by Tawni O'Dell
Her arms and legs are covered in goose bumps.
She gives me one of her unnerving, unsmiling appraisals.
“So do you.”
“What are you doing out here, anyway?” I change the subject. “You’re miles from home.”
“We weren’t at home. We were visiting our cousins but we hate our cousins so we’re doing this instead.”
“Who are your cousins?”
“None of your business.”
“Why are you visiting them if you hate them?”
“Our dad made us go so he could sleep.”
“What about your mom?”
She glances at Kenny, who doesn’t show any sign of opening his mouth and tells him to shut up.
“What’s with the stick?” I try another topic.
“It’s a dog-beating stick. There’s a lot of dogs around here,” she states flatly.
“You got something against dogs?”
“I got something against wild dogs and people’s dogs that come running at you when you walk by their house and want to rip your throat out. Dogs are supposed to be nice. They’re supposed to like kids like Kenny.”
I look down at him.
“Nice rocks, Kenny,” I comment.
I pick up a piece of the coal debris and rub my thumb over its dull black glimmer.
“This one’s a pretty one,” I say.
“You can have it,” he tells me.
“Thanks.”
I slip it in the pocket of my sweater. It’s the first time I’ve heard him speak.
“Why don’t you let me give you a lift back to your cousins’ house?”
“You’re making the offer so that means we don’t have to pay?”
“You don’t have to pay.”
“Then take us to the mall.”
“No way.”
She looks at Kenny. They have a silent conversation conducted with their eyes and pulse rates.
“Then take us home,” she says.
They don’t have to give me directions to their house. I visited it years ago when the Centresburg police searched it after I pulled Choker over for speeding and DWI (Driving While an Idiot) and discovered his van was full of TV sets and stereo systems he’d been stealing for the past month and then had no idea how to hock.
It’s a small shoebox-shaped house set in a small clearing off a mile-long stretch of dirt road that used to lead to a bridge that used to cross a creek that used to continue on to a tipple that used to pour coal into the railroad cars waiting on the tracks next to it. The bridge is gone now. The road and railroad tracks are overgrown with weeds. The tipple has collapsed into a heap of cracked timbers and brown rusted metal that’s been consumed by the forest. When the trees lose their leaves in winter, its remains can be glimpsed lying on the hillside like the decaying carcass of some huge beast.
The house is surrounded by a sea of junk: old mowers and appliances; two empty rabbit pens; a dented gray metal filing cabinet; bald tires; rusted sheet metal; black Hefty bags filled with beer cans; rolls of pink insulation; a picnic table without benches; a swing set without swings; and a disturbing number of gnome lawn ornaments without heads.
Fanci and Kenny get out of the car and follow me around to the back of my car.
“I lost my mom when I was six,” I tell Fanci as I unload their wagon and dog-beating stick.
“So?” she says.
“Did you ever find her?” Kenny asks me.
“She died.”
“Oh,” he replies, his face falling for an instant, but he brightens up quickly. “We know where our mom is.”
“Shut up, Kenny,” Fanci snaps at him.
“Where is she?”
“She’s taking a break. When dad got out of jail she said it was his turn to take care of us for awhile.”
“And how’s that going?”
“It ain’t none of your business,” Fanci says.
“Right. I forgot.”
I hold out one of my yellow business cards to Fanci.
“Here. You never know when you’ll finally be able to pay for a ride.”
She eyes it, then takes it without looking at me and slips it into her pink kitten purse.
Choker opens the front door wearing tube socks and an old green terry cloth robe with two dark patches on the front where the pockets used to be. The matching belt is missing, too. The robe’s cinched around his waist with the brown leather belt and American flag belt buckle that he usually uses to hold up his jeans.
He squints against the daylight. I can hear a TV droning inside the house.
“What the hell?” he greets me.
I put a foot on the bottom step and he moves back behind his door.
“I don’t want you around here.”
I did a real number on his face. I wonder how he explained it to his kids or if they even bothered to ask.
“Get in the house,” he tells them and they hurry inside.
“I’d like to call you a retard, Choker, but I realize that’s not politically correct so I’m just going to say you’re patriotically challenged.”
“What are you talking about?”
I gesture at his truck parked in the yard right up against the house. It’s covered in bumper stickers: Proud to be American. Born in the U.S.A. God Bless America. Red, White, and Blue: These colors don’t run.
“Who are you trying to impress with your Americanness? Other Americans? Why don’t you go drive this thing around Baghdad?”
“Fuck you,” he says.
“This is a nice little setup you’ve got here, Choker. You’ve really been able to spread out.”
“I need my space.”
“Right. You’re one of those free-range rednecks I’ve been hearing about.”
He scratches at his missing ear.
“Hank Penrose’s kid calling me a redneck? If that ain’t the kettle calling the kettle…a kettle.”
I smile at his attempt to remember the old adage.
“Don’t hurt yourself.”
“What do you want?”
“Nothing. I was just dropping off your kids.”
“You better stop messing with my kids,” he says.
“Where’s your wife, Choker? Did she spurn you, too?”
“I mean it. Stay away from my kids. I ain’t doing nothing wrong with them. I love them. I’d never beat on them the way your old man did you.”
He slams the door on me.
I pound on it with my fists and kick at it a few times and jiggle the handle, but my enthusiasm quickly passes.
My rage is immense, but my rage against him is half-hearted.
I close my eyes and find my safe place. I settle into the soft, plump cushions of the couch. I feel the heat from the fire warm my cold bare feet searching for the comfort of my mom’s rag rug next to my bed on a winter’s morning. I hear the puppy’s faint whines as he twitches in his sleep chasing rabbits in his dreams. I smell the fresh-baked cookies and taste the sweetness of cocoa on my tongue. I look out the window and see raindrops as big as silver dollars splatter against the glass that’s lit from behind by flashes of lightning.
I look again and see a face.
The shock is so great I jump up from the couch and spill hot chocolate all over myself.
No one has ever tried to look in or get in.
I want out. I need out. But I don’t know how to do it. There’s no door. I’ve never tried to leave before. I’ve always stayed as long as I could. I’ve always wished I could stay longer.
I open my eyes. My heart is thudding sickly in my throat. I’m sitting in my car, although I don’t remember walking here.
The face is still there behind the glass, and I stifle a scream. It’s only Kenny at his father’s window waving good-bye.
Chapter Thirteen
SOPHIA IS WAITING FOR ME on her front porch, sitting in a lawn chair with her big tan pocketbook at her feet. She has on a pair of mint green polyester pants, a long-sleeved white blouse, a quilted vest patt
erned in peach-colored roses, a tan raincoat, plain white canvas tennis shoes with white anklets, and a small gold crucifix around her neck.
She’s sitting in her usual upright position with her head and shoulders against the back of the chair, her feet flat on the floor, and an arm on each armrest like a queen about to receive subjects. In all my years of knowing her, I’ve never seen her slouched in a chair, or with her feet tucked under her, or sprawled out on a couch. She once remarked to me that people nowadays have even forgotten how to sit.
“Hi, Sophia,” I call out to her.
Her eyes are open behind her gold-rimmed glasses, but she could be asleep for all the movement and attention she displays. She’s wearing the dreamy expression peculiar to the very old and the very young, where they seem fascinated by something everyone else takes for granted. People find the phenomenon adorable in babies. It means they’re inquisitive and intrigued by objects in their new world. In old people they usually chalk it up to senility, but I don’t think that’s the case. For both, it’s the ability to see things in their purest sense. All the knowledge that comes from experience doesn’t exist for a child and doesn’t matter anymore to an old lady. With a life completely in front of you or a life completely behind you, the world looks basically the same.
She gazes past me at my yellow Subaru. It doesn’t register in her brain as a means of travel or the source of a loan payment or the way I make my living. She doesn’t care about its safety features or what it’s doing to the ozone layer. She doesn’t find the words MOUNT ME to be amusing or offensive. It’s simply a large roaring machine that disturbs the serenity of the day with its unpleasant noise and exhaust smell.
“Do you still need that ride?” I ask her.
Her eyes travel slowly from my car to my face and take a moment to recognize me.
“Hello, Shae-Lynn.”
“Hi, Sophia. Do you still need a ride to Lib’s house?”
“I could use a ride to Lib’s house.”
She rises shakily from the chair. I wait for her at the bottom of her porch steps. I know she won’t allow me to help her.
She passes by me. The top of her head, crowned in a small cloud of gray hair like silver spun sugar, barely reaches to my chin.
I open the passenger side door for her and wait for the comment she always makes about the color.
“Well at least everyone will be able to see us coming.”
We set off to Lib’s house driving faded, snaking blacktop that dips and swells and hugs the hills. The air rushing through my partially open window has the wet, earthy smell of an old, shattered tree stump when the sun starts to warm it after a rainstorm. It blends nicely with the faint scent of Sophia’s lavender perfume.
We exchange some small talk while Sophia sits perfectly still, strapped snugly into her seat with her gnarled arthritic hands placed primly in her lap, showing all the composure and concentration of a tiny astronaut.
“So what do you think of all this lawsuit talk?” I ask her.
“You don’t want my opinion,” she laughs. “I’m an old lady.”
“That’s exactly why I want it.”
“Well, I don’t understand any of it.” She shakes her head at me. “Back in my day a miner would never have sued his company.”
“He never could’ve won,” I remind her.
A trace of a frown passes over her lips dabbed in a shade of coral lipstick she’s been wearing for as long as I’ve known her.
“I don’t understand why people nowadays are so anxious to go running to lawyers and judges every time they have a problem. In my day the last thing you wanted to do was bring strangers into your life and have them tell you what to do. You figured out how to fix what was wrong on your own or you learned how to live with the hand God dealt you.”
She seems pleased with her brief speech and looks like she’s nodding off, then I realize she’s staring at her gold wedding band with the same detached expression she wore earlier sitting on her porch.
I wonder what she sees when she looks at it. Is it still a symbol of love and commitment? Does it remind her of her wedding in a church filled with flowers and the raucous reception afterwards in the Union Hall? Does it make her think of her husband as a vital, blushing, young man proposing to her with coal dirt under his fingernails or as the frail, wasted shell of a man whose hand she held in a hospital room the morning his black lungs took their final breath?
Or is it simply something shiny that’s caught her eye?
Lib is mowing his front yard when we arrive. His wife, Teresa, is standing over her emerald green gazing ball with a cleaning rag in one hand watching him curiously, the way she might watch a turtle trying to climb a tree.
Back and forth he marches, never breaking stride, his pace constant, his eyes fixed on the dead grass ahead of him. In summer he would be cutting perfect diagonal paths through its green lushness, but this time of year it’s the color of hay and matted down from old snow.
He’s using his lawn mower instead of the tractor his sons bought him for his birthday five years ago. He loves the tractor. He hardly ever uses the lawn mower anymore. From what Teresa has told me, when he brings it out, it’s a bad sign. It means he’s trying to physically chew up a problem.
“What’s he doing?” I ask Teresa when Sophia and I join her. “There’s no grass to mow yet.”
“He’d mow snow if he could,” she replies without taking her eyes off him.
He has on a J&P ball cap and an old pair of jeans with a white ring permanently faded onto one of the back pockets where he keeps his tin of chewing tobacco. He’s shirtless and the hair on his chest and arms is damp with sweat.
Both the passage of time and Teresa’s cooking has softened his exterior some, but the core underneath remains rock hard. His gut is like a mattress protecting a boulder, and his arms have the consistency of slabs of packed clay.
“He can blow snow,” I say.
“It doesn’t seem to give him the same satisfaction.”
She finally looks my way with a not-altogether-welcoming yet still neighborly enough smile on her lips. Disapproval flashes in the depths of her dark eyes, but she douses it quickly out of respect for the bond that grew up between us two years ago while we waited for four days and nights with Vonda, Isabel, and Brandi to find out if our men were going to live or die.
She thinks I should dress my age. I’m not sure exactly what she means by this, but whenever I’ve heard her make this comment about other women it’s seemed obvious to me that she believes there is a sort of unspoken dress code regarding appropriate attire for women at every age, and we are all under an obligation to memorize and practice it daily.
I don’t take her opinion on clothing too seriously. She’s only in her mid-fifties but she’s been dressing like she’s in her mid-seventies since she’s been in her mid-thirties. Today she’s wearing a pair of elastic-waisted navy blue polyester pants and a blouse in a blue and white check that fits her like a dental hygienist’s smock.
Neither piece of apparel is very flattering stretched across her heavy bosom and backside. She’s always been busty with ample hips but in her youth she also had an enviably small waist and petite doll’s hands she liked to show off in dainty gloves. I remember the pair of soft white ones with little pearl buttons she used to wear to church in spring and a pair of scarlet ones with matching dyed rabbit fur trim she wore at Christmas.
When I was a girl and in the full flush of my longing for Lib and his dark-eyed, Italian good looks, I hated and adored her. I wanted to be just like her yet I wished she’d disappear off the face of the earth.
I used to get out my mom’s high school yearbook and stare at Teresa’s picture. I was more fascinated by it than my own mother’s picture.
In her way, I believed my mother was just as pretty, but it was a completely different kind of beauty, fresh and unrestrained. In her senior picture, my mom looked much younger than the other girls. Part of the reason was the way she wore her
hair. It was long and free, tied back with a polka-dot ribbon and falling in waves around her wide, sunburned cheeks. All the other girls wore their hair in teased bobs with meaningless tiny bows lost in the middle of them.
Her smile was different, too—wide and engaging—while the others had closemouthed, beatific Mona Lisa smiles that I’m sure they practiced for hours before a mirror.
Teresa, on the other hand, was a dead ringer for Snow White. Porcelain skin. Ruby red lips pursed in a pouty bow. Her smooth black hair grazing her shoulders and curled at the ends in little flips. Her eyes black and empty like lovely polished stones.
Now her face is lined and careworn and her hands are rough and callused, but her hair is still a young, shiny blue-black that she wears in a thick braid that falls down the middle of her back.
Sophia gives Teresa’s arm a squeeze.
“What’s he worried about now?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He’s been upset all week ever since we went and had our will made.”
“I guess that makes sense,” I say without thinking.
I can tell instantly that Teresa feels I have no right to hold any opinion on this particular highly personal topic.
“All I mean is he’s probably been thinking about dying all week if he just made a will.” I try to explain myself and end up making things worse.
Sophia nods her agreement.
“We don’t have much but I want to make sure what we do have ends up in the right hands,” Teresa says, sounding a little defensive.
“She wants to make sure Angie doesn’t take any of her jewelry,” Sophia tells me.
She’s standing next to me, her eyes fixed on the road as she speaks, her purse hanging from the crook of one arm, looking like she’s waiting for a bus.
Angie is the daughter-in-law Teresa likes less than the other one.
“That’s not true,” Teresa protests.
Sophia nods that it is.
“Lib was terrible the whole time,” she tells us. “Then the lawyer made the mistake of saying it was lucky Lib had two Purple Hearts because that way he could give one to each son and not have to worry about choosing between them.”
“Lib got furious. He said he sure as hell didn’t feel lucky at the time he was getting two of them but he sure felt lucky now if it meant it was going to get him out of a goddamned lawyer’s office a couple minutes earlier.”