Cool in Tucson (16 page)

           
She remembered Denny getting snippy about being left in the handicapped zone, and this was it, right here, wasn’t it?  With the painted white stripes, by the stacks of plastic lawn chairs?  Maybe there were two stacks.  She walked all the way around the front of the store, looking for another entrance with a handicapped zone and two stacks of lawn chairs with pukey green plastic strips. 

Once she thought she saw her car just ahead, although there weren’t any chairs near it, but maybe she remembered those from some other time.  She almost ran toward the old brown car in spite of the heavy sacks, but when she got closer she saw it wasn’t hers.  Wasn’t even a Dodge, just a tacky old Plymouth Valiant that was that same clunky shape, and brown like hers.  Shit brindle, one of her boyfriends called it.  Honestly, all those expensive designers in Detroit and between them they couldn’t dream up any color in 1976 but dweeby fucking
brown?

            Her arms were very tired by then, the bags kept slipping and she had to stop and boost them up again, she should have brought a cart.  But she was trying to hurry because the man who’d grudgingly given her the money for beer and cigs had said, “Hurry up now, hear?  I’ll freak if I’m out of smokes very long.”  And she certainly didn’t want him freaked, she needed him nice and relaxed and still in bed so she could get the wieners and beans and milk unloaded for Denny before he saw the bags.  Then she’d give him a big wet kiss with the change and maybe he wouldn’t think about how much the beer cost.

            By then she’d been all the way around the store twice in the heat, her clothes were sticking to her and sweat was running down her legs.  She was just so frantic, running around this hateful store looking for a stupid old car that had somehow moved itself away from where it belonged, in about a minute she was going to cry.  Then she was crying, God!  Tears were running down her face into the corners of her mouth. They tasted salty and made her feel even more helpless and she couldn’t even spare a hand to wipe them off, loaded down the way she was with these
damn sacks
— 

            A box boy named Roy, gathering up carts in the lot, found her trotting around out there in the hot carbon-smelling dusk, peering at cars and crying. 

“Ma’am,” he said, “somethin’ I can do for you?”  She kind of scared him but then again he thought he sensed an opportunity for growth here.  He had just been born again and his pastor at New Life Fellowship had told him we grow toward God by giving help to those less fortunate than ourselves.  Right now Janine looked less fortunate than anybody he’d seen all day.    

            “My car’s gone,” she said.  She dropped the sacks she was carrying into the bottom of one of the carts he was pushing and stood rubbing her arms.  “My car—my car—Oh, my God,” she said, grabbing him suddenly by the upper arms,  “my daughter’s in that car!”  More tears ran down her cheeks and she clung to him frantically. 

            Roy had pulled a few shifts as an aide at Kino hospital last year as part of the Community Outreach program at school.  He was looking for ways he might, as Pastor said, make a difference.  They had taught him to keep his voice down, said it soothed the patients if you talked soft.  He leaned close to Janine’s tear-streaked face now and said quietly, “We’ll find it.  You come with me and we’ll find it.”

            He had no idea where her car was or even if she had one, but he knew where the manager was and he led her there, talking softly and holding her by the hand.  By the time they reached Mr. Dowling’s office Janine’s weeping had grown louder, she had quit talking about her car and was concerned entirely with her child, and what she seemed to be wailing now was, “Oh, my God, they’ve got my baby.” 

When Roy entered Mr. Dowling’s office leading a near-hysterical woman by the hand, he got an indignant look from the manager, who didn’t care about making a difference but just wanted to see that the produce was iced down properly so he could go home to supper.  At first he didn’t even seem to quite believe in Janine’s distress.  He looked at the naked fingers of her left hand and asked her, “Who’s this you say’s got your baby, Missy?”  

“The men who took my car!” Janine cried.  She put her head back, closed her eyes, and let out a wail like a hungry coyote.  Mr. Dowling began dialing 911. 

By the time the police car pulled up outside, Janine was telling the store manager about two dark men—Hispanic or African-American, she wasn’t sure which—who jumped in her car at the stop light in front of the store, pushed her out and drove off.  She repeated the story for the patrolman, adding, “And see, my poor baby’s asleep in the backseat.”  (She was suddenly, mysteriously, sure about that.)  And every time she said, “My baby,” she started to cry again. 

On her way to the manager’s office Janine had started to wonder if the box boy had noticed how much beer she had in those bags?  If he had, he might start to think a woman who was careless enough to leave her child in a car in a busy parking lot while she went to buy beer deserved whatever she got.  So in her mind she started to embroider her story a little bit. 

By the time they got to Mr. Dowling’s office she realized her groceries bags were probably lost in that cart outside anyway.  And by then she’d said several times, “They’ve got my baby,” and though she had no clear idea who “they” might be, she couldn’t very well take it back now.  Anyway it was true, basically, somebody had evidently driven off with her car and Denny was in it.  

This nice-looking cop seemed to assume that by
baby
she meant
infant,
and that part of the problem really got his attention.  So Janine didn’t correct him, because whatever
got him excited
about
finding Denny was good, right?  Wasn’t that what cops were supposed to do, instead of harassing single mothers every time they accidentally drove a little over the speed limit? 
Honestly.
 

The patrolman took down the model and license number of her car, called the station and repeated it to someone there, and hung up and told her that every squad car in Tucson was now looking for her car.  Janine dried her eyes and told the policeman how grateful she was for his help, and he kindly offered to drive her home if her car wasn’t found soon.  She went in the restroom and repaired her makeup a little so she wouldn’t look like such a
wreck
, and by the time she came back out there was a reporter there who said he just wanted to ask her a few questions. 

She knew things were getting a little out of hand when the reporter asked her to step out in front of the store where his cameraman was set up.  But she still had to find her damn car and get Denny back, didn’t she?  So she licked her lips and went out and stood bravely in front of the lights telling her story for the third time, and now the two men who had pushed her out of her car were a little bigger and meaner and this time they had guns.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 Sarah ate her salad while the dryer hummed.  It was her usual dinner music in this dinky duplex, where the kitchen was also the dining room and laundry. 

She had lived much larger during her marriage to Andy Burke, and she still missed plenty from those years besides the rampaging sex.  While their love lasted, they had been an ambitious, cheerful couple, with two satisfying careers, plenty of friends and lively parties, long contented days of hiking in the mountains.  

The marriage soured when Andy’s partner in his big, successful restaurant grew discontented and bailed out of the business unexpectedly.  The longer work hours and financial pressure that came with the separation piled up stress that Andy dealt with, more and more, by drunken after-hours carousing.  Guilt and the drag on his energy left him surly and apathetic at home, and Sarah, pushing to make it as a new detective and already worried about Janine, resented his lack of support and said so.  Andy responded by blaming her unpredictable work schedule as a detective.  Homeric battles began to rattle the walls of their stylish house in Oro Valley, followed by equally noisy interludes when sex settled the argument.

Andy had always been careless about time; his lateness grew egregious; soon there were nights when he never showed up.  The final emotional train wreck occurred in the dawn hours after Andy’s thirty-seventh birthday, when Sarah, seeing him pull into the driveway, began throwing his clothes out the door.

Scooping up dress shirts and boxer shorts as fast as his stupendous hangover would allow, Andy ran around the front yard accusing her of spousal abuse, yelling,  “How can you be so cruel?”

 “This isn’t cruel.  This is angry.”  She heaved another armload of suits onto the pea gravel in the yard.  “Cruel is when you spend the night with a waitress from your favorite bar while your spouse waits with twelve guests and the birthday dinner you knew she was cooking.”  Silk ties landed in a bright pile on top of the suits; a few got caught in the cactus.

“All right, I misbehaved,” Andy said, as if holding your wife up to public ridicule were a boyish prank. “Those are new shirts, Sarah, damn it, do not throw— I mean it now—” Festooned with clothing, he ran in through the door and slammed it shut.  Birds flew up out of the tree in the yard, pans rattled in the kitchen.  “If I can admit I was wrong, why can’t you be reasonable and accept my apology?  It’ll never happen again, Sarah, I swear.” 

He had made these same apologies and promises several times before, and she had accepted them because, for lots of good reasons, she loved him.  But this morning, even with rage putting a red halo around everything, Sarah saw the way his eyes gleamed as he faced her over the crusty remains of last night’s ruined feast.  And in that terrible instant, she understood:
Andy was getting off on this.
  He had progressed from casual adulterer to emotional batterer.  For him, now, her cries of outrage, his confessions of guilt and the mad lust of their reconciliations were the turn-ons he had come to need. 

That epiphany gave her the strength to leave him, but the battles didn’t end there, of course.  During the demeaning fights over money and possessions that attended their toxic divorce, a friend reminded Sarah of the lyrics of a Paul Simon song from the seventies that insisted, “there must be fifty ways to leave your lover.”

“Not if your lover’s got a lawyer and he’s determined to punish you for leaving him,” Sarah said.  “You don’t just get on the bus, Gus.  You hire another attorney and spend most of the money you’re fighting over, just to keep what you had when you married him.” 

Embarrassment over her post-divorce impoverishment had kept Sarah from insisting Denny stay with her the whole time Janine was in detox, and from fighting to keep her after Janine got out.  She knew her love for Denny was deep and real, that they enjoyed each other’s company.  And she was terribly afraid her sister was too frail to make a go of independent living.  But she herself had so little to offer—a futon in the tiny study that had to be made up every night, half a toothbrush shelf in her crowded bathroom—how great a deal was that for a child? 

And she could never tell, because Denny never complained, how much the little girl missed her mother.  Some of the social workers she had talked to had told her there was nothing like the parental bond.  “Girls, especially, want their Moms.  We’ll go an extra mile to keep families together.” 

So when the time came, she took Denny back to Janine’s house, with many admonitions about calling if she needed help.  They’d still be in close touch, she promised herself, she’d know if Janine wasn’t making it. 

But staying in touch got more and more difficult as both Janine and Denny seemed to draw away.  In the end, she admitted now as she put away her dinner dishes, she had grown tired of the pain and worry the phone calls gave her, and begun to put off calling. 

Standing now by the kitchen counter folding towels out of the dryer, she picked up the remote from a nearby table and clicked on the TV but left the sound off.  Yawning, she watched the opening credits of a sitcom, thinking maybe she’d watch one show before bed.

An amber alert interrupted the program as she opened a drawer to put the dishtowels away.  She froze in place, staring in shock at the name scrolling across the bottom of her TV screen, hearing an announcer’s voice say, “…Denice Lynch, age 10, weighing about sixty-five pounds, wearing a white T-shirt and dark blue shorts…”  Denny’s small, unsmiling face appeared on the screen.  Sarah grabbed the remote and turned the sound up.