She didn’t say a word until the “WELCOME TO PENNSYLVANIA” sign was in sight. She looked over at me, then, and a small smile spread across her face.
“‘If I take one more step, I’ll be the farthest from home I’ve ever been.’” She said this with a tone of voice that made it sound like a quotation.
“Is that a quote?”
“The Fellowship of the Ring,” she said. “Lord of the Rings.”
“Oh, seen the movies, but I’ve never had much time for reading for pleasure.”
She smiled at me. “‘Come on, Sam. Remember what Bilbo used to say: ‘It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no telling where you might be swept off to.’”
“You have the whole book memorized?” I said, laughing.
“Not hardly. I just love that quote. Always have. Having never been anywhere, I’ve always been sort of obsessed with their whole adventure. Adventures and travel in general, really. I guess I’m pretty excited to be actually going somewhere.”
“I mean, it’s Pennsylvania, not all that exciting,” I said, smirking at her. “No offense meant to all the fine folks who live here.”
She snorted. “Every single person in Pennsylvania just heard your comment, took it personally, and now they’re mad at you. Better watch behind us for the angry mob with pitchforks and torches.”
I cackled. “Seems like you’re in good spirits, now. Thought for a while there you were upset or something.”
She shook her head. “Nah, just…thinking.”
I put on a thick Kentucky twang. “Well, now, I may not be the sharpest crayon in the tool shed, but if you feel like talkin’, I could listen.”
“Not the sharpest crayon in the tool shed?”
I shrugged. “I may have mixed a few metaphors, there.”
She was quiet another moment. “I guess I’m just…thinking about what I want.”
“Okay—and what do you want?”
“A lot of things. We went over our bucket lists, but this is different. I want…a future.”
I didn’t respond right away—that deserved a more thoughtful response. “Well, the smartass thing to say is that you’ve got a future, still being, you know, alive and all. But you mean something more specific. Like, a career type of thing.”
She nodded. “Yeah. I just…I feel like I never really launched. Charlie, Cassie, Poppy, they all launched like rockets. Lexie not as much, but she still had an angle and a direction. I just…sort of sputtered into a holding pattern. If I’d grown up somewhere like your hometown, I’d probably never leave. I’d just be stuck there forever. And I want more than that; I just…don’t know what I want. I know I hate school. I hated high school, like with a passion. I was bored stupid in all my classes, except math, which can burn in hell. Then I tried a semester of community college the fall after graduation, and I hated that even more than high school. Honestly, it was all just… on me. Like, no one cared if I showed up, or what grade I got, or if I was struggling or having a shit day. It was just…impersonal. I was just another face out of thousands. And that was a tiny local community college. Expand that by about a hundredfold and a university seems like it’d be even worse. And I just didn’t see the point anyway, if I had no idea what to study, or what to major in.”
I nodded. “College was never an option for me. I make jokes about being a redneck or a hillbilly or whatever, but it’s all just jokes, mostly. I’m smart enough, but not in a books type of way. Never had time for homework, or for studying. None of it ever seemed to matter much. I had goals, and knowing about the War of 1812, or how cells divide, or how to multiply an integer or whatever the hell, none of that was relevant to what I wanted out of life, which was to work on cars, to make money, and to get the hell out of Kentucky.” I laughed. “Meaning, I barely graduated. My GPA was…embarrassing. I could’ve done better if I had bothered to try, but I just barely saw the point of even showing up. I did the bare minimum to get my fuckin’ diploma. In high school, if I got a hot tip on a good salvage, I’d skip faster’n you could say boo. School was just never a thing for me.”
“Well, things clearly worked for you,” she said, scraping a line up and down her thigh, creating a zzzzhp-zzzzhp-zzzzhp sound, “considering you own your own company at twenty-six.”
“But the question is, what do you want?”
“That’s the problem, I don’t know! I don’t want to go to school, so that kinda cuts out a lot of options. I’m not really artistic, not like Poppy, Lexie, or Cassie. So I just…don’t know.”
“Well, what do you like? What are you passionate about?”
She seemed embarrassed. “I like reading. If given the opportunity, I’d rather sit and smoke a bowl and read a book. But no one’s gonna pay me to read and smoke pot.”
I eyed her. “Question, which you’re not at all obligated to answer.”
“Okay?”
“Why do you smoke pot?”
A long sigh. “I’ve avoided asking myself that question for a while.” She watched the scenery pass by for a bit, and I gave her space to think. “I guess because I like being able to get out of my head. I can relax. Not think. Just be…happy. It’s not, like, joy, because there is a big difference between joy and happiness. But it’s something. Since I graduated high school I’ve been just working as a server, making ends meet. Paying rent, buying food. Hanging with Jillie and Leighton, messing around with Max. We’ll see a movie now and then, and Leighton is a hostess at a place that has live music on the weekends, so we’ll sometimes go see a show if the band is good—we’re all underage, but her manager lets us in as long as we don’t drink. I guess I just…don’t really have a purpose. I feel like I’m just drifting. And that’s uncomfortable.”
Another silence.
“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” she continued. “I’m not, like, self-medicating. It’s not a gateway to meth or whatever. I have zero interest in anything but pot. I worked with a dishwasher who was a meth-head and, hoooo boy, did that cure me of any curiosity.”
“I bet.” I grimaced. “More than a few of my friends got hooked on it—well, not really friends, just people I went to school with. It’s ugly shit.” I glanced her way. “So it’s just something to…pass the time, sort of?”
“More to distract me from my lack of purpose. Also, it’s just a nice way to relax at the end of the day, because I’m not really a huge fan of getting drunk. Tried it a couple times with my roommates, and the hangover is so not worth the feeling of being out of control. Weird, maybe, but alcohol just is not my thing.”
“You’re very self-aware,” I said. “Most people would just be like, ‘I dunno, I just like it.’”
“You asked me why, I’m not gonna pass the question off with a blah answer.” She looked at me. “You have any vices?”
I shrugged. “Honestly? No. Work, maybe. I’m a workaholic. This is the first break or vacation I’ve ever taken, and I’m fighting feeling guilty about it. Time away from work is time I’m not making money, and I have this fear, irrational maybe, that I’ll go broke and have to move back with my parents, and there is no way in motherfucking hell that’ll ever happen. I’d be homeless first.”
Her expression was confused and speculative. “You have a complicated relationship with your parents, I think.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I do.”
She chewed on the lower right corner of her lip. “You don’t have to talk about it, but I am curious.”
“Well.” I sighed. “There ain’t much in my life I don’t like talking about. Most shit, I’m an open book about. Grew up poor white trash, lived in a single-wide trailer, wore my dad’s old clothes half my life even when they were eight sizes too big because we were too poor to afford anything else, even from the thrift store.”
She blinked in shock. “Wow. That’s…that’s…”
“It sucked. I think I mentioned there were times we couldn’t afford both groceries
and electricity, or electricity and water, so we had to choose, which meant no plumbing for a couple weeks, or no electricity, or no food.”
“So you’ve gone hungry, not had lights…”
“Had to carry buckets a couple miles to the shop where Dad worked to fill ’em up with water, so we could flush the toilets and make Mac ’N Cheese and hot dogs, which, most of the time, we made over a fire in the backyard because it was free.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. So you asked before why I want to make a million? That’s why. I won’t ever feel that way again. Not ever.” I let out a breath. “But my relationship with my parents is something that’s hard for me to talk about.”
“You don’t have to.”
“It’s cool. I trust you.” I waffled, trying to get started. “So. Mom…I told you she worked at a bar. Little dive bar, piece of shit place that served watery beer, dollar store whiskey, and literal backwoods, homemade moonshine, which, by the way, is illegal.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah. She worked at a gas station as a cashier in the day, and at the bar at night. The bar was our main income, actually. Dad got paid shit, but it was steady, whereas Mom might make fifty bucks one night and a hundred another.”
She nodded. “I know about that all too well.”
“Right.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “So, um. Yeah. I’ve never told anyone this.” A long, long pause. “Sometimes, if things were really, really tight. Like not enough to pay any of the bills, Mom would, uh…go home with guys from the bar. For money.”
She was silent a long, tense moment. “Like…prostitution?”
I blew out a breath. “Yeah. I don’t really remember how I found out. I think…it woulda been in middle school. Or ninth grade, maybe. I had been out late with buddies, blowing off firecrackers and racing dirt bikes back in the hollers. We’d passed behind some houses—trailers way out there, you know? The places you gotta know are there to know how to get there. And I think I saw her. It’d have been late, like two, three in the morning. I saw her leaving some guy’s house. Standing on the step, shoes in hand, barely half dressed, and he gave her money.”
“You were allowed out at three in the morning in middle school?”
I laughed. “That’s what you fix on? Yeah, I mean, not allowed. But Dad worked early and slept like a dead man, and Mom worked late, so I just did whatever the hell I wanted. If I wanted to hang out with buddies till dawn drinking and cutting up, they wouldn’t know. Didn’t really care, either. Just making ends meet and making sure I had a roof and food was all they had time for. They cared about me, but keeping me fed, housed, and clothed was their only real concern. What I did otherwise was up to me. ‘Just don’t get killed, don’t end up in the hospital ’cause we don’t got money for no stitches, y’hear? And for god’s sake, don’t get your dumb ass arrested.’” I said that last few sentences in my dad’s backwoods drawl.
She frowned. “So your mom would sell herself to make ends meet, sometimes. And your dad…knew?”
I shrugged. “I dunno how that worked. I think it was something they just didn’t talk about. Mom would do what she had to do, and if she brought home extra money, great. He wouldn’t ask how.”
“Did they love each other?”
I wanted to laugh at that, but it was an honest question. “Love is a luxury they couldn’t afford, I think. They respected each other. Liked each other. Didn’t fight much and got over it quick. They rarely saw each other, really. Dad worked six in the morning till six at night most days. Sometimes later. And Mom worked from eight till four at the gas station, and five thirty to past close at the bar. So they might see each other in passing, or on the weekends. Sunday mornings, mostly, was their time together.” I winced, and she caught it.
“What?” she asked.
“Well, I learned real early on to get the hell out of the house on Sunday mornings. Those walls weren’t much but two-by-fours and shitty fake wood paneling. Didn’t baffle the sound at all.”
She widened her eyes. “Ohhh. So, they still had that together, at least? Trying to find the good.”
I laughed. “Bless your heart for that, Torie. Yeah, they had that. Loudly. Every Sunday morning at nine. You coulda set a clock by it. So I’d get up early and go fishing, most Sundays. Once I could drive, I’d go salvaging.”
She was quiet, thoughtful, her eyes on me.
“What?” I asked. “You got somethin’ to say, I can tell.”
“When you talk about your parents or Kentucky or your past, you sound more southern again.” She shrugged. “That’s not what I was gonna say, though. I guess…I’m just wondering how you feel, about…your mom. And what she did.”
I scratched the back of my head. “I dunno. Try not to think about it much, honestly. I guess I don’t like it, as you might guess. Everybody knew. It was a tiny place, where I grew up. Not on most maps. Not really even a name to it. No mayor, just a few old retired folks who called themselves the city council made sure there was a stop light and all that municipal shit. So, everybody knew my mom was, literally, the town whore. She wasn’t on the street corner, maybe, but it was common knowledge. You needed your rocks off and had some cash to burn, Della Frost down at the Crooked Barstool on the county line would go home with you.” I gripped the shifter with white knuckles, barely feeling it. “Got teased some for it. But hey, knock a few teeth out and the comments stopped. To my face, at least.”
“God, Rhys.”
“She’s a good woman. Took care of me and Saoirse. Of Dad. Made dinner. Kept the place clean on top of two jobs. I got respect for her, for how hard she worked. But it’s…it’s a complicated thing. I know she didn’t want to. But it was that or we starve, or don’t take a shower for a month ’cause the water bill was so damn expensive. As it was I’d go to school early and take showers in the locker room ’cause it was free there.”
And, of course, at that exact moment, my phone rang.
And who was it?
My dad.
Dammit.
I hesitated and then glanced at Torie.
She shrugged. “Don’t mind me. I’ll just be over here minding my own business.
I chuckled. “Yeah, well, you’re about to get an earful.” I accepted the call and turned it onto speaker and tossed the phone up onto the dash so I could drive hands-free. “Hey, Dad.”
“RJ, how are you son?” Dad’s deep, pack-and-a-half-a-day voice.
I hated that nickname. “I’m all right, but I’d be better if you called me Rhys. How are you?”
“Fuck that, boy. Been callin’ you RJ since you were a day old. You think I’m gonna stop now, you best think again.”
I half sighed, half laughed. “Yeah, yeah. I know how you are, you stubborn old sonofabitch.”
“Sounds like you’re far away.”
“You’re on speaker, I’m in the car.”
“Where ya headed?”
I had no intention of bringing Torie into this conversation, for her sake rather than mine; I winked at her and held a finger to my lips to shush her. She nodded.
“Oh, just on a road trip. Had some time between projects, so I thought I’d get the hell outta Dodge for a few days. What are you and Mom up to?”
“You know, nothin’ different. Danny Brower blew his transmission on his old Ford, so I’m fixing that, because his daddy gave him that truck back in the seventies and he said he’d be damned to hell before he got a new one. Costin’ him an arm and just about half a leg, but it’s worth it to him, but I don’t gotta tell you that.”
“No, folks get attached to their trucks, especially family pieces like Dan Brower’s.” I chewed on my lip for a moment. “How’s Mom?”
“Oh, she’s all right. At the Corner Mart where she’s been every mornin’ for nigh on thirty years now. We’re havin’ roast tonight.”
“She still at the Crooked Barstool?”
“Ehh, you know your momma. They’ll have to drag her to the nursing home and pry that apron a
nd order pad outta her old hands.” I hated the question, but had to ask. “She been…working late, lately?”
A gruff, frustrated sigh. “Nah. Home ten after two most nights, now. Kinda gettin’ past the age where those extra hours are worth it to her, you know?” He hated that question as much as I did.
Reading between the lines of Dad’s answer, the message was that Mom was getting too old to be able to get anyone to pay for her anymore.
Which meant the reason for Dad’s call would be coming the next time he opened his mouth.
“Means things are awful tight, though. Been taking some simple jobs on the side here in the driveway, just for extra cash, but it’s tricky since I don’t got all the tools myself. I been just using what’s at the shop all these years.”
I had no patience for his edging around the ask. “I’ll send you what I can when I get home, Dad.”
“Awful good of you, son. Hate askin’, but times are tighter than ever.”
“I know it.”
A long silence. “I appreciate you, RJ.”
“Tell Mom I said hi.”
“Will do.”
“Love you, son.”
“You too, Dad. See ya.”
“See ya.”
I reached up, touched the red phone icon to end the call, and shoved the phone under my thigh. Waited for the questions.
None came. I glanced at Torie. “I know you got about dozen things to say to that.”
She shrugged. “It was a private conversation I just happened to be unable to avoid overhearing.”
I sighed. “I’ve been running away from that damn nickname my whole life. It chases me.”
She grinned. “RJ, huh?”
“Rhys Jonathan Frost. Dad, as you heard, has called me RJ my whole life, and I’ve been tellin’ him to stop since I was sixteen. But everyone from my hometown just calls me RJ, and if anyone hears it, I’m RJ to them from then on. It’s a sticky sonafabitch nickname.”
She just gazed levelly at me. “If you don’t like it, then I’ll call you Rhys.”
I just sighed, grinned ruefully. “You’ll try, but now that you’ve heard it, you’ll use it. It’s inevitable.”
A Real Goode Time Page 14
