All We Had

by Annie Weatherwax

  “We’ll all be dead soon anyway,” Arlene proclaimed.

  It was an argument she used for many things and one my mother heartily agreed with.

  When Peter Pam finished unloading her bra, she took the mound of trash and deposited it into a paper bag. She rattled the ice in the bottom of her glass and finished her Coke. “I gotta get out of these mules. My feet are killing me.” It was one in the morning when she slid out of the booth. She walked through the kitchen out the back to the set of stairs that led to her apartment.

  A little while later I got up. I took the last bag of trash out back and was about to hurl it up into the Dumpster when a sound stopped me.

  A grunt, a groan. I looked up. There was a car parked at the far end of the parking lot. I heard it again, this time it was louder. I moved closer. When I got within a few feet of the car, I stopped and listened.

  The smell of that night’s burgers and onion rings hung in the air. A cloud had anchored in the sky and locked in all the heat. A faint sliver of moon lingered at an angle behind it. A bat swooped down overhead and the insects shrieked.

  The car was shrouded, but even in the dark the hubcaps gleamed. I held my breath and listened. I heard a low throaty grunt and then a thud! After that, a snicker, a sneer. Someone was laughing.

  I took a step closer and looked underneath the car. On the far side of it, the streetlamp cast an oval of yellow light. Just under the front tire, lying on its side in the gravel, I saw the mule, ­extra-large and red. Beyond it were two sets of black boots.

  I stood and backed away, quietly. Then turned and ran as fast as I could. Mel hid a key to the gas station on the ledge above the back door. I found an empty paint can in the pile of Peter Pam’s junk. I stood on it, felt around, and found the key. I dropped it twice trying to get it in the keyhole. “Come on!” I said. Finally, the key slipped in. I turned the handle and bolted for Mel’s office.

  He had a gun. Peter Pam had told me Mel kept it in the top drawer of his desk. I yanked it open, and there it was. I ran back out the door and up the parking lot. By the time I got to the car, I was panting. On the far side of it, Peter Pam was pinned facedown to the ground. Half her clothes were ripped off. The guy with the tattoos stood over her. His pants were down. His ass was white, a vein in his erection swelled. The one with the cap stood by snickering.

  I caught my breath, readied the gun with both hands, and stepped into the streetlight.

  “Let her go, or I’ll shoot you dead!” I was trying to channel Clint Eastwood, but my voice shook like Edith Bunker’s.

  I steadied the gun in my hands. In the corner of my vision, Peter Pam reached out and grabbed her mule. The one with his pants up ran for the woods. But the one I really wanted stood right in front of me.

  “Raise your fucking hands or I swear to God I’ll pull the trigger.” This time I sounded more authentic.

  His back was to me and when he put his hands up, the snake on his forearm rippled. I jammed the gun at the center of his bald head. He stiffened.

  “Ruthie,” Peter Pam said. She was still on the ground a few feet away from me. “Don’t shoot.” But I wasn’t going to listen to her.

  My mother was raped once in an alley. I was eleven when it happened. His buddy held me by the neck up against a wall. I had to hear her moan through the hand that covered her mouth and listen to the huh, huh, huh of the guy’s throaty breath as he pushed himself inside her. They left her on the ground with her skirt pulled up. I was about to run for the police when she stopped me. She looked up at me in the dim dirty light of that night, sighed, and half smiled, like the idea of calling the cops was the sweetest thing she’d ever heard.

  This time I knew better. I wasn’t going to call anyone, I was just going to shoot him.

  I took my thumb and pulled the hammer back slowly.

  “Don’t do it,” Peter Pam said.

  I’d never shot a gun, but I had a real good feeling I was going to like it. I looked straight down the barrel. I squeezed the trigger but just as the gun was about to go off, a purse knocked my arm down.

  “What the hell are you doing?” my mother said to me. Arlene and my mother must have seen me standing in the streetlight. They were bent over huffing and puffing from running through the parking lot. Before they could see her, Peter Pam snatched her clothes and vanished. My mother finally caught her breath. She looked up and when she noticed the guy standing in front of me with his arms up, and his pants half down, rage lit across her face.

  “Give me that thing.” She grabbed the gun from me. “I’ll fucking shoot him myself!” She turned and aimed. “Nobody touches my daughter!”

  “Things like this just happen,” my mother had explained to me, as if being raped was something she was used to. But this was different. The one thing my mother swore she’d do was kill anyone who laid a hand on me. So that night, when the guy made his move and bolted for the woods, my mother pulled the trigger.

  The sound of the gun hit the hot still air. A breeze moved through the branch overhead. A leaf teetered down and landed at my feet. Then everything stopped. There was dead silence.

  Gun smoke lingered in the streetlight. My mother and I stood there stunned, waiting to hear a body drop. This was how it would end. It flashed before me: my mother in an orange jumpsuit rotting away in jail. But luckily she had bad aim. My shoulders dropped with relief when I heard the thump, thump, thump of his boots pounding hard across the earth.

  Arlene had run back to Tiny’s and called the cops. They drove up the parking lot at a hundred miles per hour, skidded to a stop, and jumped out. Arlene and my mother worked themselves up talking over each other as they rattled off the details in a frenzy. “He was going to rape my daughter,” my mother screamed. “His pants were down!” Arlene added. “I should have killed him,” my mother hissed. “I could have done it with my bare hands,” Arlene said.

  “Ladies, please!” one of the officers yelled before they finally stopped.

  A storm was coming. I could smell it in the air. The wind volleyed. The treetops swayed and the silver underside of the leaves turned up. I looked around for Peter Pam but couldn’t find her. Then I felt a pair of eyes. Standing in the darkened window of her apartment, she clutched the drape and looked out. Peter Pam was dignified and private. Even from a distance I could feel her sense of shame. When she caught my gaze, she drew the curtain, backed away and disappeared.

  They found the guy the next day hiding in the Dumpster behind the high school. We IDed him right away. But I never told what really happened.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Gloom

  Peter Pam shut herself up in her apartment claiming she had the flu and I worried she’d never come out. My mother and Arlene hardly noticed, though. They were too busy phoning TV shows.

  Arlene thought the story would be perfect for Good Morning America, but when she called they put her on hold too long, so she called The Oprah Winfrey Show and was now on hold with them. She’d been sitting at our kitchen table drinking coffee and smoking Camels for hours.

  “The story is not tragic enough for Oprah,” I tried to explain to them. I was on the couch flipping through People magazine. “If someone had lost a limb in the incident, it would have been better.” Arlene and my mother looked puzzled so I tried to clarify. “And then, if you lost a leg, you’d have to be happy you still had the other one. Oprah once had on this guy who had no arms and no legs. They wheeled him out onto the stage and he told the audience how grateful he was that he could breathe. Oprah clapped and cried and said, ‘Wow, now that’s gratitude.’ She’s heavy into gratitude.” Bored, I tossed my magazine down on the coffee table. I was sure I’d made perfect sense. But by the looks on their faces I could tell my mother and Arlene didn’t think so.

  “Fuck Oprah,” Arlene abruptly quipped, slamming down the phone. “Let’s call 60 Minutes instead.”

  T
hree days passed. Peter Pam still did not come out. She claimed she didn’t like people seeing her when she was sick. So we took turns leaving plates of food outside her door.

  “Mix in some cream cheese,” Arlene instructed. “It’s one of her favorites.”

  Arlene and I were in the kitchen. I was scrambling eggs. She was pouring a cup of coffee.

  Then suddenly we heard something: footsteps on the floor above us. I looked at Arlene, she looked at me. She set the coffeepot down. I turned the stove off. We stood still and listened.

  There was a clatter. Dave, Peter Pam’s cat, knew how to flush the toilet. We heard him overhead meowing and pawing at the handle. For a while there was nothing, but then the door to Peter Pam’s apartment squawked the way it always did when it opened. We heard keys rattle, then footsteps descending her staircase.

  The back door opened, and—poof!—just like that, Peter Pam was gone. A man stood in her place wearing sneakers instead of mules. His jeans were loose fitting and worn. His white shirt was button-down, the sleeves halfway rolled up. His hair was brown, and even though he wasn’t yet thirty, it was thinning. His mustache was gone but his beard was at least two days old.

  “Well, don’t just stand there like a couple of ninnies,” he said. “We’ve got work to do before the morning rush.” With Peter Pam’s usual flare, he walked by us, picked up a dish towel, and shooed us along with it. Then he pushed through the kitchen doors.

  Peter, the man, swung his hips wide the same way Peter Pam did, and the occasional Yiddish still slipped out, but life without Peter Pam had no humor. Peter didn’t talk or laugh much, and every night after work he went straight home.

  One night, I was the last one to leave the restaurant. I shut the lights off and pulled the back door closed and when I turned around Peter was sitting on the bottom step gazing at the sky.

  I sat down next to him. For a while we looked up and neither one of us spoke.

  The sky was deep and clear. Like microscopic ocean life drifting to the bottom, the stars twinkled then receded into dust.

  “Compared to the size of the universe, we are only one billionth the size of an ant,” he finally said.

  We sat there awestruck. A satellite blinked across the sky far, far above us.

  “What fools we are to think we matter,” he said.

  I looked at him. His face was tilted up. The moonlight drew a line down his profile.

  “Why were we put here if we don’t matter?”

  “Apparently God made a mistake,” he said.

  A breeze crossed our feet. He and I now wore the same shoes—red Converse high-tops. He hugged his knees into his chest. His feet lifted off the ground.

  “Atticus Finch would disagree with you.” I said. No matter where we started, our conversations always ended up on this, our favorite topic, To Kill a Mockingbird. We both believed in aliens and agreed 100 percent, without question, that if they came to Earth and asked for just one book, that’s the one we’d give them. It was a triumph how that book showed the human race from so many angles.

  Peter Pam would have kept the conversation going, but Peter just sighed. He smiled and tapped me on the knee as if he thought I was being cute.

  “It’s getting late,” he said. “You better go.”

  So we said good night. He stood up and I got on my bike.

  “Ruthie?” he called just before I left.

  “Yeah?” I turned and faced him.

  The light at the top of the stairs by his apartment door caught his face. His eyes filled with sadness, the kind that settles in and never leaves. A long look passed between us.

  “Be careful on that bike,” he finally said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Loss

  My mother bolted upright. “What was that?” She had fallen asleep in her lounge chair.

  “McDonald’s just got off the power grid,” I said.

  Every midnight when they closed, their lights went out, and a loud zap! left a line of french-fry-smelling smoke drifting in the air.

  “Oh, thank God,” my mother breathed with a hand across her heart. “It scared me.” Relieved, she lay back down. Then she found her half-finished glass of wine on the ground next to her and took a sip.

  “What were we talking about again?” she asked. But neither one of us could remember.

  We sighed and looked up.

  “It’s so quiet,” she said.

  It was creepy how still that summer had become. Some days downtown was so empty you could hear bits of gravel skip along the curb when the breeze kicked up. That night, the day’s traffic had muffled to a barely discernible hum. Even Mother Nature was mute—no warbles or peeps or rustling in the leaves.

  The one thing we always heard was the Hansons’ walking sprinkler. It plodded back and forth across their front lawn at a slow and steady pace throughout the day and night. Hank oiled it every week and Dotty fostered it like a mother; if it ever got stuck, she’d nudge it with her walker and set it moving in the right direction. But one evening the sprinkler strayed and Dotty accidentally ran it over on the street.

  They had six similar ones gathering dust on a shelf in their store, but they never replaced it. Within a week their lawn was dead, every green shred of it gone.

  In the silence of the night, I thought I heard a noise. I turned around.

  “The Hansons’ light is on,” I said.

  “Maybe they’re awake.”

  “They go to bed at eight o’clock.”

  “Maybe there’s something really good on TV.”

  “They don’t have a TV,” I said.

  My mother fished a gnat out of her wineglass and took another gulp. A tree creaked and a chill tickled the air.

  “I’m going to peek in their window,” I said.

  “You can’t do that, she’ll think you’re a thief and beat you with her walker.”

  She had a point, so I sat back down. Dotty was a maniac with that walker. Half the town had been bruised by it.

  Nick at Night had been running a Love Boat marathon all week and when my mother realized we were missing it, we went inside. She had always dreamed of taking a cruise, so this show was one of her favorites. But I couldn’t focus.

  “What if they’re dead?” I said.

  “For Chrissake, Ruthie. All right, stay here.”

  She flung the sheet off and bolted out of bed. The back door slammed shut. I got up and watched her through the window. With her hands tucked under her chin, she tiptoed next door like a rabbit. She stood under the Hansons’ window and pricked up an ear to listen, then tiptoed back.

  “I hear snoring. Are you happy? My theory,” she continued when we got back into bed, “is that they fell asleep with the light on in those two overstuffed chairs they have. And Hank’s doesn’t have a high back so his head has kind of fallen up against it like this.” She propped herself up on her elbows and flung her head back with her eyes closed and her mouth open. Then she flopped back down on the bed. “And the angle of his head and neck has forced his mouth wide open, causing his snoring. That’s it. I’ve figured it out. I’m going to sleep.” She reached over the side of the bed, pulled her bag up, and started riffling through it. Apparently it was lipstick time again. When she was done, she chucked it into her purse and let the bag slide to the floor.

  I shut the TV off and the blue-green light faded. My mother slipped down under the sheet next to me. A breeze came in through the window and billowed the venetian blind with a soft rattle. The moonlight tumbled over us in stripes. I wrapped my arm around my mother and we spooned together like always.

  An hour later, I woke up hearing music. A love song wafted through the air. “My funny valentine, sweet comic valentine. You’re my favorite work of art.” Unmistakably Ella Fitzgerald.

  At first it was hard to tell where it was coming from. But when
I got out of bed and looked next door, I could see them in their window—Dotty and Hank in the middle of their living room, dancing. The warm light above made their faces glow. Holding on to each other, they rocked and moved across the floor like young lovers. It looked easier for them to dance together than it was for either one to walk alone.

  When the song was over, their dancing stopped. A moment later, their lights went out.

  In her daisy-print dress and wide-brimmed yellow hat, Dotty stepped out first. It was ten the next morning. The two of them shuffled to their car, folded Hank’s walker, and placed it in the back. Before Dotty walked around and put her own walker in the car, she straightened out his tie, smoothed a wrinkle on his shoulder, and helped him into the passenger’s seat. When she drove off, the purr of their Oldsmobile lingered in the street until they disappeared around the bend.

  “You see,” my mother said behind me. “They’re fine.”

  The heat in late summer was sharp and searing. The sunlight deadened every color and the lack of rain killed off several trees.

  But that afternoon, the sky tore open, the rain poured down in steely sheets, and the wind pummeled the earth in violent gusts.

  Two days went by. Our basement flooded. The electricity went out. Fat River swelled and the streets filled with water. Every groove in the earth spilled over. A low desperate groan belched across the town when the roof of the old mill building crumbled.

  On the third day, the downpours stopped. The sky slowly brightened. A meager rainbow tried to arch across the street, but a dagger of sunlight sizzled up its spine and—zap!—just like that, it was gone.

  We opened our door and looked out. The thrum of water was everywhere. It trickled down gutters, swirled down pipes, and dripped off branches. A river gushed along the street. Shiny bits of garbage caught the light and glinted in the water. Bigger things bobbed about. I counted two umbrellas, a cordless phone, two baseball caps. A flip-flop and a pair of mangled glasses had landed on our front steps. Someone’s lawn chair was angled in the bush in front of Patti’s.