In Memorium - Camilla Basham

“Are you coming or not?” The authority in his voice reminded me of my father when he would beckon me to wake for school in the morning after my mother’s pleading had failed.

“Well, are you?” His voice was strong, he was half my age, he had the power and believed he would always have the power. It was all I could do to not physically pour myself into his opened palm.

For a fleeting moment my father’s hand, calloused, stained, trembling appeared in my mind’s eye.
And there in my mind I smoothed down the pleats of my skirt, tightened my ponytail and fell into the creases of his warm palm smelling of motor oil and beer.

“A man can only stand here so long without feeling rejected.”

Loneliness jabbed me in the gut, fear threw me an uppercut to the chin and I did what any middle aged woman faced with the inevitably of mortality and a vodka buzz would do: I traded in the mediocre stemware for his warm, calloused, stained, steady hand.

Not surprisingly he lived in walking distance from the bar in a double wide. I wondered how many lonely women he picked up there. I caught myself feeling disdain for such women: those who would be led out of a bar by a stranger for the sole purpose of fucking in the middle of the day, but then I realized I was one of them.

Attempting to make idle conversation to offset the awkwardness I looked around his apartment for something, anything, to compliment in typical southern fashion. “Nice….plant.”

“It’s fake.” He moved towards me. “I’m away a lot. Fake works for me.” I took two steps back still desperately searching for the art of conversation at which I’m sure I once excelled, at least in more sober times.

“What do you do for a living?”

“Seven and seven.”

Seven and seven they called it, meaning he worked on an off shore oilrig, home for seven weeks, offshore for seven weeks. I remembered his type from childhood. They were the rock stars of rednecks.