My teeth chatter as the Bronco rolls over the grating of the cattle guard. The man drives slowly into Alberton and pulls into the gas station. He stops the car and pulls the keys from the ignition. He looks at the girl in the passenger seat a moment and is obviously waiting for something. They just stare at one another. I can’t see his face but I can see hers, and she looks at him flatly, with a hint of beckoning, or even wanting, and this continues until slowly, defiantly slow, she slides down in her seat and ducks forward. He doesn’t bother to look back at me, just says “Stay still,” and so I also, oddly, without thinking, leaned forward, resting my head on my knees.

There is one person I always forget to describe. My mother.  

 It’s as if someone once made the mistake of telling her that what you’re waiting for always comes just as you light a cigarette- food you’ve ordered at a restaurant, the local bus-  and she mistook it for a universal law. Always near her is the same glass seashell ashtray. She smokes at least two packs a day. Waiting for the perm to set, the cake to cool. Waiting for daddy to come back. Waiting for grandma to die just as patiently as my grandma waits to win her lottery.

She had run away, to be with him. When she was young. Charlotte, that’s what she was called then. Charlotte to the teachers, Charlotte on the birth certificate, and Charlie on the ranch. She ran away in the middle of the night and at sun-up they found her bed empty, her clothes gone. Uncle Jim left and one day later came back, dragging her along with him. She had run away and said her name was Rita. Rita something. Something Spanish, I think Maria. A few months later she ran away again, but this time she came back on her own, five months later, her stomach extended, me somewhere deep inside. From that moment on they never called her Charlie again, only Rita. It started out as a harsh joke but eventually took root. She was Rita, a punishment she would wear as a namesake, her own scarlet letter.

All of this happens so quietly, all of this waiting, these dirty looks, the resentments and unrealized, drowned-out dreams. It is all done in silence. Some oddly sequenced quiet to signify order. And conversely, noise to reflect chaos. But the worst kind of chaos has a silence all its’ own. A natural born lack-of-voice. The fear that stills. My mother had seen things I couldn’t, things about living that were invisible, things that kept her eyes set on distances unknown. As Charlie, she was a perky blonde who was maybe too flirtatious for her age, “asking for it,” but who loved to dance and sing, and as Rita she was an over-powdered chain smoker who never left the house, who had an interest in no one, me included.

“She has his eyes,” they would say, and that was all I knew about daddy. That I had his eyes. And maybe that’s why hers usually refused to meet mine.

            Still there is a rush of blood to my chest. The recognition of something coming that I know quite well, similar to seeing a familiar face and scrambling to dig up its’ context to you. And sometimes still, that lagging darkness, pulling at the tops of my eyelids, slackening each muscle from head to toe. Something drags behind everything, like weights composed of unhealthy attachments, past lives that cling like an after-scent and make it so there can be no new dusk. Driftwood, the ashen remains, empty caskets. I said I would do something, go somewhere, but so far everywhere is here: saccharine and clotted. Charm bracelets strung with fragments of time that I half remember- less as an actual event and more how someone contains a fuzzy recollection of the plotline to last season’s hit show- once there were seconds of intense clarity, spiritual elevation, the sense of self momentarily made more real than ground beneath feet. But as I’ve come to realize more and more: time fictionalizes everything.