“She came back with a look of disgust after dirtying up her pretty dress. She wanted me to leave, threatened my job a couple of times … blah blah blah. Then Waldo came running out of nowhere with dirt-covered paws and jumped on her, knocked her down and literally walked all over her before I pulled him off. While it was a sight I won’t forget, Waldo might have gotten into something rotten because he smelled like manure, so I hosed him off outside before we came in. Laurie-Cate, who also smelled like manure, ran off screaming.”
“No shit,” I say, laughing at the thought of her being covered in cow shit. The neighbors have cows and Waldo likes to tease them. I should have thought to look there first.
“Oh no, there was definitely shit everywhere,” Scarlett says.
“Let me get this straight … you can walk in four-inch heels as long as there are no ditches, you break your arm and don’t shed a tear, you ask your nurse if he’s your ‘luvah’ while recovering from surgery, you’ll eat a grasshopper and the hottest peppers in the South, you drink tequila like a champ, and you’ll clean a dog who’s covered in shit? Have I died and gone to heaven?”
“Wait, when did I ask you if you were my lover?” Yeah, I meant to leave that part out.
“It’s ‘luvah’” I repeat the word exactly as she said it. “You were out of it, so don’t worry.” I might be saying don’t worry, but my smirk is making her squirm.
“I don’t know why I would have asked you that,” she says, looking down at Waldo while scratching behind his ear.
“You were probably just feeling the loneliness of a new town setting in, and you were loopy from the anesthesia. I thought it was cute and didn’t think much else of it. Don’t worry,” I assure her.
“What’s your story, Austin?”
I hate that question. I avoid that question. I’ve walked out of a room when I’ve been asked, in order to avoid answering. My story sucks, and I don’t think it’s worth making anyone feel sorry for me. “Thisismy story,” I tell her, hoping she’ll take my house, dog, barn, and career as a simple form of an explanation.
“No,” she says. “I wasn’t snooping, but I needed to clean my hands up after washing Waldo. I couldn’t help but notice the pictures lining your hallway.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I tell her.
“Then you should definitely talk about it.”
I pick up a crumb from one of Waldo’s dog bones and place it on the coffee table next to us. I wouldn’t even know where to start. “This isn’t how I wanted the night to go,” I tell her.
“I know, you wanted to get laid, but first … talk. Then we’ll see where things go from there.” She’s over there smiling like she owns me, knowing just the way to sweet talk a man.
I’m more about figuring out how to keep her in my life at this point than getting in her pants, but if I ever have to watch her do another blowjob shot like again, it’s going to be a dirty scene in that bar. “Are you bribing me with sex?” I ask.
“I’m asking you to tell me your story,” she says.
“And if I tell you my story, we’ll have sex?”
She laughs at me and twirls her hair behind her ear. “Austin, you need to work on your moves. That wasn’t very smooth.”
She’s making my heart beat a mile a minute, and I can’t take it much longer. “Fine. Here’s my story, but I have one rule you have to follow.”
“What’s the rule?” She looks up at me, and I think I see a bit of fear in her eyes.
“You’re not allowed to cry or say you’re sorry.”
“I don’t cry very often,” she tells me. “I was raised by brainwashed woman, and a man whose heart is made of stone. I’ll be okay.” Who couldn’t love her? “And I know that ‘sorry’ won’t fix anything, so you’re in the clear.”
Maybe she will understand. It doesn’t sound like her life has been a whole lot better than mine. “Well, my parents had a shitty relationship for as long as I can remember. It was more of my ma not giving two shits about my pop, though. She was too busy with her girlfriends being a lady of leisure. My pop ran the farm all day and came home to a messy house and two kids who needed to be fed, bathed, and put to bed. She wanted a nice lifestyle without putting a drop of sweat into it.”
“It sounds like they should never have been married,” she says. I’ve been over that thought a million times, only to draw the conclusion that I would never have been born if they didn’t get married.
“It’s true. Anyway, for whatever reason, my pop loved her more than I can ever understand. He’d take a bullet for her. He’d give her everything he had if it meant she’d stay with him. Even as a teenager, I didn’t understand why, but who am I to question love, ya know?”
“Your poor dad,” she says. “He sounds like a good man.”
“He was.” That damn word in the past tense always causes my throat to constrict and my stomach to hurt.
“Oh,” Scarlett says as she looks down at Waldo and scratches behind his ear again.
“One day, my pop was dealing with a delayed delivery he was picking up, so he got home an hour or so late. My ma got so mad at him for messing up her plans that she told him she was leaving him for good.” Retelling this story is like reopening the wound I thought would never heal. It’s healed enough that day to day I can pretend it’s not there, but it hurts to bring it back up.
