During her first day at our school, she tells me her mama died while giving birth to her, but her daddy wanted a boy. Says he named her Sons because it’s one of the most important words in the Bible. I never read the Bible. She worries I’ll go to Hell. During silent reading time, she turns her book down, folds her hands, and out loud asks God to take it easy on me.
She wears the same off-pink overalls and a white shirt three and four times in a row, hair always in single, long braid down her back. When it gets cold, she doesn’t have a jacket, so she borrows mine. It smells like a bass when she returns it. Mom had lice when she was my age—says that picking nits and mayonnaise only goes so far. At school, all the kids take turns rubbing my head and calling me Cue. Sons tells me that it’s a sin for girls to cut their hair. On the playground, with our breath showing between us, she grabs my hand and teaches me the words to say. I can’t remember them because the wood chips hurt my knees.
She spends the night at my house, brings only her Bible. Mom cooks us waffles and maple sausage that she bought special, better than the red beans and rice we usually eat. Sons says she could only eat fish sticks because it’s Friday. Instead of watching TV like I hoped, she reads the Bible for two hours. It’s not until we’re in bed, laying next to each other, breath hot on our faces that she talks. She writhes like she can’t get comfortable, which makes my cheeks burn because Mom shared this mattress with her sister when they were kids, and you can feel each spring. I say sorry, but she says that it’s the most comfortable bed she’s ever slept on. Before she falls asleep, she scrubs her thumb back and forth across the rough ends of my hair.
On the playground, we hog the swings. I pump my legs back and forth, trying to touch the sky before I jump. Sons just sits with her eyes closed, ignoring the girls telling her to move. Summer comes quick. I ask to go to church with Sons. Mom doesn’t like the idea—she used to be in a church somewhere and had to kiss a snake, the same one the bit her dad on the mouth. Sons comes over; we stand by the empty fish stick box in the trash and beg, and Mom eventually says fine.
The first weekend after school lets out, Mom drops me off at the Rocky Mountain Project lake. Her window is rolled up, and she bites her lip. Sons’s daddy has a camping spot off the pea gravel road. A parked Honda Civic. Clothes mounded across the backseat. The front driver’s side tire is flat, shaped to the ground. He wears a tank top like the daddies on tv, but his is stained yellow on the side. He sits on top of the bowed and rotted picnic table, bare feet on the bench, eating a bag of potato chips, using his shorts as a napkin. Sons gets up from a folding chair, hugs me. I count at least four Bibles, all creased and water-stained: two on the dash of the car, one on the table next to her daddy, and one in Sons’s chair.
We eat Reese’s cups for dinner. Her daddy doesn’t talk none. Sons and me walk through the trees, the pine straw poking the bottoms of our feet. At the lake’s edge, we find flat rocks that explode in rooster tails of water because neither of us know how to skip them clean off the surface. Her daddy hollers for us to get back or else he’ll find him a hickory. He sleeps in the driver’s seat with the windows cracked; Sons unrolls a blanket on a worn, picked-clean spot of ground. Through the trees we can see fires at other sites and hear folks laughing.
In the morning, we wake up, and I put on the sun dress that Mom called church clothes. The three of us walk down to the water. I ask about going to church, and her daddy says that where two or more are gathered He is also. Fog rolls off the water, and the Sun shines through it just above the pines. We stand ankle deep in the lake. Her daddy preaches and preaches for an hour, and I stand and stand, mostly watching the fog burn off. When he finishes, he turns to Sons. Makes her kneel in the silty water, raises a foot to her, hands her a rag from his pocket. With a red face, she scrubs the muck from his heels. They do the other foot, then turn to me. I say no, but he tells me my pride’ll get me in Hell, asks if that’s where I wanna wind up.
A drop of water splashes on her face when I lift my foot, silt clinging to my sole. She gently cradles my heel in her hand as she wets a corner of the rag. A school of tadpoles swim by. A crooked grin breaks over his teeth. The rag tickles, but my stomach curls. Sons and I don’t look at each other while she works between my toes.
When school started back, she wasn’t there. Made Mom drive us through the campground, but their car wasn’t among the pines. Years later, when Mom died, I came back for the memorial dinner. With my little boy in hand, I went to the mall for a pair of high heels to wear to the memorial. Sons worked in the shoe store. She came around the corner, braid slung over her shoulder, and asked if I needed help finding anything. We blushed but both pretended not to know each other, which I was glad for. Looking at the ground, she went so far as to ask what brought me to the area, which school I went to. Knew better than to ask which church.
Just when we had small talked enough to make me forget that I knew her, she handed me a pair of shoes that were snug, didn’t pull right onto my feet. She knelt down, held my ankle, and slipped the shoe on my foot without ever looking me in the face.
BODIE FOX is a MFA student at George Mason University. Sometimes he plays the banjo, sometimes he reads for BULL. Always he loves reality tv. His work has appeared in X-RAY and Rejection Letters.
CLAUDEA discovered art through music in her teenage years, which led her to study Design at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, Romania. After graduating, she went on exploring and lived in Italy experimenting with art and jewelry making, before moving to the United Kingdom. She currently lives in London, where she works full-time and spends her free time painting.
