The Title With Her Name First
“You don’t get a say in that, Austin,” Crystal said from the back porch. “You’re not her father.”
She did not yell it. Crystal never yells. She said it the way she tells a client the color will need two sessions, calm and final, like the matter was settled before anybody asked.
A yard full of teenagers heard it. They were spread across the backyard under the string lights, holding red cups of Ale-8 and paper plates of pulled pork, and every one of them went quiet at the same time.
I was standing in the grass in my gray work shirt and jeans, still smelling a little like an attic in Perryville.
I had one car key on a ring in my hand, held out toward the birthday girl.
Kaylee was right in front of me. Long blonde hair, the lavender sundress she’d picked out at the Belk in Danville, both hands pressed together under her chin like she was praying or trying not to scream.
Behind her, in the driveway, sat a silver 2013 Toyota Corolla with a red bow on the hood so big it hung off both sides.
The balloons on the fence posts bumped against each other in the little bit of breeze we had.
All I had said was a rule. I said it smiling, the way you’d say it at a party.
Home by ten on school nights, eleven on weekends, and you text when you get where you’re going.
A couple of her friends had laughed and one boy said, “Strict,” and Kaylee had rolled her eyes at me the way she has since she was twelve.
Then her mother spoke from the porch, and the whole yard stopped.
I want to tell this right, so I will tell you what I felt first. It was not anger. It was the feeling of stepping on a stair in the dark that isn’t there.
Ten years. I had been in that house ten years.
I had paid for things in it that nobody had ever written down, and none of it made one bit of difference to the sentence that had just been said in front of a yard full of kids.
I met Crystal when I was twenty-one and she was twenty-six. I was a second-year apprentice with a heating and air outfit out of Danville, and she was the hairdresser my boss’s wife swore by.
My boss sent me to her because I looked, his words, like a lost dog.
She cut my hair in a chair by the window of a little salon on Main Street, and she talked the entire time about her daughter.
“She’s six,” Crystal said, combing. “She’s lost both front teeth and she thinks it makes her a pirate. She sleeps with a flashlight because the dark has opinions.”