Painted Dresses

by Patricia Hickman

  “I been living with a man. Freddy, he wouldn’t let me buy a stitch of clothes. That left me to wear nothing but his things.” She unzipped her jeans and opened her fly. “But I love him, so what was I to do?”

  “You’re wearing men’s underwear,” I said.

  “It’s all I had,” she said. “All he give me.”

  “Are any of the clothes in this closet yours?” I asked.

  “Nothing but a few bras.” She held up a bra, yellowed and stretched thin.

  “We’ll go shopping then.”

  A loud noise shook the trailer. I braced myself against the wall, thinking the entire place might cave in.

  “Someone’s beating my door down, sounds like,” said Delia.

  I told her to keep throwing out the men’s clothes, that I would get the door.

  A woman about thirty, black, and about to pound the door down stepped away when she saw me.

  I looked at her inquisitively, trying to smile.

  “I come looking for Delia Cheatham.” Cheatham was Delia’s name by her first husband. “Am I at the wrong place?” She was frowning, trying to see around me. Suddenly a burst of feathers and clucking from inside the trailer startled her. She backed away. Least One wanted to escape the dark trailer prison.

  “It’s a pet,” I told her. I let Least One out the door and into the yard.

  She was a spare woman, dressed too thinly for the chilly weather. When I didn’t answer her question about Delia, she backed down the stairs looking at me mistrustfully. “If you see her, she’s the ho tried to take my husband. He been living two lives, one at my place and one here until today. But it’s over now, tell her.”

  Glad to hear it, I was about to close the door, but the pain in the woman’s eyes made me continue to stare after her. It was the kind of curiosity that made my expression appear obliging, but really, my fascination with Delia’s life made me stare. Here was a woman I might have never met if I had not been placed at that instant on my sister’s threshold. “If I see Delia, may I tell her who asked after her?”

  “Sophie Deals, Freddy Deals’s wife. Delia knows Freddy, that’s for sure.”

  Delia whispered down the hall, “Tell her to get lost!”

  “Delia Cheatham! You come face me!” Sophie cocked her head to one side. She smirked and planted one clear acrylic heel on the first porch step. “You hiding, ain’t you? You know you broke up my marriage.”

  “Shut up, Sophie!” Delia yelled, but she wouldn’t come out.

  Sophie tromped back up the stairs, her long arms pulling her up by the porch rails toward me. I wanted to calm her and send her on her way. “Please, Mrs. Deals, I’m sure Delia’s got no reason to fight with you. If you’d just take some time to cool off, I’ll talk to her and see what she can do to make it right.”

  Sophie’s eyes softened. She pursed her lips, pausing, still straining to see around me. “You think you can get her to make things right?” she asked, as surprised as if I was fresh as flowers off the farm. “Only way she can do that is to keep away from my Freddy. We got four kids to bring up, and she don’t care nothing about that. Maybe you can talk to her.”

  “I will,” I promised. “She’s moving away, if that helps.”

  Sophie acknowledged me with a slight nod. “Good, then. Can’t believe my husband got tangled up with the likes of her anyhow.” She was standing out in the yard and was pretty well on her way off Delia’s property when she muttered, “Everybody knows she’s crazy. Who knows why Freddy went slumming?” She turned to walk back to her car.

  Delia yelled from inside, “Shut your face, Sophie! He don’t love you anyway!”

  Sophie turned and yelled, “Your life ain’t worth squat from this time on! You watch your back, Delia Cheatham.”

  I walked out onto the porch to be certain she was leaving. I took the steps down to the last boarded landing, continuing to force a smile any time Sophie glanced back at me. I didn’t see the door come open and the butt of my father’s rifle lift over my head. Delia yelled, “I’m not standing for this!” and then pulled the trigger. I fell onto the bottom porch step. The rifle fire was as deafening as it had been out in the deer woods with Tim. But overhead, it seemed to take all of the sound out of the air, out of my ears, as if no sound was left in the world. Sophie fell against her car.

  I clambered up the steps before Delia could unload a second round. I forced the rifle butt into the air. Delia was laughing. Sophie gunned her engine, pulling out onto the dirt road, gravel spangling my car like wedding rice.

  Reassured that Delia did not just murder her boyfriend’s wife, I said, “What a relief! I thought you got her.” I leaned against the railing, trying to regain my senses.

  “I did. She was bleeding like a knifed hog.”

  I stared after Sophie, but she kept driving until her car was out of sight.

  “She won’t come messing around here no more!”

  “How’d you get Daddy’s gun in the first place?”

  “Tim stored it in the gun rack, and I put it in back o’ your car, bent inside that steamer trunk you give me. I heard she was coming to whip me.”

  “You’ll go to jail, Delia!”

  Her smile disappeared. “Sophie’s brother’s a low-life drug dealer. The Freemans don’t go to the cops for nothing.”

  I had heard of Mason Freeman; back-page-of-The News and Observer-Mason Freeman. He did time in prison after turning down a deal with a Wilmington judge to snitch on a fellow drug-dealing relative.

  Dust lifted from the unnamed lane in front of Delia’s trailer. “Go and pack what little you need, Delia. We’ve got to get you away from here. Go, go!” I meant to the police. But the road never took us in that direction.

  Still driving, I called the rental office where I worked. A leasing agent, a college student named Kimberly I hired out of the university, was manning the phones. I oversaw a small-time rental operation. The couple who owned the apartments had given me a week’s leave to go to my aunt’s cottage. But Daddy died and the leave turned to bereavement. Either way, I was supposed to be back by Monday.

  Kimberly said, “I leased out a unit today. He’s divorcing, but drives a BMW. He checked out fine, like, he’s maybe well off. We’re going out tonight. You didn’t say I couldn’t date clients, did you? You holding up all right?” and “Sorry about your dad.”

  Delia sat beside me. She pointed to a hot dog stand. “That’d be a good place to stop for suds and a dog.”

  “Kimberly, I’ll try to make it back Monday. But stuff has come up, you know the little things that come up after a death,” I said, getting increasingly better at lying than Delia.

  A customer came in, and she had to cut the call short. “I got exams coming up. Monday would be a stretch.”

  I knew with her parents’ recent divorce Kim needed the hours for school bills. “But if I don’t get back until Tuesday, you could cover for me?”

  She was breathing into the phone.

  “You’ll get a bonus. I’ll buy you a blouse.”

  “Okay, then.” She hung up.

  I was watching the mirrors for a tail. “Delia, there’s a good chance that Sophie’s gone to the hospital. They call the cops for bullet wounds, no matter what. I think we ought to go straight to the police. You can tell them you were mad, you didn’t mean it. She threatened you.” With Delia’s track record and Daddy’s death, we could claim all sorts of mental anguish.

  She stared out the window, watching the passing stores and shops along Fifty Lakes Drive. A road sign advertised concert tickets for an underground band.

  “If we go straight to the police and you tell them that you didn’t mean to shoot her, that you were, I don’t know, just fooling around or something, maybe you’d get off with probation.”

  She cocked her head. “Them cops, they got it in for me. You know since Ray
got caught growing weed in the backyard, they drive real slow past my place now, like they’re watching me.”

  “They’re not watching you, Delia. Why would they?”

  “Ever since then, they watch me.”

  You could never tell by looking at Delia whether she was in the present or in her fictive world. She never showed it, not in her mannerisms or body language. But since she was a little kid, her bottom lip jutted out when she was off script. As we drove out of town, but onto the highway and not onto the interstate, she was wide-eyed and her bottom lip could hold dime tips.

  I said, mad as bees, “Getting back to the present, let’s talk about shooting people. Most of us don’t shoot people, so maybe you shouldn’t either.”

  Delia’s fingers curled into tight balls. When Daddy lectured her, I saw that same tight-fisted response. She told me, “I been wanting to kick Sophie Deals’s butt since Freddy told me how she treated him. She don’t love him, so I don’t know what her problem is anyway.”

  “But he’s married to her, not you.”

  “He talked about leaving her.”

  “They do that.”

  “How would you know anyway, like, you’ve had this perfect husband, and now you’re throwing him away.”

  She had a point. “No man’s perfect, Delia.”

  “There’s that new restaurant, Bojangles. They got chicken. You crying, Gaylen?”

  I wiped my eyes. The tears hadn’t flowed since the day after Daddy’s funeral. “It’s been a tough day, Delia. We just buried Daddy. My sister’s shooting people.”

  She laughed. “Life’s like a big nut, ain’t it? Hard to crack and such.”

  5

  I COULD NOT DISCERN the quiet of Boiling Waters that afternoon. No sirens going off, not even a cat stuck up a tree. The bare trees shadowing the highway seemed to turn their backs to Delia and me; a few dying wheat fronds—the kind you see sparsely growing along the highway after a grain truck drops seed on the road—listed in the wind. All at once, every little mom-and-pop business storefront looked large to me, as if I were seeing each shop newly. I knew most of the buildings by memory, even though the ownership changed hands as often as the economy fluctuated. A single American flag hung in the front window of a cafe. A mobile sign out by the road advertised coffee better than Starbucks; a yellow ribbon tied to one leg of the sign explained the caption under the coffee ad that said, “Until Bill comes home, we pray.” I had been away from Boiling Waters too long to know whose son or daughter had enlisted and gone off to the Middle East.

  Delia dug through her purse for a cigarette.

  “You can’t smoke in my car. I’ll find a place to stop for lunch, though.”

  She tossed her purse onto the floorboard.

  “You like Wendy’s?” I asked.

  “Anything with a smoking section,” she said.

  We parked on the back side of the parking lot. Inside, I led us to a booth in the center of the fast-food restaurant away from the story-tall plate-glass windows.

  She picked out another booth and sat down, expecting me to buy her food. “Just get me a hamburger, ketchup, fries, large Coke,” she said. She looked like my father lighting a cigarette. The cigarette hung sideways out of her mouth, flopping up and down when she spoke. I had seen Daddy do the same thing, sitting on the back porch after breakfast.

  I ordered and brought Delia her lunch on a tray. She still seemed out of place in a restaurant. Except for the Waffle House, she had never been one to go out and eat much, not in the light of day at least. I thought that over time, as she worked and earned her own keep, she’d ease into the social graces of ordering food. But come to think of it, I had never seen my father order a meal in a restaurant either. Eating-out culture had come up around them both but had evaded their simple daily practices.

  “They got any ketchup around here?” She unwrapped her burger and set her cigarette in the ashtray to smolder.

  I pointed to the condiment island. She could get her own ketchup.

  She got up wearing the same pouty smirk that dimpled her cheeks as a girl. Delia could never walk across a public room without drawing attention, not since she could walk. I assumed it was her way of trying to look cute for the adults, to make the aunts fawn over her, or to make my father take notice. But Daddy did not notice us girls in that manner. Even when we bought new swim-suits and Mother had us parade out in front of him for approval, he would glance at us as if we were distracting him and then glance down at the floor. Delia skipped to the condiment island. The smirk was in place, as if she was playing her hand again at age six; only at age twenty-eight, cute was not in her deck.

  The restaurant was filling up, mothers toting infants and a paint crew stopping for lunch. No one noticed Delia dancing to the condiment island except one Latino employee pushing a broom outside the women’s rest room. He glanced at her and then looked away as if he were being polite, as if he would look back and this woman would have somehow composed herself.

  Delia picked up a round empty condiment container and held it under a ketchup pump. She filled it with a flourish, pumping wildly, giggling, and glancing up and down to see who was watching. I looked down at my food.

  She filled a second one and carried them both back to the table, holding two condiments out at arms-length as if she were delivering something mysterious back to the table. “I like those ketchup gadgets,” she said. “It’s like, all-you-can-eat ketchup, no end to ketchup.”

  “I’m glad you like it, Delia, but do you have to draw attention like that? I mean, you should think about a low profile from now on until we figure out what to do about Sophie.”

  She took a bite and rolled her eyes as if tasting burger for the first time.

  “Don’t you and your friends go out?” I asked.

  She dipped a fry in ketchup. “Ain’t got the money. I do got a friend, though. Juanita. She’s not Spanish, though, except her name. We went out for a beer once after I got paid. Freddy, he got mad, took the rest of my money and said he’d save it. I never saw it. Said he paid the bills, but they shut the lights off after that.”

  “Delia, you got to take care of your own money,” I said. “How’d you meet this Freddy anyway?”

  She reflected on the shape of her fry and then said, “He worked the assembly line at Hamby’s. We sat and talked each day over lunch. The more we talked, the more he liked me. He told me I was funny. Then we went out for a smoke during break, a drink after work, one thing led to another.” A smile spread slowly across her face.

  A squad car pulled up outside. One of two officers sat in the car talking on the radio, looking down at something, perhaps a computer screen. The other got out and waited at the door for his buddy to join him. His face was a pumpkin, wide and nearly yellow. His head tilted in the cold wind, causing him to step more quickly to gain balance.

  Delia turned her face away from the cops.

  My food tasted the way nothingness would taste if served between stale buns. I swallowed a bite with soda that was more carbonation and less syrup.

  She leaned toward me and said, “Should we make a run for it?”

  The second cop got out. He stopped in the doorway behind his partner.

  “Delia,” I whispered.

  She looked at me. Her nose freckles had faded, but under the fluorescent lights they were suddenly visible, and she looked nine again.

  “It’s Deputy Bob. Keep eating and don’t look up,” I told her. He was the same Bob who arrested her boyfriend Ray for growing weed. But he had told Delia to come along too for questioning. When he frisked her, he slowed down over the vulnerable places. Delia slapped him, and he dragged her out to the car. She cried so loudly that he stopped the squad car and made her get out. She skipped back to the trailer, she told me later, not believing that he had let her go.

  “Look what the cat drug in, Johnny.” Bob s
potted Delia right away and crossed the room to walk up to our table. He stood alongside her, looking down at her. He got this look where his mouth opened and faintly smiled at her. Delia might not have known why Deputy Bob let her go that day, but it was then that I knew.

  “I ain’t botherin’ you, Bob,” said Delia. “And I ain’t looking at you, neither.”

  He was standing close enough that she could see her face in his belt buckle if she would only look up. His right hand moved down away from his waist and tapped the set of handcuffs linked to his belt. “You seen any mischief out around your place, Delia?”

  The big-faced deputy, Johnny, stood with his feet apart next to Bob, listening to his partner but also checking out the lunch deals on the overhead marquee.

  My sister finally looked up at me.

  “We’ve been at my father’s house, Deputy,” I told him. “He passed this week.”

  Bob said, “Yes’m. Heard the news about your daddy. Sorry to hear it.” He glanced back at Delia and then slowly returned his gaze to me. “Neighbor called from out your way, Delia. Said she heard gunfire in the neighborhood,” he said. “I figured it was boys out hunting too close to home.”

  “It is, after all, hunting season,” said Delia. She wrapped the remaining wedge of burger in the aluminum paper. “I ain’t got much of an appetite. Lets go, Gaylen,” she said. She slipped on the thin hooded green sweater left in her closet by Freddy.

  I expected the deputy to grab her and haul her out kicking and making a scene, but Delia walked out free. Deputies Bob and Johnny fell in line to order lunch.

  I followed her out of Wendy’s and to the car. I sat staring out over the steering wheel until Delia said, “Time to go.”

  The parking lot had filled up. Two more cops pulled in next to Bobs squad car. “They’re meeting for lunch, I guess,” I said. I had to make a choice right then and there. I imagined Deputy Bob putting his hands on my sister.

  “This place we going have a TV?” she asked. “I like to watch the war.”