,” Amber said, crushing the paper back up and throwing it in the garbage can under the sink. “She thinks she knows everything. She’s so promiscuous.”
I felt a sudden surge of big brother protectiveness when I heard her mistake. Like I wanted to kill a spider or carry a heavy box for her.
“Precocious,” I corrected her.
“Right,” she answered, curling her lip skeptically. “You’re just telling me that so I’ll use it sometime and sound stupid.”
I wondered if she even remembered that she used to trust me. My mind flashed back to a time we were fighting over my crayons. I wouldn’t let her have any of them, and she went and tattled to Mom. Mom said I had to give her at least one so I gave her white.
I waited for her to figure out what I had done while I silently busted a gut and applauded my evil genius. But she had walked off contentedly and sat down at her white piece of paper to draw me a picture of sugar, salt, and snow.
Outside, Elvis started barking up a storm. I heard a truck coming up the drive and from the other room Jody squealed, “It’s Uncle Mike.” Amber ran out of the kitchen to go put some clothes on.
Jody and Elvis were already bouncing around the truck before he put it in park. He got out, resting a case of beer against one hip, and surveyed the place. He hadn’t been out since February and everything had been covered with snow then. The only thing he could find to criticize was the lack of firewood stacked next to the house. Fortunately, he never went inside.
He and Dad had been close.
He reached down and gave Elvis a scratch between the ears and handed Jody a Butterfinger. She hugged his legs and skipped back to the house. I knew Misty wouldn’t put in an appearance. She didn’t like Uncle Mike because one time he told Dad he should spend more time with me and less with her.
“Those for me?” I asked about the beer.
They were Rolling Rocks. Not the piss water he usually brought.
“Well, they’re not for Elvis. Here, take them. You look like you’re going to kiss me for Chrissakes.”
I took the case from him. He spit a bullet of tobacco in the yard and helped himself to one of the beers. I set the case down and opened one too.
“You get a new couch?” he asked me, looking at the carcass.
Elvis had ripped open one of the cushions and little pieces of blackened upholstery and yellow foam were spread everywhere. He had pulled off the bedspread too and dragged it to his doghouse.
“Thinking about it,” I said.
“Most people wait until they get the new one before they burn the old one.”
“I guess I was overeager.”
He gave me a sideways glance. His eyes were hard to read hidden in shadow beneath the brim of a brown and gold PennDOT cap.
“You being smart with me?”
“No.”
“That was your grandma’s couch.”
“That had nothing to do with my decision to burn it.”
“You are being smart with me.”
Dad’s mom had always been a sensitive topic with the kids. There were three of them: Mike, Diane, and Dad. None of them could stand to be around her and behind her back they called her a drunk and groaned about visiting her but in person they waited on her like she was the Queen of England. When she died, they acted like they were going to crawl in the grave with her. Then the next day they were whistling and joking around while they boxed all her earthly belongings and drove them off to the nearest dump.
I never felt like I knew her well enough to form an opinion on her. She was either very nice or very mean and neither side of her personality seemed to be her real self.
Grandpa, on the other hand, was always mean. He did nothing but sit in his recliner and rant about the environmentalists in Congress who had shut down all the mines. He had already been retired before his mine closed but apparently he resented that his sons and grandsons didn’t have a job waiting to kill them too.
His cough terrified me. A harsh, wheezing hack that always made me think he was going to spit up one of the black lungs his disease was named for. He kept an empty coffee can with him all the time half-filled with his tarry phlegm.
They were a pair, Dad’s folks, but they were the only grandparents I ever had since Mom’s folks were killed when she was a kid. She hadn’t been close to the great-aunt and -uncle who took her in. She never said anything bad about them but sometimes when she talked about marrying Dad, she said he had saved her from them.
I chugged my beer, crushed the can, and dropped it on the grass. It gave me a nice buzz. I hadn’t eaten anything since my popcorn with Ashlee.
“I’m sorry,” I apologized to Uncle Mike. “I’m not feeling so hot today.”
“Now that you mention it, you look like hell.” He dropped his gaze to my shirt. “Were you gutting something?”
“I was making dinner.”
“Why don’t the girls do that?”
“They do. We take turns.”
“You bring home the paycheck. You shouldn’t have to go anywhere near a kitchen.”
“They shouldn’t either. They’re just kids.”
“Amber’s not a kid. Where is she anyway? Out running around with a boy, I suppose.”
“She’s inside,” I told him. “Scrubbing floors and doing laundry. She doesn’t have much time for a social life. She’s so busy helping out around the house.”
“Amber?”
“Mm Hmm.” I nodded over my beer can.
He finished his beer and reached for another. I had noticed a rattle in my truck earlier I would have liked to ask him about but if he stayed to fix it, he would drink all my beer.
“When are you going to mow?”
“Today,” I said emphatically.
“You’re going to need to get to that soffit and fascia this year. And the trim on those windows. That wood’s going to rot right off there if you don’t put a fresh coat of paint on. Did you ever clean out your gutters?”
“Today,” I said. “I’m going to do it today.”
Amber came out of the house in a prim pale-yellow T-shirt dress sprinkled with little blue flowers and her hair pulled back in a ponytail with a ribbon. She still managed to look like a slut.
&n
bsp; She said hi to Uncle Mike and gave him a hug. He told her she got better looking every time he saw her, and she acted like she didn’t know what he was talking about, like she had never seen a mirror. I knocked off my second beer and belched.
Amber looked over at me.
“How’s Mike Junior doing?” she asked Uncle Mike, slyly, and watched for my reaction.
Amber and I didn’t agree on much, but we both hated our cousin Mike. I didn’t know why she hated him so much but my feelings were fairly straightforward. My whole life I had been forced together with him at every family gathering, and he had used every opportunity to out-throw me, outrun me, out-eat me. He never showed up anywhere without a football trophy, or a Polaroid of his latest buck stretched out dead across the hood of his truck or his latest girlfriend stretched out drunk across a friend’s couch.
“He’s doing great,” Uncle Mike gushed. “They’re starting training already. He’s raring to get back out there. He was their third leading rusher last year. He’s hoping to be number one this year.”
“I’m sure he will be,” Amber said, smiling at me. “Mike’s the best.”
“He sure is,” I said, reaching for another beer.
The ground came rushing at me too fast, and I thought I was falling but I kept my balance. I straightened back up and heard Uncle Mike tell Amber we should try and make it up for one of the home games this year.
“Notice how he just said try and make it up,” I muttered to Amber. “It’s not like he’d want us inside the stadium with them.”
She started giggling.
“What’s so funny?” Uncle Mike asked, smiling too.
“I was just telling Amber how much I’d enjoy that.”
“Mike could show you around,” he said to Amber. “You could meet some of the players.”
“Maybe I could meet a cheerleader,” I added.
Amber grinned at me. She reached for my beer and took a sip off it.
“Mike’s dating a cheerleader,” Uncle Mike volunteered.
“Really?” I said.
Amber burst out laughing, and Uncle Mike’s smile faded.
“Well, I guess I’ll leave you two to your private joke,” he said.
“We’re sorry,” I said.
“No, it’s all right,” he replied angrily. “I’m used to it. A lot of people are jealous of Mike’s success. The only way they can handle it is to make fun of him.”
“Is that why they do it?” I whispered to Amber.
She collapsed against my arm, laughing.
“Okay. All right.” He shook his head and backed away. “I guess I’ll be going. I was only trying to help out a little.”
“As little as possible,” I whispered to Amber again, and we both started howling.
Uncle Mike got in his truck and slammed the door. The sound cut through my drunken fog and made me realize what I had done.
“Hey, we’re sorry, Uncle Mike,” I called out, running over to his truck.
He started backing out.
“Really. We’re sorry. We’re just kidding around.”
He raised his hand in a wave and shook his head at me disappointedly.
Uncle Mike had been the only person at Dad’s funeral who spent any time with me one-on-one. He took me for a walk after the burial, with his arm around my shoulders, the two of us strangers to ourselves and each other in our dark suits and stiff shoes with our heads bare and the dirt missing from beneath our fingernails.
He led me silently down row after row of polished headstones. Every once in a while, I’d notice a small flat gray stone engraved with the word BABY. I couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to mean. I thought parents always picked out a baby’s name before it was born, so how could a baby die nameless? The only answer I could come up with was after the baby died, the parents took the name back because they didn’t want to waste it.
Even my dad being lowered into the ground didn’t seem as big a betrayal as that. I imagined all these dead babies without names going up to heaven and being put in a big holding pen like livestock before slaughter while the angels tried to figure out who they were supposed to have been.
Suddenly, I couldn’t handle all the injustices in life and how a lot of them didn’t even seem to end with death.
I started shouting, in short explosive bursts, about what a joke Dad’s funeral had been. How he had lived here his whole life and knew a ton of people, but hardly anybody showed up.
Uncle Mike waited for me to get it out of my system. For me to kick a tombstone and hurt my foot because I was wearing shoes instead of my steel-toed work boots. For me to finally start crying and for me to finally stop crying.
I eventually took a seat with my back up against a big speckled gray slab. Uncle Mike’s voice came to me from above and behind.
“From the moment people heard, they made a choice,” he instructed me. “You and your sisters are either the children of a murdered man or the children of a murderer. If you’re one you deserve sympathy. If you’re the other you deserve hatred. But you can’t be both because people can’t feel both.”
I let his words sink in while I thought about how Mom had asked Uncle Mike to buy Dad a new suit to be buried in even though we couldn’t afford it, and how Uncle Mike had done it but then the funeral was closed casket. I thought about how Mom had sent a condolence card from her prison cell to Aunt Diane. I thought about how even now—after seeing my dad in the ground and seeing my mom in handcuffs—I still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was the criminal and she was the victim.
“Awkwardness kept them away today, and it’s going to keep them away tomorrow,” Uncle Mike finished before he walked off. “You better get used to it.”
I stayed there until Aunt Jan finally came looking for me talking about the glaze hardening on a baked ham and the perils of spoiled potato salad. I wasn’t sure which revelation had stunned me more: the fact that something as trivial as awkwardness could destroy something as powerful as decency, or the fact that Uncle Mike had been the guy who figured it out.
I waited until his truck disappeared, then I started pitching rocks at the empty dust cloud.
“Who needs him?” Amber said.
“He was my beer connection,” I moaned, and lay down in the middle of the dirt.
“Maybe Betty could start getting it for you,” Amber suggested.
That one killed me. I lay on the ground and laughed until every muscle in my gut hurt. I had tears in my eyes when I looked up and saw Misty standing over me, wearing oven mitts, and holding a smoking, black-bottomed pot. She dropped it.
“What the fuck?” I cried, rolling away just in time to keep it from hitting me square in the forehead.
“I’m not washing that,” she said, and went back inside.
The girls had frozen pizza for dinner. Around my sixth beer I started feeling antisocial and decided I didn’t want to eat with them. I took two more beers, a bag of chips, and Elvis, and went off down the road.
My plan was to hike to the railroad tracks and follow them to California like Skip and I used to fantasize about, but I had to stop about a quarter-mile down Potshot to take a leak. While I did, I stared into the black woods and they stared back.
Even drunk in the dark, I could find my way around them. They were my woods. I didn’t own them but they belonged to me because I had taken the time to get to know them. Ownership was about power. Belonging was submission. I wasn’t even sure who owned this land along the road. For all I knew, Callie Mercer did.
I wasn’t going to be able to pay the real estate taxes this year. They were due the first week of June, and I had nothing saved. If the bank took my house, I wondered if Callie would let me live on her hills. I could be one of those wild-eyed mountain hermits with mice nesting in my beard. I could pull down some of the boards from the mining office and build a lean-to in her clearing. I could hunt and fish and season my kill with sage stolen from her garden. One moonlit summer night she might appear with her bo
ok and her beer and her blanket and her mood swings.
The effort of pissing away a six-pack tired me out. I whistled for Elvis and staggered back up the hill. He came tearing over to me as I sat down next to my truck and gave me a couple rowdy licks on the face. I grabbed him by the ruff of his neck and pushed him to the ground. He let me lie on his softly thudding chest for about ten seconds before he jerked up with his big paws flailing. But it had been enough comfort to put me to sleep.
I woke up a couple hours later cold and damp; my mind numb and blank. I didn’t dream anymore. I had told Betty this and she said I just wasn’t remembering any of them, but she was wrong.
I was sure something had been breathing in my ear but it turned out to be my own hair blowing against it. A breeze had kicked up. The air was heavy with an incoming storm. Across the yard the night grass shivered in ripples of silver and black.
It took me two tries to find my feet. I steadied myself against my truck with one hand and inched my way around it.
Elvis was at the side of the house, growling and shaking a limp gray body so hard it kept smacking him in his own head. I had to kick him to get him to drop it.
I knelt down over the torn, bloody body. It was a groundhog. A baby one.
“Git!” I hissed at him.
He jumped away like he’d been kicked again and sat down a couple paces away from me.
I went to the shed, casting glances over my shoulder, and pausing every couple steps to make threatening lunges back in his direction. The shovel was right inside the door, but he was at the body again by the time I found it. I chained him up.
I buried what was left of the groundhog near the tree line. After I was done, I stabbed a stick in his grave and slipped an upside-down beer can over it. I named him Rocky.
Elvis strained at the end of his chain and gave me a final hopeful bark as I walked past him to the porch. I ignored him. He looked first at me, then at the grave, then stretched and lay down in the dirt with the calm surrender of a creature who knows he will eventually be set free.
I only made it as far as the living room. The sight of a floor covered in pillows was too tempting. It called to me like a lake on a scorching hot day. I held my arms out to my sides and fell into them, face first, and drifted down to the bottom.