Free What Comes After by Steve Watkins Page A

knew she had to be using money from Dad’s estate — money meant for me. But I kept quiet and kept my head down and just tried to get through each day. I did my homework and went quietly to school. I listened to Shirelle and the others discuss
Huckleberry Finn,
and I kept my mouth shut no matter how much I wanted to join in. I did my chores. I went for long walks in the woods with Gnarly. I petted him until even Gnarly, who needed love as badly as any dog I’d ever known, decided he’d had enough. I wrestled with the goats until half my body felt bruised from their butting and their horns. I caught myself talking to them — Patsy most of all. I wrote letters to Dad. I told him about the Devil’s Stomping Ground, Reba’s growing pregnancy, how well I’d cleaned up the barn — anything positive I could think of.
    And I called Beatrice. Late one night after Aunt Sue left for work. I figured it would be a month before Aunt Sue got the phone bill, and I would deal with the fallout then.
    “Hey,” Beatrice said as if she’d been expecting the call. “What’s going on?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Same old North Carolina. What about you?”
    “Same old Maine.”
    “Sounds better than here,” I said, keeping my voice low so Book wouldn’t hear — though I doubted he’d wake up. It was nearly eleven. “Look, I’m sorry about the other night, when I had to hang up on you.”
    “Yeah,” Beatrice said. “Whatever. I was kind of drunk.”
    “I wanted to talk,” I said. “It’s just that my aunt was right there, and everything’s been pretty terrible here.”
    “Terrible how?”
    “Well, she hit me, for one thing. She slapped me.”
    “Damn,” Beatrice said, though she didn’t sound as angry as I thought she should. “What did you do?”
    “What do you mean?” I asked sharply. “What did I do when she slapped me?”
    “No, I mean, why’d she slap you in the first place?”
    I started to explain about Gnarly barking, and about the chickens he killed, but Beatrice cut me off. “You shouldn’t have let out their dog.”
    “What?” I said. “Are you kidding me? She
slapped
me, B. I can’t believe you said that.”
    She sighed into the phone. “I’m not saying she should have slapped you. But she probably did have a right to be mad.”
    “You’re taking her side?” I said, incredulous.
    “Oh, just forget it,” Beatrice snapped. “Can we talk about something else besides your aunt and your farm and your goats? Can we talk about what’s going on up here maybe? You’re so caught up in your own stuff, Iris. Why don’t you ever ask about anything that’s going on with me? You could ask me about my parents, who aren’t even talking at all now, which is worse than when they were fighting all the time. You could ask me about Collie. You could ask me about
my
stuff.”
    I sat down on the kitchen floor with the phone cord looped around my arm.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, flattened by all she’d just said. “I didn’t know about your mom and dad. I thought maybe things had gotten better with me gone.”
    “Well, they haven’t.”
    I sighed, already letting go of the idea — faint in the first place — that Beatrice could help me with my problems at Aunt Sue’s. “Do you want to talk about it?”
    “I don’t know,” Beatrice said. “Won’t your aunt kick you off the phone again?”
    “Not tonight,” I said. “She just left for work.”
    For the next hour, I let Beatrice talk — about her parents, about Collie, about whatever she wanted. She’d always done most of the talking, anyway, for as long as we’d been friends. Ironically, it even made me feel better to just be listening to her, to be back in my old familiar role — at least for a little while.
    It was after midnight when we finally hung up and I crawled into bed. I was exhausted, my head crusty from lack of sleep — not just tonight, but since I’d been in North Carolina — but I was still wide