Our Small Town Scars

Chapter 1

Chapter One

The bed was a complete and total mess.

The linens were rolled up in a bunch and shoved into the corner of the wall, making the floral pattern look like the flowers had been trampled on.

The sun blasted her dusty farm town and streamed through the window on a hot day in August. The whole room baked with lingering heat.

If only the air conditioner worked better.

One stroke of paint, and then another, and then another. The paint roller was dipped into the pan and one more swipe was given to the old smoke-stained walls.

“A-ha!” Evelyn smiled. “No more nasty crap. I finally get to have all the pink I want, all the flowers I want, all the…whatever I want!”

She tried to continue, but her arms and back were tiring. She sighed heavily, laid the roller in the pan, and flopped upon the bed. “I’ve been slaving away at this all day long. I think I’ll go bake some cookies and… Oh! I’m gonna watch my favorite movie, because I can!”

She left the room with nothing but a few strokes of paint on the wall, hardly enough to have been slaving away at it for ten minutes, let alone all day long.

A few batches of cookies later, she dropped onto the couch and snacked, trying to let the air-conditioning do what it needed to do. Even though she was thirty-eight years old, she had never been able to do whatever she wanted.

With a new job as a graphic designer after a brief stint in Los Angeles—a terrible mistake that was—she felt like the world was her oyster for the first time. The very, very first time.

Her cell phone rang, playing a jingle from The Rolling Stones. It was her grandpa! Rolling her eyes in a smile, she picked it up. “Hey, Grandpa, what’s up?”

His gravelly voice came through, “Oh, I was wondering if you were going to take all of your stuff with you or if I can donate the rest of it.”

“No,” she said as she muted the TV. Grandpa’s accent was thick and heavy, like a billowing plume of tobacco mixed with moonshine. Sometimes she could hardly understand him, even though she had previously lived with him for ten years. Growing up in the boot hill did that to him.

There was a bit of a pause, and she chuckled. “Pawpaw, you still there?”

More silence followed.

“Pawpaw?”

Then she heard him gasping.

“Pawpaw?”

“I…” he stammered.

The gasping was getting louder and harder. He sounded like he was going to cry or something worse.

She sprung to her feet and bellowed, “I’m calling an ambulance!”

“N-no,” he stammered back.

She listened and then…

He sneezed.

She pulled the phone away from the earth-shattering sound. It was so sudden and bursting that instinctively she wiped the side of her cheek. She could have sworn there was snot spray there.

She held her chest and laughed. “Damn, Pawpaw, don’t scare me like that! Take your freaking Allegra.”

“Oh, it ain’t that, baby, and you know it,” he giggled merrily. A cough followed. Then another sneeze riot.

“I think Daddy got the same sneeze orchestra from you.”

“He sure did!” he said in a laugh.

“Now, you know I can’t come back and forth seven times a day to pick my stuff up. I gotta take time.”

“I wanna know why you won’t let your old pawpaw help you. I got that ol’ Chevy that’s been collecting dust for too long.”

She crossed that bright and sunny living room, all with its gloriously stained carpets, into the kitchen to clean off her plate. “Yeah, it’s got dust and rust. You know you can’t drive well since your stroke.”

“I wanna help you though.”

“I know.” She smiled again. “But you helped me for like a decade. You’ve done enough.”

He busted out laughing in that old, dried-up tone. “You’re making me feel like a calendar.”

She put a hand on her hip, and her big brown eyes glistened. “And why’s that?”

“‘Cause you’re all grown up and making me feel dated.”

She giggled at the corny joke. “Always keeping me on my toes.”

“I can’t tell you how much I’m gonna miss having you here.”

She reached for her ceramic white tea kettle.

It was one that her mother left her before she passed away, a gift from her Swedish great-grandmother.

The flowers were all red and blue, and pops of yellow danced in their black stems and leaves.

The phrase “a watched pot never boils” was hand-painted in beautiful old English font, but it was written in Swedish.

“I’m gonna miss being there too, but I had to get out on my own. Live my own life. You know?”

“You sure did! And you’re going to do great!”

“Did you need anything?”

“Nope,” he said while the TV in his background blared the local news station. “Only to hear the sound of your voice. But come get your crap, ‘cause I wanna put my pool table in here and need room for a stripper pole.”

His humor caught her off-guard again, and she laughed until her face hurt. Their goodbyes followed, and she hung up.

Wait, why am I boiling water for tea? I have my milk and leftover cookies in the living room. She stopped and looked around. “Wait, I finished my cookies.” She watched the kettle smoking, and soon it would give its screeching whistle. She shrugged. “Oh well. Tea sounds nice anyway.”

She went back into the living room and sat on the couch and looked at her teacup and then her leftover milk in the glass. She dumped the hot tea into the milk and drank.

It was the dumbest idea she’d ever had. It tasted awful.

With the movie over and the dishes done and on the drying rack, she turned and leaned against the counter to take in her pride and joy.

Her new home.

Not any home. It wasn’t an apartment or anything.

It was her own house!

Who cared if she had to buy a little baker’s rack to put next to that old and dated, small and white stove with its crusted burners so that she could store her microwave, a few bottles of wine, and her favorite coffee cup?

Who cared if the walls in that kitchen were sprawling with yellow-tainted wallpaper that had its glorious ears of corn and random sketches of chickens on them?

She sure didn’t. It also didn’t matter if the one cupboard didn’t close properly and slightly hung off its hinges either.

It was all hers.

She smiled and walked over to the refrigerator to think about dinner and as usual spoke out loud to herself, not realizing she did so out of loneliness. “It’s been a long day, but a casserole is what I need!”

Halfway through the prepping, her body started to hurt and tire. Her back screamed at her for rest. She put the chopped-up onions and prepped chicken in storage containers destined for the fridge and called for pizza.

Later on, she walked into her room and opened the window to enjoy a forgiving summer breeze and the sounds of the frogs that rang like a melodious country choir.

She fashioned the pillows to sit upright in bed and relished in the beauty of the fireflies in her back yard.

Although it was muggy, the breeze was too cool and cleansing to ignore. She ate her pizza and smiled.

How the humidity of that Missouri air filled her nose with the thick scent of wet grass.

It was so fragrant she even believed that if green had a smell, it would be that.

It wasn’t quite harvesting season. She loved looking out across her front porch to watch the farmers plow the corn and soybean fields at night.

For some reason, their little halos of lights and the sound of the machine chunking away far off made her feel like even if she lived in the country, she wasn’t alone.

Maybe she missed her pawpaw more than she realized.

She rolled over and cuddled up with that flattened floral pillow, looking out into the peaceful night, where all she could see was the dark tree line thirty feet away from her house. The breeze came again. An owl called outside near her window.

Stillness. Quietness. Her pawpaw was not there to need her anymore, not entirely.

She no longer had the hum of his old Western movies to hear while she cooked dinner.

She no longer had the dumb jokes to make her laugh even when she wanted to scream.

The thoughts tumbled in her spastic brain, and she rolled onto her back.

Somehow an hour had gone by. And another.

She turned onto her left side, but her hip pain said otherwise, and so once more she tossed to face the window again.

The small-town woman couldn’t help but think of him. No, not her pawpaw. Whoever he was. Her thoughts collided with each other.

No woman her age could deny that need. With taking care of her pawpaw for over a decade, and being sickened by low self-esteem, she had begun to give up on finding him.

Him.

Yes, whoever he was. He had to be someone out there.

Someone who didn’t fetishize her for her weight but also respected her.

Somewhere there had to be a man who wouldn’t try to use her as the other girl or a one-night stand.

But now that she was older, anytime a decent man came around, she would always see that gut-wrenching thing—a ring.

Being a Pisces, she felt she had so much love to give, and not once did any man reciprocate what she offered.

For years she chased bad boys or starved herself for the gym rat.

She even once lost her own identity falling for a foreigner who ended up stalking her at work, and dare she say it…

She shuddered.

The moment he had insisted on having sex with her, before she even knew him, it turned her off. All those men. All of them. If not cheating or lying, they came with heavy baggage and horrible hygiene, not to mention mommy issues.

She groaned. Perhaps she too had her share of baggage. Perhaps she too had let her hygiene slip ever since she started her full-time job, and her manic-depressive episodes left her without showering sometimes for a week. And perhaps she too had her own daddy issues. And mommy issues.