*
The front yard is still cloaked in mist, still empty. The dog has disappeared, but my hands still burn when I run to the car, the sweat coming in spikes with the fear of teeth. Nothing chases me to the car, where I open the doors on the driver’s side to make a shield and pee by the driver’s seat. I half hope Leonie will step in it. I zip and ease the doors shut, wonder where all the people that live in this small circle of houses are. Nothing comes for me when I glance at the house, study the closed front door, or when I creep around the back. There is a shed there, brown with a dark tin roof, papered like the house with weatherproofing liner, but no siding. There is a light coming through slits in one of the windows, which have been blacked out with aluminum foil. Someone is listening to country music inside, and when I put my eye to the slit, I see a shirtless man with a beard. He is tattooed, like Michael, but has shaved his head. There are tables with glass beakers and tubes and five-gallon buckets on the ground and empty cold-drink liter bottles, and I know I’ve seen this before, know that smell because when Michael built his lean-to in the woods behind Mam and Pop’s house, it looked and smelled like this. The reason he and Leonie fought, the reason he left, the reason he’s in jail. The man is cooking, moves as easy and sure as a chef, but there is nothing to eat here. My stomach burns. I sneak back around to the front of the house, fingering Pop’s bag in my pocket, wondering if that tooth is a raccoon’s, if it makes me so quiet and quick that even the dog won’t hear me when I circle around to the front of the house and ease inside.
When we leave fifteen minutes later, I’m not nervous and I don’t sweat. Misty’s trying to act like she’s not holding a paper bag tucked into a plastic bag, her arm straight as a yardstick at her side, the bag crinkling and hissing when she walks. Leonie looks everywhere but at Misty. She doesn’t hand Kayla off, but instead buckles Kayla in herself. When we pull away from that sad circle of houses with all that plenty inside, Misty is bent down fiddling with Leonie’s floor mats, and the bag disappears. I slide a pack of saltines and two bottles of juice I stole out of that house into my own plastic bag. After we leave the half-burnt room of pine trees, and we’re back on pavement and the highway, Leonie turns on the radio and lets it play louder than she ever has. I open my stolen bottle and drink the juice down, then pour half the other bottle into Kayla’s sippy cup. I hand one cracker to Kayla and slide one into my mouth. We eat like that: one for me and one for her. I let the saltines turn mealy and soggy on my tongue before chewing and swallowing so I don’t crunch. I am silent and stealthy in another way. Neither of the women in the front seat pay us any attention. When I eat and drink, I have never tasted anything so good.
Chapter 4
Leonie
The night of Jojo’s birthday, Misty said: If we do this, the trip’s paid for. And then: You and Michael could have enough for a deposit. Y’all could get your own place. You always say the problem is y’all parents. Yours ’cause you live with them; his because they’re assholes. Given was even more still when she said that, like stone. Through Misty’s narrow kitchen window, I could see the tops of the trees turning from a dark velvet gray to orange, from palest orange to a pink the color of the inside of my mouth. How you think I paid for all my trips up to Bishop? From tips? She shook her head and snorted. You better take advantage.
I hear them four words over and over again when we get in the car and I watch Misty put the package in the pocket under the floorboards. You better take advantage. She said them words as though decisions have no consequences, when, of course, it’s been easier for her. The way she said it, take advantage, made me want to slap her. Her freckles, her thin pink lips, her blond hair, the stubborn milkiness of her skin; how easy had it been for her, her whole life, to make the world a friend to her?
Before Michael went to jail, he installed the envelope in the bottom of my car. He elevated the car on a jack and crawled underneath with his welding tools, and he cut what looked to be a perfect square in the floor of the car, then inserted another piece of metal with a hinge, fixed the hinge, and then welded the bottom of the car back together. Two doors, he’d said, and then kissed me twice. One to hold, and the other to let it go. If I need to. He’d been home from the oil rig for six months by then, and we’d had to move back in with Mama and Pop. We’d run through the money he saved, plus his severance. He’d worked on the Deepwater Horizon as a rig welder. After it blew up, he came home with his severance money and nightmares. At the time, I’d talked him into buying a full-size bed for us to share in our new apartment, so no matter how we moved, I said, we’d sleep close, so every time he kicked in his sleep, every time he twitched or mumbled and threw up his arms, drawing back from something, I woke. I’d spent the days after the accident with Jojo in the house watching CNN, watching the oil gush into the ocean, and feeling guilty because that’s not what I wanted to see, guilty because I didn’t give a shit about those fucking pelicans, guilty because I just wanted to see Michael’s face, his shoulders, his fingers, guilty because all I cared about was him. He’d called me not long after the story broke on the news, told me he was safe, but his voice was tiny, corroded by static, unreal. I knew those men—all eleven of them. Lived with them, he said. When he came home, I was happy. He wasn’t. What we supposed to do? he asked, taking two bites of his grits before leaving them to jelly on his plate. We’ll figure it out, I said. When he started getting skinny, I thought it was because of his nightmares. When his cheekbones started standing out on his face like rocks under water, I thought it was because he was stressed out over money. When his spine rose under his skin, a line of knuckles punching up his back, I thought it was because of his grief and the fact he couldn’t find another welding job anywhere in Mississippi or Alabama or Florida or Louisiana or the Gulf of Mexico. But later I found out the truth. Later, I learned he’d figured everything out without me.
“You don’t have to be so nervous,” Misty says.
“I’m not nervous.”
“This ain’t the first time I done this.”
“I know.”
“I’m talking about with Bishop.”
Misty’s sipping on one of the cold drinks she took from her friends’ house. The woman’s name was Carlotta, and her husband, the one who cooked and gave us the bag, was Fred.
“First time I did this was when I was visiting Sonny, my ex.”
“That’s how you know them?”