“That’s a pretty wheelbarrow.” But it isn’t a wheelbarrow at all. It’s a plain wire cart for hauling groceries, laundry. She’s trying to keep to the road’s shoulder, but a vehicle would still have to cross the yellow lines to get by. He doesn’t pass. He rides just behind.
Her walk, slowed by the heat, changes his breath. She tightens her ponytail and he readjusts his hands on the steering wheel. She scratches a bug bite on the back of her leg and he offers her a ride. Either he’ll chop her up into body parts or he’ll drop her off at her house. “Thank you,” she says. “I’d love a ride. It’s hot out here.”
Trey throws her cart into the backseat. His dashboard is burgundy plastic. It smells like it’s melting. He wears a piece of string around his wrist and says little. The radio is playing “Oh, won’t you, show me the way?” That old song. She doesn’t even know how old, but long before she was born. The closer they get to her house the more she thinks he might drive past it and she’ll be as good as gone.
But he’s got more structured plans. He pulls into her driveway. “If there’s anything you ever need.”
“There might be,” she tells him. “What’s your name? Just in case.”
“Trey.”
She was only asking to be coy. She’s known his name since she was nine years old.
*
There’s nothing to do in the summertime. Sit on the porch. Hang laundry on the line. Sometimes she goes to a 4-H meeting, though she has no luck keeping chickens. They don’t like her. They don’t lay eggs. She gets her period, feels sick for a day and stays home watching TV. There’s a party in town on the Fourth of July, but not if it rains. There’s a parish fair in August and a pageant that celebrates the Europeans who bought this town from the Indians for a couple of beads, some shiny coins, and a rifle. That’s how the summer passes. That and an occasional night of babysitting at four dollars an hour, country wages, no-driver’s-license wages.
She walks to the store. She can’t get her driver’s license yet, and even then she won’t have a car. She buys candy in town and it feels like she’s gotten something accomplished. She’s walking home, eating a Tootsie Pop, when Trey pulls up beside her for the second time. One action means something to her and something entirely different to him.
“Where’s your wheelbarrow?”
With a fingernail she dislodges the candy glommed onto her teeth. “I didn’t need it today.”
“So you just left it at home.”
“That’s right.”
Stupid stuff, like he’s speaking in code. “Wheelbarrow” stands for something else he can’t say. But how is she supposed to know that?
“It’s a hot one.”
“Yes, it is.” Heat waves rise off the road up ahead.
“You have any interest in heading down to the quarry for a swim?”
“I don’t have a bathing suit on.”
His stomach sours because now he absolutely, definitely has thought of this young girl standing before him naked.
“I could stop at home and grab one.”
“All right.”
“Wait here though. My mother didn’t like your car the other day.”
*
At the quarry Trey pulls off his shirt. He wears a pair of running shorts the same color as his car. They are cut higher than the surfer trunks boys her age prefer. Trey’s shorts are the kind that sometimes accidentally expose a man. The first time she ever caught a glimpse was one of her mother’s boyfriends in a pair of running shorts. She thought there was something wrong with him. What she saw looked tortured and red, wrinkled as a turkey’s snood.
Trey’s hands are ruddy from working. That triggers a feeling inside, like she can see him using those hands to battle a woolly mammoth, drag it home for her supper. He has hair on his chest, at least one curl for every year he’s been alive. Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight. She can’t count them all. He dives into the quarry with his baseball cap still on his head, hiding something underneath.
They are trespassing, but all the kids do it. All the kids and Trey. Below the surface of the water there are broken beer bottles, brown shards coated with scum.
“Come here, little mouse.”
The words he uses. She slouches her back and stares down at him from the rocks. He has tufts of dark hair on his knuckles. A few longer mustache whiskers poke into his mouth. Trey has a mustache. She dives into the quarry after him.
*
Since she was seven she’s kept a white pocketbook filled with special things, a treasure purse. There’s a Kennedy half-dollar and a stick with a worm pattern eaten into it. There’s a small rubber monster for the end of a pencil. There’s a half-gone pack of Merit cigarettes. She found some of the treasure along the road into town, things that had flown out of people’s open car windows as they went speeding past. Some of the treasure came from a burned-down house. Some of the treasure is stones with bits of mica inside. Once, she found a blue Mylar balloon that had lost its air. She took it home. She put it with the other treasures. There is a piece of fake tiger skin in the purse. There are some seashells and old acorns and a tiny plastic bull another boyfriend of her mom’s brought back from Spain, where he was stationed. When she spreads this collection on her bed it feels like she owns lots of things: she’s rich. Her mother says, “Why do you hold on to all this junk?” But then her mom will finger a rusted thimble or a rubber-band ball. The purse makes the girl happy, the same way she used to feel after baking mud pies all afternoon. She’d made something of value from nothing and all she had to do was wait for the right person to come along and ask for it. “Two mud pies? That will be three stones with flecks of mica in them. Thank you.”
At first, everything Trey touched went into the treasure purse, even if it was just a pen or a lighter. But then he started touching too many things and she had to become more selective.
*
Her mother’s not very religious. Her mother went to college. Still, someone convinced her to join a group going on a three-day Christian retreat. A weekend up by Winamac Lake, three and a half hours away. Her mom thinks maybe she’ll meet a nice man. “A new father for you,” she says. The girl’s already had two new fathers plus the original one. Her mother registered for the retreat and they sent a brochure. Brothers and Sisters, it said. Today, perhaps more than ever, it is necessary to remind ourselves that without God we are nothing, bereft of value, incapable of doing anything. Her mother decided to go anyway. For three days.
“I really need to get away.” She plays with her daughter’s hair. Her bag is packed. “You’ll understand when you’re older.” Which is a sticking point between them. The girl already thinks she is older. After all, she’s not going to get any taller than this. After all, her mother is about to leave her home alone for three days.