by Amy Conner
“Me too,” I manage to say. What I don’t say is that I’m married, for God’s sake. I don’t say that kiss was so out of character for me I might as well be in the throes of some cerebral event, what the old-timers used to call a brainstorm. Like I said, there’s never been anybody else but Du, not really. Still, thinking of Ted’s kiss, I wouldn’t take it back—not for anything—and that astounding realization is something I keep to myself, too. Feeling the way I do right now, I’m not even sure what’s going to come out of my mouth will sound like English anyway. I sway on my feet, blinking and trying to lick my dry lips with my dry tongue.
Ted’s face is flushed, and I imagine mine is as well. “You all right?” he asks. He reaches down and picks up Troy’s makeshift leash, obviously avoiding my eyes.
“No.” The edges of my vision are darkening, and the barn rotates in a steep, ominous spiral. Swaying in the aisle, I know that this time I’m going down. “Christ,” I moan.
“Okay, okay,” Ted says. He takes my elbow, steadying me. “Easy, now. Can you hold on here a minute while I go get that water?” When all I can do is nod, he puts Troy’s leash in my limp hand and with quick, easy strides heads down the aisle, turning inside a door at the end of the shed row. I want to sit down in the dirt, but I’ve got to stay on my feet, however unsteady they are, since I’m sure that once I sit, then I’ll lie down, then all the blood will rush to my head, and then I’ll pass out. The longest minute later, Ted’s coming back with a Dixie cup in his hand and a concerned look on his face, probably wondering what he’s gotten himself into. He gives the cup to me, and I take a long, cool drink of what is undoubtedly the best water on the planet. God, that’s good. When I’ve finished, Ted takes the paper cup from me and drops it in a nearby garbage can. I close my eyes and return to my new friend, the cinder block wall.
“If you haven’t been drinking, then what the hell’s wrong with you?” Ted asks. He sounds concerned.
“Don’t know,” I mumble, opening my burning eyes and trying to stand up straight.
“Have you eaten anything today?” Without making a big deal out of it, Ted brushes my hair off my face, a gesture that both warms and alarms me. His fingertips are calloused, slightly rough on my cheek.
“Some Chessmen.” I try to take a step forward and promptly bang up against the stall door of the really big horse who’s been giving me the stink-eye for quite a while now. Ears flattened, the massive chestnut head rears backward in terror as if I’d come after the damned thing with an assault rifle.
“And a brownie,” I add.
“One of Bette’s brownies?” Ted shakes his head. “Honey, you’re high.”
Even in my addled state, “high” gets through to what’s passing for my brain. That’s almost exactly what this feels like, but my abortive experiments in college with marijuana and other drugs are so far in my past I’d purely forgotten all about them. Back then, it seemed like everybody except for ol’ Just-Say-No Julie Posey was smoking dope, but I usually faked it, passing the joint without taking a hit. Marijuana made me sleepy—and hungry, a state I’d begun to avoid whenever possible.
“That brownie did taste funny,” I admit, remembering the herby aftertaste.
“Bette’s brownies are notorious. You’ll do better walking it off,” Ted says. I have misgivings about leaving the wall beside the sulking chestnut horse’s stall, but he sounds serious. “C’mon. I’ll introduce you to some friends of mine. Here.” He wraps my hand in his own and encourages me forward. “You can do it.”
And like that, Ted, Troy, and I are walking down the aisle of the barn. I’m slow like an old lady, unsteady as a grandmother without her walker, but I do find that with each step I get a little better and Ted only has to catch me once or twice when I go crashing into the wall. Still, I’m grateful when we stop in front of the next stall and a tall gray horse pokes his head out, chewing a wad of hay. Ted strokes the horse’s long neck, sleek and smooth as dappled marble.
“This is Triton, one of my stakes horses,” Ted says, his voice affectionate. “Seven years old and sound as a Swiss bank. Won over eight hundred thousand bucks and the monster still runs like he’s three. Go ahead, you can touch him.”
The tall gray horse noses the front of my dress inquisitively, leaving a few white hairs on the black silk. Feeling timid, I slide my hand down the undercurve of his neck, mesmerized with the strong, slow heartbeat under my fingertips. “One of your horses?” I ask. “Do you own a herd of them?”
“I train ten,” Ted answers. “No herds, though. I can’t afford to own any horses myself. Damned things eat their heads off. Triton here belongs to a couple of really nice gay guys from New York, Ray and Stu. Great clients, pay their bills on time, and love to watch their horse run. He’s on the card for the Thanksgiving Classic tomorrow so they’ll be in town.” He takes my hand again, and we walk next door to meet another horse, a bay beauty with a blaze face and tiny ears like quotation marks. This one’s not nearly as intimidating, being a lot smaller than the gray.
“Say hi to Helen Wheels,” Ted says. “Filly’s fast as a lightning strike, so she’s a sprinter—needs a short race where her speed can make up for her lack of size.” The little filly arches her neck when Ted fondles her ears, her half-closed, liquid eyes glazed with contentment. “If I could own a horse, she’d be the one. I like her style.” Ted’s smile at me is intimate. “I like little women with guts.”
Blushing, I pet this one, too, loving the satin-like feel of her skin sliding easily over the exquisite crest of her neck. And Ted’s right: walking is helping, and so is the reassuring solidity of his hand holding mine. Taking our time, we move down the length of the aisle, meeting the horses he trains, getting to know them. When we reach the end of the shed row, I feel as though I’d remember these friends of Ted’s wherever I saw them, and slowly, the clean smells of hay and sleepy horses, Troy Smoot’s curious snuffling, and the papery rustle of pigeons overhead in the dusty rafters quiet my overshot senses. This peaceful company has helped bring me back to myself, enough so that it’s hard to believe I have just kissed a man who isn’t Du.
What got into me? I peek sidelong at Ted. Accident or not, once that kiss began I didn’t exactly back away. Ted steps into the last horse’s stall to rearrange an off-kilter blanket, and I lean my arms on the half-door, watching him seem to magically create order out of a tangle of mysterious straps and buckles while the horse nibbles from a hay net.
“Thanks.” I have to make myself say it, embarrassed now for being such a mess. And for that kiss. “Thanks for not taking advantage, for sticking around to make sure I’m all right.”
Ted straightens, brushing a loose straw from his jeans. “If you ate a pot brownie, might be a while before you’re really all right. Could take hours to wear off.”
“I feel a lot better,” I say, “just a little floaty, like I could walk off the edge of the world at any moment, you know?” Ted steps out into the aisle and shuts the latch on the door to the stall. “Look, I’m, uh, sorry for what happened before,” I say. Pausing, my cheeks hot, I’m determined to soldier on in my apology, even though I’d rather be in a midnight fire at sea than talk about it because I’m sure I need to say something about it. “That was really . . .”
Turning to face me, Ted takes both my hands in his own and smiles that great smile down at me. Before I lose my nerve, I rattle on doggedly. “I mean, it’s not like I go around kissing strange men all the time.”
“Yeah, that ring’s kind of hard to miss.”
“I used to have a little one,” I blurt. “Du—he’s my husband—thought I needed a big ring once he started making money.”
“Got it.” Ted nods but doesn’t say anything else, and for a long moment I’m belatedly dumbfounded to discover that, with no effort whatsoever, I can dismiss that five-carat rock and what it’s supposed to mean from my mind because I want to kiss him again. I want to put my fingers in that dark, a-little-too-long hair, gently pull his mouth to m
ine so I can feel that smile against my lips just one more time. Amazed at my thoughts, I tilt my head and really look at him, this nice man who’s just showed me his horses, inviting me in as though I have every right to be a part of this world of his.
There’s a strange, comfortable quiet between us, and in that growing quiet I begin to hear things I thought were done, the sounds of possibility, of change. If I can kiss someone besides Du, maybe I can muster a backbone and stick it out with Starr after we get home. Besides, that amazing kiss and this good silence have shut up even the rosebush voice—probably shocked to smithereens at the widening rift, seemingly as broad as the Gulf of Mexico, between the me of this morning and Annie tonight. I could get used to this silence, I think.
“Well, Annie not-from-here,” Ted finally says. “You okay to head back to Bette’s? It’s a ways.” He lets go of my hands. “I could go get the golf cart if you want.”
Reflexively, I look down at my watch. In the dim light of the shed row I can barely make out the time, but even so it’s plain that I’ve been gone a lot longer than the ten-minute walk I’d promised Troy when we left Bette’s trailer. More like an hour has passed, and now it’s well after midnight. If Starr and I can leave in the next fifteen minutes, I can still get home before I get into real trouble, but the thought of home elicits a stirring of apprehension, as though there’s something I’ve forgotten and need to remember before it’s too late. It’s probably the dope making me paranoid, but in any case, I really do need to get back.
“I can make it. That Airstream ought to still be where it was an hour ago,” I say, hugging my arms with a shiver. Without warning, it feels as though the temperature in the barn has dropped twenty degrees and it’s not like this dress is made for traipsing around in the damp New Orleans fog anyway. Seeing me shiver, Ted shrugs out of his jean jacket and drapes it around my shoulders, body-warm and smelling of him. Lord, he looks good in his white T-shirt, that broad chest, those smooth-muscled arms. I blink and look away while Troy Smoot sits at my feet, all business now after having thoroughly smelled everything he could get his nose into and lifted his leg on the garbage can.
“Thanks for the water,” I say, hugging myself tighter so I’ll be sure to keep my hands to myself because Ted looks so good. Then the nice man in the white T-shirt puts a finger under my chin, lifting it so my eyes meet his. He’s smiling, and in spite of my growing apprehension, I find myself helplessly smiling back at him. “And thanks for the hay rope.”
“Thanks for the kiss,” Ted says mildly. “I’ll walk you back to Bette’s place.”
My car’s missing.
It’s gone. Vanished. No longer there. I shut my eyes and open them again, sure that this time it’ll be where I parked sixty thousand dollars’ worth of German luxury engineering, behind the big semi with the Virginia plates. No—in the damp dirt the tire tracks are unmistakable, but the BMW is gone.
“Hey, Annie?” Ted asks. “Where’s your car?”
I don’t answer. I can’t. I stand in the space where my car used to be, my mouth open wide as one of the semi’s tires. Unbelieving, I stumble away, leaving Ted and the dog behind me. I run between the silk palm trees, up the steps of Bette’s Airstream, and bang on the door with both fists.
“Starr!”
The Confederate flag covering the window twitches, but it’s Bette who opens the door, her false eyelashes removed, a smear of night cream on her big-pored face.
“Oh, Lord, Annie,” she says, looking nervous. “You better come on in, sweetheart. Ted, that you?”
“I’ll wait out here,” he says.
I fall inside the door, fending off Bette’s attempt at a wide-armed embrace. The trailer, smelling of stale coffee and Shalimar, feels way too warm, entirely too bright after the cool, foggy night. All those swans stare at me with beady-eyed smugness from every corner of the room.
“My car’s been stolen! I’ve got to talk to Starr,” I say wildly, looking around the Airstream’s cabin. “Starr?”
Starr doesn’t answer. Her purse isn’t on the Formica countertop either.
“Bette? Where’s Starr?” My voice is trembling on the edge of the kind of panic that sends people out screaming into the streets. I have a very bad and altogether too familiar feeling about this. Somehow, I’ve screwed up again. Serves you right, the rosebush voice says, for kissing that man, and the swans seem to nod in agreement.
Bette wraps her hand around my arm, her big, greasy face concerned. “You better sit down, honey. I’ll pour us some coffee.”
“No!” I whirl away from her and stick my head outside the open door, shouting, “Starr Dukes, where the hell are you?” Ted, who’s now leaning against the side of the battered semi with his arms folded, looks up at me. His face is expressionless until he lifts an eyebrow.
“She’s not out here,” he says.
It’s a long beat before I realize Ted knows who I’m shouting for, that he knows Starr. I can only stare at him in dumbfounded vacancy. Behind me, Bette tugs at the jean jacket hanging from my shoulders, and I just restrain myself from slapping her. Where’s Starr? Where’s my car? Has she taken it to get gas or something? She has to be coming back, she has to. I’m shaking like I have a high fever, my heart pounds like the surf in a storm, and the trailer’s linoleum seems to lift under my feet with a sideways tilt.
“Sit down, Annie.” Bette pats my shoulder as she guides me to the dinette. Like an obedient dog, I sit in a stunned heap. She leans out through the Airstream’s door, into the foggy night. “You can c’mon in, Ted,” she hollers. “I’ll pour us all a cup of coffee.”
My hands are knotted together on top of the table when Ted ducks his head to walk in the trailer. He pauses and looks around, seems nonplussed by all the swans, and then slides in across from me on the dinette’s other bench. I can’t look at him.
I can’t look at anyone.
“Bette,” I say, my voice low and dangerous. “Tell me where Starr is this minute. Tell me she didn’t just take off in my car.”
Bette’s back is turned to me as she pours out the coffee I don’t want. Her wide shoulders slump. With a sigh, she pushes up the velour sleeves of her sweat suit like she’s got a tough job ahead of her and turns around to face me.
“Well, she did, Annie. Starr took your car and went back to Jackson. You were gone for so long, over an hour, and we didn’t even know where you’d gone.” Bette folds her tattooed arms across her bosom, her face worried. “I’m so sorry. She said to tell you she couldn’t wait.”
My mouth falls open again, and nobody says anything. “What?” I falter, finally. Jackson? Starr left me here, in New Orleans, in the middle of the night without a way to get home? “What?” I say again, still unable to believe this is really happening to me.
Like a dancing bear in teal velour, Bette trundles over to the dinette with two steaming cups, putting one in front of Ted, the other in front of me. “Here you go, honey.” She squeezes in next to Ted and pats my clenched hands. “Oh, Annie—I got another call, and it wasn’t an asshole trainer with a sore horse this time, it wasn’t for me. That call was for Starr.”
I jerk my hands away, clutching Ted’s jacket to my bare shoulders. “So?” I demand, panic turning to dread.
Bette’s naked little eyes are guarded. She looks down at the table. “So after that call she had to leave. Right away. She wouldn’t wait.”
“I heard that part already. What was so goddamned important that she’d strand me in New Orleans,” I say, my voice rising to an almost-shout, “when she knows how much trouble I’m going to be in when I can’t get home tonight?”
And with that outburst I’m exhausted, collapsing against the leatherette back of the bench seat, dully appraising the disaster Starr’s landed me in. Across the table, Ted takes a sip of his coffee, his eyes watching me with what looks like compassion. I’m numb inside, but my thoughts are racing: even if I could get a rental car on the night before Thanksgiving, my driver’s license, my credit
cards, and the money in the pocket of my parka—they’re all in the BMW. I’m broke and alone in New Orleans in the middle of the night. How could Starr do this to me? My eyes fill with tears.
“Didn’t she know?” My whisper sounds broken. “Didn’t she know what’s going to happen to me now?”
Bette sighs. “Oh, honey,” she says gently. With a grunt, she gets up to get me a Kleenex from the swan-shaped dispenser on top of the television. “Starr knew it was going to be a problem, but she had to do it. She said to tell you it was Mr. Right who called.”
Remember Mr. Right? The man my momma told me was going to carry me off, love me forever, and get me whatever my heart desired?
Bette goes on. “It was her chance to get together with her baby’s father, to go get married and get shut of the world of hurt she’s been in, but she was afraid he might have second thoughts. She didn’t dare waste any time.”
“But tonight?” This horror is making less sense by the minute. Starr? Going back to Bobby? “Why tonight?”
“I don’t know, sugar,” Bette says, shaking her head.
“Eight hours ago she had to be in New Orleans tonight!” I want to put my head down on the table and sob, but I can’t summon the energy even for that. “She’s going back to Jackson to marry Bobby? After all he put her through, Starr’s going back to Bobby Shapley? Has she lost her mind, thinking he can marry her just like that? Last I heard, he wasn’t even divorced! He’s still with Julie.”
I can’t seem to take this in, my mind shrieking no. Please, please tell me I’m not going to be ruined because Bobby Shapley changed his fucking mind.
Bette sits down again, and the bench groans under her weight. Her husky contralto is loaded with a galling commiseration when she says, “I know it’s a shock, sugar.”
“No, it’s not.” Ted says.
I turn from Bette’s heavy-jowled face to meet his steady, brown-eyed gaze. “What do you mean, it’s not a shock?” I ask. “What the hell are you saying?”