by Margo Catts
“No problem,” I said.
“Here you go.” The waitress put a margarita in front of Mindy and another Coke in front of me.
“Oh—I don’t need another—”
“Fella over there sent it.”
I twisted against the back of my chair. Leo, sitting on the far side of the bar at a table of cowboys, raised a glass. With his hat off and his peachy complexion, he didn’t look old enough to be in a bar. Though admittedly, it was a bar that had a little girl playing pool. I put on a smile and waved.
“Who’s that?” Mindy asked.
“Don’t go anywhere,” I said, turning around just as I saw him pushing his chair back.
“Why? You know him? Is something wrong?”
I shook my head. “No, nothing like that. My grandmother knows him. She had me ride horses with him last weekend.”
“Had you?”
“He asked, she pushed it—it’s weird. So don’t leave us alone. Please. He wants a summer girlfriend. I just—don’t.”
Mindy grinned and reached for her drink. “You don’t want a girlfriend?”
“No, I just … don’t want to make any more people mad at me than I have to this summer. I’m already waiting for Paul to start asking what made him think it was a good idea to have me watch his kids.”
Mindy laughed. She thought I was joking. People usually did, which was fine. Sugar coating on a bitter pill. Prepping the patient, so to speak, for the inevitable bad turn.
“And Coke? Seriously? Is he Mormon or something? Or did he get you pregnant?”
I felt a snatch at the top of my gut, something like the feeling when a schoolteacher caught you passing a note or trying to hide something in your desk. Approaching from behind me, the boy I’d already foolishly told I was pregnant. In front of me, a table of women I really, really didn’t want to talk about it with. In a bar. I couldn’t figure out how to arrange my face, and felt it freeze.
“Is everything okay?” Mindy said.
“Hey there.”
I found the smile I needed and turned around. “Well, hi! Thanks for the drink. I’m surprised to see you back in town.”
Leo shrugged. “Yeah, my friend’s brother is home this week so they don’t need me at the ranch. I’m picking up some shifts in the mine instead. I’m surprised you’re not up with Tuah.”
“Short weekend for me. I’m back at the Koffords’ tomorrow.”
“Ah. Great. Hope to see you around town this week, then. I’ll let you get back to your friends.”
“Great! Thanks again!” I turned back to Mindy, hardened cheer in place. She put a hand on my wrist.
Are you okay? she mouthed.
Applause went up from a table in front of the TV. I glanced at it to see Steve McGarrett standing beside a car on a promontory, pushing his suit coat open to rest his hands on his hips, Danno just rising out of the passenger seat, both of them watching another car settle into the ocean. At the bar, drunk Bill hunched over his coffee.
“Elena?”
The other four women had closed into their own circle, leaning toward each other, talking intently. Balls clacked against each other at the pool table. No. No, I’m not okay. I’m pregnant. And I’m a little more pregnant every day. And I can’t move or stand still without fucking something else up.
I pushed hard against something tight in my throat. “Yeah,” I said. Another squeeze. “Yeah.”
“Is it him? Is there a problem?”
“No—no, he’s fine. I’m fine.”
“No you’re not. You can say you don’t want to talk about it, but I’m not going to pretend I can’t tell.”
I scarcely knew Mindy, but I’d known people like her before. Intrusive. Blunt to the point of insensitivity. Tactless. I wanted to like her for the sake of what I knew, but right now I just wanted to make it all stop.
“Okay, fine,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it. Can we talk about something else? You can’t fix this.”
“So?” She looked sideways and tilted her head ever so slightly to indicate one of the other women at the table, probably the one with the long dark hair. “Just because I can’t fix Leslie’s MS doesn’t mean I don’t talk to her about how she’s doing, maybe help with her kids once in a while.”
She let go of my wrist. “I was kind of a bratty teenager.” A shrug. “I know, hard to believe. But when I was sulky my mom used to say that not talking about stuff is like growing mold.” She took a sip of her drink. “Talking airs it out. You still have the stuff, but it keeps it from getting furry and gross.”
Involuntarily, I started to laugh. And then my eyes started to burn. “Smart mom,” I managed to say.
“Yeah, my dad and my brother are idiots, and don’t tell Joan I said so. The men in my family are hopeless. But my mom’s pretty great.”
The burning in my eyes tightened and spread. I couldn’t process everything as quickly as it was coming at me. The men in my family. I knew so much more than she did about how true her assessment was. The threads of generations and intersecting lives crossed each other, knotted, and wound around others. The threads ran through me, pulling forward and backward, twisting through the tiny fingers in my belly. Olive’s tragedy, leading to Mindy, who now connected to me and to Sarah and to Tuah, who connected back to Olive, whose story shared so much with me and my own unwanted child. When Olive was alone, had Tuah ever just asked, like this, whether she was okay? How would she have answered?
“I’m pregnant,” I whispered.
Mindy’s hand on my knee. A squeeze. The dark-haired woman laughed, flipping a lock over her shoulder. I glanced sideways, but none of the other women showed any sign that they noticed our absence from their conversation.
“Does your grandma know?” Mindy said.
I nodded.
“That’s good. And she’s okay?”
I nodded again.
“Where’s the dad?”
I shook my head, which seemed to be enough. Mindy looked hard into my eyes. “This is not a big deal around here. You understand? We talk”—she tipped her head toward the rest of the table—“but it’s harmless. We’re all misfits. This place is small, we’re isolated, and the winters are awful. The only reason to stay is because folks take you as you are. Well, and there’s work. But nobody cares about your prison history or who your daddy was or where that baby came from.” She gave my knee a pat and took another sip from her drink. “So what are you going to do next?”
A weak, involuntary giggle started in my nose and then spread into my shoulders so that I finally hung my head, trying not to cry, as they shook with laughter I couldn’t control. When I could finally speak, I looked up. “Are you serious?”
She furrowed her brows. “Of course. Isn’t that about the only thing you think about?”
“I try not to. I have no idea what I’ll do next.”
“Huh. Well, don’t you kinda have to think of something, eventually?”
“No kidding.”
The waitress’s arm appeared, setting a second margarita glass on the table in front of Joan, salt snowy on the rim against the pale green liquid inside. The silver-eyed woman gestured to show that something was much, much taller than the top of her head, and Joan waved her hands in front of herself in denial.
“When are you due?” Mindy said.
“Sometime around the middle of January would be nine months, I think.”
“It’s forty weeks, hon. Since your last period. When was that?”
“Oh. The end of April was when I started to think I’d missed it.”
“No dates?”
“I didn’t exactly keep track.”
Mindy rolled her eyes, then bent over the sacklike bag on the floor beside her chair, digging in its depths for a few moments before emerging with a checkbook. She flipped it open in her lap and started counting weeks on the calendar, her lips moving slightly as she ran her finger down the columns. Finally she looked up.
“That puts you more like Chri
stmas or New Year’s.”
“Oh.”
“You’re like”—she looked back down at the calendar, tracing the numbers again—“thirteen or fourteen weeks now. You’re out of your first trimester.” She tucked the calendar back into her bag and picked up her drink, tilting it toward me. “Cheers.”
“Hey—what are we toasting?” the silver-eyed woman said.
Mindy, bless her, didn’t miss a beat. “New beginnings.” The glasses came together over a bowl of salsa and I touched rims with them.
There were assurances that summer was great here, that I would make lots of friends, that I would never want to leave. It was a few minutes before Mindy could speak to me privately again.
“Do you have a doctor?” she said.
“Not yet. But I feel good. I haven’t been sick or anything.”
“It’s not about you, silly. It’s for—” She tipped her head slightly and looked pointedly toward my belly. “You know.”
“I know.” But I didn’t. Not really. I hadn’t thought about it much.
Mindy studied me for a moment. “Are you giving it up?” she asked quietly.
I looked at the basket of chips. It was red plastic and had a waxed-paper liner. Oil from the chips had soaked through the liner, making darkened shapes that you could probably imagine as bears or trees or someone’s face. If you stared for long enough.
“Yeah,” I finally whispered. “I think so. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense, right?”
I felt the hand on my knee again. Another squeeze.
“You’ll figure it out.” She released my knee and pushed the tortilla chips toward to me. “Now eat some chips before I finish this thing off by myself.” She leaned closer. “’Cause I’m not eating for two.”
15
When I arrived at the Koffords’ house Sunday afternoon I found Paul far from ready to leave. He seemed as surprised to see me at the door as I was to see him barefoot and shirtless, hair mashed flat on one side of his head.
“I’m—ah—I’m sorry. Am I early?”
He just stared at me, then gave a slow blink. “What time is it?”
“Five.”
“Yeah.”
What did that mean? Yes I was early? Yes he agreed about the time? His gaze wandered off to the distance over my shoulder.
“I thought—you’re leaving tonight, right? Because of the heat? The desert?”
“Yeah.” He stepped back, opening the door wider. He rubbed his fingers in his hair. “Yeah. Just trying to get some sleep first. Come on in.”
I hesitated. “Should I just come back a little later?”
“Hi Lena!” Sarah burst around the corner, her greeting sounding like one word. She wrapped my hips in a wiry embrace and pressed her cheek against my belly. I was too startled to say anything. My free arm shaped itself around her shoulders and then my hand moved to her hair. My fingers caught in the knots.
“Will you braid my hair?” she said, looking up.
“Sure. Will you let me brush it first?”
She made a sound in her throat, annoyed, martyred. “Okay. I’ll get the twisties.”
“Get the brush,” I called as she started toward her room.
She ran past Paul as if he wasn’t there. He stood with his back to the wall, hands hanging empty at his sides. He didn’t shift away as I looked at him, but only stared back, eyes stark, face as naked as his chest. I knew his expression, could feel the way it had rested on my own cheekbones and lips and eyes in years past.
“How are you?” I whispered, pushing the front door closed behind me.
“Rough day.” He swallowed. “We went to see Carrie’s mom yesterday. Pretty hard on all of us.” He looked down. “I’d better go get my stuff.”
Sarah passed him as he started away from me down the hallway.
“I got the twisties.”
“What about the brush?”
“Oh.” She pivoted and ran away again. I could hear the tiny thunder of her feet, the slam of a drawer, then she reappeared with the brush and a photo album tucked under her arm.
“You sit here.” She pointed the brush at an upholstered chair the color of dry lumber. I set my bag beside it and obeyed her. As soon as I did, she wedged herself between my knees, back to me, and handed the brush and elastics over her shoulder. It was as if we’d gone through this routine a thousand times, but I’d never braided her hair before. I stared at the back of her head, afraid to feel her mother’s fingers in her hair, the same way I felt her mother’s shape in the chair beneath me.
“How about we sit over on the sofa?”
She shook her head. “Huh-uh.” Her shoulders shifted between my knees as she pushed herself more firmly into place.
This had nothing to do with me. It was something I could do for her. I squeezed my fingers around the brush amd smoothed it over the top of Sarah’s hair.
“Ow.”
This, now, I knew.
“I hardly touched anything.”
“It hurts.”
“Do you want braids or not? And if you don’t, we’ll still have to comb it out tonight after your bath.”
A deep sigh widened her back against my knees.
“Okay.” She opened the photo album and started flipping pages. Then stopped. Then flipped back a few. Then ahead again.
“Do it like this,” she said. She held the book up over her head so I could see. The pages were plastic sleeves that each held three pictures. In the center picture on the left page, Sarah was squeezing Buffers against her chest and leaning forward, eyes squinted shut against the sun, nose wrinkled, grinning to the camera. Tight pigtails curved behind and under her ears like rams’ horns. She looked younger, but only slightly, and the leafy background behind her suggested the picture must’ve been taken last summer. It was leafy in a way that wasn’t typical around here, though—ferny and shady and cloistered. Like the enclave I’d seen the day I rode up to Hat Creek with Leo. The picture above and below it must have been taken in the same place: in one Sarah had her back to the camera, squatting at the edge of a little brook; in the other Kevin held her over the water by her arms. They were both laughing.
“Where were you in that picture?” I said as I returned to brushing.
She lowered the album to her lap. “In the fairy woods. It’s my mom’s secret place. We didn’t tell it to anybody.”
“Oh.” She sounded so casual and matter of fact. “That looks like a great book,” I said.
She nodded. “I found it under Kevin’s bed.”
“Does he know you have it?”
Her head moved from side to side this time. “Huh-uh.”
Oh, dear God. Kevin would be furious to find Sarah had gotten into his private treasures, and then add the sentimental worth of the photo album in both their eyes … “Where is Kevin, anyway?” I said.
She shrugged her shoulders. “I dunno.”
We sat in silence as I brushed and braided her hair and she turned pages in the photo album. I was just getting to the bottom of the second braid when the phone rang. A few moments later, Paul reentered the room. He stopped short at the mouth of the hallway, now wearing his Dodgers cap and a plaid shirt, an overnight bag in one hand, staring at his daughter and me. His shoulders curved as if shaping themselves around something pressed into the center of his chest. I wanted to apologize, to somehow silently let him know that I understood and I was sorry, but I hadn’t known what else to do.
Sarah looked up, so that the soft little braid slipped out of my fingers and started to unravel. “Daddy, can you take us to the fairy woods?”
He swallowed hard. “What, honey?”
“The fairy woods. Mommy’s secret place.”
He drew a deep breath, then started turning his head from side to side, denying her request absolutely and firmly and finally. “I don’t know where that is, honey,” he whispered. He cleared his throat. And again. “I, ah, need to pick up Kevin.”
“Right.”
I looked down, pretendi
ng that repairing and finishing the braid required my undivided attention. A moment later the door closed with a soft clack, letting the blanket of silence settle back over us. I fastened the end of the braid, rubbed my hands on my thighs, then pushed against Sarah’s shoulders.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s see what’s in the kitchen for dinner.”
The freezer yielded ground beef and English muffins and the pantry a packet of sloppy joe mix. The potential for these ingredients brought Sarah up onto her toes, hands clenched and vibrating with excitement, making it all the worse when I had to report that there was no tomato sauce.
“But we have sloppy joes,” she insisted, holding the picture on the front of the packet to my face as proof.
“Look.” I took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure that reasoning with a five-year-old would work. “Does that feel like a sloppy joe to you?” She drew the packet back to study it herself. “Is it big enough? Do you think there are sloppy joes inside?”
A moment for consideration. “No,” she finally said, reluctant and sulky. “You make it with the stuff.”
“Exactly. And we don’t have all the stuff.”
“We always have the stuff!”
“We can get some at the store tomorrow and have it tomorrow night. I promise.”
“No! You have to get the stuff!” Sarah grabbed my wrist and pulled. “You have to look for it!”
I followed, bewildered and obedient, as she led me to her parents’ room, then heaved open a door I’d always presumed led to a closet. Women’s clothes on hangers filled the space along one side, but darkness on the other suggested a larger room.
She looked over her shoulder at me. “You have to look!”
I cast my eyes around at the stiff family portrait on the wall, the dresser topped by coins and a button and wadded Kleenex, a Trucker magazine and a half-empty packet of Juicy Fruit. A stack of shirts, plaid on plaid, hung over the back of a chair. Paul would be back any moment.
“Oh, I don’t think so. This is your daddy’s room. He doesn’t want me looking through his things.”