That Surprise Visit Make Me Happy

And I could talk to him. Tell him about all the shit.

Well, most of the shit. No teenager tells their parents all the shit that’s going on in their lives.

My Dad was my rock. My one safe haven in a world that didn’t understand me.

When he got sick, I had to come back.

I had tried to get him to move to New Mexico, but he said he didn’t want to die in an unfamiliar place, far away from everything he knew. I understood. I was single after another inevitable break up and I had been thinking of changing jobs anyway.

So here I was.

Home sweet home.

—

Monday morning was crisp, it wasn’t exactly warm yet, but a hell of a lot better than when I got here just after New Years. We kept the truck in the barn during the winter so I didn’t have to brush the snow off it or scrape the windows, but I did have to plow our own driveway with the tractor.

I had leased the land and most of our equipment out to our neighbors, but for that tractor. I couldn’t imagine selling the farm, and this way I could live there and make some money from the lease to pay for Dad’s care.

Not that there was any real treatment for MND. The best they could do was keep him comfortable. When I got here, he was still moving around, but now he was in a wheelchair and was starting to have difficulty swallowing food. This fucking disease was an ugly fast mover. The doctors told me I should expect it to be all over before Christmas.

It broke my heart to see him like this, and even if I had only seen him once or twice a year during holidays since I went off to college, we had talked every week all those years.

I dreaded losing him. Nothing had ever made me so scared.

I didn’t know what I’d do when he was gone.

I’d probably move back to Albuquerque. Maybe sell the land to the Jacks if they would let me keep the house. I didn’t know.

I just knew that once he was gone, there would be nothing left for me here but pain.

I parked the truck and walked to my office.

The bell rang for the start of the first period when I was halfway there.

It was some kind of cosmic joke that I now sat on the other side of that same desk in that same counselor’s office, that I had first put my boots on fourteen years ago.

One of the older teachers, who remembered my troubled days at Maple Creek High, had called it ‘poetic justice’ with a good-natured smirk. Colin ‘Murdermath’ Murdoch was still a nice guy, one of the few that had recognized that when a teacher starts fucking a student, something isn’t right when the whole town blames the student.

Elizabeth Anderson wasn’t teaching anymore, but she had never had to answer for her sins, so to speak, in any official way.

To be fair it had started after my 18th birthday, and after graduation, but only just. And it wasn’t me who seduced her. I guess Mrs. Pastor Anderson wasn’t altogether satisfied by her husband’s performance of his sacred duties.

She never had any trouble finding God with me though, bless her heart.

I didn’t bear her any ill will. She had just been there when I was bursting at the seams with the need for a sexual outlet, and I guess I had provided something similar for her. It wasn’t a relationship, I didn’t love her, but was desperate to explore my sexuality, and being an outcast at school the chances of making that happen with my peers seemed nonexistent.

For me it was about not going to college as a virgin. I don’t know what it was about for her. I had my suspicions though.

I hadn’t talked to her since her sister-in-law found us naked on the living room couch, with my tongue buried in her pussy. She was outraged, practically foaming at the mouth, and she made sure the whole town knew that I was a whore that had seduced her brother’s poor innocent wife.

And that had cemented me as the Town Dyke.

I didn’t blame Elizabeth for what happened. I went to her bed willingly, and despite the fallout I didn’t regret it.

It took me a few years to understand why I didn’t regret it though.

She had given me my first sexual experience, soft, tender and loving, very unlike the rough fucking my angry rebel imagination had expected my first sex to be. She had shown me that lovemaking between women could be something else entirely. Something beautiful.

Deep down, I knew that of course, but that experience was in a way the first step on my way to making peace with who I was.

What I could not forgive her for, was not speaking up when her husband and sister-in-law trash talked me all over town. My Dad even had to listen to a thinly veiled sermon on the sins of Jezebel and modern-day immorality at church one Sunday a few weeks later. He never went to the Lutheran Church again while Pastor Anderson was in office. And although he never said anything to me about it, I knew that he had gone to their house that night and given them a strong piece of his mind.

It made them stop overtly harassing me, but the damage was done. A reputation like that dies hard in a small town.