Backseat Saints

CHAPTER


11
I WAS FIFTEEN MINUTES LATE, but I made my shift at Grand Guns. Two sales guys, Derek and James, were holding down the fort.
Derek said, “There’s the princess now,” when I came in, and looked meaningfully at the clock. Derek was kind of an a*shole.
The Grandees’ main store had tables of accessories and sales items in the center, but most of the serious inventory was locked inside cases that ran all the way around the three back walls. The rifles were on vertical display in glass-front cabinets. In front of them, glass-top display tables holding the pistols were connected in a U-shape. There was an aisle running all the way around between the rifles and the pistols where the sales guys worked. On the right side, near the doorway to Joe Grandee’s office and the storage area, there was a table for the register. It had a butcher-block top instead of glass, and James was sitting behind it on what was usually my stool, minding the till. He didn’t give me any crap, though, just did a drawer check and signed out to go work the floor.
I slid into my place and tried to look like I was working, but my gaze kept stealing to the phone. Any moment, Thom would call to check up on me. I’d practiced lines in my head on the flight home. I wanted to sound bored and a little lonely for him, completely regular. After my shift, I could swing by the bank and clean out our money, then I was smoke. I’d have a twenty-hour lead time before Thom’s flight landed tomorrow.
An hour later, I still hadn’t heard from him, and that wasn’t right. He knew my schedule. Another half hour passed, and I was considering calling his hotel when I heard the door that led from the alley behind the store into the storage area crash open. Joe Grandee called, “Grab that other box.” Then I heard the unmistakable sound of Thom’s voice calling back, “I got it.”
The air left my lungs in a whoosh, and I couldn’t get more in. They weren’t supposed to be back until tomorrow. I took three desperate panting breaths and tried to make my spine unstiffen. Thom came out of the door that led to the offices. I felt him behind me, felt the push his big body gave the air. He came up right behind me and said, “Hey, baby.”
I turned on the stool toward him, trying to look pleased and surprised, but as soon as I saw him, my face froze. Thom was different. I could see it in every line of his tall body. I could smell it on him. I gave him a smile close to one of Ro’s, and he curved his lips up at me, but his eyes stayed dry and flat as matte wall paint.
“I thought you were coming back tomorrow,” I said. He didn’t make a move toward me, didn’t touch me or lean in to kiss me, and that was wrong, too.
“I couldn’t wait to see you,” he said, but he didn’t sound eager. He was in the doorway behind the low glass-top display cases, nothing between us but three feet of cool air, quickly growing cooler. I got up off the stool and went to him and lifted my face. He leaned down and put a kiss on my mouth. His lips were hard and tasted foreign, not like Thom, as if he’d been eating tamarind and cumin on the sly. As I turned to go back to my stool, he gave my ass a slap, hard enough to sting.
“There’s my girl,” he said.
Joe appeared in the doorway behind Thom and said, “Help me get this crap out of the truck.”
Thom nodded once. He was rubbing at his lips with the hand that had slapped my ass, as if he was balming them up with what that had felt like. He turned and went into the back room.
“Help me” in Joe Grandee language apparently meant, You go get the crap out of the truck while I throw my jumbo-manly key ring in the drawer by the register, grazing your wife’s titty in passing, and then plop down on my stool.
“Go give Thom a hand unloading,” Joe called to the two salesmen. “Ro and I got things under control out here.”
James and Derek went on in the back, and Joe and I sat on our stools, his by the door, mine behind the register.
“What are y’all doing back?” I asked, trying to look anything but panicked.
“Hell if I know,” Joe said. “Thom worked the show like a whirly-dervish all morning. Then he said he was done and flying home. I could come or not.” Joe was different, too. Not to such an extreme, but something had changed. I’d long wished he would keep his greasy eyeballs off my ass, but now his gaze kept drifting to my belly. He made significant eyebrows at my abdomen and added, “Why don’t you tell me why we came back early?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He waggled his eyebrows at my belly again and said, “I figured we came home to get us some good news?”
“That’s nice. What happened?” I said.
That surprised him enough to make him drag his gaze up off my body to my face. I was surprised they knew the route. “Thom said on the way to Houston you’d have some good news to tell me, once we were home.”
He shifted his eyes right back to my stomach, a gloaty smile spreading across his face, and all at once I remembered puking on the way to the airport. I’d implied to Thom I might be pregnant, to get him on the plane.
“I do not have good news to tell you,” I said, and I bit down hard on the last word.
Thom ducked his head in through the doorway and said, “Where do you want that box of brochures? In the files?” He looked only at his father, not even glancing my way, and I felt it again, this overwhelming sense of other coming off him.
“Nah, set ’em by my desk,” Joe said. “Your wife here says she doesn’t have any news to share.”
Thom’s flat gaze finally shifted to me again, and I felt a chill run up my spine at the ice in it. “I’m sure she will soon,” he said. “All the way home on the plane, when you were saying I was so quiet? I was wondering to myself what the baby might look like.”
“He’ll have the Grandee nose,” Joe said. “Both of Larry’s do.”
“Maybe not,” Thom said, with too much meaning behind it, right to me. He went back into the offices.
Joe was showing me all his teeth.
“I’m not pregnant,” I snapped.
“But Thom said—”
“I was wrong, Joe. Now can we drop it, please?”
There was silence between us for maybe thirty seconds, and then Joe said, “I think you should go to a lady parts doc, Ro. Make sure all your bits work.”
I spun sideways on the stool to face him. “Good Lord! We only just started trying.” I was angry that I felt I owed him even that much of an excuse. “Keep your mind out of my pants, please, Joe.” I wanted to say more, but something was off with Thom, way off, and I couldn’t afford to get into it with his daddy right now.
“You think it’s Thom, huh?” Joe waved one hand around at all the weapons lining the walls and cackled. “That’d be rich. A Grandee man shooting blanks!”
“I’m not at all worried about Thom,” I said in the coldest voice that I could muster. Inside, I was so worried about Thom, I felt like my spine was shivering itself into bits.
“Me neither,” Joe said agreeably. “You’re the one that worries me. Your family was Catholic, after all. You should go see a doc.”
I felt my eyes going narrow, drawn into the conversation in spite of myself. “I don’t think a gynecologist can cure Catholicism,” I said. “I don’t even think that’s something you can see with a speculum.”
Joe grinned, genial and intrusive. “A Catholic only child? That says to me your mama had something bunged up in her works. You could, too.”
I stood up, furious, just as Thom stepped back into the room, right between us, and a good thing, too. He glanced from his daddy, sitting splay-legged and relaxed on his stool, to me standing with my shoulders braced and my hands curling up into fists.
“What did I miss?” he asked.
I said, “Your daddy is a little too interested in the state of my Catholic vagina.” I was breathing hard, eyes on Joe.
“Oh?” Thom said, the single syllable tolling low, like a warning bell. His wrongness, the not-Thom-ness of him, froze me in place and killed my temper with his daddy. Thom said to his dad, “Pop, you want to go take a look, see if we put things where you want ’em?” and that didn’t sound like my Thom either.
Joe looked back and forth between us, puzzled, as if he sensed it, too. Finally he nodded and said to Thom, “Come on, then, I’ll show you how I want to shift things around.”
“Derek and James can help,” Thom said. “I need a minute. I’ve yet to say a proper hello to my wife.”
Joe pushed his lips into a down pout, but he went. Thom didn’t come toward me, though. He leaned in the doorway and crossed one foot over the other. “So. What has your Catholic vagina been up to while I was gone, Ro?” The words were right. It was a Thom-style line, and it should have made me grin, but the tone was all wrong.
I stared at him, wary. “Just hanging out in my underpants, like always.”
“Is our home phone fixed?” he asked, and with such purpose behind the question that I felt myself go very, very still inside.
“The guy is coming tomorrow morning,” I said.
“Mmm-hmm. Here’s a funny thing, Ro. I already know what’s wrong with it.”
“You do?” I said. I swallowed, way too loud. I was suddenly pleased to have Joe and two sales guys in the store. I did not want to be alone with whoever the hell this was.
He nodded. “I was worried about you, sugar. Alone in the night with no working telephone. I called Larry from Houston and had him go by the house, check on things. He said the phone line had been cut. Deliberate. Now, who would do that.”
It didn’t tilt up at the end like a question, but I answered it like one anyhow. My voice came out high and breathless. “Kids, maybe? Teenagers?”
“I don’t think so,” Thom said.
My fingers moved up to press my forehead, and I don’t think I’d ever hated Larry Grandee more than I did at this moment. That chinless bastard must have been delighted to check up on his brother’s wife.
“Larry said you weren’t home,” Thom went on.
“Oh,” I said, faint. “I had some errands.”
“Yeah,” Thom said. “So I had him go back again, late.”
“Oh,” I said again. I couldn’t look away.
“You never came home last night, Ro.”
Who is he?
I felt my face flush, deep and hot, obvious, a confession. He was still and so controlled, but any second I felt that he could calmly put his clenched hand through my face, all the way into my brain. His eyes had never been so cold on me before, or so at peace.
This wasn’t temper. This was a fundamental shift. He believed I’d stepped out. He’d added up my strangeness over the last ten days, my new wayward bedroom tactics, my overnight absence, and drawn an inevitable conclusion. He would end the game for good now, no winners.
Ro Grandee’s husband had been peeled away, and I was seeing the thing that lived underneath. I stood in the middle of Grand Guns eye to eye with the hanged man, and his face was smooth and rested. A muscle jumped in his cheek, twice, and the rest of his face stayed as still as a corpse’s. I could see my own death reflected there.
“I think you should drive me home now,” he said. “This is something we should talk about alone. You and me.”
“I have another two hours on my shift, baby,” I said. I let my body shift into Ro’s good-girl posture. No danger in being her now. Looking at him, I knew that there was no Thom left for Ro to go back to.
The new Thom had one thing in common with my husband: He did not know who he was looking at. He had sensed a difference in the hospital and while I looked for Jim, but he’d never understood his Ro was gone. It was the only advantage I had, and I smiled Ro’s guileless smile at him, because I was damn well keeping it.
“James and Derek can handle it,” Thom said.
“I better wait until Janine gets here. I was a couple minutes late and Derek was already being a dick about it.” I could not get in the car and leave with him. If I went off with this man alone, it was the last thing I would ever do.
He shrugged, but his expression did not change. He didn’t even have one to change. He was blank and still with cold, black purpose. “Derek will get over it. Get your purse.” He stepped forward and closed one hand around my wrist like a manacle.
“Thom!” Joe called from the back. I jumped, but Thom stayed still.
Thom didn’t answer. We looked at each other. He was thinking snake and bird, but it was snake and snake, and I was not done yet.
“You better see what your daddy wants,” I said. “Sugar.”
Joe appeared in the doorway. “Thom, boy, get your ass back here. I can’t find that Mauser.”
Slowly Thom’s neck turned, his focus leaving me. Joe’s influence held, even with this creature.
He said to his father, “Okay. I’ll find it, but then I think I’m going to grab Ro and cut out early. I’m tired and I want to take my best girl out to dinner.”
“Sure.” Joe shrugged. “It’s been slow, Derek said.”
Thom looked at me, his lips curving into a smile. This was chess, and he’d just hemmed my king. His goal was to get me off alone, and I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t win in a straight-up fight. He was so much bigger. A gun could level the playing field, and guns were all around me, but Thom was as good with one as I was, maybe better. Him or me. If he took me off alone in the car, armed or not, it would be me.
“That sounds great,” I said, working Ro’s best perky. “We should go to Rollo’s and have crab legs.” They were Joe’s favorite. “You want to come eat with us, Joe?”
Joe paused, tempted, but the ploy failed. “Too much to do. Plus you kids need to get working on that other project we’ve been discussing.” He waggled his eyebrows at my belly in that same too interested, pervy way. “Come on, Thom.”
“Just a sec,” Thom said to his daddy. I smiled, trying to look sweet and clueless, but Thom had been hunting with his daddy since he was six. He lifted his head and breathed in a huff of air, smelling fear. If he walked out of this room now, he suspected I’d run like a deer. He was dead damn right.
“Give me your keys,” Thom said to me. “I’ll grab my bags out of the truck and move ’em to your car after I find this gun.” Check.
“Sure, baby,” I said, no hesitation. I dug my keys out of my purse and handed them over. That threw him off balance. He wasn’t expecting me to give up my escape route. I smiled as I handed them over, Ro’s smile, pleased to be getting off work early and taken out for seafood.
His hand closed around my keys. He hesitated, not sure what he was missing.
“Thom,” Joe said, impatient.
“All right, then,” Thom said. He turned away.
Ro’s expression dropped off my face and shattered on the floor. This was my one advantage: I knew what I was dealing with, and he did not. I was Rose Mae f*cking Lolley, and I wouldn’t go trotting off like a lambkin to my death.
He was barely out of sight before I was moving, grabbing Joe Grandee’s jumbo-manly key ring out of the drawer by the register. The Buick had been Charlotte’s before it was mine, so of course Joe still had a key. He had a key to our goddamn house, too. For once the fact that Joe’s big sniffer was jammed hard into every crack of my life was working for me. I fisted my hand hard around the keys to keep them from jingling and ran, light and soundless, toward the front door.
I pushed it open and the bell chimed.
“Welcome to Grand Guns!” I cried out, loud and cheery to the empty store. “What can I help you find today?”
I slipped out the door and crossed the parking lot at a sprint, trying to find the Buick key on the overloaded ring as I fled. I barreled into the side of the car. My hands were so sweaty, shaking, I could hardly get the key in the lock.
I fumbled and twisted and got the car door open. I jumped in and started the engine. I risked a glance at the store. The front door was still closed. I threw the car into drive and floored it.
As I turned out of the parking lot, I saw Thom come out. He moved slow and deliberate, staring after me, implacable. He knew I had no place to go. I took the first turn I came to to get away from his gaze. Then I drove for home as fast as I dared.
I wasn’t sure how big my lead would be. I had Joe’s truck key on the ring, and that would buy me time. Joe would hold him back some, asking petulant questions about why his wife had taken off like a gazelle with his key ring. James lived close and usually didn’t drive to work, and Derek was an a*shole. If Thom couldn’t borrow one of their cars, he’d have to wait for Larry to come get him or for Charlotte to bring Joe’s spare keys over.
I drove like the very devil back to our house. It would cut my lead to stop at home, but I didn’t have a choice. Gretel was there, and the first thing he would do would be to snap her neck for the crime of being something I loved.
The weather had been fine, so I’d left her in the backyard with triple rations by her doghouse for the thirty hours I’d been in Chicago. That made it go faster. I left the Buick running on the curb with the door open and ran across the yard to the back gate. I called her and she came slow-trotting over, wagging, pleased to see me. When she reached the fence, she stopped, puzzled, sensing my agitation.
I flung open the gate.
“Take a walk? Take a walk?” I said, trying to sound cheery. I failed, and her eyebrows stayed worried, but the words were familiar. She came through the gate and stood panting up at me as I peeled the Buick key off Joe’s ring and dropped the rest of them onto the lawn.
I didn’t dare take time to pack. I didn’t even go inside my mint green house. Instead I ran fast to Mrs. Fancy’s, Gretel trotting close on my heels, and pounded on her door. No answer.
She was not home, and Thom had my keys, including the one that unlocked her front door. I paced the porch, twice. I should leave. Who knew when she’d come back? I couldn’t afford to wait. I started down the stairs, then paused. Gretel whined, nervous.
“Let’s take a ride? Take a ride? Let’s go!” I said. Gretel knew these words, too. She turned and ran to the Buick and hopped into the open door, taking up her rightful spot on the passenger seat.
Meanwhile, I peeled a paving stone out of Mrs. Fancy’s front flower bed and toted it back to the porch. I lifted it, shoulder high, and smashed it through the narrow window by her front door. It shattered the glass and fell through, landing on the square of parquet flooring with a clap. I saw a yellow streak as Phil ran to hide. I reached through the hole and unlocked the door.
It cost me two precious minutes to run to the guest room closet and snatch Pawpy’s gun and my real wallet out of the shoebox, but I felt better once I had the gun. I grabbed my mother’s library book, too.
Mrs. Fancy had a place for Gretel at her son’s, she’d said. She knew a shelter that could hide me. But I couldn’t wait for her, and anyway, everything in me said it was too damn close. There was no place in this city, in this state, where Thom Grandee couldn’t find me. He was coming toward me now. He’d keep coming. He always had, since the day I’d seen him through the window at Duff’s Diner, walking jaunty and confident back to claim me. The only thing that had changed was his purpose.
I got in the car and started driving, away from my Crest-colored house and from all the roads Thom might be driving down if he was coming toward me from the gun store. Gretel whined, wanting me to open the passenger-side window, but my car was easy enough to spot without her big head hanging out, licking wind.
“Shush now, Gretel-fat,” I said.
I drove as quickly as I dared for Highway 40. A red light paused me at the turn. Highway 40 stretched all the way across the country. If I turned west, it would take me to California, where my mother waited for her book.
At the airport, she had told me I was welcome. Ever since, I’d been flat haunted by images of Ivy Wheeler in a lemon grove, of living in a cool and hilly place. Ivy would be safe and new, just born, a creature with no husband and no history.
I found myself staring down the highway to the west. My mother had been offering me a place, but it was not a place she’d made for me. She’d saved money in her flowered shoe, planning all the while to leave me behind. She’d made plans that did not include me. She’d packed my regular brown bag lunch and sent me off to school with her regular quick kiss on my cheek. Then she’d left, and I’d come home to find the world had changed.
She’d remade herself, rebirthed herself as a gypsy, but she hadn’t brought me with her and showed me how. Ivy Wheeler was only a haircut, some borrowed clothes, and a pair of steel-toed boots. I faced west and said, “F*ck you,” to my mother. “You aren’t welcome.”
The light went green and my hands were on the wheel, turning it. My foot jammed the gas pedal down. The car lurched forward with a screech, turning away from her, leaving two lines of burnt rubber, curving toward the east. I knew the South. I could go to ground there. Scared, yes. But too damn mad to lie down like Thom’s good girl and die.
I ran home.