Sky Bridge

by Laura Pritchett

  “I realize it’s a bad time to leave, maybe.”

  “No,” I say. “It’s a good time. It’s the right time. I’ll see you around, Derek. I’m okay.”

  “Yeah?” He reaches out to touch my cheek. He turns and then pushes the swinging door open, and I watch him leave through the big glass window that separates the meat room from the rest of the store. His cheap, dirty jeans, T-shirt, the hand that’s still rubbing the back of his burnt neck.

  The tears that are on their way are gonna be a relief, because they’ll wash out the sting. I go to the bathroom and let them come till they’re done. Then I test out my voice. “Hey , hey! How are you?” I say to the mirror, at the ugly, stupid me that’s looking back. I want to make sure my voice doesn’t sound quivery. I want to make sure I can hold it steady. “I’m fine,” I say. “Just fine.”

  I make faces at myself. To cheer myself up, maybe, or maybe to disgust myself even more. Maybe because I don’t know what else to do. I jut out my lower jaw, then squish up my lips, lower my eyes, stick out my tongue, and then lift my eyes up and smile.

  “You jerk,” I say. I don’t know if I’m saying that to myself or to Derek or to the world, and it doesn’t even matter. It applies to everything and everyone.

  I finish cleaning the meat room, restock a few gallons of milk, mop all the aisles. Right before the store closes, I go to the Employees-Only part of the store. I’m watching my hands and I swear it seems as if they’re working on their own. I’m right next to the palettes that hold all the pop and beer, and I watch my hands pick up a twelve-pack of Coors Light and throw it in the trash. Into the big, gray trashcan that sits next to the break room. I just heave that beer right in.

  Man oh man, I tell myself, what the hell am I doing here, and how’m I going to explain this to Frank?

  I’m trying to figure that answer out as I dump the bathroom trash in the trashcan too, looking in to see if it covers the beer. I see some of the wads of toilet paper filled with my snot. I’ll say, Frank, I don’t know how the beer got there. Huh, who knows? I’ll say, Frank, I’ve stole from you here and there before, and that’s just the way it goes. I’ll say, I needed some beer and I was broke. I’ll say, I just fucking feel like shit.

  I finish gathering the trash and walk up front to see what Frank and Arlene are up to. I can see outside through the glass door, and the parking lot is dark and deserted and there’s no sign of Derek’s truck—he’s not blinking his lights at me to show he’s waiting. Arlene is clipping coupons from the newspaper, which she sends in to the manufacturers even though no customer ever used them, and I think that’s sort of illegal and so she’s a crook too. Frank is in his office, tallying up numbers or whatever he does up there. So I go straight to the back and haul the big plastic bag out to the dumpster. It’s hard to throw a bag that heavy in, but I manage to get it over the edge.

  Right as I’m ready to punch out, Frank comes back and stands in front of the pop and beer crates, but I know he’s only tallying up how much to order. I keep busy, hanging up my apron and getting a plastic cup of ice from the icemaker because I like to crunch the ice in my teeth on the drive home. Probably Frank cheats on his taxes. Probably Arlene takes a dollar or two from the till now and then. Or puts a steak in her purse on her way out. She hasn’t had an easy life, and she needs to make concessions too. When life is shitty, it is so easy to be shitty back.

  Arlene’s already left and Frank’s locked the door, so I have to wait till Frank comes up with his keys to let me out. My eyes hurt, so I keep closing them. My feet hurt from standing all day so I shift from one to the other, one to the other. Frank finally comes up, holding my paycheck. “You want me to cash it?”

  “Please.”

  “Figured. Already counted it out.”

  I sign the back of the check and he hands me two hundred and ten dollars back. As he opens the door for me, he says, “You ought to get a bank account, a savings and checking account.”

  “One of these days I’ll go.”

  “It’s not hard to learn.”

  “One of these days.”

  “If you want me to help you out with that, let me know. I’ll walk over to the bank with you. Okay?”

  “Okay .”

  “Night, Libby.”

  “Night, Frank.”

  He watches me walk to my car. He always waits for it to start before he gets in his own truck, because he knows there’s a long history of it not starting, and he’s been known to jump-start this piece of junk or give me a ride home. He does this because he’s a good guy. But not good enough. Apparently.

  My car starts and I pull away and head down the road. But after a while I pull over, turn around, and drive back to the store.

  I have to climb all the way into the dumpster to get to the bag. Trash-picking, Tess and I called this, and we used to do it all the time, mostly for beauty magazines the store threw out, or sometimes the little bouquets of wilting flowers. I find my twelve-pack and balance it on the corner of the dumpster as I climb out.

  I drink four beers on the way home. They’re warm, but what the hell, and that’s a lot of beer for me, but what the hell. And what the hell, why is it that even when you know something’s going to happen in your head and then it does your body feels snapped to pieces anyway?

  I never know what Kay will be doing when I come home from work—if she’ll be sleeping, or pacing with Amber, or drunk-happy, or drunk-pissed-off, or Gone Berserk. Sometimes she’s some mix of these, like happy drunk and cooing over Amber, or asleep on the couch with Amber on her stomach, or glaring at me as she thrusts a newly made bottle at me and heads for bed. So normally I’m not surprised at anything, because the possibilities are endless. But what I do see makes my eyebrows shoot up, because there’s Kay, sitting on the couch with Amber awake in the crook of her arm and Baxter beside her, and all of them are watching TV, and all I can think is, I am really damn drunk.

  “Hey,” I say, because they’re looking up at me.

  “Howdy, Libby.” Baxter’s got his feet up on the table. He’s wearing a white undershirt and jeans and white socks. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him sit like that before, and I can’t believe he’s just sitting there, relaxing, right next to Kay.

  “Amber’s been up for a good two hours,” Kay says. “This is the unsleepiest kid in the world. You’ll want to feed her before you go to bed.”

  “Okay.”

  “Her rash looks like it’s clearing up.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’re watching a movie,” says Baxter, nodding his head at the TV. “I was over here anyway with the swamp cooler. See?” Now he nods at the window and, sure enough, there’s a big gray box stuck there. “Does it feel cooler?”

  Actually it does. I hadn’t noticed it till now, although how I could have missed it with all that noise is beyond me. I’m pretty tipsy and so I’m concentrating on seeming anything but.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Wow. That’s real nice. Wow.”

  “Did you do those drawings, Lib?” He points toward the two I’ve just taped to the wall. One is my version of the TV-PAINTER’S “Sky Bridge,” but in charcoal, blended together so it’s soft and hazy. The other is a new watercolor, a whole piece of paper filled with one scarlet mallow flower, and the thing I’m most proud of is that I got the white space right, which is something that’s tricky to do with watercolors, since you can’t ever get the white space back.

  “Ever since she was a kid,” Kay’s saying, “always demanding art supplies for birthday presents.”

  I’m still standing up in the doorway of the living room, so Kay scoots over, closer to Baxter, and pats the couch. “Have a seat. How was work?”

  “Fine,” I say. I don’t want them smelling the beer, so I stay standing where I am. “I think I’ll get a glass of water. Either of you want something?”

  “Nope,” Kay says for them both.

  “Guess I’ll head for bed.”

  “Come get your baby.” Kay hands he
r to me and I hold my breath as I grab her. But Kay doesn’t notice nothing; she goes back to watching TV, which is what Baxter does too, so I walk to the bathroom.

  Kay hasn’t had a boyfriend since the summer I was sixteen, which is the summer she was fixing fence with Baxter and the barbed wire came springing loose from the fence stretcher and caught her across the throat and there was a lot of blood. I wasn’t there but I heard about it, how Baxter got her to the hospital just in time. Later, Tess noticed that Kay hadn’t gone out with anyone in a while, hadn’t been drinking so much. Tess was complaining about it, because she liked it when Kay left so she could turn up the music and dance around the house, but I was happy because it was just us after that.

  Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. But damn, Baxter? He’s older and too clean cut and too much of a friend, although I guess none of that really matters. But what does matter is that he knows who Kay is already, and he doesn’t have to go through that process the others did, at the end of which they all packed up to leave.

  Kay’s picked up the bathroom. Our tampon box and toothbrushes have been put away and Kay’s wiped the sink clean and brushed out the toilet. It even smells like glass cleaner.

  I stand there, looking at this clean bathroom until finally I realize I have to pee, and so I put Amber on the floor and sit on the toilet.

  The one good thing about when Kay had a boyfriend was that she paid attention to things. But there were bad things too, like trying to tell if her new guy was a nice one or a mean one. Figuring out whether he liked beer or liquor, whether he’d stay one night or a few weeks or a year. Baxter I already know, so there isn’t that much to watch for.

  Maybe he just put in the swamp cooler and decided to stay late to watch a movie. Maybe. But something about the way they were sitting makes me doubt it. As I wash my face, I think, Well, what the hell. At least one of us will have a boyfriend. And maybe Kay will rise to the occasion.

  I was six and Tess was three, and we were sitting under the table at a bar, and on one side were Kay’s legs, her jeans and boots, and on the other side there was some man’s legs, also jeans and boots, but bigger. It smelled like beer and the floor was sticky, and we were sitting on brown paper towels that Kay had put down there for us. I had a loop of string and I’d just learned how to make a Jacob’s Ladder, and I was trying to show Tess but she was too little and so she was just batting her hand against my string, which didn’t bother me. We’d all been out to eat, which was special, and we were allowed to order dessert, which was even more special, and I had a strawberry sundae and Kay had reached out and put some whipped cream on my nose, which made Tess laugh, and now I was sitting under a table playing string games with my sister.

  When we left the bar, it was just the three of us, and Kay was carrying Tess in her arms. When we got to the truck, I climbed in and she put Tess on my lap, and Tess’s eyes were open-closing the way they do when a kid’s just about to fall asleep. When Kay started to drive, she also started to cry, which confused me, maybe just because I was a kid or maybe because when you’re happy you tend to think other people are too. She said something like, “I’m sorry about yesterday, Libby,” and I said, “What happened yesterday?” and she looked at me, surprised, and said, “That wasn’t yesterday, was it? I’m going crazy. That was years ago. It’s the thing I’m most sorry for. I kicked you across the kitchen. I guess you were only two. Wasn’t yesterday. Sorry, I’m drunk. Who was I then?” She wiped her nose and smiled at me. “I am pretty damn drunk. And you were looking up at me with this confused face. That’s what made me stop. Was your face.”

  And I remember saying something to her along the lines of “I’m not confused now, Mom.”

  That only made her go back to crying. “Yes you are,” she whispered. “I’ve lost it with Tess a few more times, I know that. Because then there was two of you, and I was alone, and everybody was always yelling at me, wanting something. Once I held her under cold water in the bathtub, just to get back at her for crying so much.”

  I looked down at Tess’s face on my lap and watched her little mouth breathing. She was wearing a blue velvet dress with a lace top, a dress that I’d loved when it was mine, and it was sticky and smelled bad, but still it was beautiful. I tried to picture her as a baby, flailing in a tub of water.

  “I’m so sorry,” Kay said. “I’m so sorry I did that to the both of you. I was so tired. And I wanted my own land. And I wanted my time. For me. And I wanted a boyfriend. And I didn’t want you.”

  I looked out the window, at the dark passing fields moving by. We were almost home when I asked her, “Mom? But why’d you kick me?” Because all along I figured that’s what she was trying to tell me and her story was never getting there.

  “Oh, just because you wanted chocolate milk. Coco milk, you called it, and you stamped your feet and screamed, ‘Coco, coco. Bad Mommy,’ and you threw your milk glass at me and I kicked you across the kitchen and said ‘For-the-millionth-time-we-do-not-have-chocolate-milk!’ I was so afraid someone’d see the bruises. But I kept you at work with me, you and me and Baxter and Adeline working and pretending nothing was wrong, until the bruises were gone, and I remember thinking, Don’t kick her again, and one reason was because I didn’t want to be hiding bruises. That was the reason. Jesus. It was just so hard. You don’t understand. I know you don’t understand. It’s okay if you don’t understand. It’s just that I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be taking you to a bar with me at night. You shouldn’t be the mother to your sister.”

  I told that story to Tess one night when we were older, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t. I was drunk, though. We were both at a party, standing around a fire and a keg, drinking beer from plastic cups. She was standing next to me, dancing a little in place to the music. She listened and said, “What a bitch,” and walked off. Later she came up to me and said, “Probably that’s why I hate water,” and walked off again. Later that night, she touched my arm and said, “We got stuck with a stinkhole of a ma, didn’t we?” And on our way home, sitting in the bed of a truck with a bunch of other kids, being driven by some senior who thought it was fun to peel around the corners of old dirt roads as he took people home, she had to yell so I could hear her and she said, “Probably everyone loses it every once in awhile. It don’t mean she doesn’t love us.”

  “She loves us, sure,” I yelled back.

  “I don’t like kids, either. I just want a different kind of life. Nothing wrong with that. What do you think about kids, Libby?”

  I shrugged, but I wanted to tell her something and couldn’t find the words. It was something about the way kids love. For some damn reason, they operate under the assumption that if they love enough the world won’t be so confusing. If they love enough, good things will happen. I guess that’s it. It’s just that kids love too much. They haven’t grown out of it yet.

  ELEVEN

  “Adiós, Lib, Ad-i-ós.” That’s what Kay says every night when I come home from work. I walk in the door and she walks out. I watch her truck’s headlights swing away, and listen to the tires crunch gravel, and if I walk out the door a bit I can see her drive all the way to Baxter’s.

  Nobody’s said anything. Kay and Baxter, together. It just hangs there, like something so obvious that nobody needs to point it out.

  Most nights, after she leaves, I sit on the couch and have a beer. I’m on my third stolen twelve-pack and I’m drinking too much—even I can see that. Sometimes I flip through the channels and sometimes I close my eyes and listen to the cicadas and crickets and wind. I don’t like the swamp cooler after all—it doesn’t feel familiar—so I turn it off and open all the windows. Then I feed Amber, put her in bed, and fall asleep myself.

  I wait until I’m totally exhausted, because otherwise I can’t sleep at all.

  Now that Kay’s not here, I hear things. I think about all the crazies that drive by on the highway. Every little thing makes me jump. I have nightmares about running with Amber in my arms, trying to get a
way from evil, which is not a person but a force, like wind, and it catches us anyway and tears us to pieces. When I wake up, I have so much fear caught up in my throat that I can barely breathe. So I daydream the night away, dreaming Tess back into my life a million different ways, and men falling in love with me a million different ways, and me proving to Kay that I’m not going to turn out like her after all, and me proving to all of them—to the whole damn world—that I’m strong and sure and worthy.

  So much for brave Libby, who can’t even sleep in a house by herself. So much for the put-together me. What am I supposed to do? Say, Kay, can you quit going to Baxter’s, because I’m afraid of the dark? Fuck me.

  If I was braver, I’d call up Ed, but I like him too much and I don’t want to fuck up whatever nice feelings he might have about me. And Miguel’s working all the time, extra hours, because he’s got this plan to buy a house in Lamar for him and his cousins, because he’s ready to be out of Shawny’s old house. I can’t even talk to Arlene, or Baxter, or Frank. When I try to talk about how hard it is even to take a shower, or how much Amber cries, they act sorry but really they’re not. Basically, they’re glad to see me growing up, which means getting smashed down.

  Amber, though, doesn’t scare me like she used to—she’s sturdier—but she’s still confusing. Like, I don’t know how someone is supposed to ignore cries when the baby is just two feet away. She usually wakes five times a night and I know that’s too many and that I should let her fuss a little so she’ll go for longer stretches. That’s what the magazines say, but I think most of those magazines are written by people with a lot of extra time on their hands, and help, and some space in their house. One article said that after the baby came I should start letting things go a bit—for example, quit folding underwear, and take myself out to the spa once in a while, which just made me laugh and think, What a bunch of fuckers.