truck and trailer both. With the luck of the damned, Shawn had
crawled from the wreckage, although he’d hit his head and couldn’t
remember the days before the accident. Truck, trailer and excavator
were totaled.
Dad’s determination was etched into his face. It was in his voice, in
the harshness of it. He had to win this standoff. He’d convinced
himself that if I was on the crew, there’d be fewer accidents, fewer
setbacks. “You’re slower than tar running uphill,” he’d told me a dozen
times. “But you get the job done without smashing anything.”
But I couldn’t do the job, because to do it would be to slide
backward. I had moved home, to my old room, to my old life. If I went
back to working for Dad, to waking up every morning and pulling on
steel-toed boots and trudging out to the junkyard, it would be as if the
last four months had never happened, as if I had never left.
I pushed past Dad and shut myself in my room. Mother knocked a
moment later. She stepped into the room quietly and sat so lightly on
the bed, I barely felt her weight next to me. I thought she would say
what she’d said last time. Then I’d remind her I was only seventeen,
and she’d tell me I could stay.
“You have an opportunity to help your father,” she said. “He needs
you. He’ll never say it but he does. It’s your choice what to do.” There
was silence, then she added, “But if you don’t help, you can’t stay here.
You’ll have to live somewhere else.”
The next morning, at four A.M., I drove to Stokes and worked a ten-
hour shift. It was early afternoon, and raining heavily, when I came
home and found my clothes on the front lawn. I carried them into the
house. Mother was mixing oils in the kitchen, and she said nothing as I
passed by with my dripping shirts and jeans.
I sat on my bed while the water from my clothes soaked into the
carpet. I’d taken a phone with me, and I stared at it, unsure what it
could do. There was no one to call. There was nowhere to go and no
one to call.
I dialed Tyler in Indiana. “I don’t want to work in the junkyard,” I
said when he answered. My voice was hoarse.
“What happened?” he said. He sounded worried; he thought there’d
been another accident. “Is everyone okay?”