And then it was almost winter and the harvest was over. The night air pierced, and people began to tuck into their homes. Timber convinced his dad to put up a sign on the highway advertising the diner. Thick milkshakes, crispy golden fries. And Timber had hired the new art teacher at the high school to make a logo, a 1950s-style waiter with a high forehead. Big Daddy’s Diner, it said on the billboard. Less of the local folks came to the diner and there were more strangers and that was fine by me. These people did not know my problems. They did not care what went wrong with me and my husband. There had been so many whispers around town. If you added them all together you could hear it like one person was yelling. My mother told me Thomas was seeing a girl from a few towns over. She was almost finished with nursing school. I did not believe it. He could not love another.
I staked out a claim in a corner booth and surrounded myself with my celebrity magazines. Timber had raised the prices with the new menu, but I had an open tab with him as far as he was concerned. When he got too busy, sometimes I helped him out with his books. I ignored his hand on Papi’s ass at night, after he had turned the Open/ Closed sign to Closed on the front door. Once or twice they embraced in front of me. I nodded. There was a little grimace on my face that I hoped I stretched into a smile, but it was not for the reasons you were thinking. They loved each other. It was the love that broke my heart, not the way they expressed it, or whether it was wrong or right. I was jealous is all. I was jealous of anyone who turned things right. It is a tricky thing when you are in the middle of loving and hating someone at the same time. I guess I became a little crazy, me and my magazines all around me, my dusty blond hair down my back, sitting every day in the diner for the whole town to see.
My sister circled me without actually saying a thing about what had happened. I guess she thought it was enough that she was there for me, and maybe it was. She visited me at the diner after school every day, less to complain about our mother than to whisper about boys. Now that I was a single woman, a brokenhearted woman, she felt more open to talk to me about things besides our family.
“I like too many people,” she told me on a Friday night, before she went out on a date with a business student from UNL she had met in the parking lot of a boot store in Lincoln. He had rough hands like all the boys around here—he had done his time on the family farm—but he had a bigger vocabulary. “And the problem is it all feels like love. How do you know?” she said. She threw her hands in the air.
“I do not know,” I said.
Timber walked over to us and refilled our coffee.
“How do you know?” she said to him.
He shrugged. “You just know.”
“None of us know anything,” I said. The conversation was making me feel tricky and nervous. I did not want to have to answer too many questions. Everything in my life was up for questioning at that moment. There was not a single part of my actions that felt clean or innocent anymore.
“You know something,” said Timber softly. He had started hugging me every night before I went upstairs.
“Yeah!” said my sister. “You know plenty of stuff!” She squeezed my hand across the table. I almost cried, then I choked it in.
I knew nothing. Thomas and I had been children when we met and we were still children. I did not know much more than how to turn on a computer and type in some numbers. I had been halted since I was fifteen years old.
Back in school I was a rotten student, but not because I was dumb. I am not dumb. I just chose to do nothing. I thought that I did not need to learn what they wanted to teach me. That I already knew everything I needed to know. What good would knowledge do me? There was me and Thomas together forever and he would take care of me.
He promised me exactly that after we decided we were in love. There had been a few weeks my freshman year—before we met—when I still believed I needed to learn, or at least that I should pay attention in class. What classes did I like then? It was hard to remember. I think I had wanted to be a veterinarian. That was what all the other girls I knew would have said, too.
We were standing downtown, in the ragged, dusty square of land next to the library where some of the kids went to hang out after school. He had me in the corner, leaned up against the library wall, and we were kissing so slowly over and over. We loved to kiss for hours then. He would not touch me, though of course I felt like his hands were all over me. The clock struck six, and what kids were left started to break up and head home for dinner, and I pulled back from Thomas.
“My mom will yell,” I said. “And I have to do home-work. There’s a big test tomorrow. Pre-algebra.”
“Stay with me,” he whined. He held my hand tight, and I could feel my flesh bend under him.
“I’ll get in trouble,” I said.
“You will never get in trouble as long as you’re with me,” he said. “You will always be taken care of. You are not even my girlfriend anymore. It’s like you are my wife.”
There I was, fifteen years old and already practically married. His love engorged me. It was so comforting, and not scary at all. When you are married you have someone to lean on. And I leaned on him every time I failed a test. I leaned on him to write papers for me or to get me answers to exams from his buddies. I leaned, and he loved it. I graduated knowing nothing more than how to be one half of a whole.