Coach Ted saw me standing there and he waved me over. Lindsey walked just behind me, her voice low.
“It’s not worth being all pissed. They’re stupid bitches, anyway.”
“It’s pretty easy to say that when you’re getting on a plane tomorrow, huh?” I was trying to be mean and feeling bad about it all at once.
“Oh, like Seattle doesn’t have homophobes?”
“Not the way you talk about it.”
“Grow up,” she said. “It’s not like it’s San Francisco; it’s just better than here.”
“Exactly,” I said under my breath, just as we reached the table. In that moment I was as jealous of her getting to leave Montana as I’d ever been of anything or anyone in my life.
Ted was grinning his winning grin, his mirrored lifeguard sunglasses reflecting tousled-hair, butterfly-finals-and-make-out-session me back to me. He did the heavy, hairy arm around each of us, pulled us into an embrace that smelled of sweat and beer, which he was coolly drinking from a big plastic cup, despite the NO ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES signs posted every ten feet. “None of these brown ones for you girls, huh?’
“Nope,” we said exactly together.
“You almost caught her, Seattle,” Ted said, jostling Linds back and forth a little under that arm. “She only pulled out of your reach on the last turn. It was all that practice racing mud puppies back at the lake.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Linds said, sort of shrugging out from under his embrace some without seeming too obvious about it.
“Lindsey would kick my butt if we swam a fifty, not a hundred,” I said, trying it out as something like an I’m sorry.
Ted shrugged. “Probably. Good thing you don’t.”
Lindsey’s coach asked Ted something about relay tabulations and I stood there under the heavy, hot weight of his arm, feeling a strange kind of protection, like I was safe from whatever those girls might have said, might still be saying, so long as Ted had hold of me. I was also stalling because I didn’t want to go off again alone with Lindsey, because that would just mean it was time to say good-bye.
I could see Aunt Ruth on the grass on the other side of the chain link, under our blue team tarp. She had all my swim team shit—the towels, my backpack, our blanket and lawn chairs—packed up neat and tight, and was sitting atop the pink Sally-Q cooler, waiting for me, patient, sipping on a lemonade from the concession stand. My mom was never, as I remembered her, patient. Just the opposite, really. Seeing Ruth there, alone under the tarp, waiting, just sort of staring out at the bustle on the deck, made me feel really sad for her. How she’d taken me to all these meets, every weekend, all summer long, and how I had nothing much to say to her, ever, and when I did it was never the truth.
“You coming back next summer, Seattle?” Ted asked Lindsey as a now-dressed MaryAnne and another of the girls from the changing room walked up to the table.
“Probably. My dad might spend next summer in Alaska, though, so I don’t know,” Lindsey said, eyeing MaryAnne as she pretended that she had something to say to her coach, some reason for coming over.
“Alaska?” Ted said, shaking his head. “You have to dodge icebergs if you’re gonna swim in Alaska.”
MaryAnne turned to us at this, as if she had been part of the conversation all along. “Are you serious, Lindsey? That would really suck for you and Cameron. I mean, you two are best, best friends, right?”
“It would suck a helluva lot more for your team,” Ted added, which was better than anything Linds or I could have said right then, and was enough to make a couple of the coaches standing around chuckle. He went on, pushing me out and away from him to look me in the face. “I don’t know though, Cam. You think you can keep your speed without Lindsey one lane over?”
It seemed like the whole of the ribbons tent was waiting for me to answer, Ted and MaryAnne and coaches I didn’t even really know, and even Lindsey. And probably it was just me reading Ted’s question that way but it made me sort of nervous.
“I’ll just remember what Patrick Swayze taught me and be nice until it’s time not to be nice,” I said.
Ted mock-punched me on the shoulder, laughing along with most of the coaches. “That’s Dalton talking, not Swayze. Dalton’s a bad-ass. Swayze’s a chump. I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to be watching Road House, are you?”
“You’d be surprised,” I said, and MaryAnne rolled her eyes, but it was enough to get her to take her ribbons and move on.
Out in the pool parking lot Lindsey gave her bag to her dad and then helped Ruth and me load the white Ford Bronco Ruth had chosen at the beginning of June to help her haul all her Sally-Q stuff with ease. Jamie had promptly christened Ruth’s new ride the Fetus Mobile, or the FM for short, after she neatly situated a couple of antiabortion stickers on the rear bumper—ANOTHER FORMER FETUS FOR LIFE and PRO-CHOICE IS NO CHOICE FOR SOMEONE. Ruth suggested that it would make more sense for us to call it the LM (the Life Mobile), but there was no fun in that.
“Keep me posted on any additions to the bumper art gallery,” Lindsey said, close to my ear, as Ruth took a couple of Shastas from the cooler and slammed down the hatch.
“Well, honey,” she said to Lindsey, “I hope you have just a super school year. You call Cammie collect if you need to.”
“I’m sure I’ll call her all the time,” Lindsey said, double raising her eyebrows at me as Ruth pulled her in for a hug. Linds was mostly bare skin in her spaghetti-strap tank, and she yelped as one of the cold pops mashed against the top of her back.
“Oh, lookit me,” Ruth said, pulling back and giggling like she sometimes did. “I didn’t mean to send you back to Seattle an icicle.” Ruth was always her most embarrassing when she was being her nicest. “You take care, kiddo, okay? Cammie, remind me to stop at the gas station before we get on the road. You know I’ll just drive right past.” She opened her door and fiddled with her seat, the pops, the sweater she liked to drive in, and finally, finally climbed in and left us alone.
Now Aunt Ruth was waiting, probably watching the rearview, and Lindsey’s dad was waiting, leaned up against his pickup smoking the tail end of a cigarette, and we had used up all our time just like that.
It was one of those August afternoons that Montana does just right, with heavy gray thunderheads crowding out the movie-blue sky and the feeling of a guaranteed downpour just beginning to change the touch of the air, the color of the sunlight. We were right in the middle of the maybe twenty minutes before the storm would hit, when it was only just promised, and every single thing in its path—from the strings of multicolored turn flags over the pool to the sheen of the oily puddles in the parking lot to the smell of fried foods wafting over from the Burger Box on the corner—was somehow more alive within that promise.
We stood there in that world for what felt like a long time. The second that I started to say something, Lindsey did too, so then we laughed weirdly and stood there some more.
“I hope you really do write to me,” I finally said as I hugged Lindsey all fast and awkward like I used to hug teachers on the last day of class when I was little and there would be a whole line of students behind me also waiting to get a hug, and we were all shy and embarrassed about the whole thing.
Thankfully Lindsey was back doing her lesbian bravado, and she said, “I’m making you a mix tape like the second I get home,” and pulled me in for another hug, a real one. “You can come visit me in Seattle. It would be awesome.”
“Yeah,” I said, “maybe.”
And then she was jogging off toward her dad. I watched her spiky white-blond head bounce with the slap of her flip-flops, the clouds already that much closer together, the parking lot a shade or two darker than it had been a minute ago.
Chapter Seven
By the end of the Gates of Praise Labor Day picnic, Ray Eisler was officially dating Aunt Ruth. It was Jamie Lowry, staying with his mom that weekend and thereby forced to attend the picnic, who saw Ray do his little courtship ritual. Most of us kid
s in Firepower were busy hauling folding chairs back into the church or cleaning up the sticky plastic cups that dotted the little square of grass where we’d spent most of the afternoon. But Jamie had given up helping and instead was breaking thick hunks of crust off the disheveled pies still hanging around the dessert table. He’d bend back a chunk in such a way that it was still dripping with just enough of the blueberry or cherry or apple filling to give all that flaky lard and flour a little sweetness, and then he’d throw that into his mouth and start in on another.
He’d been at this for maybe ten minutes when I walked in front of him with the big electric coffee urn, and he said, his mouth full and his words all gummed up with pie filling and good church-lady crust, “Looks like somebody wants to stock Ruth’s freezer.”
I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him right. “What in the hell are you talking about?” I asked, balancing the coffee urn on the edge of the table.
Jamie was working a wedge of coconut cream, and he didn’t take his eyes off the pie but jerked his chin in the general direction of the dwindling crowd around the dwindling fellowship fire. “Ray’s been pulling out his Top Gun moves all afternoon.”
The weird glow of the campfire made Ray and Ruth look like silhouettes of themselves, but there they were, side by side on a log bench small enough for one, each totally absorbed in the other. Ray was one of those middle-aged Miles City guys who wasn’t a rancher but still wore the jeans-and-buckle getup sometimes—skinny guys with close-cropped dark hair and big eyebrows and not too tall, maybe only five nine in cowboy boots, their voices soft and their pickups spotless, inside and out. Ray was a guy I didn’t really notice at all unless he was still in his blue pants, blue shirt, blue baseball cap work getup, which he sometimes sported to GOP functions when he’d come straight from work, which was not the case today.
“Hey, if Ray starts banging her, maybe you can score us some of them orange push-pops. Those are the shit,” Jamie said, catching the stern eye of his mother, who was gathering her casserole dishes close by.
He was referencing Ray’s job as a Schwan’s man, delivering frozen foods across the plains of eastern Montana. Irene’s parents used to have a big freezer in their basement stocked full of Schwan’s stuff: pizzas and egg rolls and chicken nuggets, ice-crystaled foods, hard and blue white, frozen in time, waiting for you to unwrap them from their plastic sheaths and toss them into the oven, make them real again. I’d been sentimental about frozen foods since I’d rented and rewatched (for the first time since probably second grade) the movie The Care Bears Battle the Freeze Machine, wherein evil Professor Coldheart and his sidekick Frostbite attempt to freeze all the children in town and succeed at ice-blocking a couple of the bears, who, when melted by the warmth of one’s heart, become entirely normal again. Creating an actual, edible dinner out of a sidewalk-hard, so-cold-it-burned-your-hand box of chicken legs or a potpie began to seem a little bit magical.
“I don’t think I’ve ever even seen Ruth talk to him before,” I said, watching Jamie’s careful maneuver of a particularly messy chunk of strawberry-rhubarb as he attempted to dunk it into what was left of a tub of Cool Whip.
“Well, she made up for it today. She wants him bad.”
He got most of the final wedge into his mouth in two bites, took one of the baked-on dishes from his mom, and managed a chewy “Five thirty in the a.m., JJK” before doing his long stride off to their car.
He’d been calling me JJK, short for Jackie Joyner-Kersee, since we’d started the Custer High cross-country season a few weeks previous. I hadn’t planned on going out for cross-country, but Jamie had talked me into it, and now that the swim season was over, and Lindsey was over, it gave me something to be a part of besides Firepower, and it helped make high school feel less like foreign ground. Some of the team had been running all summer, but me being in swim shape, with what Coach Rosset called swim lungs, helped out enough to keep me with the pack, anyway.
I put the coffee urn in the church kitchen, which was filled with ladies doing dishes in the cavernous metal sinks, everybody full of food and laughing about nothing. This was the way I liked Gates of Praise best, after services, after prayer circles or Bible studies or Firepower meetings, when everybody was filled up with the spirit and maybe a little sugar high, when we were all done talking about wickedness and sin and shame and all manner of things that made my face burn when they were brought up, which they almost always were.
The urn went on this shelf way in the back of the pantry, and after I’d found its spot I hid back there for a minute, listening to the ladies, the way the pots and pans clattered together and sloshed the water as the dishrag was passed over them. I liked being a ghost in this place, unseen. Part of it might have been that story Margot had told me—the one about her brother and my mom kissing in a church pantry. But it was also that the neat stacks of dishes on the high shelves and the smell of Pine-Sol made me feel weirdly safe, or warm, or just normal, I guess. They kept a List of Events calendar on a little bulletin board just inside the pantry, and every single day of September had at least one event listed: Kinder-Care, Moms’ Circle, SonLights, Just-4-Dads, and on and on. Next to the calendar somebody had stuck a button with a picture of a loaf of bread on it, and the question THE BREAD OF LIFE—ARE YOU FULL?
Just a few months before the accident my dad had finally bought this $350 Hitachi bread machine he’d seen in a catalog and had been wanting and that my mom thought was unnecessary and ridiculous. They’d argued about spending the money on it for a while, and then my dad just did it anyway. And then he made bread in it a bunch of times, all in one week, like just to prove that he was actually gonna use this thing. He made a crusty sourdough and a thick wheat one too, and the whole house had smelled amazing, and my dad was so proud of himself, and we sat on the front porch with a tub of butter and a plastic bear of honey and ate and ate warm bread, and my mom wouldn’t join us and as far as I could tell she never ate any of it. But then my dad made cinnamon bread, which smelled the best of all of them, but he made it just for my mom and brought it to her at the museum, which I guess was like an apology. And it worked, I think, because then he didn’t feel like he had to use the machine all the time and they’d put it in one of the cupboards, had to make room for it, and though I hadn’t thought of it since before their funeral, I guessed that it was still there.
I reached up and grabbed the BREAD OF LIFE button, clicked the sharp pin into its holder, and slipped it into the back pocket of my jean shorts. I had a place for it in the attic of the dollhouse. And then I was crying, there in the pantry, unsure of why, exactly, but missing my parents in a way that I had made myself pretty good at avoiding most of the time.
Somebody dropped a glass in the kitchen. I heard the shards break and scatter. Everybody was laughing, shouting Nice one and Way to go, fumblehands and You sure you haven’t been in there drinking the communion wine? I took that as my cue and used the hem of my T-shirt to wipe my face, get my shit together.
Ruth met me at the now-empty dessert table, red eyed from all that time by the fire, her hair tousled. She looked younger than I’d seen her in a long time, maybe since before the accident.
Ray was standing behind her just a bit, holding the wheat-colored stone bowl we’d brought potato salad in. I remembered my parents buying it at a little gallery in Colorado when we were on vacation once. It felt weird to see him holding it; not bad necessarily, just weird, out of place.
True to her word, even before midterms Lindsey had already sent me maybe twenty handwritten notebook pages filled with her observations and current love interests, always in sparkly pen, as well as a busted-up copy of Rubyfruit Jungle, a couple of random issues of The Advocate, and maybe a dozen mix tapes with each song written in a different color on the cardboard liner inside. Everything but the tapes I hid under my mattress, which is what I knew that teenage boys, including Jamie, did with their porn-mag stashes. The tapes I wore threadbare on my Walkman during cross-country practices.
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We ran three routes, one right through the downtown, past bars and banks and the Presbyterian church and then on out past the fast-food and motels and past Gates of Praise around the cemetery, back to the school. Another circled the fairgrounds and Spotted Eagle, a sort of nature preserve and mucky boating pond, a place you went to get laid in your car, your tape deck on and your BAC way over the limit. And the third out at Fort Keogh, the military base–cum–ag research facility that was as old as Miles City itself, founded on the same site, in fact, as the original cantonment headed up by General Nelson A. Miles—the town’s namesake.
None of these places was new to me, but I saw them all differently with a soundtrack playing as I passed them by: an 1800s white-washed bunkhouse with a caved-in roof set to gangsta rap. The Penney’s and Anthony’s window scenes—dark in the early-morning hours, mannequins in sweaters and winter jackets, scarves and mittens, fake leaves scattered on the ground—set to riot grrrl. Strictly speaking, we weren’t allowed to listen to music while we practiced; but I was an initially unexpected bonus for the team, had placed in the top ten at all of our meets thus far, and I suspected that the whispers about Coach Lynn Rosset’s preference for the ladies might have also played in my favor.
Maybe I should have thought harder about this preferential treatment as a potential area for big trouble, as added weight to any rumors that might land on me about my own “preferences,” but I was just happy to get to run to whatever Lindsey had mixed up for me: sometimes Prince and R.E.M., sometimes 4 Non Blondes and Bikini Kill, sometimes Salt-N-Pepa and A Tribe Called Quest.
I’d also taken to wearing my headphones in the hallways at Custer, between classes, even when I’d go to the bathroom or my locker during study hall. I’d keep my head down, my thoughts lost to whatever song was on, me somehow both in a high school in Miles City and also in some other world entirely. This was exactly what I was doing the day in October when I rounded the corner by the attendance office and crashed into some girl in corduroys and expensive-looking loafers, which is really all I saw of her until I looked up to mumble sorry and found myself staring at Irene Klauson.