Four Corners: A Novel - Tapa blanda

Maddie's eyes opened as we crossed Pueblo, Colorado's southern limit ? forty miles from her folks' place in Cañon City.
'I took the liberty,' I said. 'I figured we should break the news proper to your family.'
She wiped the sleep from her face, not even surprised we were on the highway, and put her small hand over mine on the steering wheel.
'My mother's not going to believe her little girl is engaged.’
It was late in the morning of New Year's Eve 1999, and Maddie said her parents were just like us. I didn't see it, and in another hour, when they finally put their eyes on me, neither did they. While Maddie spooned instant coffee into four boiling mugs, her folks stared at me in silence. Her father was a long time coward ? one of them tall balding numbers, older than his wife with big hands and uncomfortable with his own size. He whispered into his little wife's ear instead of speaking to me straight and when she opened up her arms to embrace me, this substantial man shot me a look of womanly envy and hate. Maddie's mother smiled and smiled till she took all of me in, and then she got quiet and didn't know what to do with her face. She followed me around their sitting room, tapping at her perm and straightening her jeans. I didn’t let down. I groped all their favorite holiday decorations down to an ancient portrait of Father Christmas, his tiny glasses barely curbing his bloated greedy nose.
They asked me how we met, and why I loved their daughter. Why me, Francis Bruce, the declining ox with a rough cough and red eyes? A thirty-five-year-old land surveyor who made no airs, predictions or promises for Maddie's future. I didn't tell them the truth. I was thirty-seven, and Maddie had worked up the bit about the land surveyor. I told them Maddie clippered my early gray hair short at a cheap haircut spot in a strip mall, and I fell in love. I didn't mention when she was drunk or high their little daughter seemed lost but turned hungry for sex. I didn't say we met a year prior in a dirty hippie den outside Española ? how we drank vodka and sucked on tangerines, and how we held our breath till the liquor and drugs betrayed us, flushing our faces red then pink ? I didn't say any of it. And her mother thought the haircut yarn was straight till her husband whispered into her ear something wise.
Her face went white, and she took Maddie upstairs by the arm. I stood alone in the kitchen with her old man. He looked at the ground, and I don't know if he thought I was laughing ? because I was coughing. But he looked up at me, pulled his thin red lips back and told me to get the fuck out of his house. I didn't fight and walked out making sure not to touch a thing. I waited in the truck for Maddie to come storming out, crying all over her face. She was huffing and puffing and then three steps from the car door, she bent over and got sick all over the sidewalk. She didn't stop though. She just finished up, spit, and slammed the truck door hard when she got in. Her father stood at the window shaking his head back and forth. He turned his head to the side and said something over his shoulder. I lifted my hand to him and, but he didn't move. He just sipped at his coffee and closed the drapes slow, not wanting to be the first one to turn away.