It was a quiet Sunday evening in Maine. The sun was just beginning to set below the trees, and the sky was lit up in colors of red and orange. She had been walking for a while, out in the hot summer air, and the cool breeze that blew her hair back felt nice. Everyone had always told her than she blended in with the summer sun, with her rosy red hair and stand-offish demeanor; she was almost one with the essence of the season.

Today, however, she felt more like winter, cold and desolate. She had been walking for miles and miles, trying to trace her steps back home. Her mother had pulled her rickety old car over to the side of the road and forced her out the passenger’s side door, slamming it shut and leaving her there in a cloud of dust and sticky heat. She knew better than to bring up daddy, after his overdose three years earlier he was a memory best kept quiet; apparently her big mouth didn’t get that memo. Daddy had been a heroin addict when him and mom had gotten together, but he’d promised to get clean for her. Mom was still gullible like that; she just didn’t know how she could never tell when daddy was high.

There were always signs, and though she knew them well, mom had always seemed oblivious. The tell-tale needle mark in the crook of dad’s arm, or the top of his hand, the glassy eyes, and the good humor . . . Daddy was never in good humor when he ran of smack. He’d only ever hit mom once, and when he sobered up he held her and cried and said he was sorry, her and mom both knew he was sorry. After than mom didn’t come out of her room much, only to go to work and make breakfast every once in a while, other than that it was just her and daddy; up until daddy died.

All she’d asked was if she could go see him, she hadn’t been to talk to him since the funeral, and even then it was just her. She didn’t understand why it made mom so mad whenever she asked about him; mom had loved daddy just as much as she did. When she’d asked the preacher about it he said that mom was dealing with the loss a different way than she was, but after three years she wondered why she wasn’t done yet.

The sun was almost completely down and she figured she’d walked about 5 miles; she didn’t even know if she was headed toward her house anymore, she was just walking because there wasn’t anything else to do. Her shoes hadn’t been in good shape when she’d put them on, but after so much walking they were just scraps hanging off of her feet and slowing her down. For the last mile or so she’d been looking for a place to stop, and she wasn’t having a lot of luck. She’d been watching something in the distance, but the more she walked the farther it seemed to get away.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, she came upon a rickety looking stone fence. It wasn’t real pretty, a bunch of little rocks stacked on top of each other with two big rocks to hold them up. There were rocks of all kinds of colors and shapes and sizes, even ones with little shiny specks that reflected what was left of the sun back into her eyes. There could have been all kinds of creepy crawlies and venomous things hiding in that fence, but she really didn’t care; she was tired and wanted to sit down. She plopped down on one of the bigger rocks and stretched out, staring up at the clouds.

It was getting old, living like an orphan even though she’d only lost one parent. She was cooking, and cleaning, and doing dishes, and feeding the animals. Mom was working a little and sleeping when she wasn’t. She was getting tired of doing all the work and paying all the bills while mom wasted away in her room. It just wasn’t fair. She was young and full of life, she shouldn’t have to sit around and take care of the messes everybody else left behind.
In a way her life was a lot like that fence, mom and daddy had been the two big rocks supporting all the other little things in her life, and though it wasn’t stable, it was good enough to hold everything up. But then daddy died and one of the big rocks went away. If a big rock left the fence and you pushed the other one up to keep all the little rocks together, the fence could still stand up, but if you left the other big rock where it was, the entire thing would collapse. That’s what happened to her life. She was doing ok before daddy died, but after mom didn’t step up to help her any, and she could keep everything she wanted.

She couldn’t buy fancy things anymore, nothing shiny like the pretty rocks in the fence, those had fallen. She didn’t have any friends anymore either, all the pebbles that held up the breakable rocks, she was lonely. Shelter wasn’t too much of a problem, but a lot of the time she didn’t have electricity, which was ok during the summer, but made the cold winter nights too much to handle. There went the soft little bits of dirt that held the rocks just far enough apart that they didn’t crush each other with their own weight. Overall she was just pieces of a broken person who lived in a broken home, after losing part of her broken family, and all of that was crushing her.

She knew that she had rested long enough, and that if she wanted to make it home by the time the dangerous things came out she should probably getting a move on. She knew that momma would never understand what she had to say about daddy, and after a long walk she realized that there was no point asking about it. If she wanted to go see daddy she would have to go herself, nobody was going to take her. She relied on herself for everything else, so why not that to? After all, she was walking home with her own two feet because mom wouldn’t give her a ride. So, as the sun finally set on the dusty road and any hope she had to have back her happy home, she walked down the drive-way and into her dark house, where they couldn’t afford to pay the bills. She sat down in daddy’s only chair kicked off her worn out shoes, and watched momma slink into her dark room and close the door, and a few more of the rocks fell out of the wall.