She turns to another station. Bluegrass. She makes a face, flicks again. Springsteen. “Tell you what,” she mutters. “I didn’t know having a stroke could make a body so goddamn mad.”
We pass the high school. Church of God. Tobacco warehouse. I shake my head, roll my shoulders in their sockets. Being high is suddenly uncomfortable. Mel reaches into her pocket for the additional joint and hunches below the dash to light up. A yarn of smoke curls above her head and expands. She hands it to me. Our fingers touch. It is a life preserver. Old life, new life. Mel is my familiar now, the comforting future in which I live.
Shauna takes us around the periphery, quiet. I feel myself getting back my drafting-table eye for the first time since the stroke, noting the dimensions of the courthouse, the Civil War monument on the cobblestone street, churches Methodist, Super Methodist, Seventh-Day Adventist. Old Kroger, new Kroger. Finally, we slope down into the slick ultralight of the Walmart Supercenter parking lot.
Shauna parks halfway back, shuts off the engine. “I ain’t been this stoned since before Caelin was born.”
Mel clicks off her safety belt. “Why don’t I go in and get what you need. I gotta stretch my legs.”
“All right.” Shauna reaches into her purse, draws out cash. “Caelin needs her pageant nail polish. It’s Revlon Quick Dry number 76. Magenta Magic. And I need a carton of cigarettes. Get the Marlboro Reds. I’m feeling bitchy.”
“How much are they down here?”
“Carton’ll be forty.”
Mel takes the cash. “Damn. That’s cheap. I’ll get some, too. We should stockpile.”
“How much are they up there?”
“Eleven a pack. Twelve or thirteen if you go high-end.”
“Nuh uh.”
“Yeah. They are.”
“You’re lyin,” Shauna says comfortably as the door swings shut.
The parking lot is quiet. Music pipes in faintly through loudspeakers. It sounds like Amy Grant. I shift my butt on the seat, trying to stretch.
“Are you high?” Shauna asks me.
“Yup.”
“Me too.” She sniffs something back into her head and closes her eyes. “Tired. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have kids. I mean, I love them and everything. But they just eat you alive.”
She’s quiet again until “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t upset me.”
“I did, though,” she says. “You know, sometimes I feel bad about being mean to you when we were kids. Or just being…I dunno.”
“Not sticking up for me?”
“Uh. Okay.”
“Like when Brandon said I had dyke boots? Remember that?”
“You’ve thought about this some.”
I don’t answer.
“Well, I wanna divorce,” she says. “So.”
“Really?”
“He doesn’t give a fuck about me. His kids barely see him. He’s been screwing around with this girl who works at Nestlé.” She stares out the window shaking her head, lips pinched. “I don’t know what it is about Kisses women liking the ones who treat them bad.” She looks at me in the rearview and raises her eyebrows. “We all seem to do it.”
I shrug, uncomfortable.
“So fuck Brandon. If you see his car on the way out of town and want to slash the tires, go ahead.”
“Pass that along to Mel. She loves destroying property.”
“I like that girl,” Shauna says. “I do. She probably had a hard time growing up, too. You got a lot of shit you didn’t deserve, okay?”
“A lot of it came from our parents.”
Shauna shifts. “Maybe.”
“Maybe, huh.”
“Sharon, they fought so much with each other, you think they had the time to concentrate on any of us?”
“They were better with you and Jared. You made sense to them.”
“Are you saying I didn’t get any of her bullshit? Looks like someone wasn’t paying attention.” She’s getting louder. “She set a piss-poor example for all of us. And then she has the nerve to tell me not to fight with Brandon in front of the kids. Don’t you think I wanna screw around like she did? But I don’t. I got kids. I got responsibilities. They’re watching what I do. Like we were.”
She turns to face me. “Just cause Mom and I hang out don’t mean we think the same way. She wants what she wants, and when she wants something, it’s like everything else just falls away. She’s always been like that. She won’t ever change. I mean, have you ever been able to read Mom? She’s so up and down. Something’s wrong with her. Like something in her head.”
Hearing Shauna say this makes me laugh.
She smiles thinly. “And you know what? I liked your all’s movie. It was hilarious. And if she’s so afraid to watch it, then her loss.”
“She’s afraid to watch it?”
“Well, she didn’t say so, but that’s what I think. She’s afraid there’ll be something about her in it.” She rolls her eyes.
We both relax. There’s a companionable silence in the car now. I wonder if I would feel unburdened, if I would feel somehow loosened from it all, by telling one more person, aside from Mel, to be with in it all. I figure now’s as good a time as ever to find out.
“I’m back,” I tell her, “because some things happened when I was a kid, some things I sort of forgot about that came back to me a few years ago. It made me want to see everything. To see how it would make me feel.”