Shame Read Free Page A

worked, went to church, attended school sporting events, and visited friends and family, but like most small towns, people seemed only too happy to escape it. Lauren already was informing me on a regular basis that to do any real shopping she needed to be taken to Weatherford or El Reno, each an hour off, and naturally she’d prefer to go to the Quail Springs or Penn Square malls in Oklahoma City, a distant City of Oz rising from the grasslands where we went once or twice a month to stock up on food at Sam’s or to see a movie.
    So my world was limited to what it had always been—a town that was already drying up by the time I came along and long unrelieved hours on the farm where I grew up. The farm consisted of two plots of land: 280 acres where we lived on the house my grandfather built in the 1940s—always called, not surprisingly, the Home Place—and 320 acres around the section line road where sat the remains of the house my great-grandfather built in the 1920s, which we called the Old Place. The fields I cultivated were, variously, red sandy soil or dark brown soil thick with clay. The pastures in both places were rolling hills covered by grasses and hillside clumps of cedar and scrub oak, and there were oaks and towering leafy cottonwoods in the creek beds and ravines where they could sip water. Five creeks crossed our land on their short progress to the Canadian River, and my parents had dammed up two of them to create ponds, although only one was still worthy of the name, and on Saturdays I used to take the kids down to fish in it.
    Like my father, I raised wheat as a cash crop, alfalfa to make hay, and kept cattle, with some chickens to tempt coyotes and provide eggs or an occasional Sunday dinner. Over the years the kids had raised a few sheep and pigs to groom and show, but like most of my neighbors, we were pretty much a cattle and wheat operation, eating our own beef, growing vegetables in a summer garden, keeping a fruit orchard.
    Both Michelle and I were raised in a culture that made do—that raised its own food, cooked it, cleaned up after it. So it almost always required a special occasion to get us to a restaurant. Two weeks after my long afternoon of tractor-bound soul-searching, Michelle and I skipped Sunday evening services at the Watonga First Baptist Church and drove out to have a steak dinner at the Roman Nose State Park lodge in honor of her birthday. We could have had grilled sirloins out of the freezer, which I told Michelle halfheartedly as we drove to the restaurant. “But it’s different if we don’t have to cook it,” Michelle said. “It’s my birthday. I want somebody to serve me for a change.”
    â€œI brought you a glass of tea the other day,” I said. “I wait on you hand and foot. I am a slave to your every desire.”
    Her eyes crinkled when she smiled, and even though her face showed our twenty years together, it was a lovely face, and I told her that, too. “Happy birthday,” I said, and I leaned over and kissed her. “May God give you many, many more.”
    She was wearing what for her amounted to dress-up clothes: a big crinkly skirt, a colored T-shirt with a Navajo-themed vest over it, and brown pointy-toed cowboy boots. In warm weather, Michelle attended church in a sundress; she generally taught school in faded jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. She refused to get with the program, and I loved her for that. I told her that when she started getting her long hair cut and frosted by the beauty operator, I would start playing dominos with the old farmers downtown.
    The hostess, who was one of Michelle’s former students, showed us to a good table with a window overlooking the golf course and the tiny lake—more like the size of our pond really. After taking our orders (T-bones done medium-well and charred), the waitress—another of Michelle’s former students—brought salads and bread, and