What You Have Left

by Will Allison

  At first he thought she was joking, making fun of the pregnant girl for the way she’d been rubbing her stomach all afternoon. Anyhow, the plan had always been that they’d try for a baby after they quit racing, a day Wylie figured was a long ways off. But Maddy was in his ear again, ahead of him as usual, telling him she was afraid she might not be around to have a baby if she kept racing.

  Now, as he watched Sid take another turn on his grader, smoothing out the grooves, Wylie thought of the two hobby titles Maddy had won, how good he’d felt knowing she couldn’t do it without him and that he’d never let her down. That’s how he felt that afternoon at Darlington when he said yes to having a baby. It was the last time he’d felt that way.

  Gladys answered the door. It was almost lunchtime, but she was still in her bathrobe, squinting at Wylie through the torn screen as if she hadn’t seen sunlight in days, a road map of red in her eyes. When she noticed the cake, she invited him in like she didn’t have a choice.

  “Lester,” she called, “friend of yours.”

  The curtains were drawn in the narrow living room, and except for the traffic out on 321, the house was quiet. Wylie hadn’t expected Lester to be home. He hadn’t even meant to come in. He’d hoped to hand off the cake at the front door and be gone. Now he tried for a sympathetic smile and told Gladys how sorry Maddy was that she couldn’t come herself. “She had the baby on Sunday,” he said.

  “Please tell her I’ve been meaning to stop by,” Gladys said, but it didn’t sound like she meant it. It sounded like she just wanted to be left alone. She stood there cinching her robe until Lester came out of the kitchen. When he shook Wylie’s hand, he clasped it with both of his, the way a preacher does. Wylie told them he and Maddy had been praying for them ever since they heard about Nat. “We’re deeply sorry for your loss,” he said. This was something he’d rehearsed in the truck, and to his ears, that’s how it sounded.

  “You’re a good guy to come all the way out here,” Lester said. “I just put on some coffee. Let’s sit down and have some of that—what do you got there?”

  “Maddy’s pound cake.”

  “Gladys loves pound cake, don’t you, hon?” He put an arm around his wife, but she shrugged him off.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said, and then she went into the bedroom and shut the door. Lester looked embarrassed. He rubbed a hand back and forth across his crew cut. Wylie was about to say he should be getting home when Lester cleared his throat.

  “I keep telling her we can try again,” he said, shaking his head. “She don’t want to hear it.” He glanced at the bedroom door, then held up the cake as if to say, But there’s this. Wylie followed him into the kitchen and sat at the dinette while Lester cut two slices. “You know, it could have been a lot worse,” Lester said, lowering his voice. “I mean, Christ, the kid was only eight weeks old. It’s not like we had much time to get attached to him.” He set a cup of coffee in front of Wylie. “Right? You must know what I mean.”

  Wylie supposed he did. If something terrible was going to happen to your baby, better sooner than later, before she started trusting you to make everything okay. Still, as soon as he nodded, it felt like a betrayal. Pretty soon he’d be telling Lester he wasn’t sure why he’d wanted a baby in the first place. “Me and Maddy,” he said, “we just feel so lucky—”

  Lester cut him off. “Goes without saying.” His smile was tight. He took a bite of cake and Wylie got to work on his, too, promising himself he’d get out of there as soon as he was done. He was almost finished when Lester lit a cigarette and warmed up to him again, apologizing about the Fairlane. Wylie told him it was no big deal, but Lester went on and on, saying he’d never meant to leave Wylie in the lurch. Things had gotten so busy with the baby, he said, and money was tight. He still wanted to buy the car, though, assuming Wylie hadn’t already sold it.

  “Not yet,” Wylie said.

  Lester slid the pack of smokes across the table, said that originally the car was going to be a present for himself, to celebrate the baby, but now he wanted it as a surprise for Gladys. He said that since she started hanging around Maddy more, she’d been talking about entering a powderpuff derby—not racing racing, just girls versus girls—and although he’d been against it at first, now he thought it might do her some good. Wylie shook a cigarette from the pack and nodded along. He didn’t believe Lester would end up buying the car any more than he believed Gladys would want it, but he decided to give Lester the benefit of the doubt and told him he’d hold off renewing the ad, give them time to work something out.

  “In that case,” Lester said, “why don’t I come get the car today?” He said he could swing by the bank, bring Wylie a deposit that afternoon, and pay him the rest next week. Wylie tapped the end of his cigarette on the table. This wasn’t at all what he’d had in mind, but he was in too deep to back out now, and he was too tired to argue. He hadn’t slept in four days, his wife would sooner growl at him than smile, and he was starting to think he’d rather sit there smoking with Lester than go home and face his own kid’s howling. He took one last gulp of coffee and stood to leave.

  “Deal.”

  • • •

  On the way home, Wylie fell asleep at the wheel and drifted off the road, his tires biting into the grassy shoulder. A row of scrub pines floated before him. He jerked upright and wrestled the car onto the blacktop, cursing Maddy for sending him to see Gladys, cursing himself for giving in to Lester again. Shaken, he stopped at a convenience store for another cup of coffee and—debating whether to buy it even as he approached the register—a can of formula. Just in case Maddy changes her mind, he told himself. When he got home, she was asleep in bed with Holly. The baby stirred as he looked in on them, and before he had time to think twice, he whisked her out of the room. He knew you were supposed to heat the formula, but he was afraid Maddy would wake up, so he told Holly she’d have to drink it cold. He sat at the dining room table with her in the crook of his arm like a football, brushing the nipple against her cheek the way he’d seen Maddy do, dribbling formula onto her lips. She turned her head from side to side, trying to get away from it. “Come on, cupcake,” he said. “Let’s be reasonable.” She began to fuss, and when he persisted, sweating and shaking, she started to cry in earnest. He had to remind himself that she wasn’t doing it on purpose; she was only a baby. She needed to eat, whether she wanted to or not, and he didn’t know when he’d get another chance. Finally, he worked the nipple between her lips, and when she tried to spit it out, he held firm, determined that she’d at least have a taste, no matter how much she fought and flailed her little arms. It wasn’t until she began to choke that he finally eased up. As he pulled the bottle away, she coughed formula onto his arm and shrieked, a sound as terrible as a loose fan belt. “Now, now,” he said, “there, there,” but she went on and on, screaming bloody murder. It was all he could do not to shove the bottle back into her mouth, just to shut her up.

  Somehow Maddy slept through the whole thing, and Wylie spent the next hour trying to make it up to Holly, carrying her around the house and singing nursery rhymes while he waited for Lester. Once she stopped crying, she didn’t seem to hold a grudge. It was as if Sid had come along with his grader, smoothing out all the ruts between them.

  Lester never showed up with the money, and he wasn’t at the races that night, either. Same old, same old, Wylie thought. He’d been a half hour late getting to the track himself and, despite three large Cokes, nodded off in the wrecker. A track steward had to tap on the window to wake him when one of the drivers blew a tire.

  Back home, it was business as usual—distraught wife, crying baby. This time Wylie suggested they get out for a walk. The night was warm and breezy, and they followed the dirt lane past the soybean field, past the farmhouse where Cal had been cooling his heels until Maddy lifted her restraining order. Holly was asleep on Wylie’s shoulder within minutes.

  “Look at you,” Maddy said. “You’re a natural.” For the first ti
me all day, she seemed relaxed. She slipped her hand in his, swung her arm as they walked. Wylie stroked Holly’s head and glanced up at the stars. This was how he’d always imagined life with a baby, he and Maddy exhausted but not defeated, pulling together.

  They were nearing the end of the lane when they heard the crash. At first Wylie thought somebody had hit a deer, but then there was another crash, and another. As they got closer to the highway, he could see in the moonlight a figure standing on the hood of the Fairlane, stomping the windshield. He wanted it to be some local kid, Bluff Road riffraff, but he recognized the Dart idling on the roadside. After one last stomp, Lester hopped down and grabbed what looked to be a crow-bar from his backseat. Wylie tried to pass the baby to Maddy, but she held on to his arm.

  “Don’t,” she whispered. “He’s drunk off his ass.”

  And then Lester began to whale on the Fairlane’s fender. The first blow woke Holly, but Lester didn’t hear her crying until he’d taken three or four more swings. Turning, he peered through the darkness, the crowbar cocked in his hand. Wylie took a step toward him.

  “All right, Lester,” he called. “Better get on home now.”

  For a moment Lester stood and stared, his shoulders heaving with each breath. Holly continued to howl. In the distance, headlights appeared, the rumble of a tractor trailer. Finally Lester reared back and flung the crowbar into the underbrush across the road. The Dart sprayed a rooster tail of gravel as he pulled away.

  When his taillights faded, Wylie and Maddy walked over for a look at the Fairlane, saw what a number he’d done—all four tires knifed, the driver’s seat shredded down to foam and springs, the windshield intact but caved in. Wylie picked up the FOR SALE sign, brushed it off, tossed it onto the seat. Once upon a time, he’d poured his heart and soul into that car. Now all he cared about, really, was how he’d get Lester to pay for the damage.

  “Guess he changed his mind about the car,” Wylie said.

  Maddy just shook her head like she’d been expecting this all along. Wylie thought she’d be more upset, but he saw then that she’d let go, too, that whatever happened to the Fairlane now didn’t much matter to her.

  The next morning, when Wylie called the police, the dispatcher asked him to repeat Lester’s name, said wait a minute, then came back on the line and informed him that Lester Hardin was already in custody. She asked Wylie to come down to the station to file his report. When he got there, he was greeted by a detective, an older man with puffy eyes and a dark suit that looked slept in. They knew each other from the dealership: the detective brought in his ’68 Fastback GT for an oil change every two thousand miles on the nose. His office was as tidy as his car, a small, bright room with photos of his wife and daughter arranged on the windowsill. He pulled up a seat for Wylie. When Wylie asked what Lester was doing in jail, the detective took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and told him.

  Shortly after he’d finished with Maddy’s car, Lester had walked into the Richland County sheriff ’s office and confessed to the first officer he saw, a young deputy at the front desk. Lester told him about the night he’d been home alone with Nat while Gladys was waiting tables at the Waffle House. They’d been having their usual fight before she left, and he was sick of hearing her complain about money, about his job at the car wash, about having to leave her baby four nights a week just so they could make ends meet. Lester spent the evening in front of the TV with a bottle of whiskey, listening to the baby cry and trying to decide what to do about his life. When he’d had enough of the noise, he went into the nursery and held Nat, muffling the baby’s cries against his chest. All he was trying to do, he told the deputy, was shut Nat up, get him to go to sleep. But the harder the baby cried, the harder Lester held him, and by the time he let go, Nat wasn’t breathing. Lester then placed him facedown in the crib, and that’s how Gladys found her baby when she got home. When he was done talking, Lester begged the deputy to shoot him.

  At first, Wylie couldn’t quite get his head around what he was hearing. It was so horrible, he thought Lester must have made it up. What was worse, every time he tried to make it real, every time he tried to picture Lester smothering his baby, what he saw instead was himself cramming that bottle into Holly’s mouth. The two events ran together like water in his mind. For a moment he had an impulse to confess, if for no other reason than to hear the detective tell him he’d done nothing wrong. He sat quietly while the detective finished the story. He was saying that Lester finally confessed to Gladys last night, had actually gotten down on his knees and pleaded for forgiveness, at which point she’d told him she wished he were dead.

  “Then she gave him a choice,” the detective said. “Turn himself in, or she’d do it for him.”

  Wylie sat up straight, heard himself asking if Lester meant to kill the baby. The detective shrugged. “He says he didn’t. Says it was an accident. We’re just trying to find out what we can, which is why I wanted to hear about last night.” He pulled out a notepad and began asking questions about what happened with Lester and the Fairlane. Wylie had trouble concentrating. He had to force himself to make eye contact with the detective. Starting with the night Lester approached him at the track, he told everything he could remember, hoping he’d say something that would be of use. The anger he was feeling toward Lester went beyond what he’d done to the Fairlane, beyond Nat’s death even. A half hour later, as Wylie walked out of the station and into the morning glare, he wished the policeman had honored Lester’s request and shot him on the spot.

  Wylie had been planning to swing by Atlas and borrow a flatbed, then haul the Fairlane out to a buddy’s junkyard in Irmo and sell it for parts, take whatever they’d give him. Now that seemed like more than he could manage. He stopped for a six-pack and pointed his car home, gunning the engine past the juke joints and matchbox houses along Bluff Road, slowing down only to look at the ruined shell of the Fairlane as he turned off the highway. Halfway between the farmhouse and the cottage, he pulled over and switched off the ignition, sat there drinking and staring across the field at the cows. One beer, two beers, three. He told himself he was working up the courage to tell Maddy about Lester, but mostly he was thinking about his father: his brooding, his shouting, the whistle of his belt. It occurred to Wylie that maybe his father had done him a favor, that maybe he’d left to keep from doing more harm.

  After the fourth beer, Wylie slid the bottles under his seat and drove the rest of the way home. Maddy was out front with Holly and a fistful of Kleenex, sitting on the porch swing where she and Wylie used to spend evenings watching the sun set behind Cal’s silos. She looked like she was done for. At first Wylie thought she’d already heard about Lester, but it wasn’t that—just another morning of trying and failing to please Holly. He was barely out of the truck when Maddy thrust the baby into his arms.

  “You take her,” she said. She blew her nose and began telling him about Holly’s latest fit, how she’d tried feeding her on one side and then the other, but nothing was good enough. “She’s not even a week old and she already hates me.” Maddy was so worked up, she didn’t ask Wylie about his visit to the police station until they were inside. When he told her about Lester, she covered her mouth, shook her head as if it weren’t true. “Poor Nat!” she said. “Poor Nat! Poor little baby!” That got Holly going again, and if it hadn’t been for the four beers cushioning him from all the crying and misery, Wylie thought he might have started bawling himself.

  Later, though, when Maddy had gotten past the shock of it, she told him she was actually relieved. “When it was a baby dying in his sleep, that was even worse,” she said. “That could happen to anyone.”

  They were sitting on the floor with Holly between them on a blanket. Wylie lifted her up and blew a raspberry on her stomach but stopped when he noticed Maddy watching him. He thought she was about to accuse him of smelling like beer. “You know, if it weren’t for you,” she said, “he might never have confessed. Seeing you must have done it, made him re
alize what he’d done. Otherwise, why would he bust up our car on his way to the police?”

  Wylie stood and carried Holly to the window. He thought about the Fairlane, imagined Lester plunging a knife into its tires, stomping the windshield. He had to admit, he liked the idea of being the one who’d pushed him over the edge. He liked the idea of Lester wishing he were in his shoes. But for all he knew, the only things separating him from Lester were circumstance and a little luck, and he was surprised Maddy didn’t see it this way, too.

  Maddy got up and went into the bathroom, asked Wylie from behind the door to check Holly’s diaper. The toilet flushed, and then she said, “What I don’t get is, how could Gladys not have known? She lived with the guy. She was married to him.” Wylie unpinned Holly’s diaper, saw that it was clean, and refastened it. When Maddy turned on the faucet, he picked up a small blue pillow from the rocking chair. Holly was kicking as he held it above her face. He tried to imagine lowering the pillow, pressing down, but he couldn’t do it, not even for a second—as if that proved anything. But who was to say? Maybe Maddy was right. Maybe she saw something in Wylie he couldn’t yet see in himself. He pulled the pillow away and whispered, “Peekaboo,” trying to make a game of it. He figured Holly would start crying then, but she just lay there, blinking. That was what really got him: she didn’t even have the sense to be afraid.

  “Not that I blame Gladys,” Maddy was saying. “Besides, she really needs me now. I was thinking I’d go see her tomorrow, if you’d drive me over.” She shut off the water. “Are you listening?”

  Wylie leaned over and kissed Holly on the tip of her nose. When he stood up, the room spun a little. He had time to set the pillow aside as Maddy came out of the bathroom, but he kept on holding it, and then he felt her behind him in the doorway, probably leaning there with her arms crossed, wondering why he was standing over their baby with a pillow. “I’m listening,” he said.