Painted Boots (24 page)

46

I PULL MY
graduation gown over my head and drape it, with my mortarboard and honors sash, across my chair.  As I walk for the stage the warm spring air sifts the ruffles of my denim mini-skirt, which I’ve paired with a tight white tee.  My mother’s necklace sparkles in the sunlight and I’m wearing Kyle’s boots—each one painted a different shade of blue in honor of his eyes.  With my guitar strapped across my shoulder I take my place on his left, just like I do in rehearsal, leaving maybe three feet between us.

I plug in the pick-up and test the sound. 
Then I wait, tuning and re-tuning my guitar.

Kyle
talks with Jimmy Staton, a junior who’ll be playing drums.  Jimmy taps the beat while Kyle strums a few chords.

Then it’s my turn
. Kyle rotates his guitar as he walks toward me, tugging at the strap until the instrument hangs against his back.  He takes the mic from my stand, letting out the cord between his fingers until the mouthpiece dangles almost to the stage.  “You ready, for this life we’re bringing?” he asks.

“
Yes.  Maybe.”  I glance to the crowd.  “You know I am.”  He grins and I return his smile, wide and happy.

He
positions my mic then kisses me, taking his time.  People clap, a few guys call out, “Whoo!” someone whistles.  “Then hold on, girl,” he says over their noise, “’cause here we go.”

Kyle
steps up to his microphone.  He plugs the pick-up into his guitar then looks down, the brim of his hat shading his face.  He watches his fingers play the introduction, just like he does in his YouTube videos.  The beat is fast, in four/four time, and Kyle plays it solo.  Jimmy waits on his entrance.  So do I.

When
Kyle sings his voice fills the world—beautiful and tenor and edged with the same gravely sound I hear every morning of my life as we talk together, lying in his bed.  The crowd—our graduating class and their families—goes wild.

We’re steppin’ out on our own,

And yeah
we’re feeling a great unknown

But if you’ll take my open hand

Then wherever we may roam

Girl
I’ll always be your home.

Jimmy starts in, his drumming as infectious as slap-happy laughter.  It’s my cue to play and I do, feeling alive and carried, as though I’ve just discovered I have wings.  When it’s time for the second verse Kyle glances at me.  I step close to my mic and sing with him.

Don’t care, what lies ahead

I’m
true to you,

you’re
the place where

my
heart’s always led

They’ll be troubles crop up on our way

The unexpected it comes into play

But
yeah no matter where we roam

You know
you’ll always be my home.

Kyle steps away from his mic, at ease with the spotlight while playing the reprise.  But I’m at ease, too.  The five months of practice we’ve given this song, and a dozen others, have turned us from people who play together for fun, into a team.  Our music sounds effortless, though we know it’s not.

I look
out into the crowd the way Kyle taught me to do, watching as our music draws our classmates into our world.  It hits me that this is how people will always see us: in love and happy.  They’ll never see the things that wove our lives together.  They’ll never know the truth of how we fought to be.  The way we lick our wounds, naked and safe in each other’s arms while we’re talking out our pain, will always be one of our many, many private things.

It’s not so much that we have secrets—it’s that we have what makes us
us
.  Like how Mom never told me about Dad inheriting his ranch, or how Dad might never tell me why he left Wyoming, and his family, when he was young.  The stuff my parents had wasn’t mine to know.  It defined them, yes, and me by default.  But it belonged to them alone.

I glance at Kyle.  He
’s beautiful—hot in every sense of the word.  When he’s ready to play the last verse he swings round and winks at me.  “Come on, girl,” he says into the mic.  He means so many things when he says that and I hear them all, in my thoughts.  They’re my things.

You and me, we got it right

But times
there’ll be things

that
will wake us

G
irl in the night

I don’t care

what the world throws our way

Cause girl I’m
standin’ here ready to say

Hold my hand and you’ll be home

With me you’ll never be alone.

We play the reprise again and again.  Our classmates clap and dance and sing along, their voices rising like helium into Wyoming’s endless sky.  Kyle nods with his music, his body one with it.  He smiles at me, wide, happy and open.  A Gillette smile, the kind people have from being born and raised here.  The kind my father had, before Mom died.  The kind Dad has learned to have again.

He’s
out there with Jesse, somewhere, seeing my future unfold the way I saw it all those months ago after sitting in Kyle’s truck.  And next to Dad, I’m sure, Ray and Angella Thacker are in awe of what their son has been up to when he barricades himself in the Jam.

Or maybe they already knew.

For a moment I see my mother, clapping in the shadows of my recitals, yelling my name from the stands at swim meets, cheering me on across the span of my childhood.  She was my greatest fan.  But now I have Kyle.  I have Angie and Ray.  I have Jesse.  And I will always, always have Dad.

Kyle and I are quiet this evening, though I’m sure our thoughts aren’t far apart.  I cuddle against his chest, lost in the view of forest and farms and ranch land, a lazy circling hawk, the distant glimmer of sun on water.  The sky is strafed with cloud, glowing in thin strips of yellow-gold, pink and white.  Below us, in the boxy dead-end parking lot of Devil’s Tower, sunlight kisses the roof of Kyle’s vintage Chevy and sparkles atop our little Airstream trailer.  Then the light is gone.  We’re left in the sudden chill of the tower’s shadow.

The shadow! 
In all these months, I haven’t thought of it once.  It isn’t the raven-black entity Google Maps makes it out to be.  In truth, it’s hardly discernible from where it isn’t.  It could never capture a spirit, like I believed it could the night I fought with Em.  It’s not a mystical keeper of death.  The tower’s shadow is only shade, flowing like water across trees and rocks and dirt.  That I imagined it to be anything else makes me smile.

Kyle says,
“We got three days before our Cheyenne gig.”

“
Mmm,” I say.

“
So I’m thinkin’. How’d you like to break in another national monument?”

“
What?” I ask, and laugh.  “Which one?”

“Mount Rushmore.
  It’s about a two hour drive.  We could make it there tonight, easy.  Then come tomorrow we could mount the Mount and mount.”

“
You’re a naughty boy,” I say.

“
I’m
your
naughty boy.”  Kyle pulls my hair behind my ear and kisses my neck.  “It’s a good hour to the truck.  Best we get or we’ll be stumblin’ fools in the dark.”

H
e pushes me up, but once I’m on my feet I turn round to help him stand, too.  Then I brush my denim skirt smooth and shake the dust from our blanket.  The evening star has just begun to burn its place in the deepening sky when Kyle twines his fingers between mine and tugs me toward a narrow dirt trail.

I glance at him
, thinking of the summer concerts we’ve planned, excited that we’ll be in college together in the fall—unless our music keeps us on the road.  Maybe we’ll head west then, and play Seattle.  Maybe even Portland.

Maybe.

I squeeze Kyle’s hand.  He squeezes mine in return.  In the distance the edge of the world glitters, like so many things do, in the fading light.

A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s

I couldn’t embrace the hard-core work of writing without my husband and daughter.  They understand (or at least tolerate) my need to hermit.  They allow me silence when they’d prefer TV or music.  They suffer through the endless hours it takes me to grind out a first draft.  They roll their eyes as I revise, revise, revise.  Thanks guys!  You rock.

To my editors
, Mary W. Walters and Carrie Finlinson …
gracias
.

And to grandma, whose stories of growing up on a ranch in
rural Wyoming inspired elements of this book: I hope your forever is all you once believed it could be.