by Jeff Hull
So he said, “Wow.” And then, “Shit.”
“I don’t expect anything,” she said. “I just thought—knew—you had to know.”
“You’re going to keep it?”
“Yes,” she said, firmly enough.
“How are you going to raise it? What about college?”
“My family will help. My mom. She raised me. She did a pretty good job.”
“I thought you wanted to go to college and play basketball.”
“I guess we don’t always get everything we want.”
He considered his surroundings before saying, “I guess not.”
“It’s a girl. I know that already. I don’t think there’s any reason to make a big mystery out of it.”
“Wow. A baby. A daughter. Holy shit. You’re blowing my mind, Jos.” She thought, though, that he was speaking with the energy of a blown-out mind.
“I know. It’s a lot. And you already have a lot.”
“I want to be there. I want to be there when you have her.”
Josie nodded several times fast. Of course he would. But nobody was going to let him.
“We’re going to have a baby,” Mike said. “Shit. When will I be able to see her? How old will she have to be before you can bring her here?”
Here was another of those things that made Josie feel so old. She looked at Mike, listened to him talk about his blown mind and his baby coming to prison, though she knew perfectly well that was not what would happen. For so long Josie had so many ideas about how her life would be, so many plans—so many of them hatched during the long, lonely hours driving a grain truck. She had been working from happiness then, working hard in the moment and imagining futures and how they would play out for her.
What life would be like once it got started. Now she was willing to admit that she had no idea how her life would happen. She was going to have a baby girl. She was going to try to raise a child. So many things about what that was like couldn’t even occur to her yet. She was smart enough to know that.
She was decisive enough to accept enormous chunks of uncertainty as an outlook for her future. Not-knowing. But to offset the grinding anxiety not-knowing caused, she would choose whenever she could. And she had chosen something she felt she owed it to Mike to share.
“I’m not going to tell my baby her daddy is in prison,” she said. “Maybe later, when she’s older. A lot. Older. And maybe later, when you’re finished here, if you want to come and meet her, then I think it’s right for you to know her, and if you can be part of our lives somehow, okay. But I don’t want you to think or hope that that means we’re going to be a couple, or a family.”
She paused to let him absorb that and saw from the inward turn of his face that he wasn’t really, that he was opting for outrage and insecurity. Same old thing that put him here.
“Mike, it’s such a long, long time from now, you getting out of here, and I’m going to live my life however it happens, and I want to try to be happy and hope for good things for me and this little girl. And I really want you, like, someday if not now, to be able to hope for good things for me and for her.
“And I understand if you can’t right now, because I know what you’re going through is really hard—really, really hard—but I’m still going to try to find those good things. And if I meet somebody, I want my child to know what it’s like to have a father who can be in her life. And if I ever am lucky enough, I want her to see what it’s like for her mother to know real love in her life.”
“I love you, Josie,” he said, scalded by affront. “I know I do.”
This was what Josie had come to say. Keeping cool was what she had come to do. She said, “You don’t know anything, Mike. You’re seventeen and you killed … a terrible thing happened that must be so hard for you to come to grips with—so hard I can’t even imagine—but you’re going … you’re going to be away from me and from us for a long, long time—most of this little girl’s growing-up life. And you’re terrified, and who wouldn’t be? But the whole real truth is, we were never a couple. You don’t love me. You barely even know me.”
She could see the angry bafflement, could see he was going to argue the moment she stopped to take a deep breath, so she didn’t.
“You don’t know when my birthday is, or what I got my mom for Christmas last year, or the music I listen to when I’m driving the grain truck, or who my favorite basketball players are, or what I like to do on rainy days, and you’re going to be away from me for so long and there will be so many other things that come up in my life that you won’t know about me. You don’t love me, Mike. Maybe you love the idea of me. But you don’t love me. And you can’t, not now. Even if you wanted to, you can’t for a long, long time.”
“God, I do love you, Josie. I have loved you for a long time. You’re just too stupid to see it.”
She had anticipated this stridence and returned a firm, collected cool. “You wanted me. And you got me. For a minute. But that’s not love.”
His outrage reduced him to the simplest ember of him she’d ever seen, and she could see something beautiful in that burning purity. A glimpse of his essence, the hot white torch that kept Michael LaValle alight. Josie noted that the nearest guard was suddenly paying attention. She looked across the table at the skinny boy in the jumpsuit, at his wild, fiery eyes intent on burning understanding into her.
He was a kid, she saw, just a kid with two or three ideas about who he was. Although his present circumstances meant he was done being a kid about now. Josie felt like the way adults must feel when they told her things they knew she couldn’t possibly see yet. She felt like she knew so many things Mike couldn’t understand. She had felt that way before she came here, though the reassurance she saw in front of her was in no way comforting
“I know this isn’t fair,” she said. “But right now everything I have to think about is this baby. I hope she’s as smart as you are, and I hope she’s as fierce as you are. I hope she’s that willing to fight for herself, to get what she thinks she deserves, like you do. And I hope, Michael, that someday you know her. I’m going to go now.”
Mike was scrunching even further forward to protest, but Josie stood and signaled to the guard who had been watching them. When the guard stepped forward, Mike blasted himself backward in the chair, exasperated, arms akimbo, eyes askance. Behind her, Mike was shouting, “I want to name her! I want to name her!” But Josie was leaving.
She felt awful about what his next days and nights would be like, already here in this awful place and now knowing he would have a daughter in the world and no idea about how she was living for years and years to come. She knew Mike would have a million questions, a million desires and impulses. But, Josie thought, his having them didn’t mean she needed to absorb them. She was finished letting other people’s desires map her life. She was leaving with her baby girl and going back home to figure out how next would happen.
* * *
August. Harvest. Josie’s favorite time. Walking between the pickup and the combine, birdsong ran by her like a current, trickling and eddying away, ringing and pouring away. It was funny to think of a year, what could happen in twelve short months. A year ago at this time everybody had been gearing up for what was surely going to be a state championship run for the football team. Her brother had been a star about to become a bigger star. Her boyfriend had been the quarterback. They were all gone, now.
Twelve months. Coach Warner, the most important person in town, it had seemed back then, was gone. Off to Missoula to be an assistant for the Grizzlies, coaching running backs—coincidentally he would be coaching Jared there. Jared, who Coach Warner talked the Montana staff into giving a scholarship. Jared who, for the first time in his life, would be a benchwarmer. Jenny Calhoun gone, too, gone with Coach Warner and her kids to Missoula. Two people Josie had thought of as fixtures, people she couldn’t for the longest time imagine the town without. But there were no fixtures. Only the people you share with friends when you are yo
ung.
Matt Brunner.
He had chosen her when she was too young to know what it meant to choose. He became so much to her, more than she could possibly have known while she was in the middle of it. And then he was gone, the first person to be murdered in Dumont in over forty years.
Gone.
Killed by the father of her child.
And now that child. A daughter. A few more weeks and she would have a daughter. She had already decided to name the girl Elle, and call her Ellie. Her mother thought she should not work harvest, that she was too far along, that the heat and dust and stress would be bad for the baby.
But Josie wanted her daughter to know what this life was like, to feel it in her blood. And there was still grain to be harvested and trucks to fill and trips to make to the elevator. Only now Josie was not alone and she wasn’t driving trucks. With Jared in Missoula and Matt gone, Cal Frehse needed combine drivers. He hired help, mostly old-timers who’d given up on their own farms. But he knew where to trust. Now Josie drove a combine and the help drove the trucks that she offloaded grain into.
One new hand was a young man from Fort Benton, just a couple years out of high school, a lean, quiet, and tanned boy with an easy smile. In the combine, she could sing to somebody. She had the kicks and twists and hiccups of a living person within her while she bounced along the field. And when it was time to unload? Nobody dates a girl who’s nine months pregnant, but she could imagine how a cute boy with an easy smile might like a curvy young single mom one day. There was nothing wrong with imagining that.
How somebody might meet little Ellie and be as charmed by her as Josie already was, might want to bring a lovely young daughter into his own life. If that didn’t happen, it was okay. Already Dotty Lantner had committed her own teenaged daughter to babysitting Josie’s if Josie promised to play basketball her senior year. Hal Hartack had told her she would never pay for another meal at Pep’s. Brad Martin offered her a part-time job, flexible hours, the same work Ainsley did now for almost free. Britnee was some days moving to Great Falls when they graduated and some days moving to Billings, but all the days in between she and Josie talked about how they were going to dress Josie’s child and the things they were going to teach her about being a girl. There was still her senior basketball season.
She’d be a mother, but that didn’t seem a reason to lose a step. She wouldn’t be the first. And other Dumont girls had gone to Missoula and Bozeman to play basketball in college. Her mother had already said she would help with Ellie, and other people would help with Ellie, would make sure that Ellie had everything Dumont could give—and that Ellie had everything that Josie didn’t know how to give. Maybe it was all just dreams and the details wouldn’t work out.
But maybe was still worth having in mind on a stifling August day with so much hot blue sky overhead. Josie looked at the fields of waving wheat stretching unbroken in front of her. The combine was easy to drive. Staying straight was no problem. She loved where she was. She hoped she could love where she would get to. Behind her, where she’d already cut, straight lines of fresh-cut stubble mapped exactly where she’d been, parallel lines scoring the contours of the earth. If she looked far enough back, near the horizon those rows seemed to angle into each other. The difference between them touching and not touching would be imperceptible.
And she knew that if she were far, far away from here, standing on that distant, unfinished horizon, those same lines might seem to come together on her.