Bend

by Nancy Hedin

  The applause was slow and spotty. I recognized some hoots and hollers from Dad and Twitch.

  As salutatorian, Jolene Grind spoke next. She talked about God’s blessings, God’s warnings, and I thought she might have mentioned God’s recipe for good barbecue.

  Momma and Dad put together a graduation party for Becky and me at the farm. I bolted early. I couldn’t stand one more congratulations from somebody when my momma hadn’t yet said a word about me winning the scholarship. She’d had less than a month to get used to the idea that her heathen daughter was a scholarship winner, but still, she could be happy for me if for no other reason than I’d be out of the house without costing her any money.

  I ate potato salad, Jell-O, sloppy joes, and ham and cheese sandwiches until I thought I’d blow up. I stayed the longest at Jolene’s house, where I flirted with Charity and talked with Jolene. That night at Grind’s house, I learned officially who’d told Grind about Becky and Kenny having sex. It was Jolene.

  “You should’ve won that scholarship from the start. You’re the better student and the better person.” Jolene hugged me. “I’m sorry it took me squealing to get it done. I’m not exactly proud of that, but it was all I could think of doing. You need to have a chance to get away from Bend.”

  “You’re a good friend, Jolene.” I didn’t tell her that I felt really crappy about winning that scholarship right then.

  “Your momma and dad must be pretty proud of you.” Jolene looked at me.

  “Dad hugged me. He cried a little too. Momma hasn’t said anything yet. I think she’s pretty disappointed Becky didn’t get it. Go figure. Becky doesn’t even want to go to college anymore. She wants to have babies and live on a pig farm with Kenny.”

  I had applied and been accepted for school at a four-year state college two hours north without knowing if I had the money to pay for it. Now, technically, I had the money to pay for it if I could live in the dorm, but I had lost in the lottery drawing for housing. I couldn’t live in the dorm and the money I had wasn’t enough to pay for living off campus. It seemed like there was always something keeping one or both of my legs in a trap in Bend.

  Gerry helped me call the college and delay my entrance until spring of the next year, when there would likely be a spot open in the dorm. That setback might have put me in a total tailspin if it weren’t for my thoughts of having a niece or nephew in July. I planned to teach that child every bad behavior they could grasp. That way Becky wouldn’t miss me so much. Plus, as much as I wasn’t sure I’d ever get the courage to do it, I wanted to kiss Charity before I left for college.

  Graduation festivities trickled over into June and stopped. Becky and I turned eighteen that month, but had separate birthday parties. I celebrated by riding from town-to-town with Charity and Jolene. It was our first annual birthday pie tour. We sampled pies at every restaurant we found, played miniature golf in St. Wendell, and went swimming at the beach at Little Swan Lake. The three of us stayed at the beach long into the night, huddled around a raging bonfire we’d made with fallen tree branches. We sang camp songs and hymns we knew from church and top forties along with Charity’s CD player. We talked about our dreams. I censored my answers some for Jolene’s sake and comfort.

  I had already been somewhat of a fixture at the Grind place since Jolene and I’d become friends, but after Charity moved into what was at first her art studio above the garage and with some convincing became her studio apartment above the garage, I started manufacturing reasons to go there. I brought eggs. I brought the whole chicken when we were butchering. I livetrapped animals Charity might enjoy seeing or sketching. I found landscapes and lake scenes I thought Charity just had to paint. I wrote corny sayings and thinly veiled love poems for Charity to use on future clothing-writing projects.

  True to her word, Jolene hadn’t told anyone about me kissing her cheek. If it bugged her that Charity and I spent time together, she didn’t say anything about it. Pastor Grind ignored all three of us. We became a threesome in crime when we rescued the ornaments Momma had taken from Dad’s lawn display and thrown in the dumpster by the gas station. We loaded the bobbles into Charity’s truck and hid them in one of Grind’s outbuildings until another night when Charity and I placed them back in the yard.

  I’d like to think it was me, or maybe it was living in Bend, that had been surprisingly inspirational for Charity’s painting and drawing. She made a boatload of paintings and drawings. She seemed to gain confidence. She said she wanted to prove she could work in any medium, including pottery, when she applied for art school in St. Paul, and was determined to use her time in Bend to build a portfolio. It was Charity’s desire to throw pots that ended up bringing my dad and her together. He offered to help her rig up a pottery wheel.

  It was a summer scorcher when Dad let me drive us over to the Grind place in his truck. Jolene, Charity, and I watched as Dad attached an electric motor to a twirling stool. Before very long, he was on the ground wiring a switch so Charity could control the speed of the wheel with a foot pedal. While he was down on his back, Pastor and Mrs. Grind came out of their house. Mrs. Grind waved to the group and went to the car. Pastor Grind crossed the lawn like he owned the place—which he did. Then he stood over Dad.

  “Good thing you’re here, Joseph. My eight years of college and seminary didn’t equip me for work like this.”

  “No. Work like this is best left to the uneducated. I see you still got an empty cement slab. I thought you wanted another garage. Are you growing one?”

  “Give my best to Peggy, Joseph.” Grind joined his wife in the car and drove off.

  “Can I get you a pop or some lemonade, Mr. Tyler?” Jolene asked.

  “I don’t suppose you have any beer,” he said.

  Jolene didn’t answer, only smiled.

  “No. I don’t suppose you do. I’m fine Jolene. Thanks.” He got up and dusted off his pants. “I’ve got some good bricks in the back of the truck. Where should we put your kiln?”

  Charity gave him a look, something between simple gratitude and worshipful adoration. I coveted the response.

  “Let’s put it where Dad’s been trying to grow a garage,” Charity said. After Dad finished the kiln, Charity asked him if he minded if she brought me home a little bit later.

  “It’s okay with me.” Dad’s face reddened as Charity hugged him quick. “Well, yeah, I better get home and see what job Peggy has for me.”

  Jolene said she was going to drive to Will’s Diner and order a bowl of ice cream the size of her head, or the size of my head; she was really hungry. Since Jolene didn’t invite us along, Charity and I were alone.

  “Enough of this. You look really hot, Lorraine,” Charity said.

  Crap. I almost wet my pants. She thinks I’m really hot.

  “I have a job for us. We’re going to wash my truck.”

  While Charity got the hose and buckets, I pulled my tank top loose from my jeans. I wondered if my breasts were smaller than average. I tried to herd my hair back under my cap, but then gave up.

  “What do you think of Bend now that you’ve been here awhile?” That question veiled my true wonderment. I was too afraid to ask how long Charity planned to stay.

  Charity took her time answering. She soaped most of the front panel of her truck before she spoke. “Well, this town has a ferocious appetite for hardware and God.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do the math. There are only two grocery stores, two gas stations, two cafés, two barber shops, one lumberyard, one school, one bank, one feed store, a post office, one library, one senior center, one bar, one creamery, one butcher shop, one ceramics shop, but there are three hardware stores and three churches. There are only four hundred people who live here. Why would you need three hardware stores and three churches?”

  “Well, first of all, I must defend our hunger for hardware. Those hardware stores are all different and necessary in their own way.” While I formulated the lie that I hoped would sou
nd like an amusing story, I rinsed my sponge in the bucket.

  Before I could elaborate, Charity interrupted.

  “But what about the churches? Why do you need three churches? I’m sure my dad would argue that the one he runs is sufficient for everyone.”

  “I’d have an easier time explaining the hardware store surplus, but I suppose three churches aren’t much to try to catch four hundred souls. I don’t know that the churches are that much different from each other. Although, I have to admit I admire the Catholics. They can go to mass at 5 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, go about their business or pleasure Saturday night, and sleep in on Sunday. Genius.”

  “I think people feel more comfortable thinking there are big differences between churches. My God’s bigger than your God, God’s on my side sort of thing.”

  I didn’t say it, but I felt pretty certain that none of the churches in Bend would say God was on my side.

  Once the truck was washed and rinsed, I flopped on the nearest stretch of grass we hadn’t soaked. Charity piled the rags and sponges in the buckets and dragged the hose to the side of the garage and coiled it below the spigot. A hissing I hadn’t noticed until it was gone cleared my ears when Charity turned off the water. She flopped down on the grass next to me.

  I watched the clouds awhile. I turned to Charity. “Do you still believe in God?”

  “Yeah, don’t you?”

  “I want to. I want to believe all the stories about Jesus helping the poor and sick. I want to believe that I’ll never die. Then, I don’t know. I go to church and . . .” I waited a beat and then I said it. “And I’m a queer. The church says God doesn’t want me.”

  Charity didn’t answer anything right away, and I thought about taking the question back somehow so that Charity would never hear my dumb response. Charity propped her head on her bent arm and touched the top of my shoulder.

  “You see the way this part of your arm curves here and dips down where more muscle begins? God made that. And look here.” She turned my arm over so that it lay on the ground palm up, and she grazed her fingers along my inner arm from elbow to wrist. “This skin here couldn’t possibly be any smoother. God did that.” She traced my fingers, gliding her own up and down and between each one. “You see how sensitive and precise our hands can be? That’s God’s work.”

  Pain could radiate through the body. A headache could express itself down a person’s neck and back. I knew all that, but I didn’t know pleasure could land on and invade so much territory. I felt Charity’s hand on mine throughout my whole body, like my nerves were gossiping to each other and sending up flares saying, Touch me next.

  “God created everything. Come closer,” she said. I mirrored her position and tried to remember to breathe and then to breathe slower.

  “Shut your eyes, Raine.”

  That was the first time she called me that. Raine. I didn’t want to be called anything else ever again. Charity moved closer to my face. Her breath and words brushed my lips at the same time as she stroked my cheek. Her thumb passed below my eyelids.

  “This cheekbone, God made it so that your smile would have a place to stop. And your lips, God made those too—a gift for you to share. I’ll show you.”

  Then, in daylight, on Pastor Grind’s front lawn, Charity Krans kissed me. The kiss was light at first, and then she kissed me more insistently. I leaned into her kiss like I had always known her mouth. And when she let me go, after lingering a moment with my lower lip between her lips, Charity said, “I believe in creator God who made us all and wants us to live and love with fullness and tenderness.”

  Oh Lord, I was suddenly a believer! Sprinkle me or dip me in the river. Hell, I was ready to be a missionary to the masses.

  Charity sprang up, grabbed the sponges and buckets, and disappeared into the garage. Was this what had made Becky give up college? Keep me stupid and underemployed. I would live on love.

  There was a paralysis in my legs and my pulse thumped enthusiastically in a few other spots. I didn’t know whether to build a monument on that square of lawn, but I knew I wanted Charity to come right back and kiss me again and not stop until—until when? I couldn’t think of any good reason to stop. Why had we stopped? It was that question that made me haul my numb butt off the ground. Before I reached the garage, Charity was out again, pulling the garage door down. Her keys were between her lips. I envied those keys.

  “Well, I better get you home before your momma comes looking for you. Besides, I still want to try my potter’s wheel.”

  “We just kissed right? I didn’t fall on my head. It really happened?” I got in Charity’s truck. I touched my lips with my fingertips and vowed never to wash them again in case Charity’s lips never touched me again.

  “Yeah. It was real Lorraine. You’re a good kisser. Now, put on your seat belt so you don’t damage those lips by crashing against the dashboard if I stop to avoid a squirrel or something.”

  “Charity, I’m just so happy, and I don’t know.”

  “It’s okay. Let it be.”

  Not one to let a subject go, but too scared to be very direct, I changed the subject.

  “Dad always says it was love at first sight when he met my momma. I can’t imagine that. I think she held him captive for a few years until he got used to her.”

  “How could she keep him if he didn’t want to be there?”

  “Strong ropes. Oh, and my momma is a good cook.”

  “So she tied him up and won him over with meat loaf?”

  “Say what you want about my momma, but tread careful when you talk about her meat loaf.”

  Charity laughed, but worried the topic more. “Do you really think your momma had to conquer your dad?”

  “More like wore him down. You got to understand, my dad grew up poor. Food is greater than God to him. I bet he’d tell you himself that he’s never seen God, but that hasn’t hurt as much as the days when he and his ma, dad, and five brothers didn’t see food. He learned to trap, hunt, and fish because he liked to eat.”

  I don’t remember ever going on about my parents’ history, let alone their love affair, but I couldn’t stop myself from blabbing. “The lakes and woods around here were his grocery store. He told me his ma taught him to season flour, coat the fish, and fry them in a cast iron skillet—part cooking utensil, part weapon. Bacon grease flavored them and kept them from sticking. The heat of the cook stove was mildly regulated, only two settings, out and hell. He never took for granted the efforts it took to secure and prepare food. He told me he spit on his fish as they cooked so his brothers didn’t steal them from him.

  “Then he met Momma, and she tamed him and eroded his resistance with marbled beef roasted in a nest of carrots, new potatoes, and whole pearl onions. When he tasted her gravy he was done for. He sopped it up with those crusty molasses buns she makes, and he became a man with severe back trouble. He had no spine to leave.”

  “You make me hungry, Lorraine.” Charity put her hand just above me knee.

  “I was thinking the same thing about you.”

  “Well, I think you and your dad are both romantics. I think he and your momma have always loved each other. They have you and your sister. So they must have sex together.”

  “We don’t know that for certain. We aren’t identical twins. Did I mention I’m four minutes older than Becky? Besides, Becky is odd looking—she could be something spawned some other way. You know my momma never mentions scarring, and to meet Becky you got to believe she came out clawing and kicking.”

  “What about you? Did you come out of your momma clawing and kicking?” She slid her hand higher on my leg.

  Gulp. “Nope, I think my dad birthed me, or maybe he made me from wood, or tamed a squirrel until it turned into me, and that’s why I love it so much in the woods. I was a squirrel.”

  “You’re a squirrel all right. That much I believe.” Charity took her hand off my leg and put it back on that undeserving, unappreciative steering wheel. “So your momma
tamed your dad and your dad tamed you and your sister sprouted like fungus? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yep, I can live with that explanation.”

  By the time July dawned, Becky and I were both ensconced in our assigned places. I was living with Momma and Dad, and Becky had moved into a preowned, double-wide trailer house on the Hollister farm. From their kitchen window, I could see the sheds Kenny and his dad used to house the sows while the pigs were about to drop a litter. Like the pigs, Becky would farrow in a tin house.

  While Becky became double-wide herself and played house with her new husband, I worked with Twitch a little, but mostly at the diner with Momma. Becky and I had learned to walk by climbing the same red Naugahyde booths and stools. Dad swore our first words were, “Order up!” Momma said that was a lie. That our first words were, “Don’t forget to tip your waitress!”

  It wasn’t a big stretch for me to start working there full-time after working there part-time every summer since I turned fifteen. Plus, I wasn’t doing it because I lost the scholarship. I had won the scholarship, and earning extra money by working at the diner was my choice mostly. I’d have rather been working with Twitch, but Momma said scholarship or not, I would make more money at the diner. I didn’t believe in Momma’s math abilities, but I had every confidence in Momma’s boxing skills. So, I didn’t argue the point.

  The tedium was broken by visits from Charity, who flirted mercilessly with me even when Jolene was along. Momma noticed Charity’s comings and goings, but seemed pleased.

  “I’m glad you’re spending time with those girls. I hope some of their good sense rubs off on you, Lorraine. You know, Allister and I were close friends when we were in high school together in Clearmont. He had quite an influence on me.”