Wayfarer

Dad bought our microwave as a birthday gift to himself in ‘79; came to reside there on the trailer’s faux butcher-block countertop next to the oven. It was before anyone we were close with had one. Others we didn’t know must have had them.

"It’s too loud," Mother’s contribution.

Dad’s coffee was the only thing heated in it, four times a day. Now, he was an instant coffee drinker. A quick dose of tap water in his mug and a dusty spoonful of Sanka would do. Pop it in the new machine, punch in the numbers and wait for the ding, a handy signal for the abstracted. So much less time than boiling water; less than percolating. This was measured in seconds, not hours, not days; not like my life here on this ranch and in this trailer. Add a pinch of saccharin and done.

"Take your father his coffee." Mother cleared her throat; loud and distinct, her lung’s drudgery, evacuating remnants of billowy Marlboro exhales. Mother’s bark was like a sonic beam from a lighthouse leading me straight to her in grocery stores or E & H Hardware.

The coffee was too hot—too long in the new microwave. I walked heel-to-toe like a cat stalking his prey toward the dark end of the hallway, guided by a beacon of flickering light from a distant room. I spilled the coffee many times. The splotchy dots on the linoleum were evidence, like dark raindrops that no one bothers to wipe up or wants to splash in. I followed the same path every night. Only remembering that I’d need to clean up splotches when I made the walk again. All the way down the hall, all the way I blow the steam, staring it down as if to keep it still.

Dad is waiting.

Behind me I hear the sounds of the dinner table with loud boys and Mother and clinking dishes and chomping and chatter.

I had to watch my step and navigate this dark cavern of a room to deliver the steaming brew. I knew my way. I knew to avoid the metal tv tray and to hand him the cup across his body to his right hand. I turned the cup so he’d grab the handle. It was too hot for me to hold without pain, I did hold it until I was sure he had it good.

Dad's eyes never left the screen. Didn't notice my new pants, pleated plaid with fashionable giant cuffs. And thankfully, he did not notice the hole in my new pants or the bloody knee surrounded by bloody edges of plaid. Dad didn't notice much these days and that was OK with me. It meant he wouldn’t ask about the hole or the blood, eventually forcing my confession. I rode my pony. He told me I was not to ride him until he told me I could. But it’d been a week already since that telling.

In the middle of the corral made of railroad ties, grew an Athel tree with a large, low branch that ran horizontally, parallel to the ground. I had crawled up on the limb, with a crabapple coaxed Buck near me and carefully lined him up next to the branch. I slid myself close to him and gently lowered myself onto his back. His coarse buckskin hair smelled of sweat and hay beneath me and my legs stretched around his full, round belly, while I gathered myself. I grabbed a handful of his short gray and black mane and off he shot with a bolt circling the Athel. See, no need for a saddle or bridle.

I had thought of the cowboy I was, drifting the high plains, off to dusty unknown places. Lost, dreaming of vests and guns and jingling spurs, I came back to my little corral and my round Welsh pony. As if the Athel tree was a homing device, Buck darted straightway too close to the tree and caused me to raise my left leg too high and lose my balance and all at once I was wiping dust and dung from my new blue and green plaid pants and dumping hay from my enormous cuffs, inspecting the hole in the knee, paying no attention to the oozing scrape.

Mother will not be pleased, I had thought, she’d say girls can’t be cowboys.

Feeling the air on my knee now, no longer a cowboy and back with the steaming cup in my hand, I completed the handoff. Dad took the coffee and stretched his head to look around me to see what he had missed on the TV. I looked at the screen, still the same, talking heads from faraway places, too far to imagine finding.

Read this on One Good Road