Valentine

by Elizabeth Wetmore

  Son, what do you want? I say to the boy who is barely a man.

  He looks fine standing out there in the sunlight, but his eyes narrow. Well, I’m real thirsty and I’d like to use your telephone to call—

  He takes another step toward the house but stops abruptly when he sees Old Lady. He can’t possibly know, I tell myself, that it might not be loaded. I tap the barrel gently against the pecan planking, one, two, three times, and he cocks his head, listening.

  Mrs. Whitehead, is your husband at home?

  Yes he is, of course he is, but he’s sleeping right now.

  His smile gets a little wider, a little friendlier. A cattleman asleep at noon?

  It’s 11:30. I laugh, and the sound is bitter as juniper berries. How stupid it sounds! How alone it makes me seem.

  He giggles a little, real high-pitched, and my stomach roils at the sound. His laughter is a false cut.

  Lord, Mrs. Whitehead, did your husband tie one on last night too?

  No.

  He sick? Too much Valentine’s candy?

  He is not sick—I press one hand against my belly, thinking, slow down, little baby, quiet—can I help you with something?

  I told you, I’ve had some trouble. My sweetheart and I drove out here last night for a little celebration. You know how it is—

  I see, I tell him, and smooth my hand back and forth across my stomach.

  —and we drank too much, had a little dustup. Maybe she didn’t like the heart-shaped box of chocolates I bought for her, and I might have passed out—

  Did you.

  —guess you could say I lost my valentine. Shame on me, huh?

  I watch him talk, and I am holding on to my old rifle for dear life, but my throat feels like somebody just wrapped his hand around it and started to squeeze real slow. Behind him, and barely visible on the horizon, I catch a glimpse of a cherry-red car racing down the highway. It is more than a mile away, and from this distance, the car looks as if it is flying across the desert. Come and visit me please, I think as it approaches the turnoff to our ranch, and my throat aches a little. The car hesitates, a small wobble on the horizon, and then speeds away.

  The young man keeps telling his little story, still smiling, blond hair glowing in the sun. He is standing less than ten feet from me now. If there’s a bullet in the chamber, I won’t miss him.

  When I woke up this morning, he tells me, she had already hightailed it out of there. I’m afraid she might be walking around in the oil patch and that ain’t no place for a girl, as I’m sure you know.

  I don’t say a word. Listening is what I do now. I listen, but I don’t hear anything except him, talking.

  I hate to think of her getting into some trouble out there, he says, stepping on a diamondback or running into the wrong kind of person. Have you seen my Gloria? He lifts his right hand and holds it out to his side, palm down. Little Mexican gal? About yay high?

  My throat slams shut, but I swallow hard and try to look him right in the eye. No sir, we haven’t seen her. Maybe she hitched a ride back to town.

  Can I come in and use your phone?

  I shake my head real slow, back and forth. No.

  He pretends to look genuinely surprised. Well, why not?

  Because I don’t know you. I try to speak this lie as if I mean it. Because now, I do know him—who he is and what he’s done.

  Listen, Mrs. Whitehead—

  How do you know my name? I am nearly shouting now, pushing one hand against the baby’s foot, which hammers against my rib cage.

  The young man looks surprised. Well, it’s right there on your mailbox, ma’am. Listen, he says, I feel bad about what happened out there, and I’m real worried about her. She’s a little crazy, you know how these Mexican gals can be. He stares at me intently, his blue eyes just a shade darker than the sky. If you’ve seen her, you should tell me.

  He stops talking and gazes past me toward the house for a few seconds, a broad grin spreading across his face. I imagine my daughter peeking out the window at him. Then I imagine the other girl looking through the glass, her blackened eyes and torn lips, and I do not know whether to keep my eyes locked on him or turn my head to see what he sees, know what he knows. So I stand there, me and my maybe loaded gun, and I try to listen.

  I want you to step back, I tell him after a thousand years of silence have passed. Go stand next to the tailgate of your truck.

  He doesn’t move. And I told you that I want a drink of water.

  No.

  He looks up at the sky and lays his hands on the back of his neck, fingers threaded. He whistles a few bars of music and though the song is familiar, I can’t name it. When he speaks, he is a man, not a boy.

  I want you to give her to me. Okay?

  I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you go on back to town?

  You step inside the house now, Mrs. Whitehead, and get my girlfriend. Try not to wake your husband, who is sleeping upstairs, except he’s not, is he.

  It is not a question, and suddenly, Robert’s face rises wraithlike before me. You did all this for a stranger, Mary Rose? You risked our daughter’s life, our baby’s life, yourself, for a stranger. What the hell is wrong with you?

  And he’d be right. Because who is this child to me, anyway? Maybe she got into his truck willingly. I might have done the same ten years earlier, especially for a man this pretty.

  Lady, I don’t know you, he says. You don’t know me. You don’t know Gloria. Now I want you to be a good girl, and set down that gun and go inside that house, and you bring her out here.

  I feel the tears on my cheeks before I’m aware that I have begun to weep. There I stand, with my rifle, that useless piece of beautifully carved wood, and why should I not do as he asks? Who is she to me? She is not my child. Aimee and this child whose feet and fists kick and flail, they are somebody to me. They are mine. This girl, Gloria, she is not mine.

  When he speaks next, the young man is no longer interested in asking questions, or talking. Bitch, he says, you listen here—

  I try to listen for something other than his voice—a phone ringing in the house, a truck coming up the road, even the wind would be a welcome noise, but everything on this particular piece of flat and lonely earth has gone silent. His is the only voice I can hear, and it roars. Do you hear me, you stupid bitch. You hear me?

  Gently, I shake my head. No, I don’t hear you. Then I pick up the rifle and snug it against my shoulder, a right and familiar sensation, but now it feels like somebody has poured lead into the barrel. I am as weak as an old woman. Maybe it is loaded, I don’t know, but still I point it at his pretty, golden face—because he doesn’t know either.

  I don’t have one word left in me, so I flick my thumb across the safety and sight him through the aperture, my vision blurred by tears and the sorrow of knowing what I will say if he asks even one more time. Well, come on then, mister. I will take you to the ground myself, or die trying, if it means standing between you and my daughter, but Gloria? Her you can have.

  We hear the sirens at the same time. He is already turning around when I lift my gaze from the bead sight. We stand there and watch the sheriff’s car coming fast up the road. An ambulance is right behind him, kicking up enough dust to choke a herd of cows. Just this side of our mailbox, the driver overcorrects and slides off the road. The vehicle bounces off the barbed-wire fence and skids into the flock of sand hill cranes, who rise up shrieking. They take flight, all noise and thin legs and thwapping disorder, a hue and cry.

  For a few seconds, the young man holds himself still as a frightened jackrabbit. Then his shoulders slump forward and he rubs his fingers against his closed eyes. Well, shit, he says. My daddy’s going to kill me.

  A lot of years will pass before I think my daughter is old enough to hear it, but when I do, I will tell her the last thing I remember seeing before I leaned back against the doorframe and passed out cold on the front porch. Two little girls, faces pressed against t
he kitchen window, mouths agape and eyes wide open, only one of them mine.

  Corrine

  Well, it’s a murderous little shit, the skinny yellow stray with lime-colored eyes and balls the size of silver dollars. Somebody dumped it in the dirt lot behind the Shepards’ house at the end of December—a Christmas present that wore thin quick, a bad idea from the get-go, Corrine told Potter at the time—and no creature has been safe since. Songbirds have perished by the dozens. Finches, a family of cactus wrens nesting under the storage shed, too many sparrows and bats to count, even a large mockingbird. In four months, the stray has doubled in size. His pale fur glows like a chrysanthemum.

  Corrine is kneeling in front of the toilet when she hears the panicked cry of another small animal in the backyard. The birds shriek and beat their wings against the ground, and the garter snakes and brown racers die quietly, their light bodies barely disturbing the hard-packed dirt in her empty flowerbeds. This is the sound made by a mouse or squirrel, maybe even a young prairie dog. Critters, she thinks, that’s what Potter used to call them. And her throat closes up.

  Holding her thin brown hair with one hand, she finishes bringing up the contents of her stomach, then sits with her cheek pressed against the bathroom’s cool wall. The animal cries out again and in the silence that follows, she tries to piece together the details of last night. Did she have five drinks or six? What did she say, and to whom?

  The ceiling fan rattles overhead. The meaty stink of salted peanuts and Scotch drifts toward the open window, and Corrine’s eyes are wet from the force of her sick. All this, and that bald spot on the crown of her head getting bigger by the day. Not that this particular detail has anything to do with how drunk she got last night, but still—it is part of the inventory. As is the small square of toilet paper dangling from her chin. She flicks it into the toilet bowl, closes the lid, and lays her forehead against the porcelain while she listens to the tank fill back up.

  Sloppy as a bag of fishing worms left out in the sun, Potter would tell Corrine if he were here. Then he’d fix her a Bloody Mary, heavy on the Trappy’s hot sauce, and fry up some bacon and eggs. He’d hand her a piece of toast to sop up the bacon grease. Back in business, he’d say. Pace yourself next time, sweetheart. Six weeks since Potter died—went out in a blaze of glory!—and this morning she can hear her husband’s voice so plainly he might as well be standing in the doorway. Same old goofy smile, same old hopeful self.

  When the phone in the kitchen rings, the sound tears a hole in the quiet. There’s not one person in the world Corrine cares to talk to. Alice lives in Prudhoe Bay and only calls on Sunday nights when long distance rates are low. Even then, Corrine, who hasn’t forgiven her daughter for the blizzard that shut down the airport in Anchorage and kept her from Potter’s funeral, always keeps the conversations short, talking just long enough to reassure her daughter that she is fine. I am just fine, she tells Alice. Staying busy with the garden, going to church on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, going through your daddy’s things so the Salvation Army can pick them up.

  Every word of it is bullshit. She hasn’t boxed up so much as a T-shirt of that old man’s. Out back, the garden is nothing but packed dirt and bird carcasses, and after forty years of letting Potter drag her to church, she isn’t about to give those sanctimonious bitches another minute, or another nickel. In the bathroom, his leather shaving kit still sits open on the vanity. His earplugs are on his nightstand, alongside an Elmer Kelton book and his pain medicine. The jigsaw puzzle he was working on when he died is still spread out on the kitchen table, and his new cane leans against the wall behind it. A stack of life insurance forms, along with six banker’s envelopes from the credit union, mostly fifties, a few hundred-dollar bills, lies on a gold plastic lazy Susan in the center of the table. Sometimes Corrine thinks about setting the envelopes on fire, one by one, with the money still inside.

  The phone rings again, and Corrine presses her eyes against the palms of her hands. A week earlier, she broke off the volume dial in a fit of pique. Now, with the ringer stuck on high, the god-awful off-key chime pierces every nook and cranny of the house and yard, screaming when it could have asked. The voice on the other end is equally unpleasant when Corrine finally snatches up the phone, when she says testily, Shepard residence.

  Because of you, a woman shouts, I got fired last night.

  Who? Corrine says, and the woman sobs and slams the phone so hard that Corrine’s ear rings.

  The stray cat is standing outside the sliding-glass door with a dead mouse in his mouth when the phone rings again. Corrine snatches it up and yells into the receiver, Go to hell. The cat drops his victim and bolts across the backyard, scaling her pecan tree and launching his large, ugly body over the cinder-block fence and into the alley.

  * * *

  They were making plans for their retirement when Potter’s headaches started the previous spring. He was fully vested in his pension, and Corrine had been collecting hers since the school board forced her out a few years earlier, in the wake of some ill-advised comments she made in the teacher’s lounge. Maybe we can drive up to Alaska, Potter said, stop in California and see that redwood tree that’s big enough to drive a truck through.

  But Corrine had her doubts. You can’t even get the sun up there for half the year, she told him, and what the hell is in Alaska? Moose?

  Alice, said Potter. Alice is up there.

  Corrine rolled her eyes, a habit she’d picked up from thirty years of working with teenagers. Right, she said, shacking up with whatshisname, the draft dodger.

  Two days after they put down a deposit on a brand-new Winnebago thirty feet long and with its own shower, Potter had his first seizure. He was mowing the front yard when he fell to the ground, teeth clattering, arms and legs jerking madly. The lawn mower rolled slowly toward the street and came to a stop with its back wheels still on the sidewalk. Ginny Pierce’s kid was riding her bike in circles on the Shepards’ driveway, and Corrine heard her hollering all the way from the bedroom, where she’d been reading a book with the swamp cooler turned up high.

  They drove five hundred miles to Houston and rode an elevator for fifteen stories to sit in two narrow chairs with vinyl cushions and listen while the oncologist spelled it out for them. Corrine sat hunched over a spiral notebook, her pen bearing down on the paper like she was trying to kill it. Glioblastoma multiforme, he said, GBM, for short. For short? Corrine looked up at him. It was so rare, the oncologist said, they might as well have found a trilobite lodged in Potter’s brain. If they started radiation therapy right away, they might buy him six months, maybe a year.

  Six months? Corrine gazed at the doctor with her mouth hanging open, thinking, Oh no, no, no. You are mistaken, sir. She watched Potter stand up and walk over to the window where he looks out at Houston’s soupy brown air. His shoulders began to move gently up and down, but Corrine didn’t go to him. She was stuck to that chair as surely as if someone had driven a nail through one of her thighs.

  It was too hot to drive home, so they went over to the Westwood Mall, where they sat on a bench near the food court, both of them clutching bottles of cold Dr Pepper as if they were hand grenades. At dusk, they walked to the parking lot. They drove with the windows down, the wind blowing hot against their faces and hands. By midnight the truck stank of them—the remnants of a cup of coffee Corrine had spilled on the seat the day before, her cigarettes and Chanel No. 5, Potter’s snuff and aftershave, their mutual sweat and fear. He drove. She turned the radio on and off, on and off, and on, pulled her hair into a clip, let it back down, and turned off the radio, turned it back on. After a while, Potter asked her to please stop.

  City traffic made Corrine nervous, so Potter took the loop around San Antonio. I’m sorry, she told him, for adding time to our drive. He smiled wanly and reached across the seat for her hand. Woman, he said, are you apologizing to me? Well. I guess I really am dying. Corrine turned her face toward the passenger window, and cried so hard he
r nose clogged up and her eyes swelled nearly shut.

  * * *

  Not even nine o’clock, and it is already ninety degrees outside when Corrine looks out the living-room window and sees Potter’s truck parked on the front lawn. It was his pride and joy, a Chevy Stepside V8, with a scarlet leather interior. It has been a dry winter and the Bermuda grass is a pale brown scarf. When the breeze picks up, a few blades of grass that weren’t flattened beneath the truck’s wheel tremble under the sunlight. Every day for the past two weeks, the wind picks up in the late morning and blows steadily until dusk. Back when Corrine gave a shit, that would have meant dusting the house before she went to bed.

  On Larkspur Lane, the neighbors stand in their front yards, water hoses in hand, staving off the drought. A large U-Haul turns the corner and stops in front of the Shepards’ house, then backs slowly into the driveway across the street. If you really want to know, Corrine would gladly explain to anybody who cared to ask, I am not a drunk, I’m just drinking all the time. There is a world of difference between the two.

  No one will ask, but they will sure talk if she doesn’t move Potter’s truck off the lawn, so Corrine swallows an aspirin and puts on a skirt suit from her teaching days, an olive-green number with brass buttons shaped like anchors. She puts on pantyhose, perfume, lipstick, and sunglasses then creeps outside wearing her house slippers, as if she has just returned from church and is settling in for a busy day at home, doing something.