Page 4 of Roads Behind Us
Brand’s forewoman, Sweetie, would be staying in the first finished cabin. She was our best hope of getting three half-finished houses and nine more cabins completed before the end of autumn.
If winter hit before then, we’d all be screwed. I’d have to spend the next half year holed up with my teenager, my mama, who’d just put her trailer up for sale, and my derelict brother, Dixon, if he ever showed his face at home again. If their studio rental fell through, my sister and her fiancée might be forced to live here, too, and probably my best friend Rye and his girlfriend Aubrey. Until his house was ready, Rye had been sleeping on my couch some nights, on the barn floor in a sleeping bag on top of a blow-up mattress other nights, and at his girlfriend’s house in town, which she’d just sold.
Added onto that would be five to ten various animals, going in and out my kitchen door at their leisure. In an old, three-bedroom farmhouse with only one standing shower and a fifty-year-old tub?
If I had to endure Sweetie and her “intenseness” to avoid all that, I wouldn’t complain. Not one bit.
Chapter Two
Sweetie
“Chicken-fried steak.”
Chicken-fried steak and grits. Ham hocks, salty greens, grape jelly. Ooo, pepperoni rolls, buckwheat pancakes, pawpaws, and fried mushrooms. Oh, how I miss Mama’s fried morels.
Driving alone down a lonely mountain highway, listing foods I’d eaten growing up, wasn’t making my seven-hour drive down to Wisper, Wyoming go any faster. This foggy bullshit was a bitch, and my truck radio was dead. My phone’s battery had just about kicked the bucket, and for extra funsies, my charging cord decided to quit today too. I had a spare in my suitcase, but I didn’t feel like stopping to get it out of the bed of my truck.
Maybe if I counted off all the places I’d lived since I left North Carolina?
“Iowa… what was that place called? Fredman? Yeah, Fredman, Iowa. Middle of nowhere, Nebraska. North Dakota.” Ugh, I was getting frostbite just remembering that winter hell. Whoever made the movie Fargo hadn’t been far off the mark.
To the silence inside the cab of my truck, I said, “Lust, Wyoming. Now there’s a place I’ll never go back to. Five cowboys to every woman per square mile, more cows than I ever want to see again in my life, and dirt. Dusty, dirty foothills and vistas.” Lust was pretty in a barren-landscape kind of way, but I liked trees. Coming from a dead-end Appalachian holler, trees were a necessity. I felt exposed without them.
Since I left home, I hadn’t lived in any one place longer than six months, but then two years ago, I found Sheridan, Wyoming, met my boss, Brand Lee, and he gave me a job.
He probably shouldn’t have. Until the day Brand offered his handshake and changed my life, I had no steady work experience. Flitting between waitress gigs wasn’t what I considered a career. I worked as a bank teller for a short minute, and I’d cleaned enough office buildings to be awarded a gold medal for being “that bitch who empties your trash cans and accidentally bumps your computer with her Swiffer but is never surprised to find a porn site loaded up. You know, the one you jacked off to during a muted conference call?”
But I knew how to build houses, knew how to fix and rig shit when it broke. And I had an innate ability to boss men around.
“Now that you came by honestly,” I told myself.
Before he broke his back and got hooked on pills, then ran his business to the ground, my daddy had steered a tight ship at our family’s construction company. Even before he started showing me how to work the job, doing my homework in whatever build had been going up that month taught me to be a builder simply by osmosis. And I watched and listened to my dad’s guys arguing about how to do something, which team played the best football, or who’d slept with whose girlfriend.
The answers to those questions were always: The way I told you to do it, Chicago (bear down!), and lastly, you’re all a bunch of morally defunct horndogs, and you’re probably all passing syphilis back and forth between each other with your girlfriends acting as the superspreader highway.
A bunch of grown men bickering and barking like a pack of prairie dogs got old fast. Figuring out how to put them in their place so they’d go back to work came naturally ’cause I’d grown up watching my dad do it.
Too bad it hadn’t worked on my ex-husband. I could only hope that by now he’d fallen off the edge of a cliff or had contracted some rare, extra painful disease. No, I didn’t wish him too much ill will. I was relieved just to have gotten out when I did, and I thanked the Lord I’d had the sound foresight to not have children with Lincoln Louis Jr. If I had kids, my cross-country search for a new place to belong would’ve been a hell of a lot more complicated.
It made me sad sometimes, not being a mom. I’d always pictured myself as someone’s mama, but pushing thirty-five as a single, emotionally unavailable woman kind of made the whole motherhood thing difficult.
I didn’t aim to be emotionally unavailable, but running from your past and men who were weak or mean or just plain stupid always seemed harder when you wore your heart on your sleeve.
Changing my name back to Beatrice Baker before the ink had even dried on my divorce decree had been my saving grace. I was able to see myself again. Really see and feel the old me. I could look in a mirror and steel myself again to pain and loss and disappointment.
Was love really more important than strength of self? I used to think so, but in my recent experience, the answer to that question was no.
Never.
For too long, I’d been someone’s wife, which then made me a secondary character in the story of my own life. Nothing I did mattered as much as how everything I did or didn’t do or say affected my husband.
Utter fucking bullshit. But wasn’t I the dipshit who’d let it happen? Hadn’t it been me stuffing down my opinions and emotions to please a man who hadn’t considered once what might please me?
Unfortunately, it was how I’d been raised, and the loss of my only remaining parent after losing Mama at such a young age made me so fucking desperate to feel special to someone that I’d given up what made me special in the first damn place.
It hadn’t helped that all my daddy had left me was debt and pissed-off customers. I’d needed my ex-husband’s family’s legal counsel. His father owned a chain of dry cleaners. Lincoln would inherit the entire empire when his parents passed. Maybe they already had by now. I wouldn’t know because I left North Carolina almost five years ago and hadn’t looked back once.
Catching a glimpse of myself in my rearview, I asked my reflection, “Does that make you shallow? Are you a gold-digging asshole?” But my eyes were clear. My conscience clean.
