Sometimes we’d talk about a million things, and sometimes we’d just sit with the phones pressed to our ears, not saying much as we did our homework together.
“Fuck,” Bo said. “I feel like you’ve been grounded forever.”
“Me too.”
“Colt was asking about you the other day.”
I sat up straighter. “He was?” I glanced toward the sink, where Mama was washing dishes. Then I lowered my voice. “What … what did he say?”
“Nothing much. Just asked where you were. Told me to say hi.”
“Oh. Well … That’s nice. Tell him hello for me, too.”
“In eight days, you can tell him yourself,” she said. “Also, Colt and me were talking, and I think the three of us oughta take a road trip down to Tennessee. What do you think? We could go to Nashville. Just take off for a few weeks. What do you think?”
I thought she was crazy. My folks grounded me for going down the street without proper permission. They’d never let me leave the state. Not with Bo Dickinson or anyone else. But I didn’t want to say that to her. Didn’t want her to get bored of me when I was so close to being released.
So I just said, “Yeah. Maybe.”
“Agnes.” Mama had turned around from her spot at the sink and was looking my way now. “Only fifteen more minutes on the phone. Then I want your help making dinner.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I didn’t think Mama was real happy about me talking to Bo every day. She never came out and told me not to, but I could tell she was still mad at Bo for taking me down to the river. Every time I got off the phone, she’d make a point of asking why I didn’t call Christy more often.
When she’d left the kitchen, I pressed the phone back to my ear, just in time to hear Bo say, “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
I smiled. “All right. I … really, really hate cooking.”
Bo laughed.
“Mama always wants me to help her. And I do, but I hate it. And not because I can’t see real well so it’s hard. I hate it because you spend all this time making something and half the time eating it. It drives me crazy.” I sighed. “Just another reason nobody’s gonna want to marry me, and I’ll be stuck in my parents’ house forever.”
“Oh, bullshit. You ain’t gonna have any trouble finding someone to marry you. I think the hard part’s gonna be finding someone you wanna marry. Ain’t nobody in this town good enough for you.”
I felt myself blushing. It was insane, of course. There wasn’t exactly a line of boys banging down the door for a chubby blind girl who didn’t like to cook. But the fact that Bo thought that way about me, that the boys in Mursey didn’t deserve me, it felt real good.
“Your turn,” I said. “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
“I … One time I punched Nolan Curtis in the face.”
“That doesn’t count,” I said. “Because I knew that. Everybody knows that.”
Bo sighed. “Fine. All right … Um … I …” She hesitated, then swallowed, so loud I heard it through the receiver. “Sometimes, I miss my daddy.”
I was quiet for a second, because I wasn’t quite sure what to say to this. Bo hadn’t told me a whole lot about her parents. I got the sense that she didn’t like talking about them much. So all I knew was that her mama did meth and her daddy had left when she was young. Other than that, she’d never seemed real comfortable sharing much about them.
“Everybody in town thinks he’s this awful guy,” she continued. “But he ain’t so bad. Or, at least, he wasn’t when I knew him. Sure, he drank a little too much and he broke some laws, but … we used to cook together, speaking of. Mama don’t cook, but Daddy used to. All the time. And he always let me help him. He’d pull a chair into the kitchen so I could stand on it and reach the counter. Then I’d help him mash the potatoes or … sorry. It’s probably stupid. I just miss shit like that sometimes.”
“It’s not stupid at all,” I said. “And … I know it’s not the same, but if you ever wanna come over and cook with my mama, I’m sure she’d like that.”
Bo snorted. “Yeah, right. Your folks probably hate me.”
“No, they don’t,” I said. “They just don’t know you real well. If they hated you, they wouldn’t let me talk to you like this every day … And I bet Mama would like you a whole lot if you did cook with her. I’m sure you’re more help than me. I’m just saying, if you ever wanted to …”
Bo was quiet for a second before, in a soft voice, she repeated my earlier words back to me. “Yeah … maybe.”
We wander around the tiny town for a few hours before heading over to Maple Avenue around seven. The street’s blocked off, so no cars can drive down, and there are tables covered by little white tents all up the sidewalk. Some of them are selling food—the promised barbecue, some lemonade—and others are just cool, shady places for folks to sit until the sun has gone down.