Chapter Four. Ingrid
CHAPTER FOUR
INGRID
Five Days Before the Pageant
Show up for the big things. That’s what my husband, Joel, always says. And it says a lot about where things stand with us that he isn’t here with me now.
You can forget to text people back, cancel on happy hour, even blow off a birthday party every once in a while.
But you show up for the big things—weddings, funerals, the births of babies.
Because these are linchpin moments in a person’s life, moments when their identity shifts, when they become a new version of themselves, forever changed.
And when you love someone, you show up to witness the change, to meet the new version so you can keep moving forward with them.
So that’s what I’m doing. I’m showing up. I’m coming back home to Anhalt, Texas.
When my plane landed, I had another text from Dad, asking one last time if I needed him to pick me up at the airport. But I’d already reserved a rental car, the exact same make and model that I own back in Colorado, because I don’t like driving a car I don’t know.
The drive from the Austin airport to Anhalt—about an hour west, along the Blanco River where the hills start to rise—is almost unrecognizable from the one I used to make years ago, after I first left home.
Back then, the city fell away right after the airport—no Tesla factory, no facility, no cookie-cutter subdivisions yet.
Just fields, mesquite, and sky. But every time I visit, the city has expanded, bleeding into the nearby towns—Buda, Kyle, even Dripping Springs—encroaching closer to our little rural community.
As I pull into town, I pass under a banner for the FIFTIETH ANNUAL LONE STAR PRINCESS PAGEANT, strung between Herman Smith’s boot shop and a new Aveda hair salon where Timeless Treasures used to be.
Back then, Mom dragged us there every Saturday, always on the hunt for something pretty to clutter up her already cluttered display cabinets.
That’s where, on a whim, she bought me my first film camera, a 35mm Canon AE-1, which I used all through high school to snap photos of Izzy and me and all our friends.
The Dairy Queen is gone now too, where in the parking lot out back, Jimmy Marino tried to get to second base.
Y’all might look the same, but you’re cuter than your sister, he had said as his hand slid up my shirt.
It was exactly what I wanted him to think, but not what I wanted him to say.
It’s a drive-through smoothie place now, touting acai bowls and fresh-pressed juices.
They’ve repurposed the old DQ sign—the shape of something that once was, with something new plastered on top.
I hate coming back home. I hate seeing the things that have changed. And, probably even more, I hate the things that have stayed the same. Everything’s a trigger, memories come like buckshot, little pellets of remembering that burrow deep beneath my skin.
So I’ve found excuses to avoid it these last few years, and before that, my trips have always been short. A few days for Christmas or a cousin’s wedding. In and out.
And up until now, I’ve always had Joel by my side, a layer of protection, a separation between the person I was when I lived here and the person I am now.
Mom has kept me up to date on the town’s changes. But it’s still odd to see. The woods have been dug up away from the narrow roads, streets widened, construction cones warning of the town’s hollowing.
And, of course, there’s the new housing development.
They sold the Sherman land, Mom had said one day on the phone.
Oh? I’d said.
They’re going to put a bunch of new houses there.
They started digging. And before either of us could express what exactly that might mean, she told me about the newly painted benches at the library, and we didn’t say anything more about the Sherman land.
We didn’t say Izzy’s name. But she was there anyway, like she always is, the oxidized layers of an antique mirror splotching the surface of our lives.
I pass the developer’s signpost, announcing, SHERMAN RANCH.
BUILD ON YOUR OWN LOT! RIVERFRONT PROPERTY AVAILABLE.
I can’t help but look over as I nudge through traffic that didn’t used to be here when I was a kid.
Trees have been swept away, wild earth leveled into neat, flat parcels.
A few houses stand in various stages of completion.
The construction vehicles tear the earth apart just outside my window, beeping, rolling, digging, tracks grinding over dry dirt.
I watch as an excavator jerks, like an animal being shoved forward against its will, before its metal teeth muscle down, audibly straining as the ground breaks and gives way.
Its neck lifts, its mouth full. The long yellow arm spins and releases a bucketful of soil and chunks of limestone, white as bone.
It gnaws into the earth again. And again.
And it groans. It gnaws at me—the sound—all those gears crunching, all that unearthing.
I jump at the sound of a horn. I’ve missed the light turning green, and the rusty pickup behind me is annoyed. I look in the rearview to wave an apology and lock eyes with the driver.
It’s him. It’s been twenty-five years, he’s let his hair get long and scraggly, he’s grown a beard, but I would recognize Ben Sherman anywhere.
And he recognizes me.
I know that for sure, because he’s looking at me now like he’s seeing a ghost.
I stare back, certain I’m looking at a killer.