April leaned over the bathroom sink with her nose just inches from the mirror and stared, puzzled, by the way she’d fallen apart. She wondered what had happened to the girl who was pretty, the one who was chosen homecoming queen at Smoky Mountain High that first year after Camp Lab and Sylva-Webster merged into one school. That was twenty-two years ago now, and seemed like another life altogether.
Raising her eyebrows, she watched the furrows crease her forehead, then smiled a fake smile to see how the lines cut her cheeks. Her mother had always told her that cigarettes did something different to women. We wear it on the outside, she’d said, those words some cruel omen come true. A small jar of Maybelline was on the sink, and April dabbed her fingers, rubbed the aging cream onto her cheeks, then wiped it down her face with opened hands. She tried to smile again, but it was just the same sad face. She almost felt like crying but didn’t. She just lit a cigarette and blew the smoke against the ceiling above.
The front door opened and April leaned into the hallway and saw Aiden make his way through the front room toward the kitchen. He was on the phone with someone, his voice low and indiscernible. All she had on was a T-shirt, so she went into the bedroom to throw on a pair of shorts. Though she’d never say it, she was happy to see him. Aiden always made her feel good about herself, and even if those feelings were short-lived, it beat the hell out of how she felt right then.
In the living room, a cheap desk catty-cornered a wall that separated the room from the kitchen. April leaned down and shook the computer mouse to wake the screen on her desktop. There were no Facebook notifications, but she wasn’t surprised. The only reason she used Facebook at all was to spy on people she’d grown up with, to glimpse into lives that made her jealous. There’d been a time when everyone was jealous of her. She opened a second tab in the browser to cover the smiling faces of friends in her newsfeed and to search for a Dolly Parton playlist on YouTube. In April’s mind, Dolly was the ideal woman: strong, beautiful, independent, fearless. She was from just over the ridgeline in Tennessee and represented all of the things that April believed she might have been capable of if the circumstances had been different, if the world hadn’t been so set in stone.
April was raised to believe women had roles, and they were primarily to meet a man, settle down, and give him children, preferably boys, bread earners. The mountains had started to change now and girls were going off to college, some even leaving for good, but that wasn’t the case when April was growing up. When she got pregnant with Thad at eighteen and there wasn’t a man taking responsibility, her life was pegged. She was used goods, an eighteen-year-old kid trying to raise a baby she couldn’t bear to look at. April clicked a video of Dolly singing a duet of “Just Someone I Used to Know” on The Porter Wagoner Show, cranked the volume on the computer speakers until all she could hear was the song.
When she came into the kitchen, Aiden was slapping twenty-dollar bills onto the table and the bills curled from how they’d been rolled together. The tabletop was nearly covered with money and he was adding more to the pile as quickly as he could count, but she was fixed on the bags of dope.
“Who was that on the phone?” April asked. She sidled up behind him and ran her hands down his chest.
“The boy I’m hoping can get rid of this.”
“You really think he’ll buy it?”
“Leland wouldn’t say it on the phone, but he told me to meet him at his house tomorrow, and if there’s anybody in the world that can move this shit, it’d be him.”
“Who’s Leland?” She slid her hands up his chest, then rubbed his shoulders for a second before she took the seat beside him.
“Leland Bumgarner,” he said. “Me and Thad went to school with him and then I worked with him on some jobs. Runs an excavating business, but he can sell anything. He’ll know how to get rid of it.”
“What’s it worth?” she asked. Leaning across the table, she picked up one of the bags and noticed how the crystal looked like shards of glass cupped in her hand. She’d seen Aiden on dope a dozen times, watched him split locust posts for a week straight, high as a kite, but she’d never actually held meth in her hands.
“I know what I think it’s worth but we won’t get that. We’ll be lucky to get half.”
“How come?” she asked as she slid the bag back across the table.
“Because we’d have to sell it ourselves to get all the money out of it. Anybody buying that much dope ain’t looking to use it. They’re looking to sell it. And so Leland’s going to dicker us down as low as he can to get more on the back end, and that’s fine by me. The faster we get rid of it the better.”
“You don’t think you could hold out, see if you can’t get a little more out of it?”
“We keep this more than a week and Thad’ll get us locked the hell up,” Aiden said. “Hell, he’s down there right now laid up with two girls from Booker Branch.”
“He’s got what?”
“He’s got two skanks piled in that trailer that are liable to steal anything he’s got, or worse yet get the law called. I bet he ain’t been to sleep in a week.”
“Jesus, Aiden. You need to get them out of—”
“I’ve tried. For God’s sake, I’ve tried. But he won’t listen.” Aiden was still counting money, his eyes cutting back and forth as he muttered numbers under his breath. “Damn it!” he yelled and threw a handful of wadded bills onto the table. “I can’t keep count! I keep losing fucking count!”
“Well then just don’t worry about that right now.” April leaned over and put her hand on top of his, traced across his knuckles with the tips of her fingers.
Aiden glanced over at her, but didn’t say anything. She could tell how quickly his thoughts were racing. She could see it in his eyes, and when she realized he wouldn’t speak, she took his hands and guided them onto her face and neck. She watched as his expression turned to a different type of confusion, then she stood, still holding on to his hands, and guided him to his feet as if they were about to dance. He leaned in to kiss her, but she pulled away and led him out of the kitchen toward the bedroom just like the very first time. She told herself she was doing this for him, but that wasn’t true. Maybe part of it was about Aiden. Part of it was about getting his mind off things, calming him down. But it was just as much because having someone touch her the way that Aiden did would make her forget how she’d felt just minutes before. She needed him right then. As shitty as it might’ve been, she needed him to make her feel worth something.
Piano and pedal steel guitar harmonized with Dolly Parton for the opening of “It’s Too Late to Love Me Now,” as April showed Aiden into her bedroom, flicking on the light switch, and sliding out of her clothes so quickly that there seemed to be no transition from clothes to skin. She pulled his hand onto her breasts and he fumbled hopelessly with his belt as she lay back on the bed. Then he was on top of her and April winced at how it hurt for just a second when he pushed inside. She gasped and he said he was sorry, but she just settled her thighs into his ribs, interlocked her ankles at the base of his back, and pulled him deeper.
April called him “sweet one.” Every man she’d ever been with had forced himself onto her. Every man she’d ever been with had hit her. But Aiden seemed almost scared to touch her. He was unlike any man she’d ever met. The way he spoke to her and the way he waited for her permission gave her control. She felt powerful when she was around him, and that was a feeling that she’d never known. Even hurried by drugs that seemed to have his body moving in some frantic pace that his mind couldn’t keep up with, he was gentle.
Just before he came, Aiden pulled out and rolled onto his back and lay there with his toes curling and legs trembling against the bed. He panted for air and stared at the ceiling, finally standing up when his senses seemed to return. Cupping his hand at his stomach so as not to make a mess, he hobbled into the bathroom. She clenched a pillow tight against her chest and didn’t move.
When he came back to bed, she curled against him. She nuzzled into his chest and felt him bury his face into the top of her head, her hair smelling like mint. He breathed deeply through his nose and kissed the crown of her head. They lay there for a while in silence, and only when his legs quit shaking did she move.
April leaned across him and opened a drawer on the nightstand beside the bed. A glass pipe still filled with half a bowl pack from earlier that afternoon was in the drawer, and she felt around until she found the lighter and took them out for a nightcap. She sat up and struck fire to the bowl, took a long drag, let her thumb off the carb, and squinted as she held her breath. There was hardly any smoke left when she finally exhaled. She offered the bowl to Aiden but he said he didn’t want any. His heart was beating wildly in his chest and she could hear it as she settled her head back against him. April asked where Aiden wanted to go once he had the money to leave, and he told her that he wanted to move to Asheville, but that it didn’t much matter so long as there were mountains and so long as it wasn’t here.
“You ever noticed how turkeys make a big circle?” he asked.
She shook her head no.
“Well, turkeys have this way of making a big loop that might take them a month or so round trip,” he explained. “They might start in a field down there in Tuckasegee and wander up into a cove off Rich Mountain, then make their way along the ridgeline to Wolf and follow the river back down to where they started. You can sit right there in that field, and if you’ll wait long enough, right there they’ll come.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” April said. She lifted her head from his chest and looked into his eyes.
“We ain’t all that different’s what I’m saying. All of us are just scraping by until we make our way back to where we started,” Aiden said. “But for me that circle ain’t ever been wide enough. What happens to turkeys if they don’t have a big enough spread is they either run out of things to eat or they make easy pickings, but either way it ends the same.”
The way he made it sound like his life was determined was comical to her, and she almost told him he didn’t know a thing about it. He wasn’t but twenty-four years old, maybe twenty-five. Just wait till you pass forty and the best years of your life are behind you and you’ve never been off this mountain before you start talking about a place not being big enough. But she didn’t say it. She wouldn’t say that to him. He just didn’t know any different.
The fact that he was so young was part of the reason April didn’t want to tell him the news. She didn’t know how he was going to take it. She knew what Thad would say, but not Aiden. Either way, she didn’t want to tell him right then. He already had too much on his mind and the day had been too long. Tomorrow she would paint the only other room in the house that needed painting, because, the day after, the real estate agent was bringing someone by to look at the property. No one had come to look at the house in months and she’d almost given up on the idea, almost decided that after forty years maybe she ought to just call a spade a spade. Finally she had something to hope for again. If she could sell the place, she was gone.
April looked up at Aiden and he was staring straight at the wall with a look like he was trying to solve some great mystery. “I just don’t know if I can get Thad to go,” he said after a few minutes of just sitting there.
“You don’t need to get Thad to go.”
“Of course I do,” Aiden said.
“Why?” she asked, as if what he was saying made no sense at all.
“Because it’s always been me and him,” he said. “Always has.”
“And things change, Aiden. People change.” She sat up and took another hit from the bowl. “Look at me. You don’t see me hanging out with any of the people I grew up with, do you? You grow up and you grow apart and that’s just the way things happen. Twenty-four is a lot different than fifteen and forty’s a whole lot different than twenty-four and that’s all right.”
“I ain’t going anywhere without him.”
“That’s just silly,” she said. “He sure went off and left you and didn’t think a thing of it.”
“That was different,” he said, and she could tell that she’d struck a nerve. “I couldn’t go with him.”
“And that still didn’t stop him from going, now, did it?”
“Well, no.”
“And that’s what I’m saying, Aiden.”
“What’s that?”
“That sometimes you have to do things for yourself, entirely for yourself. You’ll waste your life waiting around on somebody else.”
“You’re one to talk,” he said angrily.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means for someone who sat around getting the shit kicked out of her her whole life, that’s the pot calling the kettle—”
“Don’t start that.”
“I’m just saying. You want to talk about doing something for yourself.”
“You ain’t got a clue why I made the choices I made.” There was a slight smirk on her face as she shook her head. “Now, I don’t want to fight with you. Not tonight.”
She had been sleeping in the bed she made for a long time. It hadn’t started off as a choice. When she kept her mouth closed the way she’d been told to do, her parents disowned her. It was shameful enough for a girl that age to get knocked up when she wasn’t married, but it was unforgivable the way she kept that secret. Her parents left Little Canada and there April was, just a kid with a kid, so when George Trantham came along and offered some kind of out, she took it, partly for her and partly for Thad. Waiting on folks at Waffle House wasn’t any sort of living, and so maybe she did have to take things that no woman deserved to take from that asshole, but it beat scraping by. April didn’t want to think about that, though. She was tired.
Settling her head against his chest, April ran her hand across his stomach and asked Aiden if he could go anywhere on earth where it would be, but he didn’t know. He was wide awake, but it didn’t take her long to doze off against him, her mind washing back and forth between consciousness and dream. Aiden ran his fingers through her hair, and that felt nice, and she slipped further to sleep. In one of the last flashes of thought before she drifted off, she shifted her head against him until she was comfortable and asked, “What about if you could have anything in this world, what would you want, sweet one?” He didn’t answer right away and she was quickly dreaming.
“Family,” he finally said. “Family.”
But she was already asleep. She never heard a word.