Big Man

I’m staring at her, wide-eyed. She never said…

She shoves past me, shoulder colliding with mine. “But you’re right,” she says, angrily. “I can’t wait to get home to my fancy life. Where I matter, where people give a damn about me.”

She storms past me into the house.

It’s too much. “Fine,” I call after her. “Then you can go on back now, Sasha. I’ll take care of the rest of this. Sell your share for you, and mail you the check. That’s all you really want, isn’t it? Go on home and leave the dirty work to me.”

I don’t look back to see if that blow landed. I don’t stop walking until I’m at the back door of the house, wrenching it open, storming inside. I can’t stand to look at her anymore. Those too-familiar green eyes, her face fallen in a sad expression. I can’t take it.

She knew. All along she knew. She thought I didn’t. What does that mean now?

It doesn’t matter. She made clear just now what she intends to do about this—about us. I’m nothing more than a passing nostalgic fling to her. She’s on her way back to the big city, and this time, I’ll need to really forget about her, if I ever want to move on with my life.

11

Sasha Bluebell

I stalk away across the fields, his words echoing through my mind.

You’re exactly the same girl you used to be.

He acted like he didn’t even recognize me. He lied. Pretended I was nothing more than some stranger whose property he owned half of, when all the time he knew everything. Now he expects me to, what? Suddenly feel nostalgic about him, this life, this place?

The fact that I do, a bit, isn’t the point.

The girl who grew up here alongside Grant Werther is a completely different person. A past life. I’ve got a whole life waiting for me back home in the city, one I built myself. I don’t need him or anyone.

You’re exactly the same girl you used to be, he said. How can I be? I’ve run as far from her as I possibly can.

I pace along the fence he’s been rebuilding. This part of the work he’s done almost entirely himself. I reach out to run a hand along the wire that makes up most of the fence. My fingers dance across the wooden posts every few feet, tracing the rough material. A splinter pricks my finger at one point, and I draw it out with a sigh, dropping the pesky little sliver of wood to the grass at my feet.

Wish I could deal with all my problems that easily. Pluck them out and let them fall to the mud.

But this one, especially, is going to be hard to rid myself of.

So I try to do the one thing I really don’t want to do.

I try to remember.

I start with the house itself. I have good memories there. Playing underfoot in the kitchen while Mama cooked. Running in and out of the living room, to… I grimace, rub my temples. But I force myself to relive that memory. Running in there to find Dad with a newspaper. Leaping onto the couch beside him, tugging at the paper. Making him sigh with exasperation, but then reach for me anyway, tug me onto his lap and ruffle my hair. He’d sit with me, let me read the paper with him, ignoring my childish attempts at pronouncing the big words in the news he always read.

Dad had wanderlust, Mama always said. He traveled for work at first, just weeklong trips here and there. I always cried when he left, but he never looked sad. He only looked sad when he came back.

That’s what made him run in the end, she told me. He couldn’t stand this life. Too country, too provincial. Too small.

He was never mean to us. Never seemed to hate us. Just… when he finally ran, his conscience didn’t let him look back. He used to send me a letter once a year, on my birthday. They’d be filled with a whole lot of nothing. Just platitudes. “Miss you, hope you’re doing well, thinking about you today.” No details about where he was, what he was doing. Why he left.

On my sixteenth birthday, the letters stopped coming.

On my eighteenth birthday, when I left for college, I burned the ones I had saved. I didn’t need that reminder. No more than I needed him.

But I only ended up doing the same thing he did, I realize. I ran too, I left Mama behind to deal with it all herself. I wrote off this whole town because of him.

No wonder people hate me now that I’m finally back. They look at me and see my father. They see another runaway. Another person who abandoned them for something bigger without a backward glance.