Amarillo in my Rearview Mirror
Published by Noni Nelson at Smashwords.com
Copyright Noni Nelson 2011
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Chapter 1
Dianne Matson hated Texas! She hated the heat, she hated the dust, and she hated the innumerable flying bugs that inhabited the Lone Star State. Unfortunately, right at this moment she had an overload of all three as she inched her ancient Chevy truck along the potholed gravel road that led into the trailer park where she currently resided. No way in hell was she going to call this rundown community of misfits home! Her vehicle’s air con had long since died and with today’s temperatures still nudging the 100 degree mark at six pm, the windows were wound down to try and alleviate some of the first item on the hate list she was mentally compiling. Naturally this state of affairs allowed plenty of the latter two into the truck’s cab, so by the time she finally pulled up outside her rented double-wide, a cool shower was first and foremost on her mind. Soon she was standing under a tepid stream of water in the community shower block, sluicing the day off her tired body and trying to raise enough energy to be outraged by the mould growth on the wall tiles. When she’d first moved into this park some three months ago, the general level of cleanliness in the public facilities had appalled her but she’d soon learned that complaints along these lines were met with polite smiles by the Park manager, vague promises to ‘Git right onta that, Ma’am’ and very little else. Now she hardly even noticed the general state of disrepair, she just wore her flip flops in the shower, dodged the largest of the craters in the road and made sure any foodstuffs she consumed were bought in a clean and shiny supermarket, not off the grimy shelves in the front two rooms of the manager’s house which doubled as the park store. Even when a cockroach emerged from the gap under the wall of the adjoining cubicle, all she could do was aim a half hearted kick in its general direction as it scuttled under the plastic shower curtain and out into the main bathroom area.
“Damn, but my feet ache,” she muttered tiredly, and not for the first time wondered how her world had come down to this: living in the Sunny Acres trailer park just outside of Amarillo and working in Charlie’s All You Can Eat BBQ & Bar for minimum wage and tips. And that particular commodity was becoming scarcer every day as the global financial crisis bit deep into the pockets of nearly everyone in this rural community. Six months ago she appeared to have had it all: a loving partner, a nice apartment and a good job in a print store downtown. True, she still didn’t like Texas anymore then than she liked it now, but with Karla by her side, she had been prepared to put up with almost anything. And then it had all collapsed in quick succession, tumbling like a row of dominoes, though with hindsight she supposed you could say it all began to go downhill the day she agreed to leave L.A. and accompany Karla back to her home town.
A sudden gust of hot air swirling under the door announced the arrival of a clutch of teenage girls, their squealing and giggling shattering the quiet as they vied for the three remaining shower stalls. Dianne sighed, knowing the small amount of water pressure she did have would drop to a trickle once this lot got started. Reluctantly she turned off the tap and began to towel dry her short cropped dark hair, idly studying her body in the steamy cracked mirror hanging askew on the back of the door. Running herself ragged at Charlie’s at least had the advantage of keeping her weight at an even 135lb, which sat well on her compact frame and hadn’t varied more than a pound or two since her high school days, some fifteen years ago. She still had the strong arms and legs of the AAA softball player she had been right up to the day she left California less than a year earlier. Steady grey eyes and a determined set to her mouth completed what she had always considered a plain face, but which had attracted its fair share of girls and, she reflected wryly, in her teen years and early twenties, more guys than she cared to remember. Saddled with a distinctly warped sense of humor she had rather enjoyed watching their reaction to her admission that she “batted for the other team.” Her sexuality had never really been an issue for her until the move to Texas, having come out to her own family and friends at age seventeen with a surprising lack of drama. Though the fact that she’d been born to anti-establishment hippie parents in an Oregon commune probably, she admitted to herself, had a lot to do with their acceptance.
Stepping into a pair of cut-offs and a tank top, she remembered with a grin, the reaction her coming out had elicited from her older brother, Jonathon, who at that time had been twenty and studying economics at college. He had just rolled his eyes and made a comment along the lines of “Duh, like tell us something we didn’t know, little sis.” Thinking of Jonno always made her smile; he was so different to the rest of the family and she knew that at times her lifestyle, and that of their parents, was a real trial to him. Not for the first time she wondered how someone so earthbound and conformist was born into their family. Her mom and dad still had a few acres of land on the site of the original commune where they grew organic vegetables, made jewelry to sell at art and crafts fairs, and generally behaved as if time had stopped sometime around Woodstock. In fact the last time Dianne had seen them, some three years ago, her dad had been full of talk about the replica of a Native American sweat lodge he was building. She herself had always been a free spirit and a wanderer and, the day after her high school graduation, had hit the open road in a bright yellow VW Kombi van. It had belonged to her parents and she and her Dad had spent many companionable hours, elbow deep in grease, restoring it to its original condition. Well, almost original, she had drawn the line at her mom’s attempts to decorate the paintwork with flowers, starbursts and peace signs!
The year that followed was spent exploring the Southwest states, reveling in the natural scenic beauty of such places as Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Grand Canyon, Monument Valley and many smaller, less touristy areas off the beaten track. Having inherited her mom’s natural gift for painting and drawing, she soon found that hand- drawn charcoal sketches of people, especially children, were a sure fire money- maker and allowed her to put fuel in the van and basic foodstuffs on her table. For a time Dianne was mesmerized by the red rock canyon country she encountered while traveling and occasionally thought about settling down somewhere in Utah. Eventually however, homesickness for the tall timber of Oregon, and the desire to have a less precarious method of making a living, had turned her wheels for home.
Time had slid by quickly after that. A community college course in Graphic Arts and Sign Writing, taken on a whim, had revealed exactly where her true talents lay and she aced the subject to a point where her instructors were begging her to come back and teach others. But she had known she would never have the patience for a nine-to- five job just yet, so Dianne had started with a booth at the arts & crafts market where her mom sold her jewelry. In no time at all the word had spread about her almost uncanny ability to take an idea out of somebody’s head and transfer it onto paper. “That is EXACTLY what I wanted,” became a phrase very familiar to her ears as she progressed from simple birthday or wedding invitations, up through flyers for local businesses and finally the offer of a job with a large advertising agency in Portland. But she had only stayed with them a short time, then parlayed her talent into jobs all over the west coast; even surprising herself by settling into the hurly burly of life in L.A. for several years. It was there that she had met Karla. There had been more than a few women in her life, from her first girlfriend in high school, up to the previous relationship before Karla, which had been live in and lasted some ten months. But in truth she had to admit getting bored fast and generally the first hint of real domesticity sent her bolting for higher ground. Ah, but Karla, she had been different: for the first time Dianne had wanted someone more than they wanted her.
As she walked back through the heat haze to her trailer, Dianne wondered why the past had been weighing so heavily on her mind of late. Perhaps it was part of the grieving process she was still going through following the breakup; to figure out how you arrived a certain point in your life, you had to have some idea of where you had been. A snatch of melody and lyrics from an old Judds’ song chased their way through her brain and she sang quietly to herself as she unlocked the door and stepped inside the trailer.
A burst of plaintive meowing from the cat curled up on the window ledge drowned out her voice. Smiling, she reached over and petted his sleek black coat. “What’s the matter, Mischief, you don’t like my singing voice? Well, you could be right, Mom used to say I scared away all the birds in the forest when I sang as a kid. Or are you just hungry big boy? Looks like you ate all the kibble I left this morning, come on then, let’s get you some dinner.”
Feeding the cat and making herself a toasted tomato and cheese sandwich was about all she had energy left for tonight. The heat was enervating in spite of the small window air conditioner that was keeping down the temperature inside by at least some twenty degrees. Plus she’d been on her feet at Charlie’s for over ten hours today, doubling up as a server in the buffet and working behind the bar. They were woefully understaffed even though customer numbers had been dropping month by month as the recession bit hard into jobs all over. The owner (whose name was Eric, not Charlie, go figure) had no intention of hiring any new staff, he just ran the ones he did have into the ground. Bastard, she thought savagely, he knew damn well that none of them dared complain; money was just too tight everywhere and most of the other gals had mortgages to pay and kids to support. The whole of this side of town was littered with empty houses, ‘Bank Foreclosure’ signs swaying like empty gallows in the front yards.
By nine pm Dianne could barely keep her eyes open and she slipped outside to sit on her step and have a last cigarette before heading to bed. The temperature had dropped to almost bearable as the shadows closed in around the worn out assortment of trailers and park homes and the smell of meat sizzling on BBQs and the squeals of kids splashing in the pool gave the whole complex an almost vacation-like atmosphere. Unfortunately she knew this to be far from the truth. Sunny Acres had very few holiday makers on its books, and when it did, well, you could be sure that the KOA down the road was full up. The main clientele here were the hard luck stories of Amarillo. Hispanic families unable to afford a real house, single mothers with young children and babies, pensioners eking out their meager Social Security checks, and the real dregs of society, the alcoholics and drug users. But lately these troubled financial times were ushering in a new breed of poor: previously working class white families unable to make their mortgage payments after the main breadwinner had lost his or her job. She had watched them trickling in for the past few months, some defiant and angry, some subdued, all of them with that same look of bewilderment that Dianne knew she had probably worn herself initially. The look said: “what happened, what did I do to deserve being in this dump?’ Just then, a voice from close by penetrated her thoughts.
“Hola, Senora Dianne, como estas? You like some carne asada? That wife of mine, she cook way too much again.” The speaker was her immediate neighbor, Manuel Garcia, and as he slowly walked the ten feet or so from his front porch, Dianne’s stomach gurgled in response to the savory smell of meat in the small tray he carried. Manuel was at least eighty years old she guessed, small framed and burnt to the color of the earth, his back bent from many years of hard physical labor, picking crops for a living. He and his wife, a cheerful and energetic woman who spoke very little English, had turned over their home in town to one of their sons and his growing family some years ago and retired to the trailer park. Maria still found it hard to get out of the habit of cooking large amounts for her family, who all visited often, and Manuel had taken to occasionally bringing Dianne leftovers, which she always gratefully accepted.
“Gracias Manuel, it smells divine. I didn’t think I was hungry until I smelled that; tell Maria she is an angel.”
“You need to eat girl, you work too hard on an empty stomach, is not good.” Manuel’s wrinkled face was creased in a teasing grin. Ever since Dianne had moved into the park he had been on a personal crusade to fatten her up - like a lot of Hispanic men he liked the ladies with curves to spare. His Maria was nearly as wide as her five foot frame was high and his three daughters not far behind their mother. Settling on the stoop next to her, he lit a cigarette and gestured out to the darkening shadows of twilight; with no mountains or even hills to obscure the light, real darkness came late on the flat Texas plains.
“The end of another beautiful day. Dias gracias. How lucky am I to live to see another sunset.”
It was one of things that Dianne found so likeable about this man. From all accounts his life had been hard: born into brutal poverty in a family of eleven children back in Mexico, rudimentary schooling, he’d had known nothing but work, work, work since the age of twelve, then the responsibility of a family of his own from twenty one. Two of his own brood of seven children had died young - one daughter of fever as a baby and a son in an auto accident as a teenager - but Manuel never complained. His simple gratefulness for a roof over his head and food on his plate were a reminder to Dianne that she really didn’t have it that bad. She grinned affectionately at her neighbor and spoke through a mouthful of the delicious spicy meat which she was eating with her fingers, much to Manuel’s obvious approval.
“Manuel, only you would give thanks for a day of 100 degrees, when we have already had five in a row. I swear today I could have turned off the BBQ at Charlie’s and fried eggs on the hood of my truck!”
At the mention of Charlie’s, Manuel spat on the ground at his side. “Ha, that place, they would not know how to cook good BBQ if it bit them in the ass! All they care about is money, money, money, and the sauce they use, repugnante! Everything bought in a bottle from who knows where, when they could make it themselves as I do. Lazy!”
With this indictment on the culinary arts displayed at her work place, Manuel heaved himself to his feet and took his leave, insisting she could bring back the dish whenever. Manana.
Watching his slow progress back to his trailer Dianne wished, not for the first time, that the Garcias had more money for healthcare. She guessed that some simple anti- inflammatory drugs would take a lot of the pain from Manuel’s aching body, but she also knew that every spare penny the couple had went to keep their children and their families afloat. She ground out the butt of her smoke in the dirt then rose and went back inside and crashed on the bed. Mischief curled up near her feet, purring in rhythm with the cicada’s nightly chorus.
Chapter 2
Six am came way too fast and Dianne swore softly as she groped for the off button on her bedside alarm. She would have loved to hit the snooze for just another five minutes but she didn’t dare. Her shift started at seven am, plus she was giving a lift to Krystal Yates, a young single mom who also lived in the trailer park and had started work at Charlie’s about a month earlier. Already the sun was a fiery red ball and the air held the promise of another scorcher ahead, maybe even hotter than yesterday. After quickly throwing on her uniform and washing her face, she wet combed her hair with her fingers and lightly applied a pale lipstick, the only make up she wore. Walking back into the main living area she laughed to see Mischief already draped across the front window of the trailer, his back to her, fur bristling in all directions and his long black tail swishing his obvious displeasure at her preparations to leave for the day.
“Aw, Mischief sweetie, don’t be like that. You know your mama has to go earn the pennies that pay for your designer cat food, plus the cost of leaving the air on for you all day, you spoiled boy.” But no amount of cajoling would make him turn his head and she grinned quietly to herself. This was a ritual game they played every workday, he would ignore her, ignore the kibble she left out and act as if he didn’t care diddly squat whether she stayed or went. And every day when she returned home, there he would be in the same position, as if he hadn’t moved a muscle all day, except that his bowl would be empty and there would be an incriminating cat-sized depression right in the middle of her bed. Mischief had come to her as a tiny kitten, abandoned in the courtyard of the apartment block she had lived in for a time in L.A. He had traveled out to Amarillo in a cat cage on the front seat between her and Karla and had voiced his displeasure at the trip with ear splitting moans and howls every five seconds for the first one hundred miles of the journey. His vocalizations were equaled only by Karla’s bitching about him and when she finally avowed that either he shut up or she was getting out at the next roadhouse, Dianne was more than tempted to pull over and leave the pair of them by the roadside. A towel draped over the cage seemed to solve the problem and when they had finally unpacked in the new apartment Karla’s parents had rented for them, the feline had walked calmly from the cage and ensconced himself on the couch as if he had lived there all his life.
That morning, as Dianne locked the door and slid into the cab of her truck she reflected on how that apartment had driven the first wedge into her relationship with Karla. Lighting her first cigarette for the day, she checked her watch and realized that she was at least ten minutes too early, as likely Krystal would be her characteristic five minutes late anyhow. The large Cottonwood tree next to her trailer, one of the few mature trees in the whole park, kept her truck relatively cool and she took the opportunity for some quiet introspection before the hurly burly of the day began. Hell she thought grimly, the apartment had been just the beginning of the influence Karla’s parents had wielded on her partner’s life from the moment she arrived back in this dusty cow town. The girl she had met in L.A. had seemed so self sufficient, and independent. From their first meeting she had been attracted to Karla’s ‘I know what I want and I know how to get it’ attitude. At the time Dianne had been the chief design artist at a large branch of a nationwide print and copy chain. Karla had been employed as a PA to the top executive of an Advertising Agency with whom they had a large account and she had come barreling into the shop one morning to pick up an order of brochures. All it had taken was one look to send her heart into instant overdrive. If it had been a movie, Dianne reflected wryly, there would have been fireworks going off, birds singing and love hearts drifting across the screen,. The gal standing in the other side of the counter had been a tall, slim blonde dressed in a business skirt, blouse and heels but Dianne’s gaydar alarm had rung off the scale. And she was rarely, if ever, wrong on that count. In two days they were talking on the phone for hours, by the end of the first week there had been a dinner date and a movie. Two weeks later she spent the night in Karla’s bed and within the month, Dianne had moved in with her. And yeah, she certainly heard the term ‘U Haul lesbian’ from many of her friends, gay and straight alike. She didn’t care, she was totally besotted with this gal and to her eternal wonderment, Karla seemed to reciprocate. Suddenly domesticity seemed the most natural state in the world and the more time she spent with Karla, the more she wanted, this was serious stuff…and she had loved every second of it.
“This is country radio KSTA and the time is 6.40am, here’s the new one from Carrie Underwood…”
The announcer’s voice broke Dianne’s train of thought and she swore as she eased the truck out from under the tree and crawled impatiently at the park limit of ten mph towards the far back corner of the park where most of the long term residents lived. Some people tried to make their tired old trailers look more home-like with foot high picket fencing and potted plants but a lot of them just plain quit trying a long time ago. Krystal’s mother, Laverne, at least tried: she had a small plot of green lawn around the front steps, dotted with plaster flamingos, bunnies and squirrels, the Texas flag flew raggedly from the TV aerial and a weather worn ‘Home Sweet Home’ plaque hung crookedly next to the screen door. As she hurriedly pulled up outside, Dianne saw Krystal coming down the steps, a coffee travel mug in one hand and her ten month old daughter, Jazmine Rose, balanced on her opposite hip. She grinned and waved to Dianne, then turned and yelled back through the open door.
“Mama, come git Jazzy please, Ms. Matson’s here and we’re gonna be late”. Seconds later Laverne came barreling through the door and snatched the little one from her mom and Dianne marveled at the complacent nature of this fat little scrap. With her pitch black hair already long enough to be tied up in a topknot and her baby ears pierced with two tiny gold studs. Krystal always said she was the best baby in the world and at only seventeen, she was lucky to have the support of her own mom to help bring up her little angel. Jazmine Rose’s father had been the eighteen year old son of an itinerant Hispanic family who had stayed briefly in the trailer park and by the time Krystal realized she was pregnant, he was long gone. Laverne herself was only thirty eight and though she had been married to the father of Krystal and her two sons aged fifteen and thirteen, he had walked out on them all some ten years before. She worked as a cashier in a supermarket on the other side of town and her shifts enabled her to get the boys off to school before dropping the baby at a nearby daycare centre.
“Morning, Ms. Matson. Holy cow it is gonna be another hot one today!” Krystal flung herself into the truck cab, chewing gum, talking ten to the dozen and blowing kisses out the back window to Jazmine Rose as they pulled away. With one hand she turned up the volume on the radio while the other dragged her straggly brown hair off her face and into a ponytail.
“Morning to you hon and how many times must I tell you, its Dianne please. Here, for goodness sake, give me that coffee mug, you are going to spill it all over your uniform and you know Eric likes us to be so neat and tidy for the high quality of clientele we attract in his excellent establishment”. Dianne had found out the first day they met that Krystal shared her opinion of their boss, that he was a money grubbing SOB who would shortchange his own Mother if it suited him, so she was more free with her opinions than she might otherwise have been with most other people. By now Krystal had got herself adjusted and she took back her mug, finishing it with a noisy slurp.
“Hell, I have to have at least two cups of Mama’s coffee before I leave, that brown shit we serve at Charlie’s don’t taste like no coffee I ever drank. And I cook ten times better than anything we serve, that’s why I never eat much at lunchtime. I just don’t know why you eat there, Dianne. Surely you can cook better than that – ouch!” Krystal yelped as the truck hit one of the bigger potholes in the ungraded gravel road, the impact sending her head bouncing off the cab roof and causing her to buckle the seat belt a little tighter.
Dianne grimaced and apologized “Sorry, hon, I just couldn’t get around that one. If these things get any bigger they are going to swallow a small car whole one of these days. As for cooking, nope, I don’t cook, never have, my repertoire is limited to anything I can microwave or toast. Besides, I think if God wanted me to cook, he wouldn’t have invented take out pizza.”
She chuckled at the horrified look on Krystal’s face, and then turned her attention quickly back to the road ahead, slowing down as they drew closer to the Yield sign at the T junction leading onto the main highway. The more she got to know about the Yates family, the more she realized the contrast between her first impressions and the realities of their situation. Sure, they might be dirt poor, but Laverne had done a great job with her kids, they were all polite, clean and able to take care of their own laundry and cooking, even the boys. Those kids addressed all adults as Sir or Ma’am, shook hands and looked you in the eye. And if Krystal had made a mistake in getting pregnant so young, she had grown up in a hurry, never once shirking her responsibilities towards her little one. She worked hard each day and spent her nights at home, helping her brothers with their homework and supervising their behavior as closely as their mother did. In fact in a role reversal that had struck Dianne as amusing, it was Laverne that went out on the weekends to dances or dinners with her workmates while her daughter stayed in.
Krystal wasn’t going to let up on the subject of home cooking.
“Didn’t your momma teach you to cook when you was little? Hell, I was stirring things in pots when I was so short I had to stand on a chair to reach. When you lived in that nice apartment in town, you must have eaten at home some. The rent for that place would have been fierce; surely you couldn’t afford to eat out all the time?”
Dianne, concentrating on the oncoming traffic, spoke without thinking. “Oh, Karla cooked some, it wasn’t fancy but it tasted good. She did a great fried breakfast.”
Before the last word had hardly left her mouth, her hands were tightening on the steering wheel and that sick feeling she got when she didn’t steel herself against the pain of remembering, was washing over her in clammy waves, causing her to shiver involuntarily. She and Karla had always appeared to make such a perfect combination. Karla would cook and Dianne had never minded basic housework and was a whiz with anything mechanical, both of them had been ambitious and prepared to work hard. Their apartment in L.A. had been neat and tidy, mostly because they were out of it so often and their evenings had always been full of laughter and chatter, as they each described their workdays to the other, then settled in to watch TV or listen to some music before bed. The thought of all the nights, spent wrapped around each other in their king-size bed made her mouth go dry, the sexual chemistry between them had been electric from that first day and it only seemed to get more incendiary as time went on. Karla certainly hadn’t been the first woman she had thought she was in love with, but she was the first one that had her thinking about happily ever after and growing old together. Things had been so good until Karla began to get homesick for her family and against Dianne’s better judgment, she soon found herself organizing a transfer to her firm’s branch in Amarillo at a considerable drop in salary. Karla herself just chucked in her job, avowing she’d have no trouble getting another similar position through connections in her hometown, With the 20/20 clarity of hindsight Dianne realized that she should have questioned Karla more closely about her relationship with her family and her life choices before she had left Texas and moved to L.A some three years ago.
“Love makes blind fools of us all.” the phrase was muttered almost inaudibly under cover of the radio blasting out the latest Toby Keith hit, but Krystal had sharp hearing and she gave Dianne a quick, sympathetic look.
“Well. ain’t that the truth. Hell look at me, I believed everything that no good boy told me and he left me holding a baby. Still…” her face softened as it always did when she talked about Jazmine Rose, “I wouldn’t trade her for a hill of beans now, though sometimes I sure think it would be nice to be finishing up school and having no more to worry about ’cept what to wear to Graduation. Ms. Mats - I mean Dianne - I’m guessing you were thinking about your gal again. I’m real sorry that things didn’t work out for you two, mama says it’s got to be real hard for you, on account of losing her and your good job and the apartment all in the one month. Mama says to tell you that she is always there if you need anyone to talk to; she’s real good at listening and saying all the right things. When I first found out I was expecting, Mama spent a lot of time with me, talking about life and helping me get used to the idea and all that. Well, anyhow I just thought I’d mention that…” Krystal’s voice trailed off and she blushed slightly, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. Dianne had given Laverne a brief, unemotional rundown of her relationship, and subsequent break up with Karla soon after offering Krystal a lift to work each day. In any situation, especially one involving a younger female, she preferred to be upfront, knowing how quickly gossip traveled. Subsequently though, she had avoided any personal conversation on the subject and Krystal had generally heeded her Mama’s warning not to probe any further until today.
Dianne coughed to clear her throat and awkwardly patted Krystal on the shoulder with one hand, the other keeping the wheel steady. “Thanks, hon, um, that’s real nice of your mom but I’m just fine truly.” Soon as I save enough money to get some work done on this old rattle trap I’ll be headed back to the coast, see if there’s any work going out that way.”
In truth Dianne’s optimism and confidence had both been severely dented by the sudden downturn in her situation. The gap between her words, and her ability to transform them into action, seemed an unbridgeable chasm. One thing she did know for certain was that anywhere, but anywhere, had to be better than this flat, hot godforsaken cow town.
Chapter 3
Her first view of Amarillo had been through the rose- tinted spectacles of love. She’d settled into her new workplace reasonably easily - there wasn’t the scope for artistic freedom that there had been in a huge place like L.A. - but it was a job and seeing Karla so ecstatic to be home had made it seem worthwhile. However the first big crack in the façade of her happy new world had come early, on only the second night in their new home. They had spent the better part of two days unpacking and setting up without really seeing anyone but that night, they were to drive out to Karla’s family ranch, some thirty miles south of town to meet her parents. Dianne hadn’t needed to ask to know her gal was as nervous as a cat on hot bricks. She remembered trying to defuse the tension, making a joke about how neat and pretty she was in an ironed pair of jeans and a new shirt, rather more feminine than her usual style, but she wanted to make a good first impression. Karla’s parents were a fairly elderly couple, both fast approaching seventy and Karla was their only child, a late arrival and the light of their lives. She admitted it had broken their hearts when she had left town some three years ago and they had been thrilled about her moving back. In their enthusiasm they had gone ahead and rented and partly furnished the apartment without asking permission from either of them. When her attempts that night to dispel Karla’s nervousness met with no answering smile or smart quip, eventually she had sat them both down on the sofa to talk.
“OK, babe, out with it, tell me what is dancing around in that pretty little head of yours?”
Karla’s eyes had looked everywhere but at her until finally she spoke in almost a whisper.
“Di, honey, there is something that I didn’t tell you about my folks. I meant too, honestly, I was going to discuss it on the trip but what with Mischief yowling all the time and you getting so tense and me having a headache, well I just didn’t get around to it.”
She had looked so damn miserable that Dianne’s heart melted, like it always did when she saw that her ‘Sunshine girl’ (a nickname she had given Karla on the day they met) was unhappy.
“Hey, sweetie, what could be so bad? I know it will be a little awkward at first. They are bound to be a little jealous seeing their baby girl has someone new in her life that loves her as much as they do, but I’m sure they will get used to it, especially when they see how good we are together and how well I treat you. I promise to be on my best behavior tonight, so c’mon, tell me, what is this big secret?”
“I didn’t tell them about you.”
Karla’s quiet words had hung in the air as if they had been shouted out loud and initially the statement made no sense to Dianne. Of course they knew about her, she had even talked briefly to Karla’s Mom on the phone several times in the days before they left L.A.
“Hon, I’m sorry, I don’t understand what -.”
“I didn’t tell them about US, they don’t know you are my partner, they think you are just a friend, you know, a straight girlfriend”. Karla had interrupted in a voice full of misery.
It had taken a few seconds for her words to sink in but when they eventually did, Dianne had been shocked to her core.
“What, you mean they don’t know we are a couple? But why - oh hell Karla, they don’t know you are gay? You haven’t told them, have you? How could you do this, ask me to leave my job and come here with you and not tell them? I don’t understand this at all, are you ashamed of me, what? Talk to me babe.”
The conversation that followed had been long and painful and ended with Dianne sending Karla off to her visit with her parents alone. She needed time to take in the implications of this non disclosure and what it meant for her, for them. Whilst living in L.A., Karla had been the most ‘out’ of the two of them, both in her workplace and her social life. In fact she had introduced Dianne to a whole range of lesbian bars, clubs and social groups that she had never known existed. To find that her lifestyle was totally hidden to her gal’s parents, and that she herself was seen as nothing more than their daughter’s friend, had sent her head spinning and tied her stomach in nervous knots. It was the first time she had doubted, even slightly, Karla’s commitment to their union. Later that night when Karla returned, she held her close in the darkness and listened to a tale of two people who had tried to have a child for so long, and understood that their eventual conception, when they had both long given up hope, had been treated as a minor miracle. Karla had always admitted quite cheerfully to being a spoiled brat and thinking back to any rare times of friction between the pair of them, Dianne had finally recognized that these always occurred when Karla didn’t get her own way. Being indulged by all who knew her had meant there had been no real reason to rebel against any of her parent’s restrictions, most of which centered, as Karla entered her teenage years, on how she was to conduct herself with the opposite sex. By the time she turned fifteen, she admitted to Dianne, her head buried in her lover’s shoulder and the words escaping her lips in short bursts, along with a steady trickle of hot tears, she’d already begun to understand that it was other girls, who made her heart skip. So ignoring the boys and burying herself in her studies had been an easy compliance.
“Oh hon” she had snuffled into the supply of tissues that Dianne was handing her, “I just didn’t know what to do. Momma and Daddy took me to Church every Sundays and they taught that homosexuality was a huge sin against God. How could I turn around and tell them their little girl was gay, it would have destroyed them! It was only when I went away to college in Dallas that I began to explore that side of myself and I surely did, with a vengeance. Afterwards, when I got a job there and only came home on holidays, well I was just too scared to upset them, especially Mom; you know her heart is bad. I kept telling myself after I moved to L.A. that I‘d find a way to tell them but it just never seemed to be the right time. I‘m such a coward babe, I truly tried in that last week ,but every time I opened my mouth to tell Mom on the phone, she just talked over me, prattling on about the apartment and stuff. She was so happy and all, I just chickened out.” Turning her tearstained face to hold Dianne’s gaze, she had begged
“Please, babe, I’m so sorry, I’m not ashamed of you or us, I just got caught between my parent’s views and doing the right thing, please don’t hate me.”
As always, the sight of tears in those big blue eyes was Dianne‘s undoing and she ruffled Karla’s hair and wiped her eyes.
“Aw, K. I don‘t hate you hon but that was then. You are a big girl now and it’s time your folks knew who you are. I know it won’t be easy and I’m not asking you to do it all at once but bit by bit you are going to have to get them used to the idea ‘cause I’m here to stay and I’m proud of being your gal.”
The loud blasting of a vehicle horn right behind her brought Dianne abruptly back to the present day, she was still sitting at the Highway T junction with a long line of traffic banked up behind her.
“Umm, earth to Dianne.” Krystal chuckled. “You want for me to drive ‘cause at this rate we are gonna get to work in time to clock off”. She laughed again at Dianne’s muttered exclamation of horror as she threw the truck into gear and screeched out into the highway, revving the engine in a futile attempt to coax more than 55 MPH from the old crate. She really needed a whole new vehicle if she was going to make it all the way back to the coast.
Chapter 4
Her Friday passed much as all the others before it, the boss was his usual charming self – not - and the customers ranged from delightful right through to the assholes that ran her ragged and then stiffed her for a tip. One table of suits left her a handful of small change that yielded the princely sum of $1.17, after they had spent at least $100 on drinks alone. It was all she could do not to throw it after them as they left and suggest that they probably needed it more than her.
“I need this job, I need this job,” was a mantra she was finding it necessary to repeat to herself more and more often these days. To come down to serving at tables, after the responsibility and good money she had earned in advertising for so many years, had been a bitter pill to swallow. There were times when she had to remind herself that the way this global recession was all over, she might just as easily have lost her job in L.A. by now anyway. Finally six o’clock rolled around and she opened the back kitchen door to be met by a wall of heat that almost knocked her backwards.
“Holy shit, it must be 105 degrees out here,” she said, gasping.
Mariano, one of the kitchen hands who was also headed to the car park laughed at her discomfort.
“No way Miz Matson, more like 110,” he replied with a grin “You’re not a native of Texas, that’s easy to see, but don’t worry, after a few more summers you will get used to it,”
“Not a chance” she thought to herself, climbing into her oven of a truck. By the time next summer came around she had plans to be anywhere but here. She wanted away from the heat, the dust and the arrogant ‘everything is bigger and better in Texas’ attitude that seemed to prevail in these parts. And away from the intolerant redneck attitude to gays she had come across too. Sometimes it felt like she had been sucked into a time warp, having come from more laid back and accepting communities in California and Oregon. In part, she conceded, this attitude had been what had made it so hard for Karla to own their relationship once they moved back to Amarillo, both to her parents and just in general. Mostly though, and she knew this to be true, Karla had reverted back to her role as the spoiled, only child and this ‘new’ person she suddenly had to deal with had left Dianne confused and at times, downright angry. And of course, Karla’s mom’s health scare had just added to the mix. They hadn’t been back three weeks, she reminded herself, when the woman had been rushed to the local hospital after suffering a major heart attack. From there they had air lifted her to a top cardiac unit in Dallas where it was touch and go for at least the first week.
It had been under these uncertain and stressful circumstances that she had met Karla’s father for the first time, when she drove the two of them to the airport to catch a flight to the hospital. Mr. Gruenwald was a short, unassuming man with just a hint of his German ancestry still clinging to his speech. The shock of his wife’s illness made him look older than his sixty nine years and he hardly spoke more than a dozen words during the short trip as he sat in the back seat, clinging to Karla’s hand,. In fact Dianne was later to recall that he looked like a bewildered child himself, desperately seeking reassurance from a parent that all would be well. Mrs. Gruenwald survived but was in hospital for nearly three weeks, then flown back to the local medical facility for another week, before she was allowed to go home on strict bed rest. Karla spent nearly every moment possible at her mother’s bedside and Dianne knew that then was not the time to be pushing her girl to reveal the true nature of their relationship. Instead she had worked hard at settling into her new position, inwardly chafing at the lack of artistic freedom available to her. In truth this branch was little more than a glorified copy shop with very little scope for one- off or individual art work. At night she curled up in bed in the new apartment, alone except for Mischief purring at her feet.
A bead of sweat, rolling off her forehead and stinging her eye, took her mind off the past and jerked her back into the sauna that was Friday afternoon traffic in downtown Amarillo. She had to admit was pretty tame compared to the L.A. freeways-- definitely one part of her old life she didn’t miss at all. Krystal had been picked up by her mom an hour earlier and they had invited Dianne to eat with the family around the pool that evening. Although the hygiene of the pool water was as dubious as the rest of the facilities in Sunny Acres, it was so damn hot Dianne figured it was preferable to heat- stroke.
Chapter 5
Later that evening, as she splashed around in the pool with Randy, Laverne’s youngest, and what seemed like a thousand other people, she was glad she had accepted the invite. Spending each night alone in the trailer with Mischief and each day with her conversation limited to variations on 'What can I get you to eat?', she was beginning to lose the art of adult communication.
“Randy! Shane! Krystal! Dianne! Dinner‘s ready, let‘s eat. ” Laverne’s voice rose above the shrieking and screaming of the juvenile hordes and Dianne grinned to hear her own name included with those of the kids. Although she was only about five years younger, Laverne seemed to treat her as a part of her own brood. A picnic table had been lugged down to the grassed pool area by the boys and Dianne’s eye widened and her tummy rumbled at the spread laid out on a checked table cloth: cold fried chicken, potato salad, coleslaw, bread rolls and wieners, along with two large pitchers of iced tea and soda.
“Hey Laverne, this looks just great, how on earth did you manage to put all this together when you’ve been working all day. Hell you make me feel guilty.” Dianne’s words bought a grin of thanks from Laverne as they all began to heap plastic plates with food, the boys having been told in no uncertain terms to wait until the women had got their share first.
“Well, if the truth be known, I did cheat a bit tonight” Laverne admitted as she and Dianne settled down on lawn chairs to eat. “I cooked the chicken for dinner last night and just did a double quantity, but I bought the salads home from the market today, I’m not fussed with the dressing they use on the potatoes but sometimes you just have to cut some corners. What with having to pick Jazzy up from the Centre and her momma from work on my way home, I didn‘t have time to make my own”
As she bit into the tender, spicy chicken Dianne groaned appreciatively. “It tastes divine. Krystal was just deploring my lack of cooking skills on the way to work this morning and she’s right. I’m ashamed of myself, I doubt I could boil the water to cook, the potatoes myself, much less make a dressing from scratch.”
Laverne looked a little anxious as she replied “Yeah, Krystal was telling me about the conversation you two had. I sure hope that gal of mine didn’t upset you too much; she’s about as clumsy as a baby elephant when it comes to blundering into other folks’ private business, that mouth of hers just never seems to know when to quit. But you need to know Dianne, her heart’s in the right place, she’s really taken to you and it worries her to see you alone and hurting”. Laverne looked over to where the others were sprawled on a rug and for a moment Krystal, in her new white bikini, looked no different to the dozen other teenage girls around the pool area, pretending not to be watching the boys watching them back. But there was one major difference and she sat in a little folding cot, playing with some stuffed toys and laughing as her young uncles vied with each other to make the silliest faces for her amusement. From the worry lines on her forehead Dianne knew that Laverne was silently wondering what the future would hold for the young mother, more than likely hoping it would yield something better than a trailer park home and a bunch of kids to support on her own.
“Krystal didn’t upset me, hon; she’s a great kid and a wonderful mom. You can be really proud of the way you‘ve brought her up, she has more commonsense that most adults I know.” At these words Laverne’s tense posture relaxed and her eyes smiled her pleasure at the compliment. For a moment Dianne hesitated, her natural inclination was to keep her emotions strictly to herself, but these past few days she just hadn’t been able to stop her mind thinking about Karla and their breakup. In truth she longed to talk a little, hoping that saying the words out loud might just quieten down her head.
But still she hesitated, unsure of just how to begin such an intimate conversation with another woman. Dianne had never really been one to spend endless hours chatting with girlfriends when she was a teenager, her interests had all centered on doing things: playing softball, hiking and fishing or her more solitary pastimes of drawing and photography. Maybe it was Laverne’s many years of interpreting her kid’s moods that enabled her to read the signs and initiate the conversation herself.
“You know, you can just tell me to butt out if you don’t wanna talk about it, but I can see when a person is struggling. I’ve had a lot of troubles in my own life and one thing I have learned was keeping it all inside rarely helps solve a one of them. Course I’m not suggesting for a minute I can be of any real help to you, but sometimes just putting it all out there in words and out of your head for a little bit can make a world of difference.” Laverne left the invitation hanging in the air between them for a second, and then noting the hesitation on her companion’s face she ploughed ahead. ,
“You know, Dianne, I much appreciated your telling me a little about yourself and what was happening in your life when you and my Krystal first started riding to work together. It took a lot of guts to reveal yourself to someone you had only just met, when in truth you could’ve just kept quiet and I would have been none the wiser. That you did showed me that you were a person of character and honesty and that just might be the two things I most look for most in someone that is gonna be around my kids. And in someone I’d be proud to call a friend! So what do you say we do what all good friends are meant to do? Cry on each other’s should drink a few beers and curse all the no good men in our lives.”
At this sentiment, Dianne gave a wry smile and raised one eyebrow and, as she realized what she had just said, Laverne began to giggle and the more she tried to suppress her laughter, the more it bubbled out. “Oh hell hon, in your case I should have said ‘all the no good women’ I guess.” Her chuckles were infectious and Dianne couldn’t stop herself from joining in. Soon the two women were helpless with laughter, tears rolling down their faces and clutching their plates to stop them sliding from their laps. At last Laverne wiped her eyes and gave Dianne a surreptitious wink as she reached into the cooler at her feet and extracted two icy cold bottles of Corona.
“Okay girlfriend, I have provided the beer and the shoulder, now all you have to do is tell me your troubles, I promise it will make you feel a damn side lighter and it will take my mind off all of mine. So tell me, what happened to make that gal of yours - what was her name again--Karrie?–up and leave you to try and make the rent on that apartment all by yourself? You know, I aint even met her and I’m thinking I don’t like her very much at all.” With this pronouncement Laverne took a long swig of her beer and settled back in her chair.
“Karla, her name is Karla and, oh Laverne, if you had met her in L.A. I know you wouldn’t have been able to stop yourself liking her--she was pretty and smart and funny and everyone just loved her to bits. I know I did, from the moment we met she was all I could think about and it made me the happiest girl on this planet when she agreed to us moving in together. Seems to me we scarcely had a cross word until I was stupid enough to bring her back here to Amarillo ‘cause she was so homesick.”
With every passing second the words that had always stuck in her throat seemed easier to speak and Dianne found herself pouring her heart out to her friend about the tense trip, her resentment at the apartment being chosen and rented without their say so, the incredible bombshell that Karla’s folks not only didn’t know about her but that they weren’t even aware their only daughter was gay. She progressed through Karla’s mom’s heart attack and the weeks that followed where she saw less and less of her gal. Karla had often chosen to sleep out at the ranch, rather than making the trip back to town each night, and this had increased the friction between the two of them as Dianne found herself in the unenviable position of being responsible for the rent and all the other bills as Karla declared herself unable to look for work whilst looking after her Mom.
“I swear, Laverne, I was caught between a rock and a hard place. If I complained to her about the financial burden I was bearing, it made me look like a heartless creep that valued money over the health of a parent, but the more I tried to soldier on and support her, the more she took advantage of my generosity. To tell the truth I was beginning to feel kind of used.” Dianne shifted restlessly in her chair, just saying these words to another person brought back the feeling of guilty heaviness in her chest, of being trapped in a situation where she had no control.
Laverne nodded, her expression neutral and after a few second’s pause, Dianne found she was able to continue.
“While Karla was out at the ranch, she had started reorganizing her dad’s office when her Mom was napping and she discovered that the whole accounting system was an unworkable mess. It’s exactly the kind of thing she had been doing in L.A., working for some executive or CEO and totally taking over every little detail of his life to make it run seamlessly, and in the process make herself indispensable. The trouble was that was exactly how her Dad began to feel in a very short time.” Dianne sighed deeply; her memories of the last argument between them were still fresh in her mind.
It had been a Saturday morning at the end of a long working week during which Karla had only returned sleep in the apartment the one night. This state of affairs had left Dianne feeling frustrated and angry and in no mood for the bright eyed and cheerful Karla who woke her at eight am, bouncing on the end of the bed and singing loudly.
“Wake up, wake up you sleepy head, get up, get up, get out of bed…”
Dianne groaned and rolled over, pulling the pillow over her ears-- if anything Karla had a worse singing voice than she did.
“For Pete’s sake K, shut up, this is the only day I have had to sleep- in for over a week. In case you haven’t noticed some of us have to work to pay the bills and put a roof over your head. Not,” she added viciously “that you really need it, seeing as how you are never here. I’m surprised you remembered your way back.”