Total pages in book: 112
Estimated words: 106839 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 534(@200wpm)___ 427(@250wpm)___ 356(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106839 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 534(@200wpm)___ 427(@250wpm)___ 356(@300wpm)
I approach slowly, looking around. Like maybe he’s watching.
How long ago did he place it here?
How long has this message been waiting for me?
I just stare at it for a few moments, unsure if I’m ready. Then I feel a little stupid because it might just be a piece of trash. So I walk over, shove the rock off the stump, and pick up the baggie.
The moment I do this, I ache. Because it’s the same kind of envelope that I’ve been getting all week at my jobs. It’s got my name on it—just Rosie, no Harlow—and it’s the same stylized, all-caps handwriting.
I want to open this envelope so bad, but I can’t bring myself to do it. What if it’s not another puzzle but an actual letter? One that comes with an explanation?
I’m not ready for this moment. I’m not ready to hear what he has to say. His… excuse. All these years I’ve pictured him dead. That was the only reason I could imagine that would make him stay away. After all our plans. After all those declarations of love. After him knocking me up at age fifteen.
And he’s not dead?
He just… walked away?
My legs go soft so I sit down on the stump, just staring off into the clearing. Picturing that last time we were together. Erol already knew I was pregnant. It had been a couple of weeks since the stick turned blue.
The night he found out I was pregnant we didn’t come all the way up here. We were eating hamburgers in his car in the Revenant diner parking lot. I ate two, plus a strawberry milkshake. It’s really weird how you can remember stupid details like that a dozen years later. After we were done eating, I told Erol my big news and at first, he was stunned. Speechless. But he didn’t avoid eye contact and he didn’t deny being the father or insinuate that I had been sleeping around. He handled it like a gentleman. Like it was a duty. The way I imagine a teenage boy from Bishop might.
I was relieved. And things were just fine. We kept our regular schedule. Me taking the bus down to Revenant after school, him meeting me there and picking me up.
That last time we came up here, he was excited. He was making plans for our future.
Then his birthday came. We had made plans, but not definitive ones because even though it was his birthday and not mine, he was planning a surprise for me. He was gonna pick up his beaver traps that morning and call me when he got back.
But he never did. He was just… gone. No note, no phone call, nothing.
I had never been to his house, just like he had never been to mine. I didn’t know his people, he didn’t know my people. So when he disappeared, I didn’t have anyone to question. I did look up his family in Fayetteville, but there was no one in the phone book, or 411, or online who had the last name Cross in the entire town.
The next six months were agony for me. Not just the whole ‘telling my parents’ thing or going to high school with a rapidly growing baby bump. I mean, all that was bad, but it was the emotional turmoil that nearly did me in and make me give up.
Give up. As in give Cross up for adoption.
God, that would’ve been a mistake. I love my son. He’s my everything. My life would be incomplete without him. Luckily, my family rallied behind me when Jim Bob Baptist came over to ‘talk about Rosie’s future in Disciple’ and my daddy, plus every one of my brothers, stood up and my daddy said, “No. Rosie is staying right here and you best get over it.”
I had people. I know I was lucky. Of course, my mama cried and my daddy was mad. But it was a short thing. Didn’t even last a month, I’d say.
And after Cross came, they forgot I was a child and just treated me like any other adult family member. Their parenting of me was over. It was too early, but I see why they did it this way. I was in charge of this tiny human’s life and they wanted me to know that, while they would be there to help, they were not gonna let me out of that responsibility.
There was no way I could go back to school. Everyone in my family works full-time. Most families in Disciple do their Revival duty part-time because they work other jobs, and everyone in my family has two jobs too, even if the second one is mostly just a hobby. But we’re in charge of the tent. And after all the modern-miracle scaffolding went up several years back, it turned into more than a full-time job.