tears that she’d been holding back all afternoon brimmed in her eyes again.
She looked down quickly so that Chloe wouldn’t see. “I— I don’t know,”
she managed. “We can go for a visit one weekend soon, but you’re in
school here now. I’d like you to finish out the year here.”
“But I want to go back and live with Meemaw and Peepaw again.”
“I know. I know you miss them, but you love your school, don’t you?
You have Joseph and all your friends—”
“It’s not the same.” Chloe dunked the apple slice again, but she bit it
this time. “I hate the skin.”
“Sorry. I’ll cut it off next time.”
That seemed to pacify Chloe for a few minutes. “I miss the horses and
the cows. I miss the chickens. I would do all my chores if we went back.
Please, Mom! Please?”
“We can go for a visit,” Taylor repeated softly. “I’m really trying to
make this work, sweetheart. We wanted to have some new opportunities.
We wanted to see and try new things.”
“Yeah, but why here? Why couldn’t we see them on the farm?”
Taylor knew what Chloe meant. Why couldn’t they have stayed where
they were and just visited the city or gone somewhere else? Taylor didn’t
know how to explain to her daughter that the people back home were very
small-town and had the kind of mindset that sometimes went with that. That
they weren’t open to accepting the fact that she was gay. That she wanted to
share her home with a woman. That Chloe would have two mothers.
Her friends told her that she was crazy. That she was just going
through an experimental phase. That she couldn’t possibly want to be with a
woman when she’d dated, and had a daughter, with a man. If only they
knew what special kind of torture it had been for Taylor to try all her life to
be something that she wasn’t. If only they knew that she’d had to literally
work herself up to having sex with Joe.
She was never attracted to him and she didn’t want to admit why.