The young man picked out a cheap shampoo and its matching conditioner and gave Ava a last lingering look.
“I’m okay,” she said. The man nodded at her, gave her a thumbs-up, and continued his phone conversation.
Ava left the cart in the aisle. It wasn’t even quitting time from work. So very early. God what a beautiful day. Ava and her baby would walk out of Walmart into the sunshine. She had everything she needed.
16
The motel room was spare and unadorned. Ava rested on the bed on top of the sheets. She thought for the hundredth time that she should have gone home. She didn’t deserve to be running and she sure as hell didn’t deserve to be spending any time in this shabby jail. The Rowen motel had to come up a few notches in the world to be as stylish as a jail. Jails are midcentury cinder block, not the funky, seedy look of a seventies basement. Ava had put her purse and keys on the bedside table. She had pulled off the nasty bedspread immediately; they never wash those things, even in nice places. The remote was huge and black like a giant roach—that thought alone meant that Ava wouldn’t touch it. Without cable there were no choices anyway. Ava had heard about the Rowen motel for most of her life, but she never thought she’d end up there in this hole-in-the-wall for people in between homes, the poor newcomer, the faithless middle-aged.
Ava would not go home. Her mother would hurt right along with her at least as much as Ava hurt herself. As long as her mother was alive she’d feel Ava’s hurt more than Ava did. You have to protect a person who loved you like that. There was no way Ava could avoid telling her mother what she had seen. But not right now. Thank God for Henry’s child. Without that little boy in the world, Ava thought she might get a gun, put the nose in Henry’s worthless stomach, and happily pull the trigger. She’d never pulled the trigger of a gun before, but plenty of idiots had, and she could be one of them. Once she’d seen her father with what she thought was a cap gun, a toy. “Don’t you ever let me see you with it,” he yelled at her, angry because he was afraid, though Ava didn’t understand the reason at the time.
The room had a sweet funky smell, like the skin under a roll of fat. Ava closed her eyes and put her hand over her mouth like a kidnapper. She clinched her fists to gain control, but the effort was giving her a headache. What was that smell? She wasn’t sure she could stand it all night, but she’d already paid. Not that it was so much money, she could afford it and better than Rowen, but she didn’t have it in her to go out again, greet some indifferent face at the hotel counter, shell out money all over again. She almost made the turn to the other side of town to her Aunt Lana’s, but she would ask too many questions, need too much assurance that Ava was going to be okay. Ava was not in the mood to take care of anyone else’s needs, even a kind well-meaning person. She needed silence and solitude and anonymous space to think. Anonymous not stank.
She must have dreamed because when she opened her eyes instead of the unfamiliar room, dark except for the fading light through the plastic shower curtain window treatment, she fully expected to see the ugly, crumbling face of the boy who had a crush on her in high school. Her admission to him that she liked someone else was supposed to stop his advances, but she almost declared that she liked him after all. She had not forgotten his disintegrating face. Ava got up to close the curtain but decided to walk outside. She still wore her shoes, but she grabbed the little jacket she’d tossed on the floor. Her car was parked in front of her door. She leaned on the back of it and looked around. So many times she’d wondered who rented a room from the Rowen. The motel had been the subject of a hundred stories and even more rumors in town. One of Ava’s white school friends told her the story of going to the Rowen with her mother when she was a child. Her friend had witnessed her mother beat her father with her fists the moment he opened the motel room door. The father had tried to explain, to convince her mother that the woman hastily putting on her jeans was not who she imagined she was. Even then Ava had thought the story ridiculous in a hundred ways, but the most disturbing part was the inclusion of her friend, the child, in all that stupid.
Even then Ava had known that her own father was a little scandalous, too taken with his power with women. Don had probably been to the Rowen more than once himself. But her mother hated Don’s guts at home, behind closed doors like a good mother is supposed to. You don’t take your child to a motel to witness all that impotent emotion. That story had been one of Ava’s clear proofs that white people do at best the same kind of dirt as anybody else.
The motel was surrounded on three sides by tall pine trees that made the place look more like Vermont than North Carolina. Behind the trees on one side just a couple of streets over was the Plant 4 where her father worked for forty years. No other building was visible from the parking lot, but the Simmy’s sign glowed. For about fifteen years, maybe more, the new sign was the brightest light in the evening sky in town. An outsider might imagine a new restaurant, but the sign was where the renovations to Simmy’s ended. Inside the place was still segregation-era chic, all browns and fake wood, linoleum tables and chairs one step up from the folding ones. But that depressed neglect matched the dull wash on the town. Pinewood was not a tourist mecca, since visitors are not usually interested in a downtown full of closed factories and businesses. At least the Simmy’s sign had the virtue of looking prosperous and alive.
Ava had been to Simmy’s, not often, maybe as much as once a month with some of her coworkers, but she always felt guilty about eating there. All the stories the older people told couldn’t be erased with a fancy new sign or repaved parking lot. Ava knew that none of the stories involved her directly and the restaurant could never be for her what it had been for her mother and what it might have been for her baby. Her father had gone inside with a couple of his friends right after the place integrated. The young men had sat at a table, ordered coffee from a waitress who had not and did not say a word to them. Once they got the coffee they stirred in sugar and milk, took a couple of sips and left the restaurant. All they’d wanted was to go inside, show everybody in the room that they could come in. The men had not wanted it this way. They didn’t want to take things, force the hand, pry the fingers open one by one. They wanted to be invited like friends, like men. But no invitation ever came. Though Don had not said, she knew he must have felt like a conqueror that day. A feeling that can sustain a body, keep it light and agile, ready to bob and weave for years to come.
If the baby was hungry she was not saying. Of course the baby was about the size of the head of a pin. Ava decided to wait it out. She could find food in the morning. Who knew who might wait for her in the terrible little room? This uncertainty kept her fixed to the spot. Other than her car and an old Saturn there were no other cars in the lot. Where was everybody? Fornication doesn’t go out of style, Ava thought. The silliness made her laugh. People had higher standards these days or maybe just a few dollars of open credit on the Visa. That’s all it was. Or could it be possible that grown people were reverting to their teenage pasts and making out in cars? Whatever the reason for their absence, Ava wished a few more cars would show up. She would have liked to see more people unpacking or milling around. It had been a long time since she’d been afraid, at least that kind of afraid of who might be watching her. There was a movie about a young woman alone at a deserted old motel, and though Ava was afraid to watch it all the way through she knew it did not end well for the woman. Nobody had ever been killed at Rowen’s, at least not that Ava had ever heard, but it was just the kind of place where you’d expect passionate crime, murderful and ugly, poor in every aspect, from the pimply pebbles instead of grass in front of the windows, to the garish purple doors. Every little thing about it screamed cheap, cheap, cheap and worse than that—desperate. And what’s more desperate than killing some other warm body?
The calmness of the night, the vomit taste at the back of her throat that meant fear, reminded her of the evening she and her friend Kim walked through the woods. They were chatting like friend
s do about nothing and everything. In her memory, they are young, younger than Ava can remembering being. What started it, Ava cannot say, but the realization that they might die became real. Not someday, but that day. A boy or a man with thick fingers might grab one of them while the other held fast or ran to find another man (anyone to care, anyone strong) while the other is dragged through the delicateness of ferns at the edge of the trail. Though it is a worn path for walkers and hikers, there was no one around. They couldn’t see the car they drove, the pebble-sided water fountain was a mile back, maybe more. Even the imaginary safety of the cinder block bathroom was in the distance. “Let’s run,” Ava said. The last one to the gleaming car, too hot from the high sun, the last one there is the dead girl. Last one to the car can’t tell the story. Last one to the car is the story.
The neon light for the Rowen sign was not yet on. The days were already long and balmy. Ava got in her car, locked the door, and turned on the radio so quietly it almost seemed like music from another time or from her dreams. She could sleep there until discomfort forced her back inside.
But she wouldn’t. Ava drove the few miles from the center of town to her Aunt Lana’s. Lana’s house was a small brick ranch with a long driveway. Her place was always neat and clean-looking with two impressive pots of some flower—now impatiens already in riotous bloom—flanking the door. Lana had the brick on the home painted a creamy white to help her forget that Gus’s ex-wife had once lived there. Even after thirty-odd years of marriage Lana still remembered.
Lana came to the driveway as Ava closed the car door. “What are you doing here?” Lana put her hands on her hips but seemed to think better of the attitude, “Syl okay?”
“She’s okay.”
“I can see, Ava. It’s something. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on in. I guess you’ll say when you get ready. I’ve got eleven Judge Judy shows taped if you want to join me.”
“Okay,” Ava said and followed Lana into the house.
“Oh lord, I know something’s wrong now. Come in here.”
Lana had painted her oak cabinets white and the walls were a pale yellow, her kitchen a cheerful little room with copper pots hanging like moose heads on the soffit above the sink. Ava sat at the small table in the center of the room.
“What do you have to drink, Lana?”
“I take it you don’t mean Kool-Aid,” Lana said as she reached into the upper cabinet and poured two fingers worth of liquor for Ava and a splash for herself. “Don’t tell your mama.”
“I’m not twelve, Lana.”
“She doesn’t know that. And it won’t do any good to remind her.”
Ava sloshed the liquor around but did not drink. Lana watched her play with the whiskey. “Give me that,” she said and drank the liquor herself in one large gulp. “Tell me what happened.”
“Henry has a child.”
Lana nodded her head like she’d just heard the most obvious news in the world. “That skinny-ass weasel. Is he leaving you?”
“Leaving me? I’m leaving him.”
“Well good.” Lana put more liquor in her own glass. “Now I can tell you what I really think about him. I’ve been waiting for years. You know I’m not patient.” Lana tried to remember the comments, any comments she’d heard about Henry at her salon. Were there knowing looks she should have recognized? Maybe once, a very pretty young girl had mentioned Henry, she wouldn’t mind some of that, or some other fool talk she’d said, and the salon had gone quiet. The girl had not remembered or maybe she didn’t know Lana’s connection to Henry. The women in the salon had not looked directly at Lana but they all waited for her response. Lana should have realized what that silence could have meant. The silence allowed the space for a secret.
“One day I want to hear every word of it,” Ava said as she got water from the sink. Lana had a sleeve of Dixie cups in a holder beside the faucet. The sight of it almost made her laugh out loud. The last Dixie cups on earth. Ava used to pretend she was a giant with the Dixie cup in her hand, the bottom soon soggy with liquid, bulged out threatening to break. She remembered the one-handed sensation of crushing the paper cup with her powerful and decisive grip while the waxy outside of the cup crumbled and flaked like icing on a doughnut. “I saw him in Walmart.”
“The baby?”
“The child. He’s five.”
“Shit.” Lana reached out and held Ava’s hand. “Is he pretty?”
“Who? The boy?”
“The boy.”
Ava nodded. The frightened moon face of that black-haired boy took up all the space in her memory.
“That’s even worse. Be good if he was a little troll.”
Ava half-smiled at Lana who always managed to say the unexpected thing. “I would prefer it,” Ava said.
Lana picked up the glass and drained it quickly without a wince. She thought, for not the first time, that she really should drink more. “Listen to me, Ava. I know you’re hurting right now. But I want you to see this as a chance.”
“Why would you say something like that? That’s not what you say to somebody whose marriage is over.” At the first good opening Ava would get out this house.
“Don’t get mad. Don’t get mad. To tell you the truth that’s exactly what you should say to somebody leaving a sorry marriage.” Lana rubbed her finger along her glass and stared at the ring of irretrievable brown liquor caught in the bottom. She knew Ava watched her but pretended to be absorbed in the intricate pattern on her glass.
“Maybe you know this and maybe you don’t, but I got myself in a situation.” Lana gestured to her room, her home. “Sometimes by yourself, without some pain, I mean, you can’t think of a good enough reason to do what you need to. Women are sometimes like that. A man will pack his longings in a minute. If a man gets tired of us, he takes the first train out. But us.” Lana sighed. “We always have a hundred good reasons why we can’t make the change. You understand me?”
Ava listened but did not speak.
“But if you get a little luck. I know it doesn’t seem like luck,” Lana said as she held up her hand to stop Ava from speaking. “If you get lucky, a way out can present itself. You hear me? You have the push you need.”
“I loved him.” Why Ava felt like she needed to say it she wasn’t sure.
“You still love him. Who said anything about that? This has nothing in the world to do with love. He never was and he’ll never be what you want. You know and I know that you’d have never left him otherwise.”
“That’s not true, Lana. It’s not. When we were young it was different.”
“I guess it was. At least you thought it had a chance to be different.” Lana nodded the bottle in Ava’s direction. Ava covered her glass with her hand.
“He’s pretty but he ain’t shit. You know it. Something’s wrong with him. You know it’s true. And another thing, I better not hear you defend him again.”
Lana’s hair was pulled back in a severe bun with a couple of short tendrils stuck out from the top of it. On Lana the imperfection looked intentional. She wore no makeup but her skin was slick and dewy like a girl’s skin with only the slightest hint of jowl and a weariness around her eyes that made them look like they weren’t fully open. Those small telltale signs announced her as an older woman. Ava had thought that women in her mother’s generation were so far removed from her that they might not be the same species. It took great pain for her to realize she was a woman in the world of grown women.
“I hear you, Lana. I hear you.” Ava wiped her eyes and drank the last of her water. “Lana,” Ava began. She wanted to ask how she could have missed that Lana was a woman, how she could have known her aunt all of her life and not know a damn thing about her. Ava couldn’t think how to say any of it.
“This is a chance, my girl. See it. Can you?”
17
Carrie waited for Henry like she always did. He was late of course, like he always was. “Why do you put up with
that?” her sister asked her a hundred times.
“It’s not that big of a deal,” she’d said, and it wasn’t. When you love somebody you decide what you can take and what will kill you and work backward from what will kill you. It’s as simple as that. At least this is what she told herself. You have to have a good story that binds the whole mess together. Most people construct the story to explain the life later, but people living the crazy make up the story as they go. Right there in the moment. She wasn’t a mistress, she was a girlfriend waiting for her man to get his affairs together to move out. She wasn’t a fool, she was a mother not giving up on a man because life with him was hard. Hadn’t she been chosen? The thing about being chosen that her sister never understood is the exhilaration, the knowing that he wants you. Women do anything for that. Carrie knew she wasn’t thinking about the situation like a feminist. But from what Carrie had seen everybody called herself a feminist until a man gets involved. Then it’s to the chosen go the spoils.
Carrie had always been a girl men looked at, but it had been a long time since men had locked eyes with her, half smiles on their lips, pretending to listen to their wives while they tried to get her attention. But she wasn’t that lovely kid anymore. Those days had faded, was it a fade or an acute stop? and she couldn’t remember exactly when. Becoming invisible was just as strange a process as being visible. So much so soon. She had more than her beautiful face to carry her in this life. Carrie had gone to the community college for two years and she had been a very good student, eager to please and more intelligent than people expected. She talked little in class and could see the faces of the professors change as they regarded her with renewed appreciation and a little amusement for the smarts they hadn’t considered that she possessed.
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