The Night I Finally Drove Away

Something in my chest pulled tight, the kind of tight you feel right before you either cry or leave a room, and I chose the second one.

“Excuse me a minute,” I said.

My father didn’t even glance up. “Don’t be so dramatic about a bank, Burnell.”

I went upstairs anyway, into the bathroom I’d grown up brushing my teeth in, and locked the door and put both hands flat on the cold countertop. My reflection looked back at me pale and dry eyed, like even my own face had quit expecting anything different a long time ago.

Downstairs I could hear Cleora laughing about something. That was the sound that made up my mind.

I want to be honest about something before I go any further. This wasn’t the first time. It was just the last time I let it slide.

Growing up in Doe Run, there’s not a lot of money floating around, and I understood that as a kid. What I never understood was how it always seemed to land on Cleora anyway. She got a real birthday party every year, hired bounce house and all, out at the VFW hall, while mine got moved to a Tuesday after school because “it’s easier that way” three years running. She got two weeks at church camp every summer and a car for her sixteenth birthday, used but running, while I worked the register at the feed store from fourteen on and bought my first truck with cash I’d saved a dollar at a time.

When she wanted to go to nursing school two hours away in Springfield, my parents took out a loan against the back forty acres to cover what her scholarship didn’t. When I told them I wanted to go through the lineman apprenticeship program instead of a four year school, my father told me that was probably smart, since I “wouldn’t need much help anyway.” I paid every dime of that program myself, working the overnight shift at the grain elevator between classes, and I never once heard the word proud attached to it.