Hard Time

by McKenna, Cara

  “Where are we staying?” I asked.

  “On my mom’s couch. It folds out.” As if I needed further evidence that this trip was no romantic weekend getaway. “She had my old room done up for guests, but I guess my dad got too entitled about crashing in there when he blew into town, visiting too often. So she tossed the bed and turned it into a sewing room or something.”

  “Ah.”

  He shot me a meaningful look across the cab.

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t know what you’re expecting, as far as where I came from,” he said, “but lower it by fifty percent.”

  “I know it’s not glamorous.”

  “I grew up in a trailer park . . . I didn’t really realize it back then. Hardly anybody ever called it what it was. It’s by this pond and everybody called it Lakeside. Lakeside Estates, that’s what the sign at the entrance says. Took me ’til I was about fourteen to realize, shit, I’m trailer trash, aren’t I?”

  “That must’ve been a rude awakening.”

  He nodded. “I guess. And from then on I questioned everything I’d come to think was normal. Compared where I lived to the shit you see on TV, in sitcoms and stuff. Like how just about everybody I knew had a record and a load of guns, and how they drank when it was still sunny out, unlike the people on TV. How when some teenage character on a show got knocked up, it was like, a huge deal. When all around me, that was practically standard issue.”

  “Not in your family, though.”

  He was quiet for a long moment. “My mom had us pretty young. Nineteen, with my sister. Twenty-four with me. And Kristina had a baby. Her junior year.”

  I blinked at the highway. “You have a niece or nephew?”

  “I did. Nephew. He passed away when he was still real little. Three.”

  “Jeez. You never told me.”

  “And I’d rather you didn’t go telling my sister you know. Not this first visit. It’s not a secret or anything, just . . . touchy.”

  “How did he . . .”

  Eric huffed out a curt breath. “He drowned. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Turn your back for thirty seconds to flip the burgers, and he’s gone. Just a tragedy.” His tone was sad but flat, as if he were relating a stranger’s loss, something off the news. Like maybe he wouldn’t let himself really feel about the topic, or had burned out all his emotions for it years ago. Or maybe this was like when he’d refused to tell me the details of Kristina’s assault. That caginess about sharing other people’s traumas. “Could’ve happened to anyone. Course my sister can’t see it that way—what mother could?”

  “How awful.” And no wonder she was prickly. That changed my entire perception of the woman who’d snapped at me over the phone. Made me wonder if maybe I could come to understand her control issues where her little brother was concerned.

  A different thought struck me. “It wasn’t in that lake—your lake?”

  “No, different one. Anyhow. Enough about that,” he said, and flipped the radio on low. The topic had made him distant, so I didn’t push.

  “So where did you live, when you were still in Kernsville? Before . . . you know.”

  “I moved out of my mom’s house when I was seventeen. Rented places. The last one was an apartment above a body shop.” He grinned in the glow of the dash, the Eric I’d lost in the last couple of minutes returning to me. “Stank to high heaven, and noisy, but cheap as shit.”

  “You still have friends back there?”

  He shrugged, smile fading. “Nobody too special. Nobody who cared enough to visit me at Cousins, that’s for fucking certain.”

  The rare bitterness in his voice told me loads. “Sounds like there was one or two you’d expected a bit more of.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Not sure what made me expect loyalty out of those guys. Not when it’s in such short supply where we all grew up.” And here I’d thought it was a byproduct of where he’d come from, some scrappy tribe mentality.

  “Not everyone’s as loyal as you,” I told him. “In fact, hardly anybody is.”

  He looked a little uncomfortable at that. Like maybe he didn’t love that quality about himself a hundred percent. Like maybe he’d gotten burned by it once or twice. Or maybe all this angst between us had gotten him thinking about it differently. Questioning the instincts that had gotten him locked up, and had nearly had me calling it quits last weekend.

  I let silence reign for a time, and Eric broke it perhaps forty minutes later when he said, “Next exit. Then a whole lot of fields.”

  He was right about that. The rural route we took out to his hometown was endless, ice-heaved asphalt—ten miles of juddering bumps that felt like five times that distance with Eric’s busted old suspension.

  “You’ve got—to get—a new truck,” I said, pitched this way and that.

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “We should’ve—taken my car.”

  “Nah. You’ve still got some—shocks left. No sense ruining what actually—works. Fuck, that was a deep one.” He put his fingers to his mouth like he’d bit his tongue.

  After about six years, we reached our destination, the promised sign welcoming us to Lakeside Estates, established 1972. The property was bound by a log fence that gave it a campground feel. We’d passed through Kernsville’s main drag, which boasted some okay-looking homes, even a few two-story numbers with cheerful Christmas lights. Lakeside had decorations as well . . . but more of the plastic lawn-Santa persuasion.

  I spied a sliver of frosted ice through the pines. “Must’ve been nice to grow up on the water.”

  “It’s called Green Pond,” he said dryly. “And not by accident. There’s a reason we always drove to that big lake I took you by.”

  The truck trundled past rows of trailer homes, and the place seemed run-down, but not squalid. Not depressing even, just humble. People had recycling bins and porches and even hedges; the trappings of suburbia, really, just condensed.

  “Here we are,” Eric said heavily, parking behind a sedan at the foot of a red single-wide. “Home sweet home. Looks like my sister’s come for dinner, too. That’s her Accord.”

  There were white lights strung around the large, square window at the end of the house, and I could glimpse what looked like a living room through the open blinds—framed pictures hung on faux-wood walls, a tall bookcase. The single glowing lamp didn’t reveal much else.

  Eric grabbed our overnight bags from the back and led me across salted flagstones, up onto a narrow side porch. He opened the screened door and knocked on the inner one before pushing it in. A dog barked, and nails chattered against linoleum.

  A beagle appeared, pawing at Eric’s knees.

  “Hey, Scoot.” To the rest of the house he called, “Anybody home? Son and heir in need of a hot meal, here.”

  I heard a female voice but couldn’t catch the words. Must’ve been sarcastic, as Eric cracked a warm smile in profile and shouted, “Good to see you, too.”

  I followed him inside, into a crowded but orderly kitchen. It smelled great, like chicken and dressing. I stooped to rub the dog’s ears, rewarded with much licking. When I stood up straight and stole my hands back, it licked my knees through my jeans. Eric tapped its butt with his boot. “Knock it off, Scooter.” Scooter obediently wandered toward his bowls, set in the corner.

  Eric dropped our bags by the door and I followed his lead, toeing off my shoes. He was taking my coat when a woman appeared from the next room—his mom, clearly. Salt-and-pepper hair done in flippy layers. She was short, rather round, with strong, feminine, Hispanic features, and Eric’s dark eyes. He must’ve inherited the tall genes from his dad.

  “Baby,” she muttered as he stooped to hug her. “My baby boy, where you been?”

  Eric kissed the top of her head, which melted my heart some. “Working,” he answered. “Mom, this is Annie.” He drew me over.
“This is my mom, Paula.”

  I was poised for a warm handshake but got a tight hug instead. When she stepped back she put her hands right on either side of my waist and told Eric, “What a figure on this one!”

  I had no idea what to make of that, unsure if that meant I was more or less curvy than expected. “Thanks,” I said, gleaning from her smile that whatever the verdict, she approved. “Happy belated holidays.”

  “And to you!” She looked to Eric. “I tried to keep the tree up ’til you got to see it, but the needles all fell off by New Year’s.”

  “I’ll live. Where’s Kris? I saw her car.”

  “She’s been with me all week, since . . . you know.”

  “Since he walked,” Eric said.

  She nodded grimly. “Just a precaution. She’s spooked, of course. Anyhow, she’s on the phone with your Aunt Tori.” Paula crossed herself in a way that suggested she wasn’t a big fan of Aunt Tori. “Better her than me. Who wants to hear about a person’s bunion surgery?”

  Eric glanced around, hands on his hips. “Smells like turkey.”

  “Chicken.”

  “Close enough.”

  “You eat chicken, Annie?” Paula asked earnestly.

  I nodded. “Smells like dressing, too.”

  “Oh,” she said, shooting Eric a look of overdone wonder. “You didn’t say she was from down south.” She turned back to me. “He hasn’t told us much of anything, in fact. He said you’re . . . a teacher?”

  “Librarian.”

  “Yes, right, I knew that. Eric told me that much, at least. Anyways, yes—dressing. The box says it’s stuffing. I’ve never understood the difference, though—dressing or stuffing. Is there one?”

  I shrugged. “We just call it dressing, where I’m from. My mom makes the cornbread kind.”

  “Well this stuff looks like croutons but tastes like heaven.”

  “Works for me.”

  “Jesus, Eric,” his mom said with a grin. “Warn me next time you bring a Southern girl home for comfort food. I didn’t study for this test.” To me she said, “Now where are you from, precisely, Annie?”

  Eric found a screw-cap bottle of red wine from a cabinet and poured four glasses at the kitchen table, and I let his mom grill me. She nodded at everything I said, rapt, like I was an ambassador from some exotic culture. She’d just gotten to the topic of what my parents did, when the missing sister made her entrance, declaring with patented Collier blasphemy, “Fucking Christ, but that woman doesn’t understand the meaning of TMI.”

  Her mom laughed. “Why d’you think I handed her off?”

  “Well, you’ll all be riveted to hear Tori has an ingrown nail on the middle toe of her left foot.”

  Paula grimaced. “Kris, shush.” In a falsely hushed, conspiratorial tone she added to me, “Tori is their father’s sister.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “They overshare, his family.”

  “Ha!” Kristina pulled out a chair but didn’t sit yet. “This from the woman who gave me a blow-by-blow of the neighbor girl’s lip-ring infection over breakfast.”

  Kristina was tall—easily five-ten—and built like Eric, with long legs and narrow hips. She was a bit top-heavy, and though I’d done some math and figured she was thirty-six or -seven, she wore the years roughly. Her black hair was long, loose ponytail brushing her waist. She was dressed not unlike me, in jeans and a plaid flannel, but—unlike me—she looked like she’d earned the latter with some legit wood-chopping cred. With an unsettling shiver, I tried to imagine what kind of a man could’ve overpowered this woman. Enough to break her arm, even. Then I remembered what Eric had told me on the drive, about her lost son. This woman had had more taken from her than I could begin to comprehend. It made me feel about eight years old.

  Eric stood and she slapped his back as they hugged, saying, “Can’t get over how big you got, inside.”

  “It’s that luxury health club they got at Cousins.” He stepped back to nod in my direction. “Kris, this is Annie. The one you chewed out on the phone.”

  I cringed on the inside and accepted Kristina’s shake. “Nice to meet you. Officially.”

  “You, too,” she said, sounding more resigned than delighted.

  Whatever. Close enough. I had a better chance of being hit by a meteorite than of getting an apology out of this woman—that much seemed clear. She scared me, anyhow. I kept my expectations low, hoping for civility.

  “Surprised you came for this visit,” she said to me, her tone impossible to get a read on.

  “I um . . .” May as well be honest. “The whole thing freaks me out a little. Eric figured it might be good for me to come, so I could see there’s nothing to worry about.”

  She shot her brother a look. “Nothing to worry about?”

  “Probably not, Kris. That shit’s a coward—always has been. He doesn’t have a death wish. ’Specially not if he’s sober—”

  Their mom tossed her hands up fretfully, trying to shoo the topic like a cloud of gnats. “I don’t want to talk about that horrible man.”

  “That horrible man’s the reason I’m home this weekend,” Eric reminded her. “No point sugarcoating it.”

  “But not tonight, baby. Okay?”

  He sighed, dropping his shoulders in a show of surrender.

  Paula turned to me. “Give me your glass, Annie.”

  I let her refresh my wine, and the conversation turned to Christmas—what my family’s traditions were, what the winter was like in South Carolina. More an interview than a conversation, really, and Eric and Kris kept quiet, preoccupied by a different, unspoken interrogation. I spotted them shooting one another meaningful looks, Eric’s probably demanding things like, Anybody seen him around? Kris’s blasé expression told me nothing, but Eric seemed to read something from it. He frowned at her and sipped his wine. At one point she announced she needed a smoke, and Eric went with her. I could see them through the window when I went to the sink to rinse my hands. I watched him steal her cigarette and take a long drag, though he didn’t light one for himself. He hugged his arms against the cold, the two of them trading grave looks and words I couldn’t make out over the radio.

  I didn’t like one bit that a petty part of me was jealous of their obvious bond. It looked nothing like the one I shared with him, like this was a side of him I’d not yet met. A deeply important side—the one capable of his crime. He looked like a stranger out there, a hard, handsome, serious man, breath fogging in the winter air to mimic his sister’s smoke. He felt very far away, standing just beyond that pane of glass.

  Dinner was served shortly. On paper it was nearly exactly what my own mom had made on Christmas. Roasted and stuffed chicken, dressing, mashed potatoes, green beans. The potatoes were from a box, the gravy from a can, the beans from a freezer bag; all of which might’ve scandalized my mother, but it tasted fine, just a little different. Frankly I preferred their gravy.

  I ate slowly, keeping pace with the others who were talking way more than me. Paula caught Eric up with all the neighborhood gossip, and he pretended to find it all riveting . . . though I was pretty sure he couldn’t give less of a damn about some dispute between the neighbors over property boundaries in relation to unattended dog turds.

  After dinner we all tackled the dishes, then retired to the living room to flip channels. Eric and I sat on the couch, Paula in an old wicker rocker and Kristina lounging splay-legged on the carpet with a couple of pillows under her head and Scooter curled beside her hip. We didn’t really watch anything, just made fun of stuff and drifted in and out of remembrances triggered by whatever floated by on the screen.

  At some point Paula grabbed a photo album from the bookcase, and I flipped through it, fascinated by shots of Eric as a boy, then a teenager. Lots of pictures of him standing on the sand in swim trunks, in front of what I guessed was the lake he
’d driven me to. He’d been smaller back then, of course, his narrow frame missing the tattoos and chest hair and punishing build. But the same eyes, same overgrown hair, only curlier. He smiled a lot more in those images than he did these days, eyes often squinted against the sunshine. There were hardly any photos from the winter. And only a few featuring a man I assumed was Eric and Kris’s dad. Tall guy, black hair and beard, his frame broader than Eric’s and carrying more fat. Not a single shot of Kristina with a baby.

  I tuned out of the conversation, preoccupied with questions I planned to save for after the women had gone to bed.

  Paula called it a night around eleven, telling Kristina, “You wake me and there’ll be hell to pay.” They were sharing Paula’s bed so Eric and I could have the foldout.

  “I’m not the one who snores,” Kris called after her mom.

  I added, “Good night! Thank you for dinner—it was amazing.”

  “Yeah,” Eric shouted. “Great dinner. See you in the morning.”

  Kristina swirled the clear plastic tumbler in her hand, her drink drained mainly to ice. I was nursing my third glass of wine in four hours, and neither Eric nor his mom had topped up after dinner. Kristina had switched to screwdrivers, and though she didn’t sound especially tipsy, she had to be feeling them by now, at the rate she was going. She left us and returned with a fresh round, taking her mom’s spot in the rocker with a lamenting sigh.

  “Remote,” she said, snapping her fingers, and caught it when Eric tossed it her way. Ice cubes clattered against plastic as she scanned the channels.

  “Don’t like how quick you’re sucking those down,” Eric scolded in a lazy tone.

  “You my sponsor now?”

  “Just saying.”