Educated

Dad said I was becoming “uppity.” He didn’t like that I rushed home from
the junkyard the moment the work was finished, or that I removed every trace
of grease before going out with Charles. He knew I’d rather be bagging
groceries at Stokes than driving the loader in Blackfoot, the dusty town an
hour north where Dad was building a milking barn. It bothered him, knowing
I wanted to be in another place, dressed like someone else.
On the site in Blackfoot, he dreamed up strange tasks for me to do, as if he
thought my doing them would remind me who I was. Once, when we were
thirty feet in the air, scrambling on the purlins of the unfinished roof, not
wearing harnesses because we never wore them, Dad realized that he’d left
his chalk line on the other side of the building. “Fetch me that chalk line,
Tara,” he said. I mapped the trip. I’d need to jump from purlin to purlin,
about fifteen of them, spaced four feet apart, to get the chalk, then the same
number back. It was exactly the sort of order from Dad that was usually met
with Shawn saying, “She’s not doing that.”
“Shawn, will you run me over in the forklift?”
“You can fetch it,” Shawn said. “Unless your fancy school and fancy
boyfriend have made you too good for it.” His features hardened in a way
that was both new and familiar.
I shimmied the length of a purlin, which took me to the framing beam at
the barn’s edge. This was more dangerous in one sense—if I fell to the right,
there would be no purlins to catch me—but the framing beam was thicker,
and I could walk it like a tightrope.
That was how Dad and Shawn became comrades, even if they only agreed
on one thing: that my brush with education had made me uppity, and that
what I needed was to be dragged through time. Fixed, anchored to a former
version of myself.
Shawn had a gift for language, for using it to define others. He began
searching through his repertoire of nicknames. “Wench” was his favorite for
a few weeks. “Wench, fetch me a grinding wheel,” he’d shout, or “Raise the
boom, Wench!” Then he’d search my face for a reaction. He never found
one. Next he tried “Wilbur.” Because I ate so much, he said. “That’s some
pig,” he’d shout with a whistle when I bent over to fit a screw or check a
measurement.
Shawn took to lingering outside after the crew had finished for the day. I
suspect he wanted to be near the driveway when Charles drove up it. He
seemed to be forever changing the oil in his truck. The first night he was out