WHO: Rodeo, Adelaide, and Lottie WHAT: Rodeo's release day from prison (the first time) WHERE: Montgomery, Tennessee WHEN: Spring of 2010
STATUS: Complete
Sometimes, back when Rodeo would leave for his runs, he'd come back feeling like the few days he'd been gone had been years, feeling like he had missed too much and been gone too long. Strangely, now that he really had been gone for years, he somehow managed to feel as if he'd only been gone for a day. Ripping down the main road of his home town on his bike felt the same as it had the day he left, and everything looked exactly as he had left it. The dusty road that cut through the clusters of trailers followed the same curve, had the same potholes, same trash in the same lawns all alongside it. Nothing had moved, nothing had been disturbed. Coming home after two years in prison felt the same as coming home from a three day run, and Rodeo barely stopped to think that anything would be different.
Rodeo's motorcycle kicked up a cloud of dust as he pulled up to the trailer he'd grown up in, the growl of it making the nicotine-filmed windows rattle in their frames. He toed down the kickstand, deadened the engine, and pulled his helmet off his buzzed head. He dropped it down on the seat and then jumped up the three short stairs leading to the screen door, tugging it open and ducking to step inside. He was grinning, but the expression died on his face when he found himself walking into an empty trailer.
He'd never once doubted that Adelaide would be there to greet him. He'd been envisioning this day for the past two years-- coming home, sweeping her up into a hug, finally holding his baby girl again after two years of seeing her grow into a teenager through plexiglass. She knew his release date, knew he'd be there-- it had been the constant subject of his most recent letters. But she wasn't there. Rodeo stood in the kitchen of their tiny trailer, frowning at the empty rooms, all the joy he felt rushing out of him like breath with a boot to his chest. He wandered dumbly over to the sofa that had been his bed his entire life, dropping down onto it and digging the pack of cigarettes he'd bought on the way home out of his pocket. He lit one up and sat in silence, the length of his absence suddenly dropping on him in an unexpected avalanche.
Adelaide Hawkins had always been a precociously intelligent girl, observant in her interactions with others to the extent that she saw more than most adults, and had a knack for knowing just how to get what she wanted without actually coming out to ask for it. Her gray eyes were far more serious now than they'd been two years ago when her brother was locked up, and she rarely got into trouble or made the kind of rash decisions typical of youth.
But despite all of that, she was still a thirteen-year-old girl, and being dragged away from your first school dance by your incarcerated brother's watchdogs was still ridiculous. Being hovered over by them, being told what to do and not do by them, when all she was trying to do was be normal was not okay. As Rodeo's release date neared Adelaide had been chafing more and more at the constant coverage. They weren't her brother, and she wouldn't take it.
Which was why, on the day of his release, Adelaide was riding home on the back of a boy's bike, having shaken her brother's friend when he came to pick her up from school so she could be home on time. She wanted desperately to see her brother, but there was a hard knot of resentment and maybe it felt wrong, awful and wrong, to treat Jims this way but she needed him to know that things weren't okay, and that she wasn't a little girl now.
She had Johnny Westcott stop his bike at the end of the dusty road to the trailer, and she said goodbye to him quickly, breathlessly, when she caught sight of Jims' bike in the drive. She could see Johnny catch sight of it too, and was sure that he looked just a little bit terrified as he pushed off and took off down the road.
Her heart was clenched in a fist as she approached the front door and for a moment she couldn't open it. She should have been there when he came in, she thought with a feeling of heavy regret. She never could see clearly that far ahead, but now that she was faced with it, she knew she should have been there.
But no, she reminded herself, taking a steadying breath and laying her hand on the thin tin of the door. He should have been there.
She walked inside, skinny knees below her sundress, bright hair pulled away from her face, jelly bracelets around her thin wrist and nails painted pale pink. When she saw him sitting there on that sofa, so familiar, but having been missing so long, Adelaide pressed her fingers to her mouth for a moment, not quite able to say anything.
Rodeo heard the bike come up the path, and he lifted his fingers to brush aside the stained curtain, looking out the window. He expected to see one of his friends, figuring they'd likely start dropping by, but the boy he saw wasn't one of his. He recognized the kid from town-- a hang-around who he was pretty sure he'd already beat down once before, though he couldn't recall the circumstances. Johnny was lucky he took off so quick, because Rodeo was already digging into the sofa cushions to see if he still had a gun tucked in there.
When Adelaide entered the trailer, Rodeo sat looking at her with a dark look in his blue eyes, his cigarette burning between his fingertips. He wasn't surprised to see how much she'd grown, having watched it happen over the course of her visits to the prison, but it was a shock to see her that way here at home. Signs of womanhood had begun to show on her, but there was no denying that she was still a child no matter how grown-up she felt or tried to act.
Rodeo broke eye contact with her after a moment, leaning forward to flick his cigarette over the ash tray on the coffee table, lifting it to his lips and taking a drag as he kept his gaze on the table. "Let him know that drivin' away quick ain't gonna save him. This is a small town and I already seen his face."
Adelaide knew her little rebellion had been a stupid idea, and she felt a hot bubble of frustrated regret in the center of her chest. She didn't know what she'd been aiming for, not being here when he got home, because she couldn't actually stand hurting him, and it was never going to do any good, anyway. She felt like crying, really, but that would never do. She could have rebelled against anyone else, had already been in the process of it, but her love for her brother was an invisible leash that wouldn't let her.
She crossed the room in a few strides with those coltish legs of hers, though they weren't nearly so knobby as they'd been when he left. The knobby knees were definitely the last vestiges of her growth spurts - her figure was decidedly more sweet and feminine than most were at her age. She went to the kitchen and into the fridge, where she had dinner for him all ready for cooking, and started pulling things out while she spoke, so torn between relief that he was finally there and all of her confused resentment. Seeing his face took the wind right out of her angry sails.
"I just asked him for a ride home, Jims, don't go blamin' him. Please, Jims, it wasn't anything anyway. I just… I just didn't want to go with one of your fellas again, I just couldn't stand it no more. They boss me somethin' awful but they aren't you and I can't listen to nobody who ain't you. I just…" She stopped with the jug of oil raised over a pan ready for frying and set it down, swiped at her eye in that way he knew she had that meant she wanted to cry but wouldn't. "Don't know what to do without you, Jims. Feel like I just been holdin' my breath this whole time."
Rodeo couldn't help feeing hurt that his sister had gone out the day he was due back, that she didn't stay to greet him, that she clearly didn't feel the same excitement he had over the prospect of his return. He had resolved to stay angry about it, especially when he saw her come up the road on the back of some boy's bike-- until she pulled out the big guns. Whether she intended to or not, she split him right in half with her words, and he watched her from the sofa feeling like he could weep for days.
"How you think I been feelin'? All I wanted was this day. All I been wantin' was to come back home to my baby girl, scoop her up and hold her and watch a bunch of bad movies with her all night again and then I get here and you ain't even here. Guess you got better things to do."
Adelaide nearly crumbled seeing him look so hurt, and her mouth pressed into a tight line while she shook her head. "It ain't like that, Jims, it ain't. I been... course I been counting the days this whole time. I just thought..." She lifted her hands and let them fall, in a helpless gesture that was so much more adult than it really should have been. "I wanted you to know how mad I been, that's all," she whispered. "Being stuck here with Mama, being hounded by your boys. Do you know they came to the school dance and made a scene right in front of everybody?" She narrowed her big gray eyes and firmed up her resolve when it faltered, looking at him. "You get them off my back now Jims. You promise you will."
She wanted to go over to him, but instead she crossed her arms tight over her middle, biting on her lip to keep it all in. She knew perfectly well she would forfeit her anger to him soon enough, but she was determined she would get this one promise from him first.
Rodeo looked back to Adelaide as she spoke, eyes closed off and hard. He understood that she was angry, but his friends had only been doing what he'd instructed them to do. He didn't want any boys around his sister while he was gone. She was growing into a beautiful young lady, and without any man looking over her, she was free for the taking. Rodeo knew how boys thought-- he was one, after all. When a girl had no daddy, no big brothers, she was all the easier to take. No one to answer to, no one to come after you when you broke her heart.
Rodeo's presence back at home was enough to deter most suitors who might set their sights on his baby sister, but while he was gone there was nothing stopping anyone from taking advantage of his sweet baby girl. He didn't care if she was upset over how closely his boys had guard dogged her. He saw what happened to girls who had no one watching over them. They got mixed up with the wrong boys, wound up with no self-esteem and no self-regard, fucked up on drugs or knocked up at sixteen. The men they messed around with broke them, degraded them, turned them into the kind of women who let themselves be used. Rodeo wouldn't allow that to happen to his baby sister. She didn't understand the necessity behind his actions because she didn't understand the world. But Rodeo was sure that a pretty young girl like her would have been preyed upon by every boy in town when word got out that no one was around to stop them. He'd seen it happen to other girls whose daddies or older brothers went into lockup. He had no doubt that they'd come to wreck his own sister too.
"I'm back, so they ain't got no need to look after you now," Rodeo said flatly, a bit coldly. He dropped his gaze from his sister, staring at his cigarette once more. "If that fella who was givin' ya a ride knows what's good for him, he don't need my boys tellin' him so to know he best not come around again."
Adelaide would have been turned easily, if he'd given her the eyes, if he'd thrown a 'baby girl' in there, or even if he just hadn't sounded so cold. But the way he went about it just then? Adelaide only scoffed, dumped some oil into the pan and turned it up on high. "Sure, that's fine," she sniffed. "As if I care two damn bits about him anyway."
She turned to the potatoes she'd cut and boiled, grabbed a masher and started in on them after she added a generous chunk of butter, salt and pepper, a splash of cream. "Not like I ever want to leave this trailer, anyhow. Not like I should get to have any kind of a life," she muttered under her breath. And really, once he was back on her side, once they were okay again she didn't care so much. But him looking at her like that, him scolding her made Adelaide mutinous all over again.
Rodeo's brows lifted at her casual use of a cuss, however mild it might have been. He was starting to feel sick to his stomach, guts churning and twisting in his belly. He took a long drag of his cigarette, finishing it off in one pull and crushing it out in the ash tray. He stood, fuming, too hurt and too angry to contain himself.
"Well ain't it a shame your big bad brother is back then, huh? Here to ruin your life some more," Rodeo snapped, losing his temper with Adelaide in a way he rarely ever had before. "Here expectin' more from you than showing up on the back of some hang-around's stock garbage wagon when you ain't barely even thirteen. But you know what's best, don't you? You don't wanna be here? How about you fuckin' leave?" Rodeo slammed his hand against the screen door, snapping the flimsy metal butterfly latch that kept it shut. He held it open for Adelaide, too pissed to care that he had broken it. "Door's wide fuckin' open, baby girl. Go on and find someone who loves you more than me. You'll be searchin' your whole life."
She turned and stared at him, mouth twisting up with the helpless hurt, the frustration of it, and the indecision. She didn't want to be this way with him, couldn't believe he was standing there holding open that door and telling her to go, even if she didn't think he'd ever actually let her go if she were to try. The only thing she knew for sure was she didn't want to try.
It was terrifying for her to think of, somehow, because he'd always said he'd never leave her and she'd always believed nothing could ever happen to her brother, but he'd gone away to jail for two whole years of her life, and for a girl her age that was practically forever. Maybe Adelaide wanted to go to dances and maybe she didn't, but she was starting to see only now that the real problem here was that she was terrified of how good things could be, now he was back. She was terrified to lose him that way again, no matter how he'd told her he was coming home to stay.
She reached out to switch off the heat under the frying oil, crossed her arms back tight over herself, and for a second it almost looked as if she was going to walk right past him and out. Instead she stopped, and burrowed so hard against his chest she nearly toppled them both, her face pressed into his shirt and a tear leaking down her cheek while she kept on holding round her middle like she was just trying to keep herself together.
"I don't care nothin' about any of it, Jims, I don't, just please don't ever go leaving me like that ever again. Course I'm happy you're home, I ain't thought of nothing else since you went but I'm so scared. I can't stand it if you go away again. I can't stay here without you for one more minute and I won't. Don't be angry with me, Jims. Please."
Rodeo wanted to stay angry, but it was impossible when he felt how small she still felt in his arms. They wrapped around her instinctively, and though she'd grown, she was still a child there wrapped in his grip. He buried his face in her bright hair, finally holding her after two years. His rage vanished despite himself, and she was really the only thing in this world that could possibly snap him back when he reached the edge so instantly and effortlessly. He squeezed her in his arms, standing there in the doorway of the trailer, where he'd been expecting to find her in the first place.
"I told you it'd be different," Rodeo said, murmured against her hair. "Told you I'm gonna earn straight, I promised you. I got my GED, gonna get a job, gonna stop it all... I'm gonna take care of you and mama, but I ain't gonna wind up in jail again, alright? I promise you, baby girl. I promise I won't never leave you again. Gonna be like you deserve, ain't gonna be livin' that life no more. I'm out. I'm gonna tell my boys I'm out."
"I know you said so," Adelaide nodded against him, fisting fingers in his shirt and not making the slightest move to back off from him. When he put his arms around her something in the middle of her chest started to unknot, slowly. She didn't know it, but it had been coiling tighter and tighter since he left her two years before, and probably if he hadn't come back it would have kept right on tightening.
"And I… I believe it, I do." She breathed in deep, keeping control. "Thought I was mad. Really thought I was just plain mad but that ain't it at all. Just know I can't ever stand anything like that again."
"I'm so damn sorry, baby girl... I was stupid, I was so damn stupid... I ain't gonna do it no more, alright? Never gonna put you through this again. I promise. I'll be here, always be here for you," Rodeo swore, pressing a kiss to her temple, voice slightly unsteady. He only lifted his face from her hair when he heard the sounds of their mama's van coming up the road, and he gave an unhappy grunt, dropping his arms from around Adelaide. He turned away from the doorway, intent on trying to pretend she wasn't there at all. "What you cookin', baby girl?"
Adelaide winced when she heard the van, sighing while Rodeo dropped his arms and she moved back over into the kitchen. Depending what mood their Mama was in, she might either cry and sob and welcome Rodeo home, or she'd devil him to no end about getting locked up in the first place. Or she'd be so fall-down drunk maybe she wouldn't even notice he was home - those were always the best times, in Adelaide's opinion. It'd been so miserably lonely here since Jims went, since his boys scared anyone who might call right off except old fools who'd known their mama before she was a wreck, but despite all that Adelaide preferred the empty trailer to the one filled up with the black hole that was their mother.
"Pepper fried chicken and mashed," Adelaide told him, one little bit of proof that she really had looked forward to his coming, because it was one of his favorites. She held her breath while the screen door opened, and remembered too late that Jims had broken it.
"What the hell is this, Addie Belle--" Lottie was already starting, her words slightly slurred, staring at the broken latch on the door. She had been a beautiful woman once, and the wasted remains of her beauty reminded Rodeo of the once-magnificent plantation estate on the outskirts of town that had gone abandoned and left to ruins. The paint cracked and peeled, the pillars sagged and the roof collapsed, but the lines of it were still there, traces of what once was. Her eyes were the same stormy gray as Adelaide's, but when they turned on Rodeo there was none of the sweetness of his sister in them. That was long gone. Lottie stopped in the middle of her sentence, face twisting to a scowl. She marched forward, pressing a finger to Rodeo's chest, staring him down.
"You," she spat, venomous and harsh. "What did I tell you? What did I always tell you? You get locked up, you're out. You're out of this house. You don't darken my doorstep, you don't come back here thinking this is yours. You better shack yourself up with one of your good-for-nothing friends, or you can just crawl into a motel room and die like your daddy. Look at you. Already him, already his spitting goddamn image--"
"You want me to leave?" Rodeo repeated with a barking little laugh, stepping back from the finger Lottie prodded him with. "When's the last time you paid the bills on this place? It ain't yours, that's whose it ain't."
Adelaide gritted her teeth when Lottie started in on Rodeo, anger pulsing instant and fast into her head. It made her regret giving Jims a hard time at all, though it was different. She hated doing anything that Lottie did, hated looking at her and seeing their similarities, hated thinking she could ever be like her in any way.
"Quit your nagging, Mama," Adelaide said sharply, looking up from over the stove. "I told you a week ago he was comin' home today." She pulled over the tub of already prepared chicken, setting pieces in to sizzle and pop. She took that time to draw in breath, to control the buzz of rage, to respond with what would work against Mama, rather than what she wanted to. "Go on and sit, Mama, I'll make you a brandy and we'll eat," she said, controlling her voice to soothe. "We'll catch up. You said yourself last week it'll be nice having Jims back, havin' a man at home again."
"You think you're so cool, Addie Belle," Lottie said, tipping toward her, unfocusing from Rodeo as Adelaide had intended. Her voice was grating to Adelaide's ears, petulant and sour, like bells whose sound had gone sharp. "Like butter wouldn't melt on your tongue. Well I'll tell you something, you don't know the first thing about life. Some day you'll learn what it's like being torn up by a man and you won't think you're so goddamn smart." Adelaide put the glass into her mother's hands wordlessly, letting her rant. It was always better when she turned on her, than on Jims.
It was strange for Rodeo to hear Lottie's words and to compare them to his reasons for keeping Adelaide so overprotected while he was gone. His mother was one of those women, one of those girls who had been taken by a bad man and twisted into a distorted mess of what she used to be. Lottie's fate was the one Rodeo constantly wanted to protect Adelaide from.
"Shortcake's smart," Rodeo said, putting his hands on his mama's shoulders and directing her towards one of the chairs around the table. "And I'll tear up any man who tries tearin' her up, anyhow. You ain't gotta worry about her, mama. Her big brother's back, and I ain't goin' no where this time. Turnin' it around, you know? Earnin' straight, so I won't have to leave you guys no more."
"Mm, if I had a dime for every time your daddy said that to me I'd have been able to afford to pay his bail all the times he wound up back there," Lottie grumbled, even as she sat down with her glass of brandy. She sipped it, lifting it to her lips with shaky, vein-lined hands. "You'll go back to it. No one gets out."
"Jims isn't daddy," Adelaide said staunchly. It was difficult, because she knew that contradicting Lottie on it directly like that was likely to set her off again, but she couldn't just let that go. She knew how Rodeo felt about being compared to their father, just the same as she hated it when she went into town and people told her she looked like her mama, had an air like her. It twisted her up inside each and every time. But she couldn't help defending him. "He's got his GED and everything, and he's gonna work on cars."
She silently willed Lottie to finish off the drink, knowing it was a terrible thing to want but wishing all the same that her mother would just pass out. She rolled her eyes at Rodeo over their mother's head while he sat her down, while Adelaide finished off cooking the chicken and plated up the food. She knew perfectly well Lottie would hardly eat anything, working on the drink instead with her bony fingers, and she loaded up Rodeo's plate.
When her mother scoffed and looked skeptical, opening her thin-lipped mouth to speak undoubtedly hateful words, Adelaide broke in again as if she didn't notice. "Hey did you hear Holly Hewins is gonna have another one, Mama? And Mr Hewins has been outta town for months and everybody says the baby's Luke Pacson's, and of course he's married to Mr Hewins' sister." Adelaide hated gossip, couldn't stand the people and their lowlife actions, but Lottie always ate it up, turning her bitter harsh banshee rants on them instead of on her own children, so Addie always made sure to pick up and keep in store some scandalous tidbit to be thrown out there when she just couldn't handle it anymore. The back of her mind was nothing short of a continuous chanted prayer that Lottie would leave them be sooner rather than later, that they could watch those bad movies and just be together in peace.
Rodeo eagerly took the plate Adelaide handed him, not waiting for anyone to suggest they make the pretense of saying grace before he was digging in. Every single day for the past two years, he had craved this. He'd lost weight in prison, even though he had worked out every day - he was looking thin, less bulky and more lanky than he usually was. The mess hall food was unappetizing, and he'd never been able to afford much at canteen to eat in his cell. Adelaide had her work cut out for her to fill him back out, but Rodeo wasn't concerned with that at the moment. All he knew was how damn good it tasted and how sweet it was to sit at his table, wearing his own clothes and listening to the voices of his baby sister and his mother, however rancorous she could be. At that moment, Rodeo didn't care what awful words she had for him. He was home.