“I know you are. But we’re ’bout halfway there, and that looks like a good place over by the creek. No reason to kill ourselves gettin’ there in record time.”
“Yeah.” I exhale, excited by the prospect of a real rest. The cluster of trees Ben pointed out looks shady and secure. “You’re right. We can take thirty minutes.”
“Or even an hour,” he drawls with a twitch of a smile.
“We’ll see.”
The spot is a good one.We’re able to wash up in the creek and stretch out on soft grass in the shade of the trees. We eat our sandwiches and apples, and then Ben takes off his flannel shirt and rolls it up into a ball.
He’s wearing a gray crewneck under it so it’s not strange he’d take off the heavier shirt. But I eye him questioningly as he positions the shirt behind me.
“Use that as a pillow,” he tells me.
“I don’t need a nap.”
“Just a rest.” He grins. “Look how temptin’.”
I shake my head disapprovingly, but I lie backward, my head hitting the rolled shirt perfectly. It is nice and soft for a pillow. And if it smells like Ben, that’s not unpleasant.
I like how he smells. It’s familiar. It makes me feel safe.
“Now you don’t get a pillow,” I say.
“Don’t need one.” He stretches out beside me, one arm bent up and beneath him for a headrest.
We lie in pleasant silence for a few minutes.
Then he asks, “You upset about your mom?”
I shrug and turn my head to see his expression. “I don’t even know. I’ve spent most of my life not being close to her. So it’s not… I mean, I don’t feel good about it, but it’s not traumatic. It doesn’t feel like grief.”
“Okay. I’m sorry though.”
“What are you sorry for?”
“I’m sorry you didn’t have a mom you can really grieve for. It’d be hard to lose her. So damn hard. But you’d’ve had a mom you could love all this time.”
I’m not sure why my eyes burn, but they do. “Yeah. Thanks. Maybe it saves me right now, but it sure wasn’t great all this time. Knowing she never loved me very much. My father did though. He loved me. He loved us.”
The pamphlets my father wrote were, on the surface, simply recounting pre-Fall history in the hopes it wouldn’t be forgotten. They were popular because he was a good writer, and even the younger people who were never taught to read liked to listen to them read in community gatherings.
But slowly it became clear that the pamphlets were doing more than telling old stories from history. They were questioning our current situation and our current government. Every tale of a nearly forgotten revolution had direct application to our own world.
With every new one he wrote, people would talk. People would question.
He wrote them anonymously, of course, but word gotaround in our village, as it always does, that he was the author.
Then one day my father was dead.
For no fathomable medical reason.
We knew. Everyone knew.
Anyone who speaks out, even as indirectly as my father, is silenced one way or another.
“I know he did. He’d’ve been real proud of you. Not just for all you’re doin’ but for the person you are. He’d’ve been so proud.”
“Shit, Ben, if you make me cry, I’m seriously going to hit you.”
