Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“How do you mean that?”

“There’s no boy. That’s all I mean.”

“Are things hard for you at school? Are you bullied?”

“No,” she says.

“That’s good.” He pours himself more whiskey. They turn over the crib, peg out the scores, throw down cards and count them. Grandpa collects the cards with difficulty. He shuffles them. They play a hand. He pours more whiskey, looks at it. They lay down their cards, peg points for the crib. He says, “If you went, what would you wear?”

“I’m not going,” she says.

“I don’t like to think that you wouldn’t go.”

“Well, Grandpa, then I’ll have to go to the dance.”

“Ah,” he says, “is there a boy?”

“Sure,” she says. “Sure there’s a boy.”

Grandpa’s eyes are crinkled with his pleasure. He can’t quit smiling. He sits raking his hand over his face, trying to quit because he knows that he looks like an idiot, and she can see he doesn’t want to spoil it for her by looking like that, but he can’t quit smiling and so sits pretending not to smile and looks down into his whiskey with his eyes squinting with pleasure.

“The little shit,” Grandpa says.

“You don’t know him. He’s very nice.”

“He’s a little shit,” Grandpa says. He can’t quit smiling into his whiskey. He rakes his hand down his face again. He quits the smile for a moment and then it comes back with the left side of his face and he turns the glass in its ring of condensation.

“Well, you need a dress then, sweetpea.”

“No dress,” she says, holding the split deck, half in either hand. It feels like anything could happen. It feels as if the world could open up. Then Grandpa says, “Martin’s never, he’s never really laid into you, has he?”

“No,” Turtle says.

“Of course not. Of course not.” He raises the glass, looks at the lights slanting through the whiskey, drinks it down. He sets it on the table. He seems to have forgotten about the card game.

“You ask him to go dress shopping.”

“A dress,” she says, and laughs.

“A dress. Here’s what you say, here’s how you do this,” Grandpa says, and nods. “He’ll like that. You tell him, ‘I want to go to the dance.’ He says whatever he says. Then you say, ‘Daddy, take me dress shopping.’ Then you shut up about it, that’s the end of it, and you never mention it again and you let on like you’ve abandoned the idea, until he takes you dress shopping, and then you don’t say anything about the dance, and you don’t say anything about any boy. All it is, is the dress, and it’s you, and it’s him. Then, when the dance comes, you just go. You don’t ask to go. You just go. And you come back, and you don’t say nothing, and it’s like the dance was between you and him and there might never have been a boy at all.”

Turtle shuffles the cards, deals, sits looking at the two hands. Neither Grandpa nor Turtle turns them over. She thinks, the hell, that might even work, but there isn’t a boy and there won’t be a dress, and then she thinks, you’re forgetting what your life is, Turtle, and you can’t forget that and you have to stay close to what is real, because if you ever get out of this it will be because you paid attention and moved carefully and did everything well. Then she thinks, get out of this, shit, your mind is rotten and you cannot trust yourself and you do not even know what to believe except that you love him, and everything goes from there.

They pick up their hands. Turtle’s cards are no good. She’ll wait and see what the start card gives her, but her cards themselves are no good. She might make something of them if she plays well, but when her cards are no good it’s always a game about regret, because what she’s put away in the crib she may need and there’s no way to know in advance how that will go, but there’s no way around it. She sits sorting through them to see if she can make anything of them and wondering what the start card might give her. Grandpa sits, turning his whiskey slowly, the soapstones sounding against the glass. Turtle waits for him to play, and he does not play.

That night when she walks out of the orchard into sight of the house, there is another truck parked in the driveway, and Wallace McPherson’s orange VW Bug. She squats in the grass and yokes the gun. She can see the shadows of the men around the table and she thinks, he will be in a mood, he will be in one for sure. She tears up red sorrel and sits chewing on the tart leaves. Then she rises and goes up the deck and in through the sliding glass door. Martin sits at the table with Wallace McPherson and Jim Macklemore, beer bottles spread across the table, joints and cigars crushed into ashtrays, Martin dealing out poker hands. They look at her, and Martin brings his hand down on the table with a sound like a gunshot. “Well, there you are,” he says.

“I was out with Grandpa,” Turtle says.

“Out with Grandpa,” Martin tells Wallace McPherson. “We were worried about her because she never came home, but as it turns out she is only out with her grandpa. Her beloved, beloved grandpa. I shouldn’t have worried. What harm can it possibly do, to spend all your spare time with a remorseless psychopath? A man with no imagination huddled in a bleak, reeking trailer? A trailer filled with the stink of Jack Daniel’s and of his poisonous dreams, the wretched exhalations of a bitter, hateful little mind? Only spending time with dear old Grandpa while he drinks himself to death.”

Wallace McPherson looks at Turtle apologetically. His chair is tipped back on two legs. His black beard is groomed immaculately with waxed mustachios.

“Her dear old grandpa,” Martin tells Wallace, “the gentlest of men, really. The kind of man anyone would want their daughter around.” He slaps the table again and looks at Turtle.

“What are you up to now?”

“Bed.”

“Bed? Well.”

Jim Macklemore says, “That’s an awful big gun for a little girl, isn’t it?”

Turtle looks at him levelly.

“With a big—what kind of a scope is that you’ve got there?”

Turtle doesn’t see the point in telling him.

“Can you even fire that thing?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Can you hit anything?”

She stands jawing the sorrel.

“Well,” and he shakes his head slowly. “Maybe you can, maybe you can’t.”

Martin says nothing.

Turtle walks quietly up to her room. She takes down her chest of tools and lays out a towel and sits cross-legged. She draws the Sig Sauer and drops the slide off the gun and sets it down in two pieces. She levers out the recoil guide rod. She takes a screwdriver from her tool chest and removes the polymer grips to expose the hammer strut and mainspring. Downstairs, she can hear Wallace get up and say, “Well, I guess I’m heading home.” Then muttered and inaudible joking, laughter, the sound of Wallace putting on his coat, the swish and double kiss of the sliding glass door, and Wallace’s footsteps down the stairs and into the grass, the ignition of the Bug, and Wallace backing around in the driveway. Turtle stoops over her towel, levering at the gun pieces with powder-black fingers. She ties her hair into a high, tight ponytail and goes on in a slow excavation of every cam and spring. She knows them all and she lays them carefully out on the towel. Downstairs, she can hear Jim and her daddy talking. Their voices are muted and broken by long silences. She can’t make out the words, but she can make out the tone well enough. She rises and walks down the hallway. She lies down on her belly and slithers out onto the landing, which doesn’t have a railing, just a frame of cracked redwood boards, black with age and with oil. She crawls right up to this beam, lies with her cheek against it, and she listens.