Everything I Left Unsaid(13)

“Okay,” I said, “sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

I blinked. Sorry for not being able to ask for what I want. Sorry I can’t get anything for you from town. Sorry for being here…Christ, what was wrong with me? Apologizing was an old habit.

“I don’t know, I guess.”

“I guess I don’t either. So stop.”

Right. So stop. That easy. I might be off the farm, but parts of the farm were still very much in me.

Making a grocery list in my head I walked back to my own trailer, my eyes on the dust of the track between the RVs.

“Hello, neighbor,” a woman said and I looked up to see Joan, sitting on a lawn chair on a small improvised deck on the side of her RV. She wore a short, green silk robe and a bland expression of disdain.

“Hi,” I said, feeling utterly grubby in the face of Joan’s inexplicable trailer-park elegance. She was actually kind of regal, sitting there. It was the rhinestones on her toes, maybe. Or her straight posture in the lawn chair, the casual way she held her cigarette.

Because it wasn’t her dirty-blond hair piled up on her head, or her pale blue eyes. The scars on her cheeks from long-ago acne.

But her legs, beneath that green robe, went on for miles.

“I’m Annie,” I said, into the silence.

“Joan.”

The trailer door opened and a man came out, pulling a shirt on over his head. He was thick and muscled, hairy all over, not just his chest. Even his stomach was hairy. When his head popped out of his shirt, he smiled at Joan, his face covered in a thick black five-o’clock shadow. “See you, babe,” he said leaning over the small railing as if to kiss her. Joan took a drag from her cigarette, blowing the smoke toward him, and he pulled back, rebuffed. Though he didn’t seem to be too upset about it.

“I put a little something extra for you on the counter,” he said to Joan before turning away. He gave me a wink and a smile that was so slimy it made me want to take a shower in my clothes.

If my life depended on it I could not look back over at Joan.

A prostitute? Am I living next door to a prostitute?

“A little hot for a scarf, don’t you think?” Joan said.

I put my hand up to it, wincing slightly as I touched the bruises. Joan smirked, like she knew what was under the water-lily print. Like she had been there that night in my kitchen. Like in the ten seconds we’d stood in front of each other, Joan knew all about me.

And all of it was sad.

Without another word, I left, my cheeks on fire.

Dylan had it all wrong. Ben was about as threatening as a mouse.

It was Joan I had to watch out for.

—

There was no guidebook for running away from an abusive husband. I had to go with my gut nine times out of ten, and my gut hated towns.

CNN was on in most bars all day. Magazines shouted scandalous, salacious headlines: Wife Missing! Man Grieving! in every grocery store.

Internet access was everywhere.

The potential of being spotted—found—just seemed so much higher in a city.

But that’s where grocery stores were.

In this case, Cherokee, North Carolina. There was an Indian reservation just outside of town and its influence was heavy in all the gift stores, with women and men in full headdress sitting out front, selling the chance to take a picture with them for five bucks.

All the restaurants had the word Chief in them.

It was a strange place.

The Appalachian Trail also went through here, or near here somewhere. There were men and women with giant backpacks, and filthy legs beneath their shorts, walking along the side of the road with their thumbs out.

Hitchhiking? Really?

Who the hell got to be so naive? So trusting? They were literally asking for trouble.

But when I caught sight of their faces in my rearview mirror, I realized they were probably my age. Just out of college, maybe. Having a little adventure before finding a job, or going back to grad school.

I stopped looking at them. Angry at all their opportunity. Their youth that looked so different from mine.

An IGA sat on a corner and I pulled in and parked in the shadows closest to the dumpster. In the silence of the car after turning off the engine, I went over my plan.

Get in, get out. Don’t make eye contact. Be forgettable.

That had been my credo for my week on the run.

Forgettable, I could do. I’d perfected it, really.

Once inside, I sped through the aisles, picking the same things I had for years until I stopped, my hands on a box of cereal that Hoyt loved.

I’m not…I don’t have to get this. I put the Cheerios back on the shelf and then turned to get the generic Froot Loops. My favorite. Glancing down in the cart, I realized I’d gotten all of his favorite things.

Cottage cheese.

I hated cottage cheese.

As I walked back to the dairy section to put the cottage cheese away, I felt someone watching me, and I looked out of the corner of my eyes at a woman with three kids hanging off the cart. All of them staring at me.

I accidentally made eye contact and the woman smiled.

“Do I know you?” she asked. “You look really familiar.”

Panic slipped over me like delicate, poisonous lace.

“I don’t think so,” I said, resisting the urge to put my sunglasses down over my eyes, leave the basket, and run.