Backseat Saints

PART II: THE GIRL LEFT IN THE TOWER


CHAPTER


7
I WAS FLAT ON MY back in a hospital bed for three days, pressing the button to flood my veins with morphine every time the machine counted down to zero and let me. The drug was pumped into my bloodstream through a tube, but after I pressed, it was as if I could see it coming down from the ceiling in icy chips of soothing white. They built up and blanketed me. I lay still and cool underneath, like a creature with no heartbeat, healing and waiting to reanimate.
Long before the timer worked its way down to zero and allowed me a fresh dose, the pain would sharpen, and I would sharpen with it. It took all my concentration in those clear and aching moments to hold my wounded body still. I wanted to rise up, to smite the glass that covered the fire ax in the hall and take it up by the wooden handle. I would use it to lay waste to Thom’s hale body and then hack my way through the wall of my hospital room and leap away into the blue like some teeny, slighted pagan goddess. I longed for the lovely echoes of the thunk that ax would make when it met flesh, for the feel of something rendable between my teeth.
I had to make my body rest, because right then, breathing in and out was painful. Leaping and smashing, hell, even standing up straight was beyond me. I hunched and crept my way to the bathroom and back. I would fail, not out of sentiment and weakness, as I had when I was laying for him in the ditch at Wildcat Bluff, but simply because I didn’t have the juice. Even wholly healed, my five-foot frame could not move so openly against him. So I waited and pressed the button for more morphine to hold myself at bay.
While the drugs force-rested me, my mind wandered in an endless loop around and around one subject: How would I find Jim Beverly?
I didn’t think about the why. I knew the why with a lovely, black clarity that was chafing hard at poor old Ro Grandee. She was in shreds and strings around me, a web of desperate tenderness for her Thom, trying to rebind me and hamper all the ways I was going to move. It was Ro who had given him a final out on my second day in the hospital.
I was quieted by drugs, blankly watching Thom’s broad back as he walked away after his lunchtime visit. He was heading back to work. Ro’s remains were sorrowing after him with every speck of energy she still possessed.
I heard myself say, “We should call it quits, Thom.” The words fell out in Ro’s soft tones, deliberately pitched to let him decide to hear or not, as he chose.
In less than a second he was back, bent over me with one huge hand on either side of my head, flattening the crackly hospital pillow, pushing into the mattress so my head tilted back to stare directly into his face. Half his mouth was pulled down, like he was stroking out, and the surface of his eyes looked so flat that I couldn’t see myself reflected in them.
“You will not start this shit again,” he said. One hand moved to encircle my throat and he leaned in even closer, so I could smell coffee and sweet milk on his breath. “We’re married. I will f*cking end you.”
He shoved himself up and away, using the pillow and my throat as launch pads. I watched him cross the room in long, loping steps. My mother’s cards had told me plain that it would come to this. Him or me. One day soon, his rage would break its chain and come to kill me. If I slipped back inside the skin that was Ro Grandee, I would stay and waffle and find excuses for both of us until I was dead.
I listened to the stomping footprints as they moved down the hall and died away, and then I said, “I’m gonna choose you, baby.” It came out loud and clear, a declaration to myself and what was left of her.
Then I watched the numbers on the machine count down, time leaking away. When they said zero, I pressed the button. For a few hours, morphine boxed up the whole mess of my marriage and put it away like a never-to-be-finished jigsaw puzzle. It pressed me lower and lower, into my loop of endless longing. How to find Jim Beverly? I didn’t think beyond that, not even to what Jim would be like now and what methods would best win him to my cause and what harm he might actually inflict on Thom, who had four inches and forty pounds on the boy Jim had been the last time I had seen him.
I didn’t even think about where I might go after, and whether Jim would be there with me. I did not imagine us holding hands and skipping into the muddy sunrise of a rainy morning. This was choosing, not romance. Jim was a tool, much like my Pawpy’s gun, and I’d find a way to aim him when the time came. Guns and men had always been the things I worked best. Guns had already failed me.
I concentrated solely on looking for a way to track a boy who had disappeared himself so thoroughly that his own overdevoted mother and the state cops had failed to find him. He’d left me near the end of our senior year, during a week when we’d been technically broken up. Ever since the night Jim and I had shared stolen whiskey, trying to understand what fueled my father’s love affair with drinking, I’d refused to be with him if he had even a sip of something alcoholic. It wasn’t only that I wouldn’t be his girlfriend. I wouldn’t be in a room with him.
He used the days when we separated to catch up on the benders that were his right and privilege as a star quarterback in Alabama. I suspected he got caught up on his rightful share of tail, too, but I never asked. Jim drinking was not the Jim I wanted, and those days did not belong to me.
His last night in Fruiton, he got crazy wasted at a party. I was at home, trying to be small and good and quiet, a mouse in the house, so as not to rile my daddy. In two days or three, I fully expected Jim to show up at my house with his head set to a cocky angle. He’d say, “Hey, Rose-Pop,” like nothing had happened. I’d say, “Hey yourself,” and look mad until he scuffed one foot in the dirt, sheepish, and said, “Aw, hell, Rose, I got out of hand. Come on down off the porch, and let me buy you a cherry Coke? A root beer float? Hot cocoa? Nothing says I’m sorry like a beverage with a lot of sugar in it.” I’d shake my head with fond exasperation, come down, and take his hand. We would be us again, and that would be that.
Instead, sometime after midnight, Jim crashed his Jeep into a pole. He walked away from the accident, leaving a trail of beer foam and angry footprints stamped deep into the dirt as he made his way back to the highway. A couple of passing drivers saw him hitchhiking, his thumb pointing away from town. He disappeared himself, a brilliant magic trick, emphasis on trick, and it had been played on me.
I couldn’t make sense of it. I wandered Fruiton High blind and naked as an unearthed mole, uncomprehending. Then it had come out that Jim was failing his senior year and would lose his scholarship to UNA. He’d lost almost everything, and he’d walked away from me, the one thing he should have been certain of, the one thing that was still his. Not forgivable. The day after I turned eighteen, I had done the Greyhound bus version of Jim’s hitchhike out. I’d disappeared, too, never to be found.
In the lovely, morphine-covered landscape where I lay, looking for a path to him, it dawned on me that I hadn’t disappeared, after all. I’d tried, but I had been found. My mother had found me.
Her presence at the airport was not merely a hideous coincidence. She had come to Amarillo specifically because I lived here; she’d come to put her eyes on me. She’d sat low in the coffee shop across the parking lot to watch me pimp Joe Grandee’s guns, or crouched down in a rented car on my street, watching me bend and dig in my garden. She could have been making Amarillo pilgrimages for years now. No way to tell. The only certainty was that she knew I was there long before I caught her at that airport. The proof was at Cadillac Ranch. She had left a message on the cars a day before our eyes had met.
I did love you, Rose. Pray to Saint Cecilia!
She’d left it to soothe her conscience and invoke her favorite saint in a place where she could be 99 percent certain I would never find it. But in coming to my city, she’d left a speck of working room for whatever minor saint was in charge of chance meetings and graffiti. He was on my side, no doubt tittering on my shoulder as he brought me to the airport in perfect time to catch her leaving me again.
The only question that mattered now was, how had she found me? Because if I could be found, then so could Jim Beverly.
The hole my own slivered rib had stabbed into my lung resealed itself. The hospital pulled my pretty morphine tube, and I started a new, less intense romance with Percocet. I was still bad off, but I could breathe, so they released me.
Thom drove me back to the house, bracing me in the seat with pillows and taking it easy on the curves. Once we got home, he put one arm close to his own side and bent it at the elbow, so his forearm was a ballet bar I could cling to as we made our way from the car back to our bedroom. I creaked my way down the hall like a granny, trying to walk in a way that favored my hurt places. There weren’t enough working pieces of myself to take up the slack, so I had to favor Thom.
He helped me lower myself into the bed, plumping up a ridge of pillows behind me so I could see the TV if I wanted. He gave me the remote, the book I’d been reading, and another pill to wash down with a cool cup of water from the bathroom. He reached to smooth my long hair away from my face, but something in my gaze paused him. He took his hand back. Wise move.
“I’ll tell my dad you’re still under the weather this week. He can get Kelsey to cover your shifts,” he said, sweet as sugar cereal. He was treating me like something breakable, which is different from how you treat something you yourself have broken.
I let my body lie in our bed like it was a hole-covered log, waiting for squirrels and spiders to find it and nest. Only Gretel came, flopping down with her spine a solid line of warming comfort against my calf, my faithful napping partner. Thom brought me hot cereal and scrambled eggs in the morning, Cup-a-Soups with crackers and sliced cantaloupe at night. Invalid food, with Percocet for afters. I ate it without tasting, mending through the tick of each long second, and my mind spun in a circle like a lazy Susan with a single idea on it: How did my mother find me, a thing that deliberately went and got itself lost?
When Thom came to bed, we lay on our own sides, both flat on our backs. My cold will was a ridge of Puritan pillows running in between us. But the fourth night, my body had healed enough to turn and shift without pain waking me. I fell asleep, and Ro Grandee crept over, seeking her husband’s heat. He came to her as he always had. We woke up face-to-face, our pieces tangled and tucked around each other. I unwound my limbs and took them back without looking at him. He let me go.
Thom posed little threat in these days. He was ashamed and yet so sated that it was like a bloat, making him sweet as he tended to my body, his favorite toy. He worked to heal it, same as I was, readying it for rough play. I was safe with Thom; right now, Ro Grandee was the danger.
I was back in her house, with the pretty ocean blue coverlet and sheers she’d picked, her willow-patterned china in the kitchen, the remnants of her light perfume tainting the air of the bathroom. I’d lived inside her familiar, comfortable skin for years, until it was me, until I had no choice in it. But to let myself be Ro again now was suicide, the only irrevocable sin. The drugs that held me back in the hospital were holding me too still in her territory. I felt her as a creep, growing on back over me like fungus. It could not be allowed.
When Thom brought my breakfast on a tray, I handed him back the Percocet and said, “Could you bring me a couple, three Motrin, please? And a great big cup of coffee?”
I downed the coffee and ate every bite of my cheese eggs. Thom left for work, and I could feel myself waking up, truly waking, as last night’s pill spent itself in my bloodstream and was replaced by the caffeine. The first thing I realized was that I was filthy, covered in a waxy coat of my own mank. My hair was limp and greasy. I creaked to my feet and took a long shower, scrubbing myself so hard that it was like being peeled. I made the water scalding hot. When I got out, I was pink under my fading bruises.
I opened the closet and got an eyeful of Ro’s swirly skirts in springtime colors. Sweet flats with bows and buckles and embroidered daisies. Clingy lightweight sweaters, all long-sleeved. I slammed the closet door, as repulsed by these things as if they had been hand-sewn from human skin. I went to my dresser instead and dug out a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of the old Levi’s that I wore on heavy cleaning days.
The jeans were pale blue and baby soft from a thousand washings, and they sat easy against my bruises. My rib cage pinged as I shifted, and I could tell by how the jeans fit that I’d gone barn-cat scrawny. Still, I felt whole and ready for movement, but only from the neck down. My wet hair was a heavy reminder, pulling at my sore scalp. I dried it on cool, then I bundled it away into a low ponytail and braided it. It still felt like the braid had a barbell tied to the end. I pulled it over my shoulder, where it hung past my breast, heavy and hers.
I didn’t want it touching me. I wanted none of Ro’s things touching me, and the long hair my husband loved felt like a most offensive bit of Ro-ness. I strode to the kitchen and yanked my meat shears out of the butcher-block knife rack on the counter. I thought I could lop that braid off in one fell swoop, but it was too thick. I had to squeeze the handles open and shut and saw at it with the blades to get it off of me. Finally the last connecting hairs yielded, and the braid slithered down my back to the floor. My head felt so suddenly light that it was like being dizzy.
The braided cable of hair looked like a long, glossy pet that had coiled up at my feet. It was sleek and dark, more than a foot long, so thick that I doubted I could get my finger and thumb wrapped all the way around it. I looked down at it and felt no remorse. I felt no connection to it at all. It was nothing more than a brown black rope that Thom could damn well never hang me from again.
I picked up the braid and walked back to the bathroom. I think I meant to put it in the trash, but I caught sight of myself in the mirror and stopped. I was ten pounds too thin and two shades paler than paper. My shorn hair hung around my face in a ragged tangle, longer on the right side than the left. I had kaleidoscope eyes, spinning with a hundred different colors of pure, naked crazy. For the first time in years, I was face-to-face with Rose Mae Lolley. Even my clothes were hers, faded and ill used enough to have been found in a church box. I was cold all over, predatory, and it showed in my face. Every line of my body said, Down to black business, up to absolutely nothing good.
I’d been Rose Mae in accidental flashes over the years, most recently in the ditch at Wildcat Bluff. This was the face Jim Beverly had seen, I felt certain, that night we got drunk and ran through the woods, and the rustle of ferns and branches was the crack and snap of tiny bones. Thom knew this face, too. It had been reflected in the mirror of his gaze the first night I met him, back when I was slinging eggs and corned-beef hash at Duff’s Diner. Stirring spit into his date’s drink had been a stopgap measure to keep me from boiling half her face off with a pot of scalding coffee. He’d known what he was getting, same as I had. But those were forays, a creature taking peeks and darts out of its pretty, placid home.
In the mirror I was as ugly and iridescent as a de-shelled hermit crab, fleshy and exposed. I hadn’t been this nakedly myself since the morning I left Fruiton, Alabama.
When Jim left me, it was as if he’d ripped my skin off and toted it down the highway with him. The very air stung me. I wandered the halls of my school drugged with loss and rage. I stopped turning in my work. Tests were passed out, and I sat through them, not even lifting my pencil. It was all I could do to hold myself still with the air and sunshine touching the raw and blinking object that I was. Graduation came, and I sat home through it, knowing I had flunked and not caring. I sat through summer like it was a prison sentence.
I thought I might hear from Jim on my birthday. I held myself afloat with the idea: He would call. He would tell me—and only me—where he was. He would say he’d only been waiting for me to turn eighteen, so that no one could come looking for us.
The day came, and the phone stayed silent. Then my father clocked me a good one for the high crime of walking to the kitchen, my back to him, when he was thinking he might speak to me. Kidney shot. I lay on the floor where he had put me, and I understood that Jim would not rescue me. If I stayed in Fruiton, this was my life. This was all I could be. No dear and worthy girl could be rebuilt under my father’s fists.
I packed a canvas duffel bag and slept a fitful few hours until the Greyhound station opened. Daddy was passed out on the sofa, dreaming like a dog with his bare feet hanging off the edge and twitching as he chased down rabbits or naughty daughters. I had a little money of my own, but I decided that final punch would cost him the nine dollars in his wallet as well as the sacred “whiskey twenty” he kept in his bedside table for emergencies.
There was leftover Tuna Helper in the fridge and half a pan of mac ’n’ cheese, too. It could be days before he ran out of things to microwave and realized I was gone. I wanted him to realize sooner.
There was a big print of ships in a harbor hanging above the sofa, over Daddy. It had been my mother’s. As a girl, I used to pretend she’d stepped into it and gotten on a ship and gone someplace that I could follow, the way Lucy and Edmund had floated across a painted ocean back to Narnia. I was grown up now, and I understood she left on purpose, through the front door. I was about to follow her lead.
I looked at the print, all that deep blue water hanging over Daddy’s head. I thought about the gas can in the carport, how it would slosh, unwieldy, if I lifted it and carried it back here. It was more than half-full because Daddy never fed the mower. It was cool inside our small brick house in the hour before dawn. A fire sounded nice.
Instead I turned myself, went to his room, and I stole his pistols. I took Pawpy’s both for protection and as a punishment; it was just about the only thing of Pawpy’s Daddy had. I took both his newer ones to hock, as if they were my rightful dowry. I’d have taken his deer gun, too, but it didn’t fit down in my duffel.
My last act was to dig a shedding Crayola paintbrush out of my childhood toy box. I took a coffee mug to the neighbor’s yard and scooped up a generous cupful of the dog crap that had leaked out from their dyspeptic standard poodle. I took these tools back to the sofa and used them to write, “Later, Gater,” onto the hanging print of ships at harbor. The ships and the docks were brown, and the sea was a storm dark blue. The words were hard to see, and I wondered how long he would stagger around the house, hung over and gagging, checking his shoes and sniffing and cussing, before he found my billet-doodoo.
Considering he was passed out helpless, considering that I had a swollen kidney and two loaded guns, considering how raw I was, he was damn lucky that was all I did. If he had stirred, if he had so much as cracked an eye, he would have seen the face that I was seeing in the mirror now. If he’d said the wrong word to me in that moment, then as sure as God made all the pretty fishes, I’d have put a hole in him.
I reached out and touched the mirror, disbelieving. The girl inside the glass reached at the exact same time, raising her hand on her side to meet mine, fingertip to fingertip. The glass was showing me an accurate reflection, showing me that she—I—was way too easy to read. I had to camouflage myself.
I rummaged through Ro’s flowered handbag to find the keys to my hand-me-down Buick. I drove downtown, still clutching the coil of my hair, to a place called Artisan Salon and Day Spa. I knew Charlotte Grandee paid this place a small fortune to keep her hooves sanded down and her gray covered. I had never so much as stepped inside. Thrifty Ro got her split ends trimmed at a place called Mister Clips for eight meager dollars. I did my pedicures at home. Artisan wasn’t a place we could afford, but that one glimpse in the mirror had told me a faked smile and some Maybelline blusher wouldn’t cover half my sins. Damn the cost; Thom owed me this, and more. Hell, all the Grandees owed me. I circled Amarillo’s small blocks until I found a parking space that would hold my ancient tank of a car.
I walked into the ultramod reception room, and the lone blonde waiting to have her frosty tips refreshed gasped at the sight of me and looked away fast. One manicured hand raised itself involuntarily to touch her own thick curls, like she was scared whatever had happened to me might be catching.
I looked past her to the young man behind the apple green check-in station and said, “Do you take walk-ins?”
He looked up, his mouth already shaping the word no, but when he saw me, his lips froze into a kissing shape around the unsaid word. I had the long rope of my former hair coiled around one wrist, and I lifted it and let it unfurl and dangle.
The air came out of him so fast that it made a woofing noise, and he said, “What did you do?” He sounded slightly awed.
“I had a bad idea,” I said.
“I’ll say,” he agreed, fervent.
I was used to men looking at me, but not like this. I felt my eyebrows come together, and I blinked hard. “I’m not getting out of the house much, these days. I haven’t…” I swallowed so loud that it sounded like gulping, and then I felt my mouth opening up again. “My husband died. Quite recently.” Instantly I had to fight to keep an inappropriate grin from spreading across my face.
I had not spent my week on bed rest making up drug-induced, cheerful Disney-rip-off songs about a world with no Thom Grandee in it. My only thought had been how to find Jim. Test-driving widowhood with the salon’s tanned godlet-style receptionist as my witness was my way of saying exactly and out loud why I was looking for my lost love. The boldness of it, the truth of it, moved through my body like a wave of black pleasure. It was the confirmation of a thing that had already been decided, a long time ago, in an airport. Maybe even by someone else.
The receptionist said, “This is clearly an emergency.” He had big hazel eyes, shaped very round, with a down tilt to them that made them seem sadder for me than he probably was. “Let me see what I can do.”
The blonde said, “Rexy, I am in a hurry today…,” giving me a sidelong glance. It was the look a well-fed person who was enjoying an excellent cold lamb sandwich might give a homeless fellow or a hungry dog.
“Faye will be ready for you in five,” Rexy told her. “Maybe four.” He turned back to me and said, mostly for her benefit, “You, my dear, you are past what Faye can do. Miles past. I suspect you’ve crossed the border and left Faye-country altogether. You require Peter.”
The blonde’s eyebrows lifted and she looked me up and down, clearly wondering what made Rexy think I rated. I looked back, bottom lip atremble, and I made my eyes go big and soulful, like those single-teared orphans that get painted onto black velvet. Her gaze broke first. She picked up a glossy magazine and put it up in front of her face, a wall I couldn’t climb over. It was Architectural Digest, and Charlotte Grandee got that chichi rag every month. I realized this blond thing probably knew Charlotte. They certainly looked of a set, and this was Charlotte’s spa.
I wasn’t worried, though. I currently looked nothing like the pretty Ro Grandee in the wedding photo at Charlotte’s house, and the godlet hadn’t asked my name. If I so much as whispered the word Grandee, though, I had no doubt this blond creature would be on the phone with Charlotte before the door had closed entirely behind me. She’d be delighted to reveal that Charlotte’s low-rent Alabama daughter-in-law had been seen poor me–ing her way into Artisan via the fictional death of her eldest boy. I might enjoy that, actually. But it would be tempting fate to let Thom’s mother hear this fiction right before I made it fact.
Rexy came back and said to me, “Follow me now, hon.” The blonde made a huffy throat noise, and Rexy gave her a shit-eating grin, his teeth as white and square as peppermint Chiclets. “Faye will come for you in bare seconds, Sheila. She has sworn.”
I followed him through the archway down a long moss green hallway lit by wall sconces. There were doorways on both sides, some closed with signs on them that said things like “Shhh… Massage in process!” and “Aromatherapy Room.”
I whispered, “I’m sorry about…”
“Pish, Sheila? Bottle blondes on the wrong side of forty need us more than we need them, believe it. She’s about sixty percent spackle as it stands.”
I chuckled, but now I was thinking about how much folks like to bond over a bit of gossip, how nasty good it could feel to talk ugly about outsiders with your own kind. That must be how my mother had found me. She’d asked her own kind.
Fruiton was a small town, and if a single person had seen me toting my gun-stuffed duffel bag to the Greyhound station at dawn, stomping away from the remains of my life, then the whole town as good as knew. The right people, if asked, would have been happy to relay this information to her.
I followed Rexy all the way to the back, to a more brightly lit, deeper green room with a gleaming sink and a sleek black stylist’s chair. He presented me to a short, slim man beside it who looked way too young to be cutting hair.
“This is Peter. I leave you in his capable hands,” Rexy said.
Peter’s hair was an artful tousle of multishaded gold. Up close, I could see fine lines mapped around his eyes and two deep creases framing his full lips, so he had to be at least into his thirties.
He looked at me and tsked, then said to Rexy’s back, “You weren’t exaggerating.” He walked forward and circled me, then reached down and grabbed the braid I was still holding in the middle. He lifted it without taking it out of my hand, feeling the weight. Then he let the hair go and touched the ragged ends where I’d cut it off, his soft fingers brushing my cheek. I found myself leaning into the touch like a petting-hungry stray cat.
He said, “Poor sugar. What do you want?”
That stopped me, because I hadn’t a clue. I only knew what I did not want.
“I can’t look like this,” I said.
“No. It isn’t good for America,” he agreed, so overly grave that it made me laugh. He led me over to the sink and settled me in the chair. I leaned back and rested my head in the sink while Peter washed what was left on my head. His fingers moved in a vigorous, painful rumple across my sore scalp.
“So, you want to look ‘not like this.’ That’s not terribly specific, is it?” Peter said, rinsing the shampoo and reaching for a bottle of conditioner. “Why don’t you tell me how you think you look, and I’ll go the other way.”
“Skinless,” I said.
He laughed out loud. “I meant your hair, sugar.”
“Ruined. It looks like angry hair.”
“It does look a little… fraught,” he said, smiling down at me, then he shrugged and said with perfect confidence, “Whatever you did, I can fix it.”
I believed him. With his low-down, slinky voice, he could say anything and most people would believe him. I let my eyes drift closed as he worked a thick cream that smelled like gardenias through my hair.
My mother was in California. I thought of it as her place now, like she’d walked all the way around the state, peeing endlessly to seal the borders so that nothing from the life she’d left could follow. She couldn’t have gone all the way back to Fruiton to track me. Coming halfway, just to Amarillo, must have nearly killed her. No. She would have called folks in Fruiton who were her kind. This would be both the admittedly sparse ranks of southern Catholics and shitty mothers, of which there was no shortage.
One of them must have tattled, told her I’d gone to the bus station. I’d had a crap waitress job near the bus station in every town I’d paused in. She’d simply tracked me from Greyhound to Greyhound across the country, all the way to Amarillo, without ever leaving her new territory.
This was how I could find Jim. I could call the kids I had gone to high school with, and they would talk to me, because I’d been one of them. They would tell me, their peer, more than they would have told the cops or their parents back then. Telling cops or parents would have been ratting him out; it was obvious Jim had not wanted to be found.
“Let’s promenade,” Peter said, and I started, my eyes popping open. I stood up and let him drape me in towels and a slick black poncho. As he led me across the room, I hung my braid over one arm and rummaged in my purse for a pen and a piece of scrap paper. I needed a list of people back in Fruiton who were my kind, who would talk and tattle to me.
Peter took me straight to the chair and sat me down. The leather was butter soft and the seat gave under my weight, cupping my ass like a lover and supporting my sore back better than my own bed at home. Charlotte Grandee was used to sinking her pointy back end into chairs like this. Artisan was giving me a taste of the life she took for granted. I settled myself down in the seat, acting like it was rightfully mine, as if my mother had given birth to me while sitting comfy in this very chair and I’d never yet moved off it.
Peter picked up a pair of slim silver scissors and then paused, considering me. He walked around me, looking at me from every angle.
I braced my paper on my purse and wrote, “THE LAST PARTY,” at the top. I wrote Missy Carver’s name first, because the party had been at her house. Missy had a divorced mother who went on lots of dates, so the party had almost always been at her house.
“I’m ready. Are you ready?” Peter asked. He made it sound the right kind of dirty. Like I was beautiful enough to tempt him, but he was much too gay to be a real threat.
“Hell, yeah,” I said. This was part of what rich wives like Charlotte and the blonde outside paid for, this safe, flirty assurance that they still had it.
“No input? I’m taking blades to your head, sugar-pie. Are you comfortable saying, ‘Go mad, Peter, and make me a goddess’?”
“That sounds great,” I agreed. “Let’s go with that goddess thing.”
Peter went to work with the scissors, the blades rubbing up against each other like cricket legs. I didn’t watch him cut. I didn’t look at him at all, and he seemed to feel me being finished with the conversation, because he dropped the flirt and went quiet.
Under Missy’s name, I wrote down all the varsity football players that had been in our grade. They would have been at that party, certain. Those names came easy: Rob Shay. Chuck Presley. Benny Garrison. Car Kaylor. Lawly Price. Back then, we always called the football boys by their first and last names, as if they were rock stars instead of boys we’d known since grade school.
I looked up, thinking, and accidentally met Peter’s eyes in the mirror.
“Prospectives?” he asked instantly, like I’d hit his on switch. He glanced down over my shoulder at my list.
“Guest list,” I said. “For a party.”
“Lots of boy names. Looks like my kind of shindig.” He waggled his eyebrows at me.
I looked deliberately away. The girls’ names were harder to recall. I hadn’t been the kind to have close girlfriends. Hell, I still wasn’t. I never got in the habit. This was partly because most of my wardrobe came from Fruiton Baptist’s annual clothes drive. The popular girls, with their pom-poms and sleek ponytails, recognized my outfits, and some were crass enough to greet the pieces in public like old friends. If I hadn’t been the quarterback’s girl, they wouldn’t have talked to me at all. I wouldn’t get much from the girls, anyway. Pretty had bought me an in with the fellas, but I had never been their kind.
Peter watched as I added the name of every girl Jim Beverly had taken out during the couple, three times a year that we’d been broken up. I wrote quickly. My hand could barely stand to shape the letters. I remembered all seven effortlessly, because for the short time each had been with him, I’d chanted their names under my breath all day long. I hope you get run over, Dawna Sutton. I hope bears eat you, Louisa Graham. I hope you get run over and then bears eat you, Clarice Lukey.
“It’s still a mister-heavy list,” Peter said. “And why not? A good mister-ing will do more for your pores than any product I have here.” He cocked his eyebrow to a rakish angle, so charming, but I wasn’t as easily seduced as his regular Sheilas and Charlottes.
I said as kindly as I could, “Stop.”
“I’m sorry. I’m a horror,” he said, sounding more pleased than apologetic. He gathered the front of my hair and clipped to the top of my head. “Your lips say stop, but your eyes say you’re half in love with me already. You’re the kind who likes bad boys, I can tell.”
Bad boys, he’d said, and our eyes met in the mirror again. I found myself staring at him as if I were looking down a deer gun barrel, like I saw his handsome face framed in sights. I wasn’t Charlotte’s kind, and in that moment, he knew it.
“Sugar,” I said, grinding the word into him, “you have no idea.”
I saw whatever lived under his hypercharming ease flash recognition, and then he drew back like he’d been bitten. His gaze dropped. He coughed and shook his shoulders, then his hands got busy in my hair again. I finished my list in silence, but not an angry one. I was more comfortable than I had been since I’d walked in and Sheila had given me that bitchy once-over.
When he finally spoke again, his voice had lost its indulgent purr. He sounded less Hollywood gay, less flirty, but somehow warmer. “What are you going to do with that long braid of your ex-hair?”
“I’m not sure.” I packed my list and pen back in my bag. “Maybe I’ll make a lanyard.”
“Is it virgin?”
“Virgin?” I asked. I found myself smiling at him as I said, “I was married five years, so it’s certainly seen a few things.”
He chuckled and said, “All at once, I’m glad my own hair can’t talk. I meant, do you use any kind of chemical on it, to straighten or curl it? Or do you dye it?”
“No,” I said. “That’s the color I was born with.”
He set down his scissors and said, “May I?” I handed over the cable of hair. He lifted the braid and smelled it and said, “No one in your house smokes, and I would know. You can’t get that smell out of hair. This has got to be five inches around. And so healthy. You must take vitamins. Do you drink? Do drugs?”
“You mean other than my pet heroin addiction?” I said, a little put off, and he laughed.
“I’m not asking these questions to be nosy. Hair this thick and long, gorgeous color, virgin, this can be worth a lot of money.”
I sat up straighter and asked, “How much is a lot?”
“Hundreds.” He handed the cable of hair back to me and let my front hair down out of its clip. “So you lost your husband quite recently?”
I nodded, thinking, Very recently. In fact, any day now.
“Is it safe to assume your finances have changed?” he said. I looked away. “I ask because, among my many hair-related talents, wig making shines. I do custom jobs. Local but very high end. I could sell one made out of this hair for a couple thousand. I’d give you six hundred for the raw material. Now. Today.”
I turned my head to look up at him, directly. “Six hundred? Is that a fair price?”
He nodded. “I went to Catholic school. The first thing they taught me was that people who cheat teeny, big-eyed widows go straight to hell. It’s quite fair, for what’s essentially my clay. What makes the finished wig worth more is the work I’ll put in. It will be head art by the time I’m done, and some poor balding—and wealthy—Amarillo brunette would be thrilled to have what I could make out of that perched on her head.”
“Six hundred,” I repeated. That would buy a lot of long-distance phone calls to my kind in Fruiton. Once I had a bead on Jim, it would cover a bus or plane ticket to get me to him.
“I’d throw in this haircut, which is no small change,” Peter added.
Still, something in me balked. I felt my hands fisting around the long cable, imagining some woman, a wealthy stranger, wearing my hair to play bridge, probably with my mother-in-law and the woman who’d snooted me in the waiting room. The brunette would give me a dismissive hair flip for even door-darkening a place like this; if I took the money, she could be flipping at me with my own ex–crowning glory.
“You think it over, sug—” Peter stopped himself and grinned, rueful. “Just think it over, lady friend.”
He swapped his scissors for the hair dryer. He used a round brush, and it hurt my sore scalp something fierce. I closed my eyes, clutched hard at the cable of hair, and endured it. My mother, a beauty, had slept with pink foam curlers pressing into her head most nights, willing to trade some pain to get pretty. But that was before she’d run to California to grow her locks out long and plain and dress like a gypsy. Now I’d cut my hair off, but it didn’t make me like her. I was still here, fighting to keep my life, still willing to trade pain to get pretty.
The dryer shut off. Peter turned the chair, and the mirror showed me a woman I didn’t know. She had a razor-sharp bob, the sides slanting down into points. The haircut was too angular and edgy for Ro Grandee, too polished and sleek for Rose Mae. I reached up and touched the back, feeling how he’d shingled it. My eyes looked larger, and the cut had honed my cheekbones.
“Thank you,” I said, staring. I looked more sophisticated, but also younger, as if he’d cut the last five years of my life away. And good riddance, the woman in the mirror was thinking. I could read her mind in the set of her jaw. “Thank you,” I repeated. Even the second time, it didn’t seem like enough.
“I’m quite fabulous,” he said, offhand. “Hair is important. Frame the face, lift the spirits. Imagine how happy the next lady who loses the cancer lotto here in Amarillo would be to have yours.”
Those words changed my picture of the wig-wearing lady. Now she looked like I had looked this morning, pale and wasted, crazy-mad and crazy-scared. She wasn’t playing bridge. She was in a hospital waiting room with her hair gone brittle, falling out in patches, and she didn’t give two goat shits if they let trash like me into her country club or not.
She wasn’t the true reason my hands had closed around my braid. The true reason was, if I took this secret pot of money, the ability to travel, to leave, became suddenly much realer. I was waffling, and it wasn’t Ro Grandee making me go spineless, either. Artisan was not her territory. This was something else.
I could see myself walking in a grove of lemon trees, smelling the ocean, the points of my new hair swinging. My mother had said to me at the airport, You are welcome.
But that picture was wrong. I would be traveling to find Jim Beverly, to fight to keep my life, not leave it. I opened my eyes and looked at this new, sleek woman in the mirror, all lavender eyes, pale skin, cupid’s-bow mouth. “Do you remember?” I would say to Jim. “Do you remember what you promised?” I smiled, and the me in the mirror smiled back, a lush and knowing smile that would make any man remember.
The scenery in my head changed. I was walking toward Jim down a city street, then down a red clay road, then through deep green woods like the ones we’d made our own in Alabama. He could be anywhere in the country. There was no reason to think he would have landed in California. I felt my fists loosen. I held up the braid toward Peter.
“I don’t have anything else to do with it,” I admitted.
He took it from me and put it on the shelf in front of the mirror. The points of my short hair swung, brushing my cheek, as I stood up. I liked how it felt, and I liked how the wings fell to hide my eyes when I kept my head down. I peeped out between them as Peter took out his wallet and peeled six fresh one-hundred-dollar bills out of it. I took the money.
On my way down the hallway that led back to the waiting room, I ducked into an empty massage room and closed the door. I pulled out my makeup case and made myself up, fast, like I used to in the girls’ room at Fruiton High, back when my daddy said I was way too young and got fisty if he saw me in mascara. Smoky eyes with a pale and glossy mouth. Jim Beverly’s girl.
When I got back to the waiting room, Sheila was still sitting there, waiting. I came through the door, hips swaying, not caring now if she recognized me. She was jiggling an angry foot and staring daggers at Rexy, who was saying, “Faye has sworn before all the gods that in two minutes she’ll be ready for you. Not even two. One. Mere seconds. Not even—” He stopped talking as I entered. They both turned to me and did double takes, his elaborate and theatrical, hers almost affronted.
I said, “It lives!”
Rexy gave me a frank-eyed assessment, then said, “And it’s gorgeous.”
“Thank you,” I said, smiling wide. He meant it. I could hear it in his tone and feel it in the amped-up wattage of Sheila’s glare. She looked ready to leap over the stack of fashion magazines on the coffee table and ruin my day and her French manicure by tearing my throat open. I turned and showed her all the teeth I’d bared for Rexy, then put my nose up and swanned out past her, thinking, No wonder I don’t have any girlfriends.
It wasn’t completely my fault I was so friendless, I thought as I got in my hand-me-down Buick to head back to the house Joe Grandee helped us pay for. I was hemmed in, surrounded by Grandees. They were wrapped all around my life, like the prickly pink foam that lined our attic and kept the cool air from getting out. All I had was Fat Gretel, who was too dear and dim to remember my secrets, even if she’d had a mouth shaped right for telling them. I couldn’t count Mrs. Fancy. She had never been my friend.
She’d befriended Ro Grandee, and for her own reasons, which I could not begin to fathom. She never asked about the days I disappeared, convalescing from viruses that were not going around. She knew, of course. She wasn’t stupid. She’d been conditioned to overlook these things, to be complicit in Ro’s life, and I was done with that. I was looking for my ex-lover to break the Sixth Commandment. I planned to snap the Fifth as a bonus. Genteel Mrs. Fancy could not possibly approve.
I hadn’t banked friendships in the same way I hadn’t banked money. No exit strategy. I should have had a secret stash already, saved out dollar by quarter by dime. My mother had. As a little girl, I’d watched her refill an empty bottle of a brand-name shampoo with generic, and then she’d pay the difference to her flowered-shoe bank in the top of her closet.
“Our secret, Rose Mae,” she told me. At seven years old, even before, I understood that if Daddy knew about it, that money would go away. So it stayed our secret, even though it was not our stash. It was hers alone, money she banked so she could leave me. Sometimes she’d peel off a five and drive me to Fruiton’s teeny mall to get a cone at Baskin-Robbins. Double chocolate chip tasted sweeter when it felt stolen, and though I did not know it at the time, every treat she bought me was of double value. Each dollar spent on me meant she had to stay another day, setting her back from the magic number she needed to escape. I wondered, how much was enough to let her go but not enough to pay my way as well? Hard to calculate the exchange rate on thirty bits of silver.
It was more than I had now, that was certain. I owned two pairs of flowered shoes, but the toes were empty. I’d never padded the grocery bill and kept the difference. I’d willfully not thought to, as another way I could not be like my mother. But it had also saved Ro the bother of having any real choices to make about breaking with her husband.
I caught sight of myself in the rearview and took a moment to admire my free, expensive haircut. Screw the forty cents for shampoo; I bet a cut like this cost plenty, plus the tip. History told me Thom was guilt soaked enough about putting me in the hospital to shell out for it. I pulled into the next bank I saw with a drive-through ATM and withdrew $120. I added the sheaf of twenties to Peter’s crisp hundreds.
At home, I stripped naked and then stood in front of my closet for a long time before I could force myself into one of Ro’s swirly cotton skirts and a matching sweater. Her clothes were alive, brushing my bare skin with a squirmy kind of touching that I felt all over me, every time I moved. It was close to unendurable, and it made her real in a way she hadn’t been since he’d put me in the hospital. I shuddered my way to the bathroom to touch my pulse points with Thom’s favorite perfume, my muscles twitchy under Ro’s brushed cotton.
I went in costume to the kitchen to make dinner, pulling the biggest knife out of the wooden block and cutting up too many tomatoes. When I’d hacked up the entire basket, I went after the cucumbers. I was making enough salad for an army, but I couldn’t put the knife down. The hand I’d wrapped around the solid wood of the handle and my shorn head were the only pieces of me that felt right.
I was mincing a second onion when I heard the Bronco screech up outside. The car door slammed, and ten seconds after that our front door crashed open. I stayed where I was in the kitchen, making the onion into even squares. When Thom came banging into the room, I turned toward him. I held my knife at a casual angle in my right hand, pointing at the floor, but my grip was so tight that blood could barely move through my fingers.
“Where the hell have—” His voice cut out abruptly, and he stared at my head. “You cut your hair.”
“You like it?” I said. Ro’s trembly voice. Ro Grandee’s binding clothes.
“You cut your hair?” he repeated, a question this time. He was breathing fast and deep, nostrils flaring on the inhale.
I worked to make my voice steady and my own. “I needed a change.” I did a slow spin, modeling for him with the knife still pointed down, my fingers needling at the lack of circulation.
“I called you five times,” he said while I was turning. “I had vendor meetings all damn day, and I’d get out of one and call you and go into another still wondering where you were.”
“So what do you think?” I touched the point of hair on the left side of my face. He stared at me, not seeing me at all.
“I think you shouldn’t f*cking disappear like that,” he said.
“Thom Grandee,” I said, and I had the tone mostly right now, mock stern and almost pouty, but under my control. I lived in my knife hand and kept breathing. If I knew Thom, I’d be peeled out of these clothes soon enough. “You would be a total loss as a detective. Where do you think I was today?”
He compressed his lips and blew air out his nose like a frustrated bull. “Getting a haircut, obviously. That’s not the—”
“Not any old haircut,” I interrupted. “This haircut came from a spa downtown. It cost one hundred dollars.”
That drew him up short, and his eyes refocused. I could practically hear the gears change in his brain. “A hundred dollars?”
I nodded. “Plus tip. Also, I have never had it short before, so you need to stop your yapping about I don’t know what-all right this second and tell me if you like it.” Perfect.
“Holy shit,” he said, but he didn’t sound mad now. “A hundred dollars, huh?”
“Foldy green American,” I said. “I got it done at that place your mother goes.” Whatever red wave he’d been riding when he came through the door was receding. I set the knife aside, casually, though it hurt me to uncoil my hand from it. “I needed a pick-me-up, baby. I’ve been feeling lowly.”
“I’ve noticed,” he said.
I swayed toward him, slow across the kitchen, and as I moved I grabbed the bottom of Ro’s clingy sweater and pulled it off over my head. All at once I could breathe easy, and Thom couldn’t.
“When I couldn’t get you on the phone all day, I thought…” He trailed off. I hadn’t bothered with a bra.
I knew what he’d thought. Some variation on Who is he, spiced by the idea that I had left him. He’d come home ready to hunt me down, and instead he’d found a pink-cheeked wife, out of bed and smelling like freesia, making him a supper. His only punishment was a hugely overpriced trip to a salon, so slight a rebuke that it was practically a gift to him. I paused in the middle of the kitchen to unzip Ro’s skirt and let it drop. I stepped out of it and gave it a small but savage kick. It slithered away from me across the well-waxed floor. I hadn’t bothered with panties, either.
His gaze roamed up and down me as I came to him, and he said, “I never cared for short hair, but you look beautiful. Hell, you’d be beautiful shaved bald, but this is gorgeous.”
“It dern well better be, for a hundred bucks,” I said.
“Plus tip,” he said.
“Plus tip,” I agreed, and stepped into his arms.
He pulled me close, careful, trying to be gentle with my healing body, but I sucked his bottom lip into my mouth and bit down, hard enough to sting. It felt good. I ran my claws down his back, scraping his skin, then put my hands flat against his chest and shoved off, hard and fast enough to surprise him. I pulled free from his arms. He reached for me, but I turned and ran naked away from him down the hall. He followed me, as he had always followed me.
I turned at the bedroom door, let him catch me. I kissed him again, not sweet, plenty of teeth. He lifted me up, walking me back into the bedroom with my feet dangling. He threw me backwards, so I was briefly flying, the cool air a pleasure on my naked hide. I landed, bouncing against the mattress. Then he was on top of me, and I wrapped my legs around him, dug my heels into his ass, and pulled him into me. I bit down hard into the meat of his shoulder. He reared back and I dug my heels again, drawing him in.
We rolled in the middle. I got on top and rode him like a pony. When I came it was like the sound of thick glass shattering in me, a crashing, and then I was full of bright shards that chimed against each other as they slivered up my insides with a sound like jagged bells. Then it was his turn, and I rode him down till he was nothing, till he was lying in a heap, deflated, his eyes half-closed and no one home behind them.
He took the sex as if it were simple and delicious and carried no message, and then he slept. He didn’t even know it was good-bye. I lay beside him, smiling but not pretty. I felt it as a broad stretch of my mouth that showed my whole, panting tongue to the air, and the air tasted warm and full of musk.
From then on, every time I took him to my bed it was good-bye like that. Just as every time he hit me was a reminder of how permanently I was going to say it.