Hate You Not

You and your fancy life, big sister. How am I supposed to reproduce that?

Neighborhoods branch off Hamburger Highway. We pass Willow Oaks, a little neighborhood where Dad lives now. Since Mama passed, he’s been there. He walked out the door the day she died and never went back to our childhood home again.

Right after her death was when the bank came calling. Daddy couldn’t face it, Mary Helen was panicking, and Sutt wasn’t around. So it was up to Shawn and me to work out a deal. My big brother put up two of his eighteen wheelers for collateral—mostly because Mama’s grave is on our land, behind a little church where all the Hinsons have been buried for a hundred years under the shady oaks.

It’s called Lawler Farm now—starting when my parents married, out of deference to Daddy, who was farming the land—but it’s not really. It’s Hinson land, going back generations. I’m a Lawler, but I’m Hinson, too, and I’m not letting the bank have our farm. So far, they haven’t gotten it.

I think of all the money in my bank account right now, what I could do with it. But I push those thoughts away. I’ll get the kids what they need, but I don’t think it’s right to use the money Sutt and Asher left their babies to bring the farm back steady into the black. Not even if it will be the kids’ new home. I’ll just have to keep on trying. Try harder. So I can keep them stable and secure.

I pass Shawn’s acreage on the right—and then the double wide that serves as home base for his trucking company. He’s got nine trucks now, doing real well. Our sister Mary Helen lives out near the Taylors’ pond, a few miles east. She and her kids might come over tomorrow morning. That’ll be good. Maybe.

I take a right onto my county road. It’s not mine, but it feels like it. Only thing but our farm that’s out this way is the old Helms place. Well, that and the water treatment plant. And hunting land. A lot of hunting land that’s leased to big-league city slickers from Atlanta and a few I know from Albany.

After two point five miles driving between the tall pines, my dirt road comes into view. It’s framed by fields where nothing’s growing at this moment. Woods rise up around the fields—still thick and lush, despite our hard times. I hang a right, and my truck’s tires bump over the old, familiar grooves. Pretty soon, it will be time to ask the Helms’ boy to smooth it out for me. Daddy could, of course, but he won’t touch the farm equipment. None of it. Feels like a failure, won’t move past his pride. The Lawlers have a lot of pride. I know that, don’t I?

This road always makes me feel good. I veer left at the fork, away from the path that goes out to the pastures and down to the low ponds. I’m driving in a thick wood. Mary Helen tells me anybody with some sense would be afraid to live out here alone, but I disagree. I’ve got Petey and Tink, my German Shepherds. I forgot to mention them to Margot and Oliver before they nodded off. I did talk about them yesterday, and Margot promised that she won’t be scared.

Beyond the darkness of the woods, up on my right, I see a moonlit clearing. It’s about twenty acres of bare fields where I can’t afford to plant crops—yet. I turn right at a red dirt path marked by a mailbox, and my humble home glows in the moonlight. It’s whitewashed wood, with a screened-in front porch where there’s a porch swing and a braided oval rug and two tables I set up with books and candles. Long ago, my grandmama’s spinster sister lived here. After we shut up my family’s house, which is just a little ways down the road, it made sense for me to come here.

I’ve made it mine. As soon as I near my normal parking spot, under a giant pecan tree, all the barking starts, as if in testament to that.

Tink and Petey burst out the unlocked screen porch door like the wildlings they are. The kids rouse, but only a little. There’s a moment where I panic over which limp kid to haul in first, but then Oliver sits up and frowns out the window and says, in his little city boy voice, “Oh. I hear your dogs.”

“They’re your dogs, too.” I smile back at him. “If you want them to be.”

I help him out of the truck, and he stands stoically in the pearly light as Petey and Tink whack him with their wagging tails and lick his face. And then he giggles.

“What do you think?” I murmur.