Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine by Callie Collins

Author:Callie Collins [Collins, Callie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Published: 2025-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Two

I left here once. I did. It matters to me that I left, though these days it doesn’t serve me much to talk about it. Now everybody wants to stay here instead.

I always thought it was easy to tell the people who’d never once left town. As a girl it made me embarrassed for them. You could hear it in how people talked, see it in how they moved, their forever roots, the unyielding sameness of it. There was something too delicate about everyone I knew in Austin, like they were expecting a cousin around every corner, like they were just sure they’d get whatever kind of help they needed. They seemed to me wide-eyed and too forgiving. That, or they were angry in a childish way, like my mother, mad at the world for not giving them the kind of respect they thought they deserved, seething at night under their covers. Sometimes they were both, simultaneously. I didn’t want to be that way. All I wanted was somewhere else. I wanted to come back home—twice a year at first, out of some ancient obligation to my mother, and then eventually only at Christmas. Two days, or three. I’d complain to an old, stuck friend over stringy chicken-fried steak, complain about the roads and the way people moved so slow, drip-slow—and didn’t they have somewhere to be, something to do?—until they wanted me gone again. I didn’t even want to mean it necessarily, I wouldn’t have. I just wanted to be able say it. I wanted to come back from some real city, Chicago, or Atlanta, wander just barely into the scrub till I could see the creek, dry and same as ever, and feel proud that I’d gotten myself to another place, a place where time passed loud enough you could hear it.

So I left. I was sixteen, still a kid. I left with Wendell, who’d come into my mother’s candy store on a drive from Midland to Houston, bought a dozen pieces of divinity I’d rolled back and forth into logs over a field of pecans, bent his big body down, and asked too loud right next to my ear, smelling faintly of diesel and grease, if I wouldn’t like to meet him for a Coke down the road in a couple of hours. If I could get away. It didn’t seem to matter to him much one way or the other if I showed, which is mostly why I went. The shop stank of gin and sweat and sugar, and my mother wouldn’t notice me leave anyway.

I closed my eyes, standing there on the front porch of the house I’d grown up in. It was only noon, and I’d been up at the bar an hour already, even though I hadn’t left until at least three or three thirty the night before. Given T.K. the keys to lock up after the boys and drove home with heavy legs and a catch in my throat. Now the boards

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