“Come on, let’s wash up.” I take Etta into the house, and hold on until we are out of Otto and Worley’s earshot. I don’t think I have ever been this furious at her.
“What in the hell were you thinking, Etta?” I yell so loudly, she is taken aback. “You are not allowed on the roof. You know that. I don’t care who is here doing what, you know the rules. You could’ve fallen and broken your neck.”
“But I didn’t!” She turns on me.
“What?”
“I didn’t!”
“Because you’re lucky. Lucky I was there to catch you!”
“Yeah, I’m lucky you were there,” Etta says in a tone of voice I’ve never heard before.
“Are you mocking me?”
“What do you care anyway?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t care about me.”
“Where do you get that idea?”
“All the time.” Etta storms off and up the stairs. I follow her.
“Stop right there!”
She turns and faces me.
“That’s a very cruel thing to say to me. I care about you. Of course I care. But when you do something stupid, something you know you’re not supposed to do, you can’t turn around and blame me for it. You’re the one who’s wrong here. Not me.”
“That’s all you care about. Who’s right and who’s wrong.”
“Watch your tone.”
“You just don’t want me to die like Joe. That’s all.” Etta slams her bedroom door shut. For a moment, I think of honoring her privacy, but my anger gets the best of me. I throw the door open.
“What is the matter with you?”
Etta cries on the bed. She is sobbing so hard, harder than I have ever seen her cry before. My heart breaks and I go to sit beside her. She pulls away.
“Go,” she says through her tears.
“No. We need to talk about this.”
“I don’t want to talk to you. I want Daddy.”
When I attempt to reach out to her again, she gets up off the bed and goes to the old easy chair with the broken foot and throws herself into it and away from me. I have never seen this sort of emotion from my daughter, and I am stunned. But I am also so hurt that I don’t know what to say. So I rely on my rule about being consistent in my discipline. I’m not going to let her off the hook. “Dad is not going to bail you out of this one. You need to think about what you did this afternoon. And about the way you talked to me.”
I leave the room and close the door quietly behind me. I walk down the front stairs and go through the screen door to the porch. I sit down on the steps as I have done so many times at twilight. Otto and Worley pack up their truck without saying a word. They take full responsibility for Etta being on the roof, and I don’t want to say anything more. They get into their truck and wave solemnly as they descend the hill.
I lean back on the stairs and take a deep breath. The mountains, still green at the end of summer, seem to intersect like those in a pop-up book. This old stone house seems hidden in its folds, like an abandoned castle, with me its wizened housekeeper, taken for granted and obsolete. I feel myself hitting the wall common to all mothers: the day your daughter turns on you. And it happened on such an ordinary day in Cracker’s Neck Holler. Nothing strange or different or particularly dramatic in the weather or the wind. The sky meets the top of the mountains in a ruffle of deep blue. The sun sets in streaks of golden pink as it slips behind Skeens Ridge. I get lost in the quiet, the color, and the breeze, and I’m back in simpler times, the time before we had the children, when this house was a place where we made love and ate good food and tended the garden.
The cool at twilight soothes the throbbing in my head. I am making a mess of motherhood. What do I know about children, really? I was an only child. Maybe I baby-sat here and there, but I never had a grand plan that included children. When I found out I was pregnant, I made Iva Lou order me every book on parenthood from the county library. I read each and every one, picking and choosing concepts that made sense and figuring out how to implement them. When my kids came along, I thought everything would fall into place. But my daughter is her own person, and she isn’t who I thought she’d be. And I know that I have disappointed her too—she needs an outdoorsy, athletic mom, one who encourages her to take risks. My goal is to keep her safe, and she resents that. I am filled with dread at what lies ahead. How do I stop fearing the future? No book can tell me that.
The high beams on Jack’s pickup truck light up the field as he takes the turn up the holler road. He slows down to check the mailbox, and I see him throw a few envelopes on the front seat. Then he guns the engine again, spitting gravel under his wheels. Soon I hear my daughter’s footsteps as she skips down the stairs. The screen door flies open and she runs past me, down the steps, and over the path to meet her father as he parks. I hear the muffled start to her version of The Roof Disaster and wish for a moment that I weren’t the mother, but the housekeeper, so I wouldn’t have to rat her out. I have to be consistent and train her so that at some point later in her life when she must make hard decisions, she will call back to these days, find the wisdom borne of experience and make the right choice (yeah right). I have to be the bad guy. Jack puts his arm around Etta as they walk up the path. I stand up. Etta passes by in a businesslike huff without looking at me. She bangs the screen door behind her.
“Are you okay?” Jack puts his arm around me.
“I guess.”
“We’re going to have to come up with a doozy of a punishment.”
“Great.”
“It’s all a part of life, Ave.”
As we walk up the stairs, I want to tell my husband that I wish this wasn’t my life, but I can’t. I have to find a way to love my job as a mother, and I’m going to need him to help me do it.
Big Cherry Holler is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2001 by The Glory of Everything Company
Reader’s Guide copyright © 2002 by The Glory of Everything Company and The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Ballantine Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book contains an excerpt from the novel Milk Glass Moon by Adriana Trigiani. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
www.ballantinebooks.com/BRC
Library of Congress Control Number: 2002090322
eISBN: 978-1-58836-010-6
This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books By This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Adriana Trigiani, Big Cherry Holler
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