Pie Town - Lynne Hinton [90]
Oris woke up and never saw her, never felt her touch, only was clear in his senses that she had been present, that she had given him the dream of blueness, he knew that. And she was telling her husband to get up and find the priest. He had waited the entire morning for more instructions, a detailed direction, some sensible motive, for her to join him for breakfast, but there had been no other contact, no other information. At a table set for two, he had eaten his morning meal alone. But for some reason Oris did not understand, some unknown and otherworldly reason, Father George Morris was going to have to come back to Pie Town.
Oris noticed the road sign just as he drove past it. He was four miles from Gallup.
Chapter Thirty-four
Trina folded her clothes and stuffed them in a duffel bag she’d gotten from Hector, the dishwasher at the diner. She sat down on the sofa, pulled off her shoes, and rubbed her swollen feet. She had just returned from work, a lunch shift on a Saturday, and she was tired. Her ride, Frank Twinhorse, was driving down to Texas to go to his son Raymond’s boot camp graduation ceremony, and she knew that he would be there to pick her up in a couple of hours.
Trina glanced around her apartment, still deciding what she was taking and what she was leaving. In her few months living there, she had accumulated quite a few things, and she was having a difficult time letting some of her stuff go. It wasn’t like her to be sentimental about pictures and knickknacks, coffee mugs and books, but as she glanced around she realized that she had started to make herself a home there in that garage apartment. Noticing the way she had decorated, she was surprised to realize that she had built a little nest for herself.
Since leaving home at sixteen, Trina had never been one to stay too long in a place, had never attached herself to a house, so feeling this way about an apartment—a couple of rooms and the things she had bought at yard sales and thrift shops—was not anything she had ever really experienced before. It never dawned on her that she had made a home for herself in Pie Town and that she would feel a little sad to leave it.
The truth was that Trina didn’t usually make herself at home in the places she stayed, but she was also usually not one ever to be run off. When she was six and all the other children ganged up against her one afternoon at the playground, claiming she was half-breed, part Indian and part white trash, unfit to come near them, she had simply pushed them aside and taken her place on the swing set and refused to leave. They all stood around her, boys and girls, yelling at her, spitting on her, throwing clods of dirt, but she was unflappable, keeping them at bay because she kept swinging, higher and higher, threatening anyone to come too close or they’d be pummeled by her feet, up and back, up and back. One boy tried to catch the swing as she pressed past him, but when she noticed what he was doing, she kicked backward hard and fast, catching him in the throat and knocking him down. And even then, even with the other kids saying she had killed Ricky Daughtry, she kept swinging. They rolled the boy away from her, and he eventually caught his breath and got up. Finally, Ricky leading the pack, they all walked off, leaving her alone, leaving her to her swing and her resolve never to be pushed away from a place she had chosen to be.
Over and over that kind of thing would happen to Trina. Classmates, especially the girls, teachers, coaches, pastors, parents, every season there was somebody telling her she didn’t belong somewhere. And she refused to bow down or cower