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Addie ain’t great at pretending to be a lady, but they figure she’ll do in a pinch—which is what they’re in—except, when Addie pulls the dress on and steps out of the washroom, Moze says, “Alright, well I reckon we were always gonna get caught eventually.”
Addie knows the fault lies with her legs, which are too knobby—she has always been knock-kneed—plus her calves are covered in scratches from the bramble patch they ran through last week. The law was hot on their heels and her hand was clamped in Moze’s and every few steps Moze would moan, “I knew this was a bad idea,” even though the idea had been his.
Moze is nothing if not a revisionist.
At fifteen, Addie has had some schooling and she is starting to sprout—though not enough to fill out the front of the bodice. She looks like a boy in a sack dress.
Addie glares up the hall and then she turns to glare at Moze. “You got any safety pins?” she asks.
—
Moze says, “Well. Well, I. Well.”
He clears his throat. He peers at Addy and leans back, then leans in again and squints. At last, he says, “I guess we are related then,” though in the last few years they have taken his paternity as a matter of course. Addie is wearing one of Moze’s suits with the hems pinned and her hair slicked back with crisco. A blind man could see she is the spitting image of Moze.
Addie does not have any particular feelings about the suit except that she wishes she had not felt so bad in the dress. The suit feels better.
Together, they walk down the stairs and through the lobby at a pace one could describe as leisurely. Then they step out into the dusty street. No one spares them a second glance.
-
In the hot quiet dark, while the car is parked on the side of the road hours and towns later, Moze says, “I always wanted a son.”
He sounds real casual but Addie knows he doesn’t feel casual. He is looking at her in his shirt and dress pants.
“You got me instead,” Addie tells him, smoke burning through her nose.
Moze takes the cigarette out of her mouth and throws it into the field. “I know what I got,” he says.
-
Moze does not comment when Addie begins to wear pants regularly. He continues to help her clasp her mother’s pearls around her neck every morning like always.
“Ain’t you gonna say something to me?” Addie demands one night, rounding on him in the hall in front of their rooms. “You gonna tell me to start wearing dresses again? To curl my hair?”
Addie is spitting mad in a way that feels foreign even to her.
Moze looks her up and down, unimpressed with this temper tantrum. “Now why would I go and do a fool thing like tell you what to do?” he says.
He steps into his room and slams the door.
-
They are sitting on the porch of a boarding house when Moze asks Addie if she wants him to cut her hair.
Addie props her foot on the porch railing to stop the movement of her rocking chair. “Cut my hair?”
Moze gestures at his head. Then he clears his throat. “Like mine, I mean.”
The evening presses in close, summer heat like a blanket thrown over the night.
“Be good for this weather,” he explains.
They find a stool somewhere and Moze drapes a towel over her shoulders. Neither of them say a word as thick chunks of Addie’s hair begins to fall into her lap.
Snip, snip.
When he is finished, Moze disappears upstairs and returns with his shaving mirror.
Addie looks at herself for a long time. All she needs is a spritz of her ma’s perfume and then she will be perfect.
—
Outside of Alabama, Moze stops the car in the middle of the road.
Addie wants to yell, What’d you do that for? but she remains quiet. She has been waiting for some sort of confrontation.
Moze does not speak for a heartbeat and then he asks, “I didn’t do this, did I?”
Addie looks at him. “Would it matter if you did?”
Moze sighs. He stares hard up the road. “Maybe you ought to have stayed with your aunt.”
“You go ahead and take me there right now!” Addie snarls. “We can be at her house in three days!”
Moze steps on the gas again. “Now don’t get hysterical,” he says.
—
A few days later, Moze punches a man in the middle of the street. A sleazy shoeshine took one look at Addie and said, “Just what the hell are you supposed to be?”
The shoeshine did not see Moze coming. Moze knocked him flat.
Addie does not speak to Moze for hours.
Then, as the car putters up a deserted stretch of highway, she throws open the passenger door.
Moze seems to be expecting this move. He brakes hard.
Addie hurls herself onto the road and Moze tumbles out right after her, both of them breathing hard and furious already. They face each other across the hood of the car.
In her pants and button-up shirt, in her mother’s pearls, Addie yells, “Just what the hell am I then?”
“Dadblammit!” Moze yells back. “You’re my kid!”
They get back in the car. They don’t fight about it again.
—