I shrugged.
“You must have smelled it,” he said. “It was strong. I’ve smelled it
before. On you. You always smell of it. Hell, I probably do, too, now.”
He sniffed his shirt. I was quiet. I hadn’t smelled anything.
—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