“You don’t have to clear anything with me. I’m not keeping tabs.”
“I totally understand.”
“Well, I better run. I have meat to season and a pie to make.”
“Bye Momma,” Fancy yelled from across the room.
When I hung up the receiver, Fancy’s eyes grew wide. “You know what this means right?”
“What?”
“She knows you fucked me.”
“She doesn’t know that.”
“I slept over at your place.” Her voice was incredulous.
“You could have just fallen asleep. She doesn’t know.”
“Oh, she knows your penis has been in my vagina … and my mouth.”
What was it about parents having confirmation of your sexual activities that made shit weird? I remember back in high school when my mom walked in on me and my then girlfriend having sex. Mortified wasn’t a strong enough word. We never talked about it. But one day before dropping me off at school she asked, “Are you being safe?” and I answered, “Yes ma’am.”
“Wait until I give her the play-by-play,” she teased.
Fancy and her mother’s relationship was open door policy, and they shared information most mothers and daughters didn’t, which I always thought a bit weird.
“You better not.”
Her breathing pattern shifted as she clutched her chest. “I’m going to tell her about the funny noises you make when you come.”
Grabbing a floral pillow from a nearby chair, I hurled it at her. “I don’t make funny noises.”
“It’s the combination of noises and faces that I like the most.”
“You are such a fucking brat. If you tell your momma about this dick, you ain’t getting no more.”
Fancy shut her mouth, turned an imaginary key and threw it away before dissolving into a laughing fit. When she wiped the tears from her eyes, she asked, “What do you want to do now?”
“Let’s take a shower and make some funny noises,” I said, chasing her up the stairs.
After lazingaround the house most of the morning, we made a quick run into town for groceries. Fancy was wearing one of my T-shirts and a pair of jeans I found that might’ve belonged to Willa. My property didn’t have internet service, not because I was choosing to live off the grid, but because it wasn’t a priority to me. I wasn’t a big TV watcher, and I preferred music or silence over anything else.
Anytime Dial or Cyrus visited, they’d complain because they were forced to talk to me and couldn’t disappear into their phones. Annoying my siblings was reason enough to never get Wi-Fi. When we took to the road, Fancy’s phone popped out as she searched for a signal. She even went as far as to stick her phone out the window in hopes a bar would appear.
“These back roads are essentially dead space,” I informed her.
Rolling up the window, she turned her phone over in her hand as if she was scheming a way to MacGyver cell service with paper clips and gum wrappers. “How do you doom scroll at night?”
“I don’t.”
“What do you do before bedtime?”
“I read, listen to music, play solitaire.”
“On your phone?”
“No actual cards.”
