“You need something.” He sounded sure of himself, which he always was. Being sure was a Thom thing—courtesy of a lifetime of being lavishly loved.
He sipped the coffee, and I had a vision of us doing this same thing when we were thirty. He’d chatter happily about his wife wanting him to work fewer hours at the firm, and I’d tell him my daughter spit up on my favorite tie. We’d be rich and annoying. Or we would at least pretend to be rich at thirty, which was annoying. But then the image glitches, and fuzzes like an old television, thanks to John Winters, my father.
Thom had called me two weeks before under similar circumstances. We’d talked about Mom catching Dad with Kaitlyn (“with a Y”), his trainer. We’d discussed the coming shitstorm. Two hours ago, that shitstorm made landfall in Casa Winters.
Thom asked, “What’s the current situation?”
In his early forties (or perhaps before), my father developed a love of working out at expensive gyms. He likes women who know their way around a barbell; he likes toweling off in front of large mirrors. My mom has Betty Crocker hips, Sara Lee thighs, and Mother Teresa’s devotion. They were never a very good match and hadn’t been happy together in years, if ever. I used to obsess over them and my unfortunate role in their continuing relationship. I have since, with Thom’s coaching, learned some distance. Also, my parents met when Mom was seventeen. My age.
“We’re leaving him,” I told Thom.
He accepted this pronouncement as I had, without question. “To where?” was the question. He asked it quietly, already suspecting this was the reason his Spidey sense had urged him to call.
During the family meeting, I’d requested this information too. I’d expected, oh, maybe a condo in Green Hills, there’s a place showing in Lennox Village, I have a friend with a lovely bungalow in East. We’d move from swanky Brentwood, Tennessee, to greater Nashville, Tennessee. Good-bye, cheater. Hello, alimony.
“Otters Holt. Kentucky.” I didn’t hide my disdain, having holidayed there occasionally.
“That’s where they have the very large yellow thing. What is it? A scarecrow?” he asked kindly.
“Molly the Corn Dolly,” I responded with as much enthusiasm as I could manage.
“Yes, Molly the Corn Dolly,” Thom repeated, hiding a smirk behind his mug.
He was right to smirk. My grandfather had that thing constructed, but I’d never managed to tell anyone about it with a straight face, let alone Thom, who found the humor in most things. He did not find any humor in his best friend spending his senior year in a town that didn’t even have a McDonald’s. I tipped my mug on its rim, having already thought well beyond the absence of chain restaurants. Graduating elsewhere. Graduating away from Thom. Graduating from Otters Holt. How could I put that on a college application and be taken seriously?
Small towns (population 2,876, according to the sign next to Molly) were made of nosy people, and I wasn’t village fare. Add to that I was a niche of a niche, and it had taken years to find friends who liked ties, intensity, and costumes.
Thom brooded over my brooding. We were the same age, but he’d always treated me like a little brother. I never once minded this. No one bloodied my nose with Thom around, and I always had someone next to me to ask the really important questions. The ring circumnavigated his finger. I twisted my own in unison, as if we might unlock a secret portal that did not involve me moving to Podunk.
“David, I’m going to break this to you gently: this situation sucks hairy gorilla balls, and you might die a young death of boredom or, at a minimum, never be allowed back into academia.”
He said this because I wanted to hear it.
“That was a joke,” he said.
“Not to me.”
“David, it’s not Outer Mongolia. We’ll be what . . . two hours away?”
More like an hour and a half in the Audi. This was his way of saying he wouldn’t leave me to the country mice. “It’s a year. You can do anything for a year, yes?”
“It’s a prison sentence. All because my dad got sweaty on Kaitlyn with a Y.”
“Your dad got sweaty on Marnie with an M, and Ainsley with an A, and Rhonda like a rumba,” he reminded me. “You can’t blame your mom.”
I didn’t. Nor did I condone Dad’s conduct. All this time, I’d known my mom might not get Botox injections or wear high heels to the gym, but her backbone was toned and muscular. I just hadn’t expected her to move me to Outer Mongolia when she found out. Thom and I had planned to out Dad next year from the safety of a college dorm. Then she could hit him upside the head with a frying pan and everyone would have plausible deniability.
Thom switched tactics again. “Your cousin is there, right?”
“Yeah, Mash. He’s all right, but Thom, end of the day, they’re not like us.”
“So your cousin is one of those aliens from Terminator? A mermaid? Half horse?”
“Yes,” I said. “He’s half horse and his group of friends are talking narwhals.”
Thom clapped loudly enough that a man nearby lowered his newspaper and scowled. “There’s one school for the county,” I told Thom. Otters Holt felt exotic to me. Very third world. Nashville was awash with magnet schools, private schools, and specialized academies. Families didn’t have to be very rich to send kids on this educational path, just very dedicated. My parents had been very dedicated; Thom’s parents, by way of Thom’s grandparents, were very rich. But neither of us had much experience with women. Waylan’s lower and middle schools were all-boys as well.
Thom tapped his mug, counting aloud to eight, and said, “Eight hours of ladies or gentlemen, good sir. This will increase your odds of coitus by a factor of at least five. Ruminate on that advantage.”
“You want me to find a country girl to have sex with?” I asked, as this seemed very unlikely.
“Yes, and I want her to call you darlin’ and you to call her sweet pea, and the two of you to buy a lifetime supply of overalls from Carhartt. If you don’t get Daisy Mae pregnant in three months, I’ll be devastated.” I nearly smiled, and he laughed for my benefit.
“When I visit my granddad, I live on my computer,” I said as if it were a solution, a dismissal of dating anyone or finding friends. “You remember when we watched all those dog videos?”
“Dude, you can’t watch dog videos for a year.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“I want you to figure out how ‘happiness’ works in Otters Holt. Happiness is a noun, David. Shall we go and look it up?”
We had a rare books section at the Waylan Academy library. There was a partial Oxford Dictionary collection from 1884. One of Thom’s favorite “games” in junior high involved me stopping whatever I was doing and following him to the library, where he would look up a mundane word—happiness, fear, worry—and read the definition aloud in an English accent. Charming as hell, he’d cock his head to the side and repeat, “Happiness, noun, the state of being happy.” I’d then counter-argue that he should look up happy, and we’d be caught in a loop of words and fake accents, which meant nothing except that we were dorks.
“Happiness is an emotion,” I groaned.
“Of which you are capable. I’ve witnessed the phenomenon.”
“Well, if you transform Otters Holt into LaserCon, that will be fine,” I said. LaserCon was a large but local cosplay conference we had attended since we were old enough to insist our fire-retardant Spider-Man pajamas were costumes. Thom even hosted the occasional costume party dates here at Bonjo. Pop culture nerds need other pop culture nerds. I suspected he also planned these parties at times when I was the most keyed up—near a big game, after a failed date, when my father was cruel.
He began, “I could throw a party there, but I don’t think I can—”
Then I hmmed. All my truly ingenious ideas sounded like engines.
“What’s with the hmm-ing?”
“My dad’s not going with us,” I said.
“I rather think not.”
&nb
sp; “So I might be there, but I won’t be subject to his rules anymore.”
John Winters loves me. But he loves the idea of turning me into him more. On more than one occasion, I’d let him. Without his influence, I could breathe.
“You can be whoever you want there.”
“Hell, I can be myself,” I said.
Maybe I could put my intensity to work on something other than lacrosse or grades. I could experiment with who I was when the overlord departed the kingdom. I wasn’t anxious to try this apart from Thom, but I was suddenly anxious for freedom I’d never had.
Thom smiled easily, and told me he would purchase a cookie of any size or variety if I could find the real David Winters within a ten-mile radius of Molly the Corn Dolly. He twisted his Waylan ring again. “New self. New name? You can even be Davey there if you want.”
“Big T already calls me Davey.”
“Okay then. Old place. Old name. Davey Winters. God, that sounds like you’re picking hay already.”
“I believe you bale hay,” I said.
“See, you’re already getting the hang of things.”
6
A typical church day looks like this for me: doughnuts, Sunday school, church service, lunch, homework, youth group. A typical church day for Dad looks like this: work, work, extra meetings, work, more work. Today, there are two extra meetings: one with the deacons, one with the youth group parents.
I offer to attend the parents’ meeting, to apologize. Thankfully, he declines. “At the end of the day, I’m the one responsible. It happened on my watch,” he says.
The parsonage phone has rung off the hook all week. The other deacons are churning milk into cream. I overheard the words “fired” and “Brother Scott” and they were not in reference to flames. Two parishioners stopped me at the BI-LO this week—one sympathetic, one gossipy. I was buying broccoli for Mom. “Bless your heart. I’ll bet it’s hard to be at the center of things.” And in the frozen foods aisle. “That article in the paper true?”
Then, when I was bent over, running my thumb over a Hershey’s bar to check for maximum almonds, two plump ladies had a conversation at my expense. “We’ll just see how Brother Scott disciplines his daughter this time,” they said. “That Miller girl’s involved too,” they hinted. “Those two are up to no good,” they speculated.
As if Janie Lee and I were alone in that youth room with a blowtorch.
I expect more of the same today.
Sunday School is held in the basement fellowship hall instead of the youth room. The youth could stomach the destruction—big fans have been drying the water damage all week. Right after the opening prayer, Dad said, “Everyone better be here tonight. After I talk to your parents, we’re discussing the incident. In detail.”
Janie Lee turns a wicked shade of green at his sternness, which makes me want to Bubble Wrap her. My dad’s the closest thing to a father figure she has. She’s been partially grounded all week, logging hours at Bleach because of the newspaper article. Attention means skittish customers, and skittish customers make for an unhappy Mrs. Miller. The rest of the Hexagon looks equally uncomfortable.
But by Sunday night, Janie Lee isn’t the only one who could use some Bubble Wrap. I make the mistake of sitting outside the meeting room and listening to the deacons whale on Dad, skittering around the corner only just before the first wave of them pours from the room, mouths still foaming with verbal rabies. I count to one hundred, slow my heartbeat, and take the back stairs to Youth Suite 201.
The fans are still blowing. Teens mill about, heading in and out of the suite, trying to sneak food before dinnertime. Woods Carrington hangs from the doorframe of 201, blocking anyone who wants to enter. He winks at me. I wink back. And there we are caught up in a moment of closeness even though we are fifteen feet apart.
“Billie, Woods, time to start,” Dad yells.
Let Come-to-Jesus-Scott-McCaffrey time commence. Youth Suite 201 used to be swathed in mauve, cheap Ten Commandments posters, and four billion copies of a mini-magazine called The Upper Room. Dad caused quite a stir when he gifted the room to teenagers; he practically split the church when he allowed us to decorate it during a lock-in. It was Big T who wrote that check and patted the cheeks of enough deacons so that they finally shut their grumbling faces.
It’s currently a livable dwelling for people my age, i.e., Xbox, Ping-Pong table, snacks.
Dad’s currently livid. He’s retrieving a stack of Bibles from the window ledge. “You all better buckle up.” He has erased THINGS TO DO WITH A CHURCH MICROWAVE and written a scripture reference.
Einstein bears two gray battle smudges on its otherwise white surface. The right side of the frame is melted. There in the bottom corner, the stick drawing of me holding the Corn Dolly has survived explosions, sprinklers, and Scott McCaffrey. You can just make out Harvest Festival Forever.
Dad sets Bibles at our feet and taps the board. Tap. Tap. Tap. Woods squirms—the desire to wrestle the marker from Dad nearly consumes him.
“He really has no idea what he has,” Woods whispers to me.
“Clearly,” I say, because this power struggle delights me.
Dad underlines the scripture, a cue for everyone to thumb to the address. My Bible is propped unopened on my lap. I have no room to hear the book of Hebrews because Woods says, “Did I tell you Wilma Frist confirmed this year’s the last Harvest Festival? No more speculation.”
I shake my head, disturbed by this information on a gut level. Woods is moving a Blow Pop from one side of his mouth to the other. He looks as if he’s considering Hebrews instead of this terrible news.
No Harvest Festival means no Corn Dolly. For a town that has a forty-foot-tall roadside attraction—one that comes up on the home page when you google Kentucky—the idea of discontinuing the Harvest Festival, and the Corn Dolly celebration, sounds preposterous.
The Corn Dolly may sound like a joke, but at its heart, it’s nothing to snicker at. My Grandy was the Corn Dolly winner of 1979, and how she won is a story that my father has recounted more times than he’s told the resurrection of Jesus. (It kills him that my mom has never been nominated.) The story begins, “1979 was the year of the flood,” and ends with “And that’s how Grandy changed everything.”
Otters Holt is on a verdant strip of land between Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake. Both lakes are man-made, fed by the Tennessee River, and gorgeous. When I was a kid I combined robin’s-egg and cornflower blue, attempting to color the exact shade of Kentucky Lake. “You’re missing the magic,” Mom had said over my shoulder. And I was. Nothing in robin’s-egg or cornflower spoke to the true beauty of water and sky and brown, crag-filled shoreline.
All that enchantment is fine and good if it doesn’t rain too much. Spring of 1979 it rained more than too much.
Grandy said school let out so kids could sandbag houses. She’s also fond of exaggerating: “The only thing we had more of than sandbags were Road Closed signs. Borrowed them from six other counties to have enough.” The campgrounds closed; the bison had to be moved to another park. And there was Grandy, bagging, baking, and bed-and-breakfasting ten extra people whose homes were afloat on the Tennessee. (No exaggeration there.) That wasn’t what clenched the Corn Dolly of 1979, though. Everyone helped everyone. As we do. Grandy went above and beyond.
The kid of one of her friends got caught in some quicksand and died. After the water receded, Grandy raised five thousand dollars so her friend could put a down payment on a home miles away from the waterfront. “These lakes are beautiful, but water will turn on you, Billie, and when it does, beauty ain’t what you see anymore.” I must have heard Grandy tell that story three hundred times. I never get tired of it.
That kind of stellar living and giving awards you a Corn Dolly. Every year, there is a story just like this one.
I think about Grandy. I think about Harvest Festival Forever. I think about Big T. I think about Molly the Corn Dolly. I think: No. No, I will not let this be the end
of a good thing.
“Can you believe that phrase Harvest Festival Forever survived?” I’m whispering at Woods, but Dad sets his laser eyes upon us, and taps his Bible to remind us of the task.
I flick my finger at the speech bubble.
Woods cocks his head, stares at Einstein, sees the meaning I intend. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asks.
I pretend to check a page in Woods’s Bible, but really, I’m baiting him. “You could keep it going.”
“Without Tyson?” he asks.
Good question. The Harvest Festival, the Corn Dolly, and the Sadie Hawkins dance—the hat trick of Otters Holt—have always been funded and largely spearheaded by Tyson Vilmer.
“Are you or are you not Woods Carrington, future mayor of Otters Holt?”
He’s unconvinced but intrigued. I’m determined.
“You two have something more interesting to contribute than the Apostle Paul?” Dad asks.
Preacher’s-kid fast, I answer, “I was thinking about Queen Esther.” Dad doesn’t believe me, so while I’m staring at Woods, I quote rather convincingly, “‘I’ve come into the kingdom for such a time as this.’”
Woods hears the message loud and clear. I get a pat on the knee. With Woods on task, the festival is as good as saved.
Still, there’s a reckoning to come. Everyone in the room is parked in Hebrews and waiting for the smackdown except me, so Dad asks, “Billie, you want to read for us?”
“I will, Brother Scott,” Janie Lee volunteers.
Bless her. He allows her rescue mission, but not without passing judgment that would make a Pharisee proud. Janie Lee begins to read. The paraphrase: Discipline is painful in the moment, but it helps people—the “us” is implied—grow into decent human beings. The translation: We are not yet decent human beings, but we will be when Dad finishes with our punishment.
“Do you know what that means?” asks Brother Scott.
Fifty answers, “It means you’re pissed.”
“Decent guess.” Dad goes on to explain that in his “cool-down period” he concluded there’s not enough yelling in the universe to repair the church. I was unaware of this cool-down period.
Dress Codes for Small Towns Page 5
