Backseat Saints (26 page)

Friday night, off-season, meant Jim’s parents would be sitting across from each other at the brand spankin’ new Olive Garden,
silently eating chicken Parm with endless breadsticks. I remember one Friday when we sat at that counter for over an hour,
waiting his parents out. At nine, we drove by Jim’s house to check for his dad’s car. His folks were still gone, and that
meant they’d decided to catch the second show at the movies. The caffeine, the sugar, they had been warm-ups. The house was
ours for the next ninety minutes, and we went inside to get our real fix.

“Date night for the grown folk,” I said to Jim, pulling off my hand-me-down dress and dropping it to the floor. I’d worn someone’s
pretty lace cami instead of a bra. It had a stain on the back, but Jim was focused on my front. “After dinner, I bet your
dad says, ‘Hey, Laura, you want to see a movie? Or go home and do it?’”

“Shut up,” Jim said, laughing, reaching for me, sweet like always.

I imitated his mom’s prim, high voice. “Movie, please! I like to gander at that Clint Eastwood for a couple hours, before.”

“This is so not the time to talk like my mom,” Jim said, hands on my cami. “Don’t you ever pick the movie, Rose-Pop.”

He pushed the cami up and stepped in closer, fingers moving
careful and reverent down the chain of boot-print bruises that ran from my rib cage to my hip and down my thigh. The darkened
flesh felt hot to him, he’d told me once, like it had fever. I pretended he was rubbing them away, but I knew better. He liked
it.

We were seniors. That was the year sex changed for me. It stopped being something I did for him because I loved him, loved
the kissing parts and closeness and the smell of him. Something opened up for me that year, my body finally catching up to
my choices, coming to understand all the things he was learning to do to me on his squeaky brown bunk bed, top and bottom.
He knew exactly how to touch me, how to move between my legs to please me, but always, always, his lips and fingers came back
to haunt the spots where I was blackened and punctured and ruined.

He never hurt me himself. In fact, he’d once gotten in a fistfight with my daddy on the lawn, telling him to keep his hands
off me. I needed sweetness, and Jim gave me that. The other thing I needed, I got plenty of at home. I took hard roundhouse
rights on the sly from Daddy, separate from Jim. What had Jim Beverly been getting on the sly?

He’d gotten it from Arlene Fleet. And Dawna Sutton, too, I realized. On the phone she’d said she hoped Jim was burning deep,
deep, deep in deepest hell, an extreme consequence for a three-date relationship in high school, unless something truly ugly
had happened between them.

I dug around in my bag for my notepad and a pen. I started writing Arlene a letter. I tried to remember everything I’d said
to her, to keep it in character. It was part apology, but mostly, its purpose was to let her know I could find out what I
needed elsewhere. I assured her I would not be troubling her again, because I owed her that much. I folded it up and wrote
her name on the outside of it. I would leave it on her door, and then I would be out of time, in more ways than one.

I hadn’t let Mrs. Fancy take me to her church’s shelter. I couldn’t.
Ro Grandee was harder to peel off myself than leprosy. I knew if I got scared and cold and lonely enough, Ro would bring me
back to Thom. I’d wanted to remove that option, remove Thom from the earth. In the hospital, then at home ruining my ex-wardrobe,
even yesterday as I puked my way across the country, I’d been so careful not to think of how things would be after, when Thom
was gone and I was left alone with Jim.

I hadn’t wanted to think of it, because I knew already. It would be the same thing. Before I got rid of my last bad man, I
was making damn sure I had another man just like him already lined up. Jim was every boy who had ever belonged to me, from
my daddy on down, and I hadn’t understood what that meant until Arlene Fleet had scrambled up a tree and made me understand:
Thom was suicide, and Jim was Thom in a different body. A permanent end to Thom did not end my need for him.

I took inventory. I was almost out of money. I didn’t know this city, and I didn’t have a single friend here. The most valuable
objects in my purse were a fake ID, a can of pepper spray, and a plane ticket back to Amarillo. If I was running, the start
line could not be Chicago.

I had too much I couldn’t leave in Amarillo. My dog. My Pawpy’s gun. Rose Mae Lolley’s ID and bank card, which would let me
clean out our checking account. But at four this afternoon, my shift at Grand Guns started, and if I wasn’t there, some overhelpful
Grandee or another would alert my husband that his Ro had gone AWOL.

After I left the note for Arlene, I went back to the airport, and I caught my flight home.

What the hell else could I do?

I
WAS FIFTEEN MINUTES LATE, but I made my shift at Grand Guns. Two sales guys, Derek and James, were holding down the fort.

Derek said, “There’s the princess now,” when I came in, and looked meaningfully at the clock. Derek was kind of an asshole.

The Grandees’ main store had tables of accessories and sales items in the center, but most of the serious inventory was locked
inside cases that ran all the way around the three back walls. The rifles were on vertical display in glass-front cabinets.
In front of them, glass-top display tables holding the pistols were connected in a U-shape. There was an aisle running all
the way around between the rifles and the pistols where the sales guys worked. On the right side, near the doorway to Joe
Grandee’s office and the storage area, there was a table for the register. It had a butcher-block top instead of glass, and
James was sitting behind it on what was usually my stool, minding the till. He didn’t give me any crap, though, just did a
drawer check and signed out to go work the floor.

I slid into my place and tried to look like I was working, but my gaze kept stealing to the phone. Any moment, Thom would
call to check up on me. I’d practiced lines in my head on the flight home. I wanted to sound bored and a little lonely for
him, completely
regular. After my shift, I could swing by the bank and clean out our money, then I was smoke. I’d have a twenty-hour lead
time before Thom’s flight landed tomorrow.

An hour later, I still hadn’t heard from him, and that wasn’t right. He knew my schedule. Another half hour passed, and I
was considering calling his hotel when I heard the door that led from the alley behind the store into the storage area crash
open. Joe Grandee called, “Grab that other box.” Then I heard the unmistakable sound of Thom’s voice calling back, “I got
it.”

The air left my lungs in a
whoosh
, and I couldn’t get more in. They weren’t supposed to be back until tomorrow. I took three desperate panting breaths and
tried to make my spine unstiffen. Thom came out of the door that led to the offices. I felt him behind me, felt the push his
big body gave the air. He came up right behind me and said, “Hey, baby.”

I turned on the stool toward him, trying to look pleased and surprised, but as soon as I saw him, my face froze. Thom was
different. I could see it in every line of his tall body. I could smell it on him. I gave him a smile close to one of Ro’s,
and he curved his lips up at me, but his eyes stayed dry and flat as matte wall paint.

“I thought you were coming back tomorrow,” I said. He didn’t make a move toward me, didn’t touch me or lean in to kiss me,
and that was wrong, too.

“I couldn’t wait to see you,” he said, but he didn’t sound eager. He was in the doorway behind the low glass-top display cases,
nothing between us but three feet of cool air, quickly growing cooler. I got up off the stool and went to him and lifted my
face. He leaned down and put a kiss on my mouth. His lips were hard and tasted foreign, not like Thom, as if he’d been eating
tamarind and cumin on the sly. As I turned to go back to my stool, he gave my ass a slap, hard enough to sting.

“There’s my girl,” he said.

Joe appeared in the doorway behind Thom and said, “Help me get this crap out of the truck.”

Thom nodded once. He was rubbing at his lips with the hand that had slapped my ass, as if he was balming them up with what
that had felt like. He turned and went into the back room.

“Help me” in Joe Grandee language apparently meant,
You go get the crap out of the truck while I throw my jumbo-manly key ring in the drawer by the register, grazing your wife’s
titty in passing, and then plop down on my stool.

“Go give Thom a hand unloading,” Joe called to the two salesmen. “Ro and I got things under control out here.”

James and Derek went on in the back, and Joe and I sat on our stools, his by the door, mine behind the register.

“What are y’all doing back?” I asked, trying to look anything but panicked.

“Hell if I know,” Joe said. “Thom worked the show like a whirly-dervish all morning. Then he said he was done and flying home.
I could come or not.” Joe was different, too. Not to such an extreme, but something had changed. I’d long wished he would
keep his greasy eyeballs off my ass, but now his gaze kept drifting to my belly. He made significant eyebrows at my abdomen
and added, “Why don’t you tell me why we came back early?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He waggled his eyebrows at my belly again and said, “I figured we came home to get us some good news?”

“That’s nice. What happened?” I said.

That surprised him enough to make him drag his gaze up off my body to my face. I was surprised they knew the route. “Thom
said on the way to Houston
you’d
have some good news to tell me, once we were home.”

He shifted his eyes right back to my stomach, a gloaty smile spreading across his face, and all at once I remembered puking
on the way to the airport. I’d implied to Thom I might be pregnant, to get him on the plane.

“I do not have good news to tell you,” I said, and I bit down hard on the last word.

Thom ducked his head in through the doorway and said, “Where do you want that box of brochures? In the files?” He looked only
at his father, not even glancing my way, and I felt it again, this overwhelming sense of other coming off him.

“Nah, set ’em by my desk,” Joe said. “Your wife here says she doesn’t have any news to share.”

Thom’s flat gaze finally shifted to me again, and I felt a chill run up my spine at the ice in it. “I’m sure she will soon,”
he said. “All the way home on the plane, when you were saying I was so quiet? I was wondering to myself what the baby might
look like.”

“He’ll have the Grandee nose,” Joe said. “Both of Larry’s do.”

“Maybe not,” Thom said, with too much meaning behind it, right to me. He went back into the offices.

Joe was showing me all his teeth.

“I’m not pregnant,” I snapped.

“But Thom said—”

“I was wrong, Joe. Now can we drop it, please?”

There was silence between us for maybe thirty seconds, and then Joe said, “I think you should go to a lady parts doc, Ro.
Make sure all your bits work.”

I spun sideways on the stool to face him. “Good Lord! We only just started trying.” I was angry that I felt I owed him even
that much of an excuse. “Keep your mind out of my pants, please, Joe.” I wanted to say more, but something was off with Thom,
way off, and I couldn’t afford to get into it with his daddy right now.

“You think it’s Thom, huh?” Joe waved one hand around at all the weapons lining the walls and cackled. “That’d be rich. A
Grandee man shooting blanks!”

“I’m not at all worried about Thom,” I said in the coldest voice that I could muster. Inside, I was so worried about Thom,
I felt like my spine was shivering itself into bits.

“Me neither,” Joe said agreeably. “You’re the one that worries me. Your family was Catholic, after all. You should go see
a doc.”

I felt my eyes going narrow, drawn into the conversation in
spite of myself. “I don’t think a gynecologist can cure Catholicism,” I said. “I don’t even think that’s something you can
see with a speculum.”

Joe grinned, genial and intrusive. “A Catholic only child? That says to me your mama had something bunged up in her works.
You could, too.”

I stood up, furious, just as Thom stepped back into the room, right between us, and a good thing, too. He glanced from his
daddy, sitting splay-legged and relaxed on his stool, to me standing with my shoulders braced and my hands curling up into
fists.

“What did I miss?” he asked.

I said, “Your daddy is a little too interested in the state of my Catholic vagina.” I was breathing hard, eyes on Joe.

“Oh?” Thom said, the single syllable tolling low, like a warning bell. His wrongness, the not-Thom-ness of him, froze me in
place and killed my temper with his daddy. Thom said to his dad, “Pop, you want to go take a look, see if we put things where
you want ’em?” and that didn’t sound like my Thom either.

Joe looked back and forth between us, puzzled, as if he sensed it, too. Finally he nodded and said to Thom, “Come on, then,
I’ll show you how I want to shift things around.”