Chapter Three

I couldn’t drive my dad’s car around Prairie View. I’m a hometown girl made good. How would my journalist persona be served by cruising around town in a fat new Oldsmobile, CB antennae on top? Truth be told, I couldn’t pull up to the church for the funeral in something that wasn’t me. I was that insecure.

I had lived in a small town long enough to know that what people perceive you to be, you become. They wouldn’t have it any other way. That’s why I had to leave Prairie View, Montana. It’s all so damn complicated. I had escaped living there, but my small-town identity still lived in me, always waiting to pull the rug from under my giant ego.

In Great Falls, I rented a sweet Nissan Murano, burgundy with gold trim. Butch with class, great sound, forty-seven miles on the odometer. And I headed north to the Hi-Line of Montana. A place of hundreds of thousands of acres, so desolate, so nowhere, known only to those who live there. Even Montanans from other parts of the state lived in ignorance of the vast north that pushed down on them from the top of the map.

My ritual for driving to Prairie View included one regular stop. There was this rest area about thirty-five miles south of town that I couldn’t pass up. It was the place where I readied myself for the onslaught of bittersweet memories and associations that awaited me in Prairie View. RATTLESNAKES SIGHTED. STAY ON THE SIDEWALKS. That was the sign that greeted any weary traveler pulling in to freshen up. My guess was travelers were wide awake by the time they scampered to the toilet and back again. And my sympathy went to anyone who, nervous eyes darting across the ground, stopped to give their little poochie a break in the grassy dog relief area.

I parked in front of my favorite sign in the world, rolled down all the windows, switched off the ignition, and sucked the first full breath I’d taken in twenty-four hours. A firm breeze rolled off the Rocky Mountains. The Hi-Line was rarely without a breeze from the Rockies, carrying soothing scents of sage, tilled soil, and hay. A breeze on the Hi-Line would be called a wind anywhere else.

The car metal warmed my back where I leaned against it, and I waited for my signal of home. There it came, the expectant bubbled call of the meadowlark and then, a little farther away, softer, the exuberant reply from its mate. I scanned the sage, squinting out sunlight to catch sight of the birds. There they were, skittering and bobbing above and through the wild hay and giant sage bushes. I caught a clear view of their yellow spring plumage just before the breeze whipped my hair into my eyes.

While trudging up the rise behind to the rest rooms, and making my way to the picnic tables, I kept half an eye on the ground, vigilant for rattlers.

“Yeah, Grandma, I’m watching out for snakes,” I muttered to my grandma’s ghost who still had her hold on me. It didn’t matter where I was going when I was a kid, or what was planned. The last thing I would always hear as I left the house was Grandma shouting, “…and watch out for snakes!” The Hi-Line way of saying, “I love you.”

My gaze drifted north across the limitless prairie as I sat on top of the picnic table. I stared at the Sweetgrass Hills, three dead volcanoes springing out of the flatness, lined up along the south side of the Canadian border. They had always been exhilarating to me, but today the anomalies drew a fatigued sigh from my chest. Daddy had a gawd-awful amount of land up north by the border, and I knew I’d be doing a snoot-full of driving around there before this epic was over. White exhaust smoke from an Air Force jet drew a messy figure eight over the far eastern Sweetgrass Hill.

A pair of red-tailed hawks caught my eye, and I lay back on the tabletop while I watched them do their twirly mating ritual high up on the airstream. I dozed off.

I must have been dreaming about Annie when a big old blowfly hit my temple and jolted me awake. My first waking thought was of Annie. When do I call Annie? Should I call Annie? “Shit. When will this end?” That was my usual Annie mantra.

Then I caught the scent of new wheat, closed my eyes again, and my mind floated to warm spring nights. Annie and I sitting in my Chevy, sipping Little Olys bought for us by someone’s legal-aged brother. Annie would begin our make-out sessions by reaching across the bench seat and brushing a lock of my, by that age, amber hair. I’d look at her and watch the moonlight play with her extensive blond curls. She smelled of Sand and Sable perfume.

She always had so much sadness in her eyes before she kissed me. I’m sure my eyes were never melancholy with her, just lustful and needy.

“God, Jill. I love you. I can’t explain why, but I need to do this.” And she’d place a tender kiss on my lips, lick them, and I was hers. Every time.

At first, we never went beyond intense making out and a little breast touching, outside the shirts, but that didn’t keep us from pushing ourselves onto each other, eliciting an orgasm right through our jeans.

The fall of senior year, however, our sexual explorations expanded. The first time we made full love was in my bed. My dad had taken Grandma to Hawaii as a special treat and left me on the honor system, though Grandma gave me the warning eye when they left the house. She didn’t trust me for a second, but it wasn’t bad enough to pass up a dream trip to Hawaii.

Consumed by the clumsy lust endowed to seventeen-year-olds, Annie and I spent two days in bed. We gave each other countless orgasms as we learned to finesse our sexual technique. Our bodies were carnal laboratories where we freely experimented with the elements of pleasure. We danced at the edge of a sexual precipice, pushing one another into a free fall over and over.

Every part of my body yearned for her touch, and she gave herself to me without reserve until Sunday afternoon. Then something shifted.

“Um, Annie…can I ask a question?” I was lying with my head between her breasts, occasionally licking the nipple that stood erect near my mouth.

“S…sure,” she hissed at the stroke of my tongue.

“I lost my virginity this weekend. And I’m glad it was with you. I couldn’t tell, did you lose yours? I mean…it doesn’t matter or anything. I was just wondering.” Her body beneath me stilled and the atmosphere in the bed went from loving and tender to motionless and cold.

“Don’t ever ask me that again.” And within twenty minutes, she’d showered, dressed, and left with an impersonal kiss on my lips. When you’re seventeen, “processing what just happened” isn’t in your vocabulary, much less in your skill set.

We continued to be lovers during senior year, hiding in my car’s backseat, stealing time in my bed, because the pull between us was irresistible. However, as graduation neared, she rarely called me. She took her time returning my phone calls, and by May, it was probably clear to any outside eye that she had lost interest in me. I still believed in us, thinking that our planned escape to college in Missoula would give us the time and space to build our future together.

The morning of graduation, she called me. Thrilled at her uncharacteristic behavior of actually calling me, I didn’t notice her distant tone.

“I don’t want you to hate me,” was her conversation opener, “but I have something important to tell you. I’m kinda…um, well, I’m pregnant.”

I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and certainly couldn’t respond. Blood pounded in my ears; I was shaking my head. “Say that again?”

“I’m going to have a baby in December. Don’t ask who the father is. That’s not important. But we can’t see each other again. Sorry. It’s just too complicated and I can’t talk about it. I’m sorry. When you get to college, I’m sure you’ll find a nice guy. That will help you get over all this.”

“A guy?”

“I’m sorry, Jill, but I gotta go. We’ll talk sometime.”

One month after graduating from high school, she married Wayne Robison, an obscure guy in our class whom she never mentioned before. We never did have that talk. I went to college and she had her first baby.

Occasionally, late at night, Annie would call me “just to have a chat.” I’d lie on my bed and feel the warmth of her voice and presence. For maybe an hour, her attention would be directed at me. She’d relate cute stories about her little boys, gossip about our high school buddies, and, every so often, complain humorously about Wayne. But after about six years, the calls petered out. Christmas and birthday cards continued far longer with vaguely loving reminders of what we had shared. “I always think of you, Jill.” Or “I’ll never forget our friendship.” Or “You’re never far from my thoughts.”

When I would visit my father in Prairie View, Annie and I would meet for lunch at a restaurant in a neighboring town. Or maybe she’d come to my father’s house for a beer. But we’d never show ourselves together in a public place in Prairie View. It embarrassed me to think I accepted my relegation to the shameful secret box in Annie’s closet, but I did. She was a married woman, after all, I reasoned. She couldn’t afford to be seen hanging around an out lesbian.

And I would clutch each crumb tossed, seeing them as possibilities for us to have a future when the time was right. All such communication had ceased five years before my father’s death, but I still left a peephole in my heart in case Annie ever wanted to take a look.

“Fuck.” There I was, forty-one years old, lying on that picnic bench anguishing over things that happened twenty-three years earlier. After all those years, I was still entangled. So many mornings I would wake up with a bittersweet ache in my belly because of having an Annie dream. The dreams always had the same theme: Annie and I desperate to make love, but the dreamland circumstances would force us to make a date for later. When later would come around, I’d be held up, blockaded by some dream disaster, kept from my rendezvous with Annie.

I would always wake feeling sexy, bittersweet, and bereft. If someone happened to be sleeping next to me, I’d slip her leg between mine and urge her into bringing my release. I felt slightly guilty about that, but my partners were pleased with themselves. I never even considered popping their post-orgasmic bubbles with the overrated truth. Too much trouble, since all women’s days in my bed were numbered anyway.

Peeling myself off the top of that picnic table, I resigned myself to the next few weeks. “Might as well get on with this.” When I reached my gorgeous car, I got in and finger-combed my hair. I needed to give my appearance the once-over in preparation for my entrance into Prairie View. I sent blessings to my stylist, Charles of Seattle. Just four days before, he’d trimmed my hair to shoulder length, highlighted some burnished red into it, tweezed the eyebrows to perfection, took my $250, and sent me on my way.

“Perfect timing, Charles. You prettied me up for Daddy’s funeral. Who would have thought?”

As I pulled out of the rest area, I realized I had never seen a single rattlesnake there, despite the warning. That improved my mood for a moment until I became aware of the surrounding plains and remembered their colorful, unfortunate, history. History reflected in faded, bullet-holed road signs declaring defunct promises of sanctuary ahead. “Etta’s Best Home Cooking: Fresh Pie.” “Stay-a-Spell Motel: Clean Rooms. Free TV.” “Car Overheating? Bill’s Engine Repair.” None of those businesses had been open for decades, but their signs graced the landscape like neglected tombstones.