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“I like it,” Devo said, smiling up at me and looking as pretty as any woman had a right to. She was a vision, standing in the little bit of sun shining on Mama’s porch, with her midnight hair sticking out all wonky like it liked to do.
Mama yelled, “You’re lettin’ all the bought air out!”
“Come in.” I smiled. I couldn’t back out now. I was committed to this disaster in the making. “We’re almost ready.”
* * *
“What’s your family do?” Mama asked Devo.
We’d driven out further north of the trailer park and were about to turn off the highway onto old Fish Creek Road. Our family farm was just another couple miles from here.
“My brother and sister moved away a few years ago,” Devo said. “It’s just me and my mom now, but she’s the lunch lady at Barton Elementary. In her downtime, she sews and knits and makes all kinds of crafts she sells on her Etsy store. That’s the job she loves.”
“Oh,” Mama said in a tone indicating she was surprised at what Devo had said. “I worked the lunch line here at the high school when my kids were young.”
“That’s cool,” Devo said as she took the turn. “Did you like doin’ that?”
Mama snorted. “Did I like servin’ a bunch of snot-nosed teenagers? No. I did not.” She jabbed her thumb toward me. “I had enough of that, dealin’ with her and her brothers.”
Devo laughed but tried to cover it with a cough. I wished she wouldn’t. I liked the sound of her laugh. It was breathy.
“You’ll learn real quick that my mama doesn’t pull any punches. Right, Ma? You say whatcha think.” Except for when it had to do with me and how I’d disgraced our whole family. That she never made a peep about, not once, except to tell me Jesus was disappointed in my “life choices.” But to this day, we had never sat down to talk about it. I’d tried, but she always came up with ways to steer the conversation elsewhere.
“Yes, I do. And I raised you to do the same.”
“You did.”
Devo’s lips curved up, and she peeked at me for a second. “I like that about Abey. My mom raised us the same way. My dad wasn’t really around when he was alive, so she was pretty much a single mom most of my life.”
I’d sat between them while Devo drove, and to make things even more awkward, I kept remembering the shooting star I’d seen the night Devo had given me a ride home and how the air in the truck between us had crackled with… something. I couldn’t stop picturing the way she’d bitten her lip and her eyes had darkened as she looked at me while we’d sat silent and still at the stoplight.
And I remembered how my body had felt weightless when I came with her mouth between my legs.
Mama broke the spell ’cause she kept looking past me at Devo. I couldn’t figure out why till she asked, “You Native American then?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Devo answered. “Apache. I was born on the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico. It’s where my last name comes from, Mescal.”
“Mm. I know it. My friend Doris married a man from there. His name was Victor. He passed recently, and Doris has been a wreck.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. You should talk to my mom sometime. She might’ve known him.”
Mama smiled. It seemed Devo was winning her over. How that could even happen, and so fast, I had no idea. Go fuckin’ figure. “I might do that.”
We turned onto the property I’d grown up on since the day I popped into this world, slimy and screaming, and just like it always happened, memories swarmed my head.
My daddy was everywhere on this farm.
I couldn’t look anywhere without seeing him. He was in the barn, wrangling sheep to shear them or deworm them. It was so easy to picture him out in the fields or on the porch up at the old yellow house, drinking his morning coffee and contemplating the mountains in the distance, or in the equipment barn, tinkering with the four-wheelers or trying to build yet another contraption to make shearing the sheep easier. His ideas never worked, but it had been his mission in this life. Raising sheep wasn’t an inexpensive endeavor, and he thought the less time he had to spend shearing would make his efforts as a whole more profitable.
Remembering him made me smile. I missed his scruffy beard and the way he would sit in his ratty recliner in the living room, with one foot up on the footrest and the other propped up on the toe of his shoe, pounding his fist in the air when he disagreed with a call the refs made during a hockey game on TV. It had been my favorite thing to do, to watch with him, to be on his team. My brothers loved it too. Our dad had been the king of the universe when we were young.
He had been our everything.
It was his words from the day I turned fifteen still living in my head rent-free that hurt, and the promise he’d made to me every day before that, the one he’d broken so easily when he’d caught me kissing Paula Dagmar in the barn.
From that point on, the man who’d promised to always love me, the one who had been so proud of “his yellow-haired angel,” the father I’d looked up to my whole life, became a stranger to me.
I’d felt his disappointment and disgust in every interaction we had after that.
