Читать книгу Weedeater - Robert Gipe - Страница 10

3

AIRPLANE GIRL

DAWN

Friday night, Nicolette slept in her car seat all the way to Kingsport, so I had the sundown light on the dragon-green ridges to myself. When we got out of Canard County, we were in Virginia, and stayed in Virginia for a hour till we got to Kingsport, which is in Tennessee.

Kingsport smelled like something dead you’d left in the car trunk and forgot. The last sun lit the white vapor plumes coming off the paper plant, the shiny new supermarket where the book press had been, the old stone bank on the corner in the middle of town. The chemical plant smokestacks where Willett’s dad worked glowed like the lightsticks they throw out to mark the corners of wrecks on the highway at night.

My husband’s hometown seemed like more of nothing than anything I’d ever known. People with nothing to talk about but going to work, going to ballgames, eating ice cream, and going to the beach. Nothing.

Willett’s mother lived on a broad street in town with big flat front yards, grass like carpet, and trees grown on purpose tall as trees get. The houses were big as schools. His mother’s, the smallest on her street, was still plenty big.

It was dark when we got to the house. My nerves were raw and my bones sore. I packed Nicolette to the front door. Her concrete head on my shoulder drove pain into my chest. Willett come to the door keyed up, hair shooting this way and that like shavings off a drunk man’s whittling. He smiled with his mouth open, made me want to throw a little fish in it, like they do dolphins in them aquarium shows.

I said, “Hidy.” I didn’t have any reason to be sore at my husband.

But for whatever reason, I was sore at him anyway. Willett hugged me and I let him. It felt OK. He kept it up till I got annoyed. I pushed him off with the hand not holding Nicolette. I set Nicolette down.

Nicolette stood there with her eyes closed. When her father hugged her, she said, “Did you get fireworks?”

Willett looked at me, said, “We got some sparklers.”

Nicolette wobbled, eyes still shut, said, “Light them all at once. Be like your hand on fire.”

Willett shook Nicolette by her shoulders.

I said, “Don’t wake her up, dumbass.”

Willett said, “Guess what,” his eyebrows bobbing up and down.

I said, “I don’t know, Willett. You found a quarter in the sofa?”

“Good guess,” Willett said, “but no.”

“I’m putting her to bed,” I said. “I can’t fool with you both at once.”

Willett’s mother had Nicolette a pallet on the floor in the room where we slept. I flopped her on the bed, and she lay on her belly, claiming as much bed as her stubby arms could.

I found Willett in the kitchen on a hard chair amongst his mother’s catalogs and gadgets, sucked into a hippy movie with men on motorcycles and giant moustaches and women with bikinis and flower necklaces on the television set next to her dish drainer.

He said, “Here, look at this,” and before I could say, “Here, look at me,” Willett’s mother come in, honeyed up. She said I looked tired and asked if I was getting enough rest.

I said, “I think so.”

The phone rang and she answered it “hel-looo,” and began telling the person about Willett’s father’s bowel movements and vomiting, the smoking habits of the nurses at the hospital, how long she spent on the phone with the insurance company. I told Willett I was going to bed.

He said, “You sure you don’t want to watch this with me?,” his face like a dog in a cage on an animal shelter ad.

I left him there, aggravated at my own meanness. Nicolette was dead asleep. I set on the far edge of the bed and waited for the world to fall. When it didn’t, I got in bed and turned to the wall.

I woke to Willett and Nicolette both in the bed with me, to morning light and the sound of Willett’s mother coming to get them to go to the 4th of July parade.

Willett’s mother asked him did I want to go. I said I didn’t and went back to sleep. And so it was me eating the Cocoa Puffs Willett’s mother got for Nicolette, me who heard my mother’s slurry voice on the answering machine saying she was coming over to spend the afternoon with us.

* * *

SATURDAY AFTERNOON, me and Willett stood looking out his mother’s front room picture window. Willett put his dry hand in mine. Out the picture window, Momma got out of a Jeep with Evie and two guys I didn’t know. One was muscle-huge, wore black leather, oily Fu Manchu, faded Def Leppard T-shirt with the sleeves cut out. The other was fat-huge, balding with stringy brown hair trailing off his shoulders, a man-sized pillhead groundhog. Willett turned from the window.

I said, “Where are you going?”

He said, “To check on the fire.”

When I opened the door Momma was smiling, gray in the teeth and dark red around the eyes. The other three stood behind her looking at Willett’s mother’s fancy flowers and yard ornaments. Nicolette came to the door. Momma crouched and wrapped Nicolette in her broomstick arms.

Momma said, “Yall look,” over her shoulder. “Beautifuler than I said, aint she?”

Fu Manchu nodded.

“No such a word,” Groundhog said, “as ‘beautifuler.’”

She climbed back in the Jeep. Her knee bobbed.

Willett’s mother came down the hall. “Hello,” she said. “Welcome. I’m Dorothy, Willett’s mother.”

No one said anything.

Willett said, “You ready to start cooking?,” putting his hands on my shoulders. I shrugged him off.

Fu Manchu said, “We got to go,” and got in the Jeep.

Groundhog waddled to the Jeep, started it. Off they went. Willett’s mother gave Momma a big hug. Momma hugged her back and come in the house looking high and low at all the old furniture and silver stuff Willett’s mother had.

Willett and his mother grilled hamburgers and hot dogs. We ate them on a glassed-in porch in heavy metal lawn furniture painted black with bamboo-printed seat cushions. When we got done, Willett’s mom said, “Let’s sit and talk,” which is what we’d been doing, but she took us in another room to do it some more.

Momma sat on a flying carpet–looking rug on the floor and played with Nicolette with toy soldiers and cars that Mrs. Bilson saved from when Willett was a little boy. Willett come in the kitchen with me. He said things would be all right, but he couldn’t know that.

Willett’s mom’s questions were popcorn popping with nobody watching the microwave. She asked about Hubert and my grandparents and other different ones that had been at the wedding. She asked if anything new was going on in Canard County. Momma didn’t answer much, and nothing bad happened, but it was all jangly nerves and dead air.

Willett’s mother told him to see if his daddy would eat a hamburger. Willett slipped down the hall, took his daddy a plate in his room. I followed him, but at a distance, watched from around the corner where they couldn’t see me. Arthur, Willett’s father, turned his head on the pillow, said, “There he is” when he seen Willett.

Willett walked to the bedside and put his hand on the pillow above his father’s head. He said, “You want anything to eat?”

Arthur said no. Willett sat down on the edge of his father’s bed with the tray on his lap. The window blinds were closed. The light from the reading lamp clipped to the headboard made Willett’s dad look turtle-headed. His upper lip came to a point beneath his nose. The remote control for the television lay beneath his hand on the layers of cotton blankets.

Willett asked did he want him to straighten his covers.

Willett’s dad said “No, they’re OK,” and squinted and swallowed slow, like he was hurting. “Maybe when Dawn gets her nursing degree,” he said and then stopped, wincing.

“Yeah,” Willett said, his voice trailing. “I don’t think her heart is in that.”

“So what then?” Arthur said in a hoarse whisper. “What does she want to do?”

“Tattoos maybe.”

Arthur asked was I any good and Willett said I could be.

Arthur said, “What about . . .” and lifted his hand off the remote and pointed at Willett.

Willett looked at his own pink hands and said, “I like being with Nicolette. Watching out for her.”

“That’s important,” Arthur said. “Kids.”

Willett said, “I reckon I’m going to work at the plant. Driving a forklift. In the pellet building.”

Arthur asked what shift and Willett said, “Screech’s, right now.”

Willett’s father nodded.

There was a commotion in the living room and Nicolette let out a squeal. Willett turned his head to the door and then back to his father.

Arthur said, “Go on.”

Getting a job at the plant. That was Willett’s guess-what.

* * *

MOMMA SAID, “Come on, little airplane girl,” and took Nicolette’s hands and started to spin. Nicolette laughed and her feet lifted into the air. Momma coughed and let go of one of her hands. Nicolette squealed as her other hand slipped free. She crashed into a big cupboard thing of old toys and antiques Willett’s mother had set up. Old, old Santa Clauses went flying everywhere. Corner of the cupboard caught Nicolette above the eye, and blood ran in her brow. Nicolette stood herself up and ran straight back to Momma.

I said, “Nicolette, come over here.”

Willett put his arm around Momma. Momma put her head on Willett’s shoulder, fake shocked. Willett’s mom went to Nicolette, pushed her hair back, took her and put a Band-Aid on her brow. Momma went behind her, asking Mrs. Bilson did she have some kind of ointment nobody ever heard of.

Momma’s carrying on scared us like when a truck goes too close by you walking at night. No time for fear till it was over. We were so shook when Momma asked to come with us back to the trailer, we didn’t have the wits to make up a reason to say no.

* * *

MOMMA had never asked where we live before and we never told her. On the way there, she stared out the backseat window of Willett’s hand-me-down Buick, fluttered her eyes at Nicolette’s trying to get her time.

Nicolette grabbed hold of her shirtsleeve, wanting to know Momma’s favorite cartoon, wanting to know had she been in an airplane. “Say, Momma Trish. Say.”

An edge come on Momma’s voice could’ve cut a pop can in half. Said, “I don’t know, goddammit. God Amighty, Dawn.”

I said, “Nicolette, leave her alone.” What I wanted to say is,

But I didn’t.

“Tricia,” Willett said, “you need me to stop?”

“Need you to stop talking,” she said. Momma stayed grim and tight, but she didn’t lose it. Then about a mile later, Momma said, “Stop there.”

She went in the bathroom at a filling station. She was gone a good fifteen minutes.

Willett said, “I’m worried about her.”

I said, “I’m worried about her and those guys knowing where we live.”

“She aint doing too good, is she?” Willett whispered, “She looks like she might jump out of her skin.”

“How would she do that?” Nicolette said, looking scared the first time all day. “How would she jump out of her skin?”

I said, “She aint gonna jump out of her skin,” pounding Willett hard on the ball of his shoulder. I said, “Don’t say stupid shit like that in front of her. It don’t help.”

Momma came back to the car, wiping her mouth, and we went on to the trailer.

* * *

OUR TRAILER set in a quiet park with a creek run through it outside Kingsport. Willow trees stood waiting for kids to chase in and out amongst the whips of their branches. There were trees stout enough for tire swings and plenty of room between the trailers, like you wouldn’t see nobody do now. Now everything is stacked tight, cracker boxes crammed on a shelf in a jammed-up dollar store.

We walked in the trailer to Groundhog lying on his side, barely on the sofa he was so huge, his shirt off and sweating, sucking his thumb, eyes opening and closing slow. The TV blared the bells and screams of a game show. Slobber ran down Groundhog’s wrist.

I said, “Get off my sofa, you nasty fuck.”

Momma said, “Where’s the bathroom?”

I said, “Take her, Willett. Watch her.”

Momma said, “God Amighty, Dawn.”

I said to the couch, “Get your fatshit ass out of my house.” Groundhog rolled over away from me. I slapped both hands on his arm to drag him off, but he was so sweatslick, I lost hold. I gouged my fingernails into him, rolled him off onto the carpet. Shook the whole trailer when he hit. Fu Manchu laughed from my kitchen. Everything in the refrigerator was out on the counter. Mustard splattered like paintball on the floor. Bread stacked up outside the bag seven slices high.

I said, “God Almighty.” So as not to cry I started kicking Groundhog. Fu Manchu laughed and shoved his mouth full of potato chips. I started stomping Groundhog. I said, “Get up.” He curled up like a ball.

“Get him out of here,” I said to Fu Manchu. When he didn’t do nothing, I said, “Don’t bother me to call the law, motherfucker. Get him up.”

Fu Manchu said, “Evie let us in. She had a key.”

I said, “What?”

Fu Manchu said, “We’re invited guests.”

I said, “I didn’t give Evie no key.”

Evie come up the hall. “Yeah you did,” she said. “You sure as hell did.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” I said. “Before I blow the hell out of all of you.”

Groundhog said, “I’d like you to blow the hell out of me.”

I pulled a piece of old shower curtain rod out from under Willett’s chair. I rared back to bust Groundhog over the head with it. Fu Manchu come up behind me and snatched the rod from my hand. He shoved me over top of Groundhog. I fell headfirst onto the sofa. I turned to get up but Fu Manchu shoved me back down. Groundhog got up. They stood over me, a stone wall of suck. Cool air come off Fu Manchu, like an open icebox. He drew the shower curtain rod back like he was gonna backhand me.

I started crying. I wasn’t scared of getting hit. I was grieving. Grieving for my lost house, my lost safe spot. I cried cause my baby’s private place, my quiet place, the peace place where me and Willett might be able to work things out was gone.

You don’t know, do you? You don’t know what it’s like to never want anything cause you don’t have a way to keep it safe.

Or stole. Or lost. Every chair in pieces. Every rug pissed on. Every glass and plate and toy and pretty little thing on every shelf shattered. You don’t put your hand down in the cushion of your burnhole sofa cause you’ll come back with your finger cut on bottle glass or a needle or tin can lid. Blood beading like a superball cause can’t nobody give a shit.

But our house hadn’t been like that. It wadn’t perfect like Willett’s mother’s, but it was ours and it was nice cause none of my family knew where I lived.

Fu Manchu went back to the kitchen, lay that curtain rod on the counter. He took out his hog-sticker lock blade. He cut summer sausage into little pieces and he raked them off the counter into his hand. He threw them in his mouth like they were my baby’s teeth. He stared at me.

I said, “GET OUT.”

Fu Manchu said, “I heard you before.” He was bigger than the refrigerator. I felt like one sweep of his arm might knock my house down.

Groundhog crashed to the floor, set with his back against the sofa. Willett come back down the hall, Nicolette hanging on his leg. She went to Groundhog and put her hand on his face. She said, “Momma said leave, Slobberface.”

Groundhog raked his arm and caught Nicolette in the side of the knee, knocked her down, which was enough for Willett and he set into kicking Groundhog, saying “Don’t you ever, EVER touch her.” Which we all stood and watched till Momma come out of the bathroom, bolting down the hall like a wiener dog shot out of a cannon, and Evie said, “This is stupid” and grabbed the Jeep keys off the counter and left out.

The rest, Momma included, filed out after Evie. Nicolette dragged a chair to the sink and filled up a squirt gun I’d been using to train the cat to stay off the counter and out of my spider plants. I didn’t make a move to stop her, nor did I when she went running out the door straight as a string, pointing the squirt gun dead ahead of her. Willett grabbed the squirt gun as she turned sideways and slipped past, and I finally did stand up.

“Here, girl,” Momma called from the front seat of the Jeep.

Nicolette ran to her grandmother. Willett stood there, pointing Nicolette’s squirt gun at Momma, his finger on the trigger. Momma hugged Nicolette and the Jeep started moving before she set her down. But she did get her set down before they took off, and then Momma was gone in a cloud of gravel dust.

* * *

I WOKE up that night alone in bed. Willett’s snoring came through the closed bedroom door. I got up and went down the hall. Willett’s legs curled on the sofa. The streetlight on the corner lit up the room. On the table next to him was the blue folder holding his new hire papers.

I sat down on the edge of the couch and opened the folder and held the direct deposit form to the light, did the same with the medical plan papers. The credit union papers. The paper explaining how Willett gets time and a half for all hours over eight worked in a shift, double time for all hours over twelve. The employee newspaper. The sign-up form for the employee softball league. The menu from the employee cafeteria. The membership card for the employee recreation center. After all this time. My husband. An employee. I stacked the papers and my heart hammered like somebody beating on the wall when you’re making too much noise in your motel room. I put the papers in the blue folder, took them out and held them to the light again. I closed the folder and moved to the chair facing Willett. He lay on his side with his eyes open.

“Permanent,” Willett said.

I said, “That’s good, right?”

“Right,” Willett said.

I said, “Come to the bedroom,” and went and checked on Nicolette. Then I got in bed. Time I fell to sleep, I was still alone.

* * *

TUESDAY MORNING, I lay in the bed staring into a pile of clothes and a pencil drawing I did right after high school of six lady astronauts. Light filtered through the pink sheet covering the window. Willett’s arm draped across my stomach. I took his hand in mine. He snored like a little baby cow.

I moved out from under Willett and sat up on the side of the bed and began to fold clothes. Willett’s band T-shirts. His boxer shorts. A wet pair of my jeans. I got two wire hangers out of the closet, hung the jeans on them, and hung the hangers on the new shower rod. Willett stirred as I come back in the bedroom.

He said he loved me and I said I loved him. I went to Nicolette’s room and closed one eye, held the drawing of the lady astronauts up to a blank wall, wondered would Nicolette like me to paint her a mural of the lady astronauts.

I got my navy-blue pants out of the laundry bag, dressed standing in the kitchen. I pulled a powder-blue button down shirt out of the bag, smoothed it out best as I could. I worked at a copy shop. Had been for a while. It might be that when Willett’s pay from the plant started piling up I’d be able to quit.

I opened one of my schoolbooks for nursing. Two hundred dollars for a book. Now Willett had a job like the ones his father and his grandfather and uncles and some of his aunts and a lot of his cousins had kept their whole working lives. I’d seen the pins on their lapels, on their blouses, in the pictures in the halls of their brick houses. Twenty-year pins. Thirty-year pins. Forty-year pins. He could be there forever. I could be whatever. I could be new. I could be not a nurse.

Willett rose and stretched. When he did, he knocked the lamp beside the bed off into a pile of towels on the floor.

“Goddamn, Willett,” I said, but I couldn’t be mad at him. I set the lamp back up, got the towels and shirts and stuff, and put them in a basket.

Willett moved the lamp aside looking for his work pants, which lay hanging over an aquarium had three pitiful guppies left floating around in it. Willett whistled and bobbed his head in his own little going-to-work world.

* * *

WORK THAT day at the copy shop was church bus slow. They sold office supplies at that copy place, so I went and opened a thing of scissors and got a bunch of magazines and cut pictures out of them. I cut out a movie star pushing a baby stroller, acting like she didn’t want nobody to know it was her, when obviously she did, or she wouldn’t have on the hiding-out-movie-star costume. Black sunglasses and a tight, showing-off-fake-boobs T-shirt and a hundred-dollar baseball hat like you see rich women wearing when they run out on the bypass, ponytails bouncing, trying to act like they’re in Lexington. Then I found a big old picture of a pit bull, its mouth full open, looking like a shotgun wound with teeth, its head filling up both pages of a magazine spread. I cut that out and lay it next to fake hiding movie star, and it looked just like that dog was going eat both her and her baby clean up. That made me feel better, and I was fixing to go get a glue stick and glue them to a big piece of paper and then draw some stuff around it for Nicolette, leaving her space to make up a story about them or whatever, when this bunch of women with helmets of hair, all in yellow and pink and flowerdy print dresses with sunglasses big as Big Mac boxes, their bare arms like those long skinny loaves of bread French guys carry around on the back of their bicycles, their teeth white as mall toilets.

They was fixing to have a church bazaar which I don’t even know what that is and they wanted a flyer to hand out to their friends and they wanted to know what kind of paper I thought they ought to put their church bazaar flyer on and so I got out fifty million different paper samples for them, and one of them said, “That lime’s too hot,” and another one said, “That pink looks tacky,” and they finally said, “Honey, what do you think?” like they were doing me some big favor to ask and I said I didn’t have no idea, and then I wondered to myself how many chomps it would take a pit bull to bite one of their heads off and I thought if you took their hair off first, a dog might could do it one chomp, and I was thinking such not because I cared one way or the other, but because they kept debating and debating about their paper color, and wouldn’t never stop, and so I thought, you know, their heads are actually pretty small if you take the hair out of consideration, and so I was looking at my pit bull picture and then back at the small-headedest one of them, when the biggest one said they’d decided. I took out my order pad and she fished out a piece of paper from the fifty million samples all over the counter and she said, “We’ll take this one. What do you call this one?”

And I said,

Which was like the most boring, obvious thing they could have possibly chosen. I didn’t say nothing. Or maybe I did, but if I did it wasn’t anything real bad, just like “I’ll be damned” or something like that, and probably said it under my breath, but they give me a funny look and said, “If you don’t want our business, you can tell your manager we took our business elsewhere,” and I said, “I am the manager,” because the stupid boy who was the manager was with his stupid friends staring out the front window of the shop, not paying a speck of attention to what was going on, and so them women left and I just said, “Bow-wow-wow-yippy-yo-yippy-yay” to the back of their helmets of hair, and went back to thinking about Willett’s blue folder and all his employee-ness and how the world was my goddam oyster.

* * *

WHEN THEM women left, it got quiet and everything was fine till I had to change the toner on one of the big main copiers. I spilled that toner everywhere—on the carpet, down in the copier, all over the job I was copying, all over myself. The manager and the two other boys working my shift blew snot laughing. They all went to the state university in town. They made fun of me, how I talked, the way I drug out my words.

“Fuuuuuck,” I said, when the toner got on my face and hair.

They had a time laughing at my dustyass face, but after a minute they went back to wishing for cars they seen in the parking lot. I went back to cleaning up after myself and wishing them dead. The lights in that place were gray as the carpet on the floor and the paint on the walls, and didn’t none of it ever change, morning noon or night. The boys laughed and talked about vomiting in public, and the fat funny-looking country kids in their classes. I got out the big vacuum cleaner that place had—it was big and gray too—and went to sucking up that toner powder. They were laughing louder than the vacuum. Laugh it up, boys, I thought. Cause it wouldn’t be much longer. In a minute here, I’d be working for extra money, not bill money. And maybe I wouldn’t be working at all.

When I finally got that mess cleaned up and the clunky-ass vacuum cleaner put up, I went back to copying. I was copying some book I knew was copyright violation but the boys had give me ten of the forty the guy needed it copied give to them. So I had the copier going top up. The light went straight to the back of my eyes, and hurt.

The copier was going ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk. The bell on the door rang. The toner had got up my nose. That toner powder was like coal dust. But it wasn’t. It was clean. Even though it messed everything up, it was clean, an indoor mess. It made me miss everything home, home like it was before Daddy died. Made me miss a genuine mess. Made me miss Momma making Daddy change clothes at work, making him shower at work, when his mines had a shower, so he didn’t come home covered in mine mud and dust. He’d have his work clothes in garbage bags. I’d see how dirty that work was when she’d do the wash. But he didn’t track it through Momma’s house, not when we all lived in the trailer out on Long Ridge.

That toner powder added to how I felt that day. I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t at all want to live at home, didn’t want to live in Kentucky. But in that moment, on that day, I sure did want to be home.

All the sudden I was tired of being inside, tired of being in town, tired of being swallowed up in gray. Despite all my family’s crazy shit, I wanted to be back there.

I couldn’t help it. I wished someone would come in smelling of moss. Smelling of woodsmoke. I wished someone would come in smelling of game and grease and cigarettes and gasoline. Paint. Even if somebody would come in smelling of paint, that’d be enough. Not likely here. People come in the copy shop were people living on paper, on presentations, on handouts, on printing for eight cents a page, on Internet access two dollars for ten minutes. I stood over the copier, light strobing my face. I could feel the customer behind me, but I didn’t turn around, cause if I did, the customer would be my customer. Let one of them chatty boys do the talking with the customers. But this customer come in with a smell I couldn’t figure out.

Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.

B.O. and wet dogs was part of it.

Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.

There was chewing tobacco in it.

Dawn, I said to myself, don’t turn around.

Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.

“Hey girl,” the customer said.

Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.

“Turn around here.”

Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.

Orange juice and honey.

Ca-chunk.

“Say,” the voice said.

Ca-chunk.

“Can’t you hear no more?” I knew who it was.

Ca-chunk.

I smelled my granny Jewell’s moonshine recipe.

“Say.”

Ca-chunk.

“Turn around here, you big tall thing.”

Beep beep beep.

It was my brother Albert.

Beep beep beep. Something was wrong with the copier.

Albert said, “You need help with that thing?”

Beep beep beep.

I turned to the counter. There stood Albert, stringy and brown, a big blue slushee in his hand.

I said, “What are you doing here, Albert? How’d you know where I was at?” I stacked and restacked the papers on the counter without taking my eyes off Albert.

Albert’s rat eyes twinkled like gas in a mower can. He said, “Hug?”

I come around the counter, motioned for Albert to follow me. He spread his arms wide as I went out the door into the parking lot.

He said, “No hug?” with a grin like a tent zipper.

Albert’s bird-yellow pickup set in a handicapped spot with its “Army of One” bumper stickers in the back window under the two-foot-tall stickers spelling out “REDNEKK” in gothic letters. Silver flames run back from the front wheel wells. Under lights. Tail lights blacked out. Pins holding the trunk down. Extra gauges ran up from the dashboard, which was spraypainted a lime green. Albert could waste money like nobody’s business.

He said, “Where’s your queerbait husband?” His head filled the truck’s opposite window. Albert backed up and grinned.

I walked back towards the copy shop.

“What’s the matter? Aint you gonna hug me?”

I said, “You got a woman. Go hug her.”

Albert laughed with his arms wide open.

My dark face in the glass of the copy shop door could have told me. There is no way to make your family disappear. Nor was I ever going to know peace with mine. Hubert’s face filled the glass next to my face.

Hubert said, “Where’s your momma?”

I said, “Yall get out of here. This is my work.”

“Your mother needs to call me,” Hubert said.

I didn’t even have the urge to say how pissed off I was, to tell Hubert to leave her alone, leave me alone, leave Tennessee alone. Hubert got me by the arm and jerked me around. I said, “Get your fucking hands off me, Hubert.”

He said, “I need your help, Dawn.” Hubert’s eyes was like the front end of bullets. “She’s gonna get herself killed.”

I said, “What am I supposed to do? Blink three times and make her appear?”

I could feel them asshole drips watching me from inside. Sweat was running in Hubert’s eyes. He looked like a bottle of orange pop just come out of a cooler in some old store.

“Just hold her,” Hubert said. “If you see her, hold her.”

I met Hubert’s bullet eyes with my own.

Albert put a Canard County Bugle, our newspaper, in my hand. As usual, there was a big drug bust on the front page. And there in big color pictures above the fold was Groundhog and Fu Manchu, cuffed and not even trying to hide their faces. Hubert and Albert got back in the truck.

I said, “Hey,” and Albert started the truck. I ran up to Hubert’s window. He rolled it down. I said, “Did Momma rat on them two?” and pointed at the paper.

Hubert said, “I don’t know. Why don’t you blink three times and ask her?”

Then they were gone. I went back in the copy shop. The boys were behind a row of shelves, but I heard them.

“Her boyfriend,” one of them said.

“I thought it was her brother,” another said.

“Probably both,” said the third, and then come the laughing.

I run as hard as I could, put my shoulder into them shelves. There was twelve foot of them hooked together. They went over easy and I caught all three of them dicks under it. They were rocking the shelves trying to get out, but I stood up on the flipped shelves, like a surfer, them hollering, hurt, while the desk calendars and candy bars went flying. I stomped till one of them cried and then I walked out of the store.