She’s right, but I still don’t like it.
“What’s Sharon bellyaching about,” Shauna says.
“My wicked ways.”
“Woo,” Shauna hoots.
“Shut up,” I tell them.
We sweep south and run parallel to the county line for five or six miles, finding ourselves on the parkway before we take an exit and head back toward Hollins Gap on U.S. 60’s wide, dark vein. Shauna turns motormouth at puff one and Mel bends an eager ear, asking for stories about our high school, our parents. My shoulders loosen, my breathing slows.
“My family likes you better than they like me,” I complain to Mel.
“Quit bein stupid, Sharon. She’s being stupid.” Shauna leans in and fiddles with the radio, steering with one hand, away from Randy Travis playing on Faulkner107.7. (That’s your hometown station, one oh seven seven the Tomahawk! Oooga Chaka Oooga Chaka!) We’re cruising along the path of the northbound train now. Cars heaped with coal, steam rising from the chunks. Car after car, load after load. I let myself sink, stare at things I haven’t seen in years. I do not remember where I was or what I was doing the last time I saw coal loads chug by. Maybe I was a teenager, saw it with eyes dulled by the desire to be somewhere else, anywhere else. How could I have missed this? This is the kind of beauty that gives you the fever wish to make things. How could I have not grown up wanting to draw? I feel a flash of shame. I used to hate it here. How could I have possibly hated this? This is me. I sprang from this place.
I am real stoned.
Shauna’s looking at me in the rearview. Her teeth glow in the dark. “Sharon.”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you back?”
“I don’t know,” I stall. “Figured I was overdue for a visit.”
She smirks. “Overdue for a visit, huh.”
I have always hated having to decode whatever my family says. Everything is implicit with Mom and Shauna. Everything goes without saying. It feels like they’re trying to trick me into making some sort of disclosure about myself that proves this point about me that they’ve secretly agreed upon. Every conversation, however minor, becomes another instance in which they are leaving me behind and I am running to catch up. It stings. Especially now, when nothing goes without saying. When I’m at my slowest and weakest. When I’m not even sure myself what I’m doing back here.
This all stitches together in my head, hot and itchy. I lean forward and say, “What exactly are you trying to say to me?”
“Nothing.”
“No. We’re not playing that game. You need to tell me exactly what the fuck you mean by what am I doing back here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Shauna.”
“I mean exactly what I say, Sharon.”
“You don’t. I may have just had a stroke, but I’m not a moron and I never was.”
There’s a silence. Shauna finally breaks. “You hate being back here,” she says. “We all know it. It’s been, what, four years since you visited? My kids didn’t remember you. Even when I showed them a picture. So why now?”
“Because Mom pulled out the crying act. And you know how that works wonders on me.”
“That’s not an act,” she says. “She cried to me, too. This really upset her. You didn’t even call her when it happened.”
I feel a twinge of guilt. “I did.”
“But not when it happened. Didn’t you wait like six weeks?”
“Little hard to call when I couldn’t talk without slobbering all over myself.”
“Oh, you weren’t that bad off,” she says dismissively.
“You weren’t fucking there. How dare you tell me it wasn’t that bad.”
Mel coughs softly. “She actually was in really bad shape,” she intercedes. “She couldn’t talk. For a while.”
Shauna glances at her, then back at the road. “Really?”
“You think Mom was upset?” I tell her. “It took me a month to figure out how to walk again. It was so painful when I got up for the first time that they had to give me morphine. I missed being a vegetable by about two inches. I was terrified. And the last thing I do when I’m scared is talk to you people. Because you always seem to make it worse.”
Shauna holds up one hand. “Okay.”
“No, it’s not okay. I am thirty-two years old and I had a stroke,” I yell. “They don’t even know how it happened. It happened because I am fucked.”
“All right. I’m sorry. Good God.”
We head back toward town on 460. Pass the country club, the Cattlemen’s Association, the new Dairy Queen with a long line of trucks and SUVs crowding its lot. A few teenage girls, delicate necks rising from down jackets, flit between. Shauna stops at the four-way light at the Faulkner bypass. An abandoned Maloney’s truck yawns open in a field.
“I didn’t mean we aren’t glad to see you,” she says. “It’s just that you don’t like seeing us.”
“That’s not true.”