Heteroflexibility (14 page)

“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 all 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.”

“Really.”

I scowled. I didn’t want to go into it all, Cade, Fern.. “Seems a bit much for you to come all the way here yourself. How did you know where to come?”

“Fern.”

I tensed up at her name. “You know her?”

“Of her. She called Aud when she saw you’d packed up. We realized you were reacting pretty…strongly to last night. Fern told us where to go.”

“She say anything else?”

“Nikki said she seemed relieved to know why you’d left.”

So she assumed I hadn’t found out then. God. What a mess. I kept my gaze on everything in the room but Bradford, books, ceramic figurines, the one sampler Mom had embroidered before declaring it an unfit hobby for the impatient. It read, “Good things come to those who bait.” Dad’s fishing tackle stood in the corner by the door, ready for a moment’s impulse.

Bradford drummed his fingers on the arm of the sofa. “Did something else happen?”

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Are you planning to move back here?”

I picked at a loose thread on the towel by my wrist. “I don’t know anything past this weekend.”

Dad poked his head back in. “Soup’s almost on. You probably want to wash up.”

I hopped up from the chair, glad for the reprieve. “That was fast.”

Dad dried his hands on a dish rag. “Maybe I really did make TV dinners.”

***

Dad and Bradford dominated the meal-talk. Bradford wanted to know everything about oil, and living off shore, and the price of gas. They good-heartedly debated whether it was George W. Bush’s fault prices had gotten so high, and if Obama’s imminent election had made any difference in how they had plummeted. I didn’t know anything about any of it, so I just shoveled warmed-over stew into my mouth and listened.

We cleaned up together, Dad clearing, me washing, and Bradford drying, the sleeves of his designer shirt rolled up to the elbow, like the night I’d met him.

“I’m just going to run this trash out,” Dad said, hauling the bag out from under the sink.

After the screen door slammed shut, Bradford said, “He’s a really great guy. I see where you get your sense of humor.”

“Oh he’s nothing compared to Mom. Her wit was so abrasive, it would peel paint from the walls.”

“So your Dad’s the kinder, gentler version.”

I pulled the drain stop, watching the suds circle out. “I worry that he’s lonely.”

“When did you lose your mom?”

“When I was fifteen.”

“You miss her?”

Rinsing the sink gave me time to consider my reply.  I never answered this question honestly. The truth was something I held close to my chest, like a bad hand when I was deep into a bluff.

I shut off the water. After all the lies I’d been dealt in the past few days, the unvarnished truth seemed the only course. “Not really. She was a hard woman. Biting. Full of criticism. I couldn’t do anything right. I might have hated her, even.”

Bradford exhaled in a big rush. “Whoa.”

Now I couldn’t stop. “She made me feel inferior and weak. Made fun of my hair, especially, how ugly I was. Dad was browbeaten, lucky to live away from us most of the time, off shore. When she got cervical cancer, I was certain she was just rotting from the inside out from pure meanness.”

Bradford took the towel and began drying my hands, gently, with great care. “Sometimes bad things happen to unpleasant people too.”

I let him keep hold of my hands, separated by the cotton cloth. “But that’s the thing. It was just me. I was just a whiny, self-absorbed teenager. I didn’t get her at all. I didn’t see the good things about her. I didn’t know what made her the way she was.”