Run (23 page)

“Yeah, well … that wasn’t the plan.”

Pat asks a lot of questions. About Mama. About where I’m headed. About why I’m alone. I don’t say a whole lot, though. Just one- or two-word answers.

I’m still thinking about Agnes. About the things she said.

All of it was true. I just never thought she’d be the one to say it.

It ain’t quite midnight when Pat says, “We’ll be there in a minute or two.”

I grab my stuff. She can’t take me all the way to Daddy’s house, but she can drop me on the highway. She even gives me directions, saying she’s been in these parts before, and it ain’t more than a five-minute walk to his front door.

I’m careful climbing out of the truck. And when I’m on the ground, Pat says one last thing.

“Good luck. And be safe, all right?”

“Yes, ma’am. Thanks for the ride.”

She drives off as I start walking the direction she pointed me. The little town is dark. Not too many streetlamps. And most of the windows in the houses and trailers I pass ain’t got light in them. But I manage to find the tiny brick house with Daddy’s address on the mailbox. And there’s a lamp on in the front room.

I walk up to the doorstep and then just stand there.

It’s late. And he might be in bed. Or he might not even live here. Colt said his daddy ain’t even heard from him in a while. I might be standing on somebody else’s doorstep in the middle of the night. And I ain’t sure how welcoming people are around here. This is Kentucky, after all. People got guns, and they use them.

At least in Mursey, they knew me. They might not like me, but they probably wouldn’t shoot me.

In this town, at midnight, I’m a stranger.

I take a deep breath and knock anyway.

There are voices inside. But then the door opens. And I know the man in front of me. No mistaking him.

Red-gold hair.

Eyes the color of sweet tea.

A couple scars from bar fights and brawls.

This ain’t no stranger. But he’s sure looking at me like I’m one.

“Hey, Daddy.”

He looks like he don’t know me. Like he’s never seen me before in his life.

“It’s me, Daddy,” I say. I reach up and touch my hair. “I know. With it cut this short I probably look like a boy, right? But it’s me … It’s Bo.”

“Bo,” he says. “Bo … what’re you doing here?”

“I came to see you.” Despite all the bad that’s happened tonight, I can’t help smiling. “God, I’ve sure missed you. Can I come in?”

“Uh—well, you see …”

“Wayne? Who’s out there?” It’s a woman’s voice, coming from inside the house.

“Nobody!” Daddy yells, and I try not to take it personal. “Listen, Bo—”

But I guess the woman didn’t like Daddy’s answer, because now she’s standing behind him, looking over his shoulder at me. She’s tall—taller than him—and with peroxide-blond hair. Except for the roots, which look about as dark as Agnes’s hair. Her eyes are dark, too, and right now, they’re narrowed. And even if her sight is as bad as Agnes’s, there ain’t no way she’s gonna miss the resemblance between Daddy and me.

“Nobody, huh?” she says.

Daddy looks scared. “Vera, this … this is Bo.”

“Hi,” I say. “Nice to meet you.”

But Vera don’t look like she feels the same. “Bo?” She says it like a question and an accusation rolled up in one. And even though she’s looking at Daddy now, he don’t look back.

“How’d you get here?” he asks me. “And where’s your mama?”

“It’s a real long story,” I tell him. “But that’s why I’m here, actually.” And then, because I’m still out on the porch, I ask one more time, “Can I come in?”

Vera looks like she wants to say no, but Daddy steps aside and lets me walk through the door, into the living room. There’s an old beige sofa sitting against the wall, facing a little box TV. There are kids’ toys all over the floor, too. Blocks and toy soldiers and even a teddy bear missing an eye.

“I’d better go check on Brent,” Vera says. “Make sure the knocking didn’t wake him up.”

When she’s gone, I turn to Daddy. “Who’s Brent?”

“Our son.”

“I got a little brother?” I ask.

He don’t answer. Just jumps right back into his questions. “What’s going on, Bo?”

“Right.” I sit down on the couch. “Things have been real rough with Mama lately. She’s been using a lot, and a few days ago—”

“Are you here asking for money?”

“What? No,” I say. “Nothing like that.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because … you’re my dad,” I say. “And right now I ain’t got nowhere else to go, so …”

He blinks at me, like he’s still confused. Just then, Vera comes back around the corner. And the crease between her eyes says she’s disappointed I ain’t left yet. Which makes my next words even harder. So I keep my eyes on Daddy.

He used to rock me to sleep in his grandma’s old rocking chair. Used to sing me Hank Williams songs when I was crying. Used to let me sit on his lap and watch the NASCAR race with him while he drank a beer. He’s my daddy. And no matter what this woman thinks of me, I’m his baby girl. His family.

So I take a deep breath and spit it out.

“Well … I was sorta hoping I could live here. With you.”

It wasn’t long before the days started getting hot and the humidity made us all miserable. Farmers’ kids stopped coming to school, pulled out by their parents to work in the tobacco fields. Summer was here, and we’d all be done with classes in a couple weeks. Then there were two and a half months of long, slow summer days to get through.

It got too hot to stay inside—Daddy refused to turn on the air conditioner until June to save money—so Bo and I started spending our afternoons in my backyard. We’d get off the bus at the church and head to my house. By the time we each poured ourselves a glass of sweet tea to cool down from the walk, Utah would be waiting outside for us, lying right by the back door. The first day she showed up, I nearly tripped over her. The second day, too, actually. But after a week or so, I just expected to find her there.

There wasn’t much to do outside besides get a sunburn, so Bo started bringing the book I bought her and making good on that promise to read some of the poems to me.

“ ‘Hoodwink’d with faery fancy, all amort, save to St. Agnes and her lambs unshorn …’ ”

Her voice curled around Keats’s words, so slow and soft that I nearly drifted off. We were stretched out beneath Mama’s dogwood tree, the only good shady spot in the yard. I was on my back, arms tucked behind my head. Bo was next to me, propped on her side as she read the long poem. Somewhere near my feet, I could hear Utah panting.

“What’re we gonna do this summer?” I asked once she’d finished reading.

“What do you mean?” She was flipping through the book again, looking for another poem, one we hadn’t read together yet.

“I mean … What are we gonna do? We can’t just stick around here doing nothing for two months.”

“Well, I usually work the tobacco fields at the Scotts’ farm to make a little money during the summer.”

I sighed. “That sounds nice.”

“Not really. It’s hot and exhausting, and you come back covered in tobacco gum.”

“But it’s something,” I said. “Something to do. Mama and Daddy would never let me work tobacco. They’d tell me it’d be too hard with my vision and all. And maybe they’d be right. But I’ve spent every summer of my life stuck in the house, never leaving this yard.”

“I kinda like this yard,” Bo said, still turning pages.

“I wanna do something different,” I said. “Something exciting.”

“There will probably be a few parties.”

Last year, that would have been all the excitement I needed. A couple parties, the promise of a few hours without my parents’ eyes on me, that would have been enough. But now, it hardly did anything for me. Parties were over too fast, too similar to one another. And, at the end of the night, we were still stuck in Mursey.

“We ought to go out of town,” I said. “Take a trip.”

Bo quit flipping the pages. “You serious?”

“Maybe.”

“When I suggested that, we ended up fighting. You said I was crazy for even thinking—”

“I know, I know. But I been thinking about it, and maybe if we do it right, my parents will let me go.” I sat up so I could look at her better. “I mean, they’re letting me walk home from the bus stop with you, so that’s progress, right? And the way I see it, my parents just wanna know where I am all the time. So if we plan it out right, give them all the details before we even hit the road … Maybe it would work?”

“You really think so?”

“Maybe … And we wouldn’t be going far. I was thinking we could just go visit Colt for the weekend or something.”

Bo snorted. “I see how it is. You just wanna go fuck my cousin again.”

“Shh!” I swatted at her. “Keep your voice down.”

“Your mama’s inside. She ain’t gonna hear me.”

“There might be a window open. And if she got wind of what happened with Colt, she’d never let me out of the house … or she’d hunt him down and make him marry me.”

The second option didn’t sound so bad, really. I’d never wanted to get married right out of high school, but if it meant moving in with Colt, getting out of here, I might’ve been on board.

And Bo could come, too. She could move into the guest room. Or sleep on the couch. I wasn’t real sure how big Colt’s place was. But we’d make it work. Maybe Bo could get a job singing somewhere in the city. There was a school for the blind there—maybe I could teach braille. Colt and me would be together, and Bo could find a boy of her own. Or maybe a girl. I could see her with a pretty brunette—a poet. Bo’d be great with a poet. The four of us would eat dinner together every night, then we’d sit out on the back deck counting fireflies and talking about the towns we’d escaped from …

“Maybe we could do that.” And for a second, I thought she was commenting on my fantasy. But then she added, “We could go see Colt. Bet he’d like that, actually. And not just because you’d be fucking him.”

“Hush,” I said, blushing.

She laughed. “All right. But really, what brought this on? You didn’t even wanna talk to your parents about it when I had the idea.”

“I’ve just been thinking, and you and Colt were right.” And so was Christy. I hadn’t told Bo about talking to her that day in January, and I hadn’t talked to her since. But the things she’d said had stuck with me. “Complaining about their rules won’t change them. So, maybe if I just talk to them, reason with them, it’ll make a difference. And, I mean, they let Gracie go to Florida with her friends for a whole week when she was seventeen,” I said. “And Louisville’s only a couple hours from here. Not near as far.”

“Your sister wasn’t in Florida with a pair of Dickinsons, though,” Bo said.

“Stop it,” I told her. “Mama and Daddy have really come around on you, you know. They like you, Bo. They don’t care that you’re a Dickinson.”

“Well, they’re about the only ones.” She started flipping the pages of her book again. “But all right. Let’s do it. Let’s go see Colt.”

“Yes!” I threw my fist in the air, the way Daddy did when UK won a ball game. Then I fell back into the grass, stretching my arms over my head. “We gotta work out all the details. Starting with how we’re getting there. Maybe Gracie will let us borrow her car?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Bo said. “Later, though. I ain’t done reading yet. This poem’s by Lord Byron. He’s one of my favorites.”

I nodded and closed my eyes, sinking back into that pleasant place between waking and sleeping, more content and happy this time. Even as Bo’s slow, sad words lingered in the sweltering air.

“ ‘Thy vows are all broken, and light is thy fame: I hear thy name spoken, and share in its shame.’ ”

“We could go in July,” I said. “Maybe for the Fourth? Maybe there’s good fireworks up there.”

“You can see fireworks?”

“Yeah. If they’re bright enough.”

It was the last week of May. We’d been out of school a few days, and Bo had spent almost every night at my house. She’d leave in the morning and head to the Scotts’ farm. They’d just started setting their crops, so she’d go help all day and come back to my house around dark, smelling like tobacco. She’d use our shower—always apologizing to my mama, like it was a huge inconvenience—then we’d head up to my room to watch TV and talk until bed.