I’m on a filthy outdoor sofa. Tagging along with my just-divorced cousin Rod on his so-called errands was a bad idea. I should’ve stayed at the house and hulled peas, watched 60 Minutes with my uncle.
For a good half hour at least, I’ve been waiting for Rod to make up to Jackie, a girl he’s after. She thinks his eye is wandering. It is.
This is her sister’s ex-husband’s place. Jackie and the sister are watching the property until he gets out of the state pen for busting up the face of the guy she was sleeping with after they split up.
Let me clarify: this sofa wasn’t made for outdoor use. By filthy, I mean actual smears of mud, tracks left, I’d wager, by the mangy dogs running around the yard. Frayed upholstery, white roses on less-white—it’s like sitting in the wide lap of a disgraced bride.
Rod insisted that I’m bored as all hell hanging around doing nothing with all those old people, as he calls them. My parents and I will head back to Atlanta early tomorrow; I wouldn’t mind sitting back as Steve Kroft interviews a corporate whistleblower and, during the smug pauses, listening to the soft shuffle of my grandmother’s crochet needles. But there’s no explaining that to Rod, who grew up next door to our grandparents. He’s the first-born and I’m the baby, which equals a special kinship in his mind. We two are treated the best: the entry to the house is officially known as the Hall of Rod since there are way more yearbook photos of him up than the other four of us combined, and Grandma always makes jelly cake and peanut brittle when I come to town because those are my favorites.
A woman in a striped halter top and a homemade French manicure—I’m guessing Jackie’s sister—comes out and sits on a rusty folding chair that I would’ve claimed if I saw it. And there’s a second one; but having committed to the sofa already, I’ll have to shower again anyway, and it might look rude to switch seats.
“I’ve been trying to tell her,” she says. I haven’t been introduced to either of them.
I pointlessly check my phone for the seventh time. Still dead. Shocker. Service is thin in these parts and the phone leaks power fast, searching.
“I told her she got to think about this different.” Her “think” is nearly “thank.” Rod’s doesn’t. Some cousin explained the distinction to me once: some people, our people, talk southern—long vowels, dropped g’s—and other people talk country.
“So Rod looks at other girls, why wouldn’t he? A man like that got a right. He got a lot to offer a girl. Jackie need to start thinking, what she got to offer, if she want a shot.” She pauses, as if searching for the answer to her own question. I imagine she thinks she has quite a bit to offer as well.
A quick look at Jackie when she opened the door for Rod says she’d probably fare at least as well as his last wife, who had thick hair, thin legs, and not much else. If Jackie’s in there sticking it to Rod, she must know she has something on the competition. I shrug and flick a mosquito off my leg.
The plan was to placate Jackie right quick on the way to our real destination, a cookout where he’s meeting the other girl he’s after. “We’ll just swing by,” Rod said. I’m halfway looking forward to being offered a Miller Lite by some cute, sunburned distant cousin who doesn’t remember me from the family reunion two years ago, when I had boy hips and hadn’t learned to manage my hair yet.
If we make it there. This Jackie is higher-maintenance than either of us bargained for. With my luck, we’ll end up at the Dairy Queen slurping Oreo Blizzards with the sisters, if Rod even remembers I’m out here.
“Ya’ll are cousins?” says the sister, who’s been nattering on about how picky Jackie is, how that may have worked in high school but not anymore. Her gaze meets mine for the first time; her eyes are pale hazel, almost yellow, cat-like above her sharp cheekbones and small mouth.
“Me and Rod, yeah, we’re cousins.” By day three of our visit, the panhandle cadences have sunk into my voice. They’ll disappear the moment we cross the state line and I’ll be talking in the blank Hollywood-actor style of my classmates, almost all first-generation Southerners. If you can call Atlanta the South.
“I’m Shannon,” she says. “How old are you? You got a nice smile, you should smile more.” No telling how she’s determined what the baseline is. “You know, Rod and I went out for a little bit back in high school, when he drove that little red Honda.” That car was tiny enough that I’m spared wondering if Shannon lost it to my cousin on a sweaty backseat.
“He almost asked me to junior prom.” Ha! I wasn’t aware guys awarded prom-date Honorable Mentions.
“Things change,” she says softly toward the lightning bugs that have begun to spiral above the stubbled lawn. Then she looks hard at me and repeats, “Things change.”
I nod, but the only change I’ve noticed around here is my granddaddy dying six years back, and the death of an old dying man isn’t a change in itself except it made my grandmother fold in on herself. She also started watching reruns of Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which he wouldn’t have tolerated. In Atlanta, loyalties shift, friendships loosen and crumble, and the whole world is a step, a slip, away. A ticket to a concert, a pill from a stranger’s cupped hand. A college application. Not down here. My relatives live in the Central time zone, but see movies and shop at the mall in Tallahassee, in the Eastern time zone. Slow time and fast time, they say. Nobody’s escaped from slow time since my daddy got drafted. Nobody’s tried.
Then again. In my aunt and uncle’s house, the TV screens have gotten bigger and the recliners plusher. Rod and his brothers say ain’t, but they cringe when their daddy makes a racist comment. They played golf in high school instead of football. I wasn’t paying attention; as a kid I thought getting more and doing better was the way of things, no less so than the deaths of old men. Time, not change.
Voices inside rise. Rod makes a show of storming out. The screen door slams into metal siding. He’s rolling his eyes and telling me Let’s go.
I hear Shannon as I shut the passenger door, shouting mildly, “Bye, it was real nice chatting with you, honey. Show off that pretty smile.” I roll down the window to wave but she doesn’t see; she’s gotten hold of one of the dogs and is making kissy faces at it. A breeze catches her hair and in profile she’s Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde.
Rod starts whistling as we drive off. “Lord, what a dump. You didn’t think I forgot you out there did you, little cuz? I should’ve known it was useless trying to talk any sense into her.”
His eyes dart at me quick like I might be offended on behalf of womankind. “She’s sweet. She would’ve had you inside for a Coke.” If he’d seen any point in introducing me to her, that is.
The whistling resumes and then stops. Rod offers me a Tic-Tac and shakes the rest of the container into his mouth. “You and Summer’ll get along good I think. She acts real classy.”
Amy McDaniel lives in Atlanta with her dog, Annette. Her work has been or will be in Tin House, The Agriculture Reader, and PANK. She is the author of a new chapbook, Selected Adult Lessons (Agnes Fox Press).