Bitter Texas Honey

Joan stopped at a gas station in Waco to change into her rodeo clothes—a skintight black minidress, turquoise earrings with dangling black feathers, and black cowboy boots. On her way out, she bought a bottle of Sprite, which she half emptied onto the pavement, then filled to the brim with vodka that she kept in her trunk.

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A little past six, she met her favorite cousin, Wyatt, in the parking lot of his apartment complex. For the past three years, he’d been living here, in his friend’s dining room, ever since getting kicked out of her dad’s house in Dallas. Before that, Wyatt had lived with various other friends and family members, including with Joan’s brother in North Carolina, where Wyatt tried to kill himself. Now he desperately wanted to join the marines.

The air was much colder up in Fort Worth. Joan shivered, her breath visible, walking toward Wyatt’s idling car, taking large gulps of her vodka Sprite.

“How much for the night?” Wyatt shouted through the rolled‑ down passenger window. A radio DJ’s voice emanated from the car at an absurd volume.

“Ten thousand,” Joan said, and gave him the middle finger. “Sold!” Wyatt exclaimed. She climbed into his beat‑up, pewter‑colored Nissan Maxima, which had been gifted to him by his brother‑in‑law after he totaled their grandfather’s pickup truck. The car was dented on every side and looked like it had been in a demolition derby or a hundred hailstorms. Wyatt was underdressed, as usual, wearing a white Smoothie King T‑shirt from his previous job, blue jeans, and black high‑top sneakers, untied.

“You got your braces off,” Joan said.

“Yep,” Wyatt said, and smiled big. He had gotten braces voluntarily at twenty‑one to fix a minor, hardly noticeable cosmetic issue with his canines, puzzling everyone in the family and making him appear fourteen years old.

“Looking good,” Joan said.

Wyatt’s front license plate, dangling by a single screw, scraped the pavement as he drove out of the parking lot and turned onto the street. The radio was stuck, playing a country music station at full volume. Earlier that day, he explained, all the buttons had stopped working at once in this unfortunate position. It was this music or nothing at all.

“Quite the dilemma!” Joan yelled.

He swerved and hit a curb on purpose. Joan gripped the handle above her window, her knuckles white. Wyatt threw his head back and erupted in a heavenly cackle, until eventually, Joan relaxed and started laughing too. How could she be afraid in the face of such un‑ bridled joy and destruction?

She jotted the scene down in her notebook the rest of the way, thinking Wyatt’s car might be a good symbol to use in the new story she would send Roberto, somehow representing male angst and con‑ fusion in contemporary America, like Dennis Prager talked about. She wasn’t sure how Wyatt’s car would help illuminate her narrator’s “in‑ ner life.” But she could iron that out later.

Wyatt, still giddy from the excitement of the fender bender, sang along to “Born Country” by Alabama as he turned into the parking lot, then backed hard into a cement pole before pulling neatly into a space. Joan’s bottle of vodka Sprite spilled all over the floorboard and her cowboy boots. Wyatt turned off the car and a jarring silence overtook them.

“You made me spill my vodka, fuck face,” Joan said, wiping off her boots, her ears still ringing from the music.

“Sorry. Guess you’ll have to deal with real life a little longer,” Wyatt said in his chipper way.

“That sounds terrible,” Joan said. She hated “real life.” They got out of the car to assess and admire the new body damage.

They walked along the redbrick sidewalk, past the stockyards and boot shops and barbecue restaurants.

“How’s your book going?” Wyatt asked. When they briefly lived together at her dad’s, the summer after she was pulled out of Miami, they’d talked about writing nearly every day. Together they conceived dozens of ideas for brilliant, edgy films, hilarious skits, and heartbreak‑ ing songs. Of course, they had never come close to finishing anything. Joan explained that she was working on something new, a short story. She told him about Roberto, whom she wanted to impress. “He wants to see something that showcases my narrator’s ‘inner life’ or something,” Joan said with a shrug.

“Inner life? That’s easy,” Wyatt said. “Just write something about love.”

Joan scrunched up her face. “I never write about that kind of stuff.” “Why? Isn’t love the most universal subject there is?” Wyatt began singing the love medley from Moulin Rouge, one of his favorite films. When they lived together, Wyatt had watched the movie all day every day for five days straight, until he had all the lines and lyrics memorized.

“Maybe . . .” Joan said with hesitation. She felt that Wyatt was be‑ ing naïve. He’d always been a hopeless romantic, obsessed with their grandparents’ fifty‑year marriage and still hung up on his high school girlfriend. Sure, love was a good subject for musicals and Disney films, but not for literary fiction. She wanted her work to be considered “high art.” Besides, love had always been the most embarrassing part of Joan’s life. Something to conceal, not showcase.

“What about you?” Joan asked, changing the subject. “You writing anything?”

Wyatt told Joan he’d been working on a new song and asked if she would take a look at the lyrics. He was basically a music prodigy who had taught himself to play the guitar and the piano by the time he was ten, but he had always struggled with words.

“Let’s see,” Joan said. Wyatt handed her a warm, crumpled‑up piece of notebook paper. The title, “Vines,” was written at the top in messy, childlike scrawl. As usual, the lyrics appeared to be about his ex‑girlfriend from high school, Ruby, a petite girl with a flat affect and an encyclopedic knowledge of the Dallas Cowboys.

Joan stopped walking to read. The page contained several inscru‑ table words, spelling errors, entire crossed‑out lines. Sometimes, when trying to read Wyatt’s handwriting, Joan wondered if he had some kind of undiagnosed learning disability. But after a minute, she understood. He’d written a pretty straightforward metaphor about vines growing out of Ruby and following him everywhere. No matter where he went or how many times he severed them, the vines always returned and wrapped themselves around his body, squeezing him like a boa constrictor, so tight he couldn’t breathe or move anymore. It read more like a horror story than a love song.

“Try to get more specific,” Joan said, handing him the piece of paper. “Like, what kind of vine is this? Poison ivy? Grapes? Something else?” They passed by an enormous Texas longhorn wearing a saddle, a line of urban Texans in western cosplay waiting to take pictures on its back. Wyatt stopped walking and squinted at the piece of paper, as if the answer to Joan’s questions were hidden there. Joan loved the way Wyatt took her feedback so seriously. More than anyone else in the family, he seemed to see her for the great writer she was destined to be. He made her feel wise and authoritative, like a seasoned creative writing professor instead of some loser who couldn’t finish her novel.

“Probably something with thorns,” Wyatt said. “Roses?”

“Too cliché,” Joan said.

“I’ve got it,” he said with a jolt. “Blackberry vines.”

“That could work,” Joan said.

As children, she and Wyatt and the rest of their cousins had har‑ vested the dark, sweet fruit that grew along the pasture fences in the summer at their grandparents’ sprawling West Texas ranch.

“She’s sweet, but she’s sharp,” Wyatt said, excited now. “I like the taste of her, but she hurts me. She makes me bleed. Oh! And her hair and eyes are black.”

“That’s good. Write that down.” Joan handed him her pen, and Wyatt scribbled the word blackberry at the top of the page. Joan could do this every day, she thought. With Wyatt, it was the process of cre‑ ation that she enjoyed, not the end product, which for them never manifested. But that didn’t matter. She felt a pang of sadness that they no longer lived under the same roof. Wyatt crumpled the paper back up and shoved it into his pocket as they ascended the stairs of the Cowtown Coliseum.

*

Inside the arena, the West family took up two rows of green metal chairs. Their grandparents, Wyatt’s mother and third stepdad, his siblings and their spouses and children, and their aunt and uncle and cousins were all there. Joan’s father was there too, with a woman she had never seen in her life, a brunette he introduced as Jelly Bean. Jelly Bean worked as the receptionist for the California branch of her dad’s business—a for‑profit career college called Audio Professional Academy (AudioPro) that taught people to record and produce their own music.

“Meet your new mommy,” her dad joked when Joan shook the woman’s clammy hand. This was the same thing he said about all his new girlfriends.

“Welcome to Texas,” Joan said flatly, before squeezing past Jelly Bean to sit near her grandmother, Mama, and Wyatt’s mother, who were in the middle of a passionate discussion about Barack Obama and how terrible he was for the country. Mama was confiding in hushed tones that Obama was not only incompetent, he was the literal Antichrist. She was reading a book that explained it in detail. “It’s all coming true,” Mama said in her soft southern drawl. “Everything in Revelation is happening before our eyes.”

“Well, he’s definitely not a Christian,” Wyatt’s mother replied in partial agreement.

Screens around the auditorium lit up with digital American flags, flapping in digital wind while an aggressive post‑9/11 song played over the loudspeakers. Joan surveyed the crowd, a sea of Wrangler jeans and sparkling belts, shirts adorned with gaudy crosses, animal prints, and beer logos. Toby Keith’s deep, velvety voice filled the arena with quips about bombing the Middle East. As tacky as it all was, there was something oddly comforting about being here, away from the liberal bubble of Austin. Joan loved the familiar smell of soft dirt and manure, the tucked‑in shirts and boots and swagger.

“Cap‑and‑trade’s gonna run the economy into the ground,” Joan’s grandfather, Papa, said with a detached certainty. He was a petroleum geologist who’d begun his career at Texaco in the fifties before being poached by a private oil and gas company. He still collected hefty royalty checks on all the wells he’d discovered—in Midland and Alaska and the North Sea. He was chewing on a toothpick, wearing a suede cowboy hat and an enormous silver belt buckle adorned with the letter W. “That, or we run out of oil altogether. Doesn’t matter much to me.” Papa shrugged. “I’ll be dead here pretty soon. But you need to think about it.” He winked at Joan and she smiled. She appreciated the calm, easygoing way her grandfather approached every‑ thing, including society’s imminent collapse.

“Obama’s gonna shut me down!” Joan’s dad interjected. His trade school was subject to heavy regulation by the Department of Education. When Obama first took power, things got much worse for her dad financially. He’d been forced to hire several administrators just to keep up with all the paperwork. “He wants to throw people like me in jail!” Joan ignored her dad’s comment. Of course, he was exaggerating.

But she didn’t say so. She didn’t want to give him the pleasure of an argument. Besides, she understood the overarching point he was try‑ ing to make. The regulations were unfair in that they applied only to for‑profits, not community colleges or universities. He was criminally liable if his school didn’t abide by the rules. And big government was the enemy of the people. She heard about it on the radio all the time. To keep the conversation flowing, Joan added one of her own gripes with Obama into the family pile‑on.

“His healthcare plan is going to destroy the medical profession and turn us into the next Cuba,” she declared. “We’ll probably all die on waiting lists to see our doctors, who will all suck equally by then, because there will be no incentive to work hard in med school.”

Papa smiled with a twinkle in his eye. “Joan’s got her head on straight,” he said to Mama, then turned to Joan. “Thank god we got you out of Miami when we did.”

Mama leaned over and squeezed Joan’s hand. She looked glamorous in a sparkling top and bold magenta lipstick. She smelled of fresh, expensive powder.

“It’s so nice to have you back home,” she said. “Back to your roots.”

Joan smiled. It felt good to be in sync with her family again. Being a bisexual leftist had made family events awkward and unduly stress‑ ful. In Miami, Joan had read the communist manifesto and had been convinced that people like Mama, Papa, and her father were evil oppressors. Now that she was conservative, these gatherings could be relaxing, even fun. Joan ordered a huge beer and a big puff of cotton candy from a man walking around in a red Dickies T‑shirt. She chugged her beer as she watched a rodeo clown dancing to “Cotton Eye Joe” in the center of the arena.

Wyatt, uninvested in politics, was in the row beneath her talking with his brother‑in‑law, troubleshooting his dire financial situation. He really needed to get his ducks in a row, according to the marines recruiter he’d been talking with. Wyatt owed money to pretty much every member of the West family, as well as the IRS, several big‑box stores, credit card companies, his orthodontist, and the Duke University Hospital, where he stayed for two weeks after his suicide attempt. He also had two warrants out for his arrest for unpaid parking tickets, which the recruiter was helping him take care of. Wyatt’s brother‑in‑ law was emphasizing to Wyatt not to disclose that he’d gone to the hospital at Duke or that he’d gone to rehab afterward.

In the center of the arena, a group of rural junior high students chased a terrified calf around. After a few minutes, a boy tackled the animal, slamming its body into the ground and wrapping its legs rapidly with a rope. The crowd cheered and hooted and hollered. Poor cows, Joan thought, the cotton candy dissolving into sugar on her tongue. The world was so cruel to them.

The lights went down, and the whole coliseum went dark and quiet. “God Bless the USA” began to play. A woman on a white horse rode slowly around the dirt in large circles, her posture upright. She looked elegant in her blue sequined top, but also commanding, hold‑ ing the reins in one hand, and in the other, a comically large Ameri‑ can flag. The woman leaned forward as the horse began to trot, then canter, then gallop. The flag flapped wildly in the air as the song hit an emotional crescendo.

Joan turned to Wyatt, thinking they might share a look, poke fun at the over‑the‑top song. But Wyatt was swept up in his own uni‑ verse, standing and singing along with animated passion, tapping out the rhythm on his chest. He looked almost like he did at their grand‑ parents’ Baptist tent revivals, where he always had intense spiritual experiences, crying on his knees in front of the traveling evangelists, while Joan would sit as far back in the tent as possible, her arms crossed, feeling numb.

Joan watched the woman on the horse again. The arena was pitch‑ dark now, a single spotlight following her. She had to admit it was impressive: the horse’s speed and the way the woman was so connected to and in command of the animal. The song too was catchy and moving. Joan remembered coming to these rodeos as a child, when a cowgirl was all she wanted to be. Not a writer. Not an artist. Just a woman on a horse, sparkling. It had seemed like such a simple and lovely existence back then. When the song finally ended, before the rodeo officially began, everyone in the arena bowed their heads as the announcer started in prayer. The men removed their hats and placed them over their hearts.

Dear Heavenly Father, the announcer said. As cowboys, we don’t ask for much.

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From Bitter Texas Honey by Ashley Whitaker. Used with permission of the publisher, Dutton. Copyright © 2025 by Ashley Whitaker.