Western Swing by Tim Sandlin Page B

you relate to trite.
    There was a hole in our love and she walked right through it,
    To get a better point of view you might say that I blew it.
    As Bru Hau’s heartbreak song got to me, the Toyota moved slower. I saw less and less of the high desert and more and more of what used to be. I slid into memories.
    You work me too hard and your jokes ain’t funny
    I can’t live in your life full of dreams and no money
    More than slid. Skimming along Highway 89, rolling south away from Loren, I got down and mud-wrestled with my past.
    Slime might be a better term than mud.

6
    Daddy was a gynecologist. Grandma committed suicide.
    I come from a long line of moody people on my father’s side and social climbers on Mom’s. Dad’s family was wealthy and wanted to be normal, were desperate to be normal. Mom’s family was normal and wanted to be wealthy. The two lines culminated in me, Lana Sue Goodwin Potts Roe Paul, the moodiest social climber.
    My sister Dessie once said, “Daddy fell in love with Mom because her mom served dinner at exactly the same time every night and all the furniture in the living room was wrapped in plastic. He figured anyone that normal couldn’t put out crazy kids.”
    He figured wrong, of course. Dessie turned gay at eleven. I caught her going down on the baby-sitter the night Mom and Dad drove downtown to see The King and I. I thought she was playing hide-and-seek from me and had found a really dumb place to hide. Dessie lives in New York City now with a famous lesbian magazine editor. My sister never was cute like me. Maybe she got the wrong hormones.
    Dessie won’t go to Houston to visit Mom and Dad anymore, says they’re provincial and have bad taste.
    â€œI do not care to associate myself with anyone who serves Riunite on ice with a salmon loaf,” Dessie says, “even if they are my parents.”
    From the earliest I remember, especially after Daddy started having sad spells, much was made of “Grandma’s blood.” When Dessie sat in the middle of Wildwood Way and refused to budge, Mom said, “Grandma’s blood.” When I threw the veal piccata into the living room knickknack shelf, it was “Grandma’s blood.” I never found out what Grandma’s sin was, other than killing herself while her sons were off on Iwo Jima wasting Japs, but she sure got blamed for a lot of grief fifteen years later.
    Once every seven or eight months I’d come home from school and Mom would meet me at the door, whispering, “Grandma’s blood is in your father again. Why don’t you go to Roxanne’s for the night?”
    â€œWhy do I have to leave?”
    â€œFor one night. You can come back tomorrow.”
    â€œDaddy won’t be any better tomorrow.”
    â€œYes, he will. He just needs some rest. You’ll be fine at Roxanne’s.”
    â€œSure, Mom. We got any candy bars? I’m hungry.”
    I packed off to my cousin Roxanne’s with my toothbrush, a rolled-up nightie, and an overnight case full of junk food, which I finished off by bedtime. The next day I would walk home to find Daddy sitting in his overstuffed Naugahyde recliner, staring at his hand on his knee. He usually sat about a week, sometimes a week and a half or two, not talking, not even blinking as far as Dessie and I could tell. Each night around bedtime he’d exhale a sigh that tore my spine from bottom to top.
    I reached a time where I could handle the catatonic daddy routine by pretending he wasn’t really there, that man in the chair was a visiting plant, but I never got used to the sighs. I still remember how terrible the nightly wait was and how much I hated myself when it came.
    Then one morning I’d wake up and Daddy would be in the kitchen, teasing, rumpling hair, flipping pancakes, full of energy and projects. His favorite project was the garden. Daddy spent hundreds of hours piddling over strains of