Kiss Me Hard Before You Go (10 page)

“Miles!” Evie called, desperation surfaced in her voice. “Get back here,” she said angrily.

“Even he knows when something’s better,” Finch said. “Go on back, buddy,” he whispered to Miles and gently pushed him. “Go on,” he cooed, feeling a tinge of guilt after seeing Evie’s hurt expression. Sometimes he wanted to sock himself in the face.

She pulled on Miles and gestured for him to go her way, and all Finch could see was that dumb swath of fabric of hers flying up. He never loved and hated a night gown so much.

Chapter 10

Evie chewed Miles out, and then apologized profusely for being so mean to him. She was just so – mad. Finch made her angry. She wanted to punch him on both sides of his face and then run her fingers across his stomach, touching the smooth firm surface. She groaned aloud and balled her fist. To any outsider, she looked like a two year old having a tantrum.

She darted up the steps and sat herself back down on the swing. Tripod moved her way. “Oh, now you want to be near me,” she said. “Benedict Arnold.” Tripod cowered and decided a spot further away would be a prudent choice at that time.

She could hear her dad clomping around in the house, probably sneaking something from the pantry. She sighed and tried to think about anything but Finch. She swung back and forth with her knees up to her chest. The tips of her boot heels were covered in specs of dirt and touched the edge of the swing.

***

Birthdays were always a big deal in the Barnes household – Gray made them that way. For weeks he’d sing, “I know a secret, and I ain’t gonna tell. And it’s really swell.” He’d smile and wink at Evie, as if she were supposed to be on her knees begging him to tell her what that secret was. “You can’t pry it out of me no matter how hard you try,” he always said.

Evie wasn’t into surprises. Just let her birthdays come and go without any fanfare and forget the whole thing happened. That’s what she preferred, but her pleas for a quiet affair fell on deaf ears where Gray was concerned.

On her sixteenth birthday, Evie would have been perfectly content letting the night pass without so much as a congratulatory message from friends and family. Gray had other thoughts and threw her a small party. Small being the operative word. Evie didn’t have a long list of friends, real friends, the kind that Evie knew she could count on if her life depended on it. Katie was it, and Evie was just fine with that. Having more than one was too complicated, at least for her.

Cooper, Gray, and Katie watched as Evie opened each present. Gray bent over and picked up the large box, which had obviously been wrapped by a professional with its curled ribbon and shiny red bow.

He rubbed his hands together. “You’re gonna love your gift.”

She tore the paper open and opened the brown box, pulling out the brown cowboy boots with accents of turquoise running up and down the textured cow hide. “These are the ones I saw in the window,” she said with a wide smile.

“Ole Katie told me you’ve been eyeing ‘em for a while. Put ‘em on,” he said.

She slipped her feet into them, feeling the perfection. It was as if her feet were made for them, or the other way around. She got up and walked around the living room, beaming from the comfort of them. They were cushiony and soft. “They’re perfect,” she said.

Gray looked pleased with himself. “I had to play P.I. to find out what size you wear,” he said. “Katie helped me out some,” he added and winked at her. Katie giggled.

“Lawd have mercy, I had to special order them from Berk’s. Took a whole month. I was worried you weren’t gonna get them in time,” he said.

“I love them,” Evie said and rushed to hug him, squeezing him as hard as she could.

He patted her on the back, letting her go and smiled down at her. “There’s a first,” he said. “If I had known all it’d take was a pair of boots, I would’ve gotten you a pair every year just to have a hug like that.”

She hugged him again and traipsed around the house in her new pair of boots. They rarely came off her feet from that time on, unless she had to shower or sleep, or had to work in the barn. They were a part of her, a gift from her dad, and she’d never toss them out in the trash or donate them to Goodwill. They’d be with her for life.

***

Another day passed, and Evie kept herself busy working the farm. It was time to deworm the cattle, a task that’d take an entire day, and one that Evie dreaded. No farmer was ever up for the task, but it was one that Evie hated more than anything about the job.

Wrangling them into the barn was enough of a feat, but getting them lined up and standing still long enough for Gray to shove the thick, gooey liquid up their nose was even harder. They were smart enough animals to catch on. Once a few went through the head gate— a contraption that trapped their big heads inside a round metal circle—they hesitated to move forward, only frustrating Gray even more.

“Get in there!” he hollered.

Evie tapped on the cow’s behind with the poker stick, but it was wasn’t hard enough. She just didn’t have the stomach for it. She wouldn’t want to get struck with one, so she knew they wouldn’t either.

“Come on!” he cried desperately. His cheeks had turned three shades of red, and his voice was crackling, like he was on the verge of tears.

He grabbed the stick from Evie and hit the heifer in the rump. She instantly moved, and Evie pulled the lever on the head gate. This went on for hours, and the putrid scent of cow manure and urine bristled in their weathered, run-down barn. The air was stifling hot and thick with humidity. Several beams of wood had rotted and were being smothered by mud dauber nests. Cylinder tubes resembling organ pipes constructed of dirt reached the barn ceiling.

Evie took a step backward into a pile of cow shit, thankful she was wearing her old rubber boots – the pair she didn’t care much for. “Dammit!” she said, seeing that some of it had gotten onto the bottom of her jeans. She’d have to rinse them off before she got back in the house.

“Watch your mouth!” Gray warned, but he was being a hypocrite because Evie heard him swear more than once that day. He always apologized when he did. Gray hated to curse and loathed it when he said a bad word in front of a woman. “A gentleman never curses around a lady,” he’d often say. “You make sure no man ever curses around you. Ain’t no reason to unless his life is at stake.”

“Did you...?” she began, but thought the better of it.

“What?” he asked, eyes widened and hopeful that she was seeking more guidance from him about the dos and don’ts of dating.

“Did you curse around
her
?”

He knew who the “her” was without a mention of her name. “Once. The day before she left,” he said, and Evie was sorry she asked. He changed the topic and added a few more snippets of wisdom, hoping his daughter would end up with the perfect man, or at least his impression of what the embodiment of perfection looked like for his one and only child.

Gray had a long set of guidelines that a man must meet to be worthy of his daughter. “He should pick you up for your date. None of this meeting somewhere.” He frowned. “I see so many girls meeting a guy some place. Seems somewhat tawdry if you ask me.”

Evie rarely had a response. She’d let him ramble, dishing out advice that had somehow stuck with her. “And I know all you women’s libbers like to open your own door, but let the poor fellow do it. Let him wait on you hand and foot treating you like the princess you are,” he’d say.

It was like this the entire day. Her pulling the lever while Gray’s hands were covered in the nasty, snotty looking consistency. She had to keep track of every heifer, writing down their number, making sure that each of them was dewormed. Each heifer had a yellow tag attached to one ear with bold black numbers. Evie never named them anymore. She learned a long time ago not to because they weren’t ever coming back.

“This one’s a beauty,” he said, smiling at the heifer. He talked low and sweet to them, and patted them on the head. Some said he had a natural knack with them. That they’d do anything for him, but he’d always shrug off those compliments and say, “It’s how Daddy was. I learned from him.”

Evie scrawled the heifer’s number down on a sheet of paper. “That’s ninety-three,” she said. They were almost finished.

Her legs were achy, and her lower back hurt. She knew that at eighteen years of age, she shouldn’t be in that much pain, but a day’s work was just that – work.

Heifers, she equated, were like her mother, but heifers were more forgiving. Her mother wasn’t, and for that, she could never bring herself to stop hating her. 

Her mother couldn’t deal. She didn’t want to wait out Gray’s next business decision or fanciful venture, one that was sure to make them some serious money. She wanted real cash, the kind that they could roll around in and spend frivolously on trinkets and trips and things that no one needs. The type of things rich people had just because they could. She hated that she wore the same old frocks and shoes that dated back to the Kennedy administration, and that her daughter was content running around in grimy denim – worn and torn from a day’s hard work. Her hands weren’t the beautiful buttermilk complexion they once were, but tanned with new found wrinkles and age spots to match. She loathed that she saw a reflection of a haggard woman in her mid-thirties whose life, she supposed, was over.

It didn’t take long for her to muster the strength or lack of consideration, depending on how one viewed it, to leave her family. On a beautiful autumn day, while Gray and Evie sat at a cattle auction, she packed up a few of her treasured belongings and left. A note sat on the kitchen table. Just a few words – none of remorse, none of promises. She said she couldn’t deal with it anymore, and wanted to start her life over without them. Gray blamed himself – like any father and spouse would. A small part of Evie wanted to blame the carnies for her mother’s escape – that maybe she wouldn’t be able to deal with seeing strange folk on her land every summer without reaping copious benefits in exchange. But mostly, Evie learned to hate, because her own mother, the one who had given birth to her, had chosen to live her life without her.

Rumors skyrocketed through the roof. Where had Rebecca Barnes gone? Why did she leave? Was it for another man? When Evie was asked, she’d bark and say, “Who cares,” because she didn’t. Why should they? She told herself that anyway. She refused to grieve over her mother. She had made her choice, and Evie had made hers.

She received a letter from her once, a few months after she left. Evie never opened it, and tore it to shreds right in front of her stupefied father. “We don’t need her,” she said to him. The tattered rose color paper was spread across the linoleum kitchen floor. Evie watched her father stoop to the ground, trying to put the pieces back together one at a time.

She bent down and picked up all of the fragments of paper in one swoop and tossed them in the garbage. “Don’t,” she pleaded to him. “It’ll only make things worse. She’s gone now, Daddy,” she had said. At the young age of eight, Evie had moved on with her life without her mother in it.

“That anger will kill the good in you,” her dad told her on more than one occasion, but she let it go in one ear and out the other. She could focus all of her energy hating her mother for what she did to them, especially for what she did to her father. Leaving him took a piece of his soul, and even at a young age, Evie was aware that a glimmer of light had died from Gray’s big blue eyes. For that, she could hate her and have no remorse for harboring that feeling. It was real and true, and she would never apologize for feeling that way.

Chapter 11

Evie lay on her couch, trying to watch a show on the television, but the reception was poor, and the screen rolled continuously. She got up to move the ears of the antenna and let out a frustrated sigh. The television was worthless, showing nothing but black and white images in scrambled fashion and blurred images of actresses and actors on shows Evie would have liked to have watched but rarely got the chance to see. At best, they were able to get three stations, but most of the time, two of the three weren’t even viewable.

Gray was out with Cooper, hanging out at the bar and playing pool – things that she thought sounded dull and like a waste of time. But he needed his guy time, and if bonding over a few watered down beers and shooting at some colored balls made him feel manly, then she could understand. Besides, she liked having the house to herself. She so rarely got the chance to hang out in her PJs and eat a bowl of ice cream for dinner. When he was home, she had to make sure that they ate right, and a little bit of her was always on edge – like a mama bear with its cub.

Someone pounded against her front door, and Evie screeched, heading toward the front window. She checked the time on her clock, seeing it was too late for Katie to be coming over. Katie wouldn’t have knocked so hard anyway. She wouldn’t have even bothered to knock for that matter. Katie would let herself in and make herself at home. She hadn’t talked to Katie since she told her she was pregnant, and she worried about her best friend. If they didn’t talk the next day, Evie was going to head over to her house and check in on her. That alone should tell Katie how much she cared, because going over to Nate McDaniels’ house was not something Evie did that often. He frightened her, and everyone in the house walked around him like they were walking on egg shells, afraid to stir the pot. Evie knew that was the reason Katie chose to stay at her house all the time—to get away from that sterile environment. She often wondered how a person as full of life as Katie could be related to a toad like Nate.