Cowboys after Dinner

by Shae Moloney

Europeana

I haven’t eaten rice pudding in years because the last time I did was the first time you said I was a disappointment. You didn’t come around much after that, but the four letters you sent in the following decade carried sentiments that cut me as deep as it did that day in person.

“You tell your mama not to come calling, a’right?” I couldn’t tell if it was a question or a command, so I said nothing. You avoided eye contact as you always did. I can’t recall a time in my life when you looked me dead in the eyes.

I remember the creamy sugar goo lingering on my tongue as I pushed back tears with one spoon-adorned fist. After you left the diner wearing that familiar mask of disgust, I shamefully licked up the sides of the porcelain bowl as tears flowed freely down my sticky cheeks. I ran out shortly after and everything beyond that was a blur, so if you didn’t pay before leaving, I stole that pudding. I haven’t been back to that side of town since, so I guess I’ll never know.

Impressions made when seven years old stick around a long time, I guess. They sure stuck around longer than you.

I never left Hillside, even though I threatened to over a dozen times. You might know this. I wrote you letters in the beginning, telling you about my big plans to move out west and become a cowboy. You told me once girls couldn’t be cowboys, but I wanted to prove you wrong. How impressed you would be when I showed up in a fringed vest and spurs and riding a palomino horse right up to your blue Toyota on the street.

Mom didn’t let me call you anything but “him” after you were gone. I said “dad” once, as in “do you think dad would mind if I wore his old green jacket to the park?” and she slammed a plate down so hard it cracked right in half — that plate with the yellow flowers on it she got from the neighbors when I was born — and growled, “You don’t say that word in this house anymore.”

The next day the jacket was gone and she bought me a new fleece one that was warmer than yours but didn’t smell like you.

Hillside was better without you. People got a whole lot nicer to me and mom after you were gone. I don’t think mom noticed much; she spent most of her time at the kitchen table looking at photo albums and microwaving frozen lasagna for dinner. I could watch TV as late as I wanted as long as I kept the volume down. They showed western re-runs at midnight on the old movie station, and I bugged mom for a week to get me a cowboy hat and a cap gun. I got the hat, not the gun. Mom never slept in her room after you left, and she let me drag the TV into my room so the lights wouldn’t keep her up at night when she draped herself over the couch to sleep.

In seventh grade, one day in the early spring, a police car pulled up beside me while I was kicking my toes at the puddles of melted snow and told me that I was going to stay with the neighbors for a while. They put me in the backseat where criminals usually sit — people caught shoplifting or falling down drunk in the street — and even let me work the siren a couple of times. Everybody looked so serious, and I remember thinking about my wet socks when they told me the news.

Mom must have run out of lasagna or photo albums and decided to call it quits. They found her in the bathtub. I took my soaked shoes and socks off and wondered if they would let me back in the house to get a dry pair. I didn’t understand at the time what had happened or what it meant, but I learned to block out the pain after a month or two. I never saw her properly so I pretended she had run off to be with you. You had already left, and then mom, and then everyone else, probably. I wondered when it was my turn to disappear.

I lived with our neighbors — not the Jeffersons but the Cristols, the ones who had a son a year older than me and a spotted dog named Bucky — for the next four years. I practiced quick-draw shooting with water pistols and got good at lassoing Bucky with a tied-up jump rope. I was quiet and the Cristols were very inviting. When I was sixteen, I figured I could do well enough on my own and got a job working at the hardware store on 12th Street. It used to be a pharmacy when you lived here. I spent the next year promising everybody that I would be leaving town in the spring, and then in the summer, and then before the new year.

Now it was February. It looked like I wasn’t leaving yet.

Your last letter simply said, “Everything is fine here. I hope you’re making someone proud. I didn’t want to be tied down. You’ll understand when you’re older, have your mom explain it to you.”

You wrote how you spoke, in short harsh sentences that I never fully understood. Mom never bothered to explain it to me because I wasn’t old enough yet. It must not have been that important, though, for her to leave before finishing the task.

“You okay to finish up that back room, Charlie?” The store was small, so my boss didn’t have to yell for me to hear on the other side of the floor. You gave me your name. I could have changed it, but I didn’t. Mom gave me her eyes, which I couldn’t change even if I wanted.

“Sure thing,” I said. I liked being in the store alone. I liked being alone. Closing meant we would be open for one more hour and I’d be in the store by myself, restocking and moving boxes around. Business was slow in the evening.

But goddamn. Look who showed up five minutes to close. You didn’t even recognize me; you were looking for something frantically, pacing up and down the aisles, didn’t even give me a second look. I barely recognized you. When I was seven, you were enormous, a giant, shoulders as wide as a doorframe and hands bigger than dinner plates. Am I remembering wrong, or have you shrunk in the last ten years? You looked frail, fragile, weak. And so, so old.

Was it a hammer? A drop cloth? A drill bit?

“Sir, can I help you?” I asked. You didn’t hear me. I watched you closely, wondering if your purchase would somehow make everything clear. The reason for your leaving, the reason for mom giving up, the reason for why I spent years sleeping in a shared room with a neighbor boy who snored loudly and stole food from my plate when my fake parents weren’t looking.

A box of nails? A paint brush? A plunger?

“Sir, we’re closing in five minutes.” I said, louder this time. You used to tell me to speak up, do you remember that? You said I was too quiet. I was too shy.

I was shaking and so were you.

Six boxes of matches, the big kind with the strike strip on the side. You didn’t set them down but instead held them out as an offering. Your hands were shaking so badly I could barely grab them from you.

Hillside is a small town filled with elderly couples and bored teenagers. I recognize track marks when I see them. You were so thin under your denim coat and your eyes so sunken in your gaunt face.

“What happened to you?” I blurted. I couldn’t stand seeing you like that. I couldn’t stand seeing you at all.

“W-what? You — hey!” For a moment I thought you recognized me too, but instead you flinched, twitched, shivered, and pulled a gun on me. It was no six-shooter like in the movies, but it would do the trick. The barrel stared me down because you still wouldn’t look me in the goddamn eyes. “Money,” you said. “G-Give it to me, give me the money.”

You wanted the money. I could have given you the money. You would have been so proud, though not as proud if I had been wearing denim pants and chaps and sitting tall on the saddle of my very own horse. Maybe being a cowboy is about doing what’s right. Maybe that’s why you said girls couldn’t be cowboys. What you meant was, I couldn’t be one.

I hesitated a moment too long. Your flinchy, twitchy, shivery hand pulled the trigger, and for a while I disappeared too.

You know what happened next because you were there for it, and I was on the ground bleeding over the floor I had just mopped an hour prior. You didn’t make it farther than four blocks when the cops picked you up and put you in the back seat — the one where criminals and sometimes twelve-year-olds sit — and they ran the siren themselves all the way to the station. I imagine I had more fun than you did when I was sitting there.

I testified at the trial because you only hit my shoulder and luckily it wasn’t my quick-draw shooting arm. Cowboys can ride one-handed anyway. I read your letters, every single one, though I don’t think the judge cared very much and you weren’t paying attention to me.

I was your disappointment, but now you were mine.

“Buy you a cup of coffee?” the prosecutor asked after the trial. The judge put you away for a couple of years and when they walked you out, you looked at me, looked me dead in the eye, and without mom explaining it to me, I understood.

We went to the diner. The prosecutor, whose name was Bill Keillor, drank coffee and I had tea.

“You oughta write him a letter,” Bill said, shaking four packets of sugar into his cup. “A nice long letter about your childhood. He wasn’t even listening during the trial. I think he should know what he did to you, to your mom, your family.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “I think about it.”

I hope you think of me riding off into the sunset if you think of me at all, because that’s what I’m going to do. I’m heading out west toward the setting sun.

The diner had rice pudding on the menu, the best damn pudding in the state, or so it said. I hadn’t eaten rice pudding in years because the last time I did I was a disappointment. I ordered it, ate one bite, and pushed it away.

It didn’t taste as good as I remembered.

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Shae Moloney is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer and copyeditor with a BA in English literature. She writes prose, short fiction, and poetry with a particular fondness for science fiction with dark, surreal elements. Her work has been published by Parachute Literary Magazine, The Bookends Review, and received an honorable mention in Brilliant Flash Fiction Magazine’s Science Fiction Contest. Her prose poetry is forthcoming in Mulberry Fork Review.