The Rank She Never Mentioned
The Slap
My father crossed the grass in four steps and struck me across the face in front of two hundred people holding champagne glasses, and for a full three seconds nobody moved, not even the caterers.
I want to tell this in order, because the order is the whole story. If I start with the slap, you will think this is a story about a slap. It isn’t. It’s a story about twenty six years of not mentioning something, and one afternoon when I didn’t have a choice anymore.
But I understand why the slap is where people’s attention goes first. It went there for me too, and it was my own face.
Let me back up.
Two Different Daughters
I grew up in a low brick house off Winchester Road outside Huntsville, Alabama, on land my grandfather cleared before there was a highway anywhere near it. My sister Chelsea is three years older than me, and from the time we were girls there was never any real doubt about which one of us was going to make the family proud.
Chelsea made good grades without trying hard, the kind of easy academic grace that teachers write on report cards like it’s a personality trait. She was homecoming court. She went to Auburn, then to law school in Birmingham, and she came home every Christmas with a slightly better car.
I was not that daughter. I got into trouble that was ordinary teenage trouble, nothing that would ruin a life, but enough that my mother had a story she liked to tell about me at church potlucks, usually starting with “well, Charity always did things the hard way.” I dropped a class. I dented my father’s truck. I dated a boy from Hazel Green that my mother did not approve of for reasons she never fully explained.
None of it was serious. All of it got remembered.
By the time I was seventeen, the roles in our family were set in concrete the way roles get set in families that don’t like to revisit anything. Chelsea was the daughter who was going somewhere. I was the daughter who needed managing.
I want to be fair to my parents here, because this isn’t a story about villains born that way. My father grew up with nothing, built a small metal fabrication shop from a rented garage bay into something that kept twelve families employed, and he measured worth the way a lot of men who built something from scratch measure it, by what shows up on a balance sheet or a diploma on a wall. My mother measured worth by what the neighbors would say. Neither of those is an unusual way to be broken. It’s just the way they were broken, and I grew up on the wrong side of both measurements.