Image borrowed from YahooJust Keep Walking
After Betsy’s death, Ms. Sandee wanted me to stop working, but Dad said it would make me all sullen and strange, so I kept mowing yards for the last few weeks of summer, only Dad or Ms. Sandee would drop me off and pick me up. They had a knock-down, drag-out fight about it, but Dad won, for once. Ms. Sandee tried to talk to me a couple times about the whole thing, but I wasn’t up for it. Dad just let it alone. The closest he came was a couple days after it when he took me to mow my first lawn since everything had happened. He loaded the mower and the gas can in the back of the truck, even told me he’d put some sodas in the cooler for me. It was a short drive, but he took a kind of longer route than he needed to. He was listening to country music, like he always did. I remember it clear as day. We pulled up to a light, and he switched the music off and put his hands on the steering wheel.
“Sometimes, son, you find yourself in a pit and you think there’s no way out. You think you’re gonna die down there away from the sun. Well, you’ve just got to put one foot in front of the other and keep on walking. That’s the only way out. When a man finds himself in hell, he’s got to walk clear of it.”
He never looked at me. The light changed and he eased forward. When he dropped me off, that’s when he caught my eye. But I looked down.
“Just keep walking,” he said.
I nodded and got the mower out of the back. When he picked me up an hour later, his whole demeanor had changed. He never mentioned ‘walking out of it’ again. Instead, he took me for butterscotch milkshakes, which made me sick after mowing in the hot sun.
Usually, I met the start of school with relief because it meant I was, at least momentarily, out from under the thumb of my father, but this year I started classes with some trepidation. No one gossips like teenagers, and I thought the story of my discovery of Betsy would be the talk of the town, so to speak. But no one seemed to know or care about it. I’d done a good job of keeping our true relationship, whatever that was, secret. By the time school started, Dad was convinced that everything was fine with me. The only clue that anything was wrong was the fact that I woke most nights screaming or crying, but Dad never talked about that. And I was able to overcome that by simply not sleeping.
My classes were mostly boring. It was nice to be back in English class reading and discussing literature. This year, they’d placed me in an Honors class, which I didn’t know until I walked in the first day to find a totally different group of kids than were in my usual classes. It was cool, actually, because these kids actually had something worthwhile to say.
I breezed through the first term. I focused on school. When Ms. Sandee told Dad I didn’t seem to have any kids, I managed a study date with a couple classmates at my house. It appeased them, though Dad was clearly disappointed by the fact of the other kids’ rock band tee-shirts, asthma, and/or general lack of athletic prowess.
There was a girl in a couple of my classes named Claire. She was quiet and serious, thin and blonde with glasses. I would spend parts of my lunchtime studying in the library, and I noticed that she was often there. We just sort of gravitated to the same table, since we’d ask each other questions about the homework.
“Do you write?” she asked me one day.
“What do you mean?” I asked, thinking she had mistaken me for an illiterate.
“Poetry, stories, plays: do you write creatively? I ask because I’m on staff for Flight, the school literary magazine, and we really need submissions.”
Her face had gone a little red. I felt mine growing hot too.
“I do,” I lied.
“What do you write?”
“What’s your favorite?” I asked.
“Poetry, I guess,” she said.
I nodded.
“Well if you want to submit something, you have to do it by Friday,” she said.
“Okay, thanks,” I said.
I spent that night and much of the next day composing a poem about dying trees.
“It’s pretty terrible,” I said when I showed it to her.
“It’s great!” she said. “Is it about Jesus?”
“No,” I said. “It’s about a tree.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well it’s still good.”
Christmas rolled around and with it, mid-year finals. Ms. Sandee was still giving me the worried eye, so I asked Claire if she wanted to study over at my house.
You should’ve seen Dad. He put on a clean shirt, took a shower, I think he even got a haircut. Ms. Sandee conveniently happened to make dinner early, and invited Claire over, then spent the entire meal telling embarrassing stories. Afterwards, Dad took me with him to drop Claire off, and nudged me to follow her and walk her to her door.
“Ask her out,” he whispered in a voice she couldn’t help but hear.
I walked her to her door, and we both stood there awkwardly.
“So, do you maybe want to go see a movie or something some time?” I asked.
“Okay,” she said.
I smiled and she went inside. I started back to the car, then turned and ran back to the house and knocked on her door. She opened it almost immediately.
“What day? Friday?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said.
She closed the door again, and I was back to the car before I remembered that I’d forgotten to tell her when I’d pick her up.
“Well?” Dad said.
“Movie,” I said.
“Nice,” he said.
We stopped for a butterscotch milkshake on the way home. This time, I didn’t get sick.
C.L. Bledsoe
Posted over on Troubadour 21
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