Amity & Sorrow (36 page)

She drives them away and through the night until she can stop at a bank of pay phones and drop two quarters into the slot. She asks for the Do Drop Inn in Oklahoma and she dials the number, watching her daughter in the truck’s front seat moving her scarred fingers against the glass. The woman who answers tells her in a bored voice that she does know Bradley and yes, she’ll take a message. What does she want to say?

‘Tell him we’re coming home,’ she says.

When she gets back to the car her daughter asks her, ‘Can we go and get our old clothes back?’

Driving south, she phones the bar every time she stops them for gas or the ladies’ room, every time they stop to eat handfuls of bread and cheese or sleep, hunched together, in a dark corner of a grocery store parking lot. The sun swings over them. Amity asks when they can stop to spin and pray.

At the border, she rings the bar again.

‘Yeah,’ says the lady. ‘He’s here. Sittin’ up like some kinda dog.’

‘Hello,’ Amaranth breathes, the receiver hard against her ear.

‘Bought a cell phone so you could reach me,’ Bradley tells her. ‘Forgot you wouldn’t have the number so you could.’

She laughs and he laughs. ‘How are you?’

‘Much the same,’ he says. ‘You?’

‘Tell me how you’re the same,’ she says. In the car, her daughter flies her hands through the air, swims them like Sorrow did. She turns away.

‘Sorghum’s coloring, what was left. Got the wheat in, so I’ll have somethin’ to grow for next year. Pa’s taken to his bed. His cough’s bad now. Says his lungs need Amity, whatever that means. Prob’ly just means he’s lost what’s left of his mind.’

Her throat catches and she pulls the mouthpiece away, lest she make a sound.

‘You find Sorrow?’ he asks her.

‘Yes.’ She cannot bear to tell him all of it. Perhaps she never will. ‘No Dust.’

‘No, I picked him up over in Oklahoma City. He hitched that far when his bike gave out, tryin’ to get back. I could skin him for taking your girl back home and skin him again for leavin’ me all that rape to drill on my own.’

She laughs and finds she is crying. She can see him and Dust together, watching the land, side by side, and she wants only to stand between them, watch the land grow beside them.

‘Spent the last of the money on seeds,’ he says. ‘Amaranth.’

‘Yes?’ Her heart pounds. There is something he needs to tell her – he has found someone new, or his wife has returned. He has learned the truth about her at last, all the darkness within her, all she has done, and he does not want her to come back. She will have to leave the truck somewhere for him, make some new plan for what to do next, she and Amity. Find somewhere safe to go.

‘Amaranth,’ he says.

‘Tell me.’ She steels herself for his bad news.

‘It’s amaranth. The seeds. What I’m fixin’ to plant. Amaranth.’

She breathes all her fear out. ‘Is it a good crop?’

‘It’s a new crop to me. Still tryin’ to figure it out.’ She hears him breathe in a lungful of smoke. ‘You gotta set the share pretty high so you don’t kill what’s growin’. You think it won’t come to much, but it’s all there, workin’ beneath the surface, settin’ down its roots. And when it comes time to bloom you see it’s bloodred, like blood in the fields.’

She looks across at the truck and her daughter, waiting.

‘That okay with you?’ he says. ‘You still there?’

‘I’m here.’ She understands her name then, feels its claim on her. She can grow on his land and be planted. She can learn to root herself and hope to flower. She can plant what was sacred and see what would grow. She knows his planting is his asking her to stay. ‘That’s okay with me,’ she says, and her heart bursts wide, past her daughter, past the weight of what was.

Even he, down in Oklahoma, must hear it.

Mother fills the tank and says they will be home soon.

Their lives are waiting to be picked up, like stitches, but Mother has forgotten where home is. Home isn’t made or chosen, like she says it is. Family isn’t handmade or reworked like cloth. Family is the family that God gives you, the family He wants you to have, even if it hurts you. The hurting is what He is teaching you. That hurting is your family.

All the world is shouting this truth, but Mother cannot hear it. She hasn’t seen what people do on TV. She doesn’t know how lonely an empty bed is or how bare an unstrapped wrist can feel, no sister to bind you to anything.

‘Not long now,’ Mother says every few miles. ‘Look, there’s a sign.’

The writing at the border says
OKLAHOMA
. ‘I know. I can read it,’ she says, and Mother looks at her, all surprised.

Amity thinks of Dust and she thinks of the land. She thinks of the fields and what she could do in them, and then she knows that she is the strap, stretching between what Sorrow is and what her mother wants, and between them is Amity, looking forward, looking backward, head covered, but wearing jeans.

She looks into her hands and wonders what they will do next.

See how they twitch and they want.

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