by AnonYMous
I only wished they were exaggerating.
“So we converted Brad’s old room into a greenhouse and went hydroponic. The start-up costs are steep, but the yields! Can we bring you some? Or maybe you’d like to come to dinner?”
I exhaled for approximately the three hundred thousandth time in my life. Lord love my parents, but they were New Yorkers. They were loud, and they had eastern accents, and they thought they knew what was best for everyone. Twenty plus years in Fallow hadn’t changed that. Fifty probably wouldn’t make a dent.
Dad had become a biologist for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks because he loved the West. He loved bison, yellow perch, and even prairie dogs. He loved the endless skies they lived under and the waving grasses of the high plains. Mom loved Dad, and so she’d followed him to the middle of nowhere and learned to deal with it. But the tighter they squeezed Fallow, trying to show it exactly how much they loved it, the more it ran through their fingers. They were too educated, too sophisticated, too outside.
And they didn’t seem to know it.
Watching them try hurt because it was like looking in a mirror. Over the years, I’d come to love Fallow, with its spare beauty and sincere citizens, the metaphor of it clinging to life on a drying landscape. But it didn’t seem to love me back, and I wasn’t sure it ever would. I’d started contemplating leaving, and if I could ever get over Wren, I might do just that. Maybe it would take leaving to get over her. I really ought to try it.
Before Kathy could respond or I could figure out how to help, Wren came up and draped her arm over Mom’s shoulders. “Am I invited too?”
My heart did that thing, the stupid thing where it slowed down, beat harder, and then went in double time at the sight of her: her hair tangled by the wind, her cheeks pinkened, and her lips full in the morning sun.
Mom beamed at her and gave me a significant look. “Of course! You’re invited every night.”
I sighed again, now for another reason. My parents certainly weren’t dumb for all they lacked self-awareness. Intelligence and social skills were different things. They might not know how people saw them, but they knew how I looked at Wren.
Wren politely ignored my mother’s eyebrow waggles, as she always did. Instead, she solved another problem. “Kath, Roy is looking for you.”
Kathy smiled like a death row inmate given a reprieve and bolted, without waiting for the invitation to be repeated or indeed for anyone to draw a breath.
“What are you cooking for this dinner?” Wren asked my mom. She was never fazed by my parents. She was never fazed by anyone—which was probably why she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see what was happening with Lone Gun.
I hadn’t known until yesterday whether Wren knew. I hadn’t wanted to know. I probably couldn’t take it if the answer were yes. But somehow no was worse, because I’d made her aware, and she wouldn’t ever forgive me.
“Well, we’d have to plan the menu around the tomatoes,” Dad said. “Maybe we could make that bruschetta we had in Tuscany.” That last bit was directed at me.
I glared at him. Traveling to Italy for a culinary vacation wasn’t something people in Fallow did. It seemed like bragging to point out we had.
“I could even make mozzarella,” Mom said. “Or Brad could. He’s a great cook.”
Wren gave me an assessing look. “Your son has many talents. Also many interesting . . . theories.”
“They aren’t theories.” Whatever else I said to her, I needed to make that clear. If she was going to have an inkling something was happening, she had to believe it was real and serious. This was dangerous for her, for me too, probably, and a little knowledge was worse than none at all.
She pursed her pretty mouth. “We’re going to have to agree to disagree about that.”
I started to respond, but stopped myself. There was no point in having this discussion, especially not in front of my parents. I gestured at the band, who’d rounded the corner and were coming down the street hammering away at the fight song.
“They’re starting. Again,” I whispered in a stage voice.
She smiled at me, indulgent and pitying, and I wanted to kiss her. It was basically our normal interaction, except with my parents and a marching band added in.
*
Wren
I pushed a cart down the aisle at the grocery store. Ground beef, chili powder, and beans: all the fixings for a massive Lone Gun dinner. Because that was the kind of thing Lone Gun did—ate chili. They also rode motorcycles. They drank beer. They didn’t deal fucking drugs.
I stopped in the produce section. “So my choices are apples or bananas?” I said this to no one at all because other than the checker, the store was empty.
I set a bag of apples and a huge bunch of bananas in my cart. And because Brad wasn’t there for me to direct my anger at, I glared at my groceries.
People shouldn’t hint about something earth shattering and say don’t tell anyone. It was mean. But in this case, it was also impossible. Lone Gun dealing drugs was about as silly as them putting on a charity production of The Music Man. No, actually, Uncle Paul had a good voice. Given a full case of Moose Drool, he might belt out some “Seventy-Six Trombones.”
Which left the idea of them as an outlaw gang the most ridiculous suggestion ever.
Okay, I should let it go. Ha! What a hilarious joke.
But I couldn’t. The thing that nagged me was how confident Brad had seemed. It wasn’t that he was timid. He went toe-to-toe with me on a regular basis. Chill strength cloaked his suppressed energy.
When he’d brought up the drugs he’d had beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt conviction. He not only had thought I’d known—he’d thought I might have been involved with it. Like it wasn’t even a question. I couldn’t let it go.
I shook my head and marched to the front of the store. “Hey, Kjersten,” I said to the checker as I began unloading my cart.
“Long time no see.”
It had been a week.
Kjersten was blonde and pretty in that Nordic way. She’d been a year behind me in school, though I’d been surprised she’d stayed in town after graduation. Almost no one else had.
“Have fun at homecoming yesterday?” she asked.
“Yes.” Except for the part where Brad had annoyingly emphasized he had theories he didn’t think were theories and I’d spent an afternoon stewing about it.
“How’s Zack?” Kjersten was weighing my bananas and only half-paying attention to me.
“Screwing anything with tits.”
She looked up, eyes wide with surprise. I guessed I should probably find a nicer way to put that.
“Sorry.” Now she was attentive and sincere.
“I’m not. We’re done this time.” I hoped this was true, but the lack of options and the hangdog looks would probably wear me down eventually.
She nodded in solidarity. “He’s always . . .”
“Yeah.”
That was the thing about towns like Fallow: everyone had known everyone forever. Gossip was an occupational hazard.
Take Brad. Our parents weren’t friends, so we hadn’t met until kindergarten, but ever since then, he’d been around. We’d had every class together, sung in the choir, and produced the yearbook. If we didn’t exactly run with the same crowd, seeing him had been as certain as bitter weather in January.
In the two years since Brad had come back from getting his CPA, he’d been working for Masters part-time, so I saw him more than I saw anyone outside my family. Probably more than I saw Zack.
And of course, he’d known me his entire life too. He saw me almost every day, knew my moods, knew my jokes and my ticks. Knew me. And he’d thought it was possible Lone Gun was dealing and I was involved. He thought I could do that.
Either I’d missed he was gullible as shit or . . . or nothing. There was no other option. He’d been watching too much Law and Order, and it had rotted his brain.
“So you’re fine?” Kjersten asked, meanin
g about Zack.
“I’m fine.” And I was. While I didn’t like Zack’s wandering eye, it didn’t really hurt. At this point I knew what to expect—and not—from him. He hadn’t broken my heart; he’d never had it to break.
The expression on my face must have convinced Kjersten because she changed the subject. “You’re making chili.”
“Yup, gotta keep the men fed.”
“How’s Larry?” Kjersten’s question was sidelong but interested. She’d been carrying a torch for Larry since he’d showed up in town.
Larry was technically my cousin, but since I hadn’t known about Larry or his brothers until I was an adult, I didn’t think of him as family. My mom had been so close with his first wife Deb it felt like betrayal to accept Paul’s cheating ways. Deb had most certainly given him her heart and was still twisted up beyond repair over it.
Except of course I did accept Paul’s cheating ways because I was friendly with my uncle and his sons. I only resisted by not thinking of them as my cousins, a hidden solidarity with Deb.
My standards were low.
And Larry was . . . well, the real answer to Kjersten’s question was he was driving down the Hi-Line to screw a stripper in Williston on the regular, except I wasn’t sure if she’d prefer to know now or later.
“Larry’s . . .” I couldn’t say fine because that would send the wrong message. “Okay. He’s okay.” And he was. He hadn’t seemed sick at all the last time I’d seen him.
“He almost never comes in.”
I fumbled for a credit card and a lie. “Not much of a cook.” Okay, that part was true, but it wasn’t what she’d meant.
She bagged my stuff, smiling to herself as she did it. “Tell him I said hi.”
I made an affirmative noise as I signed the receipt. I wouldn’t be passing her message along. It wouldn’t end well for anyone.
“Have good chili!” she called as I left.
Oh, now I felt like a bitch. She was happy—happy because she thought I was helping her with Larry.
For a second I considered telling her the whole thing, but of course I didn’t. Some delusions are too powerful.
In the parking lot, I loaded my bags into the trunk of an ancient Caddy the color of jellied cranberry sauce. It had been my mom’s and she had loved it. I’d put some dents in it in high school, but I refused to be parted from it. Why replace what wasn’t broken?
It was the same way I felt about Fallow. Most of my classmates had bolted before the ink had been dry on our diplomas. They’d moved to Missoula and Bozeman or they’d left Montana all together. And the towns along the Hi-Line had wilted as they had.
But there was nothing broken about Fallow. Like my Caddy, it was functional beneath the dents and better than what they were building today. Who wanted to deal with the sprawl and traffic in Bozeman?
When I was pushing my cart back to the store, I saw Scottie James and Jeff Gregory. And they were as high as the Northern Lights. Neither was wearing a jacket, and it was in the low forties with a sharp wind.
Jeff’s nose was running and he was wiping it, over and over again, with his sleeve, while spitting out words. “I don’t know, man, I just, those dots, they’re everywhere. And I think, I mean, I really think it’s, it’s my grandma’s way of keeping an eye on me.”
“But do you think . . .” Scottie was counting some change on his palm. He kept losing his place and starting over. “Do you think if she wanted to, you know, keep an eye on you she, she . . . shit. I don’t think we have enough for Funions.”
“But the dots!”
“Hey, guys,” I ventured.
Jeff startled at my greeting and began rubbing his arms. “Hey.”
He wouldn’t make eye contact with me. I’d babysat him—both of them actually—what seemed like yesterday.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“Walked.” Scottie was defiant and juvenile.
“Well, that’s good.” The store wasn’t too far from Jeff’s grandma’s. The thought of them driving right now terrified me. “Here.” I dug a couple of bucks out of my pocket and I offered them to Scott. He wouldn’t take the money, but Jeff did. “Get some food. Walk home. Sleep it off. But if you get in a car and I hear about it, I’ll call the sheriff myself.”
Scottie snorted. “Your daddy wouldn’t like it.”
“Why not?”
“Ask him.” And there was just enough sobriety in Scottie’s face that I couldn’t dismiss him as an insolent, stupid kid.
“Ask him about some high teenagers?”
Jeff ran his hands through his hair and down his face. He looked like one of those weird modern paintings, all stretched and distorted. “Yeah. Ya should.”
“Whatever.” I wasn’t going to stand here arguing with them. They were high and dumb.
I flicked my hand at them in dismissal and went back to my car. I shoved the keys in the engine, but I didn’t start it. I watched Scottie and Jeff stumble into the store. Oh, this was going to make Kjersten’s day. She’d probably tell everyone and word would get back to Jeff’s grandma and that would sort them out.
This wasn’t connected to Brad’s theories. It wasn’t.
With a grim shake of my head, I went home and made chili, refusing to think of anything else.
Four hours later, the house was beginning to smell amazing. My stomach growled loudly, but now that I had inhaled the spices, nothing but chili was going to satisfy me and it still had a ways to go.
Dad was watching TV, some action movie on cable that couldn’t be more than a few years old but was helplessly dated by the clunky, ridiculous cell phones in it. He chuckled at something, resettled and relaxed. Dad was a large man whose hair and mustache were starting to go salt-and-pepper. More salt, lately, though he was only fifty. The years had caught up with him all of a sudden. That was why I hadn’t minded moving home after my most recent break-up from Zack; he needed me.
I started setting the table and working my way around to doing something stupid.
“I saw Kjersten at the store,” I called out through the door into the den. I didn’t want to bring Scottie and Jeff—those idiots—into it. So I dropped it on poor Kjersten.
“Oh yeah?” Slouched in his ancient La-Z-boy, he rubbed his stocking feet together. It had never been clear to me whether the gesture came from the need to alleviate boredom or cold toes, but it was the sound I associated most with him.
“She said there was another arrest at the high school. For drugs.”
“Hm.” He didn’t seem to be listening to me, not closely. But he also didn’t seem nervous. I could see his profile. He was in normal mid-Sunday almost napping stance.
“That a problem now, drugs?”
“It’s a small town, Birdie. Drugs have always been around.”
This was true. I’d never been into them myself, but at least twenty-five percent of my class was stoners. I never heard about anyone using anything other than weed, shrooms, or Oxy, the last nicked from their grandmas.
Please let Scottie and Jeff have gotten theirs from Jeff’s grandma.
“But . . .” I went out on a limb guessing that this might be true—if any of it was true. “She said they were doing meth. That’s new.” I hung in the doorway, watching his reaction closely.
He didn’t give anything away. His attention was mostly on a commercial for blood pressure pills. “People do all sorts of dumb shit.” He looked over at me for the first time since the conversation began. “When did you become such a Pilgrim?”
I scoffed. “Should I add shots to the menu to prove you’re wrong?”
“Do we have any tequila?”
I snorted. Of course we fucking did.
Dad turned back to the TV and waved a hand at me. “Don’t worry about stupid kids. They always have been, will always be dumb.”
I didn’t like that answer. Teenagers were stupid—but that didn’t mean I shouldn’t worry about them. Because if they weren’t worth worrying about it, was
it okay to sell them drugs? Did he not want me worrying about them because he didn’t want me thinking about drugs in Fallow at all?
Before I could say any of this, he added, “Drop it, Birdie.”
The words were sharp. He didn’t think I wouldn’t, didn’t know I really cared, but he wanted to stop talking about it.
Shiiiiiiit.
Before my heart rate went back to normal, he started flipping through the channels. “Speaking of stupid, when are you going to forgive Zebra?”
“I’m not.” This helpfully answered both his command and his question. But it did nothing to calm my blood, which was zinging around my body while my brain chanted, Brad might be right! Brad might be right!
He glanced at me, gauging how mad I was. I wasn’t mad but I didn’t want to talk about Zack. Dad interpreted this as severe anger. “He’s sorry.”
“He’s an asshole. Always has been. I’m done putting up with it.”
“Fair enough, but you have to at least be able to work with him, if not live with him.”
“I won’t be living with him. Why do I have to work with him?” My voice was rising. Why was everyone asking me about Zack? Why did they care? I wanted to know why I couldn’t ask about drugs.
“Paul and me want to slow down a bit.” This didn’t surprise me. “And Larry, Ed, and your other cousins—”
“They aren’t my cousins.”
“—you are sour today.”
I made a face. “I’m sour every day.”
“Well, Paul’s sons aren’t cut out to run Masters, and his daughters don’t want to. So it’ll be you and Zebra.”
“And Brad.”
Dad shrugged. “Sure, he’s an employee. Like Collin.” Collin was a guy who worked in the auto shop. He wasn’t a Lone Gun. He liked fixing cars, but he wasn’t interested in motorcycles. “He’s not family.”
“Neither’s Zack.”
Dad looked at me. “That’s not my fault.”
“Don’t start.”
He laughed. “Okay, babe. Just keep things friendly with him.”
“Like tea with the fucking queen,” I said as marched into the kitchen.
I began grating cheese with so much force it smeared against the grater. He didn’t want me to ask about the drugs because he didn’t know anything. And he didn’t know anything because Lone Gun wouldn’t do that.
