Hick - Andrea Portes [40]
I miss my room. I miss my bed. I miss being a little punk with no care in the world, giving two fucks about it, just looking for trouble.
I guess I found it.
There’s a darkness here. There’s something you can’t put your finger on that’s creeping in through the edges of the linoleum and the squares between the tiles. it’s something sideways behind the drywall, something dirty and bored and mean.
I want to go home. I want my mama. All this time I thought she and I were just pure hatred. And maybe that’s true a little. But maybe a little part of her looks at me and remembers about being young and now I get to be and she’s not. Not no more. She traded in her young part to give me mine. I’m this red flag walking around, jarring her into the realization of all the years and all the mistakes and all the could have beens. I’m this constant reminder that she had two babies and only one got to stay.
Lord above, I wish you could have seen her. When she was young, she was like Doris Day, only sexy. She had white hair that flipped up and frosted pink lipstick and white patent-leather boots. She was the only girl in the state of Nebraska, I guarantee, that had the guts to wear knee-high shiny white boots. I have a picture of her in my head, wearing those boots, sitting on a plaid sofa, in a little pale frosty-blue mini-dress. she’s holding a baby up to her shoulder and smiling at the camera.
But there’s something in her smile, some giveaway behind the eyes, something scared, uncomfortable, suffering. And I wonder if that look, that far-off, buried, nervous secret, is because that baby in her arms, that baby that was me, came just a little too soon. Too quick and out of nowhere. Like one day she had hopes and dreams and then the next they were all just shut down, closed for business. When you see that look in her eyes, that sad disappointment buried deep beneath her smile, it can break your heart. The only thing that could break your heart more would be to be the reason for it.
And I wish she wouldn’t have traded her life for me.
See, you never think of your parents as people. You just think of them as the gods who raised you up and poured milk in your cornflakes. They’re just the ones you always looked up to, the ones you remember always being around, fixing things, holding your hand, making a fuss about don’t do this and don’t do that and look both ways before your cross the street. But you never think of them as someone like you. You never think of them as some human-type person like yourself who fucks up and feels bad and gets pregnant and trades their life for you. You don’t think of them like that.
I wonder if I was worth it.
I wonder how many times she wishes that baby boy had made it and not me.
Eddie comes in the kitchen and leans against the fridge. I turn my head the other way and pretend to inspect the wallpaper, little horses and cowboys riding.
“You wanna go for a drive?”
“No.”
We don’t look at each other. He stares at the floor and I stare at the wallpaper cowboys. There’s one in the middle with blond hair, bucking high off his horse with his hat in the air. If I could just jump in, I would ride off into the sunset on the back of his saddle, into the paper horizon.
“You know how to drive?”
“No.”
“You wanna learn?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll teach ya.”
I look over at him, suspicious of this nice-guy bent. I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him, but he’s playing kind. He looks up at me, slumped against the fridge, sad and leaning.
“Really?”
He nods, setting the tequila down on the counter and motioning towards the door with his head before taking his exit.
I look at the paper cowboys and the bucking broncos and, off in the distance, a cactus set down before an orange paper sun.
I