Free This Given Sky by James Grady Page A

about getting detention. He and Steve told each other that Thel trying to save them was cool. For a girl.
    On her wedding day, Thel realized: I was never a girl .
    She’d been just a friend to Jake and Steve, a buddy with breasts but nothing more. Thel kept it that way. Come high school, she made Nick Robbins her official hook-up after he asked if they could be “kinda together” until one of them found “somebody real.” That’s when she knew he was gay, would hide until years and miles buffered him from their wind-blown prairie town. They kissed only in public. He needed her. She used him and thus ran with her guys , Steve and Jake, free from all that romance and sex stuff.
    Her dad loved it when the posse hung out at her house. They never hung out at Steve’s—or Jake’s, where Everything Was Just So. The dad did his part. The mom did hers. So did Only Child Jake. Dinner was On Time. Everything had to be just so , or the universe would explode.
    Jake glided amidst those infinite possibilities of utter destruction. He got stoned, preferred grass to beer, could have had straight A’s but didn’t. Was on the football team, a free safety perched back from the melee all by himself, the last chance to stop the other guys from scoring. Steve played tight end, blocked for ball-carrying teammates or leapt to snag a pass and get tackled before his cleats kissed the grass. Steve and Jake spent so much time together fools might have wondered if they were gay, but Bonnie Ager told Thel that that sure— sure —wasn’t true about Jake, knowledge Thel never ever questioned. She knew three girls who bragged about scoring with Steve.
    Thel told the guys how her father had quit his office job in Montana’s beautiful pine mountains city of Libby to inherit his father-in-law’s auto parts store in her mom’s stark high plains hometown of Shelby. One Tuesday, when Thel was eight, her mom stood up from the lunch table, said: “No more.” Left for someplace exotic like Spokane or Seattle.
    Steve said: “Why’d she go and do that to you?”
    Thel shrugged.
    “I get it,” said Jake.
    Then and there Thel just knew he knew the ache in her every step.
    Because he was her friend. What more could she want?
    One May Friday afternoon in their junior year, Jake met Thel at her father’s store as UPS dropped off a box of repair parts for the local star from high school in the 1960s who’d gone on to create a cargo airline business and flown back for a visit in his World War II fighter plane.
    Thel’s father shuffled to the counter to sign for the box while she finished his weekly accounts like she did every Friday. Jake was supposed to drive her home to fix dinner for her dad, then be in his own house to eat at precisely six o’clock. Steve was staying close to his sis and mom because Bear Man was in town. Thel figured that, after dinner, she and Jake would hang out in her basement. That’s all, just hang, why would we do anything else.
    Her dad coughed from allergies or whatever as the deliveryman handed him the box of parts. Mumbled how he oughta get it to that guy .
    Jake said: “We’ll take it up to the airport.”
    “Well,” noted Thel’s dad, “I do got other work that needs doing.”
    “Yeah.” Jake knew that wasn’t the whole truth but it had to be said.
    Give people the space to stand in whatever lie keeps them going.
    Or their universe will explode.
    Jake drove Thel out of town to the airstrip where two aluminum hangers and a green concrete blockhouse office sat on a plateau of yellow rolling plains cupped under a thousand-mile blue sky. On the paved runway, a big man stood by a single propeller silver warplane.
    “Has to be the guy,” Jake told Thel.
    The big man beside the silver warplane had been a boxer. Kept his build, his unscrambled brains, his fighter’s eyes.
    Even as Jake felt Thel agitating to get home for her dad, even though he knew he’d be late for dinner and thus might trigger Armageddon,