You're Still the One (8 page)

I had an interview in Boston. I went from there to an interview in Houston, then up to Seattle.

I practiced my confident act. Breezy and smart, ultrastylish and competent. I could manage people, keep up with fashion trends, work with designers and other creative types, improve sales. My feet hurt in their four-inch heels.

Each interview made me feel sicker, as if I were wandering around lost, entering enemy territory where everyone was living a life that I didn’t want to live anymore, complete with spears, dead animals around their necks, and warring factions. I watched people scurrying about, stressed to the ceiling, faces tight. I saw the piled-up folders, the fashion photos, the couture clothes, the intense conversations among Type A people who thought a lot of themselves. I could
feel
the competition there. I didn’t think I could do it anymore.

The whole time, I imagined Jace beside me, smiling gently, in every interview. I saw him on his bike. I saw him relaxed at his home, on the deck. I saw him bandaging my ankle and my leg. I felt him kissing me, holding me.

I asked for an outlandish sum of money for my salary, to which the executives I was talking with nodded their acquiescence and told me about the other benefits I would receive.

I teetered out of each interview on my sweet designer heels, feeling skittish. Unhappy. Filled with dread.

My fancy clothes were suddenly so uncomfortable.

I had been living a whirling, hard-charging, fashion-centered life for years.

I no longer wanted to do that. It was nothing to me.

What did I want to do?

What appealed?

What did I like to do?

I started doing math problems in my head. How cheap could I live until I could figure this out? The house was free, there were taxes, though . . .

My time in poverty in the trailer park told me that I could not use much of my savings or I’d start to feel the three S’s: sick, scared, and sliding. As in sliding back into being poor.

But it was abundantly apparent that I needed to do something different with my life, workwise.

What could I do . . .

 

 

I wondered what the letter I’d sent was doing in my former company.

She would have hit the roof, stayed on the roof, and thrown her designer heels at everyone while cursing me.

The farther I got away from her, the better I felt.

I laughed.

 

 

When I was in Seattle for my interview, Jace called me. I was strolling through Pike Place Market, which overlooks the waterfront in Seattle, surrounded by wildflower bouquets, spices, fresh vegetables of all colors, and fish being thrown by fish sellers. I had bought a six-foot-long woven tapestry of red poppies for the house; not that I was staying in Schollton.

“Hey, Allie.”

“Hi, Jace.” I ducked into a quieter corner.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“How were the interviews?”

“My feet hurt.”

He laughed. “If you were wearing boots and walking through your apple orchard, your feet wouldn’t hurt.”

“That’s true.”

“How about coming with me to the barn dance?”

“I’m not going to the barn dance.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t dance.”

“Yes, you do. We danced in Yellowstone all the time. By the lake, in that field, camping at night with friends . . . near the elk that one time, after we got past that black bear . . .”

“That was different.”

“How so?”

“It just was. Let’s say there was magic in the lake or in the waterfalls or something.”

“Huh. Well, there’s magic here in the apple orchards.”

“Haven’t seen it.”

“You will. We’ll dance at the barn dance and you’ll know those apples have something special in them.”

“Apples are for apple pies, not dancing.”

“Bake us an apple pie and then we’ll go dancing in a barn. If you moved away, you would miss next year’s barn dance and that would be bad. Plus, I would miss you.”

“You would?” I loved Jace’s voice. The deepness of it, the totally masculine tone.

“Yes. I’ve always missed you. Come home, Allie. Please?”

“I can’t.” I watched another fish go flying through the air. “I can’t.”

My heart was cracking like a melon split in two by a hatchet. Ten feet away from me a man with a violin started playing a poignant love song, and I teared up.

“Well, if you can’t come home for me, come home for Margaret and Bob, Spot the Cat and Marvin, Spunky Joy and Leroy. They told me yesterday, when I was visiting and feeding them, that they missed you. What about Mr. Jezebel Rooster? What would he do without you? He so enjoys seeing you first thing in the morning. He’s lonely. He’s lost without you. He’ll never be happy without you.”

I wiped my tears. “I don’t want Mr. Jezebel to be unhappy and lonely.”

“Neither do I, Allie,” Jace said softly. “I don’t want that at all.”

When I hung up the phone I realized that Jace was still pursuing me, even though I told him I didn’t want kids. I assumed he assumed I would change my mind. The tears kept falling.

 

 

I left my dad’s dark, decrepit trailer when I was sixteen. Almost panting with fear, I hastily packed a bag of clothes and everything I had brought with me from Montana that had been my mother’s.

I recognized, somewhere in that firestorm of turmoil, in the hail of verbal attacks and neglect from my dad, that if I didn’t leave, I would permanently succumb to my pervasive depression and probably self-destruct.

I had almost no will to live. I missed my loving, kind mother, and my grief had only deepened for her until it was a rock in my soul. I missed the mountains of Montana, and Flathead Lake, and our blue house. I missed feeling safe, feeling loved. My dad told me I was no one—a poor and ugly kid with odd gold eyes—and I believed it.

There was one tiny and shiny spark, however, down deep in my heart, that hoped things would be better, that believed things
could
be better, and it pushed me out the door. I am sure that spark was my mother’s love. I remembered how often she had told me that she loved me, that I was a lovely person and showed my “Montana style” with flair and fashion.

My dad worked factory-type jobs until he was fired. Most nights he came home drunk, or he would come home and start slugging it down. Until I was old enough to get a job, I did anything I could to avoid going home after school. I joined sports and arts programs and helped teachers. One of my teachers actually had a sewing machine in her room, and I spent a lot of time making my used clothing look individualistic and modern, with lace, silk, beads, even leather, like my mother taught me. I was desperate for cool clothes so people wouldn’t know the truth. Kids actually called me “Model Allie,” and thought I was a trendsetter because of my outfits. They had no idea the dire straits I lived in—my clothes kept that hidden from them.

I would leave if he was home, pretending I was going to do homework at someone’s house. In reality, I would go hide outside somewhere, usually in the orchard, but I would also sometimes bike to a forest near our home and hike around, sit on a rock and fall apart, watch the leaves change color, or follow a squirrel. It’s where my love of nature started.

Nature didn’t judge, it didn’t hit, it didn’t scream and intimidate, it didn’t make me feel bad about myself. Nature was always changing, comforting, soothing. There was originality and beauty in every leaf, flower, and tree. Nature was a friend who gave back without words. I lived half of my childhood in nature.

But I couldn’t avoid my dad all the time.

“Don’t wear that T-shirt. You look like a whore . . . You better be home when I get home, Allie . . . If I find you with a boy, I’m coming after you and I’m bringing my gun. I’m not raising no slut . . . You got all A’s on your report card? Must be an easy school . . . What’s wrong with that mud-brown hair of yours? Don’t you brush it? . . . Where did you get those clothes? Think you’re a model or something? Your mom was like that, too, always trying to dress higher than she was, always looking for better. She wanted a rich man. She never thought I was good enough. I know she cheated on me . . . then she took off, damn her . . .”

He was constantly angry, and his scars made him look even more threatening and dangerous. He threw my mother’s purple-flowered china plates and broke them one night, though he knew I used them to cut up apples. When he wasn’t looking, I picked up the pieces and put them in a bag, hating him. I still have them. He stomped through the trailer. He swore. I don’t remember him ever hugging me or telling me he loved me.

One night his rage, blowing at full volume, was too much. “You look like your damn mother! You got the same golden eyes, same brown hair. She kept secrets. What kind of secrets are you hiding from me? Sixteen years old and you think you know everything?” He towered over me, chest puffed out.

I assured him, shaking, that I didn’t.

“You think you’re better than me?” With one fell swoop he dumped my homework off the table.

I assured him I didn’t, feeling nauseous.

He threw a coffee mug and it shattered the window. I remember my stomach sinking. The window was right above the bench that I slept on. It was winter. I would freeze.

“I thought you had a job, but maybe a man’s giving you money.”

I told him there was no man. I didn’t tell him my clothes were bought used, for quarters, because my knees started to knock.

“Don’t be smart with me, apple-core face.”

He was huge, a thundering monster. He picked up apples that I’d taken from the orchard for dinner that night and smashed them together in his beefy hands. “Guess you lost dinner, Allie.” He pelted an apple through the shattered window, then the next apple. He pointed to the floor, then swayed. He reeked of alcohol. “Pick that mess up.”

I grabbed paper towels and picked up the smashed apples off the floor, my hands trembling, my mind rebelling, hating him.

“Wipe my boots.”

I wiped off his boots. Black misery wrapped around me tight.

He smashed two more apples when I was on my knees. The apple pieces got in my hair. I started to cry.

“Clean those up, too, and quit crying, you baby. Your mom used to cry, too.”

I waited for him to backhand me. That’s how he really showed me I was nothing.

I cleaned everything up, my stomach growling. It was dark. I didn’t want to go back to the orchard that night, but I was starving.

I threw out the paper towels and apple pieces, his mean stare glaring right through me. “Tell me about your mother’s boyfriends.”

I sagged, completely defeated. I hated this topic. My mother didn’t have a boyfriend when she was married to my dad. I was with her all the time. I remembered no man. She didn’t even have a boyfriend in Montana. She had me. I had her. Like she said,
I had a man and that was a nightmare. No more men for me
.

My dad bullied me, his face an inch from mine, his hand up in the air, ready to strike if I denied she had a boyfriend, ready to strike if I lied and said she did have a boyfriend. It was at that second that I finally brought my chin up, defeated but not dead, and said, my voice strong, “I hate you.”

Those three words stopped him. His open palm froze in the air, his eyes widened, and the color drained from his flushed face, red with broken blood vessels.

“I hate you, Ben.” I didn’t call him Dad. He wasn’t a dad. He was a monster.

Something flashed in those narrowed eyes—hurt, anguish, I don’t know, but he lowered his hand, he bent his bull-sized head, and his heavy shoulders dipped.

He swore softly, then said, his voice breaking, “Your mother hated me, too.”

He turned and I saw him wipe his cheeks before he lumbered back to his bedroom and shut the door.

That night I scrambled out to the orchard and picked six apples and ate them. I was scared by a raccoon and a distant gunshot. I thought I heard someone else running through the orchard, gasping, as if he was being chased. The night was black except for a moon that kept hiding behind the clouds. It started to rain and I was soaked, hungry, and freezing.

I sat against a tree trunk, scared of the shadows and creepy noises, rain dripping off my face. But it was there, under the leaves of the apple tree, that I knew I was done. The unknowns in the apple orchard were less scary to me than the knowns of being in the trailer with my dad. I could not live like that anymore. I thought of my mother and her love and her hugs, how we made apple pies together, along with peach, blackberry, rhubarb, lemon meringue, and dark chocolate pies with whipped cream. She would not want me to live like this.

I had saved money from my job as a retail clerk in a high-end clothing shop and hidden it from my dad. I spent only what I had to on food, I probably should have spent more so I wasn’t so hungry, but I wanted money stashed away for safety and for my eventual escape even more than I wanted the food. I was on hourly wage and commission. There is nothing like being hungry to make you sell things well, and quickly, so I made a lot of money for a sixteen-year-old. Plus I understood clothes and style, taught by my mother.

I would use the money I had saved to make a new life.

The next day was Saturday. I sat, frozen to my bones, in the apple orchard until I knew my dad had left for his weekend job hauling rock. Before he left he stood outside the trailer and hollered my name, alternating it with swear words, and “Get the hell home,
now
, Allie!”

I stayed hidden behind the trunks of the apple trees, and after he had shoved his ungainly body into his truck with the bullet holes and sped off, I took a shower, packed a bagful of clothes and the treasures I had from my mother—including the broken china plates, the locket, and the harmonica—and left the trailer.