Backseat Saints

CHAPTER


15
I AM LIKE AN ANGRY five-year-old, holding my breath until I am blue enough to match her decor. I am giving her the silent treatment, except I am almost thirty, which means I do not crumble after ten minutes and weep into her skirts. Instead I meander around whatever room she’s in, touching all her things.
She has appointments all day long, crystal junkies and new age woo-woos coming in for readings. Whenever one rings her wind-chime doorbell, she asks me politely, in formal language, to excuse myself. I’ve toted a Barbara Kingsolver book to my room, and each time I go up and close my door and read in silent, furious obedience. When I hear the client leave, I mark my place and come back down to steadfastly ignore her where she can see me do it.
She has lots of appointments, and many of her clients are her friends, too. I hear them air kissing at her, the rustle of hugs and cheery greetings as I go up the stairs. None of them are surprised to see my ass disappearing upwards. None of them ask to be introduced. They are waiting, I suppose, to see if I am going to stick. No sense befriending another Lilah. The way my room faces the staircase, sounds travel from the parlor directly up to me. I could leave the door open and eavesdrop, but I am more interested in The Bean Trees than bullshit fates invented by my mother.
After her eleven-thirty leaves, she turns on the red-palm window sign. Belgria is a busy street. In fifteen minutes, a drive-by supplicant is ringing her bell, wanting a peek at the future. I don’t get to see the walk-in. She won’t even open the door until I am in my room with the door closed.
Perhaps she is worried that this passing chimer will turn out to be my husband, come to kill me. Thom Grandee in the parlor with the wrench. That’s ridiculous. Thom is looking for his Ro clear across the country. She is not there, and she is not welcome here. If he did know to look in Berkeley, I strongly doubt that he would stand politely on the porch and ring the bell, bearing murderous intentions like a hostess gift.
During our shared and silent lunch, my mother hooks another true believer with her sign. I am banished back upstairs halfway through my grilled cheese sandwich. I hear her answer the bell, and after a brief exchange, the door closes again, and there is no more conversation. This second potential walk-in must not have passed muster in some way.
I open my door and see her coming up the stairs with a basket of fresh laundry. She walks past me without speaking and goes down the hall to her room. She closes her bedroom door decisively, but I follow her and let myself in. She is standing on the far side of her queen-size bed, facing me. She has dumped out a jumble of bright cotton clothing on her wave-covered comforter, and she’s folding it. Her lips thin as I enter, but she does not tell me to get out. Her room is done in the same endless blues as the downstairs. It’s bigger than mine, but not as bright because her windows are covered with heavy drapes.
I come closer, stand across the bed from her. She has collected a blown-glass and crystal menagerie, and I sort through it, bored. I find sharks nested with seals, lambs cuddled up to lions, and no people: She’s made paradise on the bedside table. I put rough hands on her unicorn, picking him up and flicking his silly garland of blue roses. “You’re out of luck, buddy. No virgins here,” I tell him.
“Be careful, Rose. That’s breakable,” she says, stern and maternal.
“I’m Ivy,” I say to the unicorn, and set him down dead on his side.
Mirabelle’s nostrils flare. She leaves the rest of her blouses in a scatter to wrinkle on her bed and goes back downstairs. I go back downstairs, too.
She sits down at her table, shuffling her cards. I see my father’s note still sitting on the bookshelf, neatly folded, but now it is directly in front of Persuasion. I’m pretty sure I set it down closer to Sense and Sensibility. I don’t think she’s read it, but she must have picked it up and set it back down wrong, or at least pushed at it with one disgruntled finger. Its presence is eating at her edges. Good.
I go to the other end of the room to touch things in her small store. A bowl full of polished rose quartz shares a shelf with Saint Christopher’s medallions. Crystal balls are lined up with no irony beside a display of hand-carved wooden rosaries. She sells tarot cards here, too, and books on how to read them. The decks are stacked beside prayer candles with the images of obscure saints frosted onto the tall glass tubes that hold the scented wax.
I pick up Saint Jude and check the label. Twenty dollars seems excessive, but then again, this is a magic candle. It says so, right on the sticker. A bastardized novena is printed on the glass opposite Jude, something between a spell and a prayer. I set Jude down and paw through the candles, finding a host of less familiar friends: Expedite, Lucy, the Infant of Atocha. They’ve left Mother Church and gone voodoo.
While my mother sits on her chair and shuffles and watches me, I take up the Saint Lucy candle. The spell on the back is a demand for Lucy to reveal a hidden truth or expose a liar. I hold it up to show my mother, modeling its useful marvels as if I am Vanna White. She stares deliberately away from me. I tuck the candle into the crook of my arm and keep shopping.
I have just picked myself out a beautiful green rosary with hand-carved wooden beads when the doorbell chimes again. Her next supplicant has arrived. She starts to speak, but I know the drill by now. I am already heading upstairs. I put the candle and the rosary in my room, unpaid for. I rummage around my room for matches and find an old hotel pack in the writing desk, stuck way back behind some pale blue stationery and a veritable host of pens. Even the frickin’ ink in them is blue.
I follow her rules all day: I don’t go back to my husband. I don’t use drugs or shoot anyone. I don’t poke my nose outside the house. I use the back door in the kitchen to let Gret in and out to play with the other dogs or use the lawnly facilities, piously careful not to let a single toe over the threshold when I open it for her.
Gret spends the afternoon with Buck and Cesar and Miss Moogle, but at her regular dinnertime, I go into the kitchen and hear her single-footed scraping at the back door. When I let her in, I bend down to ruffle her ears; she smells strongly of curry. She must have availed herself of Parker’s dog door while he was fixing his own dinner. I squat down and scratch her head in earnest, saying, “That’s very naughty.” She pants into my face, and she even has curry on her breath. Parker is encouraging her.
I eat my own dinner with my mother. She fried catfish in cornmeal, and she serves it with hush puppies and buttered peas. She may have lost her accent, but she still cooks like a southerner. We eat and bristle at each other on either side of the butcher-block table in her blue-and-cream kitchen. We are almost all the way through dinner when I finally realize that she isn’t speaking to me, either. The silence I thought was my choice has, in fact, stretched both ways, and she has been as purposeful about it as I have been. I take a sip of sweet tea to clear my throat. I am now perversely ready for conversation.
“What really happened the day you left Fruiton?” I say casually, as if these aren’t the first words I’ve said to someone besides Gretel and a glass unicorn in over twenty-four hours.
Her lips thin and her eyes narrow. She tilts her head sideways and speaks to her peas in an irritating singsong, like she’s saying a catechism. “I went to mass and then confession. I prayed, and Saint Cecilia answered, telling me—”
I interrupt her with a loud snort, unladylike as I can manage, and say, “Cecilias. Plural. They’re activists, Momma, not deities. You’re telling me your underground railroad doesn’t have kid tickets? You have to be this high to ride that ride?”
She glares at me and drops the singsong. “I was praying. It was an answered prayer. I had to shake the dust from my sandals and go, right then.” It sounds rehearsed, a thing she has told herself over the years. She hasn’t said it enough yet, though. Not even she believes it. But her voice gains conviction when she changes the subject, saying, “He’s going to find you. He’s going to come here and kill you in my house.”
I shrug, unmoved. “It’s good that you have hardwood floors, then. Easy cleanup.”
She slams her fork down. “Stop it.”
Now I understand why she’s been mad at me all day. This is about Thom. She told me to do something, and I have blatantly not done it. The last time this happened, I was eight and she ordered me to clean my room. I chose to scrunch up in a blanket and reread Charlotte’s Web instead, and when she came and saw I’d disobeyed her, I was grounded. I’m grounded now, too, in a way.
We finish our meal and go off to bed, reenshrouded in our separate, angry silences.
A second day passes, much the same, and then a third. Each night at dinner I play Beast to her Beauty, asking my single question, asking why she left me behind. She sticks with her story about being told in a vision to go at once, alone, and my dinners all stick in my craw.
By the morning of the fourth day, I’ve exhausted all my adrenaline. It’s hard to stay angry when the sameness of every minute nibbles away at my resolve. My mother is waiting for a client at her table, and I am back in her store. I’ve practically memorized her limited inventory. I step to the blinds and stare out into the front yard.
Lilah is back. She’s beside the gate, begging hands folded over the top of the fence, looking yearnfully toward my mother’s place. I am so desperately bored that I think she might have the better spot.
“Come away from the window, Rose Mae,” my mother says.
“Ivy,” I toss over my shoulder. I do not move.
Lilah sees me, or at least my shape in the window. She straightens, craning forward. “Mirabelle!” she calls, plaintive and hopeless. “Mirabelle!”
I hear my mother get up from her table and come over. She’s moving quickly, and when she comes up even with me, she grabs the cord and jerks her wooden blinds closed with a clack. We stand side by side, no view but the slats, and we both choose to stare at them rather than each other.
“You should go talk to her,” I say.
“Why?” she asks, dry-voiced. “Do you no longer require the room?”
I make a slit through two of the blinds with my fingers. I see Parker has come out, trailing his pack of rowdy dogs. Gretel is among them, tripping along on his left heel. He’s wearing a crumpled button-down shirt, extremely faded, with black cotton pants that flap around his ankles like pajama bottoms. The man should clearly not be allowed to dress himself. He’s crossing the yard to talk to Lilah in that weird Shaggy-style walk, slumped down to be shorter, hands where she can see them.
“Come away from the window,” my mother repeats.
I ask, “Doesn’t he have a job?”
“Who?” my mother says. When I don’t answer, she reaches to make a peeping slit between two blinds for herself. “Oh, yes. Parker teaches anthropology over at Berkeley City College. He keeps odd hours,” she says. We watch Parker standing a good foot back from the fence, talking to Lilah, who is gesturing wildly and weeping. My mother watches me watching, and then she says, “Why do you ask?” Her voice has sharpened.
“Just curious,” I say. “He seems nice.”
She laughs, but it is a hard sound, not at all amused. “No, Rose. Just no.”
“Ivy,” I say.
“When that man you married comes, he will eat Parker alive,” she says. “From the feet on up.”
“All I said was, he seems like a nice man,” I say, and she says, almost running over my words:
“Exactly.”
Parker leans earnestly toward Lilah. He must be repeating his offer to get her into a shelter because she shakes her head at him, vehement and angry.
“I’ve never really known one of those,” I say in musing tones, mostly because my interest seems to bother her. “A nice man. I wonder what that’s like.”
“I’ll thank you not to experiment on Parker. He lost his wife to breast cancer, and she was so young—still in her twenties. They were crazy about each other, too. It was a complete tragedy. He’s had enough hard times without your mess.”
Lilah is turning away, trailing disconsolately back up Belgria. Parker stays by the fence, calling after her.
“How long ago did she die?” I ask.
“A while,” my mother says, cagey.
“A year?” No answer. “More than two years?” I ask. Nothing. “More than three?”
Parker turns away from the fence and walks back toward me, spine straight, sure-footed and easy. Shaggy-Doo is a costume, so familiar and well used that he can pull it on and shake it off between heartbeats. I’m intrigued now for real, not only because it bothers her.
“She died six years ago,” my mother says, begrudging me the information. “But it could be six months or six decades and it wouldn’t change your situation, Rose Mae.”
“Ivy,” I say automatically.
Parker is angling away from the porch stairs. It looks as if he’s heading around to the backyard, with the dogs surging around his feet in a cheerful four-pack. He disappears from my line of sight.
“He wouldn’t do you much good anyway. He’s been celibate since Ginny died,” my mother says, changing tacks. I make a piffling noise, frankly disbelieving, and she adds, “It’s a euphemism, Rose Mae.”
“Celibacy is a euphemism?” I ask, but then I get what she means. “You mean he’s impotent?” I take her silence as confirmation. “How interesting, Mother mine, that you would know that.”
“He is my good friend,” she says, prim-voiced. “And he is not for you.”
I turn away from the window and face her. “Who is he for, then, Mirabelle?” I ask. “Is he for you?”
My mother draws back, affronted. She turns away and stamps back toward her table, saying, “Don’t be ridiculous,” over her shoulder.
“I’m not. You two clearly get along, and he’s not at all bad-looking,” I say. “As for what’s not working, they have pills for that these days. You could—”
“Rose Mae! Don’t be vile,” she says, hurling herself into her chair and glaring at me over the cards. “He’s young enough to be my—” And then she stops. I feel the word she hasn’t said like an X-Acto knife, slim and sharp, opening my gut.
A heated silence stretches in between us. I change the subject. “What happens if I leave? If I break your rule and step outside?”
“Don’t test me,” she says.
“I could go out in the yard, play fetch with Gretel.”
“Do it,” she says, the temper she’s been low-boiling for days finally roiling and foaming over. “Hell, go out the front. Run after Lilah and tell her you’re allowed outside though she was not. Hit her in the face with it, why don’t you? Dance and holler. Call attention. Make it easy for that man who is coming here. Help him find you, so he can snap your neck like an eating chicken’s.”
She’s so angry, she’s shaking with it. I’m surprised at how much southern has come out in her speech. We stare at each other, and she’s panting. My breath speeds up to match hers, and in this tense and ugly silence, her mellow doorbell chimes.
It’s a hugely inappropriate noise. It startles her. We both look automatically to the other window and see the red glow of the sign seeping through the slats. She’s left it on, and it has attracted a walk-in.
“Shall I get that for you?” I ask, as sugar-voiced as a flight attendant offering a blankie. I am at the front of the room by the store’s display shelves, much closer than she is to the door. I step out and put my hand on the knob, mostly to prang her. But she draws herself upwards, setting her shoulders, saying, “No, Rose Mae,” in the “thou shalt not” commanding tones of some risen minor prophet.
“For the love of Jesus Christ, Claire,” I say, “can you not get that my name is Ivy?”
She takes a long stride toward me, not listening, intent on stopping me. I spin fast and swing open the door. Wide.
A pair of servicemen stand on the porch. They aren’t in uniform, but they are young, with whitewalled hair. Navy or maybe marines. One is short and broad with a hard face shaped like a shovel, and when he sees me he whispers, “Hallelujah,” through his teeth.
The other one is tall and skinny, and he hardly looks old enough to shave. He has milky skin and chocolate-colored puppy eyes that tilt down. He’s swaying, as if his sea legs are telling him the porch is moving. They are sweating, both of them, and the potent smell of hops and tequila rises off their skins.
The shovel-faced one crowds the doorway, saying, “What’s your name, honey?”
I lean back and say, “I think you have the wrong house.”
The tall one smiles at me, too wide, his mouth shaping a leer that is almost comical. He crams in close behind his friend, filling the doorway. “We want to get our palms read.”
I shake my head and say in quelling tones, “You boys do not want to get your palms read.”
The one with the hard face thinks I’m being funny. He crowds in even closer and says, “You can tell my fortune, honey.” He speaks directly to my breasts, as if he believes my nipples know the future.
The tall one smiles even wider, goofy drunk and harmless, but his friend muscles forward again, coming so close to me that I move back. He closes the space I make between us immediately, like it’s a dance step, and now he is across the threshold. His friend follows, but it is not the friend who matters in this room. It is this short, broad fellow with his bull shoulders and thick neck, one hand reaching to cup his own crotch and give himself a squeeze, hot eyes on my waist and hips and breasts. I step back again, fast, almost stumbling as my heels hit the lowest stair. I step up on it to keep from landing on my back in front of him. The tall one pulls the front door shut.
My mother glides quickly across the room, inserting her small body into the space between me and the sailors. “Rose Mae. Go upstairs.”
I back up another step, instantly obedient. I don’t even correct her. I want to go. I’m afraid. It would be stupid not to be, but at the same time my fingers are tingling and adrenaline has been dumped into my veins and I am not bored now, oh no. Rose Mae Lolley only needs a little lead time. I keep backing up the stairs, and my eyes feel hot and gritty and alight, as if I have come on with a sudden fever. I keep my gaze and my feral smile on the short fella, promising him things, but maybe not the things he is expecting.
My mother is still between us, blocking the base of the stairs. She is small, like me. He looms over her and around her, but her words hold him more than her small presence. “Not so fast, sailor man. You have to pay to play. Come sit down.” She glances over her shoulder to see I am not quite to the landing. “Rose. Go. Up.”
I turn and run lightly the rest of the way into my room. Pawpy’s gun is in the drawer of my bedside table. I snatch it up, the weight of it familiar and sweet in my hand. I slot bullets into the barrel, fast and slick, and then fit the barrel into its cradle with a satisfying snap.
I set the gun down long enough to pull off my boots. My sock feet whisper against the hardwood floor as I slip fast and quiet back to the landing.
I can hear my mother saying, “… two hundred dollars for the full read.” It’s a lot more than the price she quoted in the airport, but no one at the table is thinking about tarot readings. She is pretending to sell my sweet ass, while truly she is buying time. I know it’s only a ploy, but I’m still offended that she doesn’t charge more.
As I cross the landing, I hear the shovel-faced one say, “Me first, mama.”
I hear the rustle of bills, and then my mother says, “Rose Mae will call when she’s ready. Shall I turn the cards for you while we wait?”
The tall, milky one laughs, high and nervous, as I come creeping down the stairs. Shovel Face says, “Why not.”
Halfway down, I can peer between the ceiling and the banister and see the two men sitting at the far end of the room at her reading table. Their backs are to me. My mother is across from them, eyes on the cards, shuffling. She has not lit her white sage candles. She is pale, and I can tell from the set of her mouth that she is more afraid than I am.
My mother says, “What’s your name?”
“John Smith,” says the hard case.
At the same time, the one who doesn’t matter says, “Jamie.”
I am four steps from the bottom now. I train my sights on the back of the hard one’s head. My mother looks up from the cards and sees me over his shoulder. Her face flashes relief. She flips a card and says, “Well, John Smith, I’ve turned the nine of syphilis.” She flips another. “Now I’ve crossed it with the four of herpes. The cards suggest that you stop screwing whores.”
“You bitch,” Shovel Face says, and his chair scrapes back as he stands.
“I’m ready for you, John Smith,” I say, sweet-voiced, and he wheels around to face me. He sees the gun, and when he looks into its round, black eyehole, it becomes all he can see. I am colors and vague shapes behind it. I could take my shirt off, and he would not address my prescient nipples now. The gun is the whole of me, and it has his complete attention.
I hear my mother say in a steady, even voice, “Jamie, who is Gloria?”
Jamie is staring at the gun, too, mouth open, eyes completely round, sitting with his hands resting on the table where I can see them. When my mother speaks, he blinks like he is waking up and says, “What?”
“Gloria,” my mother says, steady and so calm. “Who is she?”
“My little sister?” Jamie says, confused.
“Does your baby sister want you out with ‘John Smith’? Would she like to know you are paying to use broken young women in such an ugly way, catching their sad diseases?” My mother’s voice is the voice of every mother, and Jamie can’t look at her or even me. Not even the gun can keep his gaze off the floor.
Jamie mumbles, “How do you know her name?”
“I’m psychic, you moron,” my mother says, cool, and then, “Now her phone number is forming… I see a seven. I see… a six? No. A nine.”
Jamie gasps, but I speak only to the hard one: “I think it’s time for you boys to go.”
John Smith is still staring at the gun, but his mouth sets and he says, “Fine. Give us our money back, you bitches.”
My mother starts to reach for it, but I smile and say, “She read the cards exactly right, honey. You got what you paid for.”
My mother stills.
John Smith’s initial fear is fading. Now he is calculating odds. He’s measuring his brawn and his training against the space between his body and mine, his body’s speed against my steady hands, wrapped around the old revolver. He hasn’t a prayer, but he may well be doing the math wrong. He does not know Rose Mae Lolley.
“Or stay,” I say in Rose Mae’s voice, and cock the pistol. The shift and click of the metal draws out her pleased and creamy smile. “Please stay. I’d love for you to stay.”
I am fervent, sincere, and John Smith is suddenly all done here.
They head to the door, Mr. Smith first and Jamie shuffling shamefaced after. I keep the high ground on the stairs, Pawpy’s gun trained steady on John Smith’s whitewalled head until they pass me and file outside. The door closes behind them, and my mother runs across the room to draw the dead bolt. Then the gun gets heavy and points itself down, aiming at the floor between my socks. My mother leans her face against the door, sides heaving. I uncock the revolver, and at the sound she whirls to face me.
“Are you stupid?” she says.
At the same time I say, “What was that?”
“That,” she says, “is not uncommon. More than half the signs for readers are a front for whores. When I answer the door, johns know this is not a cathouse. But you, three buttons on your blouse open, your hair all mussed, you look like an ice cream. When I tell you to get upstairs before a reading, then Rose Mae, you get upstairs.”
“Ivy,” I say, but with no conviction.
My mother looks from my feet to the gun I’ve aimed between them to my eyes to the fever I can feel on my cheeks. My heartbeat booms away inside me like the drums of war.
“Ivy,” my mother scoffs. “Look at you. You are only what you are, Rose Mae.”
I scoff right back, “Then there must be only Lolley women in the room here, Claire.”
“Don’t miss my point,” she says, her voice blade sharp. She stalks slowly toward me, coming up three stairs. She puts her hands over mine on the gun. I cling to it, and we freeze there. “Look at you,” she says. “Look at you. Why is your husband still breathing, if you have all this fight in you?”
I shake my head. I have no answer. I tried to shoot him and I failed. Ro tried to live in peace with him and failed. Even now, if it was his head in the crosshairs instead of Mr. Smith’s, my hands would not have been so steady. Even now, if he pulled his Thom-suit back on over the monster, showed up with flowers, said, “Ro, baby, come home…”
I would not go. But I would feel the tug.
My grip weakens as her hands get more insistent. I let her slide Pawpy’s gun out of my fingers. She turns away, and I sink down to sit on the stairs.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asks the gun. There’s no safety, so she breaks it expertly into its separate pieces.
“The pin broke,” I say.
“I mean what’s wrong with you, all you young women.” She is pacing up and down her parlor, one chunk of gun in each of her waving, angry hands. “My friend’s daughter, she cuts open her own skin to let the bad out. She’s a child, barely in high school. What bad can she have in her? Half her little friends are starving themselves, or puking up all their food. It’s the same thing, but the starvers say, ‘Oh, I could never cut myself like that,’ and the cutters say, ‘I’d never marry a man who hit me,’ but it’s all the same thing. You are all killing your stupid, stupid selves.”
I stay slumped on the stairs with no answer for her. I am so tired now. She is still ranting, her voice shaking with anger, as righteous as Ezekiel.
“My ten o’clock today? Bette? You saw her. She can’t be more than twenty-five, and she’s wider than most walls. She brought cookies with her, for me, she says, and sets the plate between us. She never took a whole cookie, but she sat there pinching bits off one cookie till it was gone, then another, pinch by pinch, until half the plate had been moused away.
“Then she points through the window, to Lilah mooning on the fence outside, and says, ‘I don’t understand how she can go back to him when he beats her. She might as well put a gun to her own head.’ Meanwhile, Bette is so trapped and hemmed by all the fat on her that she can’t breathe. She’s killing herself, same as my friend’s daughter with her razors. Same as Lilah.” She pauses to point at me with one accusing finger, the rest of her hand wrapped around the barrel. “Same as you.”
I stand up, grabbing the banister and hauling myself to my feet. “You are no different.”
She snorts in rude denial. “I earned my new name, Rose.”
“Please,” I say. “Then how come you can’t keep your eyes—or your hands—off that crumpled bit of scrap paper I brought over from Alabama?” I am gratified to see how immediately her eyes go to my daddy’s note. “The one true princess of Zen, afraid to read a note.”
“I am not afraid,” she says, but now her righteous indignation has a crack in it.
The doorbell chimes again.
We freeze, then she makes a noise that’s halfway between a laugh and a gasp and says, “That’s just Lisa, my next appointment. I’ll turn the sign off. You need to—”
“I know the drill,” I say, and head upstairs to my room on shaking legs. I go inside, and the walls seem to have crept in closer to each other while I was downstairs. The furniture in its familiar configuration grates at me. I need to be someplace where there is more air. I turn around and around in my room, panting like Gretel.
I can’t stay in here, because this room is full to the roof with the knowledge that my mother is right: I can say that I am Ivy, but I am only what I am. But I also cannot go outside. I feel it in the bones of me. Not because of her rules, or even because the two angry sailors may still be near; my mother’s constant warnings must be getting to me. I can’t go out, but I can’t stand to be trapped in this room with myself just now.
There is a window over the writing desk. It looks out on a small piece of roof that hangs over the backyard. I go to it and flip the latch, and it rolls open easy at my touch. I snatch up Saint Lucy’s candle and the rosary and the matches and step onto the chair. I get on my knees on top of the desk. There is no screen, and I crawl right out the open window onto the slope piece of roof that juts out under it.
I don’t have much of a view. I can see a slice of Parker’s backyard grass and the backside of the house behind this one. Still, I can breathe out here on the shingled slope, bathed equally in cool salt air and warm sunshine. I tilt my head up and look at the bright blue sky. I need to pray, and here I’ve found as good a shrine as any.
I put Saint Lucy down and light the wick, placing her in the corner where the gable offers shelter from the wind. I close my eyes and take up the beads.
I work my way around the rosary, trying not to think too hard on what it means that my mother is so right. New name or no, I have brought Rose Mae Lolley and Ro Grandee with me. I do not want to believe that they are in me, always. That they are me, always. That’s a path of thought that leads me close to Thom, so it has to be a problem for tomorrow. I need to still my heart and stop my mind from racing. I pray all the way around before the ritual calms me enough to let me open my eyes.
Parker has come into the piece of his yard that I can see. He is centered on the lawn facing my direction with his arms up, palms facing out, and he is standing very still. He is stiller than I have ever seen a human being stand. Even my daddy, laying in wait in a deer blind, would twitch more than Parker. He is still wearing those floppy black pants that look like pajama bottoms, but he has taken off the shirt. He has a sprinkling of dark red-brown hair on his chest. He’s pale all over, and his skin fits tightly over wiry muscle.
Finally his arms move, slowly. Then his whole body moves into a series of weird, slow poses that look like what might happen if kung fu and ballet had themselves a baby. He is fighting nothing, in slow motion. It’s completely unhurried, but so controlled that after only a few minutes he is sweating. He stills and holds, then moves again, deliberate and fierce.
The third time he pauses, he holds for several minutes. I’m exhausted with the adrenaline hangover, worn out from worry, and it is incredibly pleasant to blank my mind and watch a male body move with such deliberate grace. It doesn’t hurt a bit that the body in question has taut coils of muscle in the shoulders and a six-pack.
The dogs come streaming through the backyard. The big mutts run past Parker, brushing their friendly sides against his legs, but it is as if they do not exist. His gaze is turned inward, and his body moves, releasing measured and unhurried violence on monsters only he can see. Buck and Miss Moogle disappear from my line of sight, lapping the house, but Gretel pauses to watch Parker with her head tilted to a puzzled angle.
Cesar stops, too, but he’s not interested in Parker. His ears perk up, going on yellow alert. He peers all around until he sees me on the roof. Then that tattling little shit goes right to red, cutting loose with a yappy string of warning barks.
Parker’s concentration breaks. His hands drop and he follows Cesar’s line of sight up to my rooftop perch. I lift one hand in a wave, busted. Parker shakes his head at me, chuckling, and I can see what he is thinking. He is trying to decide if I am rule breaking, if this counts as outside the house. Parker does not want me to end up another Lilah-at-the-gates. I want to explain, but I can’t call down to him. Mirabelle will hear, and I do not want any more Mirabelle just now, thank you.
I turn and get on my hands and knees. I crawl my top half back through the window. I lie stomach down on the writing desk, butt humped over the sill, legs outside, and open the desk’s shallow top drawer. I dig out a piece of the blue stationery and a pen and scrawl, “I came out here to pray.” As I back through the window to the roof again, clutching my note, I also grab up a stone cat paperweight from the desk’s top. I wrap the note around the cat to weight it, then toss it gently down in the yard. It’s a testament to my goodwill toward all things canine that I don’t aim at Cesar.
Cesar and Gret run to my note first and snuff at it, and Parker follows, more slowly. He reaches between the questing dog noses and picks up the packet. He opens it, but he looks at the cat, as if the note is wrapping paper.
He looks back up at me, puzzled. I shake my head and glare, frustrated with the silence. I blow out my candle and hold it up. I point at the note with my other hand. In the yard below, my good, dim Gret wanders away after Buck and Miss Moogle, still clueless that I am present. Clever Cesar stares up at me, more affronted than alarmed that I am on his roof, a place he knows good and well that people do not belong.
Parker gets it. He reads the note, then looks back to me, impassive. He hefts the stone cat in his other hand, as if weighing it. He holds up one finger in a “wait a sec” gesture, then he walks toward the house until he disappears from my sight.
I sit another minute, and he comes back out. He holds up a blue sphere about the size of a tennis ball. I spread my hands and he throws it lightly up in an arc toward the roof. It comes right to my hands as if I’d called it.
It is a tennis ball, dog-chewed into a disreputable state, wrapped up inside my rumpled piece of pale blue stationery. Under my note he has scribbled two words.
“Me too.”
I find I am smiling at him, a wide and foolish smile. Parker raises his eyebrows at me, asking a question. I understand what he is asking, and I feel suddenly shy. This is not something I have ever done with a man. With anyone, really, except my mother when I was very small. Even so, I nod, a shallow head bob that he clocks. Parker walks to his place, and I take up my beads again. His gaze turns inward, and his arms come up and he turns slowly, punching deliberately out at nothing. I watch him as I click through the beads, the familiar words shaping themselves silently in my mouth.
We are praying together, each in our own way. His movements are still focused, but he is aware of me now. I am included. He is inside my circle, too, as I pray through the beads with every nerve I have attuned to him. Something like longing happens in my belly, and I am not sure what I am praying for now. Some freshness, maybe, a new start, a chance to go back in time, before Thom, and make some better choices.
This is the strangest date that I have ever been on.
When I finish my second circuit of the beads, the sun is going down. The temperature is dropping, drying Parker’s sweat. He stops, replete, his arms hanging by his sides. I lift my hand and he lifts his in a silent good night. We hold there for a minute, looking at each other.
Nothing is solved. I don’t know how to get free enough to be someone different. Even so, I feel comforted.
I turn and creep back inside, my mind blank. My mother has been in my room. She has seen me praying on my perch and gone away again. A plate is resting on the bedside table, and Gret lies on the foot of my bed with her ears cocked, all her attention on the food. Meat loaf, whipped potatoes, carrots, and a very large glass of red wine. I change for bed and share out bites of cooling supper with my dog. I do not share the wine. I drink the glass down to the dregs. It’s early still, but I’m exhausted and the wine makes me warm and sluggish.
I climb in between the covers and I fall asleep. I sleep dreamlessly, sated, for hours, before I hear the sound. When it begins, I am dreaming of a sweet-faced, small brown cow. She is being led up a hill to a shed, and I cannot see the face of the man leading her. The noise she makes is fearful but resigned, a mourning noise, and her eyes are huge and brown with long lashes, very human. She knows where she is being led. She knows why the man’s arms end in axes. She goes up the hill with him, lowing out her sorrow at her dreadful coming loss. Her feet thump into the earth, giving tempo as she moans a sound so grievous that it wakes me.
They are true sounds, the thump and wail, and they are coming from the parlor. The noise climbs up the stairs and gets into my bed with me as if the sound itself is sentient, a messenger to me, but speaking in a tongue I do not know. I sit up and blink, scrubbing at my face, disoriented. Gret lies tense beside my feet with her head lifted and her nose pointing toward the door.
The noise is so inhuman and unending that it takes me a solid ten seconds before I understand. There is no little cow. There is only one other living creature in this house.
This noise is pouring from my mother.