Advent

Days and Weeks and Years

Photo by Ken Kullik on Unsplash

Everybody’s got a calendar, I suppose, and some people probably pay more attention to them than others do.

My sister Bethany marked hers up, when she was going to concerts down at the fairground, and for when she got her period because she didn’t want Blake Corryman to get her pregnant, or maybe she did.

My mom, she had a calendar in the kitchen. 

If I was her, I’da been embarrassed by her markings, because she got married and divorced and married again in the same damn year.

Married Tucker Maken in February, it had lilacs on the main picture, don’t know why, both the lilacs in February and why she married Tucker Maken. 

Divorced Tucker in April for grabbin’ Irene Samson’s butt at Leyland Billiards and put a big black X on the 3rd, right under pictures of tulips.

In June, when sunflowers were on the calendar, she snuck off to Wayburn County, to the courthouse there to marry Jack Langlois. 

Jack thought that made him man of the house, and he thought those privileges included fighting me.

I ain’t much of a fighter, but I ain’t much of a quitter either, and I ain’t much of a mouth shutter when I had a few drinks, and before you say anything shut the fuck up because erry damn 17 year old I know in Custasia County drinks liquor, but the third time Jack Langlois whupped my ass I told my momma I was leaving and I was going to live in Tucker Maken’s deer stand out in Lethe Valley.

She said some dumb shit about my daddy building the house with his own two hands and me staying there til the day I died, long as I could find I way to get along with Jack Langlois, and I thought that was the dumbest shit ever since they threw Lake Fallmore out of the Crescent Theater because she was too young to be in a titty movie even though she had titties her damn self, and I told my mom so, then me and Jack were fighting again.

I bloodied his lip, or at least he lost his balance and fell against the dining room table and got a bloodied lip, then I ran out the house, stopped at Heighorns and got some snacks, then walked all the way to Tucker Maken’s deer stand.

It ain’t deer season and Tucker Maken’s a long haul trucker, and he told me once that if I got too drunk at Dreighton Overlook I could just sleep in his deer stand.

I was in Tucker’s deer stand for a week before my mom came looking for me.

And she brought the sheriff. 

I suppose I could have told Sheriff Comtois I was out there because Jack Langlois was assaultin’ a minor. It would have been no cap, straight righteous the truth.

But that would make me a snitch.

And there was another thing.

Sheriff said I was reported as a missing minor. 

But on that calendar with all them flowers and marriages and divorces was my birthday. 

I left when I was a minor. But I turned 18, drunk in Tucker Maken’s deer stand two days later.

And the Sheriff told my mom that the owner of the deer stand would have to make a complaint against someone taking temporary emergency shelter in their deer stand.

 No way was Tucker Maken gonna do that, and there ain’t no squares on no calendar that say never.

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