Shame Read Free Page B

Michelle tore into them with the joy of someone who hadn’t had to participate at all in their preparation.
    â€œYou didn’t talk to me about your day yesterday. How did the sale go?” she asked as she spread some butter on a slice of bread. I had been at the weekly cattle auction in Geary the day before and picked up some calves at a little less than two hundred fifty a head. In the spring, after they’d gained about three hundred pounds on the wheat that was now starting to sprout, I’d sell those that made it through the winter for two hundred dollars profit each, God and Mother Nature willing. All I had to do over the next six months was feed them, keep them well, keep them warm, and get them to market.
    â€œBought seventy nine head,” I said. “Some pretty good calves. If all goes well, we’ll be in business for at least another year.”
    â€œWhat did you have for lunch?”
    â€œBurger, fries, Coke, and a piece of pie. Mmm. Apple.” The auction barn had a little café where the cook did the miraculous, whipping up roadhouse delicacies within smelling distance of tons of manure. You wouldn’t think it’d be a stimulus for a healthy appetite, but all the same, I made a good meal between auction lots.
    â€œWell, I don’t remember it spoiling your dinner.” And she crinkled her eyes at me again, as if to say that she knew nothing on God’s green earth would ever do that. Fact is, if I didn’t get out and run with the kids during basketball practice I’d look like Pavarotti, and as it is, I have a gut that never quite goes away. I’ve grown to accept it, like I’ve learned to accept the white hairs sprouting on my chest and at my temples, my own set of wrinkles around the eyes. I accept them, even though I get a twinge deep in my gut when I look in the mirror and see a middle-aged man looking out at me.
    â€œUh, right,” I said. “Let’s talk about something else.” I took a deep breath, let it out, went on to another subject. “I went out and shot baskets with B. W. this afternoon before I came in to get cleaned up. He took me two games out of three. Good games, though.”
    â€œOh. Oh.” Michelle laughed and then caught herself, covering her mouth with her napkin. “That reminds me.” Michelle drew herself up proudly. “National Honor Society met Friday before school. B. W. was elected president.”
    â€œThis I have been told,” I said, chewing my food thirty times the way my mother taught me. “What’s the latest on the Lauren makeup crisis?”
    â€œOh, it gets better. She wants to know if she can double-date.”
    â€œMaybe with us. Was that her intent?”
    She gave me a look of derision, and deservedly; what junior high kid wants to be seen with parents or even wants to acknowledge their existence? “I think not. Let’s present a common front. What do you think?”
    Cherry, our waitress, came back to ask us if things were okay, which they were. “I think the usual things,” I said when she walked off. Where Lauren was concerned, I was against makeup, against double-dating, against the onset of puberty itself. Like the progressive parent she was, Michelle tried to keep me up-to-date on Lauren’s physical changes, but to be honest, I didn’t want to hear about that, didn’t even really want to learn secondhand by pulling training bras out of the dryer or carrying in grocery sacks containing feminine hygiene products. Ideally, I would have preferred for Lauren to remain prepubescent until the moment before her wedding.
    I didn’t have my head in the sand. I mean, I watched the news, I talked to my buddies over coffee every morning at McBee’s, and I heard firsthand from Michelle that girls Lauren’s age were having sex, that these days twelve-year-olds were having babies. And as somebody whose entire life was changed