Sorry about the huge entry running down the middle. I just refuse to get bogged down by HTML codes another day. I'll be rescued from my ignorance soon enough.
The beginning of this fragment is in this archived post.
I am completely unused to actually having to listen to someone’s life story. I am nearly always faking it in one way or another and, here with Parker over super nachos and pitchers of margaritas, I don’t know when to laugh or when to hang myself by stringing together strips of my napkin and jumping off the balcony we’re sitting on so intimately. Are people always this detailed? And, I hate to say: boring? How many times can you tell the story of visiting your grandparents for the summer and in how many ways? I’m highly interested, though, in this girl and her habit of sitting no more than three millimeters away from me as she’s talking and animating herself into spastics. She’s sexy as hell and, honest to God, I’m trying to remember if pancakes Mom has ever displayed a written objection to her tenants fucking their new best friends in their single-bed, one-window bedrooms.
Then, I get it: Parker is making up half her shit she’s been telling me tonight. I know this because usually halfway through people’s stories, I can plunge in and surf the waves with them. With Parker, I was getting nowhere until I began to understand what she’s doing, which is lying to me.
I put aside, only temporarily, I assure you, any thoughts of taking her home with me and I take her hand until she stops talking (five long and crazy minutes). Leaning over, into her ear I whisper to her how much I really like her. She’s quiet, perfectly quiet, resisting the urge to dismiss me frivolously. I don’t say much else as our fingers interlock and I know it’s killing her to keep silent. I’m thrilled that she knows how to follow her instincts. Kisses almost imperceptible, I come to rest against her forehead with mine and ask her if she wants to start over from the beginning. Tell everything, but tell, this time, only truth.
Tomorrow was her subdued request. We were both tired and that word was the most reasonable she’d said all day. We managed to sneak Ferocious B into the cool cat place, and I made a bed for him out of blankets on the floor of my room. We were free of all awkward and unsure moments as I slipped into my own bed and slept next to her, holding on, for the first time.
“So where is she?” playfully demands Ellery as he meets me at the shop the next morning. “Out shopping for curtains?”
“Where’s who, old man?” I laughed.
“Boy, you think you’re the only one around here who knows all the gossip? You left last night with her. A customer. Big no-no that I guess I forgot to cover, but under the circumstances with her having nowhere else to go, I understand. Before you ask how I know that about her, I even know how much you tipped at the bar for your margaritas, so...”
Embarrassed, I interrupted Ellery that I got it, he knew everything. Ferocious B was in Mom’s kitchen earlier this morning eating what appeared to be a chopped steak breakfast. Asleep, Parker and I never heard his scratching at the door to be let out, but Mom sure did. When I left for work, the dog was drooling behind the front desk, keeping cool cat gramps company. Parker, to answer Ellery’s question, was in the kitchen, cleaning and talking Mom toward the brink.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” It’s been a long time since we were in the store together, and I’m suspicious. Indentured slaves can’t be fired, can they?
“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” was Ellery’s answer. “You’re here when I’m paying you and you’re here when I’m not. Not quite sure why you hang out with old men like me, but, for a while, you can get along without me. Take a week or two off. It’s called a vacation. Use it to figure out what you’re gonna do with that girl.”
Why do I need a week for that? Why two weeks? I left, though, before Ellery could ban me from the shop for three. But not before I told him I loved him like he was my own father. “Don’t replace me while I’m gone,” I prayed to him and to whomever else could be listening.
He promised that I was irreplaceable and I had no choice but to believe him.
Her first question to me was a legitimate one. If she doesn’t know what she’s missing, how will she know where to look for it? Whatever the fuck it is, Parker added in frustration. Two days she’s known me and already uses fuck 300 times a day.Some people are absorbent that way.
I tell her that she found Ellery’s shop without knowing the shop even existed. So continuing to follow her intuition should work in the beginning. I remind her that if she reveals herself to me honestly, I should be a pretty good help. Sometimes I know right away, sometimes it takes longer.
Why do you even want to help me? was her next question.
Self-pity and insecurity won’t get us anywhere was my answer.
“My father,” says Parker, pretending she hadn’t asked that question so she could ignore me. “This has something to do with him.”
“Are you being cliché? If I had a finger for every time somebody pulled his father out of his fucked up life's butt…”
“Shut up, Stillwater,” she laughed. “Just because your daddy never looked back and you’re now so—unaffected—”
“Oh, now you’re being ironic. And with jokes.”
“I think whatever I need is in his possession. Is that a better way to put it?”
“Well, let’s go get it, then.”
“Let’s do it.” She hops up and runs outside the cool cat place to her behemoth parked on the street. I grab Ferocious B from the fenced-in yard and get him excited about climbing into the back. We’d been packed for several hours while trying to figure out our next step. And now we had it. Maybe. “Just gotta find him first,” admitted Parker as she turns the ignition key.
Parker is one of those people who thinks silence in a conversation is a sign of personal weakness, but, three hours in, she’s been unusually quiet while driving, and I haven’t said much to her to change that. We stop at a convenience store for peeing and fueling and walking Ferocious B, and I volunteer to drive for the next couple of hours. She tosses me the keys, I get in behind the wheel and say something like this: so how do you start this thing?
She looks at me. Twice, I think. And supports her head in a hand with an elbow digging into her thigh. Again with the half amused, half are you kidding me eyebrow trick: “Do you know how to drive, Stillwater?”
“I’ve seen it done.”
“Before today?”
Maybe. Because who really knows?
Locking her seatbelt, twice, I think, the lesson begins. The road is hilly, but there are no major curves and, unless you count the parade of cars passing me on the left, we have the two-lane highway to ourselves. I can’t lie and say I took over the trip and let Parker sleep the rest of the way, but I did get us to Oklahoma. Better truth: I kept us pointed toward Oklahoma and didn’t get us lost or turned around. I hit nothing on the way. Our next stop, Parker asks for the keys.
We pulled into her aunt’s driveway around eleven, midnight, whenever—about two hours off-schedule due to my old man’s afternoon crawl along the interstate. No need for a quiet entry from the dark of night: every light in the house seemed to be on. We went in through the kitchen, Parker’s knock being more of a gentle announcer than of one seeking permission.
Standing at the sink with her back facing us, a tall and very old woman with long silver hair tied with colored scarves barely turned in our direction before saying:
Stillwater Strother Crowe.
The woman said my full name as though she’d been expecting me all her life. In her kitchen. In fucking Kansas City, Kansas. Fully facing me now, she leaned against the countertop and folded her arms in some sort ofdefiant,throw down challenge. I stood immobile, knowing not what to say or think.
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