Pie Town

by Lynne Hinton

  Roger nodded. “We had dinner together last night at the diner. He seems pretty worried. He wanted to come with me today, but he decided he would cook some stew and take it over to your house for you when you come home.” Roger stretched out his legs in front of him. “He figures he’ll drive you when you’re ready to come back.”

  “So you told him you were sending me home,” Malene commented. “This is already planned.”

  Roger grinned. “You need to go home. You’ve been here the entire two weeks, Lena.”

  Malene took another swallow of water. “I just couldn’t leave him this time,” she commented. “I wasn’t sure he was going to pull through.”

  Roger glanced over at their grandson. “He looks good now,” he noted.

  Malene followed his eyes. “Finally,” she responded. “But, Roger, this time was so much worse.” She turned back to her ex-husband and shook her head. “I don’t know how many more times he can do this.”

  “Well, the good thing is that today we don’t have to worry about that,” Roger said. “He came through this crisis, and that’s enough for now.”

  Malene glanced up at the door as a nurse walked into the room. “Hello, Mr. B.,” she greeted the sheriff. “You here to relieve Malene?”

  Roger stood up. “I’m trying to get her to go home,” he replied. “But you know what a hard-head she is.”

  The nurse began checking Alex’s IV bags, the line in his vein. “She loves this boy” was all she said. Syringe in hand, she pushed the fluid into a portal in the IV line. “The doctor wants him to keep taking the antibiotic,” she explained. “But only for a couple more days. It looks like the infection is mostly gone.”

  Alex opened his eyes and smiled and then fell back to sleep.

  “She tell you about last night?” the nurse asked Roger.

  Malene answered before Roger could reply. “Hadn’t gotten to that yet,” she said.

  The nurse shook her head. “We’re still talking about it,” she said. She pulled out a pad of paper from her front pocket and made a note. “Alex is a special kid.” She grabbed the stethoscope from around her neck, placed the end on the boy’s chest, listened for a few seconds, then looked at his vitals blinking on the screen above his bed. She took the stethoscope out of her ears and wrapped it back around her neck. “Sounds good,” she reported. “Finally normal.”

  “No rattles?” Malene asked.

  The nurse shook her head. “Nope, sounds clear. I think the staff wants to do something special for Alex,” she said.

  Roger appeared confused. “Why?” he asked as he sat back down.

  “I’ll explain it to you later,” Malene replied.

  Having finished what she came in to do, the nurse gently patted Alex on the foot. “He saved that little girl’s life.” She shook her head as she watched her patient sleeping. “I still don’t know how he knew,” she said. “Children … I guess they’re just more attuned to stuff than we adults.” She sighed. “Okay, I’ll be back after a while to change that IV and to give him a bath. I’m hoping we can take him out for a spin around the unit later.” She smiled. “I know he’d like to visit some of the other patients.”

  Roger turned to his ex-wife to hear the story about what had happened the previous night.

  Malene met his eyes. “Alex had a dream,” she said. “He woke up about three in the morning and called for me. He told me to go and get the nurse.” She glanced over at the boy. “I thought he was sick or needed something, and I kept telling him that I would get him what he needed, but he insisted that I go and get the nurse on call.”

  Roger waited. “Was something wrong?” he asked.

  “Not with him,” Malene answered. “He had a dream or a message. I don’t know.” She stopped.

  “What?” Roger asked.

  “He told the nurse that the little girl down the hall … the little girl who came in a couple of days ago from the car accident I told you about, remember?” she asked.

  Roger nodded. He recalled hearing about the terrible crash that had killed both of the child’s parents and her two siblings and almost killed her. The staff at the hospital had been trying to contact family members, but they lived out of the country and had not been located. Malene had called Roger to see if he knew any way to assist them. He had made some calls to other sheriff’s offices and to a few contacts across the border into Mexico, but he had not found any additional information.

  “He told the nurse that something was wrong and the little girl was in trouble,” Malene reported. “We tried to talk Alex out of it, tell him that he was just having a dream. We thought maybe his fever had spiked again, but he finally got so adamant that she go down the hall that she did.” Malene shook her head again.

  “And?” Roger asked. He had moved onto the edge of his seat, waiting for the rest of the story.

  “And somehow the electric cord to her alarms had come unplugged,” Malene said. “When the nurse entered her room, the little girl had gone into cardiac arrest and wasn’t breathing. They did a code blue and saved her.” She took the last sip of her water.

  “And Alex knew this?” Roger asked.

  Malene nodded. “He knew it before it happened. It was crazy.”

  “Has he talked about it this morning?” Roger asked.

  Malene shrugged. “He woke up at six and asked about her, but that’s been it.”

  Roger looked over at his grandson. He knew Alex was a special boy, had some relationship with Malene’s dead mother, was more sensitive than any child he had ever met, but Roger had never known anything like this to happen. He glanced back over to Malene. “And how is the little girl?” he asked.

  “Critical, but alive,” she replied. “And still has no family with her.”

  “I’m sure the local force will figure it out,” Roger responded. “They’ll track down the grandparents.” He watched Alex sleeping, and the conversation paused between the two.

  “What do you think this means?” Malene finally asked.

  Roger shrugged. “It just means he’s more special than we even knew.”

  Malene didn’t respond. “I’m afraid it means he doesn’t have much more time here,” she said softly.

  Roger turned to his ex-wife. “I don’t think that’s what it means at all,” he said. “Why would that have to be what this means?”

  “Mama,” she answered.

  “What about your mama?” he asked.

  “You know that she had this extra way of knowing things just before she died,” Malene replied. “She knew Angel was going to give us trouble. She knew we were getting divorced. She knew Lawrence was getting deployed.” Malene shook her head. “It was just like this,” she said. “And it was just a couple of months before she passed.” A tear ran down her cheek.

  Roger leaned over and wiped the tear from Malene’s face. “It’s not the same,” he said. “She was sick and he’s just … he’s just a little boy.”

  “Still… .” It was all Malene could say.

  “Still nothing,” Roger noted. “It’s not the same,” he repeated. He turned back to look again at his grandson, who was resting more peacefully than Roger had seen him do in more than two weeks. “He’s just special” was all he could think to say while Malene nodded, dropping her face away from him and trying to trust what Roger was trying so hard to make them both believe.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  When Trina woke up after a nap on the Thursday a few days after Alex came home from the hospital, she knew for sure what she had been trying for weeks to cover up and make go away. She was pregnant. She had fallen asleep after a dinner of leftovers from the diner, curled up on the sofa, the television blaring news of movie stars and their decorating styles. She had worked the breakfast shift for Francine, home from Phoenix but sick with a virus. She had seen Roger before he left to go pick up groceries for Malene and Alex, handed him a card to give to the boy, a get-well card that promised, when he felt stronger, she would play computer games w
ith him, or poker, whatever he liked, and she would feed him ice cream and brownies she got from Fred and Bea. She wanted to ride with the boy’s grandfather over to visit, but once she realized that Roger was leaving right away for the store, she decided not to ask to tag along. She had promised Bea she would cover for Francine for both shifts.

  She had been up since five o’clock in the morning, worked breakfast and lunch, helped Fred wash down all the appliances, mop the floors, and take inventory of what was in the walk-in freezer. When she got home she decided to clean her apartment, and finally, by the time the news came on and she had sat down for the first time that day, she was tired.

  She lay still for a minute, realizing that she was different after this nap, that she felt unlike herself, and considered how it was that she now was unable to deny that something was vastly changed about her. She thought about how it was that she had managed to hide what was happening, what had happened, for the past several weeks, but that now that ability to hide and keep hidden what was going on no longer existed. She thought about how many weeks she had been this way, counted down the days since she had been in Pie Town and the days since she last had sex with Conroe, and figured she must be almost seven or eight weeks along.

  Her period was late by more than a month, and she was usually regular and paid attention to that kind of thing, but up until that evening nap, she had tried to make herself believe that she’d missed a period just because of the leaving she had done, all the walking she did to get to Pie Town, and the stress of hearing the truth from Conroe, the truck driver she met in Amarillo and followed to Tucson.

  She thought she loved him when he offered her a ride alongside him in his new rig, hauling cars from Texas to anywhere west. She thought that all of the bad things that seemed to follow her everywhere she went, all the harm and sorrow and smart city boys, had finally done all the damage they could do and she was free now. She thought that because his name was Conroe, the same name as the tiny little town where her mother had once been happy, he was somehow different from the other men she had met since leaving home and that he was honest when he said she was beautiful and that he didn’t want to sleep with her as much as wake up beside her.

  She fell for him hard and stayed next to him in that big rig, helping him deliver the fancy cars to car lots and rich people who didn’t want to drive their vehicles across the country and the new vans and wagons to the border patrolmen. She believed him when he told her he hadn’t settled down because he had been waiting all this time for her to walk across his path and that he didn’t have to wear a condom because he knew when to pull out. She believed him when he said he was only twenty-four and that he had a little house in Abilene where she could live when she got tired of the travel. Everything he said she took as gospel, and it wasn’t because she was naive or stupid or hadn’t been played before.

  Conroe Jasper was tall and quiet and had hands like her grandfather’s, thick and hard-worked, and she wanted to believe a man could be honorable and interesting. But in the end, he was just like the others, and she had walked all the way from Tucson to the Salt River Canyon before she’d even thought to take a ride with anybody else. She’d never walked so far in her life, but once she found out Conroe was well beyond twenty-four years of age, actually more like thirty-five, married with twin boys, and that the little house in Abilene was really a backroom at his brother-in-law’s place where he already had a wife and a family, she couldn’t stop pressing forward.

  She walked in the heat of the day and late into the night. She walked along the highway, avoiding the stares of the children from backseats of buses and the catcalls from men out their open windows, and finally out across the middle of the desert where coyotes and owls watched her curiously and the stars filled up the skies. She walked until she fainted from exhaustion and woke up in that small clapboard house, with an old Indian woman speaking words she did not understand.

  She stayed until she got the sign of where to head next. She stayed until she heard the name Pie Town. Trina thought she might be pregnant but tried to pretend otherwise, even though the old Indian woman patted the girl’s belly and nodded with a smile. Trina had hoped, tried to make herself believe, that the woman simply wanted to feed her breakfast, thought that she should eat. Now she understood that the old woman had known what she herself had not wanted to know. Trina lay in bed, wondering if Conroe was heading to San Diego to deliver BMWs or El Paso to hand over patrol cars, or if he was home, having already forgotten the girl he said was worth the wait.

  Trina knew her options. She could have an abortion or give the baby up for adoption. She even heard she could sell the baby and make some nice cash if she could find that 1-800 number she had been given when she was sixteen and thought she might have gotten pregnant by Tommy Dexter. She worked afternoons at the garage with her grandfather and had driven his truck clear over to Dallas to take a pregnancy test, and there she met a girl in the waiting room of the clinic who told her about the agency and her plans to sell her baby before it was born. Trina had been lucky that time—the test came back negative—and had never risked that again, at least not until this last time.

  “Maybe this isn’t all bad,” she said to herself, even though she did not believe that to be true. She blew out a long breath and closed her eyes. She had done the very thing she swore she would never do again. She had done exactly the same thing her mother had done. She’d had sex without protection, and she had believed a man who talked too sweet. And now she would probably end up in the same way she had started. Only this time, instead of being the baby, mishandled and starved, beaten by a man who hated anything lovely, she would be the woman, her mother, broken and old, used up and worn down way before her time.

  Trina sat up on the sofa and glanced at the clock. It was after nine o’clock, and she wanted to talk to someone. She wished she were back in Amarillo and could talk to Dusty or Jolene or even Lester, the bartender at the club where she hung out a lot. She hadn’t contacted any of her old roommates since she climbed up into the cab of Conroe’s truck because she knew that both of them and Lester would say the same thing. “You should have known better than to trust anybody with boots that shiny, and a man with a beard is hiding something.”

  Dusty would say that Conroe was too good at being needy and too smooth with his clumsiness. She was always a good read of men, and she had warned Trina that there was just something too clean about this boy, something too covered over. She had even guessed that he was married and had urged Trina to check him out before going out on the first date. Dusty found his name in the phone book on the Internet and told Trina to call the number just to see who answered. Trina had told her no and thrown away the piece of paper that Dusty had handed her while they drank beers on the house at the bar, compliments of Lester.

  Jolene had not been overbearing in her suspicions of Conroe, but she did not approve of Trina packing everything she owned in a suitcase and traveling with him. Jolene told her to leave at least a few things hanging in the closet so he could see them, make it clear that she was coming back and not throwing away everything to drive west with him.

  Lester could have cared less. He shrugged when Trina told him she was heading out with Conroe and said it was her life, but he had told her to call if anything happened and if she needed any help. He had even slipped her twenty dollars, all in ones, the tips from one night at Tank’s Cowboy Bar where he worked, and told her to hide the money for an emergency. He’d thrust the cash into her hands and shaken his head like he also knew that things wouldn’t work out.

  Trina longed to talk to any of her friends. She almost didn’t care that they would say they told her so. She wished she had a cell phone and could dial the numbers of people who didn’t care if she was impulsive or spent too much money on lipstick and would call her Trina Lou or Trinie or Sweetie the way they used to. She wished that she could call and tell them what had happened, how she had discovered that Conroe was married, how she walked outside of the
ir motel room and heard his voice from below, heard him laughing and chatting, so animated and fatherly, so different than she had ever heard him. She had gone out to find him, to bring him back to bed and stay past checkout time, and she stood out on the walkway, listening to him as he talked just beneath her, thinking she was asleep and wouldn’t hear.

  She listened as he talked to children, listened as he talked to his children, heard him tell his sons that he would be home soon and that they were to take care of their mom until he could get back and be the man of the house. She listened, her fingers gripping the rails, her robe hanging open so that the guy next door, watching from the window, could see her breasts, while Conroe promised them gifts from his trip and his presence at their fall baseball games, and then even a few minutes later when he talked to his wife, saying to her that he missed her and that she was the reason he was able to keep going. He said he was almost done with his work in Iraq and knew that what he was doing was good for the country and would give them some much-needed income. He would be home soon, he promised, and he was hopeful that there would be no more long-hauls, no more work overseas.

  Trina stood a floor above Conroe Jasper, two months after leaving Amarillo and falling in love, and could not believe the words that drifted up from below her. When he finished his call and came back to the room with a paper bag with two sausage biscuits, the bottom stained with grease, Trina had started walking. She took some money, packed her things, and never went back to talk to him, and he never went looking. She had walked to Salt River Canyon and then on to Pie Town, and now she was pregnant and alone, and she just wished she had a friend or somebody to talk to.

  Trina got up from her sofa, put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, brushed her hair, and decided to do the most unlikely thing she would ever think to do. She figured that where she was going somebody would be there to listen, if not to talk. She hoped that when she got to where she was going she would find a friend, or at least a listening ear. Trina, pregnant and lost and alone, put on her shoes, the ones the Indian woman had given her, the buckskin moccasins, and walked to church.