“You can’t really change nothing,” she said to me.
And then she got up and went into the bathroom, and I heard the shower go on. I started to cry. It was foolish. It wasn’t like I thought she would come with me, or even tell me good wishes, but you always think people will change at the last minute, don’t you? You always want to hope the best, even though you know that what you have already seen of people, day in and day out, night and morning, is the best they have to offer.
When Connie came, she had to honk about six times for me, and I still couldn’t stop crying. Connie thought I was changing my mind, and it took a while to tell her no, that wasn’t it at all, it was my mama. Then Connie started to cry too. She was driving Kate LeGrande’s car. Here was the person who was supposed to be my mother-in-law by the end of the day, and I had never even met her. It was Connie called and asked to borrow the car, because Mr. and Mrs. G. wouldn’t let Connie use theirs for such a purpose. I was a little hurt Kate wasn’t coming to the wedding, either. I didn’t even ask Connie why, whether Dillon’s mother disapproved (I later found out she did; she thought I would be the ruin of Dillon, which, considering where he was already, seems kind of feeble) or whether she had one of her back spells (I later found out she had). Anyhow, Connie was having all this trouble shifting, going on about how she’d told Kate she knew all about driving a stick, though she’d never done it before in her life. “And I swear to God I thought I was going to grind the hell out of the gears just getting down that hill outside their house,” Connie said. “But I made it. I was praying to Santa Caterina the whole time.” It was only the second time Connie had ever met Kevin and Dillon’s mom; the other time, she’d gone to their church just to meet Kate.
“What’s she like?” I asked. The ride seemed awful long, and I was getting hyper. I’d never even been out on a date with a boy. Now here I was marrying a grown man! Here it was, the biggest, most important day of my life, and I couldn’t even concentrate. I kept thinking how was it going to be to be married if we never even got to see each other? Would I tell people? Would I have to change my name legally for school and stuff?
“She’s really little,” Connie said. “And really nervous. The kind of woman my mother would call a nervous blond. She’s got freckles. Doesn’t look a thing like Dillon or Kevin. She started to cry during the service, and some big lady got up and sat down by her. I guess she starts thinking about the daddy or something. . . .”
I didn’t know everything about Dillon’s daddy’s death, only that it had been horrible. He had been a welder, and a pipe at a refinery exploded. . . . “He took three days to die,” Dillon told me on the phone. “It was such a goddamn shame. He was so goddamned careful, he wouldn’t even let us stand in the shed when he was welding because he thought we might look at the spark and it would hurt our eyes. We would stand on each other’s shoulders outside that dirty window and look in and see that sparkler shinin’ blue as a star.”
There had been a lawsuit, and some money. But Kate, Connie said, seemed to have spent it all on foolish land schemes with her brothers and her father. And then she married that Cajun, which took care of the last of it. And then the Cajun died, in a fight or something. That was why she was so out of heart all the time, and why it sometimes took her in church. (Mrs. G. did not agree with how sorry all the ladies at church felt for Kate; she said Kate Dillon was wetter than a sea urchin when it came to men, that she’d outlive ten of them and keep on drawing sap, but Connie and I thought that was mean.) Anyhow, when Connie first introduced herself, Kate acted like, Oh, do you know Kevin? “And we’re practically engaged,” Connie sniffed. And then, Connie said, Kate just kept trying to escape. She told Connie she had to get home and get her garden weeded and make lunch for Kier and Philippe. “I didn’t really get anywhere with her,” Connie sighed. “But today I told her I would give her all these free samples from my classes—all the ones for really white skin—if she’d let me borrow the car. She called me up to remind me to bring the samples with me. And she gave me some of these here prayer things from the church to give to Kevin. I’m sure he’ll just love them.”
We were both laughing a little by then. I felt much better. I said maybe, after I was married, we could go over and take Kate out to lunch someday, the two of us. “I guess,” said Connie. “Let’s get this over with first. You sure you want to go through with it? I mean, you could give it some more time. He ain’t going nowhere, honey.”
“I’m sure, Connie.”
So Connie gave me the bag with Elena’s homecoming dress in it, and I lay down on the backseat to change. It was the prettiest thing, I told Annie later, who reminded me that she’d seen the picture. It was almost yellow and almost white, like baby-duck down, and even though it was short on me, Connie said it looked beautiful. Then she said, “We got to get you a bouquet, girl.” Just before we got into Solamente River, we stopped at a gas station that had a little store. Connie said they’d have flowers, but they didn’t have anything except one chocolate rose in red tinfoil. We drove on a little farther, and I was crying again—I hadn’t really stopped—until Connie pulled off on this little caliche road that was all busted into cracks like open seams, from the droughty weather, and picked a whole armload of lantanas. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before,” she said. “We just see them all the time, and we don’t remember that up North these would be considered flowers, girl.”
While Annie and I were eating our lunch at Dillard’s, I told her everything I remembered about the wedding. About the clerk’s red plastic glasses that I kept staring at because they were one of those things you couldn’t tell whether it was a joke or not. About what the warden said when he took a look at my birth certificate.
“What did he say?” Annie asked sharply.
“He said the ink wasn’t even dry yet.”
I told her about how it was to hold Dillon’s hand—and I thought of his hand then, how warm and dry it was, soft as sand—and be able to smell him for the first time. He smelled like the wood chips we used to have in second grade for the class hamsters, that smell that always reminded you of being clean and little and safe. And his skin wasn’t all zits like most boys, because he wasn’t a boy, after all, but it was almost golden, except for the big dark rings under his eyes. In fact, all he said to me was, “I didn’t get much sleep last night, honey.” I couldn’t even look at him. I thought my heart would blow out of my chest like a piñata bursting with spirals of colored foil and cut-out diamonds. I kept trying to steal glances at him as he stood straight and easy next to me, but my love for him was so large, it was almost like his face would be too bright for my eyes.
It was December 6, the only wedding day I would ever have, the anniversary of it something we would celebrate every year, and I couldn’t even look at the man I was giving my whole life to. I could hear the chain around his feet slide and clank when he shifted position. They didn’t have his hands cuffed, though. I kept wondering if I’d be able to say “I do” when the time came. But by that moment, the air around me was as loud as the inside of a shell pressed over my ear. Connie had to nudge me. And then we didn’t have a ring, not for me or for him. Connie made this disgusted face and pulled off her moon spirals. Dillon slipped one over my fourth finger, left hand, but we couldn’t get the other one to fit any finger of his except the first joint of his pinkie. “That’s okay,” he told me, right next to my cheek. “It’s the new style.”
The whole thing took, like, ten minutes. The chaplain was ready to do the whole long ceremony, but the warden said no, do the short version. When the chaplain said, “Kiss the bride now, boy,” the warden had a big coughing attack. Dillon was a real gentleman. I know he probably wanted to crush me. But Dillon just put his hand on my back as though we were going to dance at the senior prom, that hot, light hand I could feel on my back long after he was led away. And he just brushed my lips with his. Connie said she had to give him credit. A convict would normally jump all over you, she said.
But I can still feel that kiss, like a mirror of all his kisses, his lips open and wet or closed and parched. I can’t see his face anymore, but I can feel his mouth and smell it, and it wasn’t until just recently, when I had to go to the clinic for strep, that I realized what he tasted like at first—like those wooden paddles doctors use to press your tongue down. After the doctor left the room, I took one of those tongue depressors out of its jar and slipped it in my pocket, and on the way home on the bus, though my throat felt like a road made of busted glass and my head ached from fever, I held it against my nose.
I didn’t tell Annie that, then or ever. And I never told her what happened the first time I visited Dillon, what happened as I sat on the other side of the bulletproof window, the few seconds I thought of as our real moment of becoming married. Despite what happened, we were man and wife, Dillon and me. You can feel guilty and filthy and regretful as sin, and your own life something you want to turn your face from seeing. But even then, there are some things you can’t dishonor by giving them away.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Annie
THE SOLAMENTE COUNTY COURTHOUSE was a Florentine fancy, a leftover from an oil boom long since extinguished. It bloomed in the middle of the tired town like an orchid in a field of broom grass. Arley couldn’t take her eyes off the ascending mosaic of black and white tiles in the domed atrium. “It makes me dizzy, Annie,” she told me, grasping a rail and leaning backward. “It’s like church.”
“If it makes you dizzy, don’t look at it,” I told her, more sharply than I had intended. The last thing I wanted was for Arley to stagger into court looking like some gum-chewing pothead from the flats. I gave her a last once-over. We’d succeeded. In her silk blouse and gray flannel skirt, she looked a little older than she really was. The touch of lipstick and mascara only made her prettier, not tartish, and enhanced the sedate quality that came to Arley naturally. She’d tied her hair back gently into a French braid intertwined with cherry-colored ribbon. She’d told me gravely, in the car, that she was going to teach me how to do a French braid, to bring my mop under control in damp weather. The only thing that worried me was the cowboy boots; but Arley would not be moved on them, not even by the tempting pair of leather T-strap flats I’d bought for her. No, she’d worn those boots on her wedding day, and she’d wear them in court.
Well, it was Texas, after all.
We huddled on one of the mahogany benches that lined the hall, and I walked Arley through the things we’d agreed she would say: that she comprehended the seriousness of her husband’s mistakes but believed he was working hard to repent of them, that though she realized she was a very young woman chronologically, she had carried out the responsibilities of a household from a very young age. In fact, I hoped Arley would never have to say a word to the judge, Harriet Clay, beyond “Yes, ma’am.”
The clerk called, “LeGrande versus the Texas Department of Corrections and Ray Henry Southwynn,” and we took our seats. Ray Henry looked good—Fleury had told me not long before that he’d taken up running three times a week, to siphon off some of that restless energy—but he was attended by weasely Polyester Petty, his counsel, who somehow embodied every cliché a cheap script about a bad lawyer could offer, from darting eyes to wide-spaced, gray little teeth. He grimaced at me. Ray Henry telegraphed me a look that on any other day might have embodied a wink. I leaned over to pat Arley’s hand. She was straining like a greyhound—even her fingers were rigid—and when I looked back, there was Dillon, loosely manacled, being led into court by a bailiff.
I had never seen him clearly before, even in a mug shot. Arley’s two pictures of him were indistinct, the main impressions being of his fair coloring and his small size. In the wedding-day Polaroid, though Arley beamed straight into the camera, Dillon’s head was turned, almost out of profile, a chin line distinct and strong as a check mark the only really clear feature. Now I saw that planed chin, and the tanned hollows below broad cheekbones, wide-set green eyes bright as peridot, set wide apart, and a nose that was almost funny, straight, sharp, elfin. His hair was white blond, thick, as long as prison would allow, and when he turned to Arley with a lazy half smile that lifted one cheek, I tried to remember having seen a more physically beautiful man, but I couldn’t. He looked like the bronze of the Coppini cowboy—weary yet erect and clean, childlike, ironic, and tender. Beside me, I could feel Arley’s attention surge out of her like a thing that had mass, like a javelin. She did not move, but her lips parted; her breath came in soft, small sighs. The rapture on her was like a vapor. I had to shake my head.
The judge stomped out and took her seat without ceremony, quicker than the clerk could call a rise—we all bobbed up and down like jumping jacks. One of the first black women to sit on the bench in Texas, Harriet Clay was now the only one; and though well over sixty, she continued to sit her ground not so much out of a sense of mission but, as she once told Texas Woman magazine, “because I’m the benchmark.” She had Ann Richards hair, a pair of slippery pince-nez, and an attitude that did not invite nonsense. “I have reviewed these documents,” Judge Clay told us, “and I am very interested in knowing just what the nature of the conflict is herein, because what I’m seeing here seems to be a whole lot of conflicting emotion and a little bit of law.” She motioned to me, with an upraised palm, like a minister advising a congregation that it was time to rise from the pews.
I told her simply that our motion spoke for itself. “My client and Mister LeGrande are legally married under the laws and provisions of the state of Texas, Your Honor. Here is a certified copy of their marriage certificate, along with the permission of the client’s mother for her daughter, as a minor, to marry Mister LeGrande, and here is Mister LeGrande’s request for his conjugal visit with his wife, as well as the warden’s summary denial of that request, an ordinary one under the law and one granted”—I quickly consulted my notes—“a hundred and sixty times in the past year at Texas penal institutions, with only a single disruptive incident”—I paused to gaze at Lawyer Petty—“created when a spouse who’d been a guard employed at the institution where her husband was incarcerated attempted to help that man escape. It was an unsuccessful attempt. There were no injuries—”
“And husband and wife now share a landlord,” Judge Clay finished for me.
“Yes, Your Honor. Well, not quite, but close enough.”
“And Mister Petty? What’s your position here?”
“My client, Raymond H. Southwynn,” Petty began, “is, Your Honor, entrusted with the rehabilitative efforts on behalf of all inmates in Solamente River Correctional Institution. In this endeavor, he is responsible not just for the welfare of said inmates but for the interest of all the residents of Solamente County and, indeed, the state of—”
“We are aware”—the judge sighed—“of the scope of Mister Southwynn’s obligations to the government.”
“Reports from various social service agencies and the institution’s examining psychiatrist may not seem to reveal a current pattern of antisocial behavior,” Petty went on, handing the clerk a sheaf of documents, with copies for me as well. “In fact, his adjustment to his current life pattern has been going quite well. However, we do have two pieces of very critical information here, Your Honor. Very critical.” Judge Clay looked down over her spectacles and raised her eyebrows. “One, a report dated October, just over six years ago, a complaint involving an allegation of forcible rape of a minor, a young woman aged fifteen at that time—a charge that indicates a prior pattern of abuse—”
I was out of my seat a little more energetically than was probably necessary.
“Your Honor, excuse me. Mister Petty knows full well that Dillon LeGrande has been convicted of armed robbery at a filling station. And that is all. He has no prior record of any kind of criminal activity at all. Mister Petty knows that his charge of sexual assault was dismissed, that this was, in fact, a romance between two young people, and that Mister LeGrande was, himself, barely twenty ye
ars old at the time.”
Petty continued: “We also have here copies of letters provided us by the family of the young woman, who now lives in Corpus, letters from Mister LeGrande that suggest what we fully believe to be harmful . . .”
The judge looked from one of us to the other. “Do these letters refer to or illuminate any substantiated incidents of assault, abuse, or violent behavior?”
Petty and I answered “Yes” and “No” at exactly the same moment. I’d seen them, and they were regular adolescent sexual rantings about the things Dillon longed to do to Rebecca Rae, how he longed for her to lie quiet and still while he stripped her . . .
Well, she had been only fifteen.
But Dillon had been all of twenty.
That didn’t sit well with me. It just didn’t. No matter how I tried to get around it, it creeped me out, the age difference between them. What he’d written was even creepier: “If we were both dead, we’d be flying free together . . . ,” though a dozen popular songs said worse. It was a stretch to construe such foolishness as provoking a suicide pact. Wasn’t it? My protectiveness toward Arley was working overtime. I looked at my client’s husband. He was just a green roughneck kid from Texas. That was all. I needed to believe that.
“Given these circumstances, and others, and especially given the tender age of the minor child involved here, it is entirely appropriate for Warden Southwynn to deny a conjugal visit between this young girl and this much older and very hardened man,” Petty went on. Judge Clay glanced at Dillon, who was sitting, straight and head bowed, in his seat, fiddling with a callus on his thumb, like an altar boy during the sermon. “Indeed, we can be thankful that this is Warden Southwynn’s—”
“Ray Henry?”
“Your Honor?”
“Want to add to this?”
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