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“Thought she might be sticking around, the way she looks at you.”
The way Caroline looks at me—
I throw a wall up there.
The way she touched me, the way she tried to comfort me, the way she took off her shoes and dug that grave with me—
I build the wall taller.
My voice is dry when I ask, “What’s there to stick around for?”
The pillow next to me on the couch has a deer on it. A naturalistic forest scene I remember thinking was real cool when I was a kid.
Tacky. That’s how this place looks to me now. My whole life here, shabby and low-class and tacky.
That’s one part of going to a rich-kid school in Middle America that I never knew to expect. You spend two years in classrooms with six-inch-wide heartwood pine molding stained deep, academic brown, and when you go back to where you came from it all looks a hundred times worse than you remembered.
Your default settings have shifted. Hondas and Toyotas instead of American cars. Handcrafted instead of machine made. Local and organic and artisanal whatever-the-fuck, and you can mock it when you’re there, but that doesn’t keep Hamburger Helper from tasting like warm piss and chemicals the next time you try to eat it.
“I don’t like you staying out there with him,” my mom says.
“Bo’s all right.”
“You don’t know. You weren’t at the trailer that night.”
“How could I have been?”
“You’re never here. Even when you’re home, you’re thinking about how much you’d rather be somewhere else. With Caroline.”
Mom trills Caroline’s name as though only snobs are named Caroline, and I’m instantly pissed.
I breathe deep, try to shake it off. She’s right that I shouldn’t have left. I lost track of my place in the world, went to Putnam, let myself believe there might be more for me, and look what happened. If I’d stayed here, Mom would probably still be with Bo. My dad never would’ve come around, couldn’t have moved into the trailer because that’s where I’d have been living.
None of this mess would’ve happened if I’d stayed.
“I’m here now,” I say.
But Caroline’s whispering in my head.
She’s saying, They’re never going to stop taking things from you, not ever.
I should’ve told her I don’t expect them to.
That’s the part Caroline doesn’t get, because she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and she grew up thinking she could be anybody she wants to, do anything she sets her mind to. The world belongs to Caroline, but it doesn’t belong to me.
I’m from Silt. I was born to take care of my sister and watch out for my mom. I belong to this place and this family, and that means they take from me, and what I’m here to do is give them what they need.
I can’t leave.
I can’t dream big dreams.
I can’t have college, or Caroline, or anything outside the borders of this place, because if I leave here I leave Frankie vulnerable to Mom’s careless mistakes and whatever narrow vision of the future she can form when she can’t see past the mountains to guess at what might be possible for her.
If I work hard, keep my head down, and take care of business, I can give Frankie the world. That’s the best I can hope for.
“I want to get a place in Coos,” I tell my mom. “Someplace big enough for the three of us.”
“Coos?”
