Valentine

by Elizabeth Wetmore

  After, Potter said he wanted a T-bone for supper. He would grill and they could have a couple of baked potatoes with all the fixins—and butter, not that margarine she had been pushing on him for the last decade. If they took a pecan pie out of the freezer now, he said, it would defrost in time for dessert. After supper, he put on a Ritchie Valens album and danced her around the living room, and so what if it had been years since they had thought to dance with each other? They could do it now, he said. Later, it would occur to Corrine that she should have known, right then and there, what he was up to.

  * * *

  On the table next to his chair in the living room, the newspaper from February 27, the day he died, is folded to the crossword. A single word is penciled in. Four letters, to walk or drive across a shallow place. Ford. On the table next to her chair sits a book of poetry that she has not touched in months, preferring instead to read articles on cancer and healthy eating, even one about a doctor down in Acapulco, an idea that Potter had immediately vetoed. She wanders back into the front hallway and lets her fingers drift across the walnut case of his AM/FM radio, twisting the knobs back and forth. On pretty nights, when the wind was blowing from the north, they would carry it out to the front porch and listen to the country station out of Lubbock. To the day he died, only Corrine, Potter, and the doctors knew about his illness. Any day, they kept promising each other, they would tell Alice and a few people from church, but then Potter went and jumped the gun. Goddamn him.

  The doorbell is mounted on the wall directly above the radio, and when it rings, Corrine nearly comes out of her skin. She stands frozen in place, heart pounding, her right hand still on the radio’s dial. The bell rings again and then she hears Debra Ann Pierce’s peculiar knock, three evenly spaced raps in the center of the door, three staccato knocks on the left side, three on the right, then the child calling, Mrs. Shepard, Mrs. Shepard, Mrs. Shepard, as she does at least once every day.

  Corrine opens the door, wedging her large body between the doorjamb and door. She squeezes her thighs together, as if given half a chance the child might try to dart between her legs, like a small dog.

  Are you the one who’s been calling me all morning, Debra Ann Pierce? Corrine’s voice is a rasp and her tongue feels like someone put a coat of paint on it. She turns her head toward her shoulder and coughs.

  No, ma’am. Debra Ann is wearing a hot pink T-shirt that says Superstar and a pair of orange terrycloth shorts that barely cover the tops of her thighs. In one hand she holds a horny toad, which she rubs between the eyes with her index finger. Its eyes are closed, and Corrine wonders if this child has been carrying a dead animal around the neighborhood, but then the little creature starts squirming in the girl’s hand.

  You should let that poor thing go, Corrine says. It’s not a pet. Little girl, I had a late night and I’m tired, and my phone has been ringing off the wall this morning.

  Where did you go?

  That’s none of your business. D. A. Pierce, why are you calling my house?

  It wasn’t me, I swear.

  Do not swear, Corrine says and regrets it immediately. What the hell does she care what this child does, as long as she gets off the front porch and leaves Corrine be?

  Yes, ma’am. Debra Ann reaches around and pulls her shorts out of her butt crack. She looks across the street and frowns. Are those Mexicans moving here?

  Maybe, says Corrine. That, also, is none of your business.

  Some people ain’t going to like that one bit—Mr. Davis, Mrs. Ledbetter, old Mr. Jeffries—

  Corrine holds up her hand. You stop that. Those men have as much right to be here as you and me.

  They do not, the girl says. This is our street.

  What do you think Mr. Shepard would think if he heard you talking like that?

  The girl looks down at her bare feet and flexes both big toes a few times. She adored Potter, the only adult who never corrected her grammar or undercut her plans, who listened attentively to her tall tales about her imaginary friends Peter and Lily, who flew in from London and regaled D. A. with stories about the London Bridge and the Queen of England. Not once had Potter suggested that she was too old for make-believe friends, never did he tease.

  Corrine pats the several pockets of her suit jacket and discovers a box with one cigarette. Well, hot damn. She pulls it out of the box and lights up, blowing the smoke just above the girl’s head. Where’s your daddy today?

  Working in Ozona—Debra Ann pushes out her bottom lip and blows upward so hard her bangs tremble—or Big Lake. The girl turns the horny toad around and holds it close to her face. I’m gonna take you home with me, she whispers ominously and grabs hold of her eyebrow. She yanks several hairs out and flicks them into the hedge next to the porch. There are small bald patches in each brow, Corrine sees now. In the days after Debra Ann’s mother left town, Corrine carried food over to Jim while Potter and D. A. sat on the couch and watched cartoons. At Potter’s funeral, the girl had leaned over the casket and peered into Potter’s face for so long that Corrine wanted to knock her in the head with the flat of her hand and say what the hell do you think you’re looking at, little girl?

  Debra Ann tries to see if the toad will fit in the pocket of her shorts, but it starts clawing at her hands. I thought you might like some company, she tells Corrine. We could finish Mr. Shepard’s puzzle.

  I do not care for any company, thank you.

  The girl gazes at her, and after a few seconds Corrine sighs. Well, I’m out of cigarettes. Do you want to ride your bike up to 7-Eleven and buy me a pack?

  D. A. nods and smiles. She is missing two baby teeth, one canine up top, one canine on the bottom, and the gaps are red and inflamed. The remaining teeth are yellow and dingy, and there are pieces of food, bread maybe, along her gum line. Her black hair is jagged and matted at the ends, as if she started to comb it out and got bored, and Corrine could swear she sees a few nits. Wait here, Corrine says and goes inside to fetch her purse. When she hands the girl a dollar bill, D. A.’s eyes widen with pleasure.

  Here’s fifty cents for a pack of Benson & Hedges, she says, and fifty cents for your time. Make sure you get the right brand—Ultra Lights.

  D. A. shoves the bill into her shorts pocket and asks if Corrine has a shoebox so she can leave the horny toad on the porch. Corrine tells her no, there is a stray running around killing anything it can catch, and the child takes off running across the lawn, the toad clasped in her left hand. When Corrine yells at her not to talk to strangers, D. A. lifts the animal above her head and waggles it in the old woman’s direction. Even from a distance, Corrine can see thin streams of blood leaking from both the creature’s eyes, its last and most desperate line of defense.

  * * *

  Potter had written his letter on a yellow legal pad he found in Corrine’s desk. He had tried hard not to nickel-and-dime the Almighty, he wrote. He had prayed for help only a handful of times that he could remember—when his B-29 lost an engine over Osaka, when Corrine had some trouble with the morphine in the moments after Alice was delivered, when they all had pneumonia in the winter of 1953. In 1968, he prayed for the price of oil to go back up, and he might have prayed to catch a bigger catfish once or twice when they were fishing Lake Spence, but he was mostly joking. And now, Potter wrote, he was counting on the Almighty not to nickel-and-dime him—because he was not willing to ride this train to the end of the line.

  He wrote that he would miss their long drives and their camping trips, and the way Corrine moved her feet up and down against his calves at night after they had crawled into the tent because she was always cold and he was always warm. He would miss all the little critters they listened to, as they lay in the tent with their sleeping bags zipped together.

  There were some things he regretted. He wished he had gone to college when he came home from the war, even if it had meant accepting help from the government. He wished they had gone to Alaska to see Alice, and he had sent their daughter a letter saying as
much. But most of all, he wished he’d done things differently on Valentine’s night. All this, from a man who had hardly written so much as a grocery list since he came back from flying bombers over Japan.

  He left the letter on the kitchen table, along with several envelopes that contained ten thousand dollars in cash. He had been worrying for weeks that the life insurance company would find some way to cheat Corrine out of the policy, and she correctly guessed this was emergency money he had stashed somewhere. At the bottom of the note, a sentence had been added, scrawled quickly with a red pen. Make sure Dr. Bauman writes hunting accident on the death certificate.

  Twenty minutes later, when the sheriff’s deputy came to the front door, and before Corrine even had a chance to ask where they had found him, the deputy told her there had been an accident, a terrible accident, the kind of accident you never saw coming. It happens more often than you would think, he said.

  * * *

  When Debra Ann returns fifteen minutes later, her mouth is ringed with chocolate and she is no longer carrying the horny toad. She clutches Corrine’s cigarettes in one grubby hand while she explains that her daddy won’t be home until eight o’clock, and she thinks there might be some leftover goulash at home, but she isn’t sure. Maybe Lily and Peter ate it all. Debra Ann leans toward Corrine and cranes her neck as she tries to see down the hallway, the smell of mildew rising from her hair and clothes. Stomach lurching, Corrine holds out her hand for the cigarettes. She knocks the box against her palm, nods gently while Debra Ann jabbers on about the horny toad, how the clerk at the 7-Eleven made her let him go before she could come into the store, and although she told the animal to stay put in her bicycle basket, of course he was gone when she came back.

  They are wild animals that will give you warts, Corrine told her. Get a better pet next time.

  I saw Mr. Shepard’s cat out there in the alley behind your house.

  That is not Mr. Shepard’s cat.

  Well, he used to feed it.

  Oh, he did not.

  I know for a fact that Mr. Shepard used to let it sleep in the garage sometimes when it was cold outside.

  Oh, bullshit, says Corrine. We didn’t even have so much as a sleet storm last winter.

  It still got cold, says Debra Ann. He might be good company.

  Corrine tells the child that she does not want to feed anything, or water it, or clean up its shit or pull ticks off its ears, or vacuum fleas out of her draperies when it gets into the house. I’ll tell you what, D. A., she says, if you can catch that cat, you can take it home with you.

  I wish I had a cat that wanted to come live with me, Debra Ann says, but my daddy only wants pets that will live in a box. I wish we had something to eat other than goulash. I wish—but Corrine interrupts and asks if D. A. remembers what Corrine’s old daddy himself used to say.

  Wish in one hand and poop in the other, see which one gets full faster? she says glumly.

  Yes, ma’am, Corrine says as she steps backward into the house and gently pushes the door closed in the child’s face.

  While the phone rings a dozen times, Corrine fixes herself an iced tea with a smidge of bourbon. When she’s sure Debra Ann isn’t hanging around the yard, she heads back outside for a porch-sit and a smoke. She will stay low, sitting on the concrete step next to the hedges, where she can see what’s going on without anyone noticing her.

  At least once a week since Potter died, Suzanne Ledbetter shows up at Corrine’s door with a casserole and an invitation to participate in some damned crochet circle or one of those god-awful recipe swaps where each woman makes the recipe and writes down her observations on a 3x5 notecard before passing it along to the next woman, who also makes the recipe and adds her notes to the card. And so it goes. In this way, the women are able to make a good recipe even better, says Suzanne Ledbetter.

  Corrine has learned over the years to say no thank you to get-togethers and recipe swaps. Still, by the time she sits down on her front porch with a drink in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other, she has a freezer full of casseroles. And a head full of bullshit too, she thinks as she lowers her bottom onto the concrete step and scoots over to peer through her scraggly hawthorns. Across the street, two young men are carrying a large television console into a rust-colored brick ranch that is a mirror image of Corrine and Potter’s—nine hundred square feet, three bedrooms, one full bath plus a powder room off the dining room. The kitchen window faces the backyard, same as Corrine’s, and the same sliding-glass door leads to a back patio, she imagines, though she never knew the previous tenants, three young men who kept a large mutt chained to a dead pecan tree in the front yard and who, mercifully, took the dog with them when they moved out in the middle of the night.

  A white sedan pulls up, and a young girl and her mother start taking several small boxes from the back seat. The woman is heavily pregnant, swollen as a deer carcass on a hot road, and there is no sign of a mister. When the car is empty, the woman stands in the front yard while the child hops around the dead tree. She is the spitting image of her mama—white-haired and round-faced—and from time to time she walks over and hangs on the woman’s maternity smock as if one or the other of them might lift off the ground and drift across the sky, should she let go.

  The woman—she looks too young to have a girl that big—rubs her daughter’s back while they watch three young men carry furniture and boxes up the driveway, through the open garage, and into the house. They are still boys, Corrine sees now, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, with sneakers, crew cuts, and cowboy hats in varied shades of brown perched on their heads. Two middle-aged men, wearing the same brown steel-toed boots that Potter used to lace up before he headed out to the plant in the mornings, stand by the front door measuring and re-measuring the doorframe against a massive mahogany door that is leaning against the house like a drunk. Corrine swirls her pinkie in her drink and looks at the pregnant woman with amusement. The front door that’s already there wasn’t good enough for her? Well! She sucks the liquor off her finger.

  One of the men holds up his hands in the shape of a door, showing how wide, how tall, and the woman shakes her head. One hand moves to her forehead, the other to her belly, and then, as the man points again at the doorframe, her upper body drifts toward the door, a boat listing ever so slightly, then sinking fast as she folds in half. A cry rises up from the men. Corrine sets down her drink and smacks her lips. By the time she has hauled herself to her feet and pulled on her slippers, the woman is on her hands and knees in the front yard, her belly skimming the dirt. The child hovers anxiously around her mother’s head. Words in both Spanish and English fly around the yard like sparrows. A man runs into the kitchen and returns with a plastic cup filled with water.

  Corrine introduces herself and points at her house across the street while the girl, Aimee, plucks at her mother’s maternity blouse. She is a jowly child with eyebrows and eyelashes so pale they are nearly invisible. The mother, Mary Rose, gasps as her blouse rises and falls with a contraction, and Corrine thinks she might have seen her back at the high school, just another girl who dropped out and got married. It’s impossible to remember them all.

  Corrine tries and fails to remember a single useful detail from the hazy twilight sleep of her labor with Alice, some thirty years ago. Can I drive you to the hospital?

  No, thank you. I can drive myself. Mary Rose presses both hands against her belly while she looks up at Corrine. I saw the wreath on your front door. I’m sorry for your loss.

  My husband died in February. I just haven’t taken it down. Corrine narrows her eyes and looks at the men and boys who stand quietly in a row, shifting back and forth on their feet, eyeing the rancher’s wife who has gone into labor in the middle of their weekend job, whose husband is well known to them and theirs.

  It was a hunting accident, Corrine says. She might as well have swallowed a shovelful of scorpions, the way those words tear at her throat, poisonous, claws out.

 
A hunting accident. Mary Rose rolls over and sits up, and Corrine is surprised to see tears in the woman’s eyes. I am so sorry. Listen, we’re still waiting for them to turn on the electricity and I don’t want my daughter sitting around the waiting room by herself. Would you mind if she came to your house for a few hours, just until my husband returns from a livestock auction in Big Springs?

  No, ma’am, Corrine says without hesitation. I cannot have anybody in my house right now, sorry. Can I call your mother, or maybe a sister?

  No, thank you, Mary Rose says. They’ve got their hands full already.

  I want to stay with you, the child whines at her mother. I don’t even know her.

  I’d be happy to drive you to the hospital and wait with—Corrine pauses while the child glares at her and clutches her mother’s smock—Aimee.

  I don’t want her in a waiting room with a bunch of strange men, Mary Rose says.

  The women look at each other for a few seconds, the younger woman’s lips a tight seam. She pulls herself to her feet and tells her daughter to run and fetch her car keys, and the little ditty bag she has set in the hall closet. After Aimee scampers into the house through the open garage, Mary Rose asks the foreman to lock up behind them when they have emptied the moving van, and when Corrine starts back toward her own front porch, already longing for the rest of that bourbon and iced tea, hoping that cat didn’t stick its nose in her glass and lick the ice, Mary Rose yells at her, too. Thanks for nothing, she says, but Corrine pretends not to hear. She keeps walking and when she is safely across the street, she dumps her drink in the hedge and goes inside to fix herself a fresh one.

  * * *

  It’s not quite dark outside when the phone rings again. Corrine, who is well into that bottle of bourbon, rushes to the kitchen and grabs the phone with both hands. Every goddamn thing in this house buzzes, rattles, or rings. She wraps the cord around the phone’s base and props open the door between the kitchen and garage with her foot. The loose skin on her arms wobbles madly when she lifts the phone over her head. The phone soars into the garage, strikes the concrete and rings twice when it lands next to the Lincoln Continental that she has forsaken in the forty days since Potter chose to remove himself from what he had once described as his situation. It was our situation, goddamn you.