By Annie Earnshaw
My sister and I like to drink on our dead father’s land. We plant our plastic camp chairs on the highest hill, which is less of a hill and more of a slight incline on an otherwise flat plain. Cheyenne drinks four from a six-pack and I finish off the other two. It feels easier to talk to her out here, where the air tastes a little grassy and you can hardly hear the road noise.
We started coming up here when we got the news he’d died. Thrown off a bull face-first into the dirt. Didn’t even make it to the hospital. None of us really knew how to feel, what to do. Cheyenne had just gotten her driver’s license, so she tossed a bottle of cheap, sweet wine into her backpack and threw an armful of quilts into the bed of her truck. I watched her from the porch, front door open, the sound of my afternoon cartoon filtering out. My eleventh birthday was two weeks earlier.
“You coming, Laramie?” she shouted through the rolled-down window.
“Where you going?”
She paused, lips twisted as she gnawed on the inside of her cheek. After a beat, she yelled back, “Does it matter?”
It didn’t. Mom’s shift at the nursing home didn’t end until six. If Cheyenne left, I would be alone with the confusing realities of death and dying.
Forty-five minutes later, Cheyenne and I hopped out of the truck to swing open the gate. The chain-link fence that divided the property seemed to run on forever, slicing through the horizon. We trekked up the hill, dropped the quilts on the ground like a bird’s nest, and laid on our backs until the shadows grew long.
In those early years after his death, I dreamed of doing something with this land. Build a big house with a wraparound porch and a double-oven kitchen. Find a muscle-lined man to build me a greenhouse so I could grow cutting flowers all year. But neither Cheyenne nor I had enough money to sink into this plot; there’s no water, no electric, no sewer. There’s barely even a road and no school district for at least twenty miles each direction. So we sit and drink.
Today, after we set up our chairs and drop a few bottle caps into the brown paper bag, Cheyenne is the first to break the silence. She holds an unlit cigarette between her fingers, flicking the tip as if to ash it.
“I think I’m going to quit my job,” she says breathily, as if the words built up pressure in her chest. It was her idea to come out here, soak in the quiet rustle of the drying prairie grass.
I hum in response. This doesn’t surprise me. Cheyenne has blazed through six jobs in the past two years, so it was only a matter of time before hawking makeup at the department store disagreed with her.
“My manager’s been a real dick,” she says. “We got a huge shipment of this ugly taupe shade last week. I swear to you, Laramie, there’s not a soul alive who could pull it off. And he says to me, ‘Cheyenne, you got to sell this shade.’ I tell the customers to try it on and then they ask me how it looks. What, I’m supposed to lie to them?”
“You can’t be nice to them?” I ask.
Cheyenne scoffs. “Trust me, I’m doing them a favor. Sending them home looking like that isn’t nice.”
I sigh through my nose and kick the toe of my shoe at the ground, driving ditches into the dirt. “What you going to do instead?”
“I’ll figure it out,” she says. “I always do.” In one grand chug, Cheyenne finishes her beer. I dump the rest of mine into a nearby bush. She inherently knows when it’s time to go.
I drive her home and wait for a few minutes after she gets inside. Fiddle with the radio, trying to pick up a clear station, adjusting my side mirrors. There’s a sheen of dust on the dash, so I fish an old takeout napkin out of the center console and try to collect it with the starchy material. Doesn’t do me much good; the dust just scattered when I try to corral it.
Annie Earnshaw is a writer and editor from (just north of) Charlotte, NC. She has a BA in English from Elon University. Annie’s fiction explores family dynamics, identity, and the female experience. She also writes in the lifestyle and wellness spaces; her favorite topics to cover are wellness trends, mental health, and body neutrality. Annie staunchly supports the Oxford comma and would like a hot chai with almond milk, please.
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