Outside, I let the sun warm me until my blood ran hot again. My scalp burned where my hair was parted, the braid hanging halfway down my back. I twisted the hank of hair and yanked, trying to get my thoughts in order.
“What was that about?” Milo unlocked my side of the truck and then walked around the front to climb in his side. “You into her?”
“It was about nothing. We sold the boar. Now we can spend the money on groceries or something.”
We drove home down back streets. I rolled down my window and let the air wash over me. It was sunny and warm, but already clouds lined with black were boiling up on the horizon, out over the lake. Lucinda was pretty, but I could learn to forget. I’d done it before.
I scooped a palmful of air, opening my fingers in the wind. We drove past the old convenience store that had once been a Chevron, a Texaco, and most recently a 7-Eleven. “Could you drop me at the shop? Gonna flip a few deer mounts. Need to catch up on work.”
“You need to catch up on sleep.” He turned down our street, toward the shop. “It’s not healthy, how you’re acting. Even Dad went home sometimes.”
What I could have said, but didn’t: Dad had a wife and a family to go home to, not a shitty apartment with no central air and a roach infestation under the scummy kitchen sink. And even then, it wasn’t enough to keep him going. He owned a business and his own home, had a wife and kids who loved him. Grandkids, even. With all of that, he left his body behind for someone he loved to find. A mess for his daughter to clean up.
I dug the keys from my pocket. The goat still sat in the window, looking lonesome without its sexual partners. “Maybe we can have Mom set up something more appropriate. Wouldn’t hurt to keep her occupied.”
“What, you don’t want her hanging around that creepy gallery?”
My father would’ve wanted me to keep our mother home. Would’ve liked me taking care of her the way he would’ve: given her a list of tasks, made her feel needed. He wasn’t the kind of dad who talked about his feelings, but sometimes he came up with some stunners out of nowhere. Once over beers, he’d smiled and leaned in, like he was gonna offer some sage advice. Your mother is a little funny, he said, touching my arm. Laughing. She does things sometimes that don’t make any sense. It’s part of her charm, sure, but it means we gotta watch out for her. Don’t want her getting into trouble.
“I think we can find something for her to do a little closer to home,” I said. “She doesn’t need that kind of excitement.”
“Excitement? She’s not a toddler, Jessa.”
“Well, she’s sure acting like one.”
He looked unhappy and I couldn’t understand why. Did he want our mother given free rein to create whatever animal porn she wanted? Did he like her running around in the middle of the night?
Milo sighed and I got out of the truck before he could say whatever he was about to drop on me. I felt like a nerve rubbed raw, probably from stress and lack of sleep and the fact that I hadn’t had sex in months.
“See you at dinner,” he finally said, pointing a finger at me through the truck window. I waved him away and went inside, thunder already rumbling in the distance.
All the lights were off and I left them that way. My eyes were gritty and sticky. I was tired of everything. We should’ve been open for business, but there was no one coming. Most of our work was done piecemeal, calls over the phone from middling hunters looking for price estimates. The drop-ins had dwindled to nothing.
I sat down in a chair next to a rack of outdated hunting magazines and bent down to unlace my boots. The socks I wore had holes in each heel; they didn’t match and I hadn’t washed them in a while. Every part of me felt achy, as if I were coming down with a mild flu. This happened to me every time I got anxious about the business, and recently everything was about the business. How we had no money, how I didn’t know what to do about my mother, how I wasn’t the man that my father was or would ever be, but maybe he wasn’t the man I’d thought he was. So what did I know about anything?
Leaning back, I propped my head against a rolled-up T-shirt, one with a picture of a deer with red crosshairs superimposed over its sleek body. I fell asleep there, telling myself it would be just for a minute, and then I’d start working on one of the many pieces stored in the skinning fridge. Everything felt easier on the cusp of sleep.
My parents’ house sat lit by buttery circles of dueling streetlamps. There were homes on either side, but no one lived in them. FOR RENT signs perpetually swung in the weedy front lawns. It stayed swampy year-round. Soupy ditchwater bred mosquitoes and their squirming larvae until they clouded the sky. They bled us dry, tiny vampires that hugged our necks and the backs of our calves, leaving behind bright pink welts.
The entrance to the local cemetery was at the far end of the street. Milo and I played hide-and-seek there when we were young. It was where we’d shared our first cigarettes and our beginner sips of whiskey, backs leaned against the lot’s sole mausoleum. It belonged to the Laniers, a family that died out before we were born. We traced our fingers in the engravings until we could sign the names in our sleep. They felt like family we’d never met, watching over us as we ran around the weedy tombstones. We forgot about the bodies buried below us in the dirt, so focused on the fun we were having.
It was where we’d buried our father. Our mother’s plot was empty beside his, graves they’d purchased in duplicate back when death felt a long way off. Strange to know my father’s body was buried less than a block from his own house. Like he could just get up one night and come home, unlock the front door with the spare key, and sit down comfortably, sipping beer in his recliner. Watch The Late Show. Fall into bed beside my mother. Sleep like he wasn’t gone from us, forever.
I parked behind my brother, pulling over the oil spot where my father’s truck used to leak before my mother sold it. That spot would never grow again, and in fact looked smaller to me, the hot beat of the sun and the persistent rain working to erode the memory of it.
Bats clipped through the purple sky, narrowly diving in and out of the branches of the oaks that bookended the house. The light over the door had burned out again and the mail was piled up inside the metal mailbox. I took in the assorted catalogs, bills, a few small packages that felt like they could’ve been DVDs, and dusted off the dead moths that had made the mail their grave.
I unlocked the door and walked inside, passing framed pictures of our family, studio shots in church clothes. My brother looked tall and gangly and pimpled in his best suit at age fourteen, myself trussed up like a piglet in a frilly pink party dress I wore only if someone threatened death. My teeth were bared in the shot, as if I were restraining myself from biting my brother’s hand, which rested awkwardly on my shoulder.
I kicked off my boots right there in the entryway, socked feet sinking into the orange-and-yellow shag. The microwave whirred in the kitchen. My mother was heating a Pyrex bowl full of frozen mixed vegetables, and my niece, Lolee, sat at the counter, cracking open Oreos and peeling out the centers. She stacked them until there were matching piles of cream and cookies.
“Gonna eat those cookies?”
“Nope.” The cookie stack was unceremoniously dumped into the same trash can where my mother threw the packaging from a sticky Styrofoam tray of chicken parts. Lolee picked up the wad of icing and rolled it between her palms, forming it into a dense ball. Then she took a big bite. Cream gummed in her braces, she turned to me and grinned.