Gone Country

“Hello?” I answered my cell phone. The call on the other end might as well have been from another planet far as far as I was from New York City.

“Where are you?”

“Alabama.”

“What?”

“Alabama.”

“I heard you. Why?”

“Dad is burning a couch in the front yard,” I said. “Mom just got back from the liquor store, barefoot, where she demanded the discount for Barefoot wine that they offer on Tuesdays.”

“It’s Friday,” my brother said.

“Exactly. ‘And you know what I told him,'” I said doing my best imitation of my mother. “‘I said, do I look like a woman who don’t know what day it is?’ And then she broke up laughing and hacking and wheezing and lit a cigarette. But she got the fucking discount.”

“Course she did. What did the couch do to dad?”

“Who the hell knows. They graveled the driveway.”

“Bet it looks better than the mud.”

“It’s some kind of accomplishment.”

“When are you coming back?”

“I’m not.”

Leave a Reply