She's two-stepping with Daddy to her aunt's scratchy record player. Her family doesn't dance much. Mostly they play cards, smoke cigarettes, tell jokes, and drink coffee.
She knows they wish she'd go outside and play with the kids but she doesn't feel like a kid anymore. She doesn't feel like a grownup either but she's learned to play canasta perched on a stool at her aunt’s elbow. Sometimes they let her sit in on a hand while her dad goes to switch the irrigation line over to the other side.
Once, when her step-mother found out that she'd been smoking with friends out behind the school gym at lunch, she had to smoke a whole pack of Lucky Stikes in front of Uncle James. One cigarette after another, her eyes red from smoke and choked-back tears. Her aunt wouldn’t look at her, never said a word.
A couple of years later she saw her aunt with her dad in the parking lot of Myrtle Hill Baptist Church, their arms around each other, barely visible in the dark. She wondered if it was that day of smoke and tears that brought them together in some kind of shared understanding that it wasn’t good to humiliate a child, even if it was “for her own good.”
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