by Lexie Ray
“Where?”
“It’s not going to be fun.”
“I’ve spoken to your father personally. I know just how little fun these things can be.”
“It’ll probably be even worse than asking my father for help,” she warned.
I chuckled. “It’s hard to imagine who in this whole wide town is more unpleasant than your father.” I hoped she wouldn’t take it as an insult, and she didn’t seem to. However, when I looked into her eyes, I realized that she probably hadn’t even heard what I’d said. She was far away, a dread weighing heavily on her shoulders, making them slump forward a little bit.
“Peyton? Who are we going to go talk to?” Now I was starting to get pretty worried.
“The only person in this whole wide town who’s more unpleasant than my father,” she said, then met my gaze. “My mother.”
Chapter 5
We sat in the truck outside of the weathered trailer for a long time, Peyton studying it, inscrutable, a tiny wrinkle between her dark brows belying her doubts. It was smaller than my trailer, in dire need of repairs, and so battered looking that it was tough to imagine that the inside was even livable. But this was the spot Peyton had directed us to, isolated on a hill, the hot, dry wind making it seem like the trailer walls were so thin the entire thing swayed at every gust.
Who knew? Perhaps it did.
I opened my mouth and closed it for perhaps the fifth time since we’d been sitting there, the engine of the truck killed, silence ruling us except for the breeze that moaned against the windows. What was I supposed to say to make any of this easier? I’d always had a good relationship with my parents — easy communication, tons of support for whatever cause I decided to take up, and all the love in the world.
Until, of course, the wreck.
But to sit there in the quiet truck with Peyton, contemplating the home that was never hers, I felt as if some of her uncertainty leeched into me.
“We don’t have to do this,” I said, then lapsed again into silence, wondering if that had been the wrong thing to say. Peyton didn’t so much as glance at me when she answered.
“You don’t have to do anything. But this is something that I have to do.”
I wondered what this would cost us — not in a monetary sense, or anything a person could really measure. This was the first time that I could really perceive Peyton’s anxiety, and it was unnerving. Not even when we were stealing land, clients, and resources from her father did she even give off the slight whiff of nerves. What was it about that trailer — and its contents — that made her so uneasy?
“Do you know whether your mother is here?” I asked, if only to say something. The hush in the truck was starting to unnerve me.
“Of course she’s here,” Peyton said, distracted. “Where else would she be?”
Something about that statement propelled her to action — she threw open the door and seemed to hurl herself out to the unkempt grass, the longer strands of which waved in the wind. I followed almost helplessly, nervous because I didn’t know quite what we were doing here, why Peyton saw fit to pay a visit to a long-estranged relative, even if that relative was her mother.
Peyton sniffed out my trepidation almost instantly, stopping in her tracks so abruptly I bumped into her.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Maybe you should stay in the car,” she said, not looking at me.
“Hey, we’re partners in this,” I reasoned. “I’m here to get answers, same as you. I’d like to meet your mother. Maybe she’ll even like me.”
Peyton didn’t dignify that falsity with a response, but resolutely strode forward. It was probably a stupid thing to say. Nobody’s parents liked their significant others — or whatever Peyton and I happened to be. Business partners. Fuck buddies? It was a conversation I didn’t think either of us wanted to have.
Peyton hesitated only a heartbeat before rapping sharply on the door to the trailer.
“Who is it?” someone hollered loudly from inside.
Another hesitation, and I held my breath, afraid, somehow, that I’d have to introduce the two of us.
But Peyton spoke up. “It’s your daughter. The one you didn’t want. Peyton Crow.”
There was a long pause inside, and then the door opened, a screen still separating us. It was a much older woman, older than I’d thought, never having laid eyes personally on Mary Crow before. She was small and wizened, but with a glitter in her eyes that had nothing to do with joy.
“If you know you weren’t wanted, why would you think I’d want to see you on my doorstep now?” Mary demanded, jutting her chin out at Peyton.
Peyton, to her credit, stood her ground. “Because it’s taken almost thirty years for me to need anything from you, and now I’m asking.”
Mary’s eyes slid from her daughter to me, and then to the truck parked just beyond us. “I don’t have any money, if that’s what you’re here for.”
“Does it look like I need money from you?” Peyton asked, her sarcasm all the more biting without a sneer. “I’ve come for advice.”
“And him?”
Peyton didn’t so much as give me a backward glance. “He came to hear it, too.”
Mary chewed on this for a few long moments. “You getting married?”
“No.” Peyton’s voice was flat even as my heart fluttered. I shut myself down, wishing I weren’t so damned naive. I was thirty proper, and my spirit had soared at the idea of attaching myself to Peyton Crow for the rest of our lives. She’d have had a good laugh at my expense if she ever suspected what I felt for her. Sex was more than enough for now, anyway. Wasn’t it?
“Thirty years is a long time,” Mary said, by way of greeting, as she heaved the screen door open and nearly hit Peyton in the face with it. “I thought I had about everything figured out by thirty.”
The inside of the trailer was just as shabby as the outside, and the whole damn thing rocked when we walked to the little kitchenette. It might’ve felt a little more like a home if it had been given a good scrubbing, but there was a dinginess that no amount of elbow grease and bleach would be able to exorcise. It was just old, and more than old, it showed signs of not having been cared for. The Corbin family house had some problems with it that had persisted because for several years, we were five men living in a house together, too busy with running the ranch and hurrying through public school to think about things like cleaning regularly and slapping the outside of the place with a coat of paint every so often. Housekeeping had lapsed until Zoe and Toby moved in, but there was never a feeling of dinginess. Through all of our problems with the ranch, ourselves, and each other, the house was a place of love. It always had been, even after our parents had died.
This trailer, though, was a place of great sadness.
“We’re here to ask you a question about horse healing,” Peyton said. “We’re in business together.”
“Some business, I bet,” Mary said, fixing a knowing stare on me. I had no idea how, but she somehow knew that we’d slept together. That stare was invasive and challenging, and that was the exact impression I got from it. That she knew everything about me, that she knew our business partnership was a little bit more than simply business.
“It’s real,” Peyton said. “And I have a question for you. And you have answers for me.”
“You want answers?” Mary eyed her daughter critically, like she was measuring Peyton’s worth and coming up disappointingly short. “It’s not going to be free.”
“I know how things work,” Peyton shot back, haughty. “I’ll pay you for your time.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“You need my money.” For how nervous she’d been in the truck, Peyton was downright arrogant. I recognized that she’d drawn the feeling around her like a cloak, protecting herself from whatever weapons her mother was planning on launching at her.
“I need money,” Mary agreed. “Just not yours. I know how you get yours.”
“You
do, do you?” Peyton asked, amused. “You too good for that kind of money, Ma? That’s not what I heard.”
If Mary Crow understood her daughter’s meaning, she didn’t let on to the fact. “I’ll help you with what you want to know. But you’re going to have to listen to what I have to say in return.”
“I came here to listen to you,” Peyton said, her voice gratingly polite, illustrating just how thin her patience was wearing with her mother’s game. “I’m asking you questions. You’re giving me answers. To get the answers I want, I’ll be listening to you. It’s a win-win.”
“What about the answers you don’t want?” Mary leaned back in her seat and looked out the window. “That’s what I want you to listen to. The answers you haven’t wanted to listen to for your whole life.”
Peyton pursed her lips, seeming to gauge her response before answering. “Who do I talk to about shipping you off to a nursing home, you old coot? The council on the reservation? Or the state of Texas? Emmett, do you know how that kind of thing works?”
I fought the urge to shrink back, to try and make myself invisible, and then simply shrugged, unable to give her any information. I was well beyond the point of regretting coming here. All I could think of doing was escaping, or trying my best to learn invisibility. Mary didn’t so much as glance my way.
“You think I’ve lost my mind,” she observed. “All young people think their elders are foolish. You’re the same, and more the fool for it. You never learned to respect those wiser than you.”
“You mean those older than me.” Peyton crossed her arms in front of her chest as if to ward off those words. “You and my father were never deserving of very much respect. Lie to yourself all you want, but I won’t be lied to. I refuse.”
“Listening to the answers you don’t want to hear. That’s the price of admission.” Mary gazed out the window, and helplessly, magnetically, both Peyton and I ducked to see what she was looking at. The grass behind the trailer was long dead, windswept and crispy, and farther off, an untied horse nibbled at something still green trying to peek out from beneath the brown growth. It wasn’t a view that could be accurately described as beautiful, but it was something to look at — and worlds better than looking around at the sad state of the interior of the trailer.
“Where’s your other horse?” Peyton asked. “You know just as well as I do how much that one hates to be alone.”
“He’s not alone. I’m here.” The old woman packed an old wooden pipe with shavings of tobacco and obstinately lit it. One inadvertent whiff of the smoke that spiraled up from the bowl informed me that it wasn’t tobacco, after all. I’d kept my nose clean throughout my youth and up until now, but I wasn’t going to fault Mary Crow for smoking a little weed at her age. I couldn’t even guess how old she might be, her hair pulled severely back from her face in a bun that was more white than black. I didn’t see signs of Peyton anywhere in her appearance, though her daughter had inherited her apparent love for talking circles around the issues at hand.
“Did the other horse die?” Peyton tried again.
“No. Sold him.”
“Ma. At least get a goat or something. That horse is stressed out. Look at him. Lonely.”
“I’ll sell him, too, soon.” Mary took a thoughtful puff of her pipe. “When the money runs out. Then I’ll find something else to sell. The trailer.”
“You can’t sell the trailer. Where would you live?”
“Well, I’m not going to sell my body.” Mary squinted at Peyton. “I have too much pride for that.”
It was a sharp barb, aimed to maim, but Peyton deflected it with a harsh laugh. “Yes, you’re a very proud woman. You only fuck for love, don’t you? So noble. And what a love story, too. Mary Crow and Dax Malone.”
“You don’t get to say that name in this house,” Mary said, her order a jagged edge of glass.
“I get to say that name where I please,” Peyton said, nonchalant. “Half that name belongs to me.”
“Then it is time for you to listen,” Mary said, setting aside her still-smoking pipe. “Because once that entire name belonged to me.”
“Stop. I’m not going to sit here and subject myself to the tale of how you and my father hooked up and made me. I’m surprised at you. You’ve gone soft and sappy. It’s high time to turn you out to pasture.”
I couldn’t help but wince at some of the exchanges I was witnessing. It wasn’t the way normal parents and children communicated, but I’d come to the understanding quite some time ago that Peyton and Mary Crow weren’t your typical mother and daughter. There was a history here that I couldn’t begin to assume I understood, or think I might pass judgment on, so I just tried to remain as inconspicuous as possible. I’d always been a little afraid of Peyton, but I was one hundred percent afraid of her mother. Even if the old woman was diminutive, long past her prime, there was something that roiled just under her surface that kept me from making any assumptions about anything.
“I thought I loved that man, once,” Mary said, ignoring Peyton’s taunts. “I was lonely, though. I’d been alone for a long time. There was another man I loved, and who loved me, too, but he died. It was as if part of my heart died, too, or at least my good sense. I couldn’t see things the way I used to. And that’s why I thought I loved that man. Your father.”
Mary paused to gather her thoughts, and I thought Peyton might take the opportunity to land another zinger, but she stayed quiet. A quick glance revealed that Mary had her daughter’s rapt attention, Peyton’s dark gaze boring holes into her mother. This was apparently information that hadn’t been shared before. The answers that Peyton hadn’t wanted to know. The payment that would be required of her if we wanted to get answers about our problem horse from Mary.
“At first I thought I loved him. I thought he loved me. But one cross word, one disagreement, and he was a different man. If he didn’t get his way with words, he tried to smash his way with his fists and his feet. It happened once, and I thought maybe he got it out of his system. And then it happened again and again. I knew I had made a terrible mistake.”
Dax Malone was a wretched bastard, and everyone in town said so, but this revelation, that he saw no problem speaking with punches and kicks, simply confirmed what had previously been simple gossip, a pervasive belief that had wormed its way into people’s minds. Everyone knew he was a bastard, even if a person hadn’t had personal dealings with him. I supposed it went to show just how broken Mary Crow had been after the passing of the man she really did love. It was perplexing that anyone could think Dax Malone was worthy of love.
“I tried to leave that man,” Mary said, looking at the horse that grazed out the window like she wished she could trade places, be put out to pasture like Peyton had idly threatened earlier. “It was a mistake, being with him. When I realized what he was, when he let his true self show to me, the one that bruised and bloodied, I tried to leave him.”
Peyton held herself so still that I was afraid to look at her, afraid that a tiny gust of wind that might winnow its way into the trailer would shatter her and blow the pieces of her all away. I’d never be able to put her back together again, and if she tried to do it for herself, it would end up wrong, or backwards, and the Peyton I knew and loved would be gone forever. What could I do to keep her strong? I was in no way capable of forcing Mary Crow to halt whatever tale she was intent on passing down to her daughter. All I could do was keep quiet and bear witness. I wasn’t even sure either of them knew I was there anymore.
“He didn’t like that.” We all watched the horse outside try to nose away the dead grass to try and find some goodness hidden somewhere beneath it. “That man really showed me how he used his hands and his fists. They weren’t for hard work. They were for causing pain. That was his favorite way to use them. And when he got tired of using his hands and feet to hurt me, he used his other limb to hurt me. And that’s how you were conceived.”
Peyton didn’t make so much as a sound, but I felt like I was
going to be sick. I couldn’t go on hearing this, but the harder thing to do would’ve been to try to leave that trailer. I was half convinced that the door wouldn’t budge if I tried to get outside right now. I couldn’t believe this was happening, and a surreptitious look at Peyton told me that this was the first she was hearing of this origin of her own life.
“When I found out you were inside of me, I told that man to give me money for an operation,” Mary continued. “He gave it to me. He didn’t want a child from me any more than I wanted one from him. But I took that money and bought this trailer. And I decided to try the operation myself. I knew how to help horses give birth. I was pretty sure I could take care of something inside of myself that I didn’t want there anymore. Just a little matter of anatomy.”
Peyton had slowly clasped her hands together in front of her and gripped her fingers tightly, her knuckles turning pale. I was gritting my teeth so tightly that it hurt my jaw, every muscle in my body taut with tension. Was this really happening? Had this really happened? It was too hard to tell. All I could do was watch and listen, just like Peyton.
“You resisted, of course.” Mary cut her eyes slyly. “If you hadn’t, stupid girl, we wouldn’t be here having this conversation. So spare me any tears. You were born after all. Obviously.”
“Does it look like I’m about to burst into tears?” Peyton asked, but she bit off every syllable like they hurt her inside her mouth. I took her statement as an invitation to look at her, to see how she was coping with this verbal assault. It was true — there weren’t any shimmery, unshed droplets in her eyes at the injustice of her origins, even if she had every right to want to cry. But she didn’t look well. She looked like she needed to sit down. I would be the last person to actually suggest that to her, though. Peyton was ensconced in her own sphere of emotions that was somehow keeping her upright — regardless if it might burst later. For the moment, and this was only moment to moment, she was still standing.
“I didn’t want you because I couldn’t look at you,” Mary said after what felt like ten minutes of silence. “I saw him in you — more him than me. I had you here, in this trailer, by myself, and then put you outside, so unable to look at you. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking straight. I thought something or someone would spirit you away and I wouldn’t have to look at you ever again.”