I let a filthy mat of hair grow over my body, and donned the skin of a lion and roamed the wilderness.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet VIII
Sometimes, usually when she was getting after the boys for tracking mud all over her clean floor, or when she was in the midst of making her millionth tray of bake sale M&M Rice Krispie treats, or when she was driving all over town to make sure everyone got to their football practices and piano lessons, Julie wondered what her sixteen-year-old self would think of the fact that she ended up becoming her mother after all.
Never mind that she was married to Tim Riggins. That was not something she ever saw coming, perhaps not even as it was happening.
They lived out in the country, off one of the county roads between Dillon and Midland, on a dozen acres of red dirt and grassland. They bought the land using an inheritance Julie got after her grandmother died, and they took out a loan to build a house on it.
Julie had graduated college that year, and Tim was working with his brother at the garage and living in a little one bedroom apartment on Washington Avenue. They had been dating long-distance for three years, and Julie was only back in Dillon a short while when Tim asked her to move in with him.
When she realised that she had been waitlisted or rejected outright by every grad school she had applied to, she said yes. On a brutally hot Saturday in July, they crammed all her things into the back of his truck and moved her into his apartment. It was too hot and they were too tired to do anything that night, and after splitting a six pack of blessedly cold beer, they fell asleep on the cool tile floor of the living room. In the morning, Tim overcooked her scrambled eggs and asked her where she wanted to put all these books.
Tim heard about the land from a client at the garage who was trying to unload it. Julie was sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon, sweltering and perusing the job ads in The Dillon Daily Star. Excitedly, he grabbed her hand and drove her out to see the place. The land was bare, hardly anything more than an unused pasture, but it sloped handsomely down to a pretty creek, and was dotted with mesquites and flowering chitalpas, and even a few unloved fig trees.
"Dunno how I can make a down payment," Tim shrugged, weighing a few pebbles in his hand before tossing them out at the grass. "I've got some saved, but not a whole lot, to be honest."
Julie looked at him, at the tender, hopeful expression on his face, and she thought of her inheritance, and how she had planned to use it for journalism school. The journalism schools which had sent her all the curt but polite "Thanks, but no thanks" letters.
She reached over and took Tim's hand in hers, and the next day they visited her bank in the morning and the realtor in the afternoon.
The first night they officially owned the land, they watched the sun go down and the stars come out, and Tim turned to Julie and asked her to marry him, shrugging nonchalantly that if he didn't make an honest woman out of her now, Coach would probably kill him.
Julie rolled her eyes and griped about how very romantic his pragmatism was, but when he kissed her and took her hand, and they blocked out on the bare earth where their kitchen and their bedroom would be, she ached with excited optimism. It wasn't New York City or Puget Sound, or even Austin, but it was hers.
"Look," Tim said, indicating the space around him with the half-empty beer bottle in his hand, "this can be your office, where you can do all your writing and stuff. We'll put a window here – best view in the place."
Julie wondered whether it would be silly to pinch herself; it all seemed too wonderful to be real.
The proverbial other shoe dropped six weeks later when Julie discovered she was pregnant.
After several hazy days of anxious disbelief, Julie broke the news to Tim. He was so happy, immediately launching into ideas of how they'd fit more bedrooms into the house, and what they should name the baby. Julie hesitated, but Tim did not, and so she drank in his excitement like it was water. She took it into herself and made it her own, and they got married at the courthouse.
William Eric Riggins was born seven months later. Before three years had passed, he was joined by Holden Taylor and Harper Tamara. Rather suddenly, Julie found herself the busy mother of three young children, and she said nothing when her office with the lovely view became the new nursery instead.
She was twenty-six years old.
Tim drank too much, and Julie worried too much. Those were the things they fought about.
Julie managed their money strenuously, and Tim could not stick to a budget to save his life. "Don't worry," he would say. "It's not like I'm gonna lose my job any time soon."
"Yeah," Julie said once in response, frustrated, "but what if the business goes under? Then what?"
"Then we'll figure something out," he shrugged.
"We'll borrow money from my parents, you mean," Julie bit out.
Tim glared at her for a long moment, and then went outside to work on the old Triumph he had up on blocks in the backyard.
Harper began to cry from her place in the playpen, and Julie abandoned the pile of bills on the table to lift her up into her arms. Harper quieted down, watching her mother with anxious brown eyes. She was a sensitive baby, the same as her brother Holden had been, and the slightest amount of discord set her off.
Julie knew it hurt Tim to hear it, but his salary did not cover their expenses, not with three small children to feed and clothe. They were always on the verge of being broke, but he would never acknowledge it. Thank god the land at least was paid for, if not the house.
Julie couldn't wait for the kids to start school so that she could work on what she'd always wanted to work on – writing. She majored in Creative Writing in college, but she hadn't had a chance to put pen to paper for anything more significant than a grocery list since.
She told herself it would be good to get freelance work to give them some financial breathing room, but the truth was that she longed to work, to make her own small mark on the world. She loved her little family, but they were not enough. They were simply not enough.
Were they supposed to be? Julie did not know.
Those years bled together, existing in Julie's memory as a somewhat surreal blur of diapers and feedings and colic and teething and trips to the emergency room. Several consecutive years of sleep deprivation led to patchy recollections, but a memory that stood out for Julie was when Harper was a year old and all three of them came down with the chickenpox at once. It was nightmarish, all of them bedridden and miserable for days, constantly scratching their burning skin and crying for her – make it better, Mama, make it better. One night after getting off work at the garage, Tim went out for a drink with Billy instead of coming straight home. It was as though he had forgotten all about them, and didn't remember until he walked whistling through the front door and found her sitting on the kitchen floor with Harper in her lap, both of them sobbing their exhausted hearts out.
The only thing that kept Julie from murdering him on the spot was that he took one look at her, slumped against the cupboards, bedraggled and unshowered, her shirt stained with vomit, and looked more guilty than she'd ever seen him look.
Tim scooped Harper out of her arms and helped her up. Julie wandered to the bathroom to attempt to clean up, and when she returned, Tim was walking around the living room with the baby, the cordless phone tucked in his shoulder as he talked to her father. Thirty minutes later her dad was in their driveway, there to drop Tami off to stay with Tim and the kids, and to take her back to their place.
Julie had never felt such a strange mixture of embarrassment and profound relief as when her mother hugged her tightly and helped her into the Explorer.
"Go on and get some rest, sweetie," Tami said, smiling softly at her. "Tim and I will take care of the babies, don't you worry."
Julie felt an intense rush of love for her mother, followed by a bottomless kind of terror at the startling realisation that she was their mother. She still needed her own mother. What was she doing being someone else's mother?
She began to cry and found it hard to stop, only ceasing ten minutes down the highway when her dad reached over and squeezed her knee.
"Deep breaths," he soothed. "You're doing fine. Quit taking everything so damn hard on yourself."
Julie slept for an entire day, and then spent part of the second watching crappy romantic comedies on the couch with her 10-year-old sister. She returned home to three kids and one husband so happy to see her that fights nearly broke out over who got to hug her first.
He couldn't really bring himself to say much more than a gruff apology, but Julie knew that the whole thing scared Tim so badly that his hands didn't touch a beer bottle for weeks afterwards.
Tim almost cheated on her once. It was when the kids were all little and they were both too exhausted to care about anything except whether everyone was fed, clothed, healthy, and not in any imminent danger. Tim didn't show up for dinner that night, and in fact didn't get home until about 2 AM, long after Julie had given in to exhaustion and gone to bed. He stumbled into their bedroom and collapsed on the bed, waking her up as he turned on the bedside lamp.
"Gee," Julie grumbled sleepily, turning over to squint at him in the harsh light, "do you still live here? I wasn't sure."
"I went out with Billy. There was a stripper," Tim mumbled into his pillow, his face obscured by his messy hair. She could smell the liquor on him. Julie felt her stomach clench; it had to be bad if he wouldn't even look at her.
"And?" she asked, sitting up a little.
"She gave me a lap dance and said if I felt like sticking around, I could take her home after her shift."
Julie sat up completely and wrapped her arms around her knees. She counted silently to ten, a tip her mother taught her, so she wouldn't blurt the first thing she thought: that she could not believe that she was married to someone who still liked to hang out at The Landing Strip with his shit-for-brains older brother. All kinds of men went to The Landing Strip; didn't Tim get that people could see him there? That they would remember that the next time they passed her in the grocery store? It was annoying enough that people gossiped about the fact that they didn't go to church and none of their children were baptised.
When her next impulse was to shove him spitefully off the bed and then probably cry, she kept counting.
"Say something," Tim said, lifting his head a little to peer warily at her.
"How did you get home?" she asked tightly.
"Took a cab."
"Where's the truck?"
"The Landing Strip."
Julie nodded. "Good," she said, reaching over him to turn the lamp off again. She turned away and tried to fall back to sleep, but now she was awake, wide awake, more awake than she'd felt in months.
There was a long silence, and Tim was so still and quiet next to her that she thought perhaps he had fallen asleep. Then his hand brushed against her back. "I'm sorry, Jules," he said softly.
Julie swallowed the lump in her throat, blinking fiercely against the darkness to force her tears away. She turned over and found him facing her, his expression pensive.
"Please don't ever do something like that to me," she whispered. "If you humiliated me like that, with a stripper, Tim, I would have to leave you and take the kids. For my pride, so I wouldn't feel like a joke. I am not that girl. But I don't want to leave you, I don't want to do this alone. I know it's hard right now, but... I don't want to do this alone."
"Jesus, Jules. I would never. I swear I would never do that to you." Cautiously, Tim pulled her to him. Julie held him close, trying hard to believe everything he said to her as he continued to mutter apologies into her hair. She did believe him, almost all of the time, and after that night he worked hard to make sure he never gave her reason not to. It helped that Tim was a terrible liar, and it almost never occurred to him to lie.
Julie couldn't say the same for herself. She came very close to cheating on him once, too.
When the boys were both in school full-time, Julie was able to take on more freelance writing work, mostly producing and editing content for corporate websites. Not exactly the great American novel, but it helped pay the bills and allowed Julie to tick the "self-employed" box on forms, which for whatever reason pleased her more than "homemaker."
When Harper started preschool, Julie ended up working part-time for a magazine based in Austin, mostly by telecommuting, but it occasionally required trips to the city where she got to stay in a nice hotel and eat at restaurants whose names didn't end in "Pit" and drink too much wine at dinner because she didn't have to worry about being responsible for anyone. Every time she drove to Austin for a couple of days, she felt like a weight was lifted from her shoulders, like she got to shrug off her identity and assume a new one, to pretend briefly that she was leading a life more like the one she imagined for herself when she was sixteen.
Her editor at the magazine was James, an accomplished journalist and author who had graduated from NYU and worked for numerous newspapers on the east coast before falling into magazines and ending up in Austin. He wasn't twice her age, but he came close, and he was one of the most charismatic and intelligent people she had ever met.
James was also completely infatuated with her from the first day she walked into the office.
He didn't try to hide it, in spite of knowing that she was married; even less so when he found out she was married to a mechanic. He looked at her strangely, like he couldn't believe that a woman like her had ended up married to a mechanic, living in a small town with three kids. The worst part was that there were times when she couldn't believe it herself, and that she felt flattered that he noticed that about her.
James flirted with her constantly, shamelessly, insisting on long brainstorming sessions over Thai food every time she was in town. It was thrilling to have discussions about ideas again, about places and people, about culture and music and art and politics. It was thrilling to have a discussion with a grown-up, never mind one whose interests extended far beyond the limited borders of a small Texas town. Their dates were productive, and made Julie feel creative, filled with possibility. She hadn't felt that way since college.
Julie also felt sick with disloyalty every time she and James went out for dinner, but she managed to rationalize it as business, even though she knew he wanted more. She didn't know what she wanted.
One night he dropped her off at her hotel and kissed her once before hinting at an invitation up to her room. Julie turned him down, her face burning, and left him standing there in the warm light of the hotel lobby. She lay awake all night, sick with guilt and still buzzing with the greedy, gratifying knowledge that someone like him was so attracted to her.
She drove home the next day, pulling into their long, red dirt driveway in the late afternoon. Tim had picked the kids up from school and the four of them were playing football in the front yard. She watched as Tim patiently tried to explain the nickel package defence to three puzzled children. He scooped Holden up in a gentle tackle as Will wrested the football from his brother's hands and took off running across the lawn. Harper chased fiercely after her eldest brother, her sun hat sliding off her head and landing in the dust. Her strawberry blonde hair flew behind her like a bright flag as she threw herself at Will, wrapping her arms around his knees and taking him down. Julie could hear their laughter.
She was suddenly overwhelmed with guilt, and love, and felt in that instant like the luckiest person and the worst mother on the planet.
"You okay?" Tim asked her as he hauled her suitcase out of the trunk, the four of them having abandoned their game and surrounded her in a cacophony of greetings once they spotted the car.
"I'm fine," Julie replied, hesitantly meeting his eyes, "just tired. I missed you."
Tim smiled her favourite smile, the one that said he was still surprised by things like love and missing, and she felt sick all over again.
"I missed you, too," he said, pulling her close for a kiss as he hefted the suitcase and led them all inside, wildly promising everyone pizza as long as they stopped shouting questions and demands at their mother.
Julie sent her resignation in to the magazine the next morning, sticking from then on to freelancing for websites and writing columns for several regional newspapers. Working at the kitchen table during the brief breaks between school bus arrivals and meals and loads of laundry was frustrating, but it was the best she was going to get.
She never told Tim what happened, couldn't bear to imagine how his face would look. Some secrets are better left untold, especially when they fail to reveal anything resembling the truth. The truth was that she loved Tim, warts and all, and would rather spend the rest of her life rolling her eyes at his lame attempts at humour than laughing at some other guy's forty-seventh witty anecdote about his third trip to Marrakesh.
"Marriage is hard," her mother said to her one cold January day when she brought Gracie over to watch her nephews and niece so that Julie and Tami could spend some time together. They sat at the kitchen table, and Julie marvelled silently that she and her mother were swapping war stories from their marriages. When Julie commented that they made it look easy, Tami smiled. "Want some free advice?"
"Yes, please," Julie replied, long since having stopped balking at her mother's counsel. It took her a long time, but she had finally figured out that there were some things she did not already have figured out, and in those cases, it served her well to close her mouth and listen to what her mother had to say.
"Whatever you do, don't stop talking to each other," Tami advised, wrapping her hands around the warm mug of coffee before her. "Don't stop telling each other how you feel, even when it's hard. Especially when it's hard – that's usually when it's the most important, baby girl."
Julie nodded, looking down at the table. Tim had many fine attributes she was in a unique position to appreciate, but communication skills were not among them.
Then again, maybe hers weren't so great, either.
One night, the kids were all feeling fractious after a long, rainy week cooped up indoors, and fights were breaking out over every inconsequential thing. Harper was in a particularly foul mood, and eventually Tim whisked her off to her bedroom so Julie could get the boys ready for bed in relative peace.
Will scampered unaided up the ladder to the top bunk, diving under the covers. At seven, he was tall for his age and an eerily identical little copy of his father, with the same long, unruly brown hair and hazel eyes. He was stubborn and strong, and already in his second year of Pop Warner football. When he ran out onto the field in his blue and white uniform, the huge pads swamping his frame, Julie would cross her fingers and press them tight against her thighs. It was a strange, archaic talisman she kept to herself, the hope that she would never have to watch her son lie motionless on that field.
Julie leaned in and kissed his scruffy head before crouching to tuck Holden in. With his dark brown hair and eyes, Holden had inherited the Taylor family good looks and, Tim told her once, that of the Hennesseys, his mother's family. It was one of only a small handful of things Tim had told her about his mother. They'd been married for almost eight years, and Tim remained extremely reticent about his childhood and his family. It was hard to unseat a lifetime of not talking about things which you knew upset people, so Julie never pressed him.
She sat on the edge of Holden's bed, tucking his covers in around him. He gazed up at her with serious, watchful eyes. Holden was quiet and very smart, and preferred his hobby of voracious reading to sports. He could, however, still be coaxed into games of football with his father and brother, and Tim and her father were both convinced that, with his patience, intelligence, and quick reflexes, Holden was born to be a quarterback. Julie merely rolled her eyes and continued Googling book recommendations for first graders who read at a fourth grade level.
Julie kissed him on his forehead and brushed his hair out of his eyes. She stood up and turned on their lion-shaped nightlight (a gift from their grandpa) before turning off the overhead light. She stood in the doorway of their bedroom and looked at them in the dim light, their faces turned expectantly towards her.
"Who loves you the most in the whole, wide world?" she asked. This was their nightly ritual, this question and their answers.
"You do," Holden replied, blinking sleepily.
"And Dad," added Will from the top bunk.
Julie smiled. "You got it. Sleep tight, guys. Sweet dreams."
"Goodnight!" they both called. Julie closed their bedroom door and stood in the dark hallway for a moment before pressing her ear against the wooden door. On the other side, she heard whispers followed by quiet giggles. Despite starting to become rather different people, Will and Holden were still the very best of friends.
Satisfied, Julie stepped across the hall and poked her head into Harper's room. Her daughter was curled up against Tim's side, and they were reading a book together, cuddled up on Harper's new "big girl" bed, cuddled in her purple and green Disney princess comforter. Julie smiled.
"It's a miracle," she said softly, leaning against the doorframe. Harper looked up and, spotting Julie, immediately fell apart and began to wail, holding her skinny four-year-old arms out in a plaintive gesture.
"Damn it," Tim swore ruefully.
"What's with this?" Julie groaned, coming over. "She's four. What kind of phase is this? Why does she do this every time I come into view these days?"
"No idea," Tim replied as he helped Harper into Julie's arms, where she continued to weep, clinging hard. "Should we let her sleep in our room again?"
"Ugh, probably not, but now that she's gotten started, it's going to be practically impossible to get her to go down now." She looked at Tim over Harper's shoulder. "Do you think we're the worst parents ever if we cave? Just this once?"
"Just for the third time this week, you mean," Tim replied, smiling up at her.
"I know, I know," she grimaced, turning and carrying Harper out of the room. "We'll probably regret this years from now when she needs therapy."
Tim guffawed, turning the lights off in Harper's room and following them. Harper cried the whole way down the hall and continued to do so while they changed, sitting in the middle of their bed and weeping like her whole world had been destroyed.
They got into bed and let her climb in between them, trying to soothe her into sleep so that one of them could carry her back to her own bed for the night. It took about 40 minutes, but finally Harper gave in and fell asleep.
Julie propped her head up on one arm, the other hand absently rubbing Harper's back. She sighed in her sleep, frowning fiercely into the pillow. Julie was grateful for the rare respite of silence.
"Don't take this the wrong way, but sometimes I stop and think that this isn't really how I pictured my life, exactly," Julie said mildly, glancing across the bed at Tim.
"Me neither," he replied with a little shrug.
"Really?" Julie asked, watching him closely. She couldn't believe him; there had hardly been a moment since they'd become parents that he'd seemed anything but totally happy.
"Yeah, I mean... Somehow I got you, and you stuck by me – I don't know why. And now I get to be a dad, and we've got this place, and I've got a real good job where I get to hang out with Billy all day. I never thought I'd be this lucky. After Street got hurt, I didn't even like to think about what was gonna happen, and when I did, I just figured... I don't know. I figured I'd be nothing."
He fell silent and Julie stared at him as he looked down at their cranky, exhausted little girl with the most genuinely blissful expression on his face.
"I have a family," he said quietly. "I never had a real family before, and now I have one."
Julie leaned over and kissed him, trying not to disturb Harper from her hard-won sleep.
"I'm sorry if I'm pissed off sometimes," she said. "It's not you or the kids, it's just... I don't know. It's me, I guess."
"I know it's not easy," he replied, shaking his head. "I know you don't always wanna be cooped up with them, that you've got things you wanna do with your life."
"God, when you say it that way I feel like the worst mother in the world," Julie breathed, looking down. "I feel so guilty."
"Are you kidding? You're an amazing mom. Look at these kids – they're all smart and healthy and happy. That's all you, Jules. You've seen what it's like when you come back from Austin; the place is a mess, the boys are at each other's throats, and the best thing I can figure out to make them for dinner is hot dogs or cereal."
Julie looked down, pleased. When she looked back up again, Tim was watching her.
"Guess I shoulda told you that before, huh?" he said wryly.
She smiled. "Maybe. I just... I wish that was enough. Being a good mom. Why isn't it enough?"
"Look, I got everything I wanted. Now we just gotta make sure you get the same. I don't wanna be the reason that you don't get to do everything you want to do."
"You're not," Julie insisted. "It's just... It's hard. Juggling everything, I mean."
Tim nodded. "Good thing neither of us is juggling all alone. Right?"
"Yeah, you're right," she smiled. They fell silent, and they watched Harper sleep until Julie felt her own eyelids become heavy. She must have nodded off, for she awoke sometime later when Tim returned from putting Harper to bed, and spooned himself up against her back. She settled in, not letting on that she was awake.
"Love you," he murmured, pressing his hand to her chest. "Gonna quit being such a dumbass and figure out a way to show you, too."
Tim became busy with a project in the backyard. This was not unusual; their large property was littered with numerous projects Tim liked to pretend to work on. When she asked him what the wood structure down by the bend in the creek was, he merely shrugged and told her it was a storage shed.
Julie didn't think much more of it until her birthday, when the kids went to stay with her parents and Tim picked up Indian take-out for her, even though he didn't like it.
"I've got something to show you," he said after dinner, "but you have to hold on. Just stay put for a minute." He stood and disappeared out the sliding glass doors onto the back deck, and Julie did her best not to peek. A few minutes later, he returned.
"Come on," he said. He covered her eyes with his hands and guided her carefully out the back door and down the steps.
"Should I be nervous?" Julie giggled, stumbling slightly in her blindness. Suddenly, Tim removed his hands, and Julie found herself standing at the start of a path of candles which led down to the little shed he had been working on.
Silently, Tim reached down and took her hand, leading her down the slope of the land to the shed. He opened the door, gesturing her forward.
Speechless, Julie stood in the doorway and found herself in a perfectly furnished little office, complete with a huge writing desk, storage, and lighting. Her laptop sat in the middle of the desk, and a shelf beside the desk held a row of dictionaries, thesauruses, and her style guides. The desk sat up against a window which overlooked the creek – the best view on their property.
Julie turned to look at Tim, astonished. He scratched his head, looking uncertain.
"It's kinda rustic, but I was thinking you could pick out some colours and we could paint it up how you want."
"Tim, I love it," Julie breathed. "I can't even... Thank you."
"Your mom helped," Tim admitted, almost apologetically. "I was trying to think of something to do for you, and this was pretty much her idea. She kinda had to spell it out to me, actually."
Julie smiled at him. He was so adorable; how did she ever end up frustrated with him, again?
"I know you never got that room I promised you when we bought this place," he said seriously. "I guess I got kinda caught up in everything and forgot about it, to be honest. I'm sorry."
Julie took his hands in hers and leaned into him, pressing a kiss to his lips. "It's okay. I love it."
"You've made me really happy, Jules. I'm the luckiest guy in the world. Now I just gotta make sure you're as happy as I am. Happier, even."
"I am," Julie insisted. She kissed him again. "This is amazing. I love you."
"I love you," he said, returning the kiss. He wrapped his arms around her waist, holding her close. "So... wanna christen the place?"
"You just revealed your true motive," Julie teased, laughing. "We can, but only because I'm on the pill. If I have another one of your demanding babies, I'll never get anything written."
"Fair enough," Tim smiled. "You gonna dedicate your first novel to me?"
"Of course. 'To Tim, for knocking me up but being kind enough to build me a place to hide from our children from time to time.'"
He laughed and jabbed her in the ribs.
"Fine!" Julie giggled. "How about 'To Tim, who takes me by surprise.'"
Tim eyed her somewhat warily. "Can't tell if that's a compliment or not."
"It's a compliment," Julie replied, leaning in to kiss him. "I promise you that."