“Papa and Mama have never really had any control over me, and you know it.”
“Yes,” Jane said.
“And there’s something else.”
“What?”
“She also agreed to do me another favor, and that is to hire you.”
“Me! What are you talking about?”
“Not to service the men, for God’s sake. Miss Minnie’s is a high-class operation. They don’t go in for, let’s say, the odd experience.”
They stared at one another a long moment.
“Anyway, I was teasing you. I’m not going to be a whore there.”
“Whore.”
“Right. The ones that do it with the men. Miss Minnie has admired my business acumen, my smarts. And she knows I mean business when I do business. I’m going to be what I guess you’d call her manager. Let her take it a bit easier from now on.”
“Oh.” Jane had been imagining Grace lying in a four-poster bed all day, naked or half naked, fanning herself with a Japanese fan, drinking gin, smoking cigarettes in between rutting with any stranger who walked through the door with his thing in his hand. But now she thought about it, Grace didn’t like people, women or men, well enough to have a job like that, with constant intimacy, be it phony and vulgar or not.
“Oh,” she said again. “Well, what is it you’d have me doing, then?”
“You might imagine there’s a whole lot of sheet-washing going on in a place like that,” Grace said. “Sex can be a messy business. They change the bedsheets on every bed several times a day. Now, you know how to run a big washing machine. The pay will not be near as good as what I’ll make but it will do its part toward keeping this roof over our heads and food in the pantry. I’ll be as skinny as you if all we keep eating is what vegetables you grow in the garden and one hunk of meat every week.”
“No. Grace. I don’t think I want to do it. I don’t think I could.”
“No? So, you just expect me to support you? Or Mama and Papa to just support you?”
“I can work a field. Cook and clean. I can earn my keep up there. I can tend cattle, need be. Papa needs help more than ever, nowadays.”
“Well,” Grace said. She poured herself another shot of the whiskey and lit a cigarette. Apparently going outside to smoke was too much trouble now. “Well, if you want to live on a farm, work a plow, weed a field, pick cotton, stick your arm up the ass of a cow, then I guess that’s your business.”
“How do you think I would like being in a house where behind every door a caravan of strange men were sticking their stinkhorns into the same women all day long? I wonder how long you will like it.”
Grace French-inhaled from her cigarette, squinting against the smoke, and blew it out the corner of her red lips.
“I guess I’ll find out,” she said. “But it’ll be them, not me. The only ‘stinkhorns,’ as you say, that I’ll see will be the ones I pluck for myself.”
Oblivion
But now there was the problem of how to go back home. Not the simple act of going home, which could be accomplished by calling and catching a ride with the doctor, or being packed and ready to go home next time her father came into town. The problem was that if she went home she would be questioned about why she was returning, and why now, and what was going on with Grace, and so on. And she had never lied to them, not exactly, and she wasn’t good at prevarication, anyway. Lying, or attempting to, or even considering it, embarrassed her, which felt like an oddly humiliating weakness.
And so she lingered, which irritated Grace, although it didn’t seem as if Grace’s new work disagreed with her. If anything, she came home in a better mood than she’d usually enjoyed coming home from the dry-cleaning and laundry shop. Jane tried to stay on her good side by keeping the house spotless, and the garden in shape, and the yard, and always had supper cooking and dishes washed. Grace grumbled a bit but it was also evident that she was glad she didn’t have to do those things. She hadn’t done much in the way of those things since Jane had arrived six years earlier.
Then her father came one day—he was not going to the stockyard every week or even every month anymore—and when she went out to his truck, which had no cattle in the empty bed, and spoke to him through the open passenger window, he didn’t seem to hear her. She spoke louder, and he turned his head slowly. Then he said, “Why don’t you drive us on over, sister?”
He shut the engine off and slowly got out and made his way around the hood, keeping one hand on the truck. He looked shaky and his eyes staked his path but really seemed to see nothing, blind sight. She caught his arm and helped him into the passenger seat. He felt even more bone-thin than he looked. He smelled of liquor already, in late morning, but it didn’t feel like that was the governing problem.
“Where are we going, Papa?” she said.
“Stockyard,” he said.
“Are you looking to buy something?”
He looked at her as if she’d said something odd or mysterious, then craned his neck around to look into the truck bed through the rear window.
“Well,” he said. “I thought I brought along a cow.”
“Did you forget to load her up?”
He looked at her again with that look of incomprehension. Then settled back in his seat and looked out the windshield. Raised a hand forward as if to say, Let’s go on now, then.
So she drove him across town to the stockyard and sat with him through the auction, but he hardly reacted to the business going on. Every now and then he seemed to pay attention to an animal, watch it enter the arena, get shown, and exit. But most of the time he had that same long, unseeing stare he’d had when he arrived at Grace’s house. When they were leaving, he asked her to get him something to drink.
“From where, or who?”
He just looked at her.
“Papa, I think the last thing you need right now is liquor. I’m sorry.”
He blinked. Looked at her. Then walked unsteadily away and over to a pickup, where he spoke with a man, and came back with a bottle tucked into the front pocket of his overalls.
Jane said nothing but got in behind the wheel. He got in on the other side, pulled out the bottle, took a swig from it after they left the lot. Sipped on the way to Grace’s house.
It was late afternoon then, November. The summer’s heat finally fully gone, enough to feel a nip in the evening air now and then.
“Are you chilled, Papa?” Jane said. “Want to roll up that window?”
“I’m fine,” he said, showing no discomfort aside from his mouth being parted as if to aid his breathing a bit. Cheeks sunken, and weathered skin pulled taut against the thin line of his jawbone.
She parked his truck in front of Grace’s house and helped him inside and onto the sofa in the parlor. Grace came home while she was making coffee, took a look around, came into the kitchen.
“What’s wrong? He doesn’t look right.”
“He’s not. I don’t know what it is. It’s not just drink, though I guess it could be, if he’s been on a long bender. Mama is not telling us everything, I know that.”
She took a cup of black coffee in to him and Grace followed.
He looked at the coffee as if it were a strange thing, then up at Grace and Jane. To Grace, he said, “I know what you’ve been up to, daughter. Don’t think people don’t talk.”
“I’m making a living.”
“As a whore. Bringing shame on your mother.”
“I’m not a whore, I’m the manager of a brothel. I do my work on my feet and behind a desk. Big difference there, you know. And it’s my business what kind of business I choose to run, anyway. You and Mama can like it or not. We’re surviving, here. Are you?”
“I’m taking Janie home with me, out of this.”
“She’ll be glad to hear it,” Grace said. Then she grabbed her purse off the chair in the foyer where she’d left it and went back out.
Their father was shaking his head. He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. Jane was shocked. She’d never seen him express much emotion at all, much less break down.
“I’m so sorry, so sorry,” he said.
“Papa, for what?”
“For you,” he said. “For your life. What you’ve had to live with.”
“Papa,” she said, “I’m fine. I am who I am. I know how to live with that.”
He shook his head, put his glasses back on, and seemed to pull himself together.
“I’m going home,” he said.
“But you can’t drive in your condition.”
“I’ll ask you not to tell me what I can and cannot do, sister,” he said. “You can move back in with us in a couple days, after I settle some things and make sure your mama has your room ready. Do you hear?”
“All right.”
He looked up at her. “I want to say something to you.”
But he couldn’t seem to find whatever words he was looking for. He got up, put on his hat, and walked out. In a moment she heard the truck start up. She went to the window and watched it drive slowly away, her father stiff and steady behind the wheel.