Fumbling through your dresser drawer forgot what I was looking forThe hottest nights were the ones I looked forward to the most.
Try to guide me in the right direction
Making use of all this time
Keeping everything inside
Close my eyes and listen to you cry
I'm lifting you up
I'm letting you down
I'm dancing til dawn
I'm fooling around
I'm not giving up
The smell of burnt fireworks and sweet corn, fresh hay and cows filled my nostrils and was chased with Lochlan's sweat as he paced slowly in front of me, smoking, smiling.
Good show tonight, hey?
Late summer is always best, I think.
Yeah.
He stopped and leaned against the back of the wagon where I sat with my brown legs and bare feet dangling over the dry baked dirt road. Dirty feet. Tired girl. My braids were all apart, my hair was filthy. I was down to three t-shirts and two skirts for free time and I figured the tan would cover most of the dirt. Some towns allowed for open fires and on those nights Lochlan would heat some water and pour it over me. That was as clean as we got most summers. I would come home on the final day in rags, voice hoarse from calling to the crowd, the sweet that offset the harsh from Lochlan playing the man. He wasn't a man yet, he wasn't even twenty years old. It was a joke but we played off each other well. I could predict his dares. He played up my sweetness to the crowd. They ate it up and we made hundreds of dollars. Enough for a carton of cigarettes for Lochlan and a new bikini for me, maybe there would be a beach within walking distance at the next town. Maybe we could eat for a whole week straight. Maybe not. He had to buy parts for the truck. Tires. Gas.
Nights we slept curled together on the single cot in the camper we borrowed for free. We had a box of cookies on the floor and a six-pack of warm beer underneath the truck. Sometimes I would sleep in the cab of the truck at the drive-in, flushed against his shoulder, my head absorbing his heartbeat. Lochlan would act out the movies for me later on, with his own interpretations. To this day Ladyhawke remains a favorite just for the fact that I laughed so hard at his dialogue I wound up on my knees in a field of strawberries throwing up blue cotton candy from the effort to stop.
I never said Lochlan wasn't a romantic. He pulled it off before there was money, and group dynamics and children. Before there were portfolios and educations and careers and debt. Before we had fifty dollars to spend without having to worry about more than a week in advance. Back then the future involved counting towns and bottles of beer and sneaking into other people's trailers to borrow marmalade and bread that we wouldn't return and picking nickles off the sidewalk in town and charming the older people into buying me two ice creams which I would then take and walk back to give one to Lochlan who would be fixing trucks and trailers all day when he wasn't posting signs ahead of the shows.
Eat fast, baby. It's melting.
My favorite nights were the too-hot ones we spent sleeping in the truck bed so that I could look up and see the shooting stars. We could claim them if we said we saw it first. He let me win. He taught me the constellations and how the weather worked. He showed me how to fix a two-stroke engine and how to steer an ox. I learned how to make a barbecue out of a tin bucket and some charcoal and I can open a beer bottle with my teeth.
But mostly he worked with teaching me how to use my pretty looks to get things from people. How to charm them into doing what I asked and how to keep them from realizing they'd been had through until we were long gone.
And it worked, for a time. Time, it turns out, was our enemy.
Only the most hardcore, hardened people can make a life out of that circumstance and we were neither. We were two dumb kids along for the ride, killing our beach country summers, loving each other, letting history write itself while we held each other in the heat and promised each other the stars above.
Time was pushing us along, pulling us out of the present and into the future. Lochlan needed to go to university. I needed to start high school. He had to get a steady job and have a shower more than once every four days. I had to be domesticated and learn to stop stealing things for his approval.
We needed to take our secrets and bury them in the center of a cornfield and then we needed to forget that location forever and leave them there to become part of the land. We needed to get along better and stop fighting.
We couldn't manage it.
I walked away from him and he turned the tables on me, deciding that he would be the one to end it first because of my stubbornness. Telling Cole that we were no longer together was his ace. Cole was still in high school and suddenly I had a ride every day in his car. Suddenly I wasn't a child anymore to him either but an equal and we spent our time listening to more music and working on the boys' cars. It was stable. It was good. On purpose, the implicit opposite of life with Lochlan, who wound up being the most stable person I will ever know, ironically.
Lochlan engineered Cole's interest so that I would still be close by and still looked after.
Cole asked me questions sometimes about Lochlan and I would lie easily. That was part of the deal Lochlan and I made in the fading sun and the dirt, in the coming darkness. I could hardly see but I could follow as Lochlan explained why some things were wrong and why we shouldn't tell and I knew he was right and it was easy for me to agree because I took half the blame. Cole died not knowing. He died and Lochlan was not his best friend by a long shot and Jake didn't get all of the history and neither has anyone else. What they understand is that Lochlan wins, every time and he keeps a sure confidence in that knowledge because of history and really when Caleb gives me a hard time it's NOTHING compared to when Lochlan and I are at odds because there are so many years and so many memories to feel my way through before I can hit on some socially acceptable and presentable way to respond.
It's the only thing I can do.
I told you when I admitted that Henry belonged to Caleb that I still had secrets. I told you I would never share them and I keep that promise because it's important to me, it's important to Lochlan and no matter how far he goes and no matter how many people I marry he is my own personal albatross and I feed and pet him daily because I don't mind having a permanent anchor to earth in him. I need him because he makes up part of who I am. We joke that he raised me, because he was trustworthy enough to be entrusted with my supervision as a child and then suddenly I wasn't that child anymore but I see him in the mirror when I look at myself. We have the same visceral reactions to things and the same habits collecting shiny things and things of value and then needing nothing but air to actually exist on. We still pour water in almost-empty shampoo bottles to make them last and we both prefer food cooked outside to anything else ever. We both drink our beer warm and pick our colors for cotton candy (blue, always blue) when everyone else says they don't care what color they get, and we both dream of those nights asleep in a field at the end of the dirt road that leads to the ocean, the road littered with ticket stubs and pieces from the first time I ever had my heart broken. Don't you ever question my loyalty ever again. You don't have that right.
What are you looking forward to most this summer, Lochlan?
The fair. Late summer. The usual. You?
Same.