“Thank you,” she heard Carrie call after her.
Ava moved quickly to the health and beauty aids, pushed the cart as quickly as the weak front wheel would allow. She stopped her empty buggy in the safety of the shampoo aisle. She had moved fast. There was no way they could see her hard ragged breathing, her body’s impulse to curl on itself, to make herself as small as she could manage. Whatever the items she’d come for were long forgotten, recalled later, and for years to come they’d be associated with this moment. What was she going to do? What could she do after what she had just seen? When she was very young she would have cried herself thoughtless, blinded with the crying, sick with it until she could do nothing else but sleep. She was used to covering herself, guarding her emotions, her every action. Because she did not wail or gulp breaths until she hyperventilated with the pain did not mean she didn’t feel it.
“You okay, ma’am?” A young man in his early twenties put his phone to his chest, looked quizzically in her eyes.
Ava nodded afraid of her voice.
“You sure?” the man mouthed.
Ava turned to the shampoos tried to focus on the many bottles.
The man put the phone back to his ear. “And I’m like why is this girl talking to me. And I’m like whatever okay and she’s like seriously calling me and the next day I text her and she says, ‘let’s meet next Monday’ and it’s like crazy dude there’s like lightning bolts flying all over the air and she’s like sitting real close to me. And she’s really sweet and we spend the entire day together and then like two mornings. For the most part we’ve been hanging out for a week. No, she’s normal. She’s like one hundred percent normal. She doesn’t bullshit around. Like me. She’s dealing with some stupid stuff but she’s like, dude, you know how people say you look familiar, you look familiar, you know? She’s familiar. She’s like the most familiar. I swear it seems like we hung out years ago, like when we were kids. I couldn’t wait to tell you, dude. I know. I know.”
The young man picked out a cheap shampoo and its matching conditioner and gave Ava a last lingering look.
“I’m okay,” she said. The man nodded at her, gave her a thumbs-up, and continued his phone conversation.
Ava left the cart in the aisle. It wasn’t even quitting time from work. So very early. God what a beautiful day. Ava and her baby would walk out of Walmart into the sunshine. She had everything she needed.
16
The motel room was spare and unadorned. Ava rested on the bed on top of the sheets. She thought for the hundredth time that she should have gone home. She didn’t deserve to be running and she sure as hell didn’t deserve to be spending any time in this shabby jail. The Rowen motel had to come up a few notches in the world to be as stylish as a jail. Jails are midcentury cinder block, not the funky, seedy look of a seventies basement. Ava had put her purse and keys on the bedside table. She had pulled off the nasty bedspread immediately; they never wash those things, even in nice places. The remote was huge and black like a giant roach—that thought alone meant that Ava wouldn’t touch it. Without cable there were no choices anyway. Ava had heard about the Rowen motel for most of her life, but she never thought she’d end up there in this hole-in-the-wall for people in between homes, the poor newcomer, the faithless middle-aged.
Ava would not go home. Her mother would hurt right along with her at least as much as Ava hurt herself. As long as her mother was alive she’d feel Ava’s hurt more than Ava did. You have to protect a person who loved you like that. There was no way Ava could avoid telling her mother what she had seen. But not right now. Thank God for Henry’s child. Without that little boy in the world, Ava thought she might get a gun, put the nose in Henry’s worthless stomach, and happily pull the trigger. She’d never pulled the trigger of a gun before, but plenty of idiots had, and she could be one of them. Once she’d seen her father with what she thought was a cap gun, a toy. “Don’t you ever let me see you with it,” he yelled at her, angry because he was afraid, though Ava didn’t understand the reason at the time.
The room had a sweet funky smell, like the skin under a roll of fat. Ava closed her eyes and put her hand over her mouth like a kidnapper. She clinched her fists to gain control, but the effort was giving her a headache. What was that smell? She wasn’t sure she could stand it all night, but she’d already paid. Not that it was so much money, she could afford it and better than Rowen, but she didn’t have it in her to go out again, greet some indifferent face at the hotel counter, shell out money all over again. She almost made the turn to the other side of town to her Aunt Lana’s, but she would ask too many questions, need too much assurance that Ava was going to be okay. Ava was not in the mood to take care of anyone else’s needs, even a kind well-meaning person. She needed silence and solitude and anonymous space to think. Anonymous not stank.
She must have dreamed because when she opened her eyes instead of the unfamiliar room, dark except for the fading light through the plastic shower curtain window treatment, she fully expected to see the ugly, crumbling face of the boy who had a crush on her in high school. Her admission to him that she liked someone else was supposed to stop his advances, but she almost declared that she liked him after all. She had not forgotten his disintegrating face. Ava got up to close the curtain but decided to walk outside. She still wore her shoes, but she grabbed the little jacket she’d tossed on the floor. Her car was parked in front of her door. She leaned on the back of it and looked around. So many times she’d wondered who rented a room from the Rowen. The motel had been the subject of a hundred stories and even more rumors in town. One of Ava’s white school friends told her the story of going to the Rowen with her mother when she was a child. Her friend had witnessed her mother beat her father with her fists the moment he opened the motel room door. The father had tried to explain, to convince her mother that the woman hastily putting on her jeans was not who she imagined she was. Even then Ava had thought the story ridiculous in a hundred ways, but the most disturbing part was the inclusion of her friend, the child, in all that stupid.