Riding Dirty by Abriella Blake Page B

plotline, Lacy thought ruefully, but it had helped her pass the hours when she was too tired and swollen to play outside—and that was most of the time. She used to write all her made-up adventures in notebooks, decorating her colored pencil drawings with stickers that her big sister would bring her from the general store. Rowan used to read the stories with her when she finished her homework, and once in a while if Lacy was feeling better she would take her for walks to show her old tribal mounds in the Indian grass prairies. They’d pick wild orchids and look for arrowheads, sometimes staying out past sunset to see the lightning bugs. Those were the happiest days.
    Now Lacy wished she could fly away into those pleasant memories instead of sitting alone in her trailer, waiting for an alarm to go off to remind her to take her oral diuretics and vitamins. There was no sound in the trailer park right now, not even an air conditioner or truck engine. In a way, Lacy was thankful for the quiet. It was so exhausting when her mother or, God forbid, her father was home. Then she’d have to focus through the haze in her brain to try to answer confusing, meaningless questions with a “yes, sir,” or “no, sir,” or else risk a painful slap across the face with a hand or belt.
    Luckily, it had been about three days since her father, George Thomas, had shown up for dinner. He was probably down at the beach in Florida or camping in Conecuh National Forest with a case of liquor and his pal Jimmy Dixon again, pissing in pitcher plants and shooting skeet. He’d do that for days, leaving Lacy and her mom Barbara to awkwardly silent, stressed meals, both on edge to hear his heavy boots on their makeshift pressure-board deck. If he didn’t come home, Barbara would rant about the tiny size of the welfare checks and complain that he would certainly get himself fired this time, and then what would they do?
    Lacy didn’t really care anymore what happened to them. It used to scare her when she was little to hear her mom talk like that. Lacy used to be scared of just about everything. Rowan was the only brave one. Whereas Lacy would retreat, Rowan would fight. Before she left home, Rowan used to tell their mom to do something about it if she was so worried. “Go to Andalusia, get your own job. Grow up!” That always shut Barbara up.
    Their father was another story, though. Rowan had stopped calling him sir a long, long time ago, and as a teen had developed an unhealthy habit of always telling him what she really thought even when he hit her. Lacy asked her to stop once. “Just say what he wants you to say, Roro,” she had begged, full of dread. “Then he won’t get so mad.” She was scared he’d kill Rowan one day, but Rowan didn’t stop.
    One night at dinner she had talked back to their father again. Lacy couldn’t remember what Rowan said to make him angry, but she did remember him hitting Rowan with a beer bottle. It cut her pretty deep and left an ugly cut that sealed into a tiny scar on her left cheek.
    That was the night Rowan had left home, leaving Lacy alone with her parents and the gnawing silence and aching in her belly. “You can’t let him bully you, Lacy,” was what her big sister had said that night when she packed her bag and hitched a ride with a friend to Montgomery. “It doesn’t matter that he’s your daddy; he doesn’t deserve to be. He doesn’t own what you think. You keep your mind free of him and don’t you ever let him make you feel small. Someday, you’ll leave and come with me. Just hang on sweet pea.”
    Nothing else really changed about the family: it just got a little quieter when Rowan left home. George didn’t have anyone to fight with anymore, especially as Lacy got sicker. He seemed to have enough sense to know he couldn’t smack her around when she was so weak, and so he hardly bothered with her. Barbara mostly avoided saying anything that would upset him, which severely limited the