There were dark whispers that her mama was a user, and a bad one. Delaney’s generally haphazard state of dress and put-togetherness and spotty school attendance gave us no reason to doubt. She had that old-beyond-her-years way of someone who’s had to parent a parent. I recognized it from looking in the mirror. It made me not much more popular than her. None of the school’s best-liked kids had to survive like we did, and they all avoided the stain of associating with us.
The basement at the First Baptist Church in downtown Sawyer smelled like a mix of the faintly medicinal, woody tang of Pine-Sol and the cool, mildewed scent of old concrete, which can’t keep out the hardest rains. I was glad to see that there was only one other kid there, seated in the semicircle of metal folding chairs. It was Delaney. This was as anonymous as a Narateen meeting in Sawyer would get. Me and a girl who never talked to anyone at school. I sat a few spaces away. Our eyes met briefly and we wince-smiled awkwardly.
We talked for the first time over stale Food Lion cookies and watery orange punch served from milk jugs. I told her my grandparents brought me. She’d come on her own. She pummeled me with facts about the science of drug addiction, talking like her mind was running from something. We found out our mamas were working Narcotics Anonymous together. My mama would later lose the battle. Her mama hasn’t lost yet, but things don’t look promising.
The next meeting, we sat beside each other. That week at school, we sat together at lunch.
Ever since I first became aware that the world contains mysteries and incomprehensible wonders, I’ve tried to live as a witness to them. As we came to know each other, I began to see something in Delaney that I’d never seen in another person. I can’t name that thing. Maybe it has no name, the way fire has no shape. It was something ferocious and consuming, like fire.
And I wanted to be close to it, the way people want to stand near a fire.
We pull up to Delaney’s half brothers’ dad’s house. Their scarred gray pit bull, Duke, strains at the swing-set chain binding him to a sickly oak tree in the overgrown lawn, giving us a terse series of hostile barks. A rusting washing machine and dryer mold on the sagging front porch. An algae-scabbed aboveground pool slouches in a corner of the yard. It looks as fun to swim in as an unflushed toilet.
We both start talking at once.
“You go,” Delaney says.
“Thank you,” I say. “My hesitation isn’t ingratitude.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not saying no yet.”
“You’re not saying yes yet.”
“It’s a lot to think about.”
“You’re smart. Start thinking,” Delaney says.
We sit for a second, listening to the drone of the insect menagerie surrounding the house in the tall weeds. Pale neon-yellow fireflies dance their luminous evening waltz. Delaney explained to me once how they make light. I’ve forgotten. Occasionally, my mind lets me hold on to a fragile bit of magic in spite of practical explanations.
“Thanks again for the Blizzard,” I say.
Delaney opens her door. “Thanks for the ride. Bye, gympie ass.”
“You can’t just impose a new nickname on me. That’s not a thing. I reject it.”
“Watch me.” She starts to step down.
“Hey, Red?”
“What?” Delaney stops getting out and sits back in her seat.
“I always knew.”
“What?”
“You’d do something important.”
She looks happy. “Yeah?”
“You deserve all this. Your life is going to change so much.”
“Not the part about us being friends.”
“I’m not worried about that. But.” I didn’t know where I was going with what I was saying. It just felt like a thing that needed to be said.
“I mean,” she says, “it’ll be easier to stay in touch if we’re at the same school.”
I reach over and yank the bill of her Dairy Queen hat down over her eyes. “Go babysit.”
She pulls off her hat and smooths the wisps of her hair. Once more she makes to leave.
“Red?”
Again she pulls herself back into my truck.
I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time letting her go tonight. “How’d you know that mold would be in that cave?”
“You’ve never asked that before.”
“Been curious for a long time.”
“How’d I know?” She looks at me and then into the chirping, humming half-light, then back at me. “Because for every way the world tries to kill us, it gives us a way to survive. You just gotta find it.”
I take the long way home to try to slow the orbit of my thoughts. It’s almost full dark by the time I pull up our driveway, the gravel popping under my tires.
Most everyone calls Papaw “Pep”—short for Phillip Earl Pruitt. He’s taking in the falling light on the porch, in one of the ramshackle hundred-year-old rocking chairs he restored. His wheeled oxygen tank is at his side. Our redbone, Punkin, sits by him.
Papaw gets lonely. Our house is on a hill overlooking the road, woods all around. He sits out on our front porch hoping someone driving by will stop in to shoot the breeze for a while. It happens rarely now, for a few reasons.
His politics didn’t always used to be much of an obstacle to friendships. He and his fishing buddies could sit for hours at McDonald’s, nursing cups of coffee, bullshitting, and having mostly good-natured political arguments that ended with everyone saying, But I’m just an old hillbilly. What the hell do I know, anyhow?
Things took a nasty turn, though, when Lamont Gardner, a black pastor and lawyer from Nashville, became governor of Tennessee. Papaw’s buddies’ hatred of Governor Gardner went beyond amiable differences into an uglier place. The racist cartoons of Governor Gardner his buddies emailed around didn’t sit well with Papaw, and he wasn’t afraid to say it.
Andre Blount was the final straw. He was governor after Governor Gardner. He was from New York and got rich after moving to Nashville and starting a private prison company with money his dad had given him after a string of business failures. He promised to bring high-paying manufacturing jobs back to East Tennessee. But mostly he was concerned about being on TV and crudely insulting rivals on Twitter. Papaw considered him a snake oil salesman, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who hadn’t worked an honest day in his life, full of hot air, braggadocio, vain promises, and venom for everyone different from him. He saw the betrayal of all he knew to be right. That didn’t sit well at all with him. And Papaw spoke his mind.