He sighs, meaning we got to change the subject before we get into one of our fights. “Who watched the baby last night?”
“I did. She cried a lot, but that’s okay.” I’d like to tell him more, how freaked-out I felt, or how it’s crazy that there’s always something to do—boil water, change a diaper, feed, burp, walk, and then all of it all over again—and how that keeps surprising me. How I don’t know how to get a onesie over her head, or how tight to pull the diaper around her tummy, or how hard to thump her back to get the burp to come. How I don’t know if I should wrap her tight in the baby blanket, because it seems too claustrophobic. And how I didn’t know about how light and hollow she’d feel, how much she’d squawk, how red-faced and blond-haired and angry she’d be.
But I’m trying hard to do what I promised, which is not get so wrapped up in this new situation that I forget about him. So instead I say, “How was work?”
“Same.” He tucks in a pinch of chew and tilts his head. “Wish I’d get off day shift. I get off when you go on. You going to come by tonight?”
I look up at a car pulling in the parking lot. “I don’t know. Amber and all. Can you come to my place?”
“Maybe,” he says. “I’ll see how I feel.”
I tug at his shirt. “I’ll do my best to seduce you if you do.”
But he doesn’t smile. “I don’t know what Tess was doing anyway, sleeping with Simon.”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s a jerk.”
“There was nothing better to do.”
“Tess has always been too damn wild. Plus she felt like she didn’t exist or something if she wasn’t using her body. Do you know what I mean? She was never not sleeping around.”
I giggle as I do Tess’s chant: “I like the boys, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like the boys.” I can picture her exactly, her arms above her head, her hips thrusting in a dance, her dark hair whipping around her head, laughing as she teased herself.
“But Simon?”
I shrug, because that is indeed a mystery. Simon was a proud member of the Cowboy Christian Fellowship, organizer of revival meetings at the rodeos. Not because there’s anything wrong with Jesus, I guess, but because Simon never stopped to consider Jesus much; he was more interested in telling people that he was riding broncs for the Lord, and anyone knows that just doesn’t make any sense. And because he’d do things like give us bumper stickers that said GOD ANSWERS KNEE-MAIL. And because he actually asked us to donate money to him so that he could buy a Harley Davidson, and he gave us little cards on which he’d written: “Psalm 18:10 reads ‘He flew upon the wings of the wind.’ Please help me do the same.” Which is just to say, as Kay put it, this religion wasn’t coming out of anyplace true, it was just the worst and saddest kind of dedication, because it didn’t involve any thought.
That’s how it was with Simon. He was the sort whose talk couldn’t be trusted. He was wispy. For example, he sure changed his tune about abortion when it came down to his future and suddenly he wasn’t so against it anymore.
What Simon really wanted was for his parents not to know. In fact, that was the one good thing about having the baby, Tess said—that it kept Simon from getting out of it completely free and clear. At least he had to fess up. Not that it mattered much, because after his parents found out they signed him up for classes at the college in Alamosa and sent him over there early for summer classes. They said he told them he wanted no part of anything. So Tess did what they asked, which was to put that she didn’t know who the father was on the hospital papers, because otherwise the government would subtract money from his paycheck for child support and all and it wouldn’t be fair for a kid to follow him around for the rest of his life, especially since he wanted the abortion too. “They got a point,” Tess had said. “There’s no need for him to get sucked into Libby’s Situation.” That’s what she called it, Libby’s Situation. I said I didn’t care, go ahead and leave off Simon’s name, because we were going to be just fine ourselves. But Derek knows about all this, so I don’t say anything. But then it’s quiet for a while, so I say, “I wonder if he ever thinks of her?”
“Who?”
“Simon. If he thinks of Amber.”
Derek shrugs. “I doubt it.”
“I thought he might come back.”
“You did?” Derek sounds surprised, because this is something I’ve never told him.
“Well, I thought he might come back and hold Tess’s hand when she gave birth or something. I think Tess did too, because those last few days, when she was home and not feeling so great, she kept looking around, like she was expecting someone. Every time a car pulled in our drive, she’d heave herself up and look out the kitchen window to see who it was.”
“Who was it?”
“Well, you mostly. Sometimes it was Clark.”
“Just stopping in to check on his new girlfriend? His about-to-give-birth girlfriend?”
“Derek, shut up. You know what I keep thinking about? How when Tess went into labor she asked the nurse to have me wait outside. ‘She wants to do it alone, honey,’ the nurse said. I thought maybe Tess would let me in. I can see her not asking Kay, because she’d likely get yelled at the whole time, but I thought maybe Tess’d want me there. How come you think she didn’t want me?”
Derek shrugs. “You got me.”
“She was in there such a long time, Derek.”
“I know.”
“Twenty-six hours.”
“Yeah.”
“I had no idea it could take so long, did you? And finally they called me in and someone handed me a baby and said, ‘Here’s a little girl,’ and I looked at Tess and she was sleeping, or pretending to. Her hair was all knotted up and there were bruises under her eyes, and there was throw-up on her nightgown and she smelled like blood. Blood and throw-up. I was so surprised. Because Amber was a girl, and because she was so blotchy purple, and because Tess wasn’t smiling and lit up. I kept thinking, Naw, this can’t be right, this is just not what it’s supposed to be. I’m just realizing that now. How surprised I was then.”
Derek spits his chew out on the sidewalk, then drinks some water from a bottle he’s got near him and spits that out too. “Libby, you’re a mother now. That doesn’t surprise anyone except you.” Then, like I knew he would, he adds, “You just have to agree I ain’t got what it takes to be a decent father.”
“You keep saying that. You don’t have to be.”
“Okay. Just don’t ask.”
“I’m not asking.”
“You and me, we were smart enough to be careful.”
“Yeah.”
“So it doesn’t seem fair.”
“No.”
“She’s the one who messed up.”
“It’ll be okay, Derek. You’ll see.”
“The problem with Tess is that you were always taking care of her and she let you. She used you.”
“No she didn’t.”
“She did so.”
“Drop it, Derek. And anyway, it’ll be okay because this morning I helped Kay and Baxter, they were working calves. Amber slept in her car seat the whole time. Babies can adapt to anything. It’ll work out.”
Derek snorts. At first I think it’s at me, but I look up and see Ed Mongers’ old orange VW bus pulling in the parking lot. There’s two kind of folks around here, as Derek likes to say, the ranching kind and the escape-people-hippie kind, and Ed Mongers is this second kind and Derek’s not mean about it, he just finds those sorts amusing. He nods and says, “Howdy,” when Ed walks by us, but sort of like he’s being ornery, and Ed says, “Hello there,” back with a smile on his face, and he surprises me by winking at me, like he knows we’re all teasing each other just a bit. He’s got on jeans and a T-shirt and so if you didn’t know Ed you’d think he was just like everyone else, but everybody around here knows that he lives in a house that’s U-shaped and made of tires with slanted windows on one side and extra tires piled all around. There’s a crummy-looking gree
nhouse behind it, and a bunch of white boxes that I guess are for his bees. He sells honey at the store, and I hope that’s not his only income, because there’s just not that many people out here that eat a lot of honey.
“I ought to go back in.”
Derek nods and looks sideways at me. “Want me to take a look at your car sometime?”
“It’s not making that noise anymore.”
“Tell me if it does.”
“All right.”
He hangs his head and rubs his thumb and finger across his eyes. I can tell how tired he is because he winces, like he doesn’t have the energy to keep his eyes open.
I say, “You should look for a different job. Or make them promote you to driller.” He shrugs his shoulders at that, though, so I add, “You going to go home and sleep?”
“Maybe rent a movie.”
I run my hand down his back. “Sneak by later if you can.”
“Amber sleeping in your room?”
“Well, yeah. But I can move her over to Tess’s space.”
“Well.”
“Derek, she’s what, a week old? That’s not old enough to know what’s going on. Believe me.”
“What if she wakes up crying?”
“You’re just inventing something to be mad about.”
“No I’m not.”
“Because you think she’s going to ruin our lives.”
“No, I think maybe it will be hard to have sex with a baby hollering.”
“Just give her a chance.”
“I’m giving it a chance.” He touches my nose, and then kisses me on the lips, a soft kiss, and then his lips are on my neck. He’s smiling as he kisses because he knows I don’t like it when he kisses me that much outside the store but that I do like it, of course, because one thing Derek knows about me is that his kisses drive me crazy, they really do, they send me spiraling in a new direction every time, and he likes to kiss me just to see me change the way a person changes when they go from existing in life to being caught somewhere magical instead.
Finally he stops and hugs me, and then he pushes himself to his feet and walks to his truck. He’s wearing Rustler jeans, since they’re the cheapest kind and they get tore up so much at work. Usually I wish he’d get a better brand so he’d look nicer, but this time the sight of those skinny legs in those cheap jeans just makes me feel sorry. Sorry that he probably won’t ever have any better. Sorry that his life isn’t a little easier, a little more fun. Sorry that he’s feeling bad about us, about something that wasn’t his fault. Sorry that we’re together but that we both suspect it’s not love. Sorry that we were just kissing and now we have an ache that we can’t do nothing about. I feel so sorry that it’s not until he’s out of sight for a good long while that I can turn and head back into the store.
Here’s a smart thing I learned from Tess: If you want someone to keep a promise, you tell the whole world about that promise.
Telling the town about our deal was Tess’s way of making sure I wouldn’t back out. That was smart, because maybe I did want to change my mind a time or two. Then I realized I couldn’t. Not unless I wanted to leave town. Not unless I didn’t care if I ever faced these people again.
“All I asked her to do,” Tess would say at the start of every conversation, “was drive me to Denver for the abortion.”
And I’d say, “Tess, that’s enough now.”
And she’d say, “Libby, I can tell the story if I want to.” She’d rub her white T-shirt, stretched tight over her big belly, and say, “But no, my big sister wouldn’t do that for me. No, Libby had another alternative. She wanted me to carry the baby. If I carried the baby, she’d raise it. Sounds noble, don’t it? But she don’t know what she’s in for.” Then she shot me a look that meant, Now that everyone knows they’ll hold you to it.
My favorite response to this conversation came from Frank. What he said to her was, “Tess, your sister is a noble gal. She’ll be a good mom. Noble.” He kept saying that word over and over, like maybe he hadn’t used it before and wanted to test it out. Later that week, he gave me a raise. That’s pretty much how it went—once Tess was really showing and Kay had been informed, everyone in town found out and after that they were generous with me. They weren’t with Tess, which is maybe why she made plans to hightail it out of here after the baby came. But for me, doors got opened and people patted me on the back. When I mopped the floors, people’d stop to ask how I was doing, had I decorated a room yet, was I pretty excited? They said things like, “Aw, you’re a good kid, Libby,” or, “You got the makings to be a fine mama.”
All that made me believe I could do it. It was nice, you know, making people proud because I’d done the right thing, but also having them sympathize a bit, because the thing I promised wasn’t so easy.
Stupid me. I thought Derek would feel that way too. I should have realized long ago that he wouldn’t, and that anyway, all that attention would never be enough.
THREE
It shouldn’t be this hot. Something is wrong. I feel like the old-timers and their croaky In all my days here, it ain’t never been like this, but it’s true. It’s never been like this. Even I remember how on summer afternoons the clouds would boil up and send down rain. Now the heat feels dangerous, like it’s pressing down to suck away the life of this earth—and even worse, it’s doing it quietly, like an evil thing waiting for us to not notice so it can pounce.
Kay’s note says, “Amber was up most of the evening, so probably she’ll sleep good tonight. Hot, isn’t it?”
The hot part is true, but the other part is turning out not to be the case.
Amber is screaming her head off, maybe because the heat makes it feel like her lungs won’t work. I’ve got her at the edge of the tub, about to give her a bath—her first bath, in fact, even though I haven’t scrubbed out the tub with Borax yet. Which is something I meant to do, but later , because her first bath would be in the kitchen sink, but the kitchen sink is full of dirty dishes be in the kitchen sink, but the kitchen sink is full of dirty dishes because the dishwasher suddenly broke and I can’t hold a crying baby and do dishes at the same time, and I can’t clean out a bathtub and hold a baby at the same time, and so this baby is just going to survive in this gross tub.
Baths are supposed to be good for calming a colicky baby. Besides, the back of Amber’s sleeper and the back of her body are covered in yellow crap, pretty much all the way up to her neck, and I have no idea how a tiny baby shits with such force.
I don’t know how to give her a bath, though. She’s slick and kicking, and I can’t tell if the water’s too warm or too cold, or how much of it to put in, but finally I get her down in the tub, with my hand cupped behind her head. She looks scared when I put her in the water, and her arms clutch at the air, like she’s looking for something to hold. Since there’s nothing, she braces her arms like she’s holding air, like she’s fighting hard to hang on to even that. I run my finger down her forehead and nose to calm her. She keeps still and stops crying, thank god, and she looks like she’s busy feeling whatever it is that she feels.
“Good idea,” Kay says. I turn around to see her standing behind me in her pajamas, which consist of her white, baggy underwear. She’s got her arms crossed over her chest and she’s leaning against the doorframe, slender and muscled, light blue veins crossing underneath her white skin.
“Sorry. I tried keeping her quiet.”
When you look at Kay, you can’t help but notice how beautiful she is, even if you don’t want to notice a thing like that. Being pretty is the last thing on Kay’s mind, and it ought to be the last thing on anyone’s mind, according to her, because it’s just one more example of a ridiculous world where everyone is hell-bent on seeing what doesn’t really matter, basically so that they can avoid seeing what does, which is the fucking inside of people. All this came out in one of her recent drunken rants, in her gone-berserk tone of voice, and what I was thinking at the time was, Kay, there aren’t that many people t
hat want to see the inside of you, believe me. But all I’m thinking now is, Kay, you are so pretty; you and Tess both have that, like it or not.
Kay yawns. “When’d she lose her umbilical cord?”
“Yesterday. I forgot to tell you. I saved the stub in her memory box.”
“Libby, that is—”
“Disgusting, I know. But it seemed crazy to throw it away since it’s the part that was attached to Tess, after all.”
She sits down on the toilet seat and her bony knees bump my side. “I remember bathing Tess. Just like this. Same tub, same kind of night.” She grabs for her toothbrush and starts brushing, and I know from the smell that it was whiskey and Coke that she’d been drinking before she fell asleep. “She thinks she’s so good, so brave, that Tess. But you know, one of these days she’s not going to feel superior to anything anymore. That’s when you know you’ve grown up. You quit feeling superior.” Then she taps her knee against my back, like she’s playing. “I was pretty smart once. Then I wasn’t. I don’t remember some of my life, your life. That’s crazy. That’s wrong.” She sighs and looks out the window across from the toilet, then leans sideways over to the sink and spits out the toothpaste. “I was busy with something else.” After a bit, she says, “Some of my boyfriends, they were all right, don’t you think? Remember Sy? He was the one with a motorcycle. He was nice.”
“Yeah.”
“And Grant. He fixed up this place a lot.”
“He built me my bookshelf,” I say.
“Did he? I don’t remember that. But then there was T.J. He was no good.”
“Look at how much Amber likes the water.”
“Give her a few weeks and she’ll be lying there, kicking and splashing and smiling. Libby, I always wanted to ask, if any of those boyfriends, did they—”
I wondered if she’d ever ask this. Probably because she has enough reason to. With some of her boyfriends it was something floating on the air, and she should have known that, and she should have been wondering all along.
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