The next—and final—photo was an older one, a Polaroid going crispy yellow at the edges. I immediately realized that this was the first pic acknowledging the Pastor, who looked young and almost dapper in his uniform, with his crew cut, and square jawline. Landon was nowhere to be seen. I searched for evidence of a date in the corner. I decided the snapshot had to have been taken sometime in the late 80s, before the Pastor had fought in the Gulf. He was standing beside a woman, lightly touching her shoulder. She was smiling in the same way Landon did, in every other pic—with a pure kind of joy in her features. Her hair was dark like her son's, and her bone structure as defined. His mother.
“Like what you see?”
I jumped about a foot in the air. When I turned around, Carson was nowhere to be found—yet there was Landon, his jaw scrunched and brow furrowed in a way that made it hard to believe he could have ever been that grinning, silly boy from the photographs.
“Landon. I...”
“What the fuck are you doing in my room?”
“We're...I'm...” His eyes were narrowed with cruelty. He looked at me like he didn't recognize me. And then his gaze traveled from my face to my pointer finger, which was resting on the white rim of his mother's picture.
“You need to get out.” He took a menacing step towards me. I noticed for the first time that he was dressed to the nines—or at least he had been, the day before. He wore a crumpled dress shirt opened a few buttons at the neck and dark tuxedo pants. A suit jacket was slung over his shoulder. Seeing the fire in his eyes, I fought the urge to ask him where he'd been the night before—but no sooner had I decided to cower than my own temper rose up like a wave. This sack of shit couldn't intimidate me. We'd established that the night we met. I wouldn't be spoken to like that, by him or any other man. In a show of defiance, I stood up straight and puffed my chest out.
“You watch the way you talk to me, Landon,” I purred flatly. “I was just trying to help.” Then, for emphasis, I took one long look around the rest of his room. The tidily made up bed. The panel of trophies. The old clunker computer, taking up most of a desk. It meant nothing. None of this stuff meant anything. Let him pack it up.
I held my chin high as I sidled past his muscular body, though he didn't move an inch aside to let me pass. I inhaled a sweet breath of his cologne, and the slightly earthy smell of his skin. He'd been drinking the night before, I could tell. Once in the hallway, I heard the door slam shut behind me, so loud it sent a shock through my system. I could no longer hear my mother's giggling outside, but Carson was doubled up along the far wall, apparently tickled to completion about leaving me alone to face off with the thug. I smacked my sister on the exposed expanse of her thigh, rigid with rage.
“Nice playing look-out, jerk!” I hissed—but Carson seemed unfazed. Beyond the shut door, I could hear water stuttering on in some corner. I hadn't realized Landon had a bathroom to himself in his bedroom. I wished I could have gotten a glimpse at that, too.
“You just looked so doe-eyed, gazing at his pictures like that...” Carson wheezed, wiping tears from her eyes. After another half-minute, her storm finally seemed to be abating, while my own face remained red.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said, fanning my hands through my hair out of habit. Today's white-blonde streaks were almost the color of my fingertips.
“Oh, baby—I think you do.” Together, we listened as the shower sounds amplified beyond the door. He was pulling back a curtain, in one violent, swift gesture. I imagined his tuxedo pants falling to a puddle around his ankles. I imagined his thick, hairy shins like tree trunks, stretching up to the muscly base of him. I imagined what was swinging between his legs, straight and thick as my wrist, slightly turgid with feeling. I imagined his narrow hips, the symmetrical scoops of his ass, then the hard cage of his chest, humming with fury, caged only by the second skin of dark down. His hair, wet in the shower. His liquid brown eyes, fierce with instinct.
“Oh, Lord,” Carson said. Without my realizing it, she'd come to place a warm, dry palm on my cheek. “Don't worry, kid. I won't tell anyone.” Her own eyes were heavy with sympathy—something I could never abide. Especially not from Carson, who was supposed to know better. The Bennett women didn't need sympathy. The very best—heck, perhaps the only good thing—we'd inherited from our mother was a stubborn sort of pride.
I shook myself free of her hand, then padded back down the rickety staircase to the many boxes in the living room. My mother and her husband-to-be kept a silent vigil there, holding hands on the couch in front of the TV. I expected a ribbing out for my abandoning the work, but they both looked preoccupied.
“We've set a date, darling,” my mother said in my direction, as I came in. I could hear another preacher, prattling from the television. Go figure. Pastor Sterling probably loved him some 700 Club.
“This Saturday. At the church.” When I looked at my mother next, she had little pearls of tears on her lower eyelids. The Pastor had turned to look at her, too. His eyes were kind. Even his withered turtle neck and his tiny head, topped by that outrageous baseball cap seemed...sweet, in that moment. He looked like an echo of his son in those photographs. Joyful.
Carson slid a hand around my waist from behind, managing in her expert way to avoid making eye contact with our mom. She whispered so only I could hear: “Don't forget. You've got two weeks until you're outta here. Two weeks. Anyone could do that.”
Chapter Twelve
Ash
July 23rd
I ran down the hallway, flip-flops thwacking against the tile. It was hot in the school, and cool sweat dripped down my back like the trails of ice cubes. Nobody bothered to turn on the AC during summer. Or on a Sunday, for that matter.
Which was just as well. High-school had looked like hell to me, so why shouldn't it feel like it, too? This would hopefully be my last trip to Lee, anyways. I needed some final, blasted piece of paper to secure my early enrollment at UT—my very last test scores as a high school student.
I was starting to get excited. But as with most moments in my life in which great change had been promised and later reneged, I was also wary. I'd been to a few college parties, after all, and been largely unimpressed with the pickings on display. There was definitely an extent to which the cheerleaders and the football team at university seemed like the cheerleaders and the football team in high school. And I wondered: would the popular kids at UT be as capable of cruelty as they had been while wandering these hallways? Was I actually preparing to enter into some new world in which I was to be taken seriously?
“Hold up, cowgirl!” cried a familiar voice. And lo, it was Mr. Dempsey—idling around the school like always. He wore a wrinkled Weezer t-shirt and square-framed hipster glasses. In the month or so since I'd seen him last, he'd grown out his goatee and the grey-flecked mop of hair on his scalp. The new look suited him, I had to say.
And for my part, I was finally allowing some of the Texas in. At Carson's urging, I'd started to take advantage of some of Austin's amazing food, which had helped me fill out my typically narrow hips. I'd ceded to the weather, also, allowing myself to be dragged out to the Austin hot springs once or twice with my sister and her bohemian bunch. We'd lay out on the rocks so long that even after multiple applications of sunscreen, I'd become the teensiest bit tan. Which was a first.