Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,5
ready for a fight. No swamp rat was going to call him ignorant. I jumped up to try and defend Tim, and as he and my father traded words, my mother, her face by now so hard that it looked like it would crack into a hundred pieces, could only sputter uselessly from her perch on the sofa, “Now now! Now now!”
Later, sitting beside Tim outside in his father’s service truck, I felt so ashamed that I wanted to disappear into the seat. Why had God given me two such horrible parents? How could they be so mean and awful? What had I ever done to deserve them?
“You’re not them, Laura. You’re not them,” Tim whispered as he wiped the tears from my face with his fingertips.
“Never be afraid of the truth, girls.”
That was another saying of Sister Mary Margaret’s, and one of my favorites. This next part of the story is important, though it’s difficult to tell. Still, I’m sure you know more about sex than I ever did when I was your age, so I don’t suppose anything I write will shock you. I’m just giving you notice, is all.
It was the Christmas holidays and my parents had gone out to visit friends for the evening. You can picture winter in Zachary—you’ve been there enough yourself when you were younger. In that flat delta landscape of pine trees and sugarcane fields, winter comes as a relief from the heat and terrible humidity suffered throughout the rest of the year. It was my favorite season, and the only time I felt any real affection for the farm. The air became crisp and clear, the pond froze over at the edges, squadrons of brown pelicans flew overhead. Making pumpkin pie with my mother in the kitchen, or carrying in firewood with my father, I could imagine myself becoming reconciled with my parents and creating a life with them on the farm. I could imagine a future where parents and child were friends instead of combatants, allies in a peaceful, sensible world.
Tim came over later that night, after my parents had left, to pick me up for a movie date at the mall. Although my parents hadn’t explicitly forbidden me to see him, it was plain they didn’t approve, and so Tim took pains to avoid meeting them, and I took pains not to mention his name around the house. They didn’t know I was still seeing him, in other words.
Tim stoked the fire in the parlor while I went to get ready. I remember chatting to him from my bedroom off the hall as I dressed, him answering me from time to time through the open doorway. When I came back into the front room he was still squatting down in front of the fireplace, adjusting the logs with a poker-Have you ever seen a man do that? I’m sure you have: the way they poke at burning logs with a kind of natural assurance—turning them over, prying them up on one end, settling them down again—as if tending a fire was something they were born for, something inherited in the genes, generation after generation, going all the way back to people living in cabins and caves. Tim was talking out of the corner of his mouth, his chin turned slightly from the fire, thinking I was still in the bedroom. I held back in the doorway to watch him.
Like I’ve said, Tim wasn’t a big boy, but he had on his red plaid barn coat that evening with a nice pair of jeans and a gray muffler looped around his neck. The side of his face caught the glow from the fire. Watching him in secret while he went on talking and poking at the logs, so at ease, so content, I felt I was seeing him at his most private. This, I thought, was exactly what Tim was like when he was most alone. And it was a most admirable and inspiring sight.
I’m only trying to put this like I remember it. Outside was cold, inside was warm. The fire was burning. We were alone and my parents weren’t due back for another couple of hours. We did just what any fifteen-year-old girl and seventeen-year-old boy would do in that situation.
I turned off the light by the door and hugged Tim from behind. He squirmed, chuckling, as I kissed his neck and ear. He turned around and lay me down on the rug. Then he hovered above me,