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Show body to be pulled against his, the whole time wishing to be gone. Within an hour, we finished the last loop around the lake and were riding around the yard surveying our work. The grass was fresh and new, a slate of green. Still quiet, the house saddled the two lakes, the plate glass window in the living room perpetually keeping an eye on things. A light in the kitchen suggested that coffee was made, but I could not see heads moving around or life of any sort. The hum from the tractor remained steady, drowning out the cicadas and frogs, and we bumped around the uneven ground, retracing the patterns in the lawn we had cut just an hour before, returning to where we had been. He cut the engine and we sat there, me between his legs, only the thick sound of tree frogs heard. My grandpa's hand moved under my shirt, rubbed my flat chest, groping, stretching, circling around. Trapped between his legs, I didn't move even though I knew what he did was wrong. He held me and rubbed me and then rubbed some more. I am still there, at the age of eight, on a tractor, in the middle of the lawn in a town that lies in the exact middle of the country, our household goods waiting for us in Washington, my books and toys wrapped in beige paper folded like origami, the Nebraska sun steady and hot, the back of my thighs slick with sweat and sliding along th( vinyl seat, his purple-veined hand, wrinkled with age and worn from overuse, rubbing chest, my shirt pulled up, leaving my belly exposed to the world. He pulls me closer to his body, lingering on my nipples, never saying a word. The summer I was eight and we stopped to see my grandparents on the way to Seattle 97 |