“You need to get to the hospital, Beatty,” Clem shouted without anything that sounded like compassion.
“Go on now,” her daddy said. “Danielle will bring me home.”
“You’re banged up worse than the car. You need to—”
“Go on now, Clem.”
“It’s fine, Clem. I got ’im.” But Momma didn’t sound like she thought Clem was wrong; more like she just wanted to prevent a fight between her husband and her brother. She even sounded a little frightened of being alone in the vast dark with only an injured husband and a teenage daughter.
When her uncle Clem’s eyes landed on her, Marjorie realized she’d been glaring at him too confidently because she thought she stood in darkness. But some of the headlights’ reflected glow must have been falling on her face, and that’s why Clem’s attention caught on her look like a hooked trout. She couldn’t help it.
Why did he always talk to Daddy like he was the big screwup in the family?
Daddy drove all over the great state of Texas selling insurance while Clem pushed a mop bucket at the coliseum, cleaning up other people’s spilled beer after basketball games. While Clem got drunk and picked fights with Hispanics because he blamed them for his problems, her daddy spent evenings with his happy family, watching the brand-new television he bought them in a house he’s already paid for. Clem’s also one of the many men who’s started looking at her differently since she became a teenager, his wariness implying the changes in her body make him think thoughts he doesn’t like and he believes she’s to blame for them.
She didn’t care how badly Daddy was hurt; she was glad Clem left.
If Daddy needed a hospital, he’d tell her mother to drive him there. What he needed was rest, a good meal, and for the people in his life to stop treating him like a child just because he had compassion for some poor, dumb antelope.
As Clem’s truck pulled a U-turn, Marjorie watched with relief as the taillights vanished into the endless dark. Behind her there were whispers.
Her mother tended to drop her voice whenever she needed to tell her daddy something he might not like, probably to shield herself from Marjorie’s opinions.
When she started whispering, Marjorie moved closer, trying to eavesdrop, while pretending to watch Clem’s vanishing truck. Her mother was asking for a boatload of details, and her father sounded tired, so very tired.
Why’d her Daddy walk all the way to the service station to make the call and then back to the Plymouth again? He didn’t, of course. He got an employee from the service station to drive him back to the car as soon as he knew she was on her way.
Then how come he didn’t ask her to meet him at the service station? It was foolish of him to wait for them alone out here in the dark when he was this badly injured. He responded by saying he wasn’t that badly injured. But Marjorie could hear something in her mother’s voice, something beyond irritation and fear. Her mother just couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that her father had been so determined not to leave the Plymouth alone for any length of time.
Marjorie had to admit, if only to herself, it was a pretty good question.
Was Daddy afraid the Plymouth would get stolen out here in the middle of nowhere? Maybe plowed off the side of the road by a truck that didn’t see it in time? She could see how her father might have been able to prevent the former—he never went anywhere without his gun—but in his current state, there would have been precious little he could have done about the latter.
Even though she was afraid it might silence them, Marjorie looked in the direction of her parents, saw her mother try to grip her father’s shoulders. He tried to step back, and the attempt caused wince-inducing pain.
“Gosh dang it, Beatty, your rib’s broke!”
“Nothing’s broke. I’m just scratched up is all. Now get in the car and let’s go.”
Her mother gave her a look, and Marjorie saw disappointment in it. Like she wished she had an ally in this moment, someone else who recognized the strangeness of her husband’s behavior, but she knew she’d never find one in her daughter.
“We should get him home so he can rest,” Marjorie said.
“Should we?” Like so many of the questions her mother asked her of late, it was both rhetorical and sarcastic.