*
The security guy’s name, according to the brass plate on his desk in a tiny, egg-scented back office, was Ron Towers. Eve had met Ron once before, in his previous position at the local Old Navy franchise across the expressway. She remembered his crusty maritime face, as if Old Navy hired its muscle through some casting process. Ron Towers was silently considering her now, like some riddle he was trying to solve. Recognition lit his raw features. “Loving,” he said. “Eve Loving.”
She nodded, and Ron Towers nodded, too, looking pleased with himself. “It’s those crazy eyes of yours. How could I forget those eyes?”
“How could I forget a Ron Towers?”
Ron sneered and typed her name into the computer on his desk. He hit enter and grinned. “Looks like we’ve got a serious uh-oh here.”
“Uh-oh,” she echoed as Ron consulted a gray metal filing cabinet. He thumbed through the contents of a drawer, retrieved a document, and displayed it like a certificate of accomplishment.
“Any return will be considered trespassing. Any further shoplifting will be referred to police action.” Ron nudged the document toward her. She didn’t need to read it. She was familiar with its content.
The list of stores from which Eve Loving was blacklisted had grown. Over the last nine years, in the sallow back rooms of major Big Bend retailers, she had signed a number of similar contracts. The paunchy or gangly guards always put on the kind of tough-guy bravado that Ron showed her now. “We don’t need your kind of business here,” they’d unoriginally tell her as they searched her face. But the truly shameful part was that these guys’ close attention, their consideration of what she might contain behind her nervous smile, always seemed like a potential antidote to her solitude. As those self-serious men led her by the elbow with a firm hand, she could feel the relieving possibility of confession, the sense that everything in her past months and years was at last coming to a climax. When those men lectured Eve, threatened her, wielded their dinky power behind their cheap nameplates, she felt her whole story rise up in her. And yet, in the end, they were always satisfied by her apologies and a contract. The madness or sorrow that might compel a fiftyish woman to steal a book meant for a teenager: a question that a man like Ron Towers was satisfied to consign to another signed document in a desk drawer.
“So what do we do now?” Ron didn’t say anything more, only looked at Eve as if she’d done something other than shoplift a boxed set, as if he really might be trying to suss out a deeper kind of guilt. She eyed the telephone on his desk. She thought of making a break for the door. Ron Towers was grinning, a little lasciviously.
In a decade of many cruel paradoxes, one of the greatest tricks that her tragic forties had played on Eve was the way that grief seemed to have sharpened whatever latent beauty she had possessed. As her face had thinned, the overlarge eyes had become cartoon-princess-like in their enormity. All the days she had spent outside to escape the musty stuffiness of her house had toasted her Semitic features with a pleasant brownish glaze. Her back troubles made her stick out her pert rear end like a bustle, made her carry her breasts like a waiter offering a tray of hors d’oeuvres. What might it mean, Eve tried not to wonder, that she wore her suffering so attractively?
“Please,” Eve said.
“The one thing I’ll never get,” Ron mused, “is why a nice lady like you would do it. Some poor kid, sure. Some toothless meth head, that’s natural. But a lady like you, is it just the thrill?”
She couldn’t tell if this was only part of his chest-thumping display or if Ron Towers might actually be troubled. This rosacea-faced man was a poor judge for her life’s crimes, but she was relieved to tell him, “I’m Oliver Loving’s mother.”
He squinted. Did he possibly recognize the name? There was no doubt that he would have heard about her family on the news, back when it happened. In the news stream spectacle that had followed that worst night, the Lovings had perhaps become the most pitiable of all those families to be so piously and publically pitied. But all that was nearly ten years ago. Ron Towers, living a hundred miles away, had likely forgotten all about Hector Espina and Bliss Township School.
“My son is in pieces. He’s scattered all over the world,” Eve told Ron now. “And I have to pick them up.” Eve had learned the trick of the homeless and the imprisoned; bad behavior has an inflection point. Act a little strangely and people will correct you, act oddly enough and people will clear you a wide berth.
“Excuse me?” Ron asked.
She reached across Ron’s desk then, for one of his massive, furry hands. Ron did not pull away as she held it like another creature, something injured they had just found together, which they could both worry over. She felt Ron’s clunky class ring, its cheap gemstone, and she twisted it loose, as if it were choking his finger. This hand, she knew, was connected to Ron Towers’s haughty, reddened face, but it really did feel separate from him now, like some other object Eve wanted to slip into her purse. She lifted its mass, and she kissed it. But then she made the mistake of looking up. Her gaze on him severed whatever strange spell had momentarily altered the space between them. He pulled his hand away, wiped it against the papers on his desk.
“You need help,” Ron Towers said.
*
The clock on Eve’s dashboard showed 9:53, the digits dimly throbbing with the engine. The Hyundai, which Oliver had long ago named Goliath, clanked and sputtered as she pulled out of her parking spot. Now that Ron Towers had let her free, she had no excuse not to retrace the route of the morning errand, ninety-four miles deep into the desert.