Uncertain, TX: Chapter Six

Previously… (Chapter Five-Read) or (Chapter Five-Audio) OR start from the beginning. Audio file to follow (so you get that East Texas twang because it is read by me).

The oxygen tank’s regulator fell past forty percent; it would need changing soon. Dana had pulled the ratty armchair from the living room to her mother’s bedside where she could keep an eye on them both as she caught up on her inbox. While Cherry continued to sleep, her canula firmly in place under her nose and shoulders propped up courtesy of the mechanical bed, Dana moved some money around to accommodate any spikes in medical needs while in town.

She looked at her bank accounts and realized that she could go without a new job for some time. A luxury, she knew, but then, she’d worked her ass off to get to this point, which was why it always rankled when Cherry never seemed to care enough to be impressed by how far Dana had come from their hardscrabble days.

Well, it was still hardscrabble for Cherry, but that was because over the years she’d refused all offers of financial help Dana had made, from new furniture, an apartment in Marshall or Jefferson, hell, even a dishwasher after Cherry had bitched on a phone call about how much she hated hand-washing.

And now, what good would it do to replace the old sofa? Repair the roof? Put new carpeting in or add a whisper-quiet dishwasher? Dana looked around the crumbling house—cleaner, at least, since Dana spent several hours shoveling out trash and using the antique Hoover on the newly-revealed floors—and knew she could at least insist on comfort for Cherry’s last days. She wouldn’t let a stray dog die in squalor; she could at least ensure her own mother had a clean place to rest her head.

The tank’s regulator hadn’t dropped, so after checking the liter-per-minute to match the doctor’s orders, she figured it would be okay to get back to cleaning in quick bursts. The short hall that bisected the house had old picture frames hanging sporadically down its length, each with a good half inch of dust accumulated.

She pulled one off its nail, yellowed under the glass with age. Cherry and Keith stood in front of a late-model Pontiac Firebird, the driver’s door and roof primer-grey: Keith’s first car project. Dana smiled at their matching feathered hairdos and laughed at Cherry’s side-eye at the car. Anything that took her now-ex-husband’s attention away from her was sure to have pissed her off.

Another frame with the image of Dana as a kindergartner, lunchbox dangling from both hands was a little farther down. Her brown hair hung in two braids, her eyes wide and lip caught between her teeth.

“Nobody’s gonna hurt you in that school. You can’t splash around in the bayou all day long, and you can’t stay here. You have to learn some things,” Cherry scolded, tugging the ends of Dana’s braids and motioning toward the school bus waiting at the end of the gravel drive.

Rubbing the side of her head, Dana grabbed the next picture on the wall. It wasn’t one she’d seen before. She brushed her dust cloth over the glass; when she got a closer look at the image, she almost dropped it. Another old picture, one that looked like it had been developed from a personal camera: a small rectangle the size of an index card, pale gold tint aging it. Cherry stood in front of a steakhouse with a man, his arm firmly around her and hand gripping high on her ribcage, just under Cherry’s breast. The sign just behind her shoulder read “Ernest’s Supper Club.” Cherry’s big bouncy curls sprayed in place with what Dana knew was a complete shellacking of hairspray combined with a belted turquoise dress bedecked with truly spectacular shoulder pads led Dana to believe this must be the late Eighties.

She forced herself to look at the man in the picture.

Medium-height, thick-chested, light brown hair slicked back with too-much product. His face was tanned from the sun. A thick mustache sat on his lip like a fat caterpillar, almost covering a silver, twisted scar at the man’s lip and cheek.

Dana had never seen this picture in her life, didn’t know her mother even knew him.

They started up a pattern. Addy would call Dana mid-morning to find their meet-up spot, they’d spend hours roaming the water, talk about everything under the sun, and then split up before dinner when Addy would have to meet Wayne at some particular spot to be driven back to their home.

“Why can’t Wayne just come get you here?” Dana asked. She chucked a pebble into the bayou.

“You don’t want to meet Wayne.”

“Maybe I do,” she said. “I’ve never known anyone who ‘had a guy’.”

“He’s not mine,” Addy replied.

“Well, your dad’s.”

“Maybe I don’t want Wayne to meet you.”

“…Oh.”

“Dana, he’s a gross employee of my dad’s. I’m not embarrassed by you. I’m embarrassed by him.”

“Okay.”

“He’s a creep.”

“Why does your mom let him drive you around, then?”

Addy shrugged, curling in on herself. “It’s part of his job, watching me.” She checked her wrist. “Anyway, I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”

Dana shook herself out of the memory. She was tempted to smash the frame, burn the photograph, but she didn’t. With a vicious swipe of her dust rag, she continued down the hall. She didn’t look too closely at any other photographs hanging after that. Let them collect dust.

The last door in the hall was to Dana’s childhood bedroom. Maybe she had a book she could read back at her rented room. She didn’t linger over the furniture, most of it piecemeal from garage sales or additions after she’d moved out for college and her own life. They didn’t hold any particular place in her memories or her heart. On the bookshelf was the coin catcher filled with mementos that did, however. She skipped past that and picked up the delicate blown-glass bird and carefully passed the dust cloth over it. She drew the tip of her finger over the arch of a wing and the phantom sense-memory of a manicured nail tracing over the roundness of her teenaged shoulder made her shudder.

She placed it back on the shelf, situating it just so, carefully avoiding looking at the photo of a beautiful girl, sun-kissed with long blonde hair, her arms around a seventeen-year-old Dana, their cheeks together, and love in her eyes.

A month after those pictures were taken, everything in Dana’s world shattered to pieces. She’d never seen Addy again, none of the Winns after... There were some memories she wasn’t brave enough to face just yet.

Dana laid the dust cloth over the coin catcher, left the room, and softly shut the door. She’d had enough to deal with without opening those old wounds, too.

“What are we doing today?” Addy asked, looping her arm through Dana’s. That was something that took a bit to get used to, Addy’s constant touching, like it was just a thing friends did. Addy would hold Dana’s hand, hook their arms together, lay her head on Dana’s lap when they stretched out under the sun. While she allowed it, secretly loved it, Dana wasn’t quite ready to touch back. She wasn’t used to such liberties with anyone. Her mom usually complained about Dana being “hot as a furnace” if she tried to lean against her on the sofa when they watched TV.

“Well… I had an idea.”

“Oh, yeah?” Addy knit their fingers together, swinging their arms between them as they walked to a dark green two-seater canoe. Tied off at the end of the pier, it was a regular loaner from the marina owner, Ronnie, who had a soft spot for Dana.

“It’s… a surprise.” She held the canoe steady while Addy climbed aboard, then passed over the small cooler Addy always brought with cold sodas and sandwiches wrapped in cellophane. She shoved them off and hopped in, paddling to catch the river current that cut through this part of the lake.

“That’s so weird that a tree can grow in the water,” Addy said, her arm dangling over the edge of the canoe. The clear, green water rushed over her hot pink nails as Dana piloted them further into the twisting recesses that ringed the vast lake.

“Cypress are the only ones that can.” Dana laid the oar across the gunwales and let the momentum drift them towards the massive, solitary tree rising up in the center of the secluded cove, Dana’s favorite place. “The knees, those big knobby roots, they pop up and help them breathe. Then over time, they grow together to the tree’s center. That rots out. And then you can have...”

She leaned over the side and grabbed at a protruding cypress knee, slick with moss and algae.

“Hand me that rope?”

Addy passed the end to Dana, who quickly tied a bowline to a hook protruding from the tree’s trunk.

“Oh my god,” Addy gasped. “A door!”

Dana chuckled to herself, pleased. She’d hung the door last year to cover the hole that had rotted out of the side of the giant tree trunk to discourage critters from nesting inside. This was her place.

“Open it up.”

Addy carefully stood, giggling a little as the boat rocked when she stretched to unlatch the door and swing it open. She gasped again. “There’s a ladder!”

“Can you reach it, or do you need help? You can put one foot on this stump here and then step onto the ladder rung.”

Addy surveyed the tree and nodded, her expensive boat shoes left her sure-footed as she nimbly climbed onto the lichen-crusted stump, then the ladder.

“Go on up and push open the trap door. I’m behind you.”

Dana waited until she could see the beam of light shine down the opening inside the trunk before grabbing the cooler’s handle and following after Addy. Addy was sitting pretzel-legged on the makeshift floor Dana had built last summer out of scraps of plywood and old shipping pallets, her face tipped to the sun.

“It’s not much, but—”

“Are you kidding?” Addy interrupted. “This is so cool. You did this? You didn’t just find it like this?”

“Yeah,” Dana answered, scratching her elbow. “It took me a bit and I had to borrow-without-asking some of the tools at Burnett’s Marina, but I don’t think Ronnie cared. As long as people don’t steal his beer, he doesn’t usually mind people taking stuff. Not if they’re locals. And heh, well, I guess not as long as they bring it back. Which I did.”

Dana closed the trap door and flipped the covers over it. She stretched her legs out, her back against the weather-worn bark of the cypress. Some of the branches had snapped off in high wind a few years back, so the top of her tree house was mostly exposed to the sun. Not enough cover for hunters to want to turn it into a duck blind nor open enough for osprey to build their own nest. Just the right amount for her to spend a lazy summer afternoon away from her mom and the house and for no one to be the wiser. “Took me most of the summer last year. I couldn’t bring all the scraps at once or people would have figured out what I was up to.”

“It’s just... that’s so cool. You’re so cool. I can’t believe you can do this kind of stuff. Building things? Survival stuff?” Addy sighed. “I just know how to put on makeup and dumb things like that. How to do my hair, who cares.”

“Well, it makes you look really nice.” Why did she say stupid stuff like that?

“Yeah?”

Addy snuggled into her side with a happy little noise. Maybe Dana wasn’t so stupid.

After a moment, Addy asked, “What do you do out here usually?”

“Oh, sometimes I like to read. Or fish. I just like to get away, you know? It’s real quiet, and anyone who happens to come by, well, they don’t think to look up here.”

“I love that you have a secret spot.”

“I can share it with you, I guess.”

Addy draped her ankle over Dana’s, closed her eyes and said, “What kind of birds you see out here, Bird Girl?”

Dana talked about osprey, kestrels, chickadees and woodpeckers, but it was almost on remote, things she’d learned from listening to Ronnie, her dad, or nature shows. Most of her attention was on how warm Addy’s bare ankle was, how Addy kept poking Dana’s side or playfully swatting her arm. Something inside of her wanted to hold Addy’s hand, hold her, but something deeper wanted it to stop, all of it, the touching, the teasing, the hope that there was someone in the world who liked and valued her, someone who would be there, always. The end of summer lurked unpleasantly in Dana’s mind, the knowledge that eventually Addy would leave, and Dana would be all alone again.

But for now, she was determined to enjoy the moment. They had a cooler full of snacks, their hidden part of the lake to themselves, and the sun was shining.

She had a friend.

They talked until it was comfortable not to talk at all, turning onto their stomachs to sun the backs of their legs.

Addy wrapped her hand around Dana’s forearm, smiling with her eyes closed. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad we met.”

It was the best summer in Dana’s memory.

_{Next chapter on Tuesday, August 4th at 8am CT, with audio book at 10:30am.}

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