Valentine

by Elizabeth Wetmore

  Suzanne and Lauralee walk up to the bleachers where the fans sit with cold beers or plastic cups of iced tea wedged between their knees, and when someone says under her breath, God love her, Suzanne knows they are talking about Lauralee, who has drifted over to the outer edge of the practice field and begun doing figure eights with her baton.

  Good job, honey, her mother calls. Try to do a reverse flash followed by a Little Joe flip.

  Lauralee wrenches her arm behind her back and spins the baton until it flies into the dirt and lands with a thud. She is so talented, a woman says. I can’t wait to see her in the halftime show in a few years. And she’s tall, says someone else. Bless her little heart. Try a pinwheel, Suzanne calls out. Try a double spin. Lauralee flings the baton into the sun, spins twice, and watches the baton roll to the sideline.

  Suzanne climbs up on the bleachers and hands out pink-and-white Avon bags. Each bag holds next month’s catalog along with lipsticks and eye shadows, perfumes and creams and lotions. Each item is wrapped with soft pink tissue paper and carefully tied with a white ribbon no wider than a fingernail. Smiling broadly and taking care to thank each woman individually, Suzanne slips their checks and cash into a small white envelope and zips it into her purse.

  Ten to one, Suzanne has a relative who owes money to at least one man sitting at the other end of the bleachers. Ten to one, her mama bounced a check to at least one of their daddies, back in the good old days. They would never hold it against her, but a woman could spend her whole life proving everybody wrong. So Suzanne keeps moving. She gathers, carries, and drops off. She volunteers, counts, plans, and falls to her knees to gather crumbs that no one else can see. There is always something that needs to be cleaned—a table, a window, her daughter’s face.

  Hit him harder, a booster yells. Y’all ain’t going to beat Midland Lee with that attitude, says another. Two boys crash into each other with a loud smack and lie unmoving on the field for a few seconds. Oh hell, one of the boosters yells from the aluminum bleachers, you just got your bells rung a little bit. On your feet, boys, shouts the coach, and the boys slowly roll onto their sides and get to their knees and stand up.

  After the Avon has been distributed, Suzanne unlocks the sides of the plastic container she sent Lauralee to fetch from the car. The lid swivels up to reveal three dozen chocolate cupcakes she’s made to give to the team when practice is over. One of the women remarks on the container, and Suzanne passes out catalogs. She is having a product party next week. They should come over for pimento cheese sandwiches and iced tea. Y’all bring your checkbooks. She winks at them, just like Arlene would have.

  On a good day, Suzanne’s mother could talk the pithy out of a cucumber. Everyone she ever met had high hopes for her. She was a master at reading a situation and becoming whoever she needed to be—Adventist, card shark, desperate mother in need of a little help. In Blanco, she had been a practicing Catholic. In Lubbock, she spoke in tongues and walked barefoot over hot coals. For a time there, when they lived in Pecos, she had everybody believing that she had lost her sight in a gas explosion. The family laughed all the way to the county line over that one.

  This all goes for Lauralee’s college fund, Suzanne tells the women, and while that is not strictly true, it is true enough.

  I’m sure she is going to be very successful at whatever she makes up her mind to do, one of the ladies says before turning to talk to the woman sitting next to her about the weather, the football team, the price of oil. When one woman gives an update on the Ramírez case, another wonders aloud what the girl’s mother was doing while her daughter was out running the streets. Well, I’ll tell you what she wasn’t doing, Suzanne says. Paying attention.

  Mmm-hmm, another woman says.

  It could have been any of our daughters, says a third.

  Not mine, Suzanne says. I don’t take my eye off her for a minute.

  And then, just as one of the linebackers stumbles to the sidelines and begins retching in the grass, Lauralee flings her baton high into the air, spins around three times, and looks up to the sky with a wide grin on her face. The baton smacks her in the eye so hard that even Coach Allen gasps. She lets out a wail that spins across the practice field like a dust devil, a high-pitched scream that is a full-frontal assault on both hearing and reason.

  Suzanne runs down the metal bleachers, each aluminum row trembling as she steps hard, her purse banging against her hip, the cupcakes forgotten and melting on the back row. She grabs her daughter by the shoulders and peers into her eye. It is barely red. She is unlikely to have so much as a bump.

  You’re okay, she tells her daughter. Rub some dirt on it. But Lauralee wails on and on, and then everybody stops what they’re doing—Coach Allen stops yelling at the team, the women stop peering into their gift bags, the boosters stop armchair quarterbacking, even the team stands still—and all of them, in what seems to Suzanne to be a single, coordinated motion, look at her as if to say, Well, do something.

  I hate the baton, Lauralee yells.

  Oh, you do not. Suzanne chews her finger and looks back over her shoulder at the row of boosters, still sitting there with their mouths open, still waiting for her to take control of the situation. She doesn’t hate it, she calls to them.

  Lauralee wails again and then falls to the ground, rolling back and forth with her hand over one eye, saying Ow, ow, ow.

  Stop it, Suzanne whispers fiercely. You want to let these people see you cry? She pulls her daughter to her feet, walks her quickly across the field, and pushes her into the front seat of the car, all while begging her to stop that damned crying and act like a big girl, for heaven’s sake. She turns on the car and points the vents directly at her daughter’s face, and now she can see that the eye has begun to swell after all. She is going to have a shiner the size of a walnut.

  Can we go home, Lauralee asks quietly.

  In a minute, honey. Suzanne gently closes the door and walks to the back of her car, where she leans against the trunk and waits for practice to be over.

  In a few minutes, the boys run into the locker room and the coaches head to their office to watch tape. The boosters climb down from the bleachers and wander to their cars and trucks, still talking about the season, the price of oil, and the concert Elvis played at the coliseum last March. And still her daughter weeps. When three men walk over to her car, one after another, each pausing awkwardly and glancing toward the front seat, Suzanne apologizes for her daughter and then reaches into her tote bag and hands each man a gift bag—one for a wife, one for a girlfriend, one for himself, though she will never, ever breathe a word about it. She smiles and winks and tucks their money into her little white envelope. She shows them the Tupperware she’s got in the trunk.

  Someday Suzanne is going to die, and when she does, what will people say about her? That she died owing money to half the town? That she was a mean drunk? No and no. That she died without a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out? No. They are going to say that Suzanne Ledbetter was a good woman, a clever businesswoman, that she toed the line. She was an angel here on earth, they will say, and our town is poorer for her loss. She looks at her list and sighs and takes up her pen and then reaches over to pat her daughter’s back. You don’t ever let them see you cry, honey. That’s all I meant.

  Lauralee sits up and wipes the back of her hand across her nose. I know.

  You have to be tougher than them.

  Before she met Jon, Suzanne herself certainly ducked a swinging fist a time or two, or an open hand. She dodged fingers curling around her ass, climbing up her back, rubbing her shoulders. She was twelve years old the first time a boy grabbed her breasts, but she won’t tell Lauralee the details—not yet, she’s still too little. For now, all she will tell her daughter, as they sit together in the car with the air conditioner turned on high, is this:

  Some boy tried to grab me once, when I was just a little older than you. He walked right up to me, in front of God and everybody else, and put his han
ds on me.

  What did you do?

  Well, I picked up a two-by-four and hit him right upside his head. Knocked him right out. He didn’t wake up for three days. Needed stitches, too—fifteen, or maybe it was twenty, I can’t remember.

  Did you get in trouble?

  Heck, no. His mama tried to send the sheriff over to ask me what happened, and when I told him, you know what he said to me? He said: Next time, make sure you pick up a board with a couple of rusty nails sticking out of it then get one of your brothers to drag him out there into the swamp and leave him for the gators. Then he gave me a dollar—which is like five dollars now. He patted me on the head and told my mama she needed to come down to the station the next day and talk with him about an unrelated matter. Suzie Compton, he said to me, you are the best thing about this place. And do you know what I did with that dollar?

  Bought candy?

  No, ma’am. I put it in a box that had a padlock on it, and I wore that key around my neck until I left home for good.

  Corrine

  When Debra Ann asks if she can borrow Potter’s old army tent, which has been gathering dust in the garage for twenty years, Corrine tells the girl that she and Potter spent many happy nights in that tent, hunting white-tailed deer in Big Bend or stargazing in the Guadalupe Mountains. They took their first real vacation as a family in the summer of 1949, the three of them staring into the Grand Canyon, Potter and Corrine gripping Alice’s fingers until she howled. When they drove back to their campsite, Alice stood swaying between them on the bench seat, and every time they hit a pothole, they laughed and threw their arms in front of their daughter saying, wouldn’t it be funny if Alice went flying out the window? When she climbed down from the seat and fell asleep on the floorboard between Corrine’s feet, Potter turned off the radio and slowed to a crawl until he could carry their daughter to the tent and zip her into the sleeping bag they had placed between theirs.

  D. A. yawns and scuffs her feet, rubs her eyes and tugs on her eyebrow. Okay, Mrs. Shepard. Can I borrow it?

  That’s what you do when you get as old as me, you remember as much as you can, all the time. How are you doing, Miss Pierce? Corrine asks, and Debra Ann smiles. It is the first honest grin Corrine has seen since the Fourth of July came and went with no sign of Ginny.

  I’m doing good, D. A. says. I’m going to help my friend Jesse get back home to Tennessee.

  Who? Corrine starts to say, because Debra Ann is too old for imaginary friends, but she decides to leave it alone. Who knows what story D. A.’s been cooking up this summer, what kind of complicated narrative she’s woven? Who can know the mind of a child?

  You’re doing well, honey. What happened to Peter and Lily?

  They aren’t real. Jesse’s a real person.

  Mmm-hmmm. Corrine reaches over and pushes the girl’s hair out of her eyes. Come over tomorrow and I’ll trim your bangs for you.

  After Debra Ann has dragged the tent down the street, a butter-and-sugar sandwich clutched in her free hand, Corrine pours herself a glass of buttermilk and makes a fried egg sandwich while she half watches, half listens to the news. Jimmy Carter, gas leak near Sterling City, rig counts up and beef down, not a word about Gloria Ramírez or the trial scheduled in less than a month but tonight, there is a new horror. The newscaster cuts to a reporter standing next to an oil lease near Abilene. A local woman’s body has been found, the fourth in the past two years. What a thing an oil boom is for a town, Corrine used to tell Potter bitterly. It brings in the very best sort of psychopath. And if the prognosticators can be believed, this boom is only just beginning. She switches off the television and heads outside to move the sprinkler.

  The summer has been dry as chalk and Corrine has made a routine of turning on the sprinklers in the morning and moving them slowly across the front yard. In the afternoons, she washes down a sandwich with an iced tea and bourbon, or Scotch, then drives to Strike-It-Rich to buy cigarettes. A few weeks earlier she pulled Potter’s truck into the garage for good. Climbing in and out of the cab was killing her knees, and she missed the FM radio and the dark-red crushed velvet interior of her Lincoln, the sensation of feeling as if she were steering a yacht down Eighth Street. Sometimes she puts a mixed drink in the cup holder and drives around town with the windows down, facing off with out-of-state drivers and equipment haulers who cut her off when she tries to change lanes. She might hate the oil, but she loves the heat and the land, its spare beauty and the relentless sunshine. It was something she had shared with her granny, along with her fondness for having a cup of coffee and chocolate doughnut for supper.

  And this, too, is part of Corrine’s routine: Every night after nine o’clock, when it finally gets dark out, she sits in Potter’s truck with the keys in the ignition and the garage door closed. For an hour or longer, she stays out there, wishing she had the nerve. When she goes back into the house, she leaves the keys in the ignition. She fixes another drink, lights another cigarette, and heads to the front porch. Nearly five months since Potter passed—and oh how she hates that word, passed, as if he just drove a little too far into the desert, as if he would soon realize his mistake, and turn around, and come back to her.

  Alice calls every Sunday and talks about coming down to check on her. She wishes Corrine would think about moving to Alaska. I’m worried sick about you, she tells her mother in late July.

  If I come live in Alaska, will you come to my funeral?

  Mother, that is so unfair. You have no idea what my life is like up here.

  But Corrine is not going to let this go for a long time, maybe even years. Guess not. Bye-bye, honey.

  * * *

  Every August for the nearly thirty years she taught English, in an overheated classroom filled with farm boys and cheerleaders and roughneck wannabes reeking of aftershave, Corrine would spot the name of at least one misfit or dreamer on her fall roster. In a good year, there might be two or three of them—the outcasts and weirdoes, the cellists and geniuses and acne-ridden tuba players, the poets, the boys whose asthma precluded a high school football career and the girls who hadn’t learned to hide their smarts. Stories save lives, Corrine said to those students. To the rest of them she said, I’ll wake you when it’s over.

  While a box fan, together with the small, cell-like window that she cracked open every morning, labored heroically to clear the sweat and bubblegum and malice out of the classroom air, Corrine let her gaze wander, gauging the reactions of her various misfits. Invariably, some little shit would pop his gum or belch, or fart, but one or two of those kids would remember her words forever. They would graduate and get the hell out of Dodge, sending her letters from UT or Tech or the army and once, from India. And for most of Corrine’s teaching career, that had been enough. When I say stories, she told those tormented souls, I also mean poems and hymns, birdsong and wind in the trees. I mean the hue and cry, the call and response, and the silence in between. I mean memory. So hang on to that, next time someone’s beating the shit out of you after school.

  Stories can save your life. This, Corrine still believes, even if she hasn’t been able to focus on a book since Potter died. And memory wanders, sometimes a capful of wind on a treeless plain, sometimes a twister in late spring. Nights, she sits on the front porch and lets those stories keep her alive for a little while longer.

  There have been plenty of months and years in Corrine’s life so unremarkable or so unpleasant that she can call to mind almost nothing about them. She does not, for example, remember the birth of her daughter in the winter of 1946, or much about the month afterward, but she remembers every detail of September 25, 1945, the day Potter came home from Japan, intact, if you didn’t count the night terrors and his new aversion to flying. Three years in the cockpit of a B-29 was plenty, he told Corrine, I won’t ever step foot in another airplane. It’s been five months since Potter died, and his voice is still as sharp and clear to Corrine as a crack of thunder.

  * * *

  He is home on a
three-day leave and they have made love for the first time in the back seat of her daddy’s Ford. The two of them sit facing each other, grinning and bloody and sore as hell. Well, that was just terrible, Corrine says. Potter laughs and promises her something better, next time around. He kisses her freckled shoulder and begins to sing. What a beautiful thought I am thinking, concerning that great speckled bird . . . and to know my name is written in her holy book.

  * * *

  Corrine is ten years old and sitting in the front row at her grandmother’s funeral. When her father starts crying so hard he has to hand off the eulogy to the minister, she finally understands the enormity of their loss.

  She is eleven and watching a calf being born for the first time, all unsteady legs and pitiful bawls, and she thinks how much her granny would have loved seeing this.

  She is twelve and her daddy comes home from a rig with a bottle of moonshine and two fingers missing. Don’t cry, baby girl, he tells her. I didn’t even need those two fingers. Now if it were these—he holds up his other hand and waggles his fingers, and they both fall out laughing, but she is remembering what her grandmother said the first time they saw an oil well come in. Lord, help us all.

  She is twenty-eight years old and a foreman calls to tell her there has been an explosion at the Stanton well. She drives to the hospital with Alice sleeping next to her on the front seat, convinced Potter is already dead, trying to figure out how the hell she is going to move through this life without him. But there he is, sitting up in bed with a shit-eating grin on his face. Ugly flash burns stain his face and neck. Honey, he says, I fell off the platform right before it blew. And the smile dies on his face. Some of the other guys didn’t, though.