Chapter Thirty-Nine
Curtis
When I woke up and went over to Mama’s house for breakfast the next morning, Allie had already left for work. “Shame she couldn’t make it,” said Mama as she laid out a plate of breakfast sausages, lightly salted eggs, and rice with avocado. “Even when she doesn’t have much to say, I always enjoy having her here in the mornings.”
“Yeah, but your breakfasts make it hard on me,” I said lightly. “She comes over here and eats your food, and then I can’t convince her to eat my food.”
“Does she not like your cooking?” asked Mama, pouring several cups of sugar into the blue lemonade pitcher and stirring rapidly.
“She likes it well enough. Or at least she’ll eat it. But you don’t hear her raving about what an amazing meal she just had, not like she does when she eats here, after she’s gotten full off of your hash browns and eggs and waffles and French toast and sausages.”
I sighed in exasperation, but Mama smiled. “She’s a good girl, Curtis,” she said from behind her coffee mug. “If y’all break up, no one will weep louder than me.”
“We’re not gonna break up,” I said as if the very idea was preposterous. “We like each other too much. And, sure, there were some kinks in the relationship when we first started, but by now, we’ve got ‘em pretty much all ironed out. It’s like when you’ve been riding the trail through a rainstorm for three hours, and then suddenly the sky clears, and the sun shines down on you.”
“Well, enjoy it while it lasts,” said Mama. “If you decide to get married, there will be storms.”
Apart from our conversation about kids a few days ago, Allie and I hadn’t discussed marriage much. Not that it hadn’t been on our minds. Lately, it was all I could think about, and I figured she was probably the same. One day soon, we would have to talk about it. But for now, I was just enjoying being together. These were good days, and I didn’t want to hurry them along too quickly.
As I got up from the table, Dad set down his paper and said to me, “I’m gonna need your help fixing the fence-post again after breakfast. Are you willing to help me?”
“Yeah, what’s wrong with it?”
“Same thing as always,” Dad said in an irritated voice. “Them hogs’ll knock down anything they see as standing betwixt them and freedom, no matter how strong it is. Anyway, I figure if we both work on it for a couple hours, we can get it secured before lunch.”
“Sounds good,” I said as I gathered up our plates. “You ever gonna tell me what you and Allie talked about yesterday?”
“Not a chance.”
But the fence didn’t actually need that much work, and I realized pretty quickly once we got out there that the real reason he had called me outside was that he wanted to talk.
“Your mother’s right, you know,” he said with an effort, ramming his shovel into the hard ground. “About what she said over breakfast.”
“I didn’t think you were listening,” I said, wiping my brow. It was a blazing hot morning, and I was already sweaty. In the distance, I could hear the groan and whine of a school bus.
“I may not always act like it, but I always listen to you two,” he said. “I have to, to make sure you’re not up to somethin’.”
I smiled. “If we were really up to somethin’, would we be talking about it right in front of you?”
“You would if you thought I wasn’t listening. The point is, you need to hold onto that girl. I haven’t said this about most girls you’ve brought home, as you good and well know. But I’ll say it about her: don’t you let go of her.”
He was using that stern tone of voice that was long familiar to me from being disciplined when we were kids, except back then it usually preceded a spanking. It was the kind of voice you didn’t argue with; you just nodded and said, “Yes, sir.”
“She reminds me a lot of your mother, especially when we were younger,” Dad went on. “Free-spirited, gentle, supportive, good with kids and animals… and I’ll tell you another thing, if she ever gets the chance to be a mother, she’ll be great at it. Some women have to work really hard at being good mothers. For your mother, it came naturally. And I suspect it will for her, too.”
It was the second time in as many weeks that someone had raised the prospect of children. I would have found it unnerving if I hadn’t already been fully on board with it.
“Yeah, she’s about the most considerate and supportive woman I’ve met.” I took off my hat and wiped down my face and head. “And I don’t say that out of any disrespect to Christine; she just happens to be really strong in that area.”
“I get what you’re sayin’,” Dad said. He was staring down at the hole, not at me, but the hole might as well not have been there for all the attention he was giving it. “I hope y’all are happy together for a long time. You deserve to have another shot at happiness. And I know I don’t say this often, but I do love you. I hope you know that.”
“I do. Thanks, Dad.” It was about all I could manage to say at that moment. It’s a weird feeling to be standing next to your dad and to realize how much you love him. Maybe if I had been more used to hearing him tell me he loved me, I would have been better prepared. But he hadn’t said those words to me since I was a boy.
I struggled to hold back my surprise and appreciation as we went on digging the post-hole.