1986
On the road to Garyville there's a sign: SLOW, CHILDREN PLAYING. "That comma's sure doin' a lot of work there," Darrel mutters. Cathy smothers a giggle in her palm. Her husband winks at her, turning left. Twenty miles from the outskirts of Tulsa, Garyville isn't far enough for Billy to get car-sick but it's wind carry an eldritch echo that makes the whole place seem off to Cathy. But with family claiming Garyville as home she can't escape it either.
She wants to ask her brother-in-law, 'It's strange here, right?' Not that Cathy doesn't trust her intuition, just if anyone's ear is tuned to the frequency uncanny it's Ponyboy Curtis. Even his name hints at something slippery between worlds.
They see Garyville through the station wagon glass. The 'Garyville means Good Neighbors' sign with that wooden horse with it's like-human eyes. Cathy looks around, staring long enough at the antique clock in the town square to realize it's hands are frozen at 6. There's Garyville High with it's faded basketball championship banners, the small movie theater (still?) advertising Butterfly, Dairy Queen a Pizza Hut.
It's not as if Cathy's swimming in sophistication herself, she lives in a middle-class neighborhood in Tulsa for pete's sake! But she can't believe Tim and Sherri exchanged New York City for this.
They gulp slurpees at 7-11. C.D. climbs up on the hitching posts with an iron-cast horse head, swinging a jump rope above his own head.
From the magazine rack she hears Darrel bark at their son, 'your brother's not a horse! No one's tying anybody up!' Then "Get down. You're gonna crack your head open bub."
Looming over everything is a billboard chipped with a photo of the Pride of Garyville: Mason McCormick.
Mason McCormick is also not a horse. He's shooting a basketball into the atmosphere. There's a pride and sense of resolve on his face that Cathy would recognize if she had time to really look.
They pass houses and farms stretched farther and farther apart, 'For Sale' 'Foreclosed.' 'Foreclosed' 'Foreclosed.' After hitting a windfall with the rest of Oklahoma Curtis Construction's back on lean times. Darrel took a pay cut to prevent layoffs and Cathy admires him more than anyone. They hate needing another bank loan. In her closet there's the blazer with starched shoulder pads and matching skirt waiting for their return like Spring allergies and summer camp permission slips.
Cathy hand rubs husband's arm feeling the friction and warmth under her palm. She leans her head on his shoulder and marvels that something she did at twenty is still the best decision of her life.
"This place gives me the heebie jeebies."
"Me too C.D," Cathy says.
"Why? It's fields and horses. Who's scared by that?" Billy asks.
"Someone who was trampled by a horse," Karen retorts.
"Or a field," C.D. says.
"Blades of grass? Huh?" Darrel snickers at his own joke. Cathy heckles 'booooooo' in his face. There is something about being cloistered in a station wagon with his wife and four children that turns her husband into Jason Seaver's understudy.
"Careless Whisper" muffles from the headphones wrapped around Karen's neck like a choker. "We're not stopping by Robyn's are we?"
"Nope just Aunt Bonnie's."
"Why don't you like Robyn?" Darrel asks. "Give us the juicy gossip."
"I just don't want to hang out with Robyn she..."
Cathy watches her two eldest children's eyes lock horns. Their braced-teeth glower like space dogs. Cathy's already decided not to intervene. C.D. nudges his elbow into his sister. Karen crosses arms, turning to look out the window.
"Robyn smells."
"Tommy, be nice."
"She stinks! I don't like it. I don't like people who smell." Tommy's mouth looks like he devoured a robin.
"Hey ya'll," Billy wears a Cathy-sized grin, "remember that nasty fight between Aunt Angie and Aunt Sher?"
Cathy remembered. She wonders if she's supposed to start her 'even loving families have problems sometimes...'
"How do you even remember that? You were like four."
"Karen, my man Billy here's a 10,000 year old Muppet in a nine year old's body. It's why we keep him away from the BEANS," C.D. stage whispers leans over his seat and pulls his bomber hat over Billy's head.
"Sit down and put your seatbelt back on, please," Cathy and her siblings doubled up, no seatbelts. Darrel rode in the bed of his dad's truck.
Garyville's also Darrel's family: his sister Mona and Cole, his brother Tim and Sherri and daughter Robyn. They're sneaking around playing hide n' seek avoiding Collins and Shepards. It's not for any dramatic reason. They just don't need to see everyone all the time. Not family, but in Garyville there's also Angela's most recent-former-in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox and Cole's niece Teresa with her lawyer husband and young son.
She had made that point while they were packing. "You do know there's only 3,000 people in Garyville? And we're related to half of them? Oh! And one main road? The chance of running into someone is pretty high."
Her husband's exasperated sigh gave her a real kick.
"So what? If we see 'em we'll say hi. No big deal. You say you don't spend enough time with Bonnie." Wait, did she say that?
Darrel snapped the suitcase and moved his hands down her curves, "hell I might even throw in a smile and a friendly wave."
"Make it a howdy and I'll suck you off when we get back."
They pass a sign rusted and dangling, "Kencaide Quarter Horse Ranch." Pass olive-green fields laid out like chessboards. It's March and everything's on the cusp of either blooming or exploding. That's when the ground starts to tremor.
"Whoa cool! Is this an earthquake?!" Billy asks.
No, Cathy starts to say, then pauses, I don't know. She was pretty sure earthquakes happened in places like California, but she remembered reading about an earthquake in some unexpected place–like Indiana or Iowa. "I think it's just the horses, honey."
Oh wow look at those horses..." Karen awes. The horses stop galloping and the ground goes still. They stare right back at the Curtises. Even at this distance their eyes are uncannily knowing.
"They heard you talking about 'em Princess."
"Yeah, I guess."
The bomber hat back on his head, C.D. growls and makes bug eyes at the horses. "It smells like as-BUTT like butt crack," he pinches his nose.
They pass the horses, pass ditches forming hollow spaces like crooks under bent arms. Cathy looks out her window, here's where Mark Jennings died.
"You're in her bathrobe." Danny Luiz whispers to his sister-in-law when he realizes Cathy is not his wife Bonnie.
"Yeah, I'm in my sister's bathrobe." Cathy feels like she's playing Telephone at a sleepover. Except she's in her sister's hallway, in her sister's blue terrycloth robe. Kissed by her sister's husband.
The wet on the back of her neck dries. "Hold on, how'd you think I was Bonnie? Didn't you see your wife sleeping right beside you?" She is beginning to renege on her silent promise not to tell her sister. Not that Bonnie won't be a gun going off in her face.
Danny's head shakes, "she's in the living room. I thought she was checking in on the kids. See for yourself."
He's right. He's also right that all Carlsons are stamps of each other. Especially in the dark. Especially from behind. It's not long for her mind to go to their brother. Cathy brings her kids when she serves meals at the Tulsa Day Center. Every face is Edwin's. She wonders if the reverse holds true. If he walked through the doors would she see a stranger?
There's an Olan Mills portrait of Danny and Bonnie's babies next to a prayer card of Saint Anthony, saint of Portugal, animals, all things and all people lost. She'd recognize Winnie right? How could she not with her face, with her eyes?
Cathy's nose is a rabbit.
"The sewer", Danny says watching Cathy's nose crinkle. "Happens every March and again in October. We're so used to it by now reckon we forgot how it smells to outsiders."
It didn't smell like a sewer. And it wasn't horses. At least not just horses.
Cathy didn't even see him come out on the patio. "Oh of course, it's not bad, just…earthy." She's lying. Cathy doesn't like lying but she'll do it to not hurt someone's feelings.
"It's Garyville."
Cathy nods, smiles halfheartedly and compliments the flowers. They really are lovely.
Adjacent to rhododendrons, her boys and a raucous game of Frisbee-wrestling-freeze tag. Karen plays dump truck with Bonnie's son. Karen plays peek-a-boo with Bonnie's daughter. Karen's slipping into the adults' conversation.
Cathy combs Karen's spine. Her teeth turn, silver and glisten like tinsel. Karen looks like Cathy with Darrel's eyes. She's almost Cathy's height and in a few years she'll be taller. Wow, Cathy thinks with the awe Karen looked at the horses, I can't believe I made you.
Bonnie brings out a package of M&Ms and starts popping them in her mouth, she gives Cathy a wistful, knowing smile. It's not that Cathy forgets that Bonnie and her other siblings are just as much Edwin's sister as she is, it's just that she loved him the most. Growing up, she and Bonnie just rubbed each other the wrong way but maybe now 20 miles away was just the perfect distance. Maybe she does remember telling her husband that she wanted to see her sister more.
It still surprised her when she found Another Side of Bob Dylan in Bonnie's record collection and despite Darrel's rolled eyes Cathy insists that they listen. She sways and lip syncs into a phantom microphone, "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that nooooow…" Sure, she's a bit inebriated (everyone at the table is to some degree-except Karen) and she laughs but sitting underneath the setting sun she feels a pang of nostalgia that will hurt if she lets it.
Darrel says Bonnie but means Cathy. Everyone laughs too loud. Cathy drowns another glass of wine. Danny shoots Cathy a pointed look. See an easy mistake to make.
Cathy shrugs, winks and puckers her lips. Danny quickly looks away. Oh, dear God, she's so drunk.
Danny works for Darrel as a foreman. The whole idea of working under your brother-in-law felt to Cathy like the set up of either a joke or a crime report waiting to happen, but they make it work.
The men shoot ducks at Oologah Lake. Cathy hates it on principle. Though less with every run-in with geese and their poop.
Grill catfish and walleye for anyone who could come on short notice. Trampled to the Curtis rec room hoisting six packs. Kicked everyone out and commandeered it as their own hideaway.
"What do they do down there?" Tommy asked. Cathy understood, she has her girl friends and needs for a life outside her husband and children too. Besides, Danny's the best (guy) friend Darrel searched his whole life for.
Cathy's husband's better looking; yet dark hair, chiseled features, muscular build, Cathy's seeing double. Feeling their lips.
Their similarities birthed spookiness. Darrel's 20 his dad and stepmom are killed in a car crash. Danny's 20 a drunk driver swerving from a Rush concert kills his parents. Darrel took custody of his brothers. Danny the guardian of his sisters. It didn't stop. Soda was sixteen when his folks died. Susana was sixteen. Ponyboy was thirteen. Paula was thirteen.
"It was a rough time," Danny said from the Budweiser shores of hindsight. "You know Paula was expelled and sent to Cleveland for jumping her home-ec teacher with a rolling pin? Fourteen years old. You heard anything like that?"
Tommy hears Christmas elves. Billy suggests a fox, maybe a honey badger. C.D.'s sure the sounds are child slaves.
In the end C.D. is the closest to right.
Cathy's head throbs from eavesdropping on Bonnie and Danny. "They'll find out soon enough, I told you this was going to happen," dropped like a grenade in a fox hole. Cathy feels a sensation not unlike being pulled into the earth.
In the golden afternoon while Bonnie's kids nap and her kids go to DQ; Danny, Bonnie, Darrel and Cathy loom over a cellar door caged in rabbit fencing. It's an ancient stable door. Cathy half-expects horses to trot out.
Darrel's in this short-sleeve polo that boasts his bulging muscles. He folds his arms and grins like a Chesire cat. "What's going on? Raising the dead, Luiz?" Now that he mentioned it, the door did remind her of a casket.
Cathy laughs, "No, they're going to push us in."
That's when the March wind trips through Cathy's hair like feet over a kudzu vine. Smells Garyville. Watches the cellar door. Thinks John Wayne Gacy. Cathy feels foolish for even thinking something so absurd taking place in her own sister's backyard, but her heart's a coffee-addled cuckoo bird. She's not really like this in Tulsa. In Tulsa she's rational and practical. She resents her sister and brother-in-law for being so conspiratorial. She resents herself and her husband for standing here jaw-slacked. Whatever it is, we've been through worse and crazier.
It's just a cellar, it's just a cellar, it's just a cellar.
It doesn't help that the next thing she knows Danny's squatting, barking at the door, "I got Darry and Cathy here."
"Christ," Darrel's jaw locks with Cathy. At Danny, Bonnie and whatever is in the cellar's mercy. Darrel's arms enfold her. They're a Harlequin Intrigue cover for John Cougar Mellencamp's America. Her husband's muscular and big. Intimidating. His hold's tight and safe. And she can feel his nails digging into her elbow.
"Bonnie, what the heck's going on?"
"Susana and her husband Mason are staying underground for a while."
By heart Cathy knows Subterranean Homesick Blues. She hears Bonnie's words. But she doesn't understand until the cellar door pops open and two people in sunglasses step up from the darkness into the light.
Cathy jumps back. Her second instinct is that this another practical joke on Bonnie's part. She gets ready to laugh or roll her eyes or cross her arms or whatever she did when she was younger, but Bonnie, Danny, this other couple's expression dispels that idea.
The woman and man put their arms out to steady themselves but after that stand up tall and straight. The man's a skyscraper.
Darrel's head shakes. Pinching the bridge of his nose to keep from splitting a gut. "Okay," All 6'2 of Darrel Curtis, Jr. titters. He wore the same face when then two-year-old C.D. asks his parents if he could keep his poop as pets. Or as his babies.
Cathy Curtis squints into the unlight. Once her eyes adjust there's a leather couch, a three legged coffee table, the kind that was popular back in the 60s and that Cathy and Darrel have in their own home. Bookshelves pulsating with spines. On the walls there are frames and fish tacked to boards.
She tries to catch Darrel's eyes but Mason cuts her view. She's molting with questions. If they read in the near-dark. If they use candles or flashlights. How they keep warm. How and why they live underground.
It's darker and nicer than her own house.
Two people walked out of the earth. What else is there to do but shake hands?
"It's a pleasure to meet you, I'm Cathy Curtis, Bonnie's oldest sister." She smiles what she hopes is this dazzling-infectious grin. The one she brings out when she wants something. When a cop pulls her over for speeding. She's not sure what she wants now. Not sure what they stumbled upon. Her neck strains from eye contact. Even her husband tilts his chin up to meet Mason's shaded-gaze.
Wait! You're on the billboard! Cathy almost exclaims but keeps quiet and notices the McCormicks smell like Christmas sweaters-wool and woodsy and a bergamont with something slightly floral too. Not like Garyville.
Mason's sorry if they gave her a fright. He sounds normal. Confident even. Cathy's sorry they imposed. Bonnie's no help. With Susana, their arms and mouths are birds in flight.
"So you live down in that hole?" Darrel asks.
"As of matter fact we do." Susana's more confrontational and lucid than Cathy would expect from someone with worms over her head. Well, she ought to throw her expectations out the window. Toss them in the ground.
Darrel stares at Susana. Blinks. "I'm not judging, Ma'am." Cathy almost laughs out loud. If there was thing her husband is-it's opinionated. Cathy recognized the same quality in herself. She tended though to be more of a peacemaker. Willing to offer an apology she didn't always mean if it meant getting things back on track.
She extends herself towards Susana McCormick, "He's really not, my husband's in construction with Danny and right now I promise you he's green with envy at the craftsmanship that must have gone into building this… Honestly it's nicer than our home." Darrel squeezes her shoulder. They're Bart Conner and Mary Lou Retton on the Wheaties box. A team.
"You looked inside?" Susana snaps.
Cathy feels very small. It's the sunglasses she decides. The sunglasses and the walking up from the earth. It's unsettling. Her insides stone-skips her blood. Well, where else would I look? She'd say at sixteen, now she's silent.
Danny claps loud enough to scare away the birds. "Hey! We're all above ground and Mace here cooks up a mean chili."
Cathy takes one rebelliously hard look into the hole before Danny shuts the door.
Darrel grins at his children. "Mr. and Mrs. McCormick decided to come up for the day."
At the McCormicks Cathy cringes sorry. Their expressions are the palindromes in Billy's math book. Could they at least remove their sunglasses so she could watch their eyes watching her?
Tommy wanted to buy Cathy a cone at D.Q. but Karen told him it would melt. Tommy melts her. Bonnie and Danny's kids wake up from their nap. They nonchalantly accept Mason and Susana's presence. Except Billy who recognizes Mason from T.V.
Cathy's surprised no one else did.
"They ripped my contract. But the view from the bench was fantastic. Watching McClain miss free throw after free throw that I could make in my sleep. And kid call me Mace-my dad's Mr. McCormick-not me. That goes for everyone here." Mace's pointer finger runs through them like a talon scraping through an open wound.
No one questions the sunglasses it relieves and disappoints her. They eat his cowboy chili despite Mace's insistence that it needs to simmer longer to be any good.
Mace excuses himself from the table and while everyone else eats and chats Cathy catches Mace clutching his stomach, his face contorting into a wet bird shocked on a power line.
They don't tell the children Mace and Susana were under the dirt.
Where could they begin?
The sky's a patchwork of ink spiked by light. Leaves are rabbit ears, Champaign bottles are rabbit ears, shoes are rabbit ears. Leaves and flowers are fox ears, mice ears and cat ears.
They eat cake Bonnie still had left over from last night. Cathy feels like she's going to expand like a balloon and then explode if she takes one more bite. She takes a heaping bite anyways. They're not on vacation-just a weekend visit-but Cathy's indulging like she is.
Mace sips buttermilk without sunglasses. Dark hair, meteor light eyes, Susana looks almost like Cathy and Bonnie. Not an exact replica, Susana's model stunning.
The chair legs are flamingo legs. Cathy's legs itch with questions. She pulls them under her. Then over Darrel's lap.
They play cards and when Cathy compliments Mace's shuffling he casually mentions his dad being a bit of a poker player when he wasn't being a cowboy. Cathy knows her dead-father-in-law wanted to be a cowboy, that he rode horses in the circus, that he played cards and gambled and that it almost broke up his marriage to Darrel's stepmom. Not that she expects Darrel to mention any of this. Besides he's too focused on winning.
Darrel's dad beat up Mason's dad decades ago.
Cathy looks at her husband watching his face for his reaction. She didn't know that. Not that he would have any reason to bring it up to her, but it's odd learning something about your husband from a perfect stranger. A perfect stranger living a penthouse life in a glorified rabbit hole in Garyville, Oklahoma...
"Sorry," Darrel shrugs unapologetically and lays down a jack. His tone edges on impolite and Cathy's shoulders stiffen. Being courteous and having good manners is common decency and important to her.
Mace doesn't seem to take offense though. On Mason, Danny and Darrel's chiseled features are stretched almost to their breaking point. He has a hawk nose and a sharp chin. An eerily-familiar smirk struts Mace's face, "Pop complained a week about his grievous injury."
Mace knows the Collins and he talks with admiration about Darrel's brother-in-law. Cole Collins reminds Cathy a bit of J.R. Ewing. Darrel though doesn't see it. Maybe it's just the cowboy hat.
When Susana steps away to use the washroom Cathy silently groans with anticipation.
"Cole know you're living in a sewer? How many dead canaries you got down there McCormick?"
That bought the first genuine smile. Not that Mace budged. She could tell Mace keeps a lot to himself. If anyone ought to understand that, it's Darrel. And yet...her mouth's a million questions bubbling. Not that she'd ask. Not that her own curiosity prevents her from backhanding her husband's ribs, 'stop.'
This time Cathy grins even though they both know he's acting like an ass. His eyes sparkle back at her.
Yeah, how do you use the bathroom down there? Mace's clutched stomach. Is there plumbing? Do they just use Bonnie and Danny's?
Cathy's still on toilets when Bonnie Carlson Luiz speaks, "Ah Texas McCormick, how is my favorite former student doing?"
1978
It's you and Angela plus Pony and Aimee-their trip down to Oklahoma corresponding with your 10th year reunion and Mark's escape from prison, revenge trip and death. Anthony, Mark and Angela's son, home with grandma, fatherless long before the highway patrolmen's bullets.
You knew Mark Jennings the longest and the least. Second grade and the two of you in the (retarded) Red Robin reading group. Then words click and makes sense and open up a whole new world for you. You end the year a (brilliant) Blue Jay and never look back.
You don't think anything about Mark will make sense but you still need to go.
You've never been to a Good Samaritan funeral before-Pony has. Before the cremation there's a nailed pine box. Before the pine box there's a woman.
This might be the long-lost-sister, Carol Jennings. The one sent to grandparents after Mark and Carol's parents killed each other.
Step forward. From the back the woman is you-almost-you. Your size, your body, your dark hair -with a slightly different cut.
It's still a surprise when your sister turns around. Were you really expecting Carol Jennings? Does Carol Jennings even exist?
Your sister didn't know Mark. Your voice is funeral-soft, but curious with a knotted brow, "Bonnie?"
the door opens...
You're in your classroom. The William Carlos Williams poem unerased. Your sister's lingering over the Willa Cather poster. She says wistfully that you decorate exactly the way she would, if she had a classroom.
You hand Tex McCormick his paper and his eyes widen at your sister. He's the third person that day who had that reaction to the two of you. You want to tell them that if they really want to feel like they're in the Twilight Zone they should see you next to your identical twin sister.
What you don't expect is for your sister's eyes to widen at Tex, too. Like she's seeing a ghost.
When he jumps the back of a motor bike you tell your sister, that's the kid Mark Jennings took hostage last week. You saw your sister and her in-laws at the funeral. Your sister scrunched up her nose like a rabbit when she saw you. She looks like a rabbit when she's thrown off kilter.
"You'll love this, I told Tex he ought to consider writing poetry-I think he might really enjoy it."
Your sister looks playfully-shocked.
You laugh but it's tinged with frustration. Your 'Miss. Carlson' desk plate drowned in book reports.
"C'mon Cathy I'm not the same person anymore. People change."
They hold hands and whisper in Bonnie's garden.
"If Mace looked like Grizzly Adams or Susana ranted about nuclear Armageddon but...Mace reminds me a bit of you."
"Great. Lemme squeeze into my lil' hidey hole."
"Don't forget your sunglasses. And Susana could be me," Darrel knows Cathy's lying but says nothing. "They made a home underground... It's really kind of interesting."
Darrel snorts. Cathy grins and pokes her husband's chest, "obviously you're curious too, or else you wouldn't have asked Mason all those questions babe. What gets me is why Bonnie and Danny didn't tell us?"
"Hey folks got some people burrowing in our backyard?"
"Maybe the McCormicks didn't even know we were over? Oh God, can you imagine? That's so Bonnie. Still...Bonnie and Danny didn't need to act so...
-"insane? nuts? batshit?"
"Yes, yes, yes and cryptic."
She wishes she could articulate how she felt sipping tea in Bonnie's mug. The whispering. She shrunk back in time. Listening to her parents talk about brother. Now here she was feeling helpless and childlike in her little sister's home.
"Don't you think Susana looks a bit like your sister?" Three sisters, but Angela once looked like a cover girl.
Darrel shrugs his shoulders and says nothing.
"Soooo...what do you think it would be like down there?" She reaches up and runs her finger from his temple down his neck. They stand above the cellar door.
"You want to do it under the mud?" His low growl's sexy. She imagines being cloaked in mud and leaves and twigs. She imagines them falling deeper and deeper until her back hits the bedrock of earth.
They're horny. They're both very horny for each other and fuck as often as possible.
Maybe the McCormicks are just horny. Susana could be a model and Mace played professional basketball. Maybe they just needed to spice it up. Maybe it stopped them from cheating or gambling or other vices. Maybe they found it exhilarating knowing that the whole dark world could cave in at any second. She squeezes her husband's bicep. She wonders how these bodies feel under the earth.
Then she sees the rabbits.
There are a dozen of them in the yard. She wonders where they could have all come from and all of a sudden like that. They lollygag like sunbathers and seem less skittish than the rabbits she's seen in her own backyard.
Tommy wants a bunny rabbit, but then again the week before he wanted a turtle and a week before that a hedgehog.
"Where do you think they came from? I didn't see any rabbit holes in the ground." Then again she didn't think there were people in the ground either.
"No idea babes. Maybe the McCormicks moonlight as slum lords."
"Or maybe they have a fetish..."
Darrel chortles but then quickly grows bored at watching the rabbits. "You want to head back inside or.."
Between kids and a busy work and social life they didn't get a lot of chances to be alone and just talk. Cathy wanted that. She always wanted Darrel.
"Let's go to the car, we don't want to wake anyone up."
They're sitting in their station wagon when Darrel says, "okay lay it on me."
"Hmmm...You ever regret not marrying Gretchen Holden?"
She's seen Paul and Gretchen's wedding photo on Cole's writing desk perched between the bronzed-raven book ends. A few times she imagined it was Darrel standing in Paul's place, his arms around Gretchen. Once she imagined it was her standing in Gretchen's place. That surprised her but didn't bother her. She adores her husband too much to let Paul's imaginary hands around her imaginary waist bother her.
"Never." His conviction lights her up like a fire. That their passion for each other is still so strong feels like the best surprise of their marriage.
Sometimes though, it feels like a big deal that her husband almost married someone else.
He broke the engagement. 'Good, I wouldn't want to be your consolation prize,' she had joked, but not really.
"That's best you got babes? That ain't hard." He gives her a cat-like grin and sleepy eyes and a fake yawn.
"Okay, who's your favorite child?" She gives him a mock-evil grin but she really wants him to admit it.
"Don't got a favorite, you know that."
"Hmm. Okay. Karen's your favorite."
"Cathy. C'mon, I don't have a favorite." His hands move to emphasize his point his knuckles brushing into her breast. "Sorry. "
She's not angry, but Cathy's stubborn and not backing down. "She's your only daughter, you share a birthday. You held her first, that has to mean something."
Maybe it doesn't matter that he can't admit it. He might not even know. It's true and Cathy's not alone. She waits for him to change the subject, for his face to drywall. She loves him, even if predictable are his moves.
"What about you?"
Love's different. Cathy loves her children with her everything. And as long as you wanted to like your children all the same and treated them equally as best you could, that's what mattered. It had to be. Sometimes your intentions were all you had.
How could she not feel closest to Carlson? He reminds her of Edwin, but so confrontational and bold.
Cathy wasn't particularly religious-not by Oklahoma standards anyways-but she long learned that Mom's a church of silent confessions.
All right, she's hypocrite, she looks at her husband, "I can't have a favorite, I'm their mommy. By the way, I'm almost positive that Tex McCormick is somehow related to Mark Jennings," She was pretty sure she told Darrel that back in 1978 after she saw him in Bonnie's classroom, but being married for fourteen years it was inevitable for conversations to loop and repeat themselves.
"Great we'll send him a fruit basket."
Edwin showed up at Mark's funeral not long after his diagnosis with paranoid schizophrenia. She remembers Angela hugging him with such warmth–she would love Angela forever for that.
Sitting in their station wagon Cathy remembers being young. She can still see the harvest moon. She can still smell the fall night and diesel, the salt and beer and sweat, the cheap cologne and cheap perfume. She can still see their faces. She can still taste the bubbles of orange soda on the tongue. The light of the moon bouncing off their teeth and acne like a telescope making it's first shaky contact with a new planet. The Stones blasting through the radio.
She can feel her hair whipping in the wind as they sped down The Ribbon. Back then they had all the time in the world and everywhere to be.
She looks at her husband, his square jaw relaxed, his hands behind his head. Cathy's in the driver seat. She can see the loop of rabbit fencing, a spiral with no beginning or ending.
"Let's escape."
A/N: S.E. Hinton owns all the characters and places from her books. Cover art by Arthur Rackham for the 1905 version of Alice in Wonderland.
Come for the awkwardly shoe-horned Alice in Wonderland allusions, stay for juicy tidbits like Angela and Cherry as fighting in-laws and Tim and Cherry married. ;) Though hopefully I do better with Cherry & Tim than the T.V. show! If you're familiar with Taming the Star Runner you'll recognize Robyn (now Robyn Shepard) as the pot smoking, cocaine snorting wild child. Teresa is also a character in TTSR. While it's not stated directly in my story Teresa is Paul Holden's little sister. Which makes Paul Holden Cole Collins nephew. *Cathy really wasn't exaggerating when she told Darry they're related to half of Garyville. AND THERE'S MORE TO COME (runs away)
Mason and Tex McCormick the Collins and Paula Luiz (and the story of her jumping her teacher with a rolling pin) are all from Tex. Susana and Danny are OCs. If you're familiar with Tex you know that Cathy Carlson is Tex's teacher. Since in my world Cathy is married to Darry in 1978 and works at a hospital I did a slight shifting and had the ' FNU Miss. Carlson' be Cathy's least favorite sister Bonnie.
Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox are parents of Biff Wilcox from Rumble Fish. M&M's real name is Edwin aka Winnie
Thank you for reading!