The night before Daddy died, I broke up with Raymond Ashby on the front porch swing as we counted the passing cars, the red ones. The sixteenth car passed by, and then the next, and then Ash said, “Seventeen, that’s how old we are,” and I said, “I don’t love you,” as if the July air could hold anything more. I still think it was the right thing to say, but I’m not sure what brought it on. I heard his voice say “seventeen,” and then could hear “eighteen, nineteen, twenty…” counting up and up, trailing off with no end, the way our game always went. No contest, no rules. We just counted and counted until it was time to stop—until it got too dark to see the color, or we started kissing, or we moved on to something else.
He stopped the swing with his foot. “What?”
I looked at the shapes in the chipped paint. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, Susanna?”
I told him the words just fell out of my mouth. I hadn’t planned out a conversation. “I don’t know what I’m saying.” It was quiet except for the cicadas. Ash put his hands over his face.
“How am I supposed to— ” My voice pinched up. “Ash—”
“But you know you don’t love me?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I need to go now,” he said, taking the steps in twos.
And the next morning, Daddy was gone. That day came at us from all corners. Momma fell asleep early in my bed. I crawled in beside her, exhausted, but unable to settle enough to keep my eyes shut. I studied the pattern in Momma’s cotton nightgown, trying to figure out a better way to have folded and stitched the cloth to make the flowers match up at the seams.
Some light caught on my Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers poster, and I opened and closed my left eye, making “the Heartbreakers” disappear again and again behind my mother’s body, the way Daddy would make his nose move when I was younger. He’d say, “Okay, Little Susie, close one eye and point at my nose,” and I’d steady myself, staring down my index finger like a telescope, serious. “Now, pay close attention and switch eyes.”
“You moved! No, stay still, Daddy!” I’d fall over in giggles.
Lying there in bed with Momma, in my father’s loss, I blinked at the poster and tried to remember all the words to “Free Fallin’.” I rolled over and looked out the window. If I could just pull the nighttime into my body— Bedsheets on the clothesline broke up the darkness and I thought of Ash. Hearing those words fall out of my mouth that night on the porch swing was like hearing someone tell me I was wrong—that after living for seventeen years, I still didn’t know myself, that I didn’t even know how to love somebody.
Ida Stewart’s poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Unsplendid, Country Dog Review, and MAYDAY Magazine; her relationship with the right margin is in its honeymoon stages. A West Virginia native, she’s currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Georgia.