Heteroflexibility Read online

“I’m sorry, Peaches. I’m glad you called. And I’m glad you’re here.”

  He led me into the house. Dad never changed much of anything. The sofas were still orange and brown plaid, the TV encased in its own fake-wood console. A dozen dusty pictures littered the top. They pretty much stopped when I turned fifteen, when Mom died, other than a wedding picture. All this time I’d been a photographer, and I hadn’t gotten a shot of me with my dad. I’d fix that. Tomorrow.

  I stumbled into my old bedroom, still decorated from my teens. We didn’t talk any more, and I collapsed onto my tattered quilt and fell asleep.

  ***

  Dad shook me awake. I peered at the ancient digital alarm clock on my old bedside table, still covered in N Sync stickers. My misspent youth. It was 6 a.m.

  “Wake up if you’re coming on the rounds. I got breakfast ready.”

  I mumbled something even I couldn’t parse.

  He straightened. “I’m fine if you don’t. You need your rest.”

  I pushed the blankets away. “No, I want to come.”

  “All righty then. Make sure you dress proper for the wind and dust. Haven’t had much rain.” He set a pair of broken-in cowboy boots on the floor by the bed. “I seem to recall you and your mom wore the same size.”

  He sauntered out the door, his stride hitching a bit. The muted light from the hallway eased into the room, resting on the boots. I leaned over the edge of the bed to touch them. Mom had worn them when she worked in her garden. I hadn’t seen them in over a decade.

  She’d always seemed to put more time and attention into her beets and radishes than she did her family. Her little rectangle of vegetables was her refuge. “You can bury a lot of troubles by digging in the dirt,” she’d say.

  She planted only oddities. Sweet onions, ginger root, cilantro, squash, habanero pepper. Never the good stuff, like watermelons or corn. Then she’d foist them on me at dinner, mumbling tripe about “salt of the earth and working my fingers to the bone.”

  With Dad gone so much, we often sat opposite each other in the fading light of the kitchen, too cheap to turn on the overhead, a showdown over the Formica table. Oh, how I hated her those nights, beets bleeding across my plate, a slab of chicken smothered with peppers and onion. Not teenager food.

  We didn’t talk as I stealthily transferred my meal to a paper napkin, waiting for moments when she stared into space, seeming to forget I was even there. She had my hair but a withered face, eventually lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke into the silence.

  If we broke the quiet and got into an argument, usually over what I’d do with my life and how to get out of this god-forsaken suburb and into a real town, she’d abruptly go back outside to dig and weed. Texas was good that way, allowing her to keep something planted year-round.

  No matter how she went out, she’d come back in happier, with muddy knees, humming some little tune—the only indication any of us ever got that she might be in a good mood.

  Dad approved of her gardening. When I’d be put out that she wouldn’t drive me to a friend’s house, he stop me from insulting her by saying “When you throw dirt, you lose ground.”

  Coming from a man who married a woman who tossed more sod than a bull in heat.

  But I never shot back with the truth, that I would know all about throwing dirt. I turned out just like her.

  I sat up and straightened my wool socks. The cold front was chillier up here than in Austin. One foot slid down into the boot, gliding comfortably past the bend, and a quick tap on the floor brought my heel firmly down.

  Dad was right. They were a perfect fit.

  ***

  The two-lane highway stretched out long and flat as we rumbled out of town in Dad’s Ford pickup. I felt a little queasy from eating fried eggs before sunup. The lack of sleep didn’t help, but I did not want to spend the day alone.

  The fields alternated in brown, yellow, and green with long skinny pipes of pivot irrigation systems sprawling like praying mantis. Sagging barns and small ranch houses dotted the landscape, flat and unbroken other than the occasional mesquite tree.

  “So, you hired a lawyer yet?” Dad kept his eyes on the road, hands relaxed on the steering wheel. A pair of cows watched us ride by from behind a barbed-wire fence.

  “Not yet.”

  “I reckon he’ll get some big shot.”

  “I don’t think so. It’s just a friend from college. I don’t expect it to get ugly. We don’t really have anything to split.”

  “You going to take the house?”

  I sunk down in the cracked vinyl seat. The light was shifting from gray to blue as we drove into the sunrise. “I don’t think so. It’s too expensive. Besides, he wants it, for the baby.”

  Dad hit the brakes suddenly, and I shifted forward against the shoulder belt. He pulled over onto the gravel shoulder. “The what?”

  Suddenly I remembered something. The woman was Fern. “Oh my God. I mean, yes, he wants the house for the baby.” I pictured her downing the Oban at the bar. “But I think he got lied to. I don’t think the girl was pregnant.” The sticks from college. The joke we’d played. She’d done it again. But why this time? Why did she want to break us up?

  Dad pulled back onto the road. “The boy never did have it all together upstairs. I’ve seen one-eyed geese with more sense.”

  “Oh, Dad. He has a master’s degree.”

  “Paperwork doesn’t make a man smart.”

  A truck hauling a trailer full of hay rolls approached in the opposite lane. Dad lifted his hand. The other driver waved back. I’d forgotten about that, such a simple gesture. The only hand signals on freeways in cities were quite the opposite of friendly.

  He cleared his throat. “You okay for money?”

  “Not especially.”

  “I’ll loan you some. You’ll need a lawyer.”

  I hated this. Each moment got more humiliating than the last. This had to be rock bottom, surely. Living with my dad and asking for money.

  Dad turned off the main road onto a strip of white gravel. We bumped and jostled a few hundred yards and pulled up before a black pumpjack, its iron head slowly rising and falling in a steady rhythm.

  He rolled down his window. The pump moved almost silently, the quiet of the hay field broken only by the truck’s idling motor.

  He listened a moment. “Sounds like she’s fine,” he said, backing up again. “Most of ‘em only need a listen. I can tell if something’s wrong with them.”

  “Do you fix them if there is?”

  “Depends on the problem. Some things are easy.” He glanced over at me, his mouth in a tight frown. “Most things are hard.”

  We drove back onto the road, only to pull off again a couple miles down. We had a dozen pumpjacks on today’s rounds, spread out all over North Texas. The truck lurched along a dirt road a ways before coming up on another, older pump, brown and rusting but still moving steadily against the cloudless sky.

  “This one’s scheduled for shut down,” Dad said, killing the engine.

  “Why?”

  “It’s an old model. Runs on a motor fueled by its own oil.” He opened his door, filling the cabin with the pop pop CRACK sound of the pumpjack.

  “That can’t be good.”

  “Oh, that’s the way the old ones sound. But this one’s got other problems.” He slid off the seat.

  I leapt into the dust, a cloud puffing around mom’s old boots. I hadn’t changed that much since high school, so my old faded jeans from my closet still fit. Dad had loaned me a flannel shirt and insisted I tie a black bandana around my neck in case I needed to cover my nose. I had, however, drawn the line at a hat.

  Dad walked up to the gate. “This kind of thirsty bird is on its way to extinction. Most all are electric these days.”

  “Is it still producing?”

  “It’s still pulling oil. But it ain’t passed the BS test in three checks.”

  “BS?” I imagined cow manure getting in machine parts.

/>   He quirked a lopsided smile, shoving a key in the padlock to the chain link fence that surrounded the pump. “Bottom sediment.”

  “Oh.”

  He opened a side panel and attached a digital box. “These readings show too much sediment. Gets too high, no one will buy the oil. No point in keeping her operational.”

  “You can’t fix it?”

  “Generally when the BS gets too high, it ain’t worth saving.”

  He pulled the box away and laid it on the metal base. “No change. I’m going to go ahead and shut her down.”

  The cranks kept turning, faithfully pushing the hammer head of the jack up and down. They didn’t know they were working in vain, pulling contaminated oil that nobody could use. Death by BS.

  The yellow-white light of the sun popped just above the rows of wheat stalks as Dad walked around to the back side of the pumpjack frame. He and the metal giant were thrown into silhouette as he opened a box and flipped the switch. Oh, how I longed for a camera.

  Gradually, the cranks wound down, the giant arm slowed, and gently, as if a rocking cradle were allowed to rest, all motion ceased.

  Dad stood, watching it, then touched the tip of his hat. “Out with the old.” He shut the box tight.

  I found my throat had closed up. Over a pumpjack. “Will it get disassembled?”

  “Up to the owners to decide. They might get somebody out here to take a look-see. Maybe put in a new pump. Depends on if it’s worth the trouble.”

  “That’s not what you do?”

  “I just take readings and check on ‘em.” He ran his hand along a metal beam. “This one’s been in service a long time.”

  Something about the stillness of the pump was too much. I’d read somewhere that it takes a little thing to break you. It’s not the big stuff, dead mothers, cheating husbands, destitution, or homelessness. It’s always the simple thing you didn’t expect to go wrong.

  My stomach clenched like I would throw up. I bent over, gulping in air. I’d never felt this bad, not ever.

  “Peaches, you okay?” Dad laid his hand on my back.

  “I…don’t…think…so.”

  He dropped the back gate of his truck so I could sit. I continued to suck in air, breathing like I would hyperventilate. I couldn’t get control of it somehow. I threw all my snark at it, every cutting thought, how ugly Cade was, how he was done with sex in three minutes, how Fern couldn’t keep a man more then five days, and what a big ol’ stupid house we’d picked anyway, with a tiny yard and a water heater that kept going out, not even worth what we paid for it.

  It didn’t help. It didn’t matter how awful I wanted to make those things sound, they had been mine--my husband, my friend, my house, my life. And none of it had been anything but a stupid lie.

  Dad ran his hand along my head, smoothing the frizz. “This Cade, he was the wrong boy. Sometimes you can’t tell by looking. There’s no shame in figuring it out later.”

  “But, he…humiliated me. With my friend.” Eyes were burning. I tightened my fists. No crying. Not going to happen.

  “Some things in this life are hard to bear. And crying or not crying, don’t make no difference to what happens.”

  “But I was mean to him, like Mom was.”

  “You don’t have to turn into your mom.”

  “I never cried when she died.”

  “I know it.”

  “Do you think I’m broken?”

  “Peaches, we’re all broken, one way or another. It’s all in how you make do with the pieces.”

  A sudden gust of wind blew dust over us. My eyes stung, and I had to wipe them with my bandana. “I think maybe it was my fault Cade fooled around.”

  “Nobody makes nobody cheat.”

  “I didn’t pay attention to him.”

  “And he didn’t work with you on it.”

  “Neither of us knew what we were doing.”

  “That’s how it always feels. But he still done you wrong.”

  The wheat rustled in the unrelenting wind. I coughed in the dust. Dad tugged his hat lower over his eyes. “If I could lay my hands on that boy--”

  “Dad. He’s almost 30.”

  “With the sense of a tumbleweed.”

  “True.” I cracked a smile. Dad had never made a snide remark. That had been mom’s domain.

  His eyes twinkled. “As bright as an armadillo in the middle of Interstate 35.”

  “With about as much future.”

  Dad stood up and dusted off his knees. “Well, let’s get out of his dust. We got to go to the next pumpjack.”

  He lifted me down from the truck. He was still that strong, even at 60. “We have three stops, then I know just the place for lunch. There’s this filly named Margo who will insult the hell out of you, but she makes the meanest pecan pie this side of the Brazos.”

  “A filly, eh?”

  “Well, she’s more like a flat-nosed donkey, actually, and has a three-hundred pound husband. So don’t get any ideas.” He opened my side of the truck.

  I climbed in. “All you need is one more mean-mouthed woman in your life.”

  He shot back, “Ain’t that the truth.” And closed the door.

  Chapter 17: Good Things Come to Those Who Bait

  Day was just shifting into evening when we pulled onto my old street. The two hour’s sleep had caught up with me mid-afternoon, and I’d been napping in the truck during the rest of Dad’s rounds. I still had my head draped over a box that was sitting between us on the seat as he shut off the engine.

  “So, who do you know with a blue hotrod?” Dad asked as we pulled up into the drive.

  My head popped up. “Bradford?”

  The car sat by the curb, gleaming and new against the backdrop of the weedy, broken-down neighborhood. I walked up to it and peered through the tinted window. Empty.

  “I think I’ve found him,” Dad called back. He stood on the narrow porch, facing the swing.

  Bradford stepped out from behind the ivy-laden rail. He looked amazing in pressed khakis and a lean salmon-colored shirt, like a visitor from another land.

  He shook my dad’s hand as I gaped from the yard. “Nice to meet you. I’m Bradford Simmons. Friend of Zest’s.”

  “Ben Ballard.”

  Bradford nodded at me. “I see you can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl.”

  I tugged nervously on the bandana. I could feel my hair blowing up in every direction.

  “You look great, really,” Bradford said. “None of that pretend Texan. The real deal.”

  Dad watched us a moment. “Well, this old man needs to get cleaned up. Come on in and sit a spell. We were planning some dinner. You’ll stay?”

  Bradford kept his eyes on me. “I’d love to, if that’s okay with Zest.”

  Was he crazy? Of course! “It’s good with me.”

  Dad went into the house. I stayed at the bottom of the steps, looking up at Bradford, feeling all of fourteen years old and crushing some high school senior who was completely and utterly out of my league.

  “So this is where Zest began?” He stuck his hands in his pockets, shuffling his shoe against the porch floor.

  Was he…nervous? “You could say that. I wasn’t born in this house. We moved up in the world when I turned five. Started out life in a double-wide trailer.”

  “Like a good country girl.”

  I climbed the stairs, holding the rail to avoid a klutz moment. “You want to come in? Dad’s probably got a beer or something.”

  He opened the door for me and I passed inside, suddenly seeing the house from his perspective. I spotted a photo of me and Cade on the television console and wished I could knock it off the back side.

  Bradford circled the room. “This is what my grandmother would call ‘honest living.’”

  “As opposed to--”

  “Living flashy. Showing your money.”

  “Didn’t have much of that.”

  “She was a
ll about staying within your means. Not getting caught up in new for the sake of new.”

  “Were you two close?” I sat on Dad’s worn recliner, nervously straightening a towel that served as an arm protector, covering stains and holes.

  “Not exactly. But she was a formidable woman. Had a falling out with my mom, but still came to see me.”

  “This was in California?”

  “Yes. Outside of LA.”

  “Pretty different from here.”

  He nodded, looking at the pictures on the television.

  I shifted uncomfortably in the chair as he picked up the wedding portrait. “Bit of a surprise, seeing you here,” I said.

  He turned sharply, an anomaly of crisp detail in the murky room. “The girls were anxious when they heard you blew out of town. They wanted to make sure you knew all was okay with them.” He set down the frame and tugged a slender blue packet from his pocket. “Your tickets. For the flight. Plus the deposit.”

  I clutched the folder with its preprinted itinerary. Inside was a check for five hundred dollars. Thank God. “They’re really okay?”

  He settled on the sofa, bent forward, hands clasped between his knees. “They’re really okay.”

  “Good, because I didn’t have gas money to get back.”

  “At least it’s not four dollars a gallon anymore.”

  “Yeah, this might not have covered it.”

  We grinned foolishly at each other as Dad crossed the living room, smoothing his damp hair. “Just passing through. Don’t mind an old man.”

  I popped up from the chair. “You need help with dinner?”

  “Don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen. You might catch me opening the TV dinners.”

  “You sure?”

  “You young people should catch up.”

  The happy crinkles in the corners of his eyes made me realize he had the wrong idea about Bradford. I’d have to set him straight later. That would be something to explain.

  I settled back in the chair. Bradford was watching me. “He seems like a great dad.”

  “He is.”

  “A good place to run to.”

  “It is. I mean. No. I wasn’t running.”

  He leaned back on the sofa. “No?”

  “No! Just thought I’d pay…dad…a visit. Before…I got on a plane and could die in a fiery crash.”