Better That Way

Chapter 6 - Delaney

The thing about a criminal charge is that it fits in an envelope.

Machen wrote us each a citation for trespass and then made us stand there in the headlights while he read the court date off the top of the page twice, like the date was the part that was going to keep us out of trouble. June 24. Nine o’clock. Bellamy County Courthouse, second floor.

Up at the top of the page, in the little box marked date of offense, it said June 6.

He tore the pages off and handed them over and I took mine with both hands like it was something breakable. It was still warm from the pad.

“Don’t be late,” he said. “And don’t come in there dressed like” — he tipped the flashlight at the pair of us, my wet knees, the grass all down the front of Wes — “that.”

He followed us out to the road and sat with his lights off while Wes drove me back to the Gas-N-Go. My car was still under the buzzing lamp, in the same spot, which struck me as absurd. It had been three hours. It felt like I had been gone since March.

Wes put the truck in park and left it running. The vents were pushing warm air because the AC had quit sometime before I was born, and there was a socket wrench on the floor by my foot that rolled every time we turned.

He put one wrist over the top of the wheel and looked at the buzzing lamp.

“You want me to follow you home?”

“That’s the last thing I want.”

He nodded. He looked out the windshield at nothing for a second, and I understood he was choosing between two things to say and was about to pick the smaller one.

“Twelve-ten tomorrow” is what he picked. “Same one. Comes in over the ridge.”

I turned all the way sideways in the seat and stared at the side of his head. “We were just arrested.”

“Cited.”

“Wes.”

“There’s a difference. Machen said so.” He kept his eyes out the windshield. But the dimple was showing, the one with no partner, and that was the only thing about him that ever gave anything away. “I’m just telling you the schedule. What you do with it is your own business.”

And I laughed.

A gas station parking lot, a quarter till two in the morning, a court date folded in my back pocket. I put my head against the seat and laughed until my eyes ran.

He sat there with the truck running and let me. I have never seen a person look so pleased with himself.

I drove home at two in the morning with the windows down and my whole body humming, and I would like to say I was worried. I wasn’t. I was so far from worried that when I saw the porch light on I actually thought, for one second, how nice, somebody left it on for me.

**********

My father was at the kitchen table, reading glasses pushed up on his head, a legal pad in front of him with a citation number already written on it.

He is not a big man. I have watched him walk into rooms full of bigger men for eighteen years and I have never once seen him hurry, and that is the entire trick of him.

Machen had called him from the field. Of course he had.

And he had gotten dressed. That’s the part I have never been able to put down.

He didn’t look like a man who had been woken at half past one and told his daughter was picked up out on the county airfield. He looked like a man with something on his calendar. So he gets out of bed, puts on a shirt with buttons up the front, comes downstairs to the kitchen, and waits for her.

There was a cup of coffee at his elbow. He had made a full pot at two in the morning, and he was going to drink it, and then he was going to go to work.

I was suddenly aware of every part of myself. Wet denim cold at the knees, a smear of field dirt on one forearm, my hair coming out of nothing on purpose. I had a piece of grass stuck in my hair that kept tickling my ear.

“Sit down,” my father said.

He wasn’t angry. That’s the part people never believe when I tell it. Grant Hollis did not raise his voice at me one time in eighteen years, because he didn’t have to; he had a way of asking questions in order that made you feel like the answer had already been entered somewhere and he was only checking it against his copy.

“Whose idea was the airfield?”

“Mine.”

“Delaney.” Patient. Almost kind. “Whose idea?”

“Mine.”

He wrote something on the legal pad. Two words, maybe three. He didn’t hurry, nor did he look up while he did it, so I sat there in the silence and waited, listening to the scratch of the pen across the paper.

That’s what I remember. Not the questions. The pen. My father sat in our kitchen at two-thirty in the morning and took notes on his daughter.

“Had he been drinking?”

“No.”

“Had you?”

“No.”

“Did he put his hands on you?”

“Dad.”

“It’s a question with an answer,” he said.

I looked at the grain of the table. There is a burn ring in it from before I was born that my mother has never once mentioned.

“No.”

He set the pen down then. Took the glasses off his head and rubbed the two spots on the sides of his nose.

For the first time that night, he just looked like a fifty-four-year-old man who had been woken up to deal with his daughter.

“You leave for school in eleven weeks,” he said. “This won’t follow you. I’ll see to it.”

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

I have thought about that thank you more than I have thought about almost anything else in my life. I have thought about it in a delivery room and in a car outside a preschool and once, badly, in the frozen aisle of a grocery store in another state. Two words, at two-thirty in the morning, from a girl who was tired and scared and eighteen years old and did not ask what exactly her father meant by “it,” or where it was going to go instead.