Chapter Twenty-Five
Curtis
I barely slept that night, thinking about how much I had hurt Allie. I didn’t think she’d understood what I had meant, but she hadn’t given me a chance to explain before she slammed the door in my face.
When I woke up the next morning, I peered through the gray curtain of rain into my parents’ yard. Allie’s car was already gone. She must have gone into work early.
With a miserable feeling, I put on my boots and sloshed through the dirt and mud to Mama’s house. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I stepped through the door, and the smell of breakfast wafted toward me: spinach, chicken and mushroom omelets fried in a special sauce of Mama’s own creation and served with Spanish-style rice and hash browns.
“Mama, that looks tremendous,” I said as she set the table. “You’ve really outdone yourself this time.”
“I was really hoping Allie would come over this morning,” said Mama, “but her car’s not in the driveway. She doesn’t usually leave this early.”
I scratched at the back of my neck. “We, uh, had a fight last night.”
“Oh?” Mama set her trivets down on the table and gave me her full attention. “Nothing too serious, I hope.”
“Well, it’d have to be pretty serious to prevent her from coming to breakfast.” As soon as I said the words, I regretted them: my remark about her eating habits last night was one of the reasons I was in hot water. “I just mean she doesn’t usually turn down a chance to eat your cooking. I think partly it’s a way of showing you respect, but also she really enjoys it.”
“Well, I’d hope so,” said Mama. “She certainly eats enough of it.”
“See, that’s just what I told her! Only she didn’t take it quite as well as if you’d said it.”
“Is that what y’all are fighting about?” Mama sounded appalled.
“No, but it came up while we were fighting.” I told her the story of how I’d heard the hogs rooting around in the garden during the rainstorm and tried to scare them away by shooting the leader. “And she objected to that, I think because she was woken out of her sleep by gunfire and it scared her, and because she feels ‘connected’ to all the farm animals.” I only meant to quote her, but it ended up sounding more mocking than I had intended.
Dad had been sitting at the table this whole time without saying anything, but as I recounted the details of the fight, he leaned forward, listening intently.
“Thanks for doing that for us,” he said when I had finished. “Honestly, I’d probably have done the same thing in your position, if I’d been out there last night. I’ve tried every means short of killing ‘em to keep ‘em from getting into the garden, and it hasn’t worked. If I’d seen ‘em out there, I’d have just about lost my patience.”
“Thanks, Dad.” I turned to look at Mama, who nodded her head.
“And if anybody has a problem with it,” he added, shuffling his paper, “they can take it up with me.”
“I just think maybe she’s not used to the idea that animals die on a farm,” said Mama as she poured honey into her coffee. “I think if you grew up in a big city like Boston, you’d have been sheltered from some of the realities of life on a farm that we take for granted. You’d go to the store to pick up your ham and never question where it came from. Now it’s looking her right in the face, and she don’t like it.”
“Do they still teach Charlotte’s Web in school?” Dad asked.
“I mean, she took this job working for a vet because she loves animals,” I said. “I think she has some sentimental attachment to them.”
Having said this, I began to wonder if perhaps our conflict was born out of fundamentally irreconcilable differences. She was the friendly, animal-loving veterinarian’s assistant from a city out east; I, the humble son of a poor farmer. We had been doomed from the start.
***
Dad and I went out riding that morning. The sky was beginning to clear after last night’s rains, but in places, the ground was still damp with mud and pools of standing water. We trotted along at a steady pace past large oaks sodden with rain and small cedars standing half-cracked, their trunks bent by the wind.
I still hadn’t seen Zach since he left for Lindsay’s house on Saturday night. Dad said he had come in a few times since then but had been mysteriously silent about where he had been and what he had done. An old friend of his from high school, Debran Fallows, rode beside me wearing a gray waterproof jacket and a straw hat.
“You know, I don’t remember you bein’ this good at riding when we was in school,” she told me after we had been riding together for some time in silence.
“I reckon I don’t remember the subject ever coming up,” I replied.
But Debran remained oblivious to my condescension. “Matter of fact,” she went on, “there’s a lot about you now I don’t remember being the case in high school. You used to be so tall and skinny, and it seemed like you was always being sent to the assistant principal’s office. I remember when you got in trouble for stealing the intercom and announcing that Brian Oakley’s mom had died from getting syphilis from a cow. Brian Oakley’s mom was pissed!”
“Not my proudest moment,” I said with a sigh.
“That was back when they still did corporal punishment,” said Debran. “How many times did you get hit with the paddle for that?”
“Three,” I said. “Which was the maximum number of slaps allowed by law. Mom and Dad had to sign off on it, and they didn’t mind, given what I had done.”
“We hoped it might beat some sense into you,” said Dad.
“Yeah, but you’ve really turned yourself around,” said Debran, her eyes fixed on me in a way that made me uncomfortable. “I don’t know if anybody’s told you how different you are from when you was a boy, but I’ve seen a definite change in you in the last ten years or so. It’s like you’re not even the same person. Marriage must’ve done somethin’ to you.”
“It did,” I said quietly, my eyes on the path ahead. “It saved me.”
Debran went on telling the rest of the group about the scraggly kid she had known in high school and how much I had grown. It was annoying, but I didn’t think much of it until Dad came up to me at the end of the trip and said low in my ear, “That girl did nothin’ but flirt with you the whole time we was riding.”
“Was she actually flirting, though?” I asked. “Because if she was, I didn’t pick up on it.”
Dad shook his head in dismay. “That’s because you’re about as perceptive as a box of doughnuts. I know women, and I know flirting, and that woman wants you. Bad.”
Debran was just coming out of the barn as he said this. I looked her over like I had done when we were riding. She wasn’t bad-looking at all in her tight-fitting jeans, with her slender waist and unusually short legs. Making out with any gal seemed a tempting prospect in the wake of my fight with Allie, but at the same time, I was old and tired and sad, and I just wanted to go home to my dog and lie down and flip through channels until I fell asleep from boredom.
As I walked home through the muddy drive, I couldn’t help noticing that Allie still hadn’t returned from work. She was always back by now unless she had an appointment with Lindsay. When I got home, I made myself a microwave dinner and occasionally ventured a glance out the window to see if she had driven in yet. But she hadn’t, and she still hadn’t returned home by the time I fell asleep.