Page 287 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 257

singing “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”
The woman who answered the phone was interested. She drove over
to the Meander to meet Sandy. “You can’t be too careful these days. You
know?” They hit it off. She was a regular. Tim plied them with drinks
and chat. The woman was younger than Sandy. She did not work. She
covered her expenses in a South Santa Rosa trailer court by renting out
her extra bedroom. “I hope you won’t mind,” she told Sandy, “sometimes
I have men friends over. Well, not friends exactly. You know. Times being
as hard as they are.”
Sandy had found a rental to share.
Three days passed before Sandy called back to the ranch. Abe answered
the phone. “Abie, honey,” she said, “it’s your mom.”
“I know who you are. I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Let me talk to Bea then.”
“Tell her I don’t want to talk to her,” Bea said.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you either,” Abe said.
“You two shits,” Sie said “I’ll talk to her.” Sie took the avocado green
receiver. “Hi, Mom.”
Abe turned away from his sisters. “You’re both sluts,” he said.
Looking out the speeding truck window at the hills passing by, Ryan
wondered why he needed these people. Thom slowly unfolded himself.
Always, they all told Ryan too much. The triplets spun out their versions
separately and together. Sandy every once in a while confided her hard
times locked in her bedroom because they all, even Thom, hit out at her.
Thom rarely expressed anything, except when he was stoned. A couple
pipefuls brought out a side of him that even he never knew existed. With
every passing confidence Ryan pieced together more than he wanted to
know about his brother’s family.
Straight people made him glad he was gay.
“We’re almost there,” Ryan said.
The valley looked dry and golden. In front of the ranch they saw Abe
standing in the road. He was hulked over, gangly, and wet.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Thom said. He pulled his truck up to his son.
“What the hell happened to you?”
Abe said nothing. He turned like he was a hundred years old and
pointed at nothing in particular. Sie stood on the front deck toweling her
hands dry like the Miss Cindy priss they called her. She was the image
of Sandy. Every Mary Kay cosmetic that her mother had abandoned was
spackled like dry-wall mud across her zits.
“When I grow up,” she said it to make them all scream at her how

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