10. Bree
— ? —
Bree
The community center smelled the way it always smelled on Saturday mornings: coffee, floor polish, and the faint undertone of decades-old sweat that no amount of cleaning could fully erase.
I loved it.
The building was old, built in the fifties, with high ceilings and wooden floors that creaked in all the right places.
Someone had hung faded streamers from the basketball hoops, leftover from a birthday party last weekend.
The morning light came through the windows in dusty shafts, catching the motes that floated in the air.
“All right, ladies.” I clapped my hands, and the women turned to face me, the youngest barely out of college and the oldest older than the building. “Let’s review last week. Wrist grips. Who remembers?”
“Rotate and pull,” Martha called out. She was sixty-eight, ran the feed store with her husband, and had a grip strength that rivaled most men half her age.
Her gray hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and she wore the same faded T-shirt she wore every Saturday, the one that said “Try Me” in block letters.
“Don’t fight the hold. Use their own weight against them. ”
“Exactly. Partner up. I want to see ten reps each side.”
The room dissolved into pairs. I walked between them, correcting angles, adjusting stances, watching these women I’d come to love practice the skills that might someday save their lives.
“Ruth, keep your elbow tucked. You’re giving them leverage.”
“My elbow doesn’t tuck anymore. It’s eighty-two years old.”
“Your elbow can tuck or your elbow can get grabbed. Which does it prefer?”
Ruth grumbled but adjusted her form. Her partner, a young woman named Callie who worked at the bank, grinned and tried the grip again.
“Better,” I said. “Much better.”
Four years. It had been four years since I’d stepped off a bus in Marigold with a suitcase in one hand and a secret growing inside me. Four years since Molly had taken me in, given me a room, helped me find my feet.
The farm had come later. A foreclosure sale, ten acres and a falling-down barn, priced to sell fast because the bank wanted it off their books. I’d bought it with the jewelry money.
The first time I saw the place, I was four months pregnant and down to my last thousand dollars, and the realtor wouldn’t get out of her car.
She rolled the window down instead, pointed a manicured finger at the sagging barn, and told me in a flat voice that the property had good bones if I was the type who liked a project.
Then she looked at my belly, and at the rust bucket I’d driven down from Austin, and I watched her decide I wasn’t that type.
I got out anyway and walked the ten acres alone while she waited with her engine running.
The barn roof had caved on one side. The fields were choked with johnsongrass taller than I was.
A raccoon or worse had been living in the farmhouse kitchen, and the well pump was a question mark nobody could answer.
It was the ugliest, most hopeless piece of land I had ever stood on. It was cheap, and it was mine to ruin. And nothing on it had ever once made me feel invisible.
I put the jewelry money down that afternoon.
My mother’s pearls, my grandmother’s ring, all of it sold one piece at a time in a pawnshop off the highway, because a woman with a baby coming doesn’t get to hold out for fair.
I signed the papers on the hood of the realtor’s car.
Then I sat in my truck in the empty yard until the sun went down, one hand on my belly, and I didn’t cry, because I’d run out of the luxury of crying somewhere around the Oklahoma border.
Rosie had been born in the middle of that first year, in the county hospital twenty miles away, with Molly holding my hand and talking me through every contraction. Seven pounds, four ounces. Black hair that would later lighten to brown. And eyes so blue they’d taken my breath away.
Rafael’s eyes.
I’d looked at my newborn daughter and seen my ex-husband staring back at me, and I’d held her tighter and promised her she’d never, ever feel the way he’d made me feel.
“Bree!” Dot’s voice cut through my thoughts. “Watch this!”
I turned just in time to see Dot, who weighed maybe a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, flip Martha over her hip and onto the mat. Martha landed with a grunt and a laugh, and Dot cackled with pure joy.
“Beautiful,” I said. “Perfect hip rotation. Martha, you okay?”
“Never better.” Martha let Dot help her up, brushing off her knees. “Lord, that felt good. My husband’s going to be real surprised next time he sneaks up on me.”
“He still doing that?” Ruth asked. “Coming up behind you in the kitchen?”
“Forty-three years of marriage, and the man still thinks it’s funny to grab my waist while I’m holding a knife.”
“Sounds like he needs this class more than you do.”
“That’s the goal.” I grinned at them both. “Surprise is half the battle. The other half is follow-through. Don’t stop until they’re down, and don’t apologize for putting them there.”
“I like that,” Callie said. “Don’t apologize.”
“Women apologize too much. We apologize for taking up space. We apologize for having opinions. We apologize for defending ourselves.” I moved to the center of the room. “In here, we don’t apologize. We act. We protect. We survive.”
The class continued. I corrected stances, demonstrated escapes, watched these women grow stronger week by week. This was what I’d built here. Not just a farm, but a community. A place where I mattered.
“Okay, new move.” I gestured for everyone to gather around. “Choke hold escapes. This is important. If someone gets their hands around your throat, you have about ten seconds before you start losing consciousness. So we need to move fast.”
I demonstrated the technique, tucking my chin, driving my thumbs into the pressure points, rotating my body to break the grip. The women watched, asked questions, partnered up to practice.
“Remember,” I said, walking between them, “the throat is vulnerable, but so are their eyes, their groin, their knees. If one thing doesn’t work, try another. Keep fighting until you’re free.”
When the hour was up, I gathered everyone for cooldown stretches and reminded them about next week’s schedule.
“Same time, same place. And remember, practice at home. The moves only work if your body knows them by heart.”
“Can we practice on our husbands?” Dot asked.
“Only if they deserve it.”
“Oh, he deserves it.”
They filtered out, chatting and laughing, and I stayed behind to straighten the mats and lock up. Through the window, I could see Main Street coming to life, shops opening, people waving at each other across the sidewalk.
The hardware store was unlocking its doors. The bakery had a line out front. Mrs. Patterson was walking her three dogs, all of them pulling in different directions while she shouted commands they ignored completely.
This was my town now. These were my people.
I grabbed my bag and headed out.
The preschool was six blocks away. I walked it every day, rain or shine, because the exercise was good and the time to think was better. Today the sun was warm, the sky impossibly blue, and I let myself feel a thing dangerously close to happiness.
The walk took me past the diner, past the library, past the little park where Rosie liked to play on the swings.
A cardinal was singing in one of the trees.
The smell of fresh bread drifted from the bakery.
Someone had planted petunias in the window boxes of the insurance office, bright splashes of pink and purple against the white siding.
I waved at people I knew. Stopped to chat with Mr. Henderson about his tomato plants. Promised Mrs. Nakamura I’d bring her some eggs next week. Small interactions, simple and warm, a human connection I’d never had in Manhattan.
The feeling lasted until I reached the pickup line and saw my daughter’s face.
Rosie was standing by the fence, her backpack clutched to her chest, her expression the particular kind of serious that meant trouble. She was almost four now, the youngest in her preschool class. She had my hair, my stubbornness, my temper.
And she had his eyes.
Those pale blue eyes, so striking against her darker hair, were fixed on the ground. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth. Her small hands gripped the straps of her backpack with white-knuckled intensity.
“Hey, baby.” I crouched down to her level. “Good day?”
Rosie didn’t answer right away. She looked at me with those blue eyes, so pale they seemed to glow in the afternoon light, and I felt the familiar twist in my chest.
“Mommy, can I ask you a question?”
“Always.”
“Why don’t I have a daddy?”
The twist became a squeeze. I kept my face neutral. Years of practice. Years of hiding what I felt so the world couldn’t use it against me.
“What do you mean, sweetheart?”
“Emma asked me today. At lunch. She said everybody has a daddy, and she wanted to know where mine was, and I didn’t have an answer.
” Rosie’s lower lip trembled. “I told her I didn’t have one, and she said that’s impossible, everybody has one, even if he’s dead or in prison or something. Is my daddy dead, Mommy?”
I took her hand. We started walking, slow, because I needed time to think.
Her hand was so small in mine. Small and warm and trusting. She swung our joined hands between us, a habit she’d had since she learned to walk, and I felt my heart crack along the same fault line it always cracked along when she looked at me with those eyes.
“Your daddy isn’t dead.”
“Is he in prison?”
“No, baby. He’s not in prison.”
I kept my voice level, the way you do when a four-year-old is scanning your face for cracks. She scanned it now, patient, waiting for an answer I didn’t have.
“Then where is he?”
A hundred possible answers ran through my head. He’s a man who didn’t love your mama. He’s someone who wouldn’t have wanted you. He’s far away and doesn’t know you exist.
None of them were right. None of them were fair.
None of them would satisfy a four-year-old who just wanted what every other kid in her class had.
“He’s working,” I said finally. “Very far away. He has an important job, and it keeps him too busy to visit.”
Rosie processed this. I could see her thinking, her brow furrowed in concentration. She had the same expression I had when I was working through a problem. The same tilt of the head. The same intensity in her focus.
“Does he know about me?”
The question I’d been dreading. The question I’d known would come eventually, and still didn’t know how to answer.
“It’s complicated, sweetheart.”
“That’s what grown-ups say when they don’t want to tell the truth.”
She was too smart. She’d always been too smart.
“You’re right.” I stopped walking. Crouched down again, so we were eye to eye. “The truth is, your daddy and I had some problems. We couldn’t be together anymore. And when I left, I didn’t tell him about you, because I wanted to protect you.”
“From what?”
From feeling invisible. From being dismissed. From loving someone who can’t love you back. From growing up in a penthouse that felt emptier than a prison cell, watching your father choose his phone over your face, learning that love has to be earned and can never quite be held onto.
“From being sad,” I said. “I didn’t want you to be sad.”
Rosie considered this with the gravity of a tiny philosopher.
“But Emma says daddies are supposed to come to soccer games and help with homework and read bedtime stories.” Her voice wobbled. “I want someone to come to my soccer games, Mommy.”
I pulled her into a hug, pressing my face to her hair so she wouldn’t see my eyes sting.
She smelled like crayons and playground dirt and the strawberry shampoo we’d picked out together at the store. She was warm and solid in my arms, this little person I’d made, this little person who deserved so much more than I could give her alone.
“I come to your soccer games, baby.”
“I know. But it’s different. Isn’t it?”
It was different. I knew it was different. I’d grown up with a father who’d taught me to ride and shoot and negotiate and never once made me feel small. Rosie deserved that too.
“Let’s go home,” I said. “We can talk more about this later, okay? I promise.”
“You always say that.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence. Rosie’s hand was small in mine, her steps shorter, her presence the only thing keeping me grounded.
I’d made a choice four years ago. I’d chosen to keep my daughter from a man who’d made me feel worthless. I’d told myself it was the right thing, the safe thing, the only thing.
Now, walking home with my daughter’s questions still unanswered between us, I wasn’t so sure.
The farmhouse appeared at the end of the road, white paint and a red roof and the chicken coop I’d built myself the second summer. The goats were bleating in the pasture. Butterbean, the pig who’d shown up one morning and refused to leave, was sunning himself by the porch.
The house wasn’t much. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen that doubled as a dining room. The floors creaked and the windows stuck, and the plumbing made alarming noises every time someone flushed the toilet.
But it was mine. Every crooked floorboard, every stubborn window, every mysterious pipe rattle.
Home.
I’d built this from nothing. I’d given my daughter a life full of love and safety and community.
But I couldn’t give her a father.
I watched Rosie run ahead, her backpack bouncing, her hair streaming behind her. She stopped to pet Butterbean, who snorted with pleasure and rolled onto his side for a belly rub.
“Hi, Butterbean!” She scratched behind his ears. “Did you miss me? I missed you. I learned about the letter Q today. It always has a U after it. Isn’t that weird?”
Butterbean grunted in agreement.