Kiss the Morning Star (6 page)

It isn’t enough. He’s still looking at me with that…that
fervor
in his eyes.

“I mean, it’s been super cool to meet you guys, and Pastor Shepherd, you’ve already taught us a ton about God’s love just by—” I wave my hand to indicate the delicious breakfast, the conversation, their home.

Lucas Shepherd nods several times, seriously, his hands folded in front of him. “I understand, Anna, if you’re not ready to serve. Though I feel, in my heart”—here he places one hand against his chest, the picture of sincerity— “that we met you two young ladies for a reason. In any case, I hope our paths will cross again someday.” He spears one more piece of bacon off his plate and then ambles away from the table.

Not ready to serve? His words are slippery somehow, reminding me of television church, the ministers with the sharp white teeth smiling while the operators stand by to take your Visa number. Did people think that way about my father? No. Not Pastor Jake Marshall. A few months ago, I could conjure up a memory of his presence—the sincerity of his voice—to reassure myself, but now it all gets mixed up in my head with the shadow he has become since my mother’s death. I pull my phone out of my bag and quickly text him again.
What will become of your church?
I need to jolt him out of this grief coma before he forgets who he was.

Kat follows me back into the guest room, and I lean down, pulling the bottom sheet tight on my corner of the bed. “How about grabbing that other side and flipping up the bedspread?”

Kat nods and smoothes out her side. “I’m sorry about last night,” she says, so quietly that I almost miss it underneath the rustling of the comforter.

“Sorry?” Sorry for crying? For…for kissing me? My heart skips.

“For crying and…stuff.”

I tuck the spread around the pillows and frown. I busy my hands with straightening out an invisible wrinkle. “You don’t have to be sorry. I mean, I cry all the time.” There’s more I want to say—the words rise up in my mouth but remain trapped there, sticky with shame and shyness.

Kat flops onto the bed, sliding down right on top of the newly smoothed surface and staring blankly at the ceiling. “That’s not what I meant, not really.”

She waits, and I know what I should do, what a normal person would do. I try to reach for her, but my face burns, my arms are stiff and heavy at my sides. I look at Katy lying there, and I’m lost, utterly lost.

“I guess it’s complicated,” she says. “It always has been.”

What is she talking about? Irrational anger—a flash fire of something bewildering and stupid—ignites in the pit of my stomach and travels up my spine like the mercury in a thermometer.

“Get off the bed! You’re messing it all up.” I grab her arms to pull her up, off the bed, but Kat fights back, wrestling to free her wrists from my grip.

The anger of a moment ago twists within me, transforming into panic.

“Get up! I want…I want to leave, okay?” I can feel her trying to trap me here.

We’re almost really fighting now; I try to drag her up off the bed, and Kat struggles to escape me. We push and pull, equals in strength, grappling like children on the playground.

She lands a kick, a sharp pain in my right shin, and then she sweeps my feet right out from under me. I fall in an awkward snarl on the bed, flailing around like a cat dropped into the bathtub. Damn it, I’m not going to Mexico. She can’t make me. I push her, crowding her toward the edge of the bed. Katy rolls and pins me, a knee on my chest.

I’m trapped. I try to stuff this strange panic down. “Let’s get out of this place!” I can hardly breathe. “Let’s just get the hell away from this creepy family!” My voice has that hysterical lilt to it, and it shames me almost instantly.

“Uh-m.” An awkward throat-clearing sound comes from behind us, and I turn to see Pastor Shepherd standing in the doorway. “Pardon me, ladies, I just wanted to make sure you didn’t forget this.” He holds up the atlas that we were looking at over breakfast. “In your haste to leave.” He smiles.

We’re frozen in a scandalous tangle of arms and legs, sprawled across the ruined bed. Neither of us can move, and likewise, Pastor Shepherd seems similarly stuck, holding out the atlas with a sort of half-horrified, half-rueful look on his face. I want to disappear, or worse than that. I want to be
vaporized
, like in some goofy science fiction movie—every bit of who I am blasted irrevocably into subatomic particles.

“Can I pack you girls a lunch?” Angela Shepherd’s sweet face peers around the door frame. She takes the atlas from her husband’s hand and bustles over to the edge of the bed, where Kat has placed her satchel. “Wouldn’t want you to leave us with an empty stomach,” she says, oblivious to the tension in the room, which dissolves in her presence like a sugar cube stirred into a steaming cup of tea.

The anger—the shame, the fear—
it
vaporizes instead of me, and I giggle, helplessly, tears streaming down my face. Hysteria squared. Of course it’s contagious. Before long, Kat and I are rolling with peals of laughter.

“Lunch. Awesome,” says Kat at last, when she can breathe. “And then we’re off!”

I look around, but Pastor Shepherd has disappeared, and even though it might be ungrateful to think this way, I’m not sorry to see him gone.

We spend the next few nights at a campground in the Black Hills, where Kat discovers she is a pretty kickass cook on a campfire. I discover that the pine trees smell like vanilla and the squirrels are vicious.

My father sends me two texts in a row, unprecedented communication skills. The first one is sort of cryptic:
Returning to church is a journey.
The second message encourages us to visit Mount Rushmore. He doesn’t mention Mom, though I’ve known about Rushmore since I was a baby. It was part of their song, from that time before I existed, the time when they fell in love.

“You don’t want to see it, just to see it? It’s like, some kind of American…
thing,
isn’t it?” Kat looks up from painting her toenails. “I mean, I don’t care. Whatever you want.”

“Not Rushmore.” My parents met there on a church retreat when Dad was in seminary and Mom was in college. The stories they used to tell in tandem—about Mom asking Dad to take a photograph of her with her best friend next to the monument; how he had accidentally opened her camera and exposed the whole roll of film. Too many details—ones that I remember—the way they finished each other’s sentences. And later the photograph album of their Mount Rushmore honeymoon trip—pages of snapshots with their bright, youthful smiles so full of the expectation of future joy—all these details crowd out any appeal I may have found in the mountainous sculpture.

I send him a response:
Take a step. I’ll save Rushmore for you.

“All right, cool. Carving a bunch of giant, dead white guys seems such a stupid thing to do to a sacred mountain.” She wiggles her toes.

Devil’s Tower is pretty much as we expected, minus the aliens. We shuffle around the base in a crowd thick with strollers and toddlers wearing backpacks with leashes attached, and sunburned young lovers handing their cameras over to strangers to capture their bliss with the otherworldly rock formation rising above their heads.

Kat rubs the back of her neck and scratches at a mosquito bite on her ankle with the edge of her other flip-flop. “Let’s get out of here.”

“That’s cool with me.” I have a headache.

The air inside the car is thick and hot, and it ripples out across the parking lot in waves. There is still a freshness in the air, though, in the smooth June sunshine that isn’t yet oppressive with midsummer humidity. “Next stop?” I pull out the atlas.

Kat shrugs, looking a little peevish. “I don’t care. Will you drive, though? I get so bored.”

I trade the map for the keys and climb into the driver’s seat, a flash of pale, freckled legs peeking out from underneath my skirt. I frown at them and wish, for the millionth time, for some pigment. “God, look at my legs. I look like a ghost.”

Kat doesn’t look. “I like your legs.”

“Yeah, well, you’re alone in that opinion.”

“Not true. The boys in A.P. Lit. used to go on and on about them every time you wore a skirt.”

Yeah, right. The boys in A.P. Lit. were too busy geeking out over their role-playing games or whatever to notice my legs—of that I’m sure. I roll my window down all the way before closing the door. “Oh my god, it’s so hot in this car, I swear I’m going to melt.” I lift the hair off the back of my neck. “Whatever, Katy. There were no boys ogling my legs. You made that up.”

“Why would I make it up? That would be kind of weird.”

“You know you’re always trying to make me feel better about myself. And it’s not like I’d ever know, with a lie like that. It’s not like I’m going to call up Danny Nash and Norman Whatshisface and be all, ‘Hey, did you used to look at my legs?’”

Kat grabs my arm. “Call,” she says. “Call them and ask. I’m serious.”

I roll my eyes and point at the map on Kat’s lap. “Find me a road. I’m ready to move.”

“Fuck you.” She fiddles with the music. “You’re not listening to me, Anna. You have no clue how many people lusted after you.”

I shift into reverse and back out of the parking spot. “What do you mean, ‘fuck you’? Which way should I go?”

“I mean fuck you, you don’t even realize when someone’s crazy about you, Your Royal Aloofness.”

“My Royal Aloofness?” I frown. Is that what people think of me?

There’s a pause, and I look over to see her fumbling with her sunglasses. She gestures. “Go right. Down to that green sign, and then hang another right.”

“People think I’m stuck up?”

“Does it matter?”

“Do
you
think I am?”

She sighs. “Maybe a little bit, senior year, but it doesn’t matter. We all knew you were sad.” My phone beeps, and Kat reaches into my backpack to get it. “Your dad,” she says, and then she reads the message. “
There are ducklings
. That’s all he says.”

Ducklings. At the pond, in the park. I laugh. “It’s been years since we went down to see the ducks.” We used to go to the river all the time and watch the ducklings as they grew up. Sometimes people would feed them bread crumbs or whatever, but my mom always said it was better to just watch, that they had plenty of food in the pond and would come close if we just sat still and silent.

“Hey, do you think he went down there? Down to the pond, looking for ducklings?”

The thought of this makes me so happy I almost miss my turn picturing him sitting quietly on the banks, waiting for the mama ducks to lead their little families past him. “Katy? Are you serious about stupid boys from high school liking me?”

“They all wanted you,” she says. And then, after a short silence, “It wasn’t just the boys.”

I’m not sure how to answer that.

We both roll the windows up halfway as I reach full speed on the highway, and for a while we sit there listening to the sound of the air rushing into the car, feeling the chill on our skin, and then we roll them up a little more so we can talk.

It’s hard to know how to begin. I clear my throat. “I’m sorry for freaking out on you this morning.” I pause, but Kat doesn’t look at me. “Pastor Shepherd…he…” I shrug. “Something about him makes me nervous.” It’s not everything I want to say, but it’s one thing. I can talk about one thing, anyway.

“I liked him. You were scared he’d make you believe again.”

“Oh,
please
, Katy.” I scowl. What’s that supposed to mean, anyway? This isn’t about
me.
“He’s too…slick, like some kind of door-to-door God salesman.”

Kat raises an eyebrow. “Watch out for the lightning, there.”

I can’t help it. I have to laugh. “Well, I didn’t trust him.”

“I thought he was nice. And so was Angela. I just got this…
feeling.
Like we were meant to meet them. Like we’ll meet again.”

“See? Now you sound just like him.” I don’t believe in that cosmic coincidences junk. What good is free will if everything is already fated, if it’s all just waiting there for us? What’s the point of making good decisions or doing good deeds, if it doesn’t change anything, if our fate is preordained? So my mom was
meant
to die, then?

“Whatever, Anna. I just said I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last of the Shepherds.” Kat sighs. “Sometimes it’s like you’re just looking for a reason to get pissed off at the world, you know? Maybe you could give some other emotion a chance.”

We ride in silence again for a while, driving west right into the setting sun. I squint at the bug-splattered windshield, my forehead drawn together in a frown. What the hell does she know, anyway? Finally I speak. “Text my dad back for me,” I say. “Tell him God won’t leave me alone.”

Kat grins and taps out the message. “Perfect,” she says. “Now. You wanna hear me read some Kerouac?”

I smile, forcing myself to relax my brows. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I am always looking for a reason to be angry. Maybe I should chill the hell out. Maybe this book will be good for me. “Bring on the dharma!” I say.

Here is what I love most about Kat. She knows how to be quiet when it really matters. Also she knows how to say what needs to be said, unlike me. I always have the words waiting in my mouth, poised behind the fence of my teeth, unable to form my lips around the syllables for fear of how the words will twist during the passage.

Here is a secret: I wonder if she’s right about Pastor Shepherd—that I’m afraid he’ll make me believe again. And if that’s not it, what am I afraid of?

I ease the car into the parking lot of the garage. The oil light came on about twenty-five miles ago, and we spent another ten or fifteen minutes driving around the tiny town of Gillette, Wyoming, searching for a mechanic. At four thirty on a Saturday afternoon, this little quick-change oil place looks to be our only option.

The tall guy in coveralls who walks into the tiny waiting room has nice eyes and a black smudge of grease along his left cheekbone. His face also reveals a five o’clock shadow and wistful thoughts of quitting time. “Hello,” he says, wiping his hands on a rag so grimy it can’t possibly be helping the situation. “You got here just in time. I was on my way out to turn off the sign.” He nods toward the neon sign in the window.

I flash a nervous smile, and wait for Kat to turn on the charm, to get this boy wrapped around her finger and ready to spend his evening solving the puzzle of our car trouble, but Kat flops down in one of the plastic chairs and leaves it to me.

“So what’s it going to be?” asks the mechanic. “Standard oil change? Air filter?” He smiles, seeing my nervousness. “Oh, it’s okay, don’t worry. I’ll stay to get you set up. If I don’t, I dunno where you’d get an oil change ’round here till Monday.”

“I think—” I say, and my voice sounds far away and wrapped in layers of gauze. “I think maybe we have some bigger problems?”

His eyes stray for just a tiny fraction of a second toward the front window, toward that sign he must wish he had unplugged ten minutes ago, but he remains professional. “All righty. Well, let’s take a look. Pull her into the first bay there, okay?”

I toss the keys to Kat. I hate driving into garages, especially the kind with the big hole in the middle of the floor. Even when I go super slow, I can’t imagine how I’ll avoid crashing into the door or dropping a portion of my vehicle into the pit. I wander over to the coffee pot and sniff at it once before pouring myself a Styrofoam cup full. My mom and I used to tease my dad about what a coffee snob he was—Mom would do things like microwaving old cups of coffee just to drive him nuts. To me it mostly all tastes the same. Still I find myself imitating his habits—sniffing the brew as though I will turn it down if it has been on the burner all afternoon, when in reality I would probably drink it even if it were mostly solid.

After a while, Kat comes back in looking worried. “So it turns out we were supposed to stop driving the car when the oil light came on,” she says.

“I told you!” I had, indeed, advocated for immediate stopping, but Kat had insisted we keep going.

“Well, apparently the oil is kind of necessary. And we don’t really have any left. Something about the plug in the oil pan leaking or maybe it’s missing?”

“Missing?” I squeeze my arms in front of my chest, holding myself together. “I mean, wouldn’t all the oil just pour right out?”

“Well, yes, Anna babe. That’s why we don’t have any left.” Kat flops down on the chair again and picks up an old fishing magazine. She shrugs. “I guess it wasn’t all the way gone. The guy says the plug was like, in pieces. So some of the pieces were still all stuck in there, which slowed the oil down some. He says he got all the pieces out.”

“Well, now what? Can he just put another plug in, fill it up, and off we go?” I look outside at the bleak gray sky, the scrubby expanse of parking lots and fields that line both sides of the road as far as the eye can see. “I mean, we can’t stay here until Monday. Where would we even sleep?”

Kat pulls her hands through her hair, twirling it around her fingers. “It’s just…he doesn’t have the part. The plug, I mean. And it’s time for him to go home, you know? I don’t really know what we should do, but we can’t drive the car, not without any oil in it.” For a moment Kat’s face seems etched in glass—her expression still and nearing transparency. It scares me to see her so fragile. What will we do?

The bell on the front door jangles, and a thin, timid-looking woman with a fuzzy-headed toddler comes in. She smiles at us and settles the little one next to the faded toy box in the corner.

Moments later, the mechanic comes back into the waiting room, this time scratching his head. He shoots an apologetic look at the woman and then nods a couple times as though reassuring himself that he knows what he’s talking about. “I took a look at it—looks like the last person who changed your oil stripped the threads on the plug, then cracked it in half when they were trying to tighten it.” He glances at Kat. “You didn’t notice it was losing oil? That the stuff was dripping on the ground?”

The little boy catapults himself toward the mechanic’s legs. “Daddy! Daddy home now?”

“Whoa, buddy, easy.” He scoops the boy up into his arms.

Kat shakes her head. “I guess I never really pay attention to the oil.” She scrunches up her hair again.

The mechanic nods. “Well, I’d say you’ve been losing oil slowly but steadily for a while now. I can order the part from Casper, but honestly, Tuesday’s probably the soonest we’ll get it.
Maybe
Monday afternoon, but with the way stuff stacks up over the weekends, I don’t know. I already tried to rig a few temporary options, so maybe you could limp it down to Casper or something. I could try a few more things…” He trails off, looking at the young woman in the chair. She smiles sadly.

Kat raises her eyebrows at me, and I look out the front window again. The wind has really picked up, and dust whips wildly across the parking lot.

“Is—is there a campground or something where we could stay, somewhere close by?” Kat keeps twirling her imaginary pigtails and pursing her lips.

The mechanic and his wife both shake their heads. “There’s the Comfy Time Motel,” says the woman softly. “I could give you girls a ride there.”

We stand awkwardly in the middle of the room, between the couple. I tap my foot, nervous energy coiling and uncoiling in my legs, in my stomach. Kat was supposed to figure out all the car stuff before we left. It was on the list. We don’t have the money to drop on a motel room for two or three nights, at least not this early in the trip. I mean, we could do it, but it would set us up for problems later on. We have a pretty tight budget for lodging, although we do have some “fun” money set aside. I suppose we could use that on a motel and forget about having fun.

“No, give me a little while. I can rig up something,” he says. “Probably.” He looks apologetically at the woman—his wife? Girlfriend? “I mean, it’s still pretty early, really.”

She smiles, but I can see the weariness in her eyes, how much she really wants him to come home. “Yes, honey, work on it awhile more. It’s okay. We can come back for you later.”

I can’t do this to them, intrude on their weekend like this. It’s not right. “We’re ruining your night,” I say. “It’s fine. We can figure something out.” We step outside to give them a chance to talk, and the wind nearly knocks us over. It’s major dust bowl action going on in the town of Gillette. Acres of topsoil whip through the air, swirling and eddying across the pavement.

Kat shouts, throwing her arms up over her face. “Let’s go around the building!”

We run to the lee of the garage, bent nearly double against the wind, which seems to suck the words out of me and fling them into the next county. “This is going to be a crazy night!”

Kat huddles in closer. “I know!” she shouts in my ear. “What should we do? Motel, you think?”

I’m facing the parking lot, so I’m the one to see the squad car drive up. My heart instantly goes into a tap-dancing routine on speed. “Oh my god!” I push Kat back from the corner of the building, toward the alley behind. “It’s the cops!”

Even with her natural skill of composure, Kat’s face still registers a little flash of fear.

“It’s those guys we ran over!” The grim headlines return to my mind, and I can see it all laid out in front of us—jail, court, testimony, even prison. I imagine my dad’s face gone all skeletal with worry, that lank gray hair he used to keep so clean and shiny clinging to his disappointed face.

It takes Kat only a second to regain control. “For the last time,” she shouts, “we did not run anybody over!”

We scramble back around the corner of the building, leaning into the wind. Kat pushes me the last fifteen feet toward the door. “Go, you moron!” Her hands are firm on my shoulders. “Get a hold of yourself. It’s just the local police.”

I consider this. It would probably be some other kind of law enforcement, if they were tracking down two hit-and-run killers who had crossed the state line, wouldn’t it? The thought casts enough doubt in my mind to propel me inside, though I swear my wrists can already feel the weighty shackles snapping shut.

“The whole north side of town ain’t got power,” the cop says as we enter, struggling to close the door against the bluster outside. His rodentlike face twitches with importance. “This storm rollin’ in, gonna be out all rest of the weekend, I reckon.”

Oh, thank God. He’s here about the weather, that’s all. My spastic heart slows to a nervous trot.

The cop turns to face us, nods, and twists his face into a smile. “That your little Toyota in the shop?” he asks.

Kat nods, pressing her lips together.

“Long way from Minnesota, ain’t ya?” He says Minnesota like Mini-soda, and I’m struck by the thought of one of those tiny little cans of soda pop. I don’t exactly giggle, but enough amusement shows on my face that the cop narrows his eyes. Cops are so suspicious of a good time. I have to dig my fingernails into my palms to stop smiling.

“You girls stayin’ in town, then?” His eyes are shrewd, and his narrow lips quiver.

Kat slips her arm tightly around my waist and gives him a saucy smile. “We might stay all week,” she says, raising her voice over a sudden groan of wind that shakes the whole building.

I watch the nervous little man’s face flicker with conflicting emotions as he eyes the two of us, Kat with her grinning and me biting on the edge of my finger. It’s like he wants to find us guilty of something, but he can’t quite decide what.

At least he doesn’t seem to react to our license plates. If the guys from the Sage Creek Campground had been able to remember the plates, or the model of our car, that information would have been disseminated to all law enforcement in the area. Either those guys had been too drunk to notice or remember the information, or Gillette, Wyoming, was far enough away to escape notice, at least for today. I pull my hand away from my mouth and curl it into a fist. What about tomorrow? And the next day? Tuesday is a long ways away. Anything could happen.

“You’re not planning on being here too much longer, then, are you, Leroy?” The cop talks to our mechanic, who shrugs. “I’ll drive by a coupla times tonight and tomorrow, like usual, make sure everything is in order. If you lose power over on this end, I’ll come through a little more often.”

“Oh, you know, that’s okay,” says Leroy. “I mean, things will be fine. I’m just going to see what I can do for these girls and then head home. Have a good night, now, Officer Henley.”

The cop nods to the woman. “Evening, Donna. You take care now!” He tips his hat to the little boy and then hurries out to the cruiser he has left running in the lot.

“We’ll just get out of your way now, so you can close up,” Kat says. “Do you think you could point us toward someplace with power, someplace we could get some dinner?”

I nod, drawing my arms around myself. “Maybe pizza?”

The mechanic’s wife looks up, her whole face brightening. “How old are you girls?” she says.

“Eighteen,” says Kat. I’m seventeen for three more weeks actually, but it’s close enough.

“I’ll call my little sister, Casey. She’s seventeen, and I bet she and her friends would show you around. She’s a lot of fun. Can I give her a call?” Donna has her phone open already.

Kat reaches over and pulls my finger away from my mouth. “That would be awesome,” she says. “Road trips are more fun when you’ve got a local to show you the ropes.” Kat’s grin is so easy; I force my mouth into a sort of grimace and wonder what it would be like to be so comfortable around people all the time.

Leroy nods to me. “While Katherine is setting up your dinner plans, you need to get anything out of your car? I put it in the back parking lot.” Kat hands me the keys, and I head uncertainly toward our car. How long would we be gone? If we stay at a motel, will we be able to grab some things later? I shove several pairs of underwear into my backpack and peer into the backseat, trying to decide if anything needs to be moved to the trunk or taken with us. Is the gun in there somewhere? The weed? In the end, I’m too besieged by the buffeting winds to stick around. I run to the front door, holding my arms in front of my face to keep the grit out of my eyes.

Leroy holds the door open for me, and I step into the waiting room, where Leroy’s wife, Donna, is talking on her cell phone. “Oh, I see you right now,” she says, waving out the window toward a set of headlights pulling into the lot. “Okay, ’bye.” She snaps the phone shut.

A car zips across the lot and parks carelessly askew, and two girls jump out; they race toward the door in tandem, their coifed blonde hair withstanding the worst of the wind. As they spill in the door in a hiss of giggles, my stomach tenses, my voice retreats. These girls are plastic perfect—from their bubble-gum lips to their shiny heels.

“Sissy!” squeals the slightly taller Barbie, the one who was driving. She runs over and embraces her sister, kissing both her cheeks in a great show. She turns to the little boy, who grins. “And how’s my favorite little man?” He runs to her to be tickled, while the other girl examines her cuticles near the door, tapping her impossibly pointed patent-leather toes.