by Wendy J. Fox
“What if I stayed over at your place?” Alex said.
“You can’t,” Melanie said. She almost said sorry, but she was not sorry, and she was glad she caught herself.
He looked deflated for a second, and as he pulled his fingers from hers and turned towards his car, she wanted to tell him to try and remember everything he had ever loved about his wife, not just the obvious, like a first date or the birth of their children, but everything—the way she might be a desperate snorer and deny it, or the way she might leave her shoes and stockings in a trail from the door to the sofa, like breadcrumbs, for him to find her.
What if she’s the best person you have, Melanie wanted to say to him, but you’re ignoring her?
She clicked her key fob to unlock her car door. She got inside and buckled up. From the side mirror, she could see Alex was still standing in the parking lot, and he was looking at her bumper or something else low to the ground. Backing out of the parking space, she was careful of the other cars and of him. When her vehicle was parallel to where he stood, she rolled down her window and looked up towards him.
“Get in your car,” she said, but he shook his head and said that he could not.
“Yes you can,” she said. “You just don’t want to.” The radio was switched on very low, and she heard the sound of the newscast like a hum. He was looking away from her.
Putting the car into gear, she was not sure she was being fair. He was hurt, she could see that, but it was not something she could be responsible for. Slowly, she let the clutch out and, slowly, she maneuvered away from him. When she checked the mirror again, he was in the same place on the asphalt, eyes turned down and head hanging.
Chapter Twenty-One
Lucy Estelle
Summer, 1970
The night Jenny’s father left, Lucy Estelle had turned in early, taking the baby with her. They both woke at the same time in the morning. Jenny opened her tender brown eyes to the new light in the bedroom, and her mother said, Good morning, honey girl. Lucy Estelle hadn’t put Jenny in the bassinet, and it was clear to her that her husband had not touched the other side of the sheets. She scooped her daughter into her arms and lifted her shirt. She left the room with her daughter content on her breast and she checked the house—a small, tidy house; a modest house—and she found no trace of Larry. She checked again; it did not take long to look twice, but still, no one. She checked a third time, stepping out into the yard, peeking into the backseat of her car while noting that his truck was absent. She swept the shower curtain aside, just in case he had drunk too much and, in the dead heat of summer, fallen asleep against the cool of the porcelain tub. She checked the closet: a duffel bag, gone. She noted a few swinging hangers that she was sure had held shirts the night before. When she finally popped the tin where they kept the grocery money, there was only the silver bottom. Jenny was still at her breakfast.
In fact, Lucy Estelle had always known better than to keep much money in the tin, because Larry dipped into it so often for beer. One day not long after they had married, she had been wise enough to move most of her money from her regular bank to one a few towns over. Her family had always been customers; the branch had given them mortgages and auto loans and had helped her greatly when she had to sort out the life insurance policies after her parents had died in the accident. The teller had even called a manager to the floor, trying to convince her to stay, and Lucy Estelle had said she was sorry. All she could think of was what would happen if Larry drained her savings. He was her husband. He could do that. Now she kept most of her spending cash and her checkbook in an envelope in the bottom of the box of laundry detergent, a place where she was sure he would not look. The rest of her savings, which was not much, but it was all she had, she kept in a branch thirty miles away. When she handed over the bills at the gas station or wrote out a note in the market, her transactions smelled of manufactured scents like Mountain Fresh or Spring Rain or whatever had been on sale.
She had not loved Larry when she signed her name on the paperwork, and she had not loved him when Jenny was born.
Lucy Estelle missed her own mother. Her mother, canning cherries. Her mother, brushing her hair until the shine came up. Her mother, giggling when her father pinched her tush in the kitchen. Her mother, holding her daughter’s hand on the porch on nights when the moon was not out, saying, We named you Lucy Estelle, girl, because Lucy means “born at daylight,” and Estelle means “star.”
* * *
It was Saturday. Lucy Estelle sat at the empty kitchen table. She looked at the phone on the wall but it did not sound. She looked at the beer cans in the bin, but there was no rustling, no message for her. She had not known Jenny’s father long. They had met at a party on the riverbank that she had gone to with some of her friends from school; it was the summer of their graduation. After that, he had come around some.
Lucy Estelle worked at a construction company, in the office. She did paperwork for permits and the field-crew schedule. They had given her the job out of pity because her parents had just died, she was sure, but she was good at it.
After she had told Larry she was pregnant, they went to the courthouse. She had worn the same maroon dress she wore on her high school graduation day, because it was her only good dress. Her aunt had bought it for her. It had come in the mail from JC Penney. He wore a shirt borrowed off of a friend.
She looked again at the beer cans in the bin. He had been working his way through a case when she went to bed. Usually, she would have heard his truck—the low, rumbling motor, the exhaust rattling, and then the way he drove the diesel, with his foot to the floor, squealing down the dirt drive, rutting the grooves even deeper. This was not the first time she had awoken to find him gone, but it was the first time he had taken anything.
Lucy Estelle whispered to her daughter, We’ll be okay, and rocked her until she went back to sleep.
She thought about Larry being gone and how the tiny house had a little more space. Maybe she was meant to not wake up. She was not sure she would have tried to talk him out of leaving, but she knew she would have insisted that he say good-bye to their daughter.
She had grown up an only child in a quiet house—her parents found each other late, and even one baby was a risk, but they tried it anyway. Her mother had been frank with her that she, Lucy Estelle, was not the first one, but she was the first one to have been born whole. On certain days her mother had a quiet, low sadness, and as Lucy Estelle grew older she could only imagine her mother was thinking about the others. She knew two had been miscarried very late and were buried in the garden under a carpet of iris and phlox, but she was not sure about the rest.
Lucy Estelle had told her mother almost everything, but she did not tell her that sometimes she dreamed of them—she was not sure exactly who they were, except that they were her siblings. She had dreamed she was out in the garden and their parents were calling to all of them. Their shared mother was shouting their names, she knew this, but the actual syllables were just out of reach, like listening underwater, or sometimes the syllables were slightly clearer, like when she would build a fort of couch cushions and blankets and the adult voices on the other side were muffled through the quilting and cotton batting. In her dreams, there were creatures around, a sounder of pigs or a brood of chickens snorting and clucking at the children. It was the swine who were the most urgent, nudging and rooting at Lucy Estelle’s feet while she tried to kick away their snouts, the jabbering of her brothers and sisters fading into the forest, the sows circling her in a chain, some of them a ton or more, their teats dragging against the patchy lawn. She understood that to avoid being trampled, she had no choice but to stay in the center of their ring, so she let them herd her along. She understood she was supposed to feel safe. When she dallied, their bristling skin scraped against her calves. The hens pecked at the fresh ground turned up by the heavy hooves, the roosters would not stop their hooting, even in
the afternoon light. Both the barrows and the boars kept a sly eye turned toward the chickens. They were not nimble enough to hunt, but they were keen to get a taste of poultry if one of the birds was disabled, or better, crushed.
In the dream, she would reach the door to the back porch, and the swine would get fuzzy then, starting to depart. She smelled of feather and mud, her face streaked with tears and her dress torn, tufts of down in her hair. She would know that if she stepped up and opened the screen the barnyard would dissolve, and it would be only her and her mother. She would have forgotten she was calling to the others, and the nicks left from the sows nipping Lucy Estelle’s ankles would close in an instant. She worried for the other children left alone, sheltered only by the ragged edge of trees and the low shrubs in the garden. Still, she lifted her foot up on the homemade stairs and reached for the screen’s latch, every time.
* * *
The house had belonged to her parents. The car accident had happened when she was a junior in school. That had been hard. She had never wished for a sibling more in her life. She was glad both sets of grandparents were gone, though, because even as a young person, and even before she was a mother herself, she understood how it was worse to bury a child. She was not sure how to approach the arrangements; she was not sure how to handle everything. Her aunt was a great help then, asking questions and sitting with her through the long nights and helping her clean out the house. She did not want to erase her folks, but she could not stand to see her mother’s empty dresses in the closet and her father’s mud boots by the door, crumpled and leaning sideways.
There had been a wreck on the road, and her father had swerved to avoid it. The rolling of his small pickup was lost in the larger commotion of a crumpled passenger car with a child inside and crates of chickens upturned on the asphalt, their light bones crushed on impact.
That day she had come home from school and the door was locked. Lucy Estelle—without a key, because she had never needed one since someone had always been home—waited for them on the steps until a police cruiser turned and came slowly up the drive, dust pooling with the gentle exhaust.
When he reached her on the steps, she stood, and he took off his hat.
Her parents had turned the latch against their own not coming home, and while she could have broken a window, it did not occur to her that this might be necessary.
“I’m sorry if you were waiting on me,” he said. He was a regular cop, not a Stater, but an officer from a few towns over whom she did not recognize; his forehead was white from always wearing the uniform cap. She had not caught his name, but she didn’t think she would forget his pinched face. He had other words on his lips, but she dropped the backpack she had been clenching the whole time and fell toward him. He smelled like aftershave and nervous sweat. He put his arms around her, warm in the already warm air. She thought she heard him say, Your parents, but maybe she only felt it.
Then, she heard the stamping of the hogs, the low braying of the cattle, and the peal of the cock’s crow in the dry air.
When she tried to move her legs, she could not, so the officer carried her to the backseat of the cruiser and hoisted her inside; he turned on his lights for the short drive into town, the flash of red and blue reflecting against the road, like a beacon for nothing.
* * *
There was some money, her parents’ savings, which would carry her for a while, but as soon as she graduated, she took the job at the construction company anyway. The house was paid for, and the small life insurance policy arrived before she even had time to wonder. Her mother had a dent in the side of her head that was large enough to nix an open casket, but at the service Lucy Estelle had kept her face neutral. Her father’s sister and her father’s brother were there, her uncle was with her small cousin, Irene, and she remembered worrying for the girl, only ten. Her parents had always paid special attention to her, a child without a mother, and Lucy Estelle knew she would not be able to visit her the way her folks had, making the drive across the eastern plains and bringing biscuits wrapped in a tea towel to keep them warm.
Later, she overheard that an off-duty officer had found her parents, had tried CPR, had torn his clothes to tie their bodies, had ridden with them to the county hospital. She had heard he was nearly naked when he trailed them to the emergency room, his uniform shredded and even part of his undershirt torn to strips. His boots streaked the tiles red. The details did not matter to her. One truck on a single lane road erring on a turn, or a pile of metal on the highway flattened by a semi: the outcome was the same.
* * *
Even if the house was small, Larry had been impressed that it was hers. She did not even try to make him understand what she had lost for it, or explain that she did not care about property. He walked the perimeter of the yard and speculated. She sat at the table and pined.
In time, she hoped, the baby would change them. It had happened quickly, and she could tell he did not want to propose, and though she did not want to accept, either, they both agreed. The same doctor who had seen to her pregnancy had done their bloodwork.
And when Jenny came, she came fast. It was spring, and the driveway was pitted with mud. Larry was not at home—he was never at home—so Lucy Estelle drove herself to the hospital, breathing deeply as she worked the pedals. This is the clutch, she repeated to her left foot as she navigated, and to her right, This is the accelerator, and this is the brake. Still, the car jerked down the road, and she squinted until she realized that only the parking lights were on, but in the dim twilight, the brights hardly made a difference.
Before she left the house, she wrote a note: Baby coming. See you soon? and left it on the counter. He still had not turned up hours later when Jenny was born, early in the morning, and was still not there that afternoon when a nurse came with paperwork. She gave Jenny her own maiden name, and she said she was married but that she did not want to list the father.
The nurse shrugged. She’d been a few years ahead of Lucy Estelle at school. “Doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “If it matters to him he can go to the records office and make the correction.”
Lucy Estelle looked around the empty room. “He won’t.”
“Sorry,” the nurse said, and started pumping on the blood pressure cuff.
At home with Jenny the morning Larry left, she missed her mother. Her mother, who peeled peaches for her because she did not like the velvet skin. Her mother, who plaited her hair into tight French braids and fishtails. Her mother, who probably never wondered if her husband would come home, and probably never thought about changing the locks just in case he did.
Lucy Estelle kept Jenny close, the baby’s skin warm on her skin. She had milk for her daughter and a solid roof. She had some money still, from the life insurance—the accident was only two years ago, but how time had passed—and she had the job at the construction company that was waiting for her on Monday. They had been nice when she had taken a few weeks off when Jenny was first born. It might have been pity again, but pity didn’t bother her. She was working part-time, and Jenny stayed with a woman down the road who had three children of her own and was grateful for a few extra dollars. If she had to compare Larry vanishing to her parents vanishing, it was nothing.
“Nothing,” she said, and the sound of her own voice startled her.
She decided she would change the locks, and she got up carefully so as to not wake the child, and she washed her face and combed her hair with one hand. Anything more would have to wait. She found her car keys on the hook and eased Jenny into the passenger side, milk-drunk and swaddled. Lucy Estelle drove slowly—she had wanted to get a car seat but had not yet.
At the hardware store, she recognized the clerk, Roger, from her class in school. She told him that she wanted to get new door handles, that the old ones were always loose.
“I’d try tightening the screws before getting all new,” he said. “Larry could d
o that for you,” he said.
“I don’t think Larry is going to be doing that for me,” she said.
“He’s not so handy, huh?”
Lucy Estelle avoided his eye, but nodded. There was a row of packaged knobs, their latches like tongues.
Roger looked at the baby. Jenny was still asleep; her head rested on Lucy Estelle’s shoulder and the top of her shirt was a little damp from the heat and a fine thread of drool.
“You got a dead bolt?” Roger asked.
She said she did, and he suggested she might change that too, if it was from the same key.
Lucy Estelle thanked him and paid for the merchandise and drove home, a little more quickly this time, because Jenny was awake and fussing. She took a deep breath as she came up the driveway, and didn’t exhale until she could see there was no one parked in the carport.
When she stepped inside the house, she had Jenny balanced on her left arm with her shopping dangling from her right, and on the counter, glinting against the scratched laminate were Larry’s housekeys, which she had not seen in the darkness of early morning.
“I guess we don’t have to change the locks, baby girl,” Lucy Estelle said to her daughter, and Jenny gurgled and kicked her legs.
She checked the clock, still before noon, and she drank a glass of water. She nursed Jenny until she was asleep. She put her own milk-stained shirt in the soaking pail, for now permanently kept by the diaper pail, and took the laundry off of the line. Her father, though not wealthy, had long been a believer in conveniences, but her mother had always refused a clothes dryer. They used the line most of the year and a clothes horse in winter. Inside or out, her mother had always hung everyone’s private things between the folds of a shirt or under a tea towel for modesty, and for years Lucy Estelle donned underwear damp at the crotch and bras with a moist back, even when her skirts had gotten crispy.