by Amy Sorrells
“What’s your story?” Bryan says to Gabe.
Gabe goes on scraping the grill, even though I can see from where I’m standing that it’s clean.
I keep my head down and focus on mopping the floor and listen.
“Hey. Big guy. I said, what’s your story?”
Gabe turns, eyes Bryan’s coffee mug, and grabs the pot to top it off. “Don’t have one.”
“Well, you’re new around here, am I right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then what’s your story? People don’t come to Riverton for kicks and giggles.”
I don’t like Bryan’s tone, but I know better than to hush him when he’s talking to somebody. Besides that, I’ve been wondering the same thing. I try to move the mop slow enough to hear Gabe’s answer.
“I’m an EMT. Riverton Fire Department was advertising positions, and they didn’t have any in my town. Came where I could get a job.” He shrugs.
“Why you working here, then? At the diner?”
“The EMT job is only part-time. For now. A way to get my foot in the door for full-time.”
Bryan is quiet for a moment, and I’m sure he’s thinking up a wisecrack.
“An EMT, eh? Do you get to wear a badge or something for that?”
I can see, even without looking, the sneer on Bryan’s face.
“No . . .”
“So if you catch me smoking pot or something, you can’t arrest me, right?”
Hersch, usually focused to the point of oblivion to everything going on around him, turns his head ever so slightly and studies Bryan from the corner of his eye. Even from where I am across the dining room I can see that the natural downturn of his wrinkled mouth sags further.
“Here’s your pie, Bryan. Why don’t you work on it instead of interrogating our new employee?” Carla slides the slice across the counter at Bryan.
“Interrogating is way more fun, sweetheart.” He takes a bite of pie, making a point to chew with his mouth wide open and smiling at her.
When I finish the floors out front, I move on to the bathrooms, but not before catching Gabe’s eye, the questions on his face plain as day: Seriously? This is your boyfriend? How can you stand to be with this jerk?
I liked a nice boy once. His name was Adam Montgomery, and he was the kind of boy who always had a seat on the stage at the end-of-the-year awards. Besides that, the way his jeans fit him drove me crazy. Liked him from junior high all the way until his family moved away in tenth grade.
I couldn’t hardly look at him if we passed in the halls, I liked him so much. But he had a girlfriend. Her name was Angel, of all things, and she looked like one, too—perfect hair, the right label on her jeans, the way she walked like a dancer across a stage. All I could do was look at him, though, and imagine what it would be like to be Angel, to have Adam look at me the way he looked at her, to have him hold my hand, to have his arm wrapped around my waist as we walked to and from class.
I imagined doing with him the things I heard girls talking about in the bathroom between classes, how far they went with their boyfriends, and I thought that’s what loving and being loved by somebody meant. Mama never told me otherwise, and I heard the sounds she and the men who came over made through the thin walls of our trailer.
So when Bryan was the first boy I ever kissed, I just let him do with me what I figured I was supposed to let him do. I took what he gave since I hadn’t been used to receiving much of anything. For a good while, his giving made me feel alive, something I’d about given up on after losing Jayden. I might be a nobody, but apparently I’m pretty enough to hook up with when every other available girl our age is off to college. The things we do together fill a hole inside me—at least they did—a hole Mama and losing Jayden carved wide and long as the Ohio River Valley.
I’d pray as he peeled my clothes away, that the Lord would please let Bryan love me like Adam Montgomery loved Angel, and to please keep me from getting pregnant. I liked it all just fine, until the mean came, the kind of mean Mary Ashby must have known. And after that came the life growing inside my belly that I haven’t told a single soul about.
I pour bleach in the toilet. The fumes rise up and sting the inside of my nose and throat, and I fight back a wave of nausea before scrubbing it clean and moving on to the sink and mirrors. The drops of blue glass-cleaner spray cling, then drip down my reflection. My brown eyes stare back at me as I wipe, so different from Mama’s clear-blue ones. My hair is dark. Mama’s is mousy gray-brown. Pictures are all I have of my father to know I look like him. I like to think I’m not like Mama at all, until I notice the bruises fading on my upper arms as I reach up to wipe the lights, bruises that never seem to go away before there are new ones, bruises like the ones Mama’s boyfriends left on her, too.
I tuck a stray piece of black hair behind my ear and think about Sudie, how she doesn’t like Bryan either. Sudie says a good man does more than just the things me and Bryan have been doing, and that a good man doesn’t ever hurt a girl. I’ve never told her, but somehow she can see thoughts and feelings on my face without me breathing a word. Sometimes I think she can see the bruises I’m careful to cover with clothes.
I would leave him.
I would.
But the nausea reminds me I need to stay.
8
* * *
Riverton won the wrestling meet, and the fresh air from Bryan’s car window is a relief from the musty smell of sweat and mat dust. The pale gray of the country road whirs by as the sun drops below the horizon. A great horned owl dive-bombs from a distant tree, then drifts across the pale-orange edge of the sky before disappearing into another grove. Bryan turns the radio up and pretends the steering wheel is a guitar.
When we get to the Red Pepper, Riverton’s pizza shop where all the high school teams go after a win, I see from the stickers on the car windows that most of the wrestling team is already there. Inside, I find a booth and sit alone until Nick and Gus, two quiet, acne-covered kids whose claim to fame is being the sole members of the highest weight class of the team, ask if they can sit with me. They aren’t much company since they’re glued to their phones, elbowing each other on occasion to check out random YouTube videos or lifting their eyes once in a while to look at my chest.
I roll my eyes and pull the zipper on my sweatshirt up as high as it will go without choking me. Bryan goes from table to table, sometimes sitting with the wrestlers, more often flirting with underage girls. He comes back to me when he needs another slice of pizza or a refill on his beer.
This is what I do for fun, Gabe.
I look up when a family of three comes in, and recognize Mary Ashby and her parents. I don’t recall that I’ve seen her since our high school graduation. She went away to college, so she must be home for spring break. I duck my head and slump in the booth and hope she doesn’t see me or that I’m here with Bryan. At the time of their scandal I felt bad for Mary, but I didn’t believe what she said about Bryan. No one did. She acted hysterical. He acted like a jerk, but not a jerk capable of rape. But that was before I started dating him.
Across the dining room, Bryan doesn’t notice the Ashbys. He’s too busy looking into the eyes of a blonde who can’t be older than a freshman.
I am wondering if the Ashbys will stay if they see Bryan is here, when Mrs. Ashby picks a booth two down from ours and sits with her back to everything. Mary slides in next to her. Mr. Ashby sits across from them, but he wouldn’t know me from Eve. Besides that, the booths are high enough folks can’t see over the tops of them.
I decide to join Nick and Gus and lose myself in my phone, playing through a couple of games, trying to ignore the fact that I have to use the bathroom. I don’t want to get up and risk Mary seeing me, but I can’t wait any longer. Feels like she and everyone else at the Red Pepper are looking at me as I head to the back.
I take my time in the bathroom, redo my hair, put on some lip gloss, and I’m washing my hands when Mary bursts through the door. Red ange
r splotches her cheeks and her face has completely lost the soft lines of adolescence. I wonder if I look that way too.
“It is you,” Mary says.
“Hi, Mary.” I try to fake surprise.
“Are you here with . . . him?” Her chin trembles, the last word of her question barely audible.
My face must give away my answer.
“Why? Did you believe his friends and the paper, too?”
Et tu, Brute?
I hear the words of our high school English teacher reading Julius Caesar and telling us to underline that passage. I think of the white Mercedes with the red leather interior and third grade. We are not so different, Mary and I, the way life has forced us to assume false things about each other. And about ourselves.
“Well, it’s true, Jaycee. All of it. He did rape me.”
“I—”
She holds up her hand. “You saw me that day at the hospital. He beat me because I thought I was pregnant. Up until then he was fairly smart about it, always careful to hit me where no one would see the bruises. But I guess the possibility of a pregnancy pushed him over the edge. He broke my arm, punched me in the face, kicked me in the gut.” Her hand moves over her belly. “Nothing would have survived that.”
“Mary, I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah?”
It is a question and an accusation. An admonishment and a warning. I want to crawl under the sink to get away from her hard stare.
“Yeah . . .” I nod. My voice sounds like a wheeze.
“My advice? Get away from him while you can.” She flings the door open and I’m left alone again.
With one hand, I grab hold of the counter to steady my legs, which feel as if they will melt right out from under me. My other hand covers the growing curve of my own belly.
A couple months back, alone in the bathroom at the diner, I’d prayed, Lord, please don’t let me be pregnant. Please? I prayed over and over as I unwrapped the white stick and studied the tiny window where the lines change color. My thighs burned when I crouched and struggled to stay balanced while holding the pregnancy test and trying not to let it fall into the toilet. I laid the stick on the counter on a couple of tissues and waited, acutely aware of every sound in the diner, from the whoosh and rattle of the kitchen worker pushing plates through the dishwasher, to the clanging of the doorbell as more people came in. I backtracked in my head for the thousandth time. . . . I’d had a lighter period in September and not at all in October. A site on the Internet said stress can cause missed periods, and goodness knows I was stressed. I’d clung to that possibility for a few weeks until my normally flat chest started overflowing my bras and I couldn’t button my jeans.
Early on, I spent every second I could on the Riverton library computer, searching the Internet about pregnancy, trying to convince myself something else was making me late. And praying.
God had always protected me before. Mama’d brought home so many different guys, and I’d had too many late-night and hallway encounters with them to count. Strung out on drugs or alcohol, they’d stumble into my room—before and after Jayden was born—and I’d lie there, still as a rabbit cornered in a pile of brush, praying they wouldn’t see me, or if they did, that they wouldn’t touch me. The Lord had answered my prayers and kept me safe from all those junkies. Not one had laid a hand on me.
I convinced myself that since I lost my virginity with Bryan by choice I didn’t deserve for God to hear me. In the bathroom at the diner I’d sat on that toilet and waited the three minutes. Then five minutes. Then a minute longer before I got brave enough to look at the results. My insides trembled same as they’re trembling now in the bathroom at the pizza place. I’d folded myself into two then like I do now, trying to hide the roundness of my belly, the same place that’d made me twist with longing whenever Bryan had touched me.
There had been no mistaking the positive results.
I’d seen the same two lines on the test Mama’d bought when she’d discovered she was pregnant with Jayden. I remember how she’d gone out partying that night, trying to force a miscarriage. I thought about how it’d felt not having a daddy for the father-daughter events at school, no one to teach me how to ride a bike, no one to turn to when Mama wasn’t there, no one to blame besides Mama for not having enough to eat or wear or for freezing in the winter because the propane ran out again. I can’t blame Mama that my father died before I ever knew him. For a while we’d been all right, until she started making bad choice after bad choice and we ended up where we are now. Two family members in the ground, and not a lot of hope left for the living.
I’d looked at the mirror in the diner’s bathroom same as I’m looking in the mirror now, thinking again about how there’s no way I can bear raising a child in this mess.
9
* * *
Somehow I manage to leave the bathroom and see that the Ashbys have gone. A waitress stands bewildered, holding their pizza by their empty table.
“We’ll take it if they’ve gone,” Nick says to her.
She shakes her head and rolls her eyes, then brushes past me on the way back to the kitchen.
Bryan is still talking to the underage blonde. His back is to me, so I veer outside and get to the parking lot in time to see the taillights of the Ashbys’ old white Mercedes blink once, then twice, before the car turns onto Main Street and disappears.
Nausea threatens when I think about Mary, and about what could happen to me when Bryan finds out about this baby.
I start walking to the town square and the diner, where I left my car. I can be there in ten minutes, faster if I hurry.
Lord, please. Don’t let him notice I’ve gone.
The wind has picked up. Haze surrounds the moon. Three-story buildings with arched windows and ornate trim line the street to my left. To my right are more shops interspersed with historical homes whose backyards slope down to the river, an inky ribbon this time of the night, dotted with an occasional light from a fishing boat or a barge. I like to imagine what the river looked like to the first settlers in the valley, before homes and then towns and then cities were built, before trees were cut and land cleared, before the wood rats and muskrats, the badgers and the mink, the kingfishers and the heron, the stocky little flycatchers and all the other animals were shoved aside and forgotten by people who didn’t know how much they mattered. Chop and burn. Build and pave. Wildlife is adaptable, after all. Survival of the fittest.
Maybe that’s why Jayden’s in the ground.
Maybe that’s why Mary’s baby, if she really was pregnant, was beat to death before it took its first breath.
What kind of a chance does any child have around here anymore?
I am yards from the diner and can see the moon reflecting in the plate-glass front window when car lights cast my shadow long on the sidewalk. Bryan’s car rolls to a stop in front of me. Exhaust chugs from the rumbling muffler and I veer to avoid inhaling it. The car jerks as Bryan puts it into park and gets out, the car door swinging from the force of his exit.
“What are you doin’?” he says through clenched teeth.
The flash of annoyance I am well acquainted with is replaced with fury. I’ve never challenged him like this before.
The street and sidewalks are empty. Stores are dark and closed. We are well past homes and the soft glow of porch lights and side-table lamps spilling onto front lawns.
“Always careful to hit me where no one would see the bruises,” Mary said.
I cross my arms and step back. Act like it’s no big deal. “I’m just tired. You were having fun,” I say, trying my best to stand straight, assured. My voice sounds cheerier than I want it to. Fake.
“What did she say to you?”
“Who?” How could he have seen Mary talking to me? He was talking to the blonde.
“John said he saw them leaving. The Ashbys. And that he saw both of you come out of the bathroom.” John is Bryan’s best friend, and a better gossip than most of the girls in Riverton.
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“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I take a step back again.
He takes three more steps toward me, his hands balled into fists at his sides. “I don’t need my girlfriend standing me up. You hear?”
“Like I said, you were having fun. I didn’t want to bother—”
His fingers wrap like a vise around my arm and I feel my head snap backward as he shoves me. His breath is hot, heavy against my face. “That’s a lie.”
A bit of courage rises in me, enough for what I need to do. “I didn’t want to break up with you in the middle of the Red Pepper or in front of your friends.”
He lets go of my arm and takes a step back. He chuckles. Then starts to laugh, a mocking cackle that scares me. “You don’t mean that.”
Help me, Lord. “Yes. I do.”
For a split second his face looks like that of a little kid, one coming off the field after losing his first Little League game. But that only lasts a second.
“Girls don’t break up with me. ’Specially girls like you. I’m the one who’s breaking up here. You never were worth it anyway.”
The smack against the side of my face that follows his words is hard and blinding. I’m glad I’m too shocked to absorb the names he’s calling me. He grabs both my arms hard now. Feels like his fingers are squeezing against my very bones.
“Stop it, Bryan. You’re hurting me.” I think about Mary, how the kick I’m sure is coming next must have felt against her belly.
“There a problem here, Jaycee?”
Bryan’s grip on my arms slackens, and he’s as surprised as I am to see the man behind him.
Hersch stands there, back stretched straighter than I’ve ever seen it. He holds a push broom in one hand, and I can see the Marine POW tattoo on the thick curved forearm of his free hand. He’s still wearing the white pants, white button-down shirt, and white apron he wears every day, though it’s hours past closing. His brown eyes are kind, knowing, as he looks past Bryan and right at me.