All the sudden I was tired of being inside, tired of being in town, tired of being swallowed up in gray. Despite all my family’s crazy shit, I wanted to be back there.
I couldn’t help it. I wished someone would come in smelling of moss. Smelling of woodsmoke. I wished someone would come in smelling of game and grease and cigarettes and gasoline. Paint. Even if somebody would come in smelling of paint, that’d be enough. Not likely here. People come in the copy shop were people living on paper, on presentations, on handouts, on printing for eight cents a page, on Internet access two dollars for ten minutes. I stood over the copier, light strobing my face. I could feel the customer behind me, but I didn’t turn around, cause if I did, the customer would be my customer. Let one of them chatty boys do the talking with the customers. But this customer come in with a smell I couldn’t figure out.
Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.
B.O. and wet dogs was part of it.
Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.
There was chewing tobacco in it.
Dawn, I said to myself, don’t turn around.
Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.
“Hey girl,” the customer said.
Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.
“Turn around here.”
Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.
Orange juice and honey.
Ca-chunk.
“Say,” the voice said.
Ca-chunk.
“Can’t you hear no more?” I knew who it was.
Ca-chunk.
I smelled my granny Jewell’s moonshine recipe.
“Say.”
Ca-chunk.
“Turn around here, you big tall thing.”
Beep beep beep.
It was my brother Albert.
Beep beep beep. Something was wrong with the copier.
Albert said, “You need help with that thing?”
Beep beep beep.
I turned to the counter. There stood Albert, stringy and brown, a big blue slushee in his hand.
I said, “What are you doing here, Albert? How’d you know where I was at?” I stacked and restacked the papers on the counter without taking my eyes off Albert.
Albert’s rat eyes twinkled like gas in a mower can. He said, “Hug?”
I come around the counter, motioned for Albert to follow me. He spread his arms wide as I went out the door into the parking lot.
He said, “No hug?” with a grin like a tent zipper.
Albert’s bird-yellow pickup set in a handicapped spot with its “Army of One” bumper stickers in the back window under the two-foot-tall stickers spelling out “REDNEKK” in gothic letters. Silver flames run back from the front wheel wells. Under lights. Tail lights blacked out. Pins holding the trunk down. Extra gauges ran up from the dashboard, which was spraypainted a lime green. Albert could waste money like nobody’s business.
He said, “Where’s your queerbait husband?” His head filled the truck’s opposite window. Albert backed up and grinned.
I walked back towards the copy shop.
“What’s the matter? Aint you gonna hug me?”
I said, “You got a woman. Go hug her.”
Albert laughed with his arms wide open.
My dark face in the glass of the copy shop door could have told me. There is no way to make your family disappear. Nor was I ever going to know peace with mine. Hubert’s face filled the glass next to my face.
Hubert said, “Where’s your momma?”
I said, “Yall get out of here. This is my work.”
“Your mother needs to call me,” Hubert said.
I didn’t even have the urge to say how pissed off I was, to tell Hubert to leave her alone, leave me alone, leave Tennessee alone. Hubert got me by the arm and jerked me around. I said, “Get your fucking hands off me, Hubert.”
He said, “I need your help, Dawn.” Hubert’s eyes was like the front end of bullets. “She’s gonna get herself killed.”
I said, “What am I supposed to do? Blink three times and make her appear?”
I could feel them asshole drips watching me from inside. Sweat was running in Hubert’s eyes. He looked like a bottle of orange pop just come out of a cooler in some old store.
“Just hold her,” Hubert said. “If you see her, hold her.”
I met Hubert’s bullet eyes with my own.
Albert put a Canard County Bugle, our newspaper, in my hand. As usual, there was a big drug bust on the front page. And there in big color pictures above the fold was Groundhog and Fu Manchu, cuffed and not even trying to hide their faces. Hubert and Albert got back in the truck.
I said, “Hey,” and Albert started the truck. I ran up to Hubert’s window. He rolled it down. I said, “Did Momma rat on them two?” and pointed at the paper.
Hubert said, “I don’t know. Why don’t you blink three times and ask her?”
Then they were gone. I went back in the copy shop. The boys were behind a row of shelves, but I heard them.
“Her boyfriend,” one of them said.
“I thought it was her brother,” another said.
“Probably both,” said the third, and then come the laughing.
I run as hard as I could, put my shoulder into them shelves. There was twelve foot of them hooked together. They went over easy and I caught all three of them dicks under it. They were rocking the shelves trying to get out, but I stood up on the flipped shelves, like a surfer, them hollering, hurt, while the desk calendars and candy bars went flying. I stomped till one of them cried and then I walked out of the store.
4
DRY IT UP
DAWN
I didn’t answer the phone when work called Wednesday morning. I was done copying.
“Well,” Aunt June said when I told her, “why don’t you come take my summer class?”
I was sitting up in bed when she asked me. I put the phone in my lap. Cause I don’t want to, I didn’t say. I also didn’t say this:
Aunt June was wanting to make a difference teaching them classes at the community college, and I’m sorry, Aunt June, but I’m afraid what you’re doing don’t. There were photographs by the thousands mounted on the walls in the building where Aunt June taught—photos she and her students put there the summer before, photos taken with throwaway cameras by kids and church people, by everybody in Canard County, pictures of endless mamaws standing at stoves stirring skillet bottoms skimmed with gravy, people standing out front of trucks with their fighting chickens balanced on their arm, feathers pluming down, grandfathers and grandchildren with guns, endless trailer underpinning backdrops, endless four-wheelers, photos of baptism hot tubs, children holding hot dogs and plastic tigers,