Christine, his brown-haired Goldilocks.
*
April, two weeks out from the full pink moon. At their campsite, Emmett made crispy salmon and cannellini beans in cumin tomatoes. After eating, they smoked a bowl of Kentucky green by the firelight under the endless black sky. It wasn’t until they’d crawled into their tent, sated and laughing, that Emmett realized he’d forgotten the most important camping item he meant to bring: condoms. They always used them, no exceptions. “Birth control pills make me completely crazy. I can’t take them,” Christine had warned him in the past.
“I’m so sorry. This was supposed to be our first romantic weekend away, and I blew it,” he said to her as she lay there naked in his sleeping bag, a spring zephyr raising the scent from between her legs. He’d once walked past a bowl of ripened nectarines at work, and their jabby musk had smelled just like her.
“You’re being so dramatic about this. It’s okay,” she said.
“I just wanted everything to be perfect, so we could escape town…for a night. Your family—”
“Look. My family sucks. There are literally KKK members in it. And my dad has always hated your dad. We both know this! Fuck all of them, okay? We don’t need them,” she said.
“They’re still your family; there’s nothing you can do about that.”
“My dad said he’d stop giving me money if I didn’t break up with you, and he knows I won’t do it. Here I am, with you! Where I want to be. We don’t need them. We don’t need anyone.”
“I’m sorry I forgot the condoms.”
“I’m not,” she said, pulling him on top of her, guiding him inside.
And when she told him she was pregnant, without hesitating he’d gotten on one knee on the dock behind the restaurant and promised to buy a ring as soon as he could. Two days after that, Emmett put on his pressed white shirt and brown jeans, and they went to the courthouse with Hunter and Savannah in tow, got married, walked out into the springtime sunshine as one flesh. Christine’s hair was pulled over her shoulder, braided loose with sweet pea blossoms. She wore a petal of a dress, the peachy color so tender and unassuming it made him want to cry.
*
“Damn, it feels dangerously good to destroy things,” Tallie said out on the deck, satisfied.
“You’re sure you don’t mind? I can give you money for the grill.”
“Apparently you can give me money for almost everything.”
Emmett smiled before a deep sadness moved through him. “I’m heading out early Sunday morning. Just so you know,” he said. It had begun raining again in steady drips as he and Tallie stepped into the kitchen. She went to her bedroom and returned with the black backpack she said he could have. He thanked her and took it, began filling it up, thinking of Christine saying black backpacks made her sad. Are you sad now, Christine? Please say no.
“Where will you go? Back to Clementine?” she asked.
“I know it would make you feel better if I told you I was going back to Clementine, but I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Your parents would be elated to see you, to know you’re okay.”
“How do you know that?”
“Do your parents have any mental health issues…if you don’t mind me asking?”
“No. I mean, not that I know of,” he said.
“Anxiety, depression?”
Emmett shook his head.
“Well…they’re your parents, and you’re their only child. That’s how I know they’d be elated to see you.”
“But not all families are warm and loving. Some are extraordinarily anemic. Not everyone’s parents are so great. Some are really terrible,” he said.
“Are yours terrible, Emmett?”
“No, but a lot of them are,” he said, zipping up his newly filled backpack, setting it in the kitchen corner.
“Will you tell me about them? What are they like?”
He told her his dad worked for an agriculture and farming insurance company and was looking forward to retiring soon and that his mom was a damn good cook. He told her his parents weren’t perfect, but his mom was close. His dad had barely missed the Vietnam draft and was a new generation of man. He’d never laid a hand on Emmett to hurt him, making him a rarity in the country town where they grew up, where most kids were raised going out to pick their own whipping switches from the trees in the yard. He told Tallie his parents were quiet and private, and they’d only wanted one child. That they’d happily welcomed Christine into their lives as their daughter-in-law and they’d grieved alongside him when she died.