Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [41]
The year I was six I remembered the best. We had the most photos from that year, from the summer before first grade and the spring at the end of it.
I flipped through the pages, touching each picture. Rivers clogged with beaver dams. The sprawling flatness of Casper. The layered pink cliffs near Lander. Herds of bison at Yellowstone National Park and blurry pronghorn antelopes leaping through the Red Desert. A postcard from the art exhibit we’d seen of Bev Doolittle, a western artist who hid Indians and wildlife in her painted landscapes. I remembered pointing out pinto horses in the notches of aspen trees, the creased faces of Indian chiefs in boulders on the ride home.
We’d visited the Devil’s Tower, like a wedding cake carved from ancient rock. The Tetons, jagged mountains whose name meant “breasts” in French. Hell’s Half Acre, which made our badlands look not so bad at all.
No wonder I’d fallen in love with geology.
We’d gotten lost plenty of times, but it had always felt like an adventure. We had to coax directions from the owners of ranches and diners and trading posts, the kind of folks who thought long and hard before speaking. The farther out in the hinterlands, the more eccentric the directions. Stuff like:
When the dirt gets a sorta yellow color, you’ve gone too far.
Go on past the Lutheran church and then, at Edwin’s house, make a right. (As if we had any idea who Edwin was.)
You’ll see an old brown building that says Dairy Mart. Don’t turn there!
In the following years, whenever Momma mentioned the things we’d seen—“Do you remember Indian Ridge?” or “Look, there’s a picture of the Elkhorn Arch in Afton. We drove under it. Grace, do you remember?”—I claimed that it had been too long, that I remembered nothing.
But I did remember.
Maybe not all the places Momma and I had seen. But I remembered the way we’d been. Together.
I remembered how we’d always tried to stretch pageant season a little longer, to find just one more pageant for me to enter, to fill up the gas tank just one last time. Though like water swirling into a drain, everything eventually wound down to Washokey.
When Momma acted like my Little Miss Washokey screwup was such a fiasco, it brought to light a fundamental difference between us. I lived for our road trips. But for Momma, the pageants were the important thing. Our journeys had just been the means to an end.
There was only one photo of that last pageant. Momma must have taken others, but I didn’t know what had happened to them.
This one showed all the girls dancing onstage, in the mayhem of our final act. I hadn’t covered my face with paper on this one, since Paige Shelmerdine and her flamingo pink dress had done the job for me. Now I wondered if when that image was snapped, I’d already made the impulsive decision that would knock my universe sideways.
I tried to imagine Mandarin standing there, watching, somewhere just outside the frame. But through all my years of pondering, I never could guess what she’d been thinking when she saw Momma scold me backstage.
I still couldn’t guess what Mandarin was thinking—like when she’d asked me to run away with her to California.
I chased that thought out of my mind and closed the book.
On Monday morning, we arrived at school a few minutes early. Taffeta danced away into the throng of kindergartners. I stood in the cottonwood grove and scanned the lawn for Mandarin, although I knew I wouldn’t find her. She usually arrived late in the mornings, since she considered attending homeroom a pointless waste of sleep.
I adopted an insolent expression as I leaned back against a tree. Or tried to, because the trunk was a little too far away. I ended up practically diagonal. When I adjusted my pose, the bark made a crumpling sound.
I turned and found a poster for the cowboy dance stapled to the tree trunk.
I stared at it. In tempera paint, a hokey country couple danced in a swarm of musical notes. Every phrase was framed with exclamation points: Come one, come all!! Kick up your