Home: Part 43

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for a while.

April 1958 

Terry had two brothers. Mark, the oldest of the three, lived in Albuquerque where he owned a small restaurant. He had a wife and two children, and from what I gathered from Cindy was the family outcast who had turned his back on the farm and everything involved with it. "He doesn't even write letters home or send Christmas cards," Cindy told me. "Terry says the two of them were close, but then Mark changed and moved away." Tony was the youngest of the three boys. He was a couple of years younger than I was, and he was what Cindy called "special." She chose her words carefully. "Not retarded, just slow." I'd seen Tony at school, and he had seemed normal enough to me.  

A couple of days after my experience with Terry in the barn, Cindy knocked on my bedroom door. Inside my room, she sat on the chair at my small desk and looked at me. "Terry's not sure about you," she said.

I didn't know how to take that. "What does that mean?" I asked. 

She pursed her lips. "He just says he's not sure he can trust you. That's all."

"Trust me with what?"

"With things he says or does."

"That's what he says?"

"Yes."

"I don't know what that means."

"He says you were acting strangely in the barn the other day when we were at his house."

"I wasn't."

"He says that. He wants you to be friendly with Mark when we're all together, but he's not sure he can trust you."

"Trust me to do what?" I'd never even spoken to Mark, so I didn't know what Terry could be talking  about, or thinking. I did not remember seeing Mark the few times I'd accompanied my sister to Terry's house.

"Just remember that Terry is my boyfriend, okay? He's important to me." She seemed genuinely concerned, but I was not sure of why or for whom.

"I don't want to be doing your church stuff," I said. 

"You're not old enough to know what you really want, or what you need," she said. "Everything Terry and I do is good for you. Not just for god."

"Dad says I don't have to go to church if I don't want to. Not anymore."

She let that sink in as if weighing whether I was bluffing. "I'll talk to him." She got up to leave. "I might go to Terry's next week, too. You'll come with me."