Backseat Saints

by Joshilyn Jackson

  I looked up, thinking, and accidentally met Peter’s eyes in the mirror.

  “Prospectives?” he asked instantly, like I’d hit his on switch. He glanced down over my shoulder at my list.

  “Guest list,” I said. “For a party.”

  “Lots of boy names. Looks like my kind of shindig.” He waggled his eyebrows at me.

  I looked deliberately away. The girls’ names were harder to recall. I hadn’t been the kind to have close girlfriends. Hell, I still wasn’t. I never got in the habit. This was partly because most of my wardrobe came from Fruiton Baptist’s annual clothes drive. The popular girls, with their pom-poms and sleek ponytails, recognized my outfits, and some were crass enough to greet the pieces in public like old friends. If I hadn’t been the quarterback’s girl, they wouldn’t have talked to me at all. I wouldn’t get much from the girls, anyway. Pretty had bought me an in with the fellas, but I had never been their kind.

  Peter watched as I added the name of every girl Jim Beverly had taken out during the couple, three times a year that we’d been broken up. I wrote quickly. My hand could barely stand to shape the letters. I remembered all seven effortlessly, because for the short time each had been with him, I’d chanted their names under my breath all day long. I hope you get run over, Dawna Sutton. I hope bears eat you, Louisa Graham. I hope you get run over and then bears eat you, Clarice Lukey.

  “It’s still a mister-heavy list,” Peter said. “And why not? A good mister-ing will do more for your pores than any product I have here.” He cocked his eyebrow to a rakish angle, so charming, but I wasn’t as easily seduced as his regular Sheilas and Charlottes.

  I said as kindly as I could, “Stop.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m a horror,” he said, sounding more pleased than apologetic. He gathered the front of my hair and clipped to the top of my head. “Your lips say stop, but your eyes say you’re half in love with me already. You’re the kind who likes bad boys, I can tell.”

  Bad boys, he’d said, and our eyes met in the mirror again. I found myself staring at him as if I were looking down a deer gun barrel, like I saw his handsome face framed in sights. I wasn’t Charlotte’s kind, and in that moment, he knew it.

  “Sugar,” I said, grinding the word into him, “you have no idea.”

  I saw whatever lived under his hypercharming ease flash recognition, and then he drew back like he’d been bitten. His gaze dropped. He coughed and shook his shoulders, then his hands got busy in my hair again. I finished my list in silence, but not an angry one. I was more comfortable than I had been since I’d walked in and Sheila had given me that bitchy once-over.

  When he finally spoke again, his voice had lost its indulgent purr. He sounded less Hollywood gay, less flirty, but somehow warmer. “What are you going to do with that long braid of your ex-hair?”

  “I’m not sure.” I packed my list and pen back in my bag. “Maybe I’ll make a lanyard.”

  “Is it virgin?”

  “Virgin?” I asked. I found myself smiling at him as I said, “I was married five years, so it’s certainly seen a few things.”

  He chuckled and said, “All at once, I’m glad my own hair can’t talk. I meant, do you use any kind of chemical on it, to straighten or curl it? Or do you dye it?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s the color I was born with.”

  He set down his scissors and said, “May I?” I handed over the cable of hair. He lifted the braid and smelled it and said, “No one in your house smokes, and I would know. You can’t get that smell out of hair. This has got to be five inches around. And so healthy. You must take vitamins. Do you drink? Do drugs?”

  “You mean other than my pet heroin addiction?” I said, a little put off, and he laughed.

  “I’m not asking these questions to be nosy. Hair this thick and long, gorgeous color, virgin, this can be worth a lot of money.”

  I sat up straighter and asked, “How much is a lot?”

  “Hundreds.” He handed the cable of hair back to me and let my front hair down out of its clip. “So you lost your husband quite recently?”

  I nodded, thinking, Very recently. In fact, any day now.

  “Is it safe to assume your finances have changed?” he said. I looked away. “I ask because, among my many hair-related talents, wig making shines. I do custom jobs. Local but very high end. I could sell one made out of this hair for a couple thousand. I’d give you six hundred for the raw material. Now. Today.”

  I turned my head to look up at him, directly. “Six hundred? Is that a fair price?”

  He nodded. “I went to Catholic school. The first thing they taught me was that people who cheat teeny, big-eyed widows go straight to hell. It’s quite fair, for what’s essentially my clay. What makes the finished wig worth more is the work I’ll put in. It will be head art by the time I’m done, and some poor balding—and wealthy—Amarillo brunette would be thrilled to have what I could make out of that perched on her head.”

  “Six hundred,” I repeated. That would buy a lot of long-distance phone calls to my kind in Fruiton. Once I had a bead on Jim, it would cover a bus or plane ticket to get me to him.

  “I’d throw in this haircut, which is no small change,” Peter added.

  Still, something in me balked. I felt my hands fisting around the long cable, imagining some woman, a wealthy stranger, wearing my hair to play bridge, probably with my mother-in-law and the woman who’d snooted me in the waiting room. The brunette would give me a dismissive hair flip for even door-darkening a place like this; if I took the money, she could be flipping at me with my own ex–crowning glory.

  “You think it over, sug—” Peter stopped himself and grinned, rueful. “Just think it over, lady friend.”

  He swapped his scissors for the hair dryer. He used a round brush, and it hurt my sore scalp something fierce. I closed my eyes, clutched hard at the cable of hair, and endured it. My mother, a beauty, had slept with pink foam curlers pressing into her head most nights, willing to trade some pain to get pretty. But that was before she’d run to California to grow her locks out long and plain and dress like a gypsy. Now I’d cut my hair off, but it didn’t make me like her. I was still here, fighting to keep my life, still willing to trade pain to get pretty.

  The dryer shut off. Peter turned the chair, and the mirror showed me a woman I didn’t know. She had a razor-sharp bob, the sides slanting down into points. The haircut was too angular and edgy for Ro Grandee, too polished and sleek for Rose Mae. I reached up and touched the back, feeling how he’d shingled it. My eyes looked larger, and the cut had honed my cheekbones.

  “Thank you,” I said, staring. I looked more sophisticated, but also younger, as if he’d cut the last five years of my life away. And good riddance, the woman in the mirror was thinking. I could read her mind in the set of her jaw. “Thank you,” I repeated. Even the second time, it didn’t seem like enough.

  “I’m quite fabulous,” he said, offhand. “Hair is important. Frame the face, lift the spirits. Imagine how happy the next lady who loses the cancer lotto here in Amarillo would be to have yours.”

  Those words changed my picture of the wig-wearing lady. Now she looked like I had looked this morning, pale and wasted, crazy-mad and crazy-scared. She wasn’t playing bridge. She was in a hospital waiting room with her hair gone brittle, falling out in patches, and she didn’t give two goat shits if they let trash like me into her country club or not.

  She wasn’t the true reason my hands had closed around my braid. The true reason was, if I took this secret pot of money, the ability to travel, to leave, became suddenly much realer. I was waffling, and it wasn’t Ro Grandee making me go spineless, either. Artisan was not her territory. This was something else.

  I could see myself walking in a grove of lemon trees, smelling the ocean, the points of my new hair swinging. My mother had said to me at the airport, You are welcome.

  But that picture was wrong. I would be traveling to find Jim Beverly, to fight to keep m
y life, not leave it. I opened my eyes and looked at this new, sleek woman in the mirror, all lavender eyes, pale skin, cupid’s-bow mouth. “Do you remember?” I would say to Jim. “Do you remember what you promised?” I smiled, and the me in the mirror smiled back, a lush and knowing smile that would make any man remember.

  The scenery in my head changed. I was walking toward Jim down a city street, then down a red clay road, then through deep green woods like the ones we’d made our own in Alabama. He could be anywhere in the country. There was no reason to think he would have landed in California. I felt my fists loosen. I held up the braid toward Peter.

  “I don’t have anything else to do with it,” I admitted.

  He took it from me and put it on the shelf in front of the mirror. The points of my short hair swung, brushing my cheek, as I stood up. I liked how it felt, and I liked how the wings fell to hide my eyes when I kept my head down. I peeped out between them as Peter took out his wallet and peeled six fresh one-hundred-dollar bills out of it. I took the money.

  On my way down the hallway that led back to the waiting room, I ducked into an empty massage room and closed the door. I pulled out my makeup case and made myself up, fast, like I used to in the girls’ room at Fruiton High, back when my daddy said I was way too young and got fisty if he saw me in mascara. Smoky eyes with a pale and glossy mouth. Jim Beverly’s girl.

  When I got back to the waiting room, Sheila was still sitting there, waiting. I came through the door, hips swaying, not caring now if she recognized me. She was jiggling an angry foot and staring daggers at Rexy, who was saying, “Faye has sworn before all the gods that in two minutes she’ll be ready for you. Not even two. One. Mere seconds. Not even—” He stopped talking as I entered. They both turned to me and did double takes, his elaborate and theatrical, hers almost affronted.

  I said, “It lives!”

  Rexy gave me a frank-eyed assessment, then said, “And it’s gorgeous.”

  “Thank you,” I said, smiling wide. He meant it. I could hear it in his tone and feel it in the amped-up wattage of Sheila’s glare. She looked ready to leap over the stack of fashion magazines on the coffee table and ruin my day and her French manicure by tearing my throat open. I turned and showed her all the teeth I’d bared for Rexy, then put my nose up and swanned out past her, thinking, No wonder I don’t have any girlfriends.

  It wasn’t completely my fault I was so friendless, I thought as I got in my hand-me-down Buick to head back to the house Joe Grandee helped us pay for. I was hemmed in, surrounded by Grandees. They were wrapped all around my life, like the prickly pink foam that lined our attic and kept the cool air from getting out. All I had was Fat Gretel, who was too dear and dim to remember my secrets, even if she’d had a mouth shaped right for telling them. I couldn’t count Mrs. Fancy. She had never been my friend.

  She’d befriended Ro Grandee, and for her own reasons, which I could not begin to fathom. She never asked about the days I disappeared, convalescing from viruses that were not going around. She knew, of course. She wasn’t stupid. She’d been conditioned to overlook these things, to be complicit in Ro’s life, and I was done with that. I was looking for my ex-lover to break the Sixth Commandment. I planned to snap the Fifth as a bonus. Genteel Mrs. Fancy could not possibly approve.

  I hadn’t banked friendships in the same way I hadn’t banked money. No exit strategy. I should have had a secret stash already, saved out dollar by quarter by dime. My mother had. As a little girl, I’d watched her refill an empty bottle of a brand-name shampoo with generic, and then she’d pay the difference to her flowered-shoe bank in the top of her closet.

  “Our secret, Rose Mae,” she told me. At seven years old, even before, I understood that if Daddy knew about it, that money would go away. So it stayed our secret, even though it was not our stash. It was hers alone, money she banked so she could leave me. Sometimes she’d peel off a five and drive me to Fruiton’s teeny mall to get a cone at Baskin-Robbins. Double chocolate chip tasted sweeter when it felt stolen, and though I did not know it at the time, every treat she bought me was of double value. Each dollar spent on me meant she had to stay another day, setting her back from the magic number she needed to escape. I wondered, how much was enough to let her go but not enough to pay my way as well? Hard to calculate the exchange rate on thirty bits of silver.

  It was more than I had now, that was certain. I owned two pairs of flowered shoes, but the toes were empty. I’d never padded the grocery bill and kept the difference. I’d willfully not thought to, as another way I could not be like my mother. But it had also saved Ro the bother of having any real choices to make about breaking with her husband.

  I caught sight of myself in the rearview and took a moment to admire my free, expensive haircut. Screw the forty cents for shampoo; I bet a cut like this cost plenty, plus the tip. History told me Thom was guilt soaked enough about putting me in the hospital to shell out for it. I pulled into the next bank I saw with a drive-through ATM and withdrew $120. I added the sheaf of twenties to Peter’s crisp hundreds.

  At home, I stripped naked and then stood in front of my closet for a long time before I could force myself into one of Ro’s swirly cotton skirts and a matching sweater. Her clothes were alive, brushing my bare skin with a squirmy kind of touching that I felt all over me, every time I moved. It was close to unendurable, and it made her real in a way she hadn’t been since he’d put me in the hospital. I shuddered my way to the bathroom to touch my pulse points with Thom’s favorite perfume, my muscles twitchy under Ro’s brushed cotton.

  I went in costume to the kitchen to make dinner, pulling the biggest knife out of the wooden block and cutting up too many tomatoes. When I’d hacked up the entire basket, I went after the cucumbers. I was making enough salad for an army, but I couldn’t put the knife down. The hand I’d wrapped around the solid wood of the handle and my shorn head were the only pieces of me that felt right.

  I was mincing a second onion when I heard the Bronco screech up outside. The car door slammed, and ten seconds after that our front door crashed open. I stayed where I was in the kitchen, making the onion into even squares. When Thom came banging into the room, I turned toward him. I held my knife at a casual angle in my right hand, pointing at the floor, but my grip was so tight that blood could barely move through my fingers.

  “Where the hell have—” His voice cut out abruptly, and he stared at my head. “You cut your hair.”

  “You like it?” I said. Ro’s trembly voice. Ro Grandee’s binding clothes.

  “You cut your hair?” he repeated, a question this time. He was breathing fast and deep, nostrils flaring on the inhale.

  I worked to make my voice steady and my own. “I needed a change.” I did a slow spin, modeling for him with the knife still pointed down, my fingers needling at the lack of circulation.

  “I called you five times,” he said while I was turning. “I had vendor meetings all damn day, and I’d get out of one and call you and go into another still wondering where you were.”

  “So what do you think?” I touched the point of hair on the left side of my face. He stared at me, not seeing me at all.

  “I think you shouldn’t fucking disappear like that,” he said.

  “Thom Grandee,” I said, and I had the tone mostly right now, mock stern and almost pouty, but under my control. I lived in my knife hand and kept breathing. If I knew Thom, I’d be peeled out of these clothes soon enough. “You would be a total loss as a detective. Where do you think I was today?”

  He compressed his lips and blew air out his nose like a frustrated bull. “Getting a haircut, obviously. That’s not the—”

  “Not any old haircut,” I interrupted. “This haircut came from a spa downtown. It cost one hundred dollars.”

  That drew him up short, and his eyes refocused. I could practically hear the gears change in his brain. “A hundred dollars?”

  I nodded. “Plus tip. Also, I have never had it short before, so you need to s
top your yapping about I don’t know what-all right this second and tell me if you like it.” Perfect.

  “Holy shit,” he said, but he didn’t sound mad now. “A hundred dollars, huh?”

  “Foldy green American,” I said. “I got it done at that place your mother goes.” Whatever red wave he’d been riding when he came through the door was receding. I set the knife aside, casually, though it hurt me to uncoil my hand from it. “I needed a pick-me-up, baby. I’ve been feeling lowly.”

  “I’ve noticed,” he said.

  I swayed toward him, slow across the kitchen, and as I moved I grabbed the bottom of Ro’s clingy sweater and pulled it off over my head. All at once I could breathe easy, and Thom couldn’t.

  “When I couldn’t get you on the phone all day, I thought…” He trailed off. I hadn’t bothered with a bra.

  I knew what he’d thought. Some variation on Who is he, spiced by the idea that I had left him. He’d come home ready to hunt me down, and instead he’d found a pink-cheeked wife, out of bed and smelling like freesia, making him a supper. His only punishment was a hugely overpriced trip to a salon, so slight a rebuke that it was practically a gift to him. I paused in the middle of the kitchen to unzip Ro’s skirt and let it drop. I stepped out of it and gave it a small but savage kick. It slithered away from me across the well-waxed floor. I hadn’t bothered with panties, either.

  His gaze roamed up and down me as I came to him, and he said, “I never cared for short hair, but you look beautiful. Hell, you’d be beautiful shaved bald, but this is gorgeous.”

  “It dern well better be, for a hundred bucks,” I said.

  “Plus tip,” he said.

  “Plus tip,” I agreed, and stepped into his arms.

  He pulled me close, careful, trying to be gentle with my healing body, but I sucked his bottom lip into my mouth and bit down, hard enough to sting. It felt good. I ran my claws down his back, scraping his skin, then put my hands flat against his chest and shoved off, hard and fast enough to surprise him. I pulled free from his arms. He reached for me, but I turned and ran naked away from him down the hall. He followed me, as he had always followed me.