by M. O'Keefe
At night I watched through the window of my car as the young girls came out in short skirts and heels so high they could barely walk. Or boys in tight pants, playing with their nipples through net shirts, talking to truckers who watched them like if they could, they would unhinge their jaws and swallow them whole.
Those girls and boys climbed into the trucks, smiling and licking their lips, only to come out an hour later, smiles vanished, tucking money into their pockets.
And I got it—I understood, they were playing a part. I knew all about that in my own life. But they were so convincing. So illicit and knowing. Forbidden and confident. The parking lots reeked of sex.
I watched them and wondered and thought about what went on in those trucks.
What I knew about sex could fit in a shoe box. A terribly small shoe box. And I knew that the reality of what was happening in those trucks was totally illegal, probably cold at best, and degrading more often than not.
But what if it wasn’t always? What if one of those truckers and one of those men or women were kind? Were excited? And careful? What if they were able to take something that could be awful and painful and scary and made it…nice? Or more than nice?
It’s not like I thought it was The Notebook happening in those trucks—I wasn’t stupid. I was just…hopeful.
And if I had hope for them…couldn’t I have hope for myself?
I thought about that in my car in those truck stops until I was…hungry.
And that was a hunger I had no idea how to feed.
—
A half hour later, still sweating, even after the coldest shower in the history of cold showers, I stood in the bedroom of my trailer and considered doing something I’d never done before:
Dropping the towel and lying down naked across my bed so the breeze coming through the screens would blow right across my hot body.
My naked body.
Because I could do that. No one was here to care. Or stop me.
I put my fingers against my neck. It was a sick habit, but I caught myself pressing my thumb against the worst of the bruises—just until it hurt again.
A reminder. An anchor…Don’t move too fast, Annie. Remember where you’re from.
Crouching down slightly, I caught sight of the world outside when the breeze came through the window. What if someone was standing right there? Just when the wind blew and someone saw me…naked on the bed?
The chances were minuscule. The idea ludicrous, surrounded as I was by walls of metal. Thin metal—but still.
The truth was I was more self-conscious alone than I was with other people.
In the end, twenty-four years of conditioning won out. Defeated, slightly ashamed of myself, I got dressed.
Annie McKay, you’re just not the kind of person who lies down naked in her bed in the middle of the day.
In the drawer next to my bed was the phone programmed with only one number. Dylan. I felt the world in a new way these days. Since pulling myself up off the floor and leaving my life behind. I was new.
And I wanted to call Dylan.
And I was terrified of that. Terrified of what it meant. About me, about my decision-making. All of it. Everything about Dylan felt risky.
Calling him was an invitation to something dangerous.
Not yet, I heard his voice in my head, that dark purr. But soon.
There was a knock on my trailer door and I jumped like a scalded cat, yanked from my utterly impure thoughts.
“Hey, Annie. I think a package arrived for you.” It was Kevin outside my door. Just Kevin. I put a hand against my throat and felt my heart pounding hard.
“There’s got to be a mistake,” I said, opening the door. “There isn’t anyone who would send me a package.”
“Well,” he said, looking down at a small box, wrapped in regular post-office brown paper. “It’s addressed to ‘Layla-slash-the new cleaning lady.’ And you’re the closest thing I got to a cleaning lady around these parts.”
Layla.
That box was from Dylan.
Kevin held it out toward me but I couldn’t get my hands to move. I could barely get my lungs to move. He’d sent me something.
“You want me to pitch it?” he asked, dropping his hand to his side with a shrug.
“No!” I cried. “No, I’ll…I’ll take it.”
Of course I would take it.
It was a package from a man I could not stop thinking about. It was a bad idea, I got that, but what was just one more bad idea? I was kind of on a roll these days.
“Here you go.” He handed it to me and left, walking back across the dirt path to the other side of the trailer park.
I closed the door and put the box down on the table and slid into the settee. The handwriting on the top was a woman’s handwriting. Weird. But whatever.
I grabbed a knife from my drawer and slid it between the edges of the cardboard, cutting open the brown tape that sealed it shut.
Inside was a phone charger. And a note.
For the phone. For emergencies, the note read in very different handwriting than what had been on the box. This was a man’s handwriting. Sharp and slashing across the white paper in dark ink.
I hope you are all right.
A phone charger. For emergencies. The breath I’d been holding shuddered hard out of me. I had no idea what I thought was going to be in there, but a phone charger was not it. I grabbed the note and phone from my cupboard and went into my bedroom where I plugged the charger into the wall and hooked it up.
Manners dictated I say thank you. I had to contact him.
You know, because of manners.
A dark thrill, a sort of giddy misgiving, rolled through me.
I pulled up his number on the phone but instead of calling him, I texted.
I got the charger, I wrote. Thank you. So much.
I deleted the so much. No need to go overboard.
You’re welcome, he wrote back.
I pulled my bottom lip between my teeth and waited for him to say more. But the screen stayed the same.
Either write something or put it down, I told myself. Because this is ridiculous.
In the end I put the phone back in the drawer and shut it.
But I thought about it—about Dylan—for the rest of the night.
“Hey Kevin,” I said, walking into the office a week later. Kevin sat directly in the path of the rattling air conditioner in the window, playing computer solitaire. “I’m going to need more garbage bags and a new rake.”
“There isn’t a rake in the shed?”
“There is, but it’s broken.”
“You can’t fix it?”
And I thought I was cheap.
“Nope.”
“A shovel won’t work?”
I sighed. “No. Kevin. I really need a rake. And some hedge trimmers. Heavy-duty ones.”
“Why?”
“I’m going after the kudzu.”
Kevin nodded, impressed maybe by my antagonistic nature toward the creepy mummy plant.
“I’ll get that for you tomorrow,” he said. “You done real good out there. Most people don’t get past the flies and the garbage.”
“Well, I figure the garbage had to be the worst part.” And it had been disgusting, but I did it. I shoveled it. Bagged it and cleared it.
“Amen to that,” Kevin said. “And here.”
He slid the key to the shed across the counter.
“You saying I’m not unsavory?” I asked, smiling.
“That’s what I’m saying. And take the day off. Too hot to work anyways.”
“But…” We don’t talk about money. That had been one of Hoyt’s rules. About how much we got. Or what we need. We don’t say a word about any of it. It’s low. Vulgar.
Those rules wouldn’t get me very far in the outside world. I would starve to death trying not to be vulgar.
“I need the money.”
Kevin leaned his heft back in his office chair, which squealed agai
nst the weight.
“I’m paying you a salary,” he said. “Just make it up another day.”
I’d worked on the farm my entire life and not once did it earn me a penny. All my money I had to ask for, from Mom and then from Hoyt.
Until I took that three grand from Hoyt’s safe.
Back wages, I’d told myself.
“Now, go on.” Kevin shooed me out the door. “Take a day off.”
“You sure?” I asked. “Because if there’s anything else that needs—”
“No. Nothing else needs doing. Now go.”
Still, I lingered at the door. It’s not that there weren’t a thousand things I needed to get done, but all of them meant leaving the trailer park. This small island of safety. Of work.
I totally tore my life up by the roots and now I was too scared to actually live it.
“Were there any other packages delivered for me?” I asked.
Every night I looked at that phone and thought about calling Dylan. About texting him. Every night I chickened out. Or resisted, like that was a virtue.
“Nope. You gonna stand around here all day?”
“Nope,” I said, pushing the door open and making the bell overhead jingle. “I’m leaving.”
I would go twenty miles into town to get some groceries, because that’s what normal people did when they ran out of gas station food and dish soap. And then I would see if there was a library with an internet connection so I could check on the news from Oklahoma.
Woman Runs Away, I imagined the headlines. Though considering Hoyt, the headline should undoubtedly be more like Lying Wife Runs Out on Husband, Leaving Him No One to Smack Around on the Fifth Day in a Row Without Rain.
Heading back to my trailer I saw Ben in his garden, curling the delicate stems of peas up twine runners tied to the top tier of his fence.
“Sugar snaps?” I asked as I approached.
“No,” he laughed, not looking up, which frankly was a relief. I wasn’t good with eye contact. “Nothing so fancy. I’m trying runner beans for the first time.”
“I wanted to thank you for the tomatoes and the mayo.”
“You did. I got that note. Both notes. You want to write me a letter, too?”
I smiled at the rusty teasing. Smith used to tease me that way, too. A long time ago.
Oh God, Smith.
In my house we had this front hall closet. Right off the foyer next to the front door no one ever, ever used. That front hall closet was where we put the stuff we didn’t know what to do with. Christmas decorations. My grandfather’s old coats. My grandmother’s formal dress, in a garment bag I liked to open when I was a kid, to see the sequins and the peacock pin at the dress’s neck.
And I had one of those closets in my brain. That’s where I’d put all my memories of Smith. All my guilt over what had happened. What…I’d done to him. And I hadn’t thought about him in years, but for some reason, Ben opened that door and the memory rolled out.
“Well, I wanted to thank you in person, then,” I said, pulling myself away from those awful memories.
“My pleasure. I’ve got fifty more tomatoes I can put on your doorstep.”
I had a sudden brainstorm of homemade pasta sauce, with ground beef and Ben’s tomatoes. I learned how to be a lousy cook from my mom, the lousiest, but one year Mom—before things with Smith got so strange, and the new minister, and Mom getting sick—got it in her head to volunteer to make the meat sauce for the church spaghetti supper. She found this recipe on the back of a can of tomatoes and it was such a huge hit that she ended up making the spaghetti sauce for the church for years.
It was the one thing we could make that didn’t involve opening a box and preheating the oven.
And I could give Ben some spaghetti sauce. The quid pro quo of it appealed to me.
“I’ll take whatever you care to give me.”
His garden had everything. Peppers, cucumbers, beets, even. Along the far edge of the fencing were herbs. I saw basil and oregano, which would be pretty awesome in the pasta sauce.
“You want something you should ask for it, girly.”
“I don’t…that’s not—”
“What do you want?” His eyes were nearly black they were so dark, and when they looked into mine I felt pinned to the ground.
Ugh. Eye contact.
“Nothing.”
“Go away, girly. I got no time for this.”
His dismissal stung. “The basil,” I said.
“Yours. Anything else?”
I shook my head, far too uncomfortable to answer.
When I’d needed help, really needed it—life-or-death stuff—I’d been unable to ask. There was no way I was asking for more from this guy’s garden.
“I’m running into town,” I said. “Is there anything you need?”
“Nope.” His thick, gnarled fingers were busy with the delicate work of making sure his beans grew up the twine.
There were tattoos on his knuckles. A word, each letter on a different finger that I couldn’t quite make out.
“Okay,” I said, “sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
I blinked. Sorry for not being able to ask for what I want. Sorry I can’t get anything for you from town. Sorry for being here…Christ, what was wrong with me? Apologizing was an old habit.
“I don’t know, I guess.”
“I guess I don’t either. So stop.”
Right. So stop. That easy. I might be off the farm, but parts of the farm were still very much in me.
Making a grocery list in my head I walked back to my own trailer, my eyes on the dust of the track between the RVs.
“Hello, neighbor,” a woman said and I looked up to see Joan, sitting on a lawn chair on a small improvised deck on the side of her RV. She wore a short, green silk robe and a bland expression of disdain.
“Hi,” I said, feeling utterly grubby in the face of Joan’s inexplicable trailer-park elegance. She was actually kind of regal, sitting there. It was the rhinestones on her toes, maybe. Or her straight posture in the lawn chair, the casual way she held her cigarette.
Because it wasn’t her dirty-blond hair piled up on her head, or her pale blue eyes. The scars on her cheeks from long-ago acne.
But her legs, beneath that green robe, went on for miles.
“I’m Annie,” I said, into the silence.
“Joan.”
The trailer door opened and a man came out, pulling a shirt on over his head. He was thick and muscled, hairy all over, not just his chest. Even his stomach was hairy. When his head popped out of his shirt, he smiled at Joan, his face covered in a thick black five-o’clock shadow. “See you, babe,” he said leaning over the small railing as if to kiss her. Joan took a drag from her cigarette, blowing the smoke toward him, and he pulled back, rebuffed. Though he didn’t seem to be too upset about it.
“I put a little something extra for you on the counter,” he said to Joan before turning away. He gave me a wink and a smile that was so slimy it made me want to take a shower in my clothes.
If my life depended on it I could not look back over at Joan.
A prostitute? Am I living next door to a prostitute?
“A little hot for a scarf, don’t you think?” Joan said.
I put my hand up to it, wincing slightly as I touched the bruises. Joan smirked, like she knew what was under the water-lily print. Like she had been there that night in my kitchen. Like in the ten seconds we’d stood in front of each other, Joan knew all about me.
And all of it was sad.
Without another word, I left, my cheeks on fire.
Dylan had it all wrong. Ben was about as threatening as a mouse.
It was Joan I had to watch out for.
—
There was no guidebook for running away from an abusive husband. I had to go with my gut nine times out of ten, and my gut hated towns.
CNN was on in most bars all day. Magazines shouted scandalous, salacious headlines: Wife Missi
ng! Man Grieving! in every grocery store.
Internet access was everywhere.
The potential of being spotted—found—just seemed so much higher in a city.
But that’s where grocery stores were.
In this case, Cherokee, North Carolina. There was an Indian reservation just outside of town and its influence was heavy in all the gift stores, with women and men in full headdress sitting out front, selling the chance to take a picture with them for five bucks.
All the restaurants had the word Chief in them.
It was a strange place.
The Appalachian Trail also went through here, or near here somewhere. There were men and women with giant backpacks, and filthy legs beneath their shorts, walking along the side of the road with their thumbs out.
Hitchhiking? Really?
Who the hell got to be so naive? So trusting? They were literally asking for trouble.
But when I caught sight of their faces in my rearview mirror, I realized they were probably my age. Just out of college, maybe. Having a little adventure before finding a job, or going back to grad school.
I stopped looking at them. Angry at all their opportunity. Their youth that looked so different from mine.
An IGA sat on a corner and I pulled in and parked in the shadows closest to the dumpster. In the silence of the car after turning off the engine, I went over my plan.
Get in, get out. Don’t make eye contact. Be forgettable.
That had been my credo for my week on the run.
Forgettable, I could do. I’d perfected it, really.
Once inside, I sped through the aisles, picking the same things I had for years until I stopped, my hands on a box of cereal that Hoyt loved.
I’m not…I don’t have to get this. I put the Cheerios back on the shelf and then turned to get the generic Froot Loops. My favorite. Glancing down in the cart, I realized I’d gotten all of his favorite things.
Cottage cheese.
I hated cottage cheese.
As I walked back to the dairy section to put the cottage cheese away, I felt someone watching me, and I looked out of the corner of my eyes at a woman with three kids hanging off the cart. All of them staring at me.
I accidentally made eye contact and the woman smiled.
“Do I know you?” she asked. “You look really familiar.”