finds herself stuck in a back seat, gazing out a window and remembering that the curse of being a teenager is knowing how your momma can be a better wife and not being able to tell her because she just won’t listen.
Daddy had been crisscrossing Texas for days on another work trip, and they’d expected him later that evening, so when the call came, Momma had been in the middle of preparing his usual welcome home dinner—chicken-fried steak with bacon gravy and Frito casserole, his favorites. Of course, once they all sat down to eat, her mother would give them her usual lecture on how Frito casserole was technically an entrée, not a side dish, but just this once she’d yield to her husband’s expansive appetite. The same lecture, every damn time. It was a wonder her father still came home.
She listened to KLLL whenever she cooked, so she was singing along with Loretta Lynn when the DJ cut in with a newsbreak about how the Plains Rapist had got another woman up in Plainview. She’d cried out and killed the radio as if the damn thing had bit her. Ironing her hair in her room, Marjorie was so startled by her mother’s outburst she almost knocked the iron from the board. The damn newspaper article the other day certainly hadn’t helped. They’d run a drawing of a victim’s description of the stocking cap, which apparently had star designs around its eyeholes and silver thread around the mouth like fading lipstick, and now her mother’s anxiety was even worse.
When the phone rang just a few minutes later, her mother cried out again. Further proof, Marjorie had thought, that Momma was a silly woman who brought needless fear everywhere she went. Like a rapist would telephone first.
Marjorie could tell from her mother’s tone that it was her father on the other end of the line, and he was in some kind of trouble.
She followed Momma next door to Uncle Clem’s even though her mother had told her to stay put in case Daddy called again. The Plymouth was apparently all right—banged up but drivable, her mother said with an authority that made it sound like she was directly quoting her husband—but her daddy was not. The story came out of her mother in a frantic rush as she stood on Clem’s back porch and he listened through the screen door he was holding open with one hand, one arm already punched through the jacket of his janitor’s uniform. He was on his way to the overnight shift at the municipal auditorium and in no mood for this nonsense and wanted to know how his sister’s husband could have been stupid enough to get out of his car and check on an injured animal like that, even if he was the one who hit it. Her mother had fired back that pronghorn antelopes weren’t known to play dead like opossums, and it wasn’t her husband’s fault the damn thing had kicked him in the gut, and the point was she needed a ride, not a discussion of roadkill ethics.
The three of them squeezed onto the bench seat of Clem’s Studebaker pickup while Marjorie tried to draw comfort from the stars. But all the sniping going on right next to her—Clem didn’t have time to follow them back into town because it wasn’t on his way, so Beatty had better be damn sure the car’s actually drivable—was coming close to draining the magic from the big starry skies she loved so much. In the end, that wasn’t possible; she was sure of it. She’d always be just like her daddy, comforted by open spaces and strengthened by silence.
They found her father a few minutes past the service station’s lone island of light, standing beside the Plymouth, its angled headlights shooting across the empty field. When he started toward them at the sign of their approach, Marjorie saw how badly injured he was. She’d figured the term “kicked in the gut” had just been an expression, but her daddy held his stomach in both arms, as if he was afraid it might burst. The closer he got to the Studebaker, the more visible the blood under his arms became. Despite her mother’s protests, Marjorie hopped from the truck before it had come to a full stop. When she ran to him, the instinct to hug her made him flinch. Either he didn’t want to get blood on her or just didn’t want to reveal