Back Roads

by Tawni O'Dell

  “I didn’t say anything about alcohol. I’m talking about beer.”

  “If your social worker found alcohol on the premises, the girls would be put in foster homes immediately. You’re underage.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t care if your sisters are put in foster homes?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you have a funny way of showing it.”

  “I have to go.”

  I stood up and pulled my Redi-Mix Concrete cap out of my back jeans pocket. Betty glanced at her watch and said, “We still have fifteen minutes.”

  I slapped the cap on my head and pulled the brim down to my eyes. “My apologies to the taxpayers,” I said, and headed out the door.

  The false spring had only lasted a week and then, as if to punish the worms and the girls for their optimism, the weather had turned brittle cold. I blew in my hands and rubbed them together, then stuck them under my armpits while I walked quickly to my truck. I didn’t know why I was hurrying. The heater didn’t work.

  The county Behavioral Health Services office was in the same long, low, brown brick building as the DMV and the animal control office. Across the intersection was the Eat N’ Park that had driven Denny’s out of business (even Grand Slam breakfasts couldn’t compete with Eat N’ Park pies) and the strip mall with Blockbuster Video, Fantastic Sam’s, the Dollar Tree, and a Chinese restaurant called Yee’s. I always stopped at Yee’s after my appointment with Betty.

  Jack Yee, the guy who owned the place, bobbed his head and smiled deliriously when I walked in and his wife did the same, waving from a far corner where she always sat at a table reading a newspaper. I feared I was their best customer, and I only came in once a month and bought a two-dollar egg roll.

  Jack tried pushing the General Tso’s chicken on me.

  “Spicy, spicy,” he said, grinning.

  “No, thanks,” I told him, even though I was starving and all I was going to get at home was blue box mac and cheese and hot dogs. It was Misty’s night to cook. She was twelve.

  He gave me Jody’s umbrella and cookie for free and asked about her. He and his wife had only met her once, but they were blown away by her. They couldn’t stop touching her hair. It fell all the way down to her butt and was the same color as the gold letters stamped on church hymnals.

  All the girls had long hair—including Mom—but Jody’s was the most admired. Mom’s was the reddest. Misty’s the most neglected. Amber’s the most likely to smell like a rank old blanket from the back of some guy’s pickup truck.

  I took the little brown bag and sat it next to me in my truck, then spent the half-hour drive from Laurel Falls to Black Lick watching the grease stain grow from the egg roll pressing against the paper. I wanted to eat it more than anything in life. I rolled down the window to try and get rid of the deep-fried smell, but I couldn’t stand the cold. By the time I took the final bend leading home, I was driving so fast the old Dodge Ram was shuddering.

  Ours was the only house on Fairman Road, an unpaved two-mile shortcut connecting two parts of a county road that doubled back on itself. Locals called it Potshot Road because before my dad had started piecing together our house at the top of it, so many deer gathered in the clearing any hunter hiding in the trees could take a potshot and hit something. Every hunting season, Dad had to lock up the dogs in the garage and Mom made us kids play inside for fear of getting shot. I never felt safer than those days Amber and I spent hiding beneath a blanket-covered card table playing war and listening to the crack of rifles outside and the calm blasted silence that always followed.

  The deer had thinned out the past couple years though. Even the stupidest animal could sense when a place had gone bad.

  The truck bounced over a rut, and the egg roll went flying off the seat onto the floor, where it landed on top of a bunch of empty fast-food coffee cups, crumpled McDonald’s bags, and a cheap gray windbreaker with Barclay’s Appliances written across the back. One of Jody’s dinosaurs was down there too and my parents’ wedding picture.

  I had found the picture stuffed in the bottom of a garbage bag a couple months after the shooting. The sharp corner of the cheap yellow-gold frame had poked a hole through the plastic and scratched me on the calf while I was standing in my underwear putting on a twist tie. The rip got bigger and garbage spilled out all over the kitchen floor and I had froze, bracing myself for the flat of my dad’s hand to connect with the base of my skull and for the tiny stars of light, like floating dandelion fuzz, to drift into my line of vision and pile up until I couldn’t see anything but cold white nothingness. Then I remembered he was dead.

  The girls were all asleep so I cleaned up the mess myself. I kept out the picture and was on my way to throw it in the outside can when something made me throw it in my truck instead.

  I never looked at it. Whenever I happened to notice it by accident, I buried it under the trash but it always managed to surface again: Dad in a white suit and a glossy shirt patterned in jewel-toned splotches like a melted stained-glass window, way too much hair and collar, a Burt Reynolds mustache, a blood-red carnation in his buttonhole, grabbing Mom around the waist and grinning drunkenly at one of his off-camera buddies; Mom in a gauzy white handkerchief dress, a ton of eye makeup, long white feather earrings and ceramic Farrah hair, her shoulders kind of hunched together and her head tilted away from Dad’s breath, looking like she was trying not to throw up. I gave her a lot of morning sickness.

  I reached over with my foot and pushed the picture under the trash.

  The first half-mile of our road was straight uphill and the trees grew together over the top of it making a tunnel of leaves in summer, and a tunnel of snow in winter, and a tent of bare branches like charred fingers the rest of the year. Our house sat at the crest. Across the road was the clearing, stretching out green and smooth, then disappearing over a slope into a rolling sea of hills the color of rust and soot and worn yellow carpet. The power lines and the smoke-belching twin coal stacks of the Keystone Power Plant in the distance were the only signs of humanity. Whenever people asked me how we could stand to stay in the house, I told them I liked the view and then they thought I was even crazier than before they asked.

  Aside from Laurel Falls National Bank, the only thing that could have driven me away was the sight of the four empty doghouses. Every time I parked my truck and was greeted with silence instead of the barking chorus I had come to expect ever since I was old enough to put meaning to sound, I hated myself for failing them. But dog food cost a fortune. I managed to find homes for three and kept Elvis, my shepherd mutt. He was allowed to come inside now, but he was nervous about it. So were the girls. If anything could have brought my dad raging back from the dead it would have been the sight of a dog lying in the middle of his living room.

  Misty opened the front door and let Elvis out. She followed him and stood on the front porch, silent and expectant, fingering the pink rhinestones on the grimy cat collar she wore around her wrist.

  The collar had belonged to the kitten Dad got her for her tenth birthday. It only survived for two months before we found it shot in the woods.

  I remembered Mom taking the death harder than anyone. She burst into tears when she saw what was left of the blood-matted fluffy white carcass Misty had dragged back to the yard by its tail.

  She folded Misty into her arms and held her while Misty stood stiffly and stared at the body with her eyes a glazed brown like a medicine bottle. Then she knelt down and slowly unbuckled the collar and fastened it around her wrist while Mom’s hands still clutched her shoulders. Later Mom said she had been in shock.

  “Did you get my egg roll?” Misty called out, rubbing her thin bare arms at her sides and her stockinged feet against each other.

  I threw the bag. Elvis stopped in his tracks on his way to meet me and watched its flight. It fell on the frozen mud next to the steps and he bounded over to sniff it.

  Misty glanced at me, unsmiling, before she walked do
wn to get it. I couldn’t tell if she was pissed or hurt or couldn’t care less. Her mask of freckles gave her the appearance of being more persecuted than she really was.

  I started across the yard and paused at the patch of cement with a sawed-off piece of pipe sticking from it where Dad’s satellite dish used to be. I tapped at it with the toe of my boot and reminded myself I needed to get rid of the rest of the pipe before someone got hurt on it. The dish had gone the way of the dogs, leaving us with only four channels. Jody lost Disney. Misty lost Nickelodeon. Amber lost MTV and Fox. At the time they had all been too depressed about Mom and Dad to care, but now they weren’t and I had to hear about it every day.

  I went inside and wiped my boots on the mat by the door, but I didn’t take them off the way I used to have to.

  “Did you get my fortune cookie and umbrella?” Jody asked from the living room.

  On my way through, I told her Misty had the bag. I tossed the stuffed dinosaur over the back of the couch, and Jody’s head popped up from the cushions.

  “Sparkle Three-Horn,” she cried. “I lost him.”

  “I know. I found him.”

  “Where?”

  “My truck.”

  The head disappeared and the couch said, “Thanks.”

  I walked into the kitchen and found the Thursday pot of boiling water on the stove and five hot dogs laid out on a paper plate ready for nuking in the microwave. I opened a cupboard and grabbed a bag of pretzels. Misty came in after me, eating her egg roll.

  I hadn’t noticed from a distance that she was wearing some of Amber’s purple eyeshadow again. Mom wouldn’t have approved of her wearing makeup already, but I had surrendered control of everything female to Amber the day Misty came to me the year before and told me she was pretty sure she had started her period.

  I looked at the hot dogs again and did the math: one for Jody, one for Misty, three for me.

  “Isn’t Amber eating?”

  “She’s got a date.”

  “What?”

  Misty tore open the Kraft box, pulled out the cheese packet, and dumped the macaroni in the pan. The water foamed up, and she adjusted the heat.

  “She said you’d be mad. But I can watch Jody. I’m old enough.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I know. Amber said the main reason you’d want her to stay home is because you want to ruin her fun. Not because of the baby-sitting.”

  I threw the bag on the counter, and pretzels spilled onto the floor. Elvis lunged for them as I stormed out. Misty pushed one aside with a blue-polished big toe and kept stirring the pot.

  I pounded on Amber’s door so hard her Indian dream catcher fell off the wall. She was holding it in her hand when she opened the door. She had on a red lace bra and hiphugger jeans, and her pinched expression of annoyance changed into a satisfied smile when she saw me looking at her.

  “You’re supposed to watch the kids tonight,” I yelled at her over the music blaring from her radio.

  She turned her back on me and walked with exaggerated hip thrusts over to her dresser, the top of her hummingbird tattoo peeking at me over the waistband of her jeans. He seemed to be waving a green wing at me.

  She grabbed a brush and bent over.

  “Misty’s twelve. She can baby-sit a six-year-old,” she said upside down from behind a curtain of reddish-blond hair.

  “They shouldn’t be alone in the house late at night,” I said.

  “What is your problem? Why is it okay to leave them alone during the day and not at night? I swear you’re afraid of the dark.”

  She finished and stood up, tossing her hair behind her with her throat arched and exposed, a female gesture that always cut right through me.

  I stood at the doorway not wanting to go in. Every inch of wall space and ceiling was covered with tie-dyed scarves and pieces of sheets done mostly in purples and blues. Her only window was hung with strings of midnight-blue star-shaped beads. The shelves behind her bed were packed with psychedelic-colored candles, most of them lit. The combination of the colors and the dim lighting gave the place a half-digested feel.

  I walked through it quickly and arrived at her stereo sitting on a cinder-block shelf next to a stack ofGlamour magazines worth at least two hundred pounds of dog food.

  I turned off the radio.

  She threw her brush back onto her dresser in protest where it clattered against all her makeup and hair stuff.

  “What is your problem?”

  “I can’t hear.”

  “No, I mean what is your problem?” she said again, rolling her empty blue eyes at me. “Did Betty Wetty tell her Harley Warley he needs to have more wee-spect for himself? Did she tell him he needs to get more wee-spect from his girls?”

  She made a kissy face. I didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t need to stay home tonight,” she added, and pulled a tiny, striped sweater out of her drawer that looked like something a schnauzer might get for Christmas. Amazingly, she squeezed her head into it and the fabric expanded, first taking on the shape of her face, then the shape of her breasts.

  She caught me staring at her again and smiled triumphantly. “Admit it,” she said. “You just hate the idea that I have a life and you don’t.”

  “Define life,” I said.

  The smile flickered and went out. She retrieved her brush and gave her head a few vicious strokes, then started lightly slapping it against the palm of her hand the way Dad used to do with Mom’s wooden cooking spoon before he took off after one of us.

  “You know what your problem is? You’re pissed off because you have to work. Well, you’d have to work anyway. It’s not like you’d be going to college or hanging out with friends or doing anything meaningful. You don’t even watch TV.”

  I laughed even though I wasn’t feeling the least bit humorous. “Meaningful?” I repeated. “Like fucking guys in the back of pickup trucks?”

  The brush flew out of her hand and hit me in the arm.

  “You’d give anything to fuck someone,” she hissed at me.

  I wanted to pick up the brush and beat Amber senseless with it. I wanted to put big red welts on her pretty face and make blood gush from her ears. Not because I hated her. Not because she deserved it. Not because I wanted to make her fear me. Simply because it would feel good.

  This must have been the same way Dad used to feel before he belted me, and I took some comfort in realizing the desire to hurt someone was nothing personal. The difference between Dad and me was that he always went ahead and hit one of us, and he was a much happier person.

  I knew it never occurred to Amber that I might hurt her. She believed violence was an act of strength, and she thought I was weak. Otherwise, she would have never risked pushing me like she did. She hated getting hit.

  I picked up her brush and gave it back to her. For a moment we both held onto it, and I felt it tremble.

  She went back to preparing for her date. I went to get ready for work.

  Amber had the best room in the house: mine. She used to have to share with Misty until Jody came along, then she got my room and I got kicked into the basement. I didn’t want to go, and I never bothered to try and make the place homey. A twin bed with a naked lightbulb hanging over it, a chest of drawers, a stereo, a coat of leftover green bathroom paint on one of the cement walls, a square of purple shag carpet, and a couple of mousetraps were the only signs of life down here.

  Most nights I lay on my back and imagined what it would feel like if the lightbulb crashed down on my forehead and a needle of glass pierced my eyeball or got in my mouth and I swallowed it.

  Skip used to say if someone got a glass sliver under his skin and didn’t take it out right away, it would get into his bloodstream and travel to his heart and kill him. We tried killing Donny that way once—there was a ton of broken glass around the old mining office—but Donny wouldn’t let us stick the glass in him, not even for a Tastykake Jelly Krimpet.

  If the bulb ever did b
reak and a sliver did kill me, I’d want to be buried with the white glass shards all over my face. People would think they were white rose petals unless they got up close.

  I pulled the string and the light came on after a couple sputters. In a day or two, I was going to pull the string and the bulb was going to die with a hollow pop, and I didn’t know where Mom kept the new ones. When she went off to prison she took all sorts of secret domestic knowledge with her: what drawer the envelopes were in; how to make Jell-O jigglers; which bubble bath brand made the longest-lasting bubbles; who was allergic to what, and who was afraid of what.

  The closest I ever came to asking her for help was the time I needed the cupcake pan to make cupcakes for Jody’s school birthday party. It had already been a year and a half since Mom’s sentencing, and I hadn’t heard anything from her outside of secondhand messages through the girls. Not a single phone call, card, or letter. Not a single attempt to mastermind a jailbreak or mount an appeal or tell her story to Oprah. Of course she hadn’t heard anything from me either.

  I knew it was stupid for both of us to be sitting around blaming each other for abandoning each other and trying to figure out who did it first. It wasn’t any different from asking, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” knowing full well it didn’t matter because God had to come before either one of them.

  But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t see any reason to keep up a relationship with her. She wasn’t ever getting out. She was done being our mother. I understood that completely from the moment I saw her take a seat in the back of the sheriff’s car with a serene slumped relief like she was going off to bed after a particularly long hard day. The part I still didn’t get was why.

  It turned out Misty knew where the cupcake pan was and spared me from making the phone call to Mom. Misty used to bake blueberry muffins in it for Dad all the time. Mom wouldn’t do it for him because she knew he was going to smother them in butter, and she worried about his cholesterol level. She told me once she envied women who lived back in the good old days who only had to worry about Indians and mountain lions killing their husbands. Something about those things being beyond a wife’s control.