Nowhere but Home A Novel - By Liza Palmer Page 0,30

sister. She must know those women will never accept her. She must know that they will find some loophole and not let her be part of the Stallion Battalion. How can she not know this by now? I guess for the same reasons I don’t. We’re constantly waiting for this town to be . . . fair. We’re waiting for our home to accept us, as we accept it. I guess we’re waiting for our “terms” to be considered.

But it’s never going to happen.

“Five minutes,” Fawn says, her eyes darting toward the door.

“I just want to talk to Dee and then I’ll sneak out the back. I promise,” I say.

“You guys can talk back in the kitchenette. And close the door,” Merry Carole says, motioning to Dee to make it quick.

Dee and I walk to the kitchenette and I elaborately close the door behind us.

“Can you get away tonight? Maybe we can drink and talk?” I ask.

“Sure, sure . . . Shawn gets home around seven, I can meet you at the Hall of Fame at what . . . eightish?” Dee says.

“That’s perfect. I’ll meet you there,” I say.

“Just real fast, how’d it go?” Dee asks, pulling a Coca-Cola from the minifridge and cracking it open.

“He offered me the job,” I say.

“What . . . did you . . . are you taking it?” Dee plays with the top of her Coke can, dusting it and spinning the flip top around and around.

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t.”

“Okay . . . we’ll talk. Tonight. Now go on before we both get into trouble,” Dee says, shooing me out the back.

That night, I walk down the same side streets Merry Carole and I played on endlessly as kids. The closer I get to the Drinkers Hall of Fame, the closer I get to the plot of land where Momma’s restaurant once stood. It’s dark enough that I won’t have to really see it, but I know the terrain like the back of my hand.

I step up onto the curb and walk through the dirt and overgrown weeds that have overtaken where the shack once was. I just stand there looking at the emptiness. Haunted. The cicadas sing. The music wafts out from the bar. The leaves rustle at a rare summer breeze. And I just stare. Gone. It’s gone. The eight-by-eight shack where I spent my childhood is gone and now just blackness remains. In a lot of ways. I let my head fall to my chest as I try to steady my breathing. I know Merry Carole hasn’t sold this land out of some warped sense of loyalty to Mom. I wish she would. That way the failures of our family wouldn’t live on as a black hole in the North Star landscape. A couple of people burst out of the bar just next door and it snaps me out of my unwelcome literal walk down memory lane. I turn and drag myself away from the gravitational pull of my disastrous family tree.

The Drinkers Hall of Fame. An induction ceremony no one wants to be a part of. The Hall of Fame, as we call it, has stood on that dusty plot of land for as long as North Star has been a stop on the railway. It’s been called the Hall of Fame since around the 1950s. Before that it was called every hackneyed Texan name in the book: the Two-bit Whore, the Hitching Post, Old West Tavern, Lone Star Saloon, the Cowboy, and the ever memorable Three Wise Men Bar and Grill (which never really caught on).

From the outside, the Hall of Fame looks like every other bar in a small town. Not really welcoming, but not scary either. But for us in North Star, it’s our watering hole. The place where the lights are low enough and the music is loud enough so people think they’ll have privacy—until the rumors about what they did are being whispered all over town the next day. I push open the creaky wooden door and try to prepare myself for what’s just inside.

Steve Earle’s “Feel Alright” hits me like a ton of bricks. The darkness blinds me momentarily as I blink to steady myself. A crack of the cue ball hitting a newly set up triangle of balls, a hoot and a cowboy boot shuffle, and the sound of beer bottles hitting the inside of a trash can wafts over me. I open my eyes and the room comes into