“I got a little brother?” I ask.
He don’t answer. Just jumps right back into his questions. “What’s going on, Bo?”
“Right.” I sit down on the couch. “Things have been real rough with Mama lately. She’s been using a lot, and a few days ago—”
“Are you here asking for money?”
“What? No,” I say. “Nothing like that.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because … you’re my dad,” I say. “And right now I ain’t got nowhere else to go, so …”
He blinks at me, like he’s still confused. Just then, Vera comes back around the corner. And the crease between her eyes says she’s disappointed I ain’t left yet. Which makes my next words even harder. So I keep my eyes on Daddy.
He used to rock me to sleep in his grandma’s old rocking chair. Used to sing me Hank Williams songs when I was crying. Used to let me sit on his lap and watch the NASCAR race with him while he drank a beer. He’s my daddy. And no matter what this woman thinks of me, I’m his baby girl. His family.
So I take a deep breath and spit it out.
“Well … I was sorta hoping I could live here. With you.”
It wasn’t long before the days started getting hot and the humidity made us all miserable. Farmers’ kids stopped coming to school, pulled out by their parents to work in the tobacco fields. Summer was here, and we’d all be done with classes in a couple weeks. Then there were two and a half months of long, slow summer days to get through.
It got too hot to stay inside—Daddy refused to turn on the air conditioner until June to save money—so Bo and I started spending our afternoons in my backyard. We’d get off the bus at the church and head to my house. By the time we each poured ourselves a glass of sweet tea to cool down from the walk, Utah would be waiting outside for us, lying right by the back door. The first day she showed up, I nearly tripped over her. The second day, too, actually. But after a week or so, I just expected to find her there.
There wasn’t much to do outside besides get a sunburn, so Bo started bringing the book I bought her and making good on that promise to read some of the poems to me.
“ ‘Hoodwink’d with faery fancy, all amort, save to St. Agnes and her lambs unshorn …’ ”
Her voice curled around Keats’s words, so slow and soft that I nearly drifted off. We were stretched out beneath Mama’s dogwood tree, the only good shady spot in the yard. I was on my back, arms tucked behind my head. Bo was next to me, propped on her side as she read the long poem. Somewhere near my feet, I could hear Utah panting.
“What’re we gonna do this summer?” I asked once she’d finished reading.
“What do you mean?” She was flipping through the book again, looking for another poem, one we hadn’t read together yet.
“I mean … What are we gonna do? We can’t just stick around here doing nothing for two months.”
“Well, I usually work the tobacco fields at the Scotts’ farm to make a little money during the summer.”
I sighed. “That sounds nice.”
“Not really. It’s hot and exhausting, and you come back covered in tobacco gum.”
“But it’s something,” I said. “Something to do. Mama and Daddy would never let me work tobacco. They’d tell me it’d be too hard with my vision and all. And maybe they’d be right. But I’ve spent every summer of my life stuck in the house, never leaving this yard.”
“I kinda like this yard,” Bo said, still turning pages.
“I wanna do something different,” I said. “Something exciting.”
“There will probably be a few parties.”
Last year, that would have been all the excitement I needed. A couple parties, the promise of a few hours without my parents’ eyes on me, that would have been enough. But now, it hardly did anything for me. Parties were over too fast, too similar to one another. And, at the end of the night, we were still stuck in Mursey.
“We ought to go out of town,” I said. “Take a trip.”
Bo quit flipping the pages. “You serious?”
“Maybe.”
“When I suggested that, we ended up fighting. You said I was crazy for even thinking—”
“I know, I know. But I been thinking about it, and maybe if we do it right, my parents will let me go.” I sat up so I could look at her better. “I mean, they’re letting me walk home from the bus stop with you, so that’s progress, right? And the way I see it, my parents just wanna know where I am all the time. So if we plan it out right, give them all the details before we even hit the road … Maybe it would work?”
“You really think so?”
“Maybe … And we wouldn’t be going far. I was thinking we could just go visit Colt for the weekend or something.”
Bo snorted. “I see how it is. You just wanna go fuck my cousin again.”
“Shh!” I swatted at her. “Keep your voice down.”