by Sofia Grant
“Baby,” she cried, getting to her knees and crawling to where Georgina lay sprawled. The bodice of her dress was streaked with a grass stain that would never come out of the yellow broadcloth, and bits of cut grass stuck to her sweaty neck, but Margaret gathered her into her arms, her heart in her throat. Please, please, please, she thought, then realized she was saying the words out loud. “Don’t be hurt, darling, Mama is so sorry, please.”
A figure came striding toward her on long legs, blocking the sun. Hank—Hank, who was supposed to be gone all day taking a pair of brothers from Oklahoma to see some land that a rancher was selling. He shouldn’t be home so early—but that’s how it went with Hank these days: sure things fell through for reasons he never bothered to elucidate; repeat business evaporated, cold calls somehow ended up with him at the tavern until his supper was burnt or cold or both and Georgina was put to bed yet again without saying good night to her daddy.
But at least he hadn’t seen Margaret hit their child. She hoped he hadn’t, anyway; she was pretty sure he’d come around the corner of the house only after she’d already fallen.
“What happened here?” he said cheerfully, and she was relieved—even as she was trying to make sure that Georgina was all right, she was still gauging her reaction by how Hank responded.
“She fell,” Margaret said, wincing at the lie. “I was just—she had my brooch. She was running toward the field. I didn’t want—”
Georgina stirred in her arms, blinking in the sun that slanted past her father, touching a pudgy hand to her cheek. She started to cry, but it was her fake cry, big breathless sobs accompanied by crafty peering through her thick eyelashes to see if her audience was convinced.
“Mama hit me, Daddy,” she announced.
“That’s not—Georgina!” Margaret snapped. “Don’t lie to Daddy. You took my nice brooch out of my jewelry box. That was very bad.”
Georgina pouted and sniffled and reached for Hank, and for once Margaret was glad when he picked her up and swung her into the air.
“Take her inside, won’t you? I need to find my brooch.”
Hank laughingly obliged, and she could hear their voices as they went back to the house. It wouldn’t last—afternoons at the tavern usually meant brooding evenings on the back porch, no help with the baby’s bath, fights picked at bedtime—but at least Margaret had a few moments to get herself together.
She found the brooch in a matter of moments. The spray of garnets set in gold reflected the sunlight so brilliantly that it caused spots to appear in her eyes as she closed her fingers gratefully around it, almost too hot to touch. It was, she realized with a sob, the most beautiful thing in her world—other than her daughter, she reminded herself furiously, her own child—too fine to wear with anything in her closet. The years—and a pregnancy and long months of nursing—had reduced her wardrobe to a stained and worn mess. Few of her dresses even fit anymore, and she’d taken to wearing Mary Beth’s castoffs most days, housedresses with no waist, baggy trousers from her days in the WAC, kerchiefs in her hair.
In fact, she was wearing one of Mary Beth’s blouses now, a thin seersucker that gapped over her bosom. She pinned the brooch to its collar for safekeeping and wiped her hands on her skirt and stared longingly down the road toward town. Earlier today she’d calculated that she needed eleven dollars for groceries and the electric bill, but she didn’t have the energy to ask Hank for it now.
Across the lane and up the gentle hill, the windows in the rancher’s house were open, but no one peered out past the curtains; no one would come over later to make sure everything was okay. That was because Mrs. Pratt, the rancher’s wife, was dying. Every morning her husband came out of the house a little more stooped, his face a little more lined, and headed for the barn. Soon it would be over—Mr. Pratt and Hank had shared a flask at sunset last week, walking the perimeter of the field; he’d confided that once his wife was dead and buried, he was moving to town, where his sister and her husband had an extra room.
Margaret sat on her haunches, delaying the inevitable, the fraught hours between now and when she would finally be able to convince Georgina to sleep. Then she would have a bit of time to herself, half an hour to read the book she’d gotten at the library or write a letter to one of her old sorority sisters, who didn’t seem nearly as boring now as they had in college. Only, a few moments into a new chapter or halfway down the piece of notepaper, she was bound to be overcome with such exhaustion that she’d fall asleep practically before her head hit the pillow.
Was this how Mrs. Pratt had felt, thirty years ago, when her young husband had brought her home to this land? They weren’t particularly friendly people, but from their few conversations Margaret knew that they had two grown sons, both of whom had moved out of state. Until she’d gotten too weak last fall, Mrs. Pratt had moved steadfastly through her chores each day, unsmiling and serious, the loose skin of her bare arms jiggling as she hung the laundry and beat the rugs and washed the windows. Margaret had seen her once on the porch, silhouetted against the morning sun, her sheer housedress revealing the sagging breasts, the loose skin of her stomach, and she’d had to turn away in disgust. But would the decades wreak their sly havoc on Margaret, as they had on Mrs. Pratt, until she would find herself on this very porch one day, Georgina grown and gone, and realize that she’d traded her entire life away?
“I can’t,” she whispered, flicking bits of grass from her skirt. Slowly, she got to her feet. Her ankle throbbed, but at least it wasn’t sprained; she limped slowly back to the house. She dragged herself up the porch stairs and held the railing for support.
Inside, she found Hank reclining on the sofa with Georgina on his lap and the Burpee seed catalog in his hands. Georgina was laughing and poking her finger at the cover illustration of impossibly bright, perfect dahlias, singing nonsense words the way she only did for Hank.
“You were at Hemphills,” Margaret said. These were not the words she had planned to say, but they tumbled out on a wave of bitterness.
Hank peered over Georgina’s shiny pale curls, frowning. “One drink, for God’s sake. I had one drink with a fellow who may well hire me. Is that a crime these days?” When she didn’t answer, he sighed, and set Georgina gently on the floor with the catalog. That would be the end of it—Margaret had been looking forward to paging through it before bed, admiring all the lovely drawings of asters and zinnias and bluebonnets, choosing a few packets of seeds as a special treat to buy with the money she’d saved over the winter in a coffee can in the back of a cupboard behind the yeast and the baking powder. But now its pages would be torn and wrinkled, reduced to trash, like everything else that spent any time in their home.
“Come here, baby,” Hank said.
Margaret folded her arms over her chest and refused to look at him. This was a familiar ploy, and one she rarely resisted, because as hard as her life had become, as tarnished as her dreams and diminished her hopes, Hank could still, always, make her forget all that. He’d gather her into his arms and she’d inhale his whiskey-scented breath and then he’d kiss her and she’d taste that wicked reminder on his lips. He’d run his hands over her hips and growl deep in his throat and she’d be lost to him, all over again. She’d protest that she hadn’t bathed and her hands were rough and raw from the laundry and her hair was awful from the humidity and he’d stop her with a deeper kiss, and they’d settle Georgina in her room and sneak away to the bedroom and make love with their hands over each other’s mouth, laughing until they couldn’t help themselves, until their lives fell away from them and it was just the desperate holding on, ascending and crashing, forgetting everything else.
But not today.
“Sweetheart,” Hank pleaded, holding his arms out wide, willing her to come to him. “I’m sorry I didn’t come straight home. But this might be a steady job. Big as the Yates field, they’re saying, and just imagine what it’ll take to get it up and running. Look, I’ll take you to the quarries this weekend, I’ll
buy you a new dress—please, baby.”
“I can’t do this anymore,” Margaret said quietly. A big fat hot tear spilled over and splashed on her cheek, but how could that be? She wasn’t sad, exactly, she was just—tired.
“Can’t do what?” Hank said warily, letting his arms fall.
“Let’s move back to New London. Please. Daddy will give you a job, you know he will.” (He’d been offering, in fact, since the week after her parents’ disastrous visit to Austin; a letter had arrived on his company letterhead, smelling like his tobacco and written in his blocky hand. Since then he’d written every month, slipping in a few dollars now and then.) “And you can still fly,” Margaret added hastily. “On the weekends and—and maybe after, you know, you and Daddy work things out. We can live in the garage apartment until we find a place, we won’t have to pay rent or—we can finally get ahead, like you always say you want to.”
And her father would smooth things over with her mother, if there was any grace in this world, and maybe, just maybe, Caroline would watch Georgina now and then and Margaret could finally rest. Blessed, delicious sleep, in the dark back room of the old groundskeeper’s apartment where she had once played. It was shaded by overgrown cherry laurel and the windows were hung with heavy plain brown oilcloth curtains, and there was a darling little pint-size stove and painted cupboards and hooks for pots and pans. It was small, but it wouldn’t be like here, because Hank would be working and Georgina could start nursery school and surely Caroline would soften when she saw that Margaret was . . . well, that Margaret was sorry. Sorry for the nasty spoiled girl she’d been, sorry for the way she’d treated her parents, sorry for the boys she’d strung along and the girls she’d snubbed and for never caring enough about the events that had taken place before her birth to let her mother tell her about them.
Hank’s face had drained of color and he was leaning back against the couch as though she’d shot him. “Mags,” he said in a strained voice. “I’ll do better. Look, I know it’s been hard for you, stuck out here with no one to talk to. I remember what I promised you, baby, I do. But I can’t go back to New London. I can’t.”
He stared out the window, but his eyes were blank. “Name another place. We can go west, if you want, there’s work in Abilene and San Angelo. I can ask around . . . or I can get rig work. It pays, it’s steady.”
“No,” Margaret said. “It’ll be the same, wherever we go.” She couldn’t bear to tell him that she knew more about his promises than he did—that no matter how many fresh starts and second chances he got, they’d all end up the same: tempers boiling over, handshake deals falling apart, too little rest and too many meals of beans and corn bread. Somehow, Hank managed to keep believing that it would be different.
Margaret played her ace, the lie she’d been holding back. “I miss my family. It’s different for you, but it doesn’t have to be—all we have to do is apologize to my mother. You can do that, for me, can’t you? Sweetheart? It doesn’t mean she’s right, it doesn’t mean I love them more than you, darling. You know that, right? You know I love you more than . . .”
Than anything, she was about to say, but that would mean that she loved him more than her own child, and only monsters felt that way, women too brittle to nurture their offspring, too selfish to care for their families.
And besides, it was different with him, an entirely different kind of love. Margaret was still astonished by her love for her husband, but it had been there always, as long ago as she could remember, until it had become as much a part of her as her bones or blood. At those early Daisy meetings—there was Hank, age thirteen, fourteen, careering across her mother’s backyard with his BB gun and his baseball glove, smoking his father’s cigarettes and pulling the girls’ pigtails, pilfering the cupcakes that were meant for the ladies and dancing jeeringly away from his own mother when she threatened to warm his bottom with a paddle. Margaret had loved him then and it was her first love, the pure one, the best one; and as she got older, he only grew in her estimation until she arrived at adulthood with a particular notion of what it meant to be heroic. Just out of reach—always running—untamed and ungovernable: that was her Hank.
“Forever,” she finally settled on, whispering the word and tracing his hard jaw with her fingertips. Often this worked; her touch could soothe him when nothing else did.
But Hank put his face in his hands and for a moment Margaret wondered if he was crying, a possibility so frightening that she wished she’d never said anything at all. But he merely rubbed his eyes and took a few deep breaths, the sharp planes of his shoulder blades rising and falling, before looking up at her bleakly.
“Don’t ask me for this,” he said. “Because I won’t live in your parents’ house and I won’t apologize. Do you hear me, Mags? I’ll never apologize. When I left, I promised myself I’d never go back. I didn’t ask to get blown up and I didn’t ask for my brother to die, and I didn’t ask for my mom to wake up in the middle of the night screaming all the time, waking Helene up, so I was the one who had to get her and walk her around until she went back to sleep. You understand me?”
Margaret nodded, afraid to say anything. He’d told her parts of the story before, and she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to hear any more. Besides, it would only make him dig in further. It remained to be seen if Hank meant what he said, about refusing to come home with her. He didn’t seem that drunk, at least not blackout drunk, and despite everything he was still a proud man; if she gave him some time to get used to the idea, he might come around.
“I saw him, you know,” he said, laying his head on her shoulder so his words were muffled against her neck. “That day. When, when I got burned. He was under a piece of the ceiling. I saw his legs—I knew his shoes, see, because they used to be mine. It was his pants. His shirt sleeves. Only I couldn’t see his face. The ceiling fell right on him. I got hold of his ankles and I was—I was—and it was so hot, it was like—you’ve never seen anything—but I thought if I could just—”
“Oh, Hank,” Margaret whispered, and something opened up inside her. A bloom like a spent rose, lovely but doomed. She would do anything to heal his hurt. And: she couldn’t.
He caught her fingers in his and nearly crushed them. He put his weight against her and she struggled to support him. She knew he got his strength from her. And the giving of what he needed, that was what gave her strength.
“Come with me,” she said, and he released her hands and followed her meekly to the bedroom. But once they were inside he was no longer meek. He shut the door carefully, quietly, so as not to wake Georgina. He looked at her, taking his time, and she stood tall and still and felt the uneven ends of her home-cut hair grazing her shoulders, and she put her fingers to the pearly buttons of her blouse. The blouse was cheap, not good enough even for the plain, crooked-toothed wife of a deliveryman, but Margaret pretended it was scarlet satin, and she imagined her breasts spilling from it as if they were as firm and inviting as they had been when she first came to him. She begged Hank to see her as she was on the inside, blazing with want and need and her passionate devotion.
He pushed her hands away so that he could attend to the task himself, his impatient fingers callused from work, clumsy. Finally the blouse fell away and she unhooked her brassiere, and with his needful hands on her, she forgot that she was worn and tired and found that other version of herself, the one who flaunted her beauty and gambled with everything that mattered.
AT FOUR FORTY-FIVE the next morning, Margaret slipped out the front door with a satchel over her shoulder and Georgina heavy in her arms. She’d been up for nearly an hour, gathering what she needed as quietly as she could, her last task to write the note now laid out on the counter and held down with a jar of peach preserves that Mary Beth had dropped off.
“My darling, please don’t make me beg. It’s only for a while until we find our own place. Mother will understand. I promise. Don’t break my heart, for I won’t last a day without you. Your love always.”
The walk to town was only half a mile, but with a sleeping child in her arms and her bag over her shoulder containing apples and bread and cheese and a change of clothes for Georgina, it seemed five times as long. The kerchief she’d tied over her hair quickly became too warm, her forehead dampening with sweat. When she arrived at the bus station, the sun was breaking over the trees. Men stood waiting, their weariness in the hunch of their shoulders, the thin streams of smoke from their cigarettes. These were men accustomed to waiting, in shabby coats and worn-out shoes, their eyes downcast. They glanced at her, at Georgina, with no expression at all.
The bus waited, belching and stinking. Finally, the driver emerged from around the corner of the building and hoisted himself into his seat. The men parted, allowing her to board first.
“Ma’am,” the one closest to the door said, holding out his hand for her satchel. Gratefully, she let him take it, but when he followed her up into the bus, she set Georgina down in the first empty seat and took her bag back with a curt nod. She did not intend to start a conversation with him or with any of her fellow travelers: despite appearances, she was no drifter, no unmoored unfortunate like the rest of them.
Margaret was going home.
Chapter Fifteen
Katie had eaten the fried chicken and apple and Clif Bar awfully fast—maybe too fast. Now she felt a bit queasy. After washing her hands at the sink and drying them on a threadbare towel embroidered with a cluster of cherries and the word “Tuesday” in a curving scroll, she decided to call it a day, head to bed, and put off any further explorations until morning.
Katie turned off the downstairs lights and checked the locks twice, though after seeing how quickly Jam dispatched the lock with his credit card, it was difficult not to imagine all manner of ambulance-chasing thugs breaking in to steal the remaining detritus of her grandmother’s life. She padded upstairs in her socks, carrying her toothbrush and toothpaste, and surveyed the old bathroom. A thin yellow towel was hung over the tarnished towel rack, and a cracked plastic shower cap hung on the knob of the cabinet. Katie touched it with her fingertip, imagining the last time her grandmother had pulled it over her head.