Every year, my father goes away to a reunion with his old military buddies. Two whole weeks where the house sits quietly and I don’t jump at every creak and strain the old place makes. Friday comes and brings me my dinner in the evening. I tell her she doesn’t need to—I cook every day normally anyway—but she says it makes her happy. She brings Algie, and he tears around the lower floor of the house, skidding all over the place, his nails making tap, tap, tapping sounds on the polished floorboards.
My father loves his trip away. The weeks leading up to him leaving were actually okay; he didn’t touch me once, and so for the first time in a very long time I don’t have a single mark on my body. Callan comes and gets me in the morning before school, letting himself into the house, and it feels liberating somehow, like for just a second I’m a normal teenaged girl and my boyfriend is allowed to hang out with me, unafraid of getting his balls hacked off with a rusty spoon.
We’re walking home from school three days after my father left, when Callan folds his arms around me and draws me up close against him, kissing me in the street. My breath feels like water, slowly filling me up, rising from my stomach all the way to the top of my head. My skin breaks out in goose bumps, and Callan must feel the change in me because he laughs, rubbing his hands up and down my arms. “Feels strange, right? Not worrying about that old man of yours,” he says.
It’s weird that we don’t talk about it very often, but Dad casts a huge shadow over us at all times. Callan’s been accepting of my clipped, firm responses whenever he’s suggested that he come over and introduce himself to Malcolm. Perhaps I’m not as good at masking my abject terror whenever he brings this up, but Callan never pushes. He drops the subject right away, and two seconds later it’s like we were never even talking about my home life.
“This feels right, doesn’t it? Nice not having to hide,” Callan says into my hair. He nibbles at my ear lobe, gathering my hair in both his hands and sweeping it down my back, out of the way, so he has better access to my neck.
“We’re still out in public,” I say, panting a little. “We still have to observe the laws of common decency.” I don’t want him to stop what he’s doing, though. His mouth on my skin feels so good. I can barely think straight.
“Observe the laws of common decency? You sound like a fifty year old,” Callan says, laughing. Little does he know that the line comes straight from my father’s mouth, who is close enough to fifty. He says it all the time whenever he sees people holding hands in the street. “We’re young. We’re kids. We’re supposed to be making out on the streets, making the old folks feel awkward about themselves. They used to do it, too, though, bluebird. Guaranteed Mrs. Lowercroft used to get fingerbanged in her lowercroft when she was a teenager.”
Mrs. Lowercroft, the woman he’s referring to, is walking with her grocery bags looped over either arm on the other side of the road. She has to be in her early sixties now, hair done up majestically in true southern belle scrolls and swooshes of steel gray. She sends us a rather scathing sideways glance as she passes, high heels making loud rapping sounds against the sidewalk.
“There is no way she ever let a boy touch her vagina,” I say. “That woman is far too proper. Her husband’s probably still a virgin.”
Callan gives one hard laugh. “They had a son. He died, though, years ago.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah. He had cancer. He was only twenty-three. Mom told me she used to have a huge crush on him. She cried herself to sleep for two months after he passed away.”
I can imagine Jo doing that. She’s such an empathetic person. She feels everything for everyone. Her own pain must be breathtaking. “Poor Jo. Let’s get her some flowers on the way home.”
We cut behind the Smoke Shop and hop the fence into the fields beyond, giggling like idiots as Mrs. Lowercroft stands on the corner of 5th and Main, watching us like we’ve lost our minds. I’d be concerned that she might tell my father about my behavior, but she’s always hated him. No matter what I did, she’d rather gossip to her girlfriends than confront my father directly over the errant child he’s raised.
The tall grass whips at our legs as Callan and I run. The fields stretch on forever, down to the reservoir that my mother used to take me swimming in when I was tiny. The sun beats down, causing sweat to bead and run down my back as we collect stems of Yellow Cosmos, Indian Blanket, Lemon Mint and Black-Eyed Susan. I pull out the disposable camera Callan gave to me last week—this must be our seventh camera now—and I hang back, taking a picture of him walking ahead of me, flowers held by his side, his free hand out, skimming the tops of the wild wheat and grass. I’m sun drunk and so happy I could burst by the time we reach the water. Light glances off the flat surface of the reservoir, the wide, deep body of water so calm and still that it looks like a mirror.
Callan drops his book bag to the ground and places his carefully gathered bunch of flowers on top of it. When he stands, he looks at me mischievously. “So?” he says.
“So what?”