It made me cough violently, and my eyes watered. I couldn’t stop blinking and coughing.
She poured herself another glass. I thought it was strange how we weren’t talking about her mother.
I sat quietly for a minute while she downed her second tequila—just stared off into the woods and watched the breeze move the dappled sunlight around. For that minute, everything felt nearly normal again.
Next thing I knew she was grabbing me by two big handfuls of my shirt. Suddenly. Almost violently. I was seized by panic, but I didn’t try to get away, except in my head. My fight-or-flight reflex got stuck in the middle on “freeze.”
“You have to do something for me,” she said, her voice intense and full of distress. “Promise me. Promise me you’ll do it!”
The alcohol had obviously gone quickly to her head. Mine had kicked in a little bit, too. My arm and leg muscles felt tingly, my belly hot. Then again, it was hard to know how much of that was fear.
“I don’t even know what it is yet,” I said.
Which was brave under the circumstances. Even faced with that kind of pressure, I was not about to promise to do something until I knew what I was promising. I took promises seriously, even then. All these years later, even more so. That seemed to override my tendency to do as adults commanded.
“Tell her you won’t take the dogs.”
“Take the dogs? I was never going to take the dogs. Did she think I was trying to steal her dogs?”
“No,” she said. “No, no, no.” Her words had begun to slur. “You’re not getting what I’m saying. You’re not getting it right at all. Tell her that if anything happens to her, you won’t take them. Or take care of them.”
“Um . . . ,” I said. And then, because I was extremely uncomfortable, “Could you please let go of my shirt?”
“Oh. Sorry.”
She unclenched her fists and let go. Smoothed out the places she had wrinkled. Or tried to, anyway.
I breathed for what felt like the first time in ages.
“I couldn’t take the dogs if I wanted to. My parents wouldn’t let me have them.”
“Good! Tell her that. Promise me you’ll tell her that.”
“Why?”
“If you use your head, you’ll know.”
I stared off into the woods for a minute, but nothing came to me. Maybe because I was still shaken.
“Sorry,” I said. “I have no idea.”
“The dogs need her. They would have no one else to take care of them. If you wouldn’t, I mean. So that’s her reason to stay. Get it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I get it.”
“You sound like you don’t.”
She was probably right about that. I probably sounded like I didn’t get it. Because my head was still so full of the parts of the thing I didn’t understand. I was wondering if the lady, her mom, had almost left the planet accidentally or purposely, and, if purposely, why the dogs hadn’t held her here. And also I was wondering why she didn’t have more reasons to stay than just that.
“I just think it’s too bad,” I said.
“Damn straight. Nearly everything is.”
She was slurring badly now. But she still poured herself a third full glass. She poured a little more in my glass, but I pretended not to notice.
“Wait,” she said, staring at the side of my face. I could see it in my peripheral vision. “Which part?”
“The part about how the dogs are her only reason.”
She didn’t answer straight away. Just sighed noisily.
We sat quietly for a minute or two. I was wanting to make a break for it and go home. But for the moment I was rooted to the spot.
“I don’t know why she stayed in this damn town,” she said. Wistfully, as though staring at a pitiful situation I couldn’t see. “Nobody knows why. Everybody thought it made sense to go far away. Well . . . everybody except her, I guess. She could have started over where nobody knew her. What was keeping her in this town, I don’t know. Instead she had to live like this.”
She swung one wild arm back toward the cabin.
“What’s wrong with this town?” I asked. A bit defensively. After all, this was my town.
“People are crap, that’s what’s wrong with it. They don’t let her forget. They say exactly the wrong thing. They ask these rude, stupid, intrusive questions without stopping to consider how they make her feel, how they bring it all crashing back. And that she’s heard them a thousand times before. They whisper behind her back, and I mean to this very day.”
I allowed a silence to fall. In case there was more. There didn’t seem to be more.
“I feel like I’m missing something,” I said.
She stared at the side of my face again. I didn’t dare look over, but I could tell.
“Oh,” she said, drawing the word out long. “You don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“That’s right. Of course you don’t. You’re fourteen. You weren’t even born yet. Well, that’ll be nice. You can come see her when she gets home, and you’ll be the only person in her life who doesn’t know who she is. She’ll like that.”
I took that to mean she wasn’t going to tell me.
“I should go,” I said.
I moved the boy dog’s head off my leg and stood. Stared down at the daughter for a moment. The drunken daughter.
“You’re not going to try to drive back to the hospital, are you?” I asked.
No reply.
I looked around for a car—which was silly, because if there had been one, I would have seen it long before that—but I saw only the pickup truck that was always there. That had been there since I’d stumbled on the place.
“Are you even driving?” I asked at last. Because so far she wasn’t answering.
“Yeah,” she said, the word muddy with effects of tequila. “I got a rental car parked out on the River Road.
