The Night They Dumped My Boxes

The yard

The rain was coming down so hard that night that I almost drove past my parents’ place on the county road outside Elmore. My headlights swung across the front yard the way they had a thousand times growing up, and that was when the beam caught the first cardboard box, torn open and slumped near the mailbox like something a stray animal had gotten into.

I slowed the truck to a crawl. My tires hissed on the wet gravel.

There were more boxes. There were boxes all across the grass, and their sides had gone soft and dark in the rain, and the things inside them were sliding out into the mud. I saw books, swollen fat with water, their pages fanning open in the wind. I saw my old winter coat, the good wool one, flattened into the ground like a shot bird. I saw the shoebox of letters from my bedroom, the one I had kept since high school, collapsed on itself beside the driveway with its corners drooping like wet paper skin.

I put the truck in park. I sat there with both hands locked on the wheel, and I listened to the wipers scrape back and forth across the glass, and for a second I did not understand what I was looking at. It did not make sense. My whole life, everything I had left in that house, was lying out in the yard in the rain.

Then something hit the windshield.

It was a soft, wet slap, and a smear of yellow dragged itself down the glass in one long line, and I smelled cheap mustard before my brain caught up to what it was. A half-eaten hot dog. It slid off the hood and dropped into the mud with the rest of my life.

I looked up at the porch.

Three weeks earlier

Let me back up, because none of that yard makes sense unless you know what I had done three weeks before, and why.

My name is Margaret Colvin. Everybody has always called me Meg. I grew up on that same county road, the third of the Colvin kids in a town of maybe nine hundred people, where the biggest buildings are the grain elevator, the Methodist church, and the school that runs kindergarten straight through twelfth grade under one flat roof. If you are from a place like that, you already know exactly the kind of town I mean. If you are not, I could describe it for an hour and you would still only get half of it.

I was not the pretty one and I was not the easy one. That title in our family went to my younger sister, Kayla. Kayla’s crayon drawings went on the refrigerator and stayed there until they yellowed. Kayla’s report cards got read out loud at the supper table. When Kayla wrecked her first car at seventeen, it was the road’s fault, it was the rain’s fault, it was anybody’s fault but hers, and Dad had a new used Chevy in the driveway for her inside of a month. When Kayla ran up a credit card in her twenties, it was an emergency, and the family circled around her like a wagon train.