Page 15 of He
I nodded, wondering why this bright pixie of a girl dressed in green denim overalls was talking to me.
She tried again. “Is it OK if we walk to class together?”
I shrugged and she fell into step beside me. I guess she was unnerved by my silence because she suddenly asked, “So, Oren, where did you grow up? I can tell you’re not from around here.”
“On a farm—my grandfather’s farm.”
“So, you were raised by your grandfather?”
Reared. I started to correct her, thought better of it. I was unsure how to answer her. I don’t feel anyone, least of all my grandfather, reared me. I feel more like I reared myself, pulling myself, like a wounded wolf in a forest, from milestone to milestone.
“Yes,” I said.
“Don’t you have parents?”
“They died.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t be. It was a long time ago.”
My parents had been driving the Buick Electra 225—Grampy Eddie’s beloved “deuce and a quarter.” They were also drunk. The Electra collided with a tanker truck making a late delivery to Locust Hollow’s only gas station and exploded. We’d buried what we could find of them—rags, teeth, bones, a hank of hair—and pretended they’d been whole in their caskets. I can still see Reverend Jack in his sooty cassock standing over my parents’ grave and thundering about sin and retribution but uttering nary a word about forgiveness and redemption. Calming down, he’d concluded the graveside service, “We therefore commit these bodies to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”
I’d found it deeply unfair that having been raised in ashes and dust, having returned to the ashes and dust of her childhood the summer before, when my grandmother had died, that again and for all eternity my mother would be consigned to ashes and dust. It had especially hurt because I knew how much she hated moving back to the farm. A few years after we moved to the farm, after my brothers were born, I overheard my mother tell my father, “I hate it here. I blame Eddie.”
“Eddie?” my father repeated, sounding puzzled.
“Yes. Eddie. If he hadn’t gone and gotten his fool head shot off over a woman, we would never have moved back here.”
I’d wanted to hear the rest of their conversation—I was then of an age where I was curious about the world of adults—but being a kid, the need for sleep surpassed my curiosity and I fell asleep before I heard any more.
I no longer remember my parents’ faces or the sound of their voices. I do remember the smell of corn whiskey on their breath and, in hard times, the sugary smell of MD 20/20.
“So, you’ve no other family?” MJ asked.
I thought of my stupid, violent brothers. “No,” I said.
“I can’t imagine not having a family,” she said. “My mom is one of three children, and my dad, Octavio, is eight of nine. I have, like, forty-two cousins. I can’t imagine not having family.”
When I shrugged, she nudged my shoulder with hers. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be your family.”
“I have Jackson,” I said.
“So now you have Jacksonandme.” After a moment, she added, “You can count on me. I’m an only child. I always wanted a brother, though, and now I feel like I have one.”
She was so kind, I thought. Vivienne Leigh as Blanche DuBois inA Streetcar Named Desiremight have always depended on the kindness of strangers, but outside of my parents—for a time, before we moved to the farm—and Jackson, there hasn’t been anyone I can count on to show me kindness. And certainly, there were no strangers in Locust Hollow.
“So, you and Jackson…?” MJ queried, interrupting my thoughts.
“What about us?”
She drew a breath, seeming to marshal her strength. “So, are you…like…lovers?”
I looked at her. “We are.”
“But he doesn’t go to school here?”
“No. He’s not the college type. That’s why we live off campus.”
