Читать книгу Blind Shady Bend - Adina Sara - Страница 15

A FAINT BEEP WENT OFF somewhere in the kitchen, the microwave timer stuck with fifteen seconds left, an irritation like a fly buzzing in the next room. Daphne was finally asleep in the stroller but she needed to be changed. Later, Callie decided. Ralph would be starved when he got home and she just remembered to add the turnips to the stew, they were still rock hard and he liked them mushy. She turned the heat up and hoped he wouldn’t get home just yet, hungry as she was. Daphne finally asleep after all those fitful minutes of steady rocking, and Callie’s arms were still tingling from the task of keeping the child moving and still, moving and still, moving and still.

She wheeled the stroller into the bedroom, very carefully closed the door just enough so that noises would not enter but cries could still be heard. She beeped off the microwave and took a deep breath, soaking in the silence. It hadn’t exactly been her idea to have a baby but it did seem like the next thing to do.

Ralph’s business was doing well, better than expected. Automatic sprinkler systems guaranteeing evergreen lawns, how could it not succeed? New subdivisions were getting approved every week in the valley and the people looking to live in them were the kinds who were attracted to bright green lawns. Ralph had insisted on expensive high-gloss pamphlets, he was that kind of visionary. “Put the money in,” he liked to say, “and it will come back doubled.”

Ralph was gone a lot, of course. He had to be. There was no one in the company that believed in the product as much as he did. Sure he loved the money. But he seemed to love the thrill even more. It was the beginning of a new time along San Juan Ridge. Funky old properties dotted with doublewide trailers and crumbling geezer shacks were on their way out. People were plopping pre-fabricated houses onto cheap land, rolling out perfect lawns and a couple of azaleas or whatever the ladies liked, rocking on their decks to the sound of their money growing.

And those houses required sprinkler systems. Simple as that. A young generation was buying up country acreage and they wanted lawns so their kids wouldn’t track mud across the wall-to-wall carpets. The gold had been mined out of these parts long ago, but there was a new kind of gold popping up above ground, and Ralph Daschle had pick in hand.

This week he was talking to some builders over on the east side of Lookout Mountain, closer to Riverdale. “I’ll probably be a couple of hours late tonight, maybe more” he called to her that morning, “It’s all flat land out there, honey. What I call lawn country!” but she was bending over to pick up Daphne’s bottle, now covered with crumbs, and only heard “maybe more.”

“We’re gonna be rich, baby” he yelled too loudly, honking all the way down the driveway, and sometimes she just wanted to kill him.

She remembered now that he said he’d be late, and relaxed into the late afternoon. The baby down, turnips and pot roast cooking, Callie sat on the window seat, let her shoulders sag into their sockets, and listened for the rumble of gravel. The road was quiet. Dead quiet, but for the soft snap of lacewings and finches, darting through the wind. Whatever few minutes Callie had until Ralph got home, or Daphne woke up, she reveled in this precious fleeting quiet. She walked barefoot to her room and faced the mirror like it was a confessor. Looked deep but could only see the surface tracings of her tired old lines.

Callie removed her blouse, unhooked her bra, and sighed. Look at them, she almost cried. Drawn and puckered now, not at all like a young woman’s breasts should be. The baby had done something to her nipples, thickened them with all that pulling and yearning, so they looked like discarded bits of leather hardened in the sun. And the shape, once round and tight, had gone slack. You’d think all that milk would have filled them out more but they did the opposite. Drained them. She had read somewhere in a woman’s magazine that breast feeding enhanced the size, “breast feeding’s not just for the baby. It will give your man a lot more to love . . .” or something along those lines. Nothing but lies. Hers were drawn and tired and flopped shapeless against her freckled skin.

Callie tugged at her jeans. Size 4, she used to wear a 2, but these were still too tight. She pulled hard and slowly stretched them over and around her belly, ugly belly, lined with blue zigzag reminders of those last few horrid months. The aching back, peeing all the time, she figured out early on, watching other expectant mothers prancing around all pink-cheeked with their bright clean maternity clothes, she knew early on she wasn’t cut out for this.

The baby made a gurgling sound. She stopped still in front of the mirror and prayed. Sometimes the gurgle preceded a full out scream, and sometimes it faded mysteriously back into silence. Shit, not yet. Don’t fucking wake up yet. Please God, please.

Callie turned back to herself, her ugly misshapen blue-lined self, and touched it. Not on the skin, but on the mirror, feeling the cold hard glass against her fingertips. Touch me, her body called but she wouldn’t dare. It had betrayed her and did not deserve her tenderness.

And now the shower, full force, just what she needed and she let out a guttural sigh that sounded like it came from far away. The sound, no it was the baby, crying now, cries getting louder, so she turned the water on higher, turned the nozzle to pulse so the water beat down hard on her back, her neck, the sticky creases between her breasts, her ears, loud water rushed over her so she could not hear, even if she wanted to, the baby awake and screaming from somewhere across the other side of her life.

Ralph got home late, like he said he would, the turnips dissolved completely just the way he loved them. It really didn’t take much to make him happy.

Even the baby was happy now, having completed a good long sleep after that earlier fit that brought Callie’s shower to a premature halt. The house smelled delicious and she had even managed to clip a few mimulas for the table, a scraggly spray of forget-me-nots, one sprig of thyme that managed to put out a nice smell despite its pathetic appearance. Sauce and flowers and newly polished toenails, all on account of a few lucky little naps that had scattered themselves mercifully, like jewels, across her day. This is a mother’s life and it’s not so bad really, she decided, stroking the baby’s head, the fuzzy fine fur, too sparse for color, thin and pale and mostly bald. She traced the tender spot that offered scant protection to the tiny unfinished brain and nuzzled her lips into the overwhelming softness. Sucked it in.

“You’re looking pretty” he greeted her with a pat on the ass and a quick nuzzle to the baby who was starting to make cooing sounds which Ralph insisted was Daddy. Grabbed a beer first and then his wife, eager pecks on the mouth and “dinner smells good baby.” He was a good man, he was. She pulled her blouse down, it had wrinkled in their embrace, and she noticed a stray flower stem tucked into her waistband. Whisked it away. Ralph was right, she was pretty.

Later that night, he took her, hard. It had been a great day and this was his way of celebrating. Thirty-six homes were going up near Riverdale and guess what, every last one of them was going to need a sprinkler system.

“I told you baby, I told you, I told you,” he grunted as he bore his way inside her, smacking his hips full throttle against her. Sometimes Ralph could be gentle, even sweet, but those times usually coincided with some vulnerability, a lost sale, some deal gone sour, and she would nurture his smallness in her deft hands, make him feel like a man again. But this time she wasn’t expecting much in the way of tenderness. This time he rode her like a bull, so wild he was with pleasure.

“Honey,” he said, wiping the sweat from his eyes as she rolled out of his grip and on to her side, facing out to the small patch of sky outside their bedroom window, “honey, this is the deal we’ve been waiting for. Once the developer agrees to buy my systems for this Riverdale project, the rest of the valley will hear about it. He knows the mayor, Callie. He knows the fucking mayor. Over on the other side of Lookout Mountain they’re starting to bulldoze. Do you know what that means?”

“Sprinklers!” she laughed, wiggling his soggy cock back and forth like a garden hose. What was left of his juice splattered against the sheet and she rubbed it all over his belly squealing “sprinklers, more sprinklers.” They squealed and grabbed and rolled into each other one more juicy time, with the glee of the soon-to-be-wealthy, the glee of those who think they can see the backlit edge of their wildest dreams creeping into view.

Ralph had always been a dreamer, but the good kind. He didn’t just lie back all starry-eyed and certain, no, he worked on those dreams. Ralph could sell anything, even back in high school, he pushed a cart up and down the aisles of the football stadium selling nothing but crushed ice from his parent’s doublewide freezer. No overhead, he figured wisely, but for the cost of small paper cups, and the sweaty hot kids in the stands gladly gave him fifty cents for a cool swab of freezing slush to wipe their foreheads, sneak down their girlfriend’s blouses, scrunch between their teeth when the ball was out of play. It was a genius plan and Ralph raked in more money than the soda and pretzel vendors combined. Something cheap and cold was really all anyone needed and that’s exactly what he delivered. Back then, as now, Ralph was not ashamed to admit he was damned proud of himself.

She saw his pride and confidence from the stands as he called up and down the stadium aisles “ieeeeece chips ice cold ieeeece chips” and she saw it when he took her to the movies in his spit-polished truck. She saw all that pride and confidence and couldn’t get enough of it. She sidled up to him hoping some of it would rub off, like crushed ice against hot skin.

Here it was six years later and it still felt that way, though he had moved from ice chips to refrigerator magnets to car alarms to automatic sprinkler systems, while she, she was still Callie, the girl in the stands, looking for an arm to hook into, looking for someone to lean on.

“Night baby” he mumbled, turning into her, “I love you, baby” he whispered into the sticky pillow.

Callie turned her eyes toward the night. Ralph’s arm wrapped around her, she didn’t dare move, afraid to wake him. She stroked the dark hairs on his arm, soft in one direction, bristly in the other, and found herself thinking about Robin again. It usually only happened at times like this, quiet, in the dark, when dreams and what was really happening got mixed up into indecipherable whirls. She hadn’t run into him since that first time, several weeks back, maybe more, she wished she could remember exactly. She tried picturing him but Ralph shifted slightly, and the coarse hairs on his arm tickled her neck. Callie couldn’t help but wonder if Robin had as much hair on his arms. She didn’t think he did.