The Familiar Dark(50)

I wrenched open the front door, shot Zach a look over my shoulder. “Stop it,” I said, as loud as I dared. “It was sex. And it was good. But it didn’t mean anything. Get back in that kitchen and have coffee with your wife. I am not what you want. Trust me.” Even now, sparing his feelings. The way women are taught to behave. Making it about what was good for him instead of what was bad for me.

“What do you want?” Zach asked, like he actually thought the answer might be him. It almost made me pity him for being such a child. He still didn’t understand that what this might have been once upon a time made no difference anymore. One-night stand lust, potential true love, lifelong friendship. All the possibilities ceased to matter the moment Junie died.

“I want to wake up tomorrow and have a daughter again. Or I want to wake up the day I met you and call in sick to the diner. Rewrite history.” I shrugged. “I want this pain to go away. Can you make that happen?”

Zach shook his head, his eyes ancient. “No.”

I stepped out onto the porch. “Then grow up, because you don’t have anything I need.”





TWENTY


I’d visited my mama’s trailer more since Junie’s death than I had in the entire time she’d been alive. It scared me how familiar it all felt, how I slipped back into it like I’d never managed to claw my way out. It fed into my horrified suspicion that this was where I was always destined to end up. That my time as my daughter’s mother had been only a momentary blip, a brief respite from my true nature. That what I really was, and always had been, was my mother’s daughter.

The rusted black pickup was still parked in my mama’s yard, but this time I got the dubious pleasure of meeting the man who drove it. Or at least I assumed the guy passed out on my mama’s ripped faux-leather sofa was the owner. One homemade-tattoo-covered arm thrown over his face, a sliver of hairy beer belly winking at me where his T-shirt failed to meet the waistband of his dirty jeans. He was so exactly my mama’s type she might as well have picked him out of a catalog.

He barely stirred when I let myself in, tattered screen door slamming behind me. “Mama?” I called. “You in here?” Too keyed up to be careful, forgetting all the protocols in place to keep things on an even keel. Don’t scream, don’t demand, don’t surprise. My mama was like a rabid dog that way, one mistake in the approach and you were as good as dead.

“Jesus Christ, quiet the fuck down,” my mama hissed from the direction of the kitchen. She came around from behind the fridge, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Got half a mind to kick your ass,” she said. “Barging in here like you own the place.”

The thing that had been nagging at me, plucking my mind like a violin string over and over until it about drove me crazy, had come rushing in as I’d left the Logans’ house this morning. The first time I’d let it go in what felt like forever, and suddenly there it was, my mind laying it out in front of me like a hog on a platter, ripe for the taking. I pointed at her, took two steps in her direction. “How did you know what Junie’s walk was like?” I demanded.

My mama’s brow wrinkled up. “What in the hell are you talking about?” She swirled her cigarette hand beside her head. “Has grief made you loony, or what?”

The man on the couch lowered his arm, squinted at me through bleary eyes. “Who the hell are you?” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Shut up,” I said without looking at him, kept my eyes glued on my mama. “In my house the other day, in my kitchen. You said you knew about Zach and me because he and Junie have the same walk.”

My mama stubbed her cigarette out on the countertop, flicked it into the sink. “Yeah, so?”

“How’d you know? How do you know Junie’s walk well enough to recognize it in Zach? And don’t give me some bullshit about seeing her from a distance. You’ve never been that close to her, not for long enough to matter.” I wanted those words to be the truth, needed them to be, but I already suspected they weren’t, long before my mama opened her mouth and confirmed it.

“You got some nerve, coming into my home, accusing me.” She paused, took a swig from her beer. “What exactly is it you’re accusing me of, anyway? Knowing how your daughter walked?” Her voice turned high and full of fake panic. “Quick, someone call the cops. I should be arrested. I’m a goddamn menace to society.”

That’s how you always knew my mama felt cornered, backed against the wall by her own lies. She came out swinging, wild and mean, and she didn’t care who she took down in her wake.

I sank down into one of the wobbly chairs clustered around the scarred kitchen table, leaned forward until my forehead almost touched my knees. “You knew her,” I said, more to myself than to my mama. “You knew Junie.” It was my worst nightmare come true. Everything I’d tried to protect her from, insulate her against, walking right up and making itself at home.

“I was her grandma.”

I shot upward so fast tiny stars sparked in my vision. “I was her mother. And I told you no. I told you to stay the fuck away from her!” I slammed one hand down onto the table, wondered how bad a price I might have to pay for the startled jump it caused my mama. “Isn’t that what you always said when we were growing up, to anyone who tried to interfere, stick their noses in our business trying to help Cal and me? That you were our mama and you made the rules?”