“Late in the year for it,” Lula said. She unrolled her nylon stockings and wiggled her toes in the air. In the way of Cherokee women, Lula could still make you feel that she held down the Earth around her one moment and then seem almost like a girl the next. “Did you do your homework?”
“I swept and did the rugs too.”
“My Teeny,” Lula said, calling her the nickname that had stuck when Justine’s middle sister, Josie, hadn’t been able to say her name. Together they pushed the swing back and let it fall forward.
Justine closed her eyes. In the cool air that had come with the night’s rain, her mother’s warmth felt nice, which made the words she’d been practicing feel all the worse.
“Evenings like this make me wonder how a body would want to set their bones anywhere other than these hills,” Lula said.
Justine opened her eyes. The two-bedroom house they rented with her granny sat on the edge of Beulah Springs, the outer walls almost as much tar paper as asphalt shingle. She had her own room now that her sisters, Dee and Josie, had married themselves out of state, but her mother and Granny still split a room barely big enough for one. Hand-sewn curtains strung on a clothesline separated their beds. The low green hills beyond the train tracks seemed like folds in a crumpled blanket after Dee sent her pictures of Tennessee mountains. Justine had a good idea why a body might light out for other hills, other lands.
“I talked to Daddy.” Her nerves blurted it out for her.
Lula put her feet down to stop the swing. Justine couldn’t read her mother’s face, but she wished she could put the words back in her mouth, swallow them for good.
Justine’s father had dropped the family off for a Saturday night service at Beulah Springs Holiness Church almost seven years back. As far as anyone could tell, he’d then been swallowed up by the Oklahoma sky. He’d never sent an ounce of child support or a forwarding address, never even called.
Lula held herself together with a religion so stifling and frightening that Justine, the youngest and always the most bullheaded, never knew if she was fighting against her mother or God himself, or if there was even a difference. Still, her father was a betrayal of the knife-in-the-heart variety—something far beyond all their fighting—and here he was on a cool spring evening, right between them.
“He’s in Texas. Near Fort Worth,” Justine said. She bit her lip. “He asked me to go to Six Flags with him. Just for the weekend. He has a little boy now, I guess.”
She almost hoped Lula would hit her, but Lula stared into the hills. It wasn’t clear she had heard, so Justine’s mouth kept moving.
“Six Flags is an amusement park. With roller coasters. I know you might think it’s too worldly, but I can wear a long skirt on the rides and all. It’s sort of like a big old playground!” Justine forced a smile. She pushed a strand of hair back into her bun and waited. “I’m sorry, Mama.”
Lula remained quiet, focused on the horizon.
“I guess I pestered Mr. Bean at the plant so much he helped put me in touch.” She didn’t say that she’d gotten the information from her dad’s old foreman almost two years ago and then been so ashamed that she tore the paper into bits she spread over Little Locust Creek. A few weeks back, her treacherous mind had begun to play the numbers across her thoughts, a musical sequence that interrupted her over dinner or during tests.
“I’m real excited about Six Flags,” she said, and despite everything, she realized it was true.
“I’ll talk to Pastor about it,” Lula said, finally. She pushed herself out of the swing and walked inside.
At first Justine was surprised at how well it had gone. Then she saw Lula’s purse kicked over on the porch, her comb and Bible in a puff of cat hair. Justine scrambled to retrieve them and ran her hand over the textured leather cover of the heavy book.
She pushed past the screen door and went to her mother’s room, where she could hear Lula already in prayer. One of Lula’s drawings of a Plains Indian’s teepee was tacked to the closed door. Justine knew that on the other side of the teepee, her mother knelt, as she did in church. Instead of a wooden pew or an altar, Lula’s face was buried in her twin bed, if she had made it that far. Justine ran her finger over the smooth indentations of her mother’s ink. She wanted to take Lula the purse and Bible, decided that if Lula stopped praying, she would make herself push through the door. She would go into the small, dark room, where maybe she would lay her head on her mother’s shoulder. If she did, Justine knew that her mouth would open back up. Instead of telling Lula about Six Flags and a new half brother, Justine would tell her about what Russell Gibson did to her.
She wouldn’t be able to omit the details of the night she’d snuck out and met him down their dirt road, how he looked back over his shoulder then let her steer the car while he pushed from the open driver-side door, only cranking the engine once they were well out of Lula’s earshot. How her stomach flip-flopped over the way he had looked at her as he drove, shaking his head, saying, “Fif-teen,” and how her insides had frozen when she noticed a blanket folded neatly in the back seat. She would say how very sorry she was that she had pretended to be asleep that night when Lula stuck her head into the dark room and said, “Good night, my Teeny. Love you.” She would tell her how she’d thought his abrupt movements must have been what first dates were made of. She would tell Lula that she said no quietly at first.
But Lula’s prayer rose and dipped into a moan. Then great, body-shaking sobs vibrated through the door into Justine’s hand, along her arm, and into her chest. She dropped the purse and Bible on the kitchen table and locked herself in the bathroom.
“Shit. Shit. Shit,” she muttered. Feeling as if her bones were shaking, she took a can of Aqua Net, covered her eyes, and sprayed it all around her head. She waved hairspray from the air and then scrubbed her face red with scalding water. Her father’s blue eyes reflected back at her, not Lula’s brown eyes or eyes that seemed her own. Mostly she didn’t think about him anymore. She didn’t think she wanted to see him, but what was done was done. She decided then that she would go to Six Flags with her father and never think of Russell Gibson again. It was as if her young heart could only hold the two emotions: one, a guilt so deep for betraying her mother that it left her feeling like a human rattle, empty save for a few disconnected bones; and two, a joy so sudden and surprising at the thought of riding Big Bend, the fastest roller coaster in the world, that she felt she might pass out.
2.
“We’d love to have you, babe,” her father had said. “We’ll go to Six Flags. It’ll be a blast.” Through the crackly long-distance line, his baritone sounded familiar but busy, his words fireflies that flitted between them without illuminating a thing. She cradled the telephone on her shoulder and counted France, Spain, Mexico, Confederacy, United States on her fingers, trying to think of the sixth flag. “Roller coasters big as mountains,” he’d said. “Hold on.” She heard muffled talking, then he came back. “Justine, is everything okay?”
“Just dandy,” she said, and he was off again, filling the distance between them with empty words. It was a presumptuous question after all these years: Is everything okay? Where to begin? She knew he’d meant: Why now? Just like she knew that if he’d really wanted her to visit, she wouldn’t have had to go to such lengths to find him. She should have called her oldest sister, who was spending the summer on the Holiness Camp Meeting circuit with her new preacher husband.
Six Flags, like the basketball team she’d wanted to join last year, was “of the world.” Justine could hear Lula already: “The world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.” Justine was only fifteen, but she held no illusions—nor intentions—of abiding forever. Maybe Six Flags would be less hurtful than the truth that she needed to get away from here. And that her father was the there.
She had imagined the night for weeks after Russell Gibson had first spoken to her on her class trip to Sequoyah’s Cabin. When she’d