by Amy Engel
When it was over, the last prayer voiced, the last hymn sung, I wanted to escape the same way I’d arrived. But Zach and Jenny were allowed to exit first, and then they lined up by the front door. A gauntlet we had to run before we were free. I had no idea what to say to them. Sorry for your loss sounded wrong considering I’d suffered the exact same misfortune. And I had no words of comfort, no real belief that someday our loss would no longer feel like a gaping wound or that our daughters were better off. The dead were gone and the world could be a nasty, festering place. And somehow, our daughters had gotten tangled in its ugliness. That was the only truth I knew. At least I was smart enough to know that saying it out loud wouldn’t be helpful to anyone.
Zach and Jenny were standing together in the vestibule, arranged under a banner of silver foil balloons spelling out IZZY and attached to the floor with hot-pink ribbons. I wondered if the person responsible for them was the same one who’d left me the cookies. A thoughtful gesture turned macabre and ghoulish in actual execution.
I was still worrying over what to say when Jenny saved me, her social graces much more polished than mine. Turned out I didn’t need to say a word. She swept me into her thin arms the second I approached. Her tearstained cheek pressed into mine, and her shuddering breath whispered past my ear.
I pulled back as gently as I could, gritting my teeth against the urge to shove her off of me. “The service was very nice,” I managed.
Jenny’s lip quivered as she tried to smile. “Thank you.”
Zach laid his hand on my back and I flinched away, feeling surrounded, buried under their grief and good intentions when I was struggling to stay afloat myself. “Is there anything we can do for you?” he asked.
I shook my head without looking at either of them. The air in the vestibule was too warm, the heater pumping even though the temperature outside was spring mild, and a bead of sweat slithered down my spine. I swallowed down the lump forming in my throat. “No, I’m okay. You worry about yourselves.” The words came out harsh, accusing rather than conciliatory.
“Come on,” Cal said, grabbing my hand. “Let’s get some air.”
I pushed out through the heavy double doors, letting them swing shut on Cal’s hurried good-byes. I gulped in the fresh air, early evening painting the sky with pink. This had always been Junie’s favorite time of day, when the light turned hazy and the clouds sparkled.
When Cal dropped me off at home, it took ten minutes of convincing to get him to let me go in alone. “You have to be getting sick of my couch,” I pointed out. “It’s lumpy as hell.” He didn’t disagree, but started to open his door anyway.
“Seriously, Cal,” I told him. “I’ll be fine. I just need some time alone.”
He turned and looked at me, and I held his gaze. “Nothing stupid, right?” he said.
I nodded. I knew he meant a bottle of pills or a razor. My head in the oven. What I was planning might have been even dumber. But I wasn’t like Cal; I lied all the time. Had it down to a science. “Nothing stupid,” I agreed.
SIX
The titty bar my mama had mentioned, the one where Jimmy Ray had been hanging out recently, was about ten miles down the road, situated a few feet off the highway and topped with a giant sign announcing ADUL EN ER AINMEN. I didn’t know if some thief had a hankering for Ts or if there had never been any to begin with, but the sign had looked the same for as long as I could remember. And if anyone was confused by the missing letters, the silhouettes of naked women painted on the boarded-up windows were a dead giveaway as to what went on inside.
I didn’t doubt that this was Jimmy Ray’s new watering hole. My mama’s information was always good. But I didn’t think Jimmy Ray was spending his time here looking at boobs. He had that crazy charisma particular to very bad men. He didn’t need to stuff dollar bills in the G-string of some washed-up meth addict to get his rocks off. He had women lining up to do that for free. Which meant whatever he was doing here was business related. Money laundering or signing up mules, if I had to guess. And business always made Jimmy Ray more careful than usual. Meaner, too.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous, maybe even scared. I knew what Jimmy Ray was capable of when he felt cornered. My wrist still ached on rainy days, and every time I thought of him fear pulsed at the base of my spine, my legs wanting to run even when he was nowhere in sight. But scared wasn’t going to stop me. Not now. What’s the worst he could do? Kill me? The thought didn’t even bother me all that much.
I’d only been inside the strip bar once before, back when Junie was an infant and I’d been desperate for some extra money. I’d gotten about five minutes into the interview—had been told that while blow jobs and hand jobs were fine, actual fucking had to be off premises, but hadn’t yet been asked to peel off my top so the owner could ogle my milk-heavy breasts—when Cal had barreled through the front door and dragged me back outside. I’d screamed at him for interfering, for treating me like a baby, but inside I’d pulsed with relief. Standing on that beer-sticky stage night after night, letting glassy-eyed men flick my nipples when I leaned over to take their money, would’ve kept Junie fed in the short run but killed something inside me in the long term, something I needed in order to be a different kind of mother than my own.
I jerked down the rearview mirror and looked at myself in the dim light of the parking lot. I pulled out my ponytail holder and ran my fingers through my hair, pinched some color into my cheeks, slicked some sheer gloss onto my lips. Jimmy Ray, for all his bravado and bullshit, was a fairly simple guy. He liked his women pliable and pretty. I couldn’t give him the first one, but I could bluff my way through the second.
The smell was the first thing that hit me when I pushed through the heavy door. Sweat and spilled beer. Something dank and musky that made you immediately think of sex. And not the good kind. The dirty, hopeless, borderline-mean kind. I paused inside the doorway, let my eyes adjust to the darkness. Cheap strobe lights blinked on the edges of the long narrow stage that extended out into the middle of the bar, studded at intervals with stripper poles where a couple of topless women slid along their lengths, gazes somewhere far away. Music pounded into my skull, way too loud for the relatively small space and even smaller crowd. A few men hunched on bar stools pulled up to the stage, slack gazes pinned on the women above them. A table of guys in the corner, one of whom was getting an unenthusiastic blow job from a middle-aged stripper wearing only high heels and a silver G-string. His friends watched, too bored to do more than stare, too turned on to look away.
On the other side of the room, a bartender lounged behind the bar talking to a couple of men nursing beers. No one seemed to have noticed my arrival, which meant Jimmy Ray probably wasn’t here. Everyone lived on high alert when he was around. I was the only woman in the place other than the ones working, but I wasn’t worried. I was used to places like this, even though they hadn’t been part of my life in years. If nothing else, my childhood had taught me how to navigate the world’s seedy underbelly.
“Hey, Sam,” I said, sliding into the empty bar stool next to the man on the end. He turned and looked at me, his face breaking into a slow smile. I’d always liked Sam. Of all Jimmy Ray’s hangers-on, he was the most human, with his scruffy beard and tiny paunch of belly. He’d always had the decency to look sorry, at least, after Jimmy Ray had a go at me. Which is more than I could ever say for the rest of them, Jimmy Ray included.
“Well, look who the cat dragged in. Jesus, Eve. How you been?” At the last second, it hit him and his whole face shifted. “Oh God, sorry,” he said. “I just . . . I forgot for a second. About your daughter. I didn’t hear until yesterday.”
“Junie,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Sam said, snapping his fingers. “That’s right. Junie.” He glanced down at his beer. “Sure am sorry.”
“Thanks,” I said, watching the red flush work its way up his neck, visible eve
n in the semidark.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked. He stared at me without smiling.
“I’m good,” I told him.
He shook his head. “Don’t take up a seat at my bar unless you’re gonna order something.” I vaguely recognized him from my time with Jimmy Ray. Mark, Mike, some M name. Back then, he’d worn his brown hair in a buzz cut but it was longer now, gathered in a stubby ponytail at the nape of his neck. A single gold hoop glinted in his ear. I imagined a certain type of woman would find him attractive, one who took a quick look instead of paying attention to the details. Because he was the kind of good-looking that didn’t hold up to close inspection—dark stubble failing to disguise a weak chin, small eyes set too close together, and a thin-lipped leer masquerading as a smile. He’d always been an asshole and apparently hadn’t changed with the passing years. The kind of guy who took a tiny bit of power and inflated it into something he used to hammer everyone around him.
I peered at him. “Are you for real? Is there a line outside I missed somehow?”
Sam put his hand on my knee, squeezed gently. “She’ll have a beer,” he said. When the bartender turned his back on us, Sam rolled his eyes. “Matt takes his job serious.”
“Does he own this place now?”
Sam shook his head. “No, Jimmy Ray’s got this place.”
My heart thumped hard in my chest, and I took a sip of the beer Matt had placed in front of me. The foam tickled my lip, and I almost coughed at the bitter sting of it. I hadn’t had a drink since Junie was born, not a single sip. It was on my unwritten list of rules. Turned out I’d lost the taste for it over the years and I pushed the bottle away.
“What are you doing here?” Sam asked. “Seems like an odd choice. You know . . . with everything.”
I shrugged. “I needed to talk to Jimmy Ray about something. Heard this might be a good place to catch him.”
Sam gave me a sideways glance. “You may not be his favorite person right now.”
“What?” I said, startled. “Why?” I couldn’t imagine why I was even on Jimmy Ray’s radar anymore. We’d given each other a wide berth in the years since we’d split, the occasional mocking wink from across the grocery store parking lot as close as he’d come to acknowledging my existence.
Sam opened his mouth to answer, but one of the strippers sidled up behind him, slung a skinny arm around his neck. “Hey, baby,” she said. “Buy me a drink?” She pressed her body into Sam’s back, and his face heated red again. Maybe that was why he had a beard, an attempt to hide his tendency to blush, a reaction that probably earned him plenty of shit from Jimmy Ray’s crowd.
“I’m in the middle of something,” he said, shrugging her off.
She pouted at him, even though she was a couple of decades past the stage where pouting was even moderately endearing. “Awww . . . come on,” she said. “One drink.” She glanced at me and smiled with blank eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to smile back, my gaze falling to the ring of bruises around the crook of her elbow, the scabby track marks on her skin.
“Hey, Maggie,” Matt said, rapped twice on the bar with his knuckles to get her attention. “No one’s interested in buying you a drink.” He paused, smirked. “Or sampling your dried-up old cunt.”
“Now, come on,” Sam said, but quiet, like he knew better than to contradict Matt. Had learned that lesson the hard way.
Maggie squared her jaw, pushed back her shoulders. But I could see her hands shaking where they rested on her hips. “You can’t talk to me like that,” she said. “I’m gonna tell Jimmy Ray. That’s sexual harassment. You can’t do that no more.”
Matt laughed. “Oh, shit.” He pretended to wipe tears of mirth from his eyes. “Are you serious? You gonna run out and get Me Too tattooed on those saggy tits? Goddamn, Maggie, you crack me up.” He flapped his bar rag at her. “Get the fuck out of here.”
Maggie glanced at me, something timeless and weary passing between us. The world might be changing in some places, but not here. Here it was still the same old merry-go-round of drugs and poverty and women being chewed up and spit out by men. People in other worlds could wear black evening gowns and give speeches about equality and not backing down, but out here in the trenches, we fought our war alone and we lost the battles every day.
I watched as Maggie shuffled off, limping a little in her cheap stilettos. If not for Cal, that could have been my fate, and I had a sudden urge to hug my brother, thank him for the hovering that usually drove me nuts.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” a voice said from behind me. I heard anger in the words, but curiosity, maybe even amusement, in the tone. A shiver worked its way up my spine. Jimmy Ray.
I turned on my bar stool and came face-to-face with my biggest mistake. A lot of people would have fingered Junie for that honor. Getting knocked up the summer before your senior year in high school wasn’t exactly genius-level thinking. But I’d never considered Junie a mistake, not even when I had no idea how I was going to afford her or where my next meal was coming from. Because, let’s face it, my future wasn’t exactly gold-plated before she started growing in my belly. So having her didn’t change much, other than the fact that I had an extra mouth to feed. It wasn’t like I was giving up college scholarships or trips to distant lands by having a daughter at eighteen. I’d never given much thought to what came after high school, had spent most of my time and energy just trying to survive my childhood. And truth was, Junie had saved me from the inevitable slide into my mother’s type of life. I hadn’t cared about myself enough to try and be different. But from the moment she was born, I’d cared about Junie. Loved her enough to slam on the brakes and do a one-eighty.
I’d been almost perfect. No drinking, no drugs, no smoking, no stealing or getting in fights. No arrests. No men. Or almost no men. But when I’d screwed up, just the once, I’d screwed up big. Jimmy Ray was never a plan I’d had. I’d like to say he charmed me or that I was lonely, but that wouldn’t be the truth. Jimmy Ray was never big on charm. And other than Cal, I’d been a loner all my life. Loneliness was more a permanent state than something I’d ever thought about escaping. It would probably be most accurate to say Jimmy Ray was like an itch I had to scratch. I’d been walking the straight and narrow for almost three years, since the day I’d found out I was pregnant with Junie, and I was starting to chafe under my own restrictions.
Being a good mother hadn’t been as effortless as I’d tried to make it seem. There were plenty of days when Junie was little, crying all night with colic as a baby, or whining for a toy I couldn’t afford as a toddler, when I’d had to lock myself in the bathroom and scream into a towel. Knot my hands into white-knuckled fists and count to a hundred just to keep from slapping her. Those early years were the worst, when slipping into my mama’s brand of motherhood had seemed dangerously close. A hair trigger waiting to be pulled. And then I ran into Jimmy Ray one day at the gas station, and thought maybe he was a way for me to let the pressure off, get a taste of relief.
I’d seen Jimmy Ray around when I was growing up, older than Cal but younger than my mother. I’d known what he was because I wasn’t blind. But I’d still fallen for the dark hair and green eyes, the lopsided grin, the tiger tattoo curled around his neck. The scent of danger he wore like cologne. When I was with him, I felt like the old Eve, the one who had flirted with disaster and never cared about how much something might hurt. I hadn’t believed him when he said what we had was different, that with me he was a changed man. I knew he was full of shit because I’d listened to a dozen men spout the same lies to my mama over the years, but I’d thought I could contain the damage when we inevitably blew apart. Somehow it had still caught me by surprise, the moment when he’d backhanded me across my own kitchen table, split open my cheek in front of my daughter and kept right on eating his chicken potpie while my blood dripped out from between my shaking fingers. So yeah, I wasn’t blind, b
ut I was stupid. I’d thought that I could dip a single toe into the pool. Didn’t realize I was drowning until I was completely submerged.
“I’m looking for you,” I told him, gripping the seat of my bar stool with both hands to steady myself. He looked older and harder than I remembered, skin starting to loosen at his jaw, deeper lines fanning out from his eyes, one of which was swollen shut, the lid bruised almost black. “What happened?” I asked him. Hoped whoever delivered that punch enjoyed it because it was probably the last thing they ever did on this earth.
Jimmy Ray snorted, took a hit off the beer bottle dangling from his fingers, and then pointed at his eye. “This? Courtesy of your brother. Came in here all fired up a few nights ago. I let him have his shot, because he’s a cop and who needs the aggravation.” On anyone else it would have smacked of face-saving bravado. On Jimmy Ray, I knew it was the truth. Cal’s badge was the only thing that had spared him from a bullet in the head. And now I knew why Sam had worried Jimmy Ray might not want to see me.
“Cal?” I said. “Why?” But I remembered Land’s questions about Jimmy Ray the day Junie died. That would have been all Cal needed. He stayed within the letter of the law most of the time now that he was tasked with enforcing it, but he’d learned at my mama’s knee. No one messed with Cal’s family. We protected each other with bared teeth and claws. No excuses and no forgiveness. And no amount of civilizing, no years of carrying a badge, could ever completely tame that impulse.
Jimmy Ray slammed his beer bottle onto the bar top. “He wanted to see if I was eager to start talking.”
“Were you?” I asked, although I already knew the answer. It would take more than a couple of punches for Jimmy Ray to spill his guts if keeping silent was in his best interest.