Grade school was for pretend boyfriends. In high school you got the real thing. By the summer before my sophomore year, the two most popular girls in class had boyfriends, even a couple of the quiet girls had rings from older boys, and Leanne still had her out-of-town cowboy boyfriend.
I met my first real boyfriend at a rodeo dance late in the summer, right after I turned fifteen. He had blond hair and blue eyes. He rode bulls in rodeos and was lean and a little bowlegged. He picked me out of the handful of girls without dates and asked me to dance. He wore his cowboy hat at a tilt, and for seventeen he was cocky and sure of himself. The moment he turned his blue eyes toward me, I let go of my thoughts about what rodeos did to animals. I would do anything to get him. To keep him.
He danced the Western Swing with me and made it look like I knew what I was doing. At the end of the night he asked for my phone number. Not long after that, he called and came for a visit. Now I had my very own out-of-town cowboy.
Before school started that year, Mom and Dad took Cris and me on a weekend trip to Pendleton.
“It’ll be a vacation,” Mom said.
“There’ll be a swimming pool at the motel,” Dad said.
“You’re coming,” they both said.
Mom and Dad would want to go out on a Saturday night in Pendleton and they needed me to be the babysitter. Cris was seven and couldn’t be left in a motel room alone. Pat was married and gone from home by then, and Leanne and Brad had summer jobs and didn’t have to come on this trip.
Things had changed in our family in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to name back then, maybe because it had come on so gradually. It was a kind of breaking apart, some of which was to be expected from us kids getting older and going our own ways. But, more than that, the ulcer problems Mom had over the years had gotten worse and she didn’t have the energy she used to have for mothering or paying attention to what we were up to. And Dad’s drinking took him away from us more and more. Most nights we put his dinner in the oven on warm-bake and were heading off to bed by the time he came home.
I’d pulled back from expecting too much from either of my parents, which helped to keep me from any disappointment. So I might have protested against going on this weekend vacation in Pendleton. But I didn’t. I thought it might be fun, the four of us together. I liked watching out for my little sister. And I liked swimming in motel pools. Best of all, my cowboy boyfriend lived closer to Pendleton than he did to Condon, and he said he’d come to see me.
On the Saturday of our vacation, Cris and I played in the motel pool most of the afternoon. Neither Mom nor Dad came down to jump in or to watch us. After a while, Dad came out and said he was going out for a bit and that Mom had a headache and needed to rest. He didn’t say where he was going. I knew he’d find a bar.
The sun went behind the roof of the motel. Cris and I went to our room and changed out of our suits and then to Mom’s room. We all walked over to Cimmiyotti’s Steak House, a fancy restaurant near the motel. We’d meet Dad there.
The light was low in the restaurant. The young waiter, not much older than me, led us to the table. Candles put shadows on the ceiling and the white tablecloths.
Mom kept looking toward the dark doorway that led to the bar. The candles made shadows under her eyes and in the hollows under her cheekbones. The waiter took our orders for our drinks, Mom, Cris, me: just water, Shirley Temple, Coke.
Dad came out of the bar, slow, careful in his steps. He stood next to the waiter. His face was loose and empty with alcohol. “And a gin and tonic,” Dad said to the waiter. The top of him moved in a swaying circle. One hand held the chair.
The menu in my hand was heavy with the idea of food I hadn’t ordered, didn’t want anymore.
The waiter put a hand on Dad’s elbow and pulled the chair out. Dad sat with a slump, one of his arms on the table, the other gone slack over his knee.
“Yes, sir. A gin and tonic.” The waiter backed up. He looked at me, fast and away. I pressed the crease in the white tablecloth.
Mom put her hand across her forehead, holding her temples. “Jesus, Jack.” Two quiet words, swinging for a fight. The tension between them had become familiar in the past few years. Him drinking, her mad.
The disappointment came down on me, the dark weight of it. How drunk he was. He could have come swimming with us like he used to when the whole family went to the beach for a week-long vacation after harvest. He could have had the afternoon of doing something fun; we could all be here like a regular family instead of a family pretending he wasn’t drunk, that Mom wasn’t angry. It burned in me, my stomach, my chest, my throat.
Dad leaned into the arm on the table. His other arm came up slow, careful. He rested one hand on the other. Cris was pressed back in her chair, almost disappeared in the dim light.
Dad’s eyelids hovered low. “What’re you girls having to eat?” He blinked a few hard blinks, as if he wasn’t drunk, as if Mom wasn’t there with her eyes covered and her jaw clenched up tight.
It was a still-frame moment, and inside this moment my voice came through the burn of my throat. I said, “Oh Dad.” I slid out of my chair and left the table. Took the words that could hurt him, past the table, past the candles, the waiter with our drinks.
“Babe,” Dad called out, “come back.” Surprised.
Mom said, “Let her go.” I couldn’t tell if her raised voice was for him or for me.
I pushed open the glass doors of the restaurant and stepped out into the late summer night. I’d never walked away from either of them before. I’d never not come when they called.
The warm summer air tasted of dried grass and dust. My boyfriend’s phone number was in my back pocket on a slip of paper he’d given me, but I’d already memorized it. I walked toward the motel room, swung the key from the black oval tag that was so big it could never be lost.
By the time Mom came with Cris, the cowboy was with me, him sitting on the bed, me perched on the edge of a chair because I knew Mom would be bringing Cris to the room we were sharing. Mom asked if I was okay. The cowboy watched. I hadn’t told him about Dad. I kept my back straight and my jaw tight. I said yes, I was okay.
Mom said to the cowboy, “You’ll have to leave by ten o’clock.” She looked at me, her belief that I would be a good girl held in the way she nodded at me before she went out the door.
Cris sat on the floor in front of the lit TV screen. The cowboy pulled me over next to him on the bed. He kissed me. Cris turned and looked at us. Then looked back at the TV.
The cowboy tried to get me to lie down on the bed with him. “I can’t,” I said. Shadows of TV people in the dark room. The silhouette of Cris from behind. I wanted to be a good girl.