The Photo My Teacher Called A Lie
The kid in the third row
Most of the people who went to Bell Creek High with me could not have told you my name in ninth grade. That is not me feeling sorry for myself. It is just the truth of how it was. I sat in the third row by the windows in almost every class, wore sneakers my grandma got half a size too big so I could grow into them, and I kept my head down the way you keep your head down when you have already learned that being noticed usually means being picked on.
Bell Creek is a flat little farm town in the middle of nowhere, the kind of place where the tallest thing for twenty miles is the grain elevator by the tracks. We have one stoplight, a diner called the Bluebird that still runs a hand-lettered pie board, a feed store, a hardware store that has been in the Kessler family for three generations, two churches that hold a joint potluck every August, and a football field that fills up on Friday nights when nothing else in a hundred miles will. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows your business. And in a town like that, once people decide what you are, they do not really let you be anything else.
I was the poor kid. The quiet kid. The one who lived with his grandmother out on County Road 9 in a farmhouse that needed paint. That was my slot, and I had stopped fighting it.
What almost nobody in that town knew, because I had learned the hard way to stop telling them, was that my mother flew fighter jets for the United States Air Force.
The photograph
I kept one picture of her folded inside my notebook. I did not put it on my wall or in a frame on the dresser, not because I was ashamed of her but because it was the kind of thing I did not want other people’s hands on. In the picture she is standing next to an F-22 on a runway with the heat coming up off the concrete in waves. She has on her flight suit, the sleeves pushed up, dark sunglasses, one hand resting near the ladder that goes up to the cockpit. She is not smiling much. My mom never smiled much in pictures. She always said posing felt like lying, standing still and pretending to feel something for a camera.
Her name is Dana Barnes. Major Dana Barnes. She was stationed at Langley out in Virginia when she was home, which was not often, and deployed overseas when she was not, which was most of the time. My whole childhood was measured in the gaps between her being gone and her being back, and in the phone calls that came through at odd hours because of the time difference, her voice a little delayed on the line, asking about my grades and whether Grandma’s knees were holding up.
My father died when I was six. He rolled a tractor on a wet hillside on my grandfather’s land, and after that it was just me and Grandma in the farmhouse most of the year, with Mom coming and going like weather. People in town knew I did not have a dad. That part they understood, because half the kids I grew up with were missing one thing or another. What they could not fit in their heads was the other part. A mother, from Bell Creek, flying a twenty-million-dollar fighter jet over places most of them could not find on a map. It did not match the story they had already written about me, and people will fight to keep their story before they will change their mind.
So I stopped saying it. By seventh grade I had learned that telling the truth about my mother cost more than it was worth. I would say she was in the Air Force and leave it there, and let people assume she pushed papers at a desk somewhere, because that they could believe. The whole truth I kept folded up in my notebook where nobody could laugh at it.