I type:
See you in a little bit, Pres. Drive was fine.
Don't hit send.
Delete it.
Type:
Thanks. Can't wait to see you too.
Don't hit send.
Delete it.
I lock the phone, put it face-down on the seat.
I'll answer her when I get home.
In person.
Because I’ve been ignoring her texts for months and maybe today is the day I stop ignoring her texts.
But maybe it isn't. I don’t know yet. I'll decide when I see her face.
I sit there.
Jaeger shifts in the trailer.
The radio shifts to some new artist I don't recognize.
The sun is up properly now. Pink is gone. Sky's the color of a faded pair of jeans.
I should drive. I'mgoingto drive in a minute.
I let myself think about her—about my mother—for thirty seconds.
That's the deal I make with myself.
Thirty seconds a morning, and not more, because more than thirty seconds is the thing that breaks me.
Thirty seconds. The thermos. Hers.
Dented on the side, scratched silver, and she drank coffee out of it at the fence line every morning when she watched me ride as a girl.
The cigarette.
She smoked one a day. Just one. On the porch at sunset. She said every woman needs one thing nobody's allowed to comment on.
The fourth of July, last year. The yard.
Her hair coming down in pieces. The Jack Daniel's in a Solo cup.
Her pointing at Marlena across the yard and screamingyou home wrecking bitchand then the grenade—and that one, that girl, that's his daughter.
Presley's face. Pops's face.
My mother—blonde hair wild, makeup smeared, the woman who used to drink coffee out of a dented thermos at the fence line—screaming the name Presley across her ex-husband's yard like she was throwing glass at him.
