Crossing Tinker's Knob

by Cooper, Inglath

  A grin automatically lit his face again. “I don’t guess so.”

  She wondered if he would have been shocked to know she was a lot more intrigued by him than he ever could have been by her, even though she was the one who looked different.

  He stopped tossing the ball, walked a little closer. “Our house has a secret room.”

  “Really?” she said.

  “Yep. It has a secret door, too.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “It was built during the Civil war in case somebody needed to hide from the Union soldiers.”

  “Really?” she said, impressed.

  “Wanna see it?”

  She looked down at her hands, laced them together in her lap, her heart thudding hard. She knew her mama would never let her do such a thing, but she nodded anyway. “Not today, though. We’ve got more deliveries to make.”

  “Oh,” he said, and she was left with the feeling she’d disappointed him. She glanced at the house where her mother still stood at the door talking to Mrs. Griffith. Maybe it was worth asking. She got out of the car and ran to the porch.

  Her mother turned at the sound of her footsteps, the floral-print cape above her dress lifting in the afternoon breeze. “What is it, Becca?”

  “That boy said they have a secret room in their house. He said he’d show it to me. Can I go see it, Mama?”

  Martha’s gaze settled on the boy who had wandered up beside her. “That’s a very nice offer,” she said. “But we have to be going.”

  “This is my grandson, Matt,” Mrs. Griffith said. “And you must be Becca. Stay and let me fix you some tea, Mrs. Miller. The children can take a look at that room.”

  “Thank you so much, Mrs. Griffith,” Martha said. “But we really do have to be going.”

  “Well, some other time then,” Mrs. Griffith said.

  Disappointed but not surprised, Becca lifted a hand and walked back to the big black Impala, opening the heavy door and sliding onto the vinyl seat.

  A few moments later, her mother got in and backed out of the driveway. Becca could tell by the press of her lips that she was unhappy with her. They hadn’t reached the stop-light on Tanyard before she said in a stern voice, “That was not appropriate, Becca. If you’re unable to wait in the car as I’ve asked you to, you’ll have to stay at home next time.”

  Becca said nothing for a few moments, and then, “What would have been wrong with just looking at it, Mama?”

  Her mother drove on for a good bit before answering. “Sometimes, Becca,” she said, “we put ourselves in places we would be better off not ever going in the first place.”

  Becca wanted to disagree. Matt Griffith was just a boy who wanted to show her a room. What could be so wrong with that? She pressed her lips together and turned to the window, aware that arguing would only earn her a stay at home next week. “Yes, Mama,” she said in a neutral voice even as her heart knew its first flare of defiance.

  8

  Frogs and Sunrises

  “You don’t get to choose, you just fall.”

  - Author Unknown

  Now

  The frogs were extra loud tonight. Their voices slid beneath Abby’s open window and filled the darkness, familiar and comforting. All her life, she’d loved this sound, nighttime’s lullaby. She wondered what it would be like to live in a city where there weren’t any frogs, honking horns the only sound to sleep by.

  She lay on her back, the covers thrown aside. The night was warm, no air-conditioning in the house. She squeezed her eyes closed, keeping them shut tight, as if that alone would keep him from her thoughts.

  But it didn’t work. She could think of little else these days. She’d never understood what would motivate a person to take drugs like cocaine or heroine, but thought she might understand the addiction if this was what it felt like when a person’s senses were altered to another state.

  At nearly midnight, the house was quiet, everyone else long asleep. She flicked on the lamp next to her bed and opened the drawer of her nightstand, removing the white envelope she’d received a week ago. She pulled out the letter from the school principal and read it as she had done a dozen times since finding it in the mailbox. She’d nearly memorized the words by now, and the accolades rang through her head. . .only perfect SOL score in your class. . .so proud of your accomplishment. . .hope you will consider scholarship opportunities.

  A wave of frustration rolled over her. She put the letter down and got out of bed, crossing the floor to the window and raising it high enough that she could sit on the sill with her feet dangling, her toes barely touching the side roof below.

  She was eighteen years old, but sometimes, she felt so much older than that.

  Part of her resented feeling this way. Part of her wished she could be like the other kids in her school, getting ready to go to college, thinking about what they wanted to be when they graduated.

  Abby longed to be a vet. She was good with animals. She had a sort of connection with them that had been there for as long as she could remember. Mama said God made her special that way. The part of her that questioned this life she’d been born into wondered why she had to feel guilty for wanting to use what He gave her. Would He not understand this desire in her to do something good with her life?

  If the answer was no, why had He put it there? Was she to ignore it, hold onto the faith that it would eventually go away? Should she accept without resentment that she should leave school, work as a housekeeper or a nanny until she married?

  Beau said that was crazy.

  Maybe that had been one of her first mistakes, though. Confiding in Beau Lassiter. They’d started talking one day in Advanced Biology. Beau was smart. Really smart. He planned to be a doctor. And Abby had no doubt he would do big things with his life. He thought the same could be true for her if she wanted it because she was smart, too.

  But then that was one of the weird things about their relationship. Because they went to the same school, had most of their classes together, it was easy to forget how different their lives were when they went home at night. Abby knew what was expected of her. She’d already disappointed her father and her grandmother by not leaving school. Neither of them could see why she wanted her diploma, why acing her SOL test meant something to her. They could only anticipate disappointment in continuing her education, her mama’s quiet insistence something else she hadn’t figured out and the only reason she was still going.

  Though her mother wasn’t one to openly disagree with either Abby’s father or grandmother, on this subject, she’d taken a stance and refused to yield. Abby didn’t understand why her father hadn’t put his foot down against it. Normally, if he felt strongly about something, he said so in a voice he saved for the times he really meant it.

  She had to believe he knew that school had mattered to her mother, even though she had not gone beyond the tenth grade. Abby remembered a time when she was ten or eleven, and she’d found an old folder up in the attic with each of her mother’s report cards from first grade through her last year in school. They were all straight A’s, not a single B.

  Abby thought her mother was an amazing person. She hadn’t gone to Harvard or discovered some miracle cure for a deadly disease, but she’d made a name for herself in the community with the heirloom vegetables she grew and sold to the nicer restaurants and stores on Tinker’s Knob Lake and in nearby Roanoke.

  In the wintertime, she sold some of her seeds through a mail-order business. Abby knew it hadn’t been an easy road. She’d witnessed the resistance her mother endured from Grandma Miller on countless occasions. Once her grandma had questioned her mother about working with restaurants that sold alcohol to its customers. Abby remembered her mama’s measured and even voice when she said, “Unless they’re using my tomatoes or corn or potatoes to actually make it, I don’t see what it has to do with me.”

  Grandma had walked off without responding. Even now, Abby remembered being proud of her mama for standing up for her
self.

  From below her window, she heard the rustle of a bush, and then in a familiar whisper, “Abby!”

  Beau. Her stomach flipped at the sound of his voice. And she let herself admit she’d been hoping he would come all along. “I’m coming!” she said, keeping her voice soft.

  She lowered herself to the tin roof below, set her bare feet against the cool surface. From there, she tiptoed over to the branch of the huge old maple she’d used as a ladder since she was a little girl. She swung across to a wider branch, dropped one lower, then down the trunk on the rungs nailed to its wide base.

  Beau waited for her below. They said nothing. They didn’t need to. She stepped into his arms, pressing her face to his white Nike t-shirt, inhaling the clean, reassuring scent of him. She lifted her face to his then, because she knew that for a little while, at least, his kiss would make all the stuff she’d been thinking about tonight disappear, like the voices of the frogs with the sunrise.

  9

  Truths

  Farm Tragedy Claims Two Victims:

  Miller Girl Still Unable to Recount Events

  - The Ballard County Times

  Now

  I can’t sleep.

  I want to. I actually long for it, that moment when my eyes close and awareness slips away.

  But tonight, it shows me no mercy, and I lie here in bed, staring at the shadows on the ceiling, my thoughts refusing to shut down.

  Once when I was twelve, I came across a book in the school library called The Power of the Mind. I had to write a paper for my science class on the brain, and I remember flipping through the pages and reading a section on the human ability to block out pain. I ended up writing on Dr. Freud’s theory of repression, a theory not all doctors agreed with. He said that people sometimes push painful memories into the unconscious mind where I guess, basically, they don’t have to look at them anymore.

  Reading that years ago, I had no way of knowing whether it was true or not. I still don’t know what’s true for other people. I only know my own truth.

  A long time ago, a window closed between me and the world I still live in. I can actually see through the window. And I can hear what’s said to me and to others. But the window doesn’t let me talk back. I’m locked here in this dark place, just me, separated from the people I love by something so much heavier than anything I can push past.

  At first, I was terrified that I might never see light again. But at some point, all my fear turned to gratitude. Because I realized that the scary place wasn’t behind the door where I am. I’ve already seen what’s here. It’s what’s on the outside of the door that I don’t know about. That I don’t want to know about.

  The difference between my reality and Dr. Freud’s theory is this: my pain is indeed trapped, but I’m down here with it, reliving it each and every day.

  Some people believe in a place called Purgatory, a kind of holding room for those not yet pure enough to go on to Heaven. If there is such a place, maybe this is where I am. But if so, then it is where Becca is as well.

  She goes about her life as if it’s the one she chose for herself. And to anyone who doesn’t know her as I do, she’s convincing. Maybe there’s something in sisterhood that keeps us tapped into one another, so that we know almost intuitively what the other is feeling.

  Whatever the explanation, I feel the sadness she keeps buried so deep in the same way I feel the crushing weight of my own anguish. Regret is the wheel that keeps us both rolling through one day to the next.

  Becca has made her life busy enough that there’s not a lot of time to think about what might have been. But I know there’s a hollow place inside her where something very different once was.

  For me, there’s actually comfort in the thought that one day I’ll be released from all this. And that’s the fragile rope I cling to. The knowledge that at some point, it will be all right for me to leave.

  The question that keeps me here is where will that leave Becca? How can I go, knowing that she’ll still be here, carrying on where I left off?

  10

  Echoes

  Giving up doesn’t always mean you are weak; sometimes it means that you are strong enough to let go.

  - Author Unknown

  Now

  The house felt lonely without her, echoed in places Matt had never noticed before. He’d gone to bed earlier, but finally given up on sleep at just after one a.m. The last person to pay condolences had left at seven. Until now, there had been things for Matt to do, decisions to make, people to visit with, places to be.

  Gran had always filled up the space around her, added dimension and depth to it by the sheer force of her personality alone, her laugh the kind that made people feel as if the room had been flooded with sunlight. It hit Matt with the harshest kind of finality that he would never hear that laugh again.

  Taking the stairs to the living room, he stopped midway down to study the pictures lining the wall. They were mostly of him, a few as a baby, red-cheeked and chubby. And then dozens from age six and on, little League shots with team after team. He recognized the boys’ faces. They’d played both together and against each other. Until now, seeing the old pictures, Matt hadn’t recognized how they’d grown from year to year to year, little guys to boys to young men.

  There were individual shots of him with Wilks, two teenagers with muscled arms slung around each other’s shoulders, lower lips protruding with the Skoal chew they’d first tried at eleven, the nausea instantly turning them both green.

  Matt could almost smell the tobacco, the leather of their gloves, a time when baseball had been about hot summer nights, pitching and hitting for no reason other than the love of the game. They’d both lived for it, the simple connect between bat and ball, the solid whack that signaled a great hit.

  Somewhere along the way, Matt had lost that. Wilkes, too. Somewhere along the way, it had become more about who made the crowd cheer the loudest. Who got a date with the hottest cheerleader. It had become about the competition between them, the increasing awareness that people compared them, and from those comparisons arose judgment. One of them was better than the other. The question was which one.

  Looking back, Matt could see that this awareness had started the change between them, but it hadn’t been the deciding factor in where they’d ended up. The deciding factor had been Becca.

  Matt took the stairs to the living room where his laptop sat on a desk by the window. He’d brought along plenty of work. Depositions to review. Case notes. Billable hours. Time was what he had to sell and in D. C., he never seemed to have enough of it.

  The grandfather clock ticked loudly in the otherwise silent house, reminding him that he hadn’t billed an hour in days. The thought left a heavy feeling in his chest, and he felt tired of this constant awareness of time unsold. It was the one thing about being an attorney that he had not expected, the way hours disappeared like water swirling down a drain.

  His cell phone rang from the desk where he’d plugged it in earlier to recharge. He considered not answering, but when it stopped ringing and then started up again almost instantly, he gave in and glanced at caller id, biting back a heavy sigh. Phone to his ear, he sat down in the desk chair and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. “Hey,” he said.

  “I knew you wouldn’t be sleeping.” Phoebe sounded as if she’d been crying, her voice raspy at the edges. He pictured her face, beautiful by any standard, blotchy with tears.

  “Yeah,” he said. It was on the tip of his tongue to add that ten years of marriage had at least given them reliable knowledge of the other’s habits, but he stopped himself, not wanting to argue.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I wish you would have let me come.”

  “It seemed better that you didn’t,” he said, hearing the razor slice in his response. Ironic that he’d ended up the bad guy in all of this.

  Silence stretched between them, until Phoebe finally spoke. �
�Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked, the question soft in a way he knew was difficult for her. Phoebe’s instinct had never been to grovel, but to fight no holds barred for something she considered rightfully hers.

  “No. But thanks.”

  “I can still come down. In the morning. I’d like to, Matt. Let me do this for you.”

  Pure loneliness tempted him. But the thought of her here tightened the knot in his stomach. For now, he didn’t want to think about his life with Phoebe. He ran a hand over his face, said too quickly, “No. I’ll be home in a few days.”

  She started to say something, stopped. He knew she was crying again, and more than anything, he hated the fact that he didn’t care. This deadness inside him was the scariest part of what had happened to them. How could they ever find their way back from that?

  Matt clicked off the phone then without saying another word. Maybe it was cruel, but anything he had to say would only be more so.

  He got up from the desk, wandered into the kitchen, hands in the pockets of his suit trousers, a tension headache now gripping the back of his neck.

  Gran had spent a good portion of her days in the kitchen, canning pickles, freezing corn, baking pies or cakes for sick neighbors or friends from church.

  The stove and refrigerator were old by today’s standards, although they worked as well now as they had when he was a boy. He opened the frig, stared at the shelves weighed down with dishes of food, each labeled with a piece of masking tape describing the contents inside as well as who had brought it. They were people he’d known growing up, people he hadn’t seen in years, but whose names he instantly recognized.

  Sweet potato pie – Janice Blankenship