On that day, ten years ago, I ran into the house and grabbed as many finger sandwiches and brownies and cookies as I could carry. I nearly tripped over my own two feet in my rush to get back outside before the boys left me.
I handed them both the goods and stuffed a brownie in my own mouth so Gavin wouldn’t feel like a charity case. In the brief time since my parents had died, I’d already had my fill of sympathy and I didn’t like the bitter taste of it. At all. He and I were the same in that way, I could feel it. So I didn’t ask, didn’t say a word about why his clothes and hair were filthy, or why he was roaming around town alone in search of food.
We ate on the short walk to an abandoned lot where we proceeded to throw discarded beer bottles against a brick building until I couldn’t lift my arm.
Each beautiful shattering explosion of glass brought me back to life, bringing to light the emotions I’d covered with a heavy black blanket. The world had turned gray the day our parents died, literally. It’d been rainy and gloomy in Texas every day since. But that release, “breaking shit,” as Gavin put it, brought color back to my world like sun peeking through the clouds. It felt so good. Too good. Guilt for enjoying myself weighed on my nine-year-old brain.
“Fuuuckkk,” I screamed out, just to release some of the pain and confusion.
Gavin stopped and stared at me. Dallas kept throwing bottles while I crumpled to the ground. Letting my long, tangled mess of curly hair provide a dark curtain between myself and the boys, I cried—really cried—for the first time since we’d gotten the news. At some point the sound of glass breaking ceased.
“Don’t touch her.” My brother’s voice was frighteningly calm, but heavy with the threat of violence. “She’s fine. You want to be friends? You don’t ever touch her.”
Lifting my head I saw Gavin approaching me. He’d been coming to comfort me, from the looks of it, but Dallas’s warning had stopped him in his tracks. Gravel dug into my knees and the palms of my hands while I watched conflicting urges battle for control in the depths of the boy’s mysterious eyes.
“Get up, Dixie Leigh,” Dallas said, his voice softer than before. “It’s time to go home.”
Home. That was a joke. Home was a brick house in a suburb half an hour outside of Austin where we rode bikes and played with our friends. Home included our mom and dad, pancakes for breakfast, and Saturday morning cartoons. We were going to a rickety old shack with no TV and a dilapidated front porch on a dirt road in Amarillo to live with people we usually only saw on holidays.
Home had died with our parents. We weren’t ever going home again.
As I burst out of the stairwell, metal door clanging behind me, I take in a deep lungful of damp air. It’s cloudy in Texas today, just as it was on that day ten years ago.
Dallas and Gavin and I don’t roam the back roads of Amarillo like a pack of strays anymore, but in a lot of ways, our lives are still the same. Except now we make our way across Texas in Emmylou, the used Chevy Express that hauls us and our equipment from gig to gig, playing music for anyone who will pay us to. Even though sometimes they just pay us in food and tips from a jar.
We started playing in our grandparents’ shed when I was fifteen, but we didn’t really decide to make it official until we placed third in a competition at the state fair when I was a senior and the boys had both graduated.