The Longest Night by Andria Williams

also one of the reasons for the fight—and Nat wasn’t ready to go home. She didn’t want to give up this sunny, carefree feeling for the quiet house, Paul’s stiff shoulders, his stoic conviction that he’d been right. He was always so damn certain. She’d dropped him off at the bus stop that morning and made it just around the corner before pulling over and giving the steering wheel three smacks with her palm, her face crumpling. It was humiliating to have to beg for the car, to hear Paul fret and waffle about being late for work, as if she were a child with no proper sense of limits. Did he think she
wanted
him to be late for work? Why was he so difficult? When she could soften him up he was wonderful, he was the best man in the world, but other times he was a citadel, and it was exhausting.
    So it seemed a reprieve when, reaching the bottom of the mountain, she came to a little town called Kirby that had a local diner. “Girls, should we stop for milkshakes?” she asked.
    Their sun-weakened cheers convinced her that they should.
    “Good,” she said, pulling into the dirt parking lot and climbing out. “A little sugar will perk you right up.” The girls were dazed from sun and light; they lolled against their opposite doors, shoulders lobster pink, limbs loose with fatigue. Sam came out scowling, rubbing her eyes, her dress bunched up behind her legs. Nat reached for Liddie: There was sand crusted between the toddler’s small fingers. Her nails were black crescents. Mica sparkled on the bridge of her nose beneath a line of dark-brown bangs.
    It was two in the afternoon and the diner was mostly quiet. As soon as they set foot inside Nat felt out of place. She’d expected something brighter and cleaner but there was a dinginess to the place, grime in every crevice, a sense of not quite caring. In the far corner stood a jukebox that wasn’t playing, and there was a small dance floor where no one danced. A black-haired waitress with oily, pitted skin picked at her fingernails, a young cowboy read a newspaper near the back, and a bearded man munched absently on a hamburger while two long-haired women looked out the window.
    Well, they were already inside and the girls had expectations, so Nat ordered three milkshakes. When these arrived she sighed in relief. They stood like towers of promise with sky-high whipped cream, and cherries that left pink impressions in the clouds. Within minutes the sugar brought forth its promised energy and the girls were bouncing on the rubbery seats. Nat took them to look at the jukebox.
    “We get five songs for a dollar,” she read, flipping through the lists. “Oh, ‘Charlie Brown’ by the Coasters!” she said. “You’ll like that one, it’s funny. One of the guys says in this low voice,
‘Why’s everybody always pickin’ on me?’ 
”
    Liddie giggled, but Sam looked troubled. “Why are they?” she asked. “Why
are
they picking on him?”
    The machine whirred, the opening guitar of “Charlie Brown” strummed in, and the girls grabbed their skirts and hopped up and down on the small dance floor. Their shoes clapped and their pinkish legs bounced, and they spun and teetered, laughing. Nat didn’t want them to get too loud but she didn’t want to rein them all the way in, either, because this was their day. They were out in the world and it was warm and sunny and she was not in the mood to be the grown-up.
    When the song finished Liddie stood on tiptoe and said “Kiss, Mama,” and Nat burst out laughing. At that moment, her daughters’ happiness seemed so simple, so easily earned and free of adult corruption, she didn’t even want to go home.
We could wander the West, we three
.
Nothing would tie us down!
Then the thought chilled her: What a terrible notion, selfish and sinful. Of course she wanted to go home.
    And she was punished for having that thought at all, because Sam, spinning vigorously though the music had stopped, toppled sideways and knocked a