Don realized he’d made a mistake though he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He felt the stiffness return to Sylvia, the closed-off place he hated in her that would one day brick up against him.
“Come on baby,” he said. “We don’t have to mess around with that. I just want to be here with you.”
Sylvia swiped the clothes from the bed, leaned to the footboard, and untangled the complicated sheets. She should divorce this man. The same reasons she told him again and again to leave and don’t come back were the reasons she should make it legal, go ahead and sign the papers. But not today. Today she pumped gas across from the now closed movie theater where white people had lined up around the block to see Coal Miner’s Daughter in 1980. She and Don had passed by them in their car twice. Neither of them had ever seen people lined up for a movie, and out of all of the people in line not a single one of them was black. She remembered how sick she’d felt to be driving by, not included in the celebration once again.
Besides no one had noticed her today. Not the girl at the Bi-Lo supermarket, who didn’t pause as she looked around her to the next customer, not the teenage boys, all baseball caps and oversized shirts loud-talking outside of Lana’s hair salon, not the old man at the gas station on the other side of the pump, watching the numbers roll on the display like he was hoping against all hope that seven would not follow six, just this once, and none of the passing people in the mountain town, not another soul, besides this man, had thought to remember that Sylvia Ross was even alive.
“How long are you staying, Don?”
Don reached his fingers to the clasp of her bra, popped it open like a combination lock. “How long you need me?”
14
Ava secreted the expensive digital pregnancy test into her purse and walked the few steps into the bathroom at the bank. She couldn’t imagine how many tests she’d bought over the years from drugstores and from the depressing dollar stores that had popped up all over the county. Good news! you can still shop, poor, poor people. But a dollar times a hundred, a thousand (who knew at this point?) was a staggering number. There might be a section of floating trash in the ocean with mounds and mounds, millions of used pregnancy tests. One day in the far future, they might coalesce, fuse together (the tectonics of it unknown to the lay observer) into a pee-smelling island. Ava thought not for the first time that she was losing her mind. She held the pee stick to her side and waited. How much of her life had she dolloped out in three-minute intervals she couldn’t say. Maybe in heaven you get back all the time you lost hoping, the gift for not giving into great despair. Ava willed herself not to look at the pregnancy test. She looked.
On the walk back to her office Ava glanced up at Jenny, who smiled back at her. Ava nodded. People meant well. She would say something nice to Jenny today. Ava entered her office and sat down at her computer, she glanced back again to her purse and at the nasty pregnancy test she’d hastily put inside.
Everyone, BFP! BFP! Big Fat POSITIVE, POSITIVE. I just took another look at the glorious smiley face on the readout to make sure I wasn’t imagining it! I couldn’t even wait the three minutes, but I didn’t have to. I’m going to call the doctor as soon as I finish writing all of you. Now if we make it past the 7-week mark you will hear my screams. My first two were gone early. People call it losing a pregnancy, but it felt like they were taken from me. I wasn’t expecting to feel ripped out. I know you know what I’m talking about. I told myself every time that I was done. But here I am! And you know what? I am going to enjoy it this time. Maybe life is about these small moments maybe that’s all some of us get. But I’m going to be hopeful. Hope with me! Is that dumb? It’s probably dumb. At 7 weeks the books say the baby will probably survive. A good heartbeat at 7 weeks—I need it! Pray. Pray. Ava2WW
15
Ava parked her car near the Goodwill truck at the back of the lot at Walmart after work the next day. Her plan was exercise, but the walk to the door of the big-box store would be the totality of her day’s exertion. She wasn’t rabid about exercise, far from it, but she had heard about weight all her life from her mother, how it crept up, how it stuck, how the menace of it changed a body from a young and vital one to a bulbous old one, a beautiful face embedded in the fatty rolls of a large head. She vowed to avoid having more of her than what she wanted. She’d planned to go to the Y and walk for half an hour on the elliptical, but her car with its own stubborn mind wouldn’t make the turn to the gym. She tried. Instead Ava put on her workout clothes after her last meeting, cut out early, and headed to get a few groceries, mostly for her mother. The town hadn’t had a Super-Walmart for that long, but Ava still tried to avoid it. The store was too big, not a store at all, but a big-box store, like entering a charmless small town. She hated the epic trek from apples to Preparation H, the awful cool-blue light that made the rows of Tide, ice pops, the plastic toxic-green gleam of Mountain Dew look like they belonged on an autopsy table. This was not experience-shopping, but necessity shopping.
The trailer truck door was open and a large white woman sat in a folding chair in front of the opening. Her job seemed to consist of waiting long intervals for someone to drop off plastic bags full of the junk they couldn’t give away at their yard sales. Ava clicked her car locked, positioned her purse under her arm. The woman looked up at her but did not speak. Ava nodded in the woman’s direction. How in the world did she pass the time with no book, no radio, just the blacktop vista of the dullest parking lot on the planet? On the back of the Goodwill truck over the woman’s head were two large signs: NO DUMPING and PLEASE DO NOT TAKE DONATED ITEMS. Nothing in this scene would have been remarkable to Ava, except she noticed a child’s bicycle with a pink banana seat in the small pile of trash bags full of clothes, garish toys made of indestructible plastic and too many housewares straining for escape against the flexible sides.
“Look at that bicycle,” Ava said. “You know I had one like that.”
“Mine was purple,” the woman replied.
“No tassels. That’s a shame.” Ava walked over to the donation heap, held the handlebars of the small bicycle, and examined the scratched-up blue and white frame. “Can I buy it?”
“You have to go to the store. We’re not allowed to sell anything out here.”
“I’m going to have a baby.”
The woman looked Ava over. Ava imagined that the woman saw Ava’s flat stomach, low percentage of body fat, no telltale spread of her nose and face. “Good for you,” the woman said. “You know they’ve got plenty of tricycles in Walmart.”
Ava laughed and let the bicycle fall back onto the plastic bags. “You are the first person I’ve told. I don’t think I’ve said it out loud until now.”
“We aren’t even that close.” The woman managed a half-smile. “Come on to the store in the next couple of days. We’ll have put this stuff out by then.”
“I guess it can wait,” Ava said and rubbed along her belly, as she had seen so many other expectant moms do. “She won’t ride the thing for years. I probably have some time.”
“I’ll see you,” Ava said and lifted her hand in almost a salute. Ava had no idea what she’d do with that beat-up old bike. She was just being spontaneous. Nothing wrong with that. Though it was just about three-thirty, the parking lot was three-quarters full. The parking lot was always at least three-quarters full. Ava wished for the hundredth time in her life that she’d had a twin. With a twin she could share everything, tell all her secrets, her fears. She would know how she looked. How she really looked, without the filter of her own happiness or depression. For the hundredth time she scolded herself for having the most narcissistic wish in the world. Who wishes for another self, another body just to see your own fool face?
She hated coming to Walmart at all and mostly avoided it, but it was too much effort to find a mom-and-pop store or make the forty-minute trek all the way to Hickory for a better selection or a quainter setting. Ava, like most other people in town, found her stubborn car turning into the
Walmart parking lot nine times out of every ten, her resolve to shop local gone again. Walmart had become for most people in town the only shopping for miles. That song that was driving her crazy kept running through her head. All that glitters is gold, all that glitters is gold. Only shooting stars break the mold. But no way could she make out most of the lyrics. She reminded herself to look up the song so she could at least sing a verse. Is that what old people do? Probably. New music was as foreign to her now as it had been to her mother when she was a teenager. Back then she’d wondered how anyone avoided music, how the newest raps, the inevitable boy bands, how in the world did old people fail to notice?
She would not go to the office supplies. For once she would stay out of that aisle. Last year during the back-to-school sale she had bought a hundred notebooks at ten cents each. The clerk had asked her if she were a schoolteacher. She had nodded in a noncommittal way in case anyone who knew her overheard the conversation.
Ava would tell Henry about the pregnancy in a week, two at the most. He would not share her excitement, only her worry. Ava didn’t honestly know exactly what he’d think. Even after seventeen years with him, she still felt love, she felt loyalty, but she couldn’t claim to really know what the hell he wanted.
In the parking lot, almost to the door, a white woman and a small brown boy were about to enter the store. They were holding hands. The boy skipped, tugging on his mother’s arm, his happiness a contagion that made Ava smile along with his mother. She recognized the woman. A number of customers from the bank knew her even when she didn’t know them, but Ava knew the woman was not a customer.
The boy struggled to get a shopping cart from the corral at the store’s entrance. His father had to have been black or maybe one of the Mexican men that were now a significant part of the population. When Ava was the boy’s age, the children of one Hispanic family went to her school. One. The Hispanic kids now nearly outnumbered the black kids. That’s a lot of change for a generation. The boy was part of a growing number of interracial children in town. White mother, brown child equals a brown father somewhere in the picture. That was an easy equation. The boy turned to face his mother, the cart wrestled from the rest of the pack. Ava did not know the woman personally, the mother, but more than once Henry had mentioned her. He saw her at the store, he’d said, in passing. Did Ava remember her from school, he’d said. Even as he said the woman’s name, or even just mentioned her, Ava could see the mistake on his face. Ava had hoped he was just infatuated with her. Men get that. It passes. Maybe everybody felt some of that heat from a forbidden person, but Ava wasn’t sure. What she knew was she had no attraction for any man anymore. They were too much trouble, even for sex the trouble just wasn’t worth it. In fact the whole enterprise of romantic love was just too hard to be worth it. Her grandmother had told her more than once that the thing about men was once you learn them you won’t want them. Though there were minutes, never much longer, that Ava wanted to be wrapped up and consumed, the best part of sex hands down, it was only minutes of that longing, no more. These days when she got a glimpse of a beautiful man, she sized him up like a jeweler. Good cut, good sparkle, nice setting, but not something she herself could afford.
The boy’s face was all teeth as he pushed the cart toward his mother. What a beauty he was. Ava smiled at him the way people smile at beautiful children, her eyes puddled, her face soft. “Mama, I got it,” he yelled.
“Shh, you’re not in the woods, Z,” his mother said, but she wasn’t really bothered.
Maybe it was the slide of the automatic door, and the rush of the pretty woman suffering with the heavy load of her baby carrier on her way to the shopping carts. Or, maybe the boy sensed Ava’s eyes on him and in the way of small vulnerable things felt danger in her concentrated interest. Whatever it was the boy looked past his mother and directly at her, their eyes locked on each other.
“Come on, baby,” his mother said, motioning him forward. The two of them began their shopping. Ava turned to leave, but not before she dropped her bag and keys. She kneeled to pick them up. The sensation to lie down and stay on the floor at the dirty entrance, let one after another of the shoppers stomp her body into the ground, grind her until she was unconnected dust, was almost irresistible. The boy had Henry’s face. His complexion was lighter for sure. His hair was finer with less kink. But his face was unmistakably Henry’s. Ava stood up straight, turned to the place the boy and his mother had been. She watched the boy go to his mother with strawberries. Though she couldn’t hear them, the mother, what was her name? The mother instructed the son to get bananas. The blood rushed into her head. Is this how it felt to faint? The boy’s head had straight dark hair cut close, like Henry’s. She had known it. Of course she had. The days Henry had mentioned the woman, she saw his embarrassment, and if she’d allowed herself, she would have felt the secret. He had been trying to tell her, people do that. People need to tell the shames of their lives. Good God! He had wanted her to know. The third or fourth time he mentioned that woman’s name, her name is Carrie, that’s it, she had almost asked Henry, how long has it been? But she hadn’t wanted to hear it. She had realized it all, but what a difference between knowing and seeing with your own eyes.
The mother and child roamed through the produce. The boy pulled lines of plastic bags from the little stands for apples. The woman let him pick out his own pears. Ava turned to leave, the automatic door dutifully opened for her though she was leaving through the entrance. No, she shook her head like a toddler. No. She would stay. She would not be run off like she had done something wrong. Ava grabbed a shopping cart to steady herself and have something to do with her hands. She followed the woman and Henry’s child to the dairy section.
“Hello,” she said. The woman had her back to the organic milk and turned to the sound of Ava’s voice. Her face dropped, a cartoon face. But what a doll’s face the woman had, wide pink lips, thick longish hair she clearly didn’t appreciate. Hair that men would think looked bed tossed. She was a thick girl. She was beautiful.
“Hello,” the woman said, but she looked stricken. She held her son’s hand tighter. “Hello,” she said again.
“You don’t know me,” Ava began, not sure she could continue for her pounding heart. “I saw you when I came in. I just saw your boy. He’s beautiful.”
The woman gripped the boy’s hand tighter, positioned herself a little in front of him as slyly as she could without being insulting. The boy sensed a problem. Ava could see it on his face. He must spend a great deal of time with his mother, reading her reactions, sensing her moods. He looked at Ava and back to his mother.
“Thank you. He is a good boy too,” Carrie said, her mouth twitched. She was nervous but tried her best to look composed.
Ava was the one who looked like she might cry. The woman in front of her was not a trashy woman. Trash would look defiantly at her, look smug or smirk at her. Trash would goad her, hint at what she’d taken from her, at all she’d won. This woman was not trash.
Ava bent to get closer to the boy’s face. “You are a beauty. Do you know that?” Ava said to the boy. “How old are you?” She saw the woman flinch from the proximity. Ava raised herself to her full height. She would not scare him.
“He’s five.”
“What a face. Are you good to your mother?” Ava’s voice broke, but she would not cry.
The boy looked at his mother not sure what to say.
“He’s perfect. He’s my heart.”
“You’re lucky for that,” Ava said to the woman. “You are Carrie, aren’t you?” Ava tried not to sound cold, but she was sure she did.
The woman nodded, like she was not sure what she was admitting to.
“You be good to your mother, okay?” Ava said to the boy. She wanted to say more, and searched her thinking for a more lasting idea, one that might seem wise to a little boy. For a long second she considered saying something cruel that would ring for years, maybe forever in the boy’s ears, about his mother,
about his status as a boy without a father’s name in the world. She would not do it. She was not trash either. Ava steered her cart away from the dairy section all the way to the other side of the store as far away from them as she could.
“Thank you,” she heard Carrie call after her.
Ava moved quickly to the health and beauty aids, pushed the cart as quickly as the weak front wheel would allow. She stopped her empty buggy in the safety of the shampoo aisle. She had moved fast. There was no way they could see her hard ragged breathing, her body’s impulse to curl on itself, to make herself as small as she could manage. Whatever the items she’d come for were long forgotten, recalled later, and for years to come they’d be associated with this moment. What was she going to do? What could she do after what she had just seen? When she was very young she would have cried herself thoughtless, blinded with the crying, sick with it until she could do nothing else but sleep. She was used to covering herself, guarding her emotions, her every action. Because she did not wail or gulp breaths until she hyperventilated with the pain did not mean she didn’t feel it.
“You okay, ma’am?” A young man in his early twenties put his phone to his chest, looked quizzically in her eyes.
Ava nodded afraid of her voice.
“You sure?” the man mouthed.
Ava turned to the shampoos tried to focus on the many bottles.
The man put the phone back to his ear. “And I’m like why is this girl talking to me. And I’m like whatever okay and she’s like seriously calling me and the next day I text her and she says, ‘let’s meet next Monday’ and it’s like crazy dude there’s like lightning bolts flying all over the air and she’s like sitting real close to me. And she’s really sweet and we spend the entire day together and then like two mornings. For the most part we’ve been hanging out for a week. No, she’s normal. She’s like one hundred percent normal. She doesn’t bullshit around. Like me. She’s dealing with some stupid stuff but she’s like, dude, you know how people say you look familiar, you look familiar, you know? She’s familiar. She’s like the most familiar. I swear it seems like we hung out years ago, like when we were kids. I couldn’t wait to tell you, dude. I know. I know.”
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