by Amy Conner
Ted’s eyes don’t waver. “You’ve known her—how long?”
Without thinking I say, “Since I was seven years old. What about it?”
Ted shrugs. “Then how can you be shocked when Starr Dukes runs off with your car?”
This hits like a baseball bat to the gut. I stare at him, hoping I heard wrong.
“So you do know her,” I say. “In fact, you seem to know Starr better than I do.” Could Ted be one of the men in her past? Starr, sitting on that god-awful ugly bed, clasping her hands in her lap and looking dreamy. Poppa said that the wages of sin is death. I’ve made me some mistakes, but I can’t say I’d do anything different. Not knowing why I should care, I swallow hard and have to ask, “So . . . how well do you know her?”
Ted doesn’t say anything right away. He takes a sip of coffee and puts the cup down before he says, “It’s not what you think, Annie. Starr’s like a lot of people—comes from nothing, wants a lot. I’d say that if taking your car and leaving you behind was the one way for her to get over, she’d drive off with your BMW in a heartbeat and never look back.” He idly turns his cup in its saucer. “Starr and I were friends once, sort of. That’s all.” His tone tells me to take his word for it.
Bette runs her fingers through her tight brown curls, working them into a loopy, corkscrew halo. She looks tired, too. “And that’s the way it is with me and Starr,” she says, sounding subdued. “She only tells me what she thinks I need to know, so I can’t answer all your questions, Annie. She hadn’t even told me about being pregnant, and wasn’t that a surprise when she walked in the door! But I’ll tell you what, once Starr’s made up her mind, she’s like a round from a thirty-aught shotgun—whatever she’s aiming at, she’s gonna take it out.”
Eyes cast down at her wide lap, Bette gulps, obviously steeling herself for what she says next. “And Annie”—she lowers her voice—“this isn’t the first time Starr’s been pregnant, but she swears it’s going to be the last, said that phone call meant she wasn’t going to have to fight anymore, she’d never be broke again. Starr’s going to be set for life.”
I’m reeling with humiliation. I want to crawl into a hole and die. I want to wake up in my bed at home to find that this has been a wicked, wicked dream. Ted’s face is carefully without expression, but the terrible sympathy in Bette’s eyes tells me I’ve been a fool. What have I done to myself now?
Finally, I locate my voice. “I still have to find a way home,” I say, defeated and thin as tap water. “All my money, my driver’s license, everything’s in the car. I have the clothes I’m standing up in. And a dog.”
“Well, the dress looks fabulous on you.” Bette narrows her eyes and gives me the once-over. “I’d lose the boots, though. You need a killer pair of Ferragamo sling-backs.”
“And he’s a good dog,” Ted offers.
“Where is he?” I ask. In the midst of all this sickening revelation, have I lost Troy Smoot, too?
“He’s in my truck,” Ted says. “There’s a pile of clean horse blankets in the back seat, fresh from the Laundromat. He’s warm and comfortable.”
“Why’d you do that?” I rub my eyes, put my face in my hands.
Ted reaches across the table and gently pushes a thick sheaf of hair off my face. I look at him through my fingers. “I’m going to drive you both home,” he says. “You ready to leave?”
This offer is as surreal as everything else. “Why are you being so nice to me?” I ask.
“You liked my horses, and I don’t have another date for tonight.” His voice is easy, but his eyes tell me that he means it. “I can get you home and be back here before my first horse runs tomorrow.”
Looking relieved, Bette nods her approval. “Ted’s one of the good guys, honey,” she says. “Go on home, Annie. Things will look better in the morning.”
It’s already morning.
Ted’s truck is humongous, an older black four-door Ford diesel with an extra pair of tires on the rear axle. Ted calls it a dually. There’s a welter of fast-food bags, gas station receipts, road maps, a couple of shiny aluminum horseshoes, a tattered paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and a claw hammer underneath my feet on the passenger’s side. I’m shivering on the frigid bench seat that’s as cold under my bare thighs as only vinyl can be, waiting for the big engine block finally to warm up so we can have some heat.
“Somebody stole the radio back in Virginia,” Ted says. “I could sing, if you want. My ex-wife used to say I sound okay for a guy whose only musical experience is hymns from when I was an altar boy. Sometimes I sing Van Halen in the truck, just because it feels good.”
“I’m not really in the mood for music, thanks.”
It’s a quarter of two o’clock in the morning, black as the underside of a crow’s wing except for the brief pools of efflorescence surrounding the deserted interstate’s lamps. Just as the truck begins to lose its chill, we pass the last exit and leave New Orleans, plunging into the darkness of the spillway, going back the way I came, across the marsh and up the I-55. Slipping off my boots, I curl my feet underneath me and lean my head against the window, looking through the bug-splattered windshield at indistinct stands of cypress trees, the hummocks of switch grass and reeds spread under the scattered stars. Troy Smoot snores softly in the back seat, ensconced in his pile of horse blankets.
I glance over at Ted. He drives like a guy accustomed to the thousand-mile distances between racetracks, forearm resting on top of the wheel, one long leg bent, the other stretched to the pedal. His profile in the greenish light of the instrument panel is cut from the cloth of the night.
“You hungry yet?” he asks.
“No.” I can’t imagine eating anything. Hell, I don’t even want a cigarette—which is unusual, although just as well because the pack’s in my purse in the BMW. I wish I hadn’t thought of that. Damn her. “I’m not hungry.”
“You’re going to be. Bette packed up some cookies for later, for when you want them.” He pauses. “I told her about the brownie while you were in the bathroom.”
Cookies. If I hadn’t eaten those Chessmen, I probably wouldn’t be in the mess I’m in. If I hadn’t eaten the damned brownie, Starr, Troy, and I would be almost to Jackson by now. The truck hums along the elevated miles of the spillway, its diesel engine a constant drone, and the silence, so alive before, is thick and lifeless between Ted and me. What can I possibly say? I don’t deserve his kindness—a silly, vacuous woman who deceived her husband, ran off to New Orleans, and got stranded there.
Finally, I clear my throat. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry you have to drive me two hundred miles back to Jackson.”
“I’m not,” Ted says. “Sorry, I mean. It’s a good excuse for spending more time with you. I’d like to know you when you’re sober, Annie.” He turns and glances at me briefly before he puts his eyes back on the road again. “Besides, driving’s half of what my job’s about. I’m good at it—better than singing anyway.”
“Still,” I persist, “you shouldn’t have to—”
Ted interrupts. “Why don’t you just say thank you and let it go?”
I swallow my apologies. “Thank you,” I whisper. But letting it go is going to be a lot harder.
Still, after that the mood in the truck lifts. As if by mutual agreement, Ted and I don’t talk about Starr. I can’t even think of her without crying, and he seems to know this.
Instead, we head directly to all those places you’re never supposed to go with an acquaintance: politics (he’s a nonvoting Republican, I’m a blue-dog Democrat), religion (he’s a Christmas Catholic, I’m a lapsed Episcopalian), and money (both of us agree that while it doesn’t buy happiness, it sure makes miserable a lot easier to take). I find myself laughing at Ted’s absurd stories of the backstretch, especially the ones about Bette and her temper, something of a small miracle since I was sure it would be years before I laughed again. Even so, from time to time there’s a sense of black ships on my horizon, the foreknowledg
e of what might be waiting for me at home. It’s a disturbing disconnect with a whiplash effect. I’ll be laughing, talking, and then out of the blue I’m besieged by sharp-edged, wince-worthy memories of a tribe of Barbies in sock-dresses, a broken majolica umbrella stand, a burning tractor, a four-and-a-half-inch heel and an empty pint bottle left under a gardenia bush. Disapproving faces around the dining table. My mother’s perpetual disappointment with me. Du’s wary eyes watching me maneuver myself into yet another corner at a law firm cocktail party.
He trusts you. It’s an ambush. The rosebush voice has been lying in wait for this opportunity. Look what you’ve gone and done to Du. He trusts you.
Trusts me to screw everything up, you mean. The realization presents itself like an old diary, my private thoughts misplaced and found in a box in the attic many years after the fact.
I’ve known this a long time, it seems. I shift uncomfortably in my seat, the unwelcome understanding coming home to roost like pigeons on a ridgepole at sunset: one at a time, each with a soft thud of inevitability. I’m cringing as I think about how we live together, thoughts I usually avoid. Of course Du never would have agreed to let me take this trip—he barely lets me go shopping on my own. It’s Du who supervises the dinner menus, signs off on the gardening, consults Myrtistine on every damned little thing around the house, keeps me on his radar whenever we’re at a function or even just out for drinks with another couple. No, I think, Du Sizemore doesn’t trust me at all.
What’s most disturbing about this knowledge is the fact that I already knew it.
More subdued now, I let Ted talk and drive, two things he really is good at. He keeps it all light and humorous, thank God, because I’m sorely distracted. After another sixty miles, we’ve crossed the state line and I find I’m hungry—no, ravenous—only to discover that Troy Smoot has surreptitiously nosed open Bette’s bag of snickerdoodles and eaten them all, every crumb.
“It’s okay,” I say. Another random eating episode averted. I know I ought to feel relieved, but instead, I’m ready to hunt through the jumble on the truck’s floor for anything, even just a leftover pack of Wendy’s saltines. I don’t think I’ve ever been this hungry in my life.
“You sure?” Ted asks. “I can stop.”
“I’ve had plenty already today. I’ll live.”
“Not if you don’t start eating,” Ted says. “Seriously. You’re one beautiful lady, but you’re way too skinny. If you were a horse, I’d worm you. There’s a truck stop at the Fernwood exit. I’m going to buy you a ham sandwich and then take you on to Jackson.”
And like that I hear Starr, in the passenger seat of the BMW. You probably have no idea how men look at you—like they want to buy you a ham sandwich, then take you home.
Starr. All over again, I experience the gash in my utterly unfounded trust. I lose it then, bursting into loud messy sobs that seem to rip their way out of my chest. I can’t stop them either because, like seeds, these tears were planted this morning in the rose garden when I gave up on the baby, they took root when Starr rubbed out the two little girls drawn in her breath on the car’s window, and they’ve been waiting for their chance to explode into the light ever since I learned she’d abandoned me. I trusted her. She was my best friend once, a long time ago, but how could I have been so gullible? Tears are all I have left.
And it appears these upstart tears mean to have their way with me, and so they do, all the way to the off-ramp, all the way to the dark edge of the parking lot behind the Fernwood Travel Plaza, all the way—inevitably it seems—to Ted’s arms again.
“Hey, baby,” he murmurs into my hair. “Hey, now. It’s going to be okay.” He strokes my back, soothing me as he might a nervous horse or a worn-out child. I’m getting the front of his T-shirt wet, but I can’t quit crying.
“You’ll be home before you know it, sweetheart,” Ted says.
I sob. “That’s the worst part of this—home.”
Ted tucks my head into the hollow between his neck and broad shoulder. “Well,” he says lightly, “isn’t that the place where they have to take you in?”
“You have no idea. You have no idea how awful it is, how awful I am. All my life, I’ve tried to do the right thing, but the right thing always seems to turn into the wrong thing somehow.” The words pour from my mouth like a busted faucet in my rush to get it out. “If I can’t get back in time tonight, everyone is going to be giving me that look again and I can’t stand it, I can’t take being a fuck-up of the highest order anymore. It’s always been that way for me. Why is it so damned hard? Why am I always such a mess?”
Feeling emptied out, I come up for air at last, wiping my eyes, but Ted is warm, Ted smells wonderful. Ted feels too good for me to move back to my side of the front seat, so I rest my head on his shoulder and come closer.
He kisses the top of my head, his lips just barely brushing my hair, but I feel it. “You seem just fine to me, Annie,” he says. “For what it’s worth, I think you did the right thing by a friend and she let you down. You can’t be responsible for the whole world, honey.”
That’s when I really cut loose crying. It’s that word. Responsible .
Ted scoops me up like a load of caterwauling laundry, and I instinctively wind my arms around his neck. He opens the door, carrying me the short distance to the back seat of the truck and gently sets me down in the heap of horse blankets with Troy Smoot. Alarmed at this noisy interruption of his nap, the dog shakes himself and leaps into the front seat. I roll to my side and curl up in a miserable ball in the midst of the blankets, still warm from Troy, crying myself into hysterics. The rosebush voice, strangely on the same team as I am for once, is crying, too. Then the slick fabric of the horse blankets rustles as Ted climbs in the back, shuts the door, lies across the seat and takes me in his arms again. Ah, I breathe. That’s better. Gradually the tears slow. I catch my breath while he holds me close.
“Hush, baby,” Ted says softly. “I’ve got you.” I’m quieting now, aware of his body pressed against my own. I wipe my eyes and look up at him.
“Ted?” I ask. “What are we doing?”
He sighs, shifting so that there’s the barest space between us. “Getting to know each other better, I think,” Ted says, his voice thoughtful. “I’ve been doing most of the talking so far. Tell me something about you, Annie,” he says. “Tell me about something that’s important to you.” His hand is on my hip, just resting there, but I feel the warm weight of every finger, the solid breadth of his palm, and for the first time that I can recall, for once I come to understand. This time, in this place, I already know what’s important. I know what’s important to me.
“Not yet,” I whisper. “Not yet.”
This time, the kiss isn’t an accident. No, and this time I slide my hand to the front of his jeans, closing around the long, hard length of him. I press my lips to the surprised groan deep in his throat. Ted pulls me closer, his breath running rough.
“Are you sure, Annie?” he says, low-voiced and hoarse.
I am.
CHAPTER 14
After Starr left the first time, the new year of 1964 came like a cut-off notice from the electric company.
Within the first week after the Christmas holidays, my name found itself figuring prominently in Miss Bufkin’s green ledger of problem students. I missed Starr so much I couldn’t bring myself to play with Lisa Treeby or any of the other, more tractable children my grandmother tried to force upon me. I was such a consummate brat because they weren’t Starr: “accidentally” sitting on Lisa’s Kenmore playhouse, collapsing it beyond repair (she cried), taking Laddie’s Christmas money in a game of poker with the Old Maid cards where I made up the rules and so couldn’t lose (he cried), cutting the real human hair off of Julie’s Madame Alexander doll (she smacked me). Among many other infractions, I was so bad that everybody’s parents complained and that put a stop to that. My grandmother was livid, but for once she couldn’t make everybody do her bidding and have me back ove
r to play. No, I was anathema, and the word got around.
But the weeks passed and I eventually got used to the isolation, to having no best friend. In time, the intolerable pain of missing Starr faded but, feeling obscurely vengeful and wanting to make a point, I turned again to the forbidden company of the Bad Kids. No matter how often I was punished for my part in their exploits, I sneaked, lied, and hung out with them anyway. My mother despaired of me during the dark days of that long winter.
Like all seasons, though, the winter ended. Finally summer vacation rolled around, and true to winter’s promise, life had become a slow-motion disaster epic from which I seemed to learn nothing. Even so, when Joel Donahoe tried to put my eye out that June, by then I was eight years old and should have known better. Buddy Bledsoe had been shipped off to Boy Scout camp again for the summer, and so Joel obligingly filled the miscreant vacuum to become the baddest of the Bad Kids in the neighborhood. That alone should have been proof no good could come of us playing circus together in our garage during a rare, unsupervised afternoon.
“Hold still, Annie,” Joel warned. He was balanced on one foot, my mother’s sewing scissors in his hand cocked and poised to let fly. My back was pressed flat against the stucco wall, arms outstretched in a classic posture of a knife thrower’s girl-target. Joel let fly, and the sharp point of the scissors struck my forehead just above my left eyebrow, then fell to the garage’s cement floor with a clatter.
“Ow!” A warm trickle flowed into my eye. It didn’t hurt yet, but I couldn’t see for the blood. “Methyl Ivory,” I screamed, running for the back door and the pillowed fortress of her dark arms. “Joel Donahoe put my eye out!”
“I didn’t do it.” Joel’s yelp was already far away, past the ligustrum hedge separating our yard from Dr. Thigpen’s house next door.
That summer, my mother was playing a lot of bridge. When she got home and saw the bloody Band-Aid over my left eye, she didn’t wait to hear the whole story. Her face assumed that some one’s-go nna-p ay-for-this expression indicating the end of that someone’s life. Not even stopping to take off her hat, she marched out the wide front doors in search of Joel Donahoe, stomping down the steps, and across the St. Augustine in her spike-heeled pumps, white gloves fisted, her gray silk shantung skirts billowing gun smoke. From the homeland of Methyl Ivory’s vast lap, I contemplated the death of Joel Donahoe with a self-righteousness reserved only for the young and naïve. Vengeance, I was sure, would soon be mine.