The Animators(64)

“Nuh uh.”

“Yeah. They are.”

“You’re lyin,” Shauna says comfortably as the door swings shut.

The parking lot is quiet. Music pipes in faintly through loudspeakers. It sounds like Amy Grant. I shift my butt on the seat, trying to stretch.

“Are you high?” Shauna asks me.

“Yup.”

“Me too.” She sniffs something back into her head and closes her eyes. “Tired. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have kids. I mean, I love them and everything. But they just eat you alive.”

She’s quiet again until “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You didn’t upset me.”

“I did, though,” she says. “You know, sometimes I feel bad about being mean to you when we were kids. Or just being…I dunno.”

“Not sticking up for me?”

“Uh. Okay.”

“Like when Brandon said I had dyke boots? Remember that?”

“You’ve thought about this some.”

I don’t answer.

“Well, I wanna divorce,” she says. “So.”

“Really?”

“He doesn’t give a fuck about me. His kids barely see him. He’s been screwing around with this girl who works at Nestlé.” She stares out the window shaking her head, lips pinched. “I don’t know what it is about Kisses women liking the ones who treat them bad.” She looks at me in the rearview and raises her eyebrows. “We all seem to do it.”

I shrug, uncomfortable.

“So fuck Brandon. If you see his car on the way out of town and want to slash the tires, go ahead.”

“Pass that along to Mel. She loves destroying property.”

“I like that girl,” Shauna says. “I do. She probably had a hard time growing up, too. You got a lot of shit you didn’t deserve, okay?”

“A lot of it came from our parents.”

Shauna shifts. “Maybe.”

“Maybe, huh.”

“Sharon, they fought so much with each other, you think they had the time to concentrate on any of us?”

“They were better with you and Jared. You made sense to them.”

“Are you saying I didn’t get any of her bullshit? Looks like someone wasn’t paying attention.” She’s getting louder. “She set a piss-poor example for all of us. And then she has the nerve to tell me not to fight with Brandon in front of the kids. Don’t you think I wanna screw around like she did? But I don’t. I got kids. I got responsibilities. They’re watching what I do. Like we were.”

She turns to face me. “Just cause Mom and I hang out don’t mean we think the same way. She wants what she wants, and when she wants something, it’s like everything else just falls away. She’s always been like that. She won’t ever change. I mean, have you ever been able to read Mom? She’s so up and down. Something’s wrong with her. Like something in her head.”

Hearing Shauna say this makes me laugh.

She smiles thinly. “And you know what? I liked your all’s movie. It was hilarious. And if she’s so afraid to watch it, then her loss.”

“She’s afraid to watch it?”

“Well, she didn’t say so, but that’s what I think. She’s afraid there’ll be something about her in it.” She rolls her eyes.

We both relax. There’s a companionable silence in the car now. I wonder if I would feel unburdened, if I would feel somehow loosened from it all, by telling one more person, aside from Mel, to be with in it all. I figure now’s as good a time as ever to find out.

“I’m back,” I tell her, “because some things happened when I was a kid, some things I sort of forgot about that came back to me a few years ago. It made me want to see everything. To see how it would make me feel.”

“And how’s that going.”

“Did you see my panic attack during dinner? Not so awesome.”

“What kind of stuff did you remember?”

I take a deep breath. “When I was eleven, Teddy Caudill and I found a bunch of pictures of little girls that his dad took. Some of the stuff the FBI got later.”

Shauna goes still. There’s a pause in the music piped over the loudspeaker, a moment of almost complete silence before we hear an ad for a sale on Goodyear tires.

“You’re joking. Right?” she says quietly.

I stare at her in the rearview.

She puts her face to the side without turning in her seat, waiting for me to say something. She inhales, exhales.

I wipe my nose onto my hand, rub my eyes. Outside, the automated Walmart doors part. Mel lopes out into the night, a stack of cigarette cartons tucked under one arm. She holds one aloft in her hand, triumphant. Breaks into a run for us.

—

We cruise back through town. I try to see everything: the long downtown building that once housed Belk-Simpson on Main Street, the Faulkner Sundry Store, Cummings Lunch Counter, which retained its rattling bar seats and Johnson-era newspaper clippings on the walls until it closed.

The hilltop of Phillips-Stamper Cemetery hangs over everything. Our father lies at the western end, feet pointing toward the interstate. Small lanterns and floodlights have been placed on headstones, creating a glow on the rise in the dark, a hundred pinpoints of light. Mel cranes her neck to look, watching the hillside rise higher and higher above town, an outline of the city founder, his back to us, visible against the sky. There are stars. She curses softly in wonder, state-tax cigarette trembling between her lips.