Heartbreak Town

by Marsha Moyer

  "Let's just say I'm reassessing my priorities," Ash said. "Is that rational enough for you?"

  "Meaning what?"

  "Meaning that my life's turned into a country-western song. I lost my job, I lost my wife—"

  "And you're drunk and living in a trailer. Congratulations. Except for prison, I think that covers all the bases." I looked out the back window. My old view of the dogwoods and pines was Ash's now. "So if you're not playing music anymore, what? You're just going to sit out here in the woods and stare at your belly button?"

  "I wouldn't be the first. Ever hear of a guy named Thoreau?"

  "Did you tell Jude he could move in with you?"

  "Not in so many words. I said he could stay with me whenever he wanted."

  "Well, for the record, he can't."

  "Hey, I'm gonna get the place cleaned up good. Get a little furniture. And once the electric and the plumbing are hooked up-"

  "This isn't about lights and water, or sleeping in a bedroll. It's about your drinking. I won't have Jude living with it—not in Nashville, not in my house, not in a trailer in my backyard. I've done the best I could the past few years not to turn him against you, but every day you keep this up, you're pushing me further and further." Ash seemed to be examining a particularly fascinating whorl in the fake wood paneling. "He thinks you hung the moon, Ash. Why can't you live up to that? Why won't you even try?" I turned and let myself out of the trailer and back into the yard.

  On the screen porch I met Jude coming out dragging his backpack, which was too heavy to carry.

  "Hold up a minute," I said. "We need to talk."

  "I can't," he said. "I'm going to Daddy's."

  "Well, that's what I want to talk to you about, see," I said. "He's not quite ready for you out there."

  "That's okay," Jude said. "I can sleep on the floor."

  "Jude, listen to me. Daddy and I have a deal. And until Daddy holds up his part of it, then he can't have any company in the trailer. Understand?"

  "No," Jude said. "What kind of deal?"

  "I can't tell you that. I'm sorry. It's just between him and me."

  Jude's eyes welled with tears. He dropped the backpack.

  "But he saidl" he wailed, his voice quavering up and down like scales on a piano. "He said I could come whenever I wanted!"

  "But he forgot to ask me first."

  "I don't like you!" Jude shouted, running off down the hall. "I think you're very mean, and Daddy thinks so, too!" He slammed his bedroom door. Then, for good measure, he opened it and slammed it again.

  I did what I often did in times of stress, which was to close my eyes and picture myself at Faye's. I breathed deep, filling my lungs with the imaginary, comforting scents of roses and gardenias, hyacinths and lilies, eucalyptus, raffia, the deflated Mylar balloons stacked on the counter waiting for a turn at the helium tank to send them airborne. Truth be told, I felt grounded at Faye's in a way I never did in quite the same way anyplace else. There I could still conjure a remnant of who I used to be, the widow who'd walked in that door seven years before and asked for a job like she did it every day, who'd let herself be watched and wooed in front of the whole town by a handsome carpenter in a white pickup truck. I'd had nerve then, or at least a kind of energy that passed for nerve, and now I missed that person. I missed her innocence, her dumb hope. I wanted to pull her aside and warn her about the long and heartbreaking list of things she didn't see coming. Oh sure, I'd tell her, right now it's all slow dances and sweet whiskey kisses. But someday there will be lost weekends, raised voices, doors slamming in the night. Someday there'll be a trailer in your yard.

  chapter eight

  The trailer, it turned out, was only the beginning. When

  I got home from work on Monday, there were also a backhoe and a pumper truck. I stood on the screen porch watching Ash and a man I didn't know supervise the backhoe operator, who had excavated part of the septic tank and several lengths of PVC pipe, along with a three-foot-high pile of red dirt.

  The septic work took two full days, though I had only Jude's sketchy narrative for details, since I was avoiding questioning Ash directly. The third evening, when I arrived home, the hole in the backyard was not only filled in but neatly graded over—we'd never had any grass to speak of in the first place, thank goodness—and inside the trailer, lights burned in every window.

  "Well, I'll be damned." As I watched out the kitchen window, Ash wrangled an orange vinyl dinette chair off the tailgate of his pickup and up the cinder-block steps.

  Geneva elbowed me aside so she could get a good view. Bailey had taken the kids to Little League, and, against my wishes, she'd come out to the house bearing a big care package for Ash full of nonperishable foodstuffs and secondhand dishes and household supplies.

  "Hey, he's still my brother-in-law," she said. "Anyway, Lucy, aren't you dying to see what he's done with the inside?"

  "I've seen the inside. Trust me, the best way to improve it is to take a torch to it. Or a pickax. Did you bring one of those?" I poked around in the cardboard box. "Easy Cheese," I said. "Now there's a wholesome dietary essential."

  "Fine," she said. "I'll go check things out, bring back a full report. On second thought, maybe I'll just keep it to my— Hey. Who's that?"

  I set down the canned cheese and moved back to the window just in time to see a willowy figure coming out Ash's front door in Levi's and broken-down boots, tossing back a hank of long, black hair like she was cracking a whip. Ash, in the bed of the pickup, handed down a second chair to the woman, who hoisted it smartly.

  "Jesus Christ," Geneva said. "It's Heather Starbird."

  Heather Starbird was one of those tough, sexy girls who looked like they should be driving a forldift or wrestling a live crocodile on the Discovery Channel. She and her boyfriend, Tripp Redmond, had moved to Mooney while we were living in Nashville, two or three years before, but they'd quickly become minor local legends, and so, when I came back to town, I became aware of her by reputation, would see her drive by in her old wood-paneled Buick wagon and think, Oh, there goes Heather Starbird, even though I'd never had occasion to meet her. Heather cleaned houses and commercial buildings for a living, while Tripp had a lucrative business repairing air-conditioning in automobiles until an even more lucrative sideline in marijuana farming brought him to the attention of Sheriff Marjo, who sent him off on a two-year, taxpayer-sponsored vacation to the Department of Criminal Justice in Cherokee County. Without Tripp, everybody expected Heather to disappear quietly, but she'd stuck around, looking vacant and mysterious as she drove her wagon from one job to the next, her ropy black hair flying out the window. There were all kinds of stories about her, that she was one-quarter Cree Indian, that you could see old needle tracks inside her arms if you looked hard enough, that she was just hanging around waiting for the right time to try to break Tripp out of prison.

  "What's she doing here?"

  "Moving furniture?" Geneva said.

  "How old is Heather Starbird, anyway?" I said. I couldn't help noticing the delineation of her triceps, the tanned ribbon of skin between her jeans and her green tank top as she carried the chair up the steps.

  "I dunno—thirty?"

  "You're sweet," I said, "but there's no way that girl's a day over twenty-five." We watched as Ash carted a small table from the pickup and in through the front door. He met Heather coming out, and they did one of those laughing after-you, no-after-you tangos.

  "Well, you know how it is. Skinny girls look older."

  "Right." Heather stood on the cinder blocks, twisting her hair into a knot at the back of her neck, her long legs planted shoulder-width apart.

  "I mean, look at her! Those hipbones are like doorknobs."

  "Is this supposed to be making me feel better?" I said.

  "Come on, Lucy. There's not a chance on God's green earth Ash has got something going on with Heather Starbird. It's right in your backyard, for heaven's sake!" It sounded like Geneva was trying to convince
herself as much as me. "Maybe he hired her to do some cleaning for him."

  "That must be it."

  "Well, I'm not standing around here guessing. Give me that box."

  "You can't go out there!"

  "Why not? It's a free country."

  I stood at the window watching Geneva cross the yard, watched Ash greet her with a kiss on the cheek, watched him take the box from her and set it on the step and introduce her to Heather, who immediately went back indoors, leaving Ash and Geneva out front to chat for a minute or two before she, too, followed Ash inside.

  I turned and went into Jude's room and started picking up dinosaurs and putting them in his toy box, even though I knew I'd catch an earful from him when he got home and found I'd moved them. Then I went back into the kitchen, took a package of hamburger meat out of the freezer, and set it on the drain board. Through the window I saw Heather sitting on the tailgate of Ash's truck, swinging her legs and smoking a cigarette. Ash and Geneva came outside, and Heather flicked her butt into the dirt and stood up, brushing her hands on the seat of her jeans as Geneva walked back toward the house.

  I hurried down the hall to my bedroom. "Lucy?" Geneva called as she came in the door.

  "Back here!" I grabbed a pile of dirty laundry off the chair in the corner to make myself look busy.

  "You don't fool me for a minute," Geneva said, coming into the bedroom. "I saw you standing there with your nose up against the kitchen window."

  "Don't you need to run along?" I said. "Your family will be home any minute."

  "I was right," she said, taking a seat at the edge of the bed. "She's cleaning the place for Ash. The guy he bought the trailer from gave him her name." And even if he hadn't, Ash would have found her anyway. A sexy, black-haired girl with track marks, a boyfriend in prison, and a pot farm—they probably broadcast satellite signals to each other, something beyond the range of the ordinary human ear.

  "The furniture came from one of her clients," Geneva went on as I started sorting the laundry. "Ash happened to mention his place wasn't furnished, and Heather told him about this lady she works for down near Kildare whose renter moved out and had some stuff she wanted to get rid of. Ash got the whole lot for thirty bucks—a couple of chairs, an end table, a chest of drawers, even a mattress."

  "Good for him," I said. "Looks like he'll be needing it."

  We heard Ash's truck start up, and Geneva and I moved over to the window and watched it roll slowly past the house on its way out to the main road, Ash at the wheel, Heather in the passenger seat, smoking and staring out at nothing. "Must be Happy Hour," I said.

  Geneva turned to me and shook her head. "Don't you ever give anybody the benefit of the doubt?"

  "Anybody, yes. Ash, no."

  "Want to let Jude sleep over tonight? It'll save you a trip back to town."

  I put his pajamas and a clean set of school clothes in a shopping bag, and Geneva took them and drove away. I stuck the hamburger back in the freezer. Without my son to tend to, I had the whole evening to do whatever I wanted. I could scramble an egg for my supper, clean house, balance my checkbook. Better yet, I could lie in the tub eating Rocky Road ice cream and reading Cosmopolitan till I turned into a prune. I stood gazing out the kitchen window at the lights burning from the windows of the trailer, and saw that Ash had left Geneva's box sitting on the cinder-block steps. It would serve him right, I thought, if I went over and decorated his new place from end to end with Easy Cheese.

  I poured myself a glass of iced tea and carried it out onto the front step. The evenings were getting longer, and the air had a sweetness to it, a blend of pine and sun and good red dirt. There's a saying in Texas that springtime is nothing but two or three mild days between winter and summer, but when it was here, it had a way of tricking you into believing it would be endless. Or maybe I knew better, but wanted to believe it anyway. If I hadn't had a problem with wishful thinking, I wouldn't have been where I was in the first place. A bird cried out in the deep woods, and I thought about Hank Williams and his whippoor-will, his midnight train whining low. Maybe it was true that some lights were meant to burn brighter but shorter than others, and the rest of us were left to go on fumbling in the dark as best we could. I had to admit, I missed that light. I wondered if Ash had come back to East Texas because he missed it, too.

  A vehicle turned in off the FM road, headlights bobbing and twisting through the trees toward the house. I thought if I kept still, Ash might not see me sitting there, but the lights, instead of heading around the side of the house, swung into the front yard. There was enough daylight left to see that this wasn't Ash's truck, but a sleek black sports car, a low-slung two-seater.

  The engine died, and a man climbed out of the driver's seat, swiping a hand through his long, dark hair. Something about the gesture gave me goose bumps.

  Then the passenger door opened, and I jumped to my feet, spilling my tea. When Denny was off in Nashville, or tooling around the countryside with her band, I couldn't stand to think about her sometimes because it made me miss her so much. But now, as I ran down the steps and pulled her into my arms, I let my feelings for her rush over me, warm and pure and restorative, like bathwater. I never gave a thought to the sports car or the squinting, handsome man. I was only thinking that she was here, making good on her promise to come down and straighten us out.

  I stepped back and held my stepdaughter at arm's length, trying to see past who she'd become to what she'd once been. If there was a ghost of that teenager, it was buried somewhere inside this supple young woman with the fire-engine-red hair and skim-milk complexion, the faint spattering of freckles. She had on jeans and fancy hand-tooled boots and a cut-off T-shirt that read, if you're not sore, you haven't been riding in vegas. She looked good as a redhead. We were almost exactly the same height. Through some weird kismet, she'd come to look like she could be my real daughter, by birth and not just happenstance.

  It wasn't just the hair, though, that made her look different. I couldn't put my finger on it until she stuck out her left hand and I saw the diamond band winking there like a miner's headlamp. Then I knew. It was love that had changed her, that lit her up like candles inside her skin.

  "Oh, my Lord! You're engaged?"

  "Guess again."

  "Not…"

  Denny turned and motioned to the man, who came loping around the car, and hooked her arm through his.

  "Say hello to Mr. and Mrs. William Butler Culpepper the third!" She laughed, her cheeks flushed, her dark blue eyes burning. She looked a little unhinged to me, not just with love but with a recklessness I recognized from Ash's end of the gene pool. "Will, this is my stepmom, Lucy Farrell."

  "Pleased to meet you," Will said in a low, pulled-taffy voice, blinding me with his teeth. No wonder Ash wanted to kill him. It was probably like looking into a mirror, like seeing the reflection of your own snakeskin heart.

  "Well—my goodness!" I took the hand he extended. "Welcome to the family. This is so sudden!"

  "We had a few days off in Vegas, so we, well, we just did it!" Denny said breathlessly, her words tumbling over each other. "I mean, when it's right, why wait? You know yourself what that's like."

  I started to say that I hardly thought my situation was a shining example. But Denny was gazing at Will like his face was a magnet, something she couldn't tear her eyes away from. I could have stood there yammering till I was blue in the face and she wouldn't have heard me. It was too late for that; the damage was done.

  "Where's Daddy?" Denny asked.

  "It's a long story."

  "What else is new?"

  "Come back here and let me show you something."

  I led the way around the side of the house, Denny's arm linked through Will's like a tow chain, chattering a mile a minute: about how they'd been playing craps at the casino at Caesar's Palace and Will had started winning and then kept on winning, and when the pot got to eight thousand, they'd cashed in and run over to Harry Winston and bought the ring, then
hopped in a cab and gone straight to the Happy Together wedding chapel. I had to admit, it did sound madcap and romantic. But then, I knew firsthand all about madcap and romantic.

  We rounded the corner into the backyard and Denny pulled up short, stopping her narration in midsentence. "What the hell is that?"

  "Looks like a trailer," Will drawled. I glanced over at him to see if he was being funny, but there didn't seem to be an ironic bone in his body.

  "I can see that. What's it doing here?"

  Just then, the sound of another engine could be heard making its way up the road. As Ash's truck appeared around the side of the house, Denny threw up her arm and waved, and he pulled in next to the trailer and cut the engine.

  He got out carrying two oversized plastic bags from Wal-Mart, dropping them on the running board as Denny hurried forward to give him a hug.

  "Oh, Daddy," Denny said. "What are you doing! This is just so, so crazy!"

  "I might ought to ask you the same thing, baby girl."

  "I've been so worried about you! The people at the rehab called me when you took off. Didn't you ever stop to think about that? Couldn't you have just called and told me what you were doing?"

  He smiled at his daughter and smoothed her hair. "You mean you were so worried about me, you drove all the way down here to check on me? Looks like you'd have more important things to do than that."

  "Well, no, I… We just wanted to tell you in person."

  "Tell me what?"

  "Daddy, you remember Will." Her voice quavered a little.

  "Be hard to live in Nashville any length of time and not know Will Culpepper." Ash looped his arm around Denny's neck and together they walked toward us, Ash giving Will the full brunt of his gaze. "I hear you're playing in my daughter's band now."

  Will's Adam's apple rolled. "Yes, sir."

  "Well, good. Maybe you can keep an eye on her for me. See, we have a deal, Denny and me. I made her swear on her life she'd never get mixed up with a musician. I promised her if she did, I'd have no choice but to chase him down and cut off his—"