Read Online One Day the Wind Changed by Tracy Daugherty - Free Book Online Page B

the Casbeers’ house. Where were Ceci Jo and Jeannie?
    I couldn’t see a thing down the dark, flat slab of Hill Street.
    We walked into the house. “I’m going to check on your mom,” Dad said. “Get your pj’s on, okay? I’ll come tuck you in.”
    â€œBoys, is that you?” Mama called from the kitchen. “Where were you?”
    I heard my father sigh. My mother’s voice rose.
    Before I made it to my room I’d lost my breath.
    In her crib, beside a largely empty bookcase in my parents’ bedroom, my sister cried. I sat on my bed, glaring at the clown, waiting for someone to comfort the baby. I got up and toggled my light switch. A slow pulse—rebellious, steady, as glorious as a Celtic drumbeat. I told myself I was trying to ignite my stars. Would anybody see them?
    Shouting in the kitchen. “Dusty,” “ugly,” “breath,” like scattered clues from a puzzle. My father said, “Shh.”
    I went to my sister, whose face was puffy and red. From beside the bed I picked up my mother’s house shoes. The bells rang. The baby hushed and watched me. Slowly, I waved the shoes, timing my shallow inhales to the beat I’d begun, recalling the firm movement of Reginald’s fingers on my body earlier tonight. “Shh,” I said. “Shh, shh, shanty girl. You’re bigger than you think you are.”
    Wind rattled the window—seeking the last of my air. I sensed a shadow behind me. My sister laughed. Still shaking the bells, I drew the largest breath I could, and turned to look at my mother, my father, in the doorway.

Shopping with Girls
    T he trees and the fountain, along with the tinted glass and marbled granite of the storefronts, formed a small town beneath the transparent green roof of Westgate Mall. An idealized Main Street. Sitting in the regulated air (a constant sixty-eight degrees, Howard guessed), listening to water slap fake stones, he was happy to discover he could still feel desire.
    If this was Main Street, it sure as hell belonged back east, Howard thought. The glitzy signs and the faceless mannequins in the displays were like nothing else he had seen in southwest Texas. He had courted Mindy on a typical West Texas street, twenty-three years ago. Walking home from the high school gym one October afternoon following a football pep rally, he had waited on the sidewalk while she ducked into Beasley’s Shoes. Had he held her books? Probably, though he didn’t remember. Junior year, 1975: chemistry, calculus, The Red Pony?
    Every few minutes, she would tap the window inside the store to get his attention, lift slippers, pumps, or outrageously risqué red high heels, and seek his approval with her head cocked to the side, charmingly (she had built up to the high heel moment, she confessed to him later). In that brief ritual of the shoes, on that mild afternoon, he knew their future together. They would marry. Always, she would reach for the next dazzling thing. And he would wait on her and approve.
    So how had he missed the fundamental fact: that one day she’d reach for the sky? He was an oil man. His world was prescribed, not in the clever way of the mall, with sales displays set in your path, bold colors used to inspire the impulse buy. No, Howard’s world was defined by rotted organisms and the moraines in which they had died. Oil country was precisely circumscribed for a man with his rudimentary skills. In West Texas, he understood what to look for so detritus could be coaxed to the earth’s surface for refining, packaging, and selling.
    Outside this region he knew he’d be lost. So he kept his head down and paced the same old ground.
    Petroleum’s thick, jellied stink never did dazzle Mindy, except to repulse her. Finally, one year, dissatisfied with Howard and his desert world (it had been her world too!), she snagged a man from the clouds: a Boeing engineer. He whisked her off to