Goodbye Earl(6)

The girls never hung out at Kasey’s anymore, though.

Not since her dumbass stepdad, Roy.

The farmhouse that her real daddy and his friends built with their bare hands was on the edge of Goldie, almost like if Kasey stayed there too long, she could slip right off the map.

She promised herself that one day, she’d actually do it.

Roy truly was a dumbass and an angry ass and a violent ass too. Kasey hated him more than she ever thought she could hate someone. He hit Kasey’s mom when he got drunk and nasty, and when Kasey’s mom wasn’t there, he’d smack Kasey around too. The last time he’d done it, Kasey took a steak knife and told him if he ever touched her again, she’d stab him without thinking twice.

It’d been a month since.

The girls knew some of what Kasey’s home life was like even though she didn’t tell them everything. She didn’t tell them Roy pulled her hair and smacked her across the face once when she was doing the dishes “too loud.” She didn’t tell them about the time he’d pushed her into the wall for talking back when all she’d done was ask him to repeat what he had said. Kasey couldn’t bring herself to tell the girls those things. It was all too dark, too embarrassing.

Kasey’s dad, Isaiah, was killed by a drunk driver when she was only six months old, and by the time Kasey was in elementary school, her mom had gone through a lot of different dickhead boyfriends, although most of them didn’t hang around too long. Losing her dad flicked a switch in her mom. Kasey’s dad was a good man, and since something so terrible happened to him, it was like it scared her mom into dating only assholes from there on out. Like some sort of desperate defense mechanism. Even though her mom’s boyfriends sucked, none of them were as bad as Roy. None of them ever laid a finger on either of them until him.

Her mom and Roy got married when Kasey was in middle school, and her mom was so tough, so staunch about everything, Kasey couldn’t get through to her when she tried to talk her into leaving him. On one hand, she resented her mom for it, for tying herself to a no-good man like Roy, but on the other, it terrified Kasey—thinking of secret reasons why her mom would stick with him. Like there must’ve been something Kasey didn’t know, something she couldn’t ever understand. Maybe when you got to a certain age and had a kid to take care of and you let yourself be sad enough, let grief slice you deep enough, you forgot who you were. Maybe the who you once were escaped through those slits the grief-knife made. So you let people treat you all kinds of ways you never would’ve before, because you just got so tired.

Maybe her mom just got so tired.

Kasey’s mom saved her dad’s truck for her and signed it over on her sixteenth birthday. She didn’t like to let anyone else drive it, because it was all she had left of her dad outside of the farmhouse besides a pair of his old jeans and some of his T-shirts. But when Roy needed the truck, he didn’t ask, and Kasey was scared to say no. Plus, Roy needing the truck meant he would probably be gone with it for two or three days and things would feel normal for a little while.

Until he’d pop up again and ruin everything.

Dumbass put a cloud over that farmhouse, but Kasey felt her daddy there, even now. In those hardwood floors he’d measured, cut, and sanded himself. In that kitchen table he made with his bare hands. She fantasized about her daddy returning from the grave and saving them, taking his house and his family back. She kept a picture of him tucked in front of the permanently lit-up check engine light in her truck. In it, her daddy was young and shirtless. Smiling, shielding his eyes. Sun-kissed—his deep-brown skin even browner from working outside so much that spring she was born.

She never left the picture in the truck when Roy borrowed it; Kasey shut the engine off, put the picture in her backpack, and went inside.



In the kitchen, Kasey tied her hair up, turned her iPod on and tucked it in her pocket, put her earbuds in. Filled a pot with water for the pasta. Rosemarie, Ada, and Caro had pooled their money together and gotten her that iPod for her birthday. Kasey had cried; it was her second-favorite material possession after her truck.

She listened to the Chicks album as the pasta boiled, and she sang along, chopping mushrooms and onions for the sauce. She made meatballs from scratch, rolling them across her palms and carefully setting them to sizzle in the hot pan. Her mama taught her to make meatballs when she was a little girl, told her it was her daddy’s favorite recipe—from The Godfather, his favorite movie. Kasey felt a lift in her heart, thinking about her and her mama having the house to themselves for a couple days, maybe. She was stoked to surprise her with spaghetti and meatballs and the fancy garlic bread she’d just taken out of the freezer.

One of her earbuds was snatched out.

Kasey gasped. Roy, behind her. She hadn’t heard him come in.

“Your mama’s working late tonight,” he said.

“Oh. She didn’t call me—” Kasey began, rabbit-hearted.

“I was just at the store. I just talked to her.”

“Okay…well, I was making us spaghetti dinner, so I guess we can eat it later.”

He moved next to her and started filling up his big plastic cup with water. She was never scared of Roy when she was in the kitchen near the knives; the one she’d been chopping with was right by her pinky on the cutting board. She eyed it and looked out the open window at the sleeping vegetable garden waiting for her to put seedlings in, come May. She’d already started some basil, tomatoes, and sweet peppers under grow lights in the garage next to Roy’s weed plants. Like every spring, she was looking forward to planting berries. Even when the world was a sinkhole, little green sprouts made Kasey feel all right.