Happy Monday, friends!
I’ve been working on a contemporary fiction project again recently and am currently fleshing out the history of one of my main characters. I wrote this piece to help develop a certain aspect of his character/personality and thought I’d share it here!
I hope you enjoy.:)
“I heard Mother and Daddy talking real quiet in the kitchen last night.”
Debbie Rutledge, having cornered her little brother where he was helping his model horses play rodeo beneath the piano, passed along this bit of knowledge in a covert tone of voice.
Roy’s eyebrows knitted. “We’re not supposed to eavesdrop.”
Debbie cast her eyes downward to Roy’s favorite palomino, thick eyelashes spreading on her round cheeks as she adopted an attitude of having been properly chastised. After a few moments, she leaned close to Roy’s sunburned ear. “Daddy said we’re moving again.”
Roy forgot any scruples regarding his sister’s questionable behavior and stared at her in mournful disbelief. “Why?”
“He’s in the Air Force, silly. When you’re in that, you have to move a lot.” And Debbie tossed her hair over her shoulder in an aloof way that Roy understood to mean If you were ten, you’d understand.
Now Roy stared at his palomino (who had stopped barrel racing to listen to Debbie’s bad news) and tried to understand why the fact that Daddy worked with planes meant they had to move…again. Couldn’t planes fly so fast and be back to the same place in a jiffy? “But why?”
“Daddy says it’s just part of the job.”
“Can we ever come back again?”
Debbie shrugged carelessly. “I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t hear them talk about that.” Her eyes brightened, like she was actually excited about having to leave. “I wonder where we’ll go! Maybe we’ll get to have a blue house or live near mountains.”
Roy ran a finger down his palomino’s painted mane. He thought about the good friends he’d made here – Doug and Tony and Ben in particular, who’d taught him how to play cops and robbers – and the ice cream shop that was just down the street and the hydrangea bush beneath his bedroom window that was the best hiding spot ever for hide and seek.
Even if they did live in a blue house near the mountains, would there be friends like Doug and Tony and Ben and an ice cream shop and a hydrangea bush there? Roy wasn’t so sure. When he found something good – like his palomino, which he’d found last summer underneath the slide at the school playground, half-covered in mud – he never wanted to let it go. You could never be sure you’d find something quite so nice ever again.
“When I grow up,” Roy said slowly, “I’m going to get a job where I can stay in one place forever and ever.”
His palomino liked that idea, too.