The Animators(63)

I am real stoned.

Shauna’s looking at me in the rearview. Her teeth glow in the dark. “Sharon.”

“Yeah.”

“Why are you back?”

“I don’t know,” I stall. “Figured I was overdue for a visit.”

She smirks. “Overdue for a visit, huh.”

I have always hated having to decode whatever my family says. Everything is implicit with Mom and Shauna. Everything goes without saying. It feels like they’re trying to trick me into making some sort of disclosure about myself that proves this point about me that they’ve secretly agreed upon. Every conversation, however minor, becomes another instance in which they are leaving me behind and I am running to catch up. It stings. Especially now, when nothing goes without saying. When I’m at my slowest and weakest. When I’m not even sure myself what I’m doing back here.

This all stitches together in my head, hot and itchy. I lean forward and say, “What exactly are you trying to say to me?”

“Nothing.”

“No. We’re not playing that game. You need to tell me exactly what the fuck you mean by what am I doing back here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Shauna.”

“I mean exactly what I say, Sharon.”

“You don’t. I may have just had a stroke, but I’m not a moron and I never was.”

There’s a silence. Shauna finally breaks. “You hate being back here,” she says. “We all know it. It’s been, what, four years since you visited? My kids didn’t remember you. Even when I showed them a picture. So why now?”

“Because Mom pulled out the crying act. And you know how that works wonders on me.”

“That’s not an act,” she says. “She cried to me, too. This really upset her. You didn’t even call her when it happened.”

I feel a twinge of guilt. “I did.”

“But not when it happened. Didn’t you wait like six weeks?”

“Little hard to call when I couldn’t talk without slobbering all over myself.”

“Oh, you weren’t that bad off,” she says dismissively.

“You weren’t fucking there. How dare you tell me it wasn’t that bad.”

Mel coughs softly. “She actually was in really bad shape,” she intercedes. “She couldn’t talk. For a while.”

Shauna glances at her, then back at the road. “Really?”

“You think Mom was upset?” I tell her. “It took me a month to figure out how to walk again. It was so painful when I got up for the first time that they had to give me morphine. I missed being a vegetable by about two inches. I was terrified. And the last thing I do when I’m scared is talk to you people. Because you always seem to make it worse.”

Shauna holds up one hand. “Okay.”

“No, it’s not okay. I am thirty-two years old and I had a stroke,” I yell. “They don’t even know how it happened. It happened because I am fucked.”

“All right. I’m sorry. Good God.”

We head back toward town on 460. Pass the country club, the Cattlemen’s Association, the new Dairy Queen with a long line of trucks and SUVs crowding its lot. A few teenage girls, delicate necks rising from down jackets, flit between. Shauna stops at the four-way light at the Faulkner bypass. An abandoned Maloney’s truck yawns open in a field.

“I didn’t mean we aren’t glad to see you,” she says. “It’s just that you don’t like seeing us.”

“That’s not true.”

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.”