Backseat Saints (20 page)

“It dern well better be, for a hundred bucks,” I said.

“Plus tip,” he said.

“Plus tip,” I agreed, and stepped into his arms.

He pulled me close, careful, trying to be gentle with my healing
body, but I sucked his bottom lip into my mouth and bit down, hard enough to sting. It felt good. I ran my claws down his
back, scraping his skin, then put my hands flat against his chest and shoved off, hard and fast enough to surprise him. I
pulled free from his arms. He reached for me, but I turned and ran naked away from him down the hall. He followed me, as he
had always followed me.

I turned at the bedroom door, let him catch me. I kissed him again, not sweet, plenty of teeth. He lifted me up, walking me
back into the bedroom with my feet dangling. He threw me backwards, so I was briefly flying, the cool air a pleasure on my
naked hide. I landed, bouncing against the mattress. Then he was on top of me, and I wrapped my legs around him, dug my heels
into his ass, and pulled him into me. I bit down hard into the meat of his shoulder. He reared back and I dug my heels again,
drawing him in.

We rolled in the middle. I got on top and rode him like a pony. When I came it was like the sound of thick glass shattering
in me, a crashing, and then I was full of bright shards that chimed against each other as they slivered up my insides with
a sound like jagged bells. Then it was his turn, and I rode him down till he was nothing, till he was lying in a heap, deflated,
his eyes half-closed and no one home behind them.

He took the sex as if it were simple and delicious and carried no message, and then he slept. He didn’t even know it was good-bye.
I lay beside him, smiling but not pretty. I felt it as a broad stretch of my mouth that showed my whole, panting tongue to
the air, and the air tasted warm and full of musk.

From then on, every time I took him to my bed it was good-bye like that. Just as every time he hit me was a reminder of how
permanently I was going to say it.

T
HE NEXT DAY, as soon as Thom left for work, I gathered up Ro Grandee’s floaty skirts, her sheer, fitted cardigans, and her
lace-trimmed blouses and bundled them into the washer. I added a packet of red Rit fabric dye and started the machine. Heavy-duty.
Hot water. Extra spin cycle. I left Ro Grandee’s wardrobe to ruin itself and walked over to Mrs. Fancy’s in my Levi’s and
the shirt I’d worn to Artisan.

I was lifting my hand to knock when the door sprang open. Mrs. Fancy let out a peeping yip noise and hopped back. Ro would
have jumped back, too, like a moving echo, but I didn’t so much as twitch. I lowered my arm and waited. Mrs. Fancy put one
hand to her chest, breathing in, then covered her mouth. Her eyes got bright and her shoulders shook, and I could tell she
was laughing behind her hand.

“Lordy, Ro, you like to give me a heart attack,” she said when she could speak. “Look at your hair. I didn’t even recognize
you. Why, you’re lovely all bobbed.”

I’d been missing morning coffee for more than a week now, but she didn’t ask. She never asked. It had made her Ro Grandee’s
perfect friend, but it made me angry now. Angry enough to feel just fine about all the ways I planned to use her. Even angry
enough to steal from her.

“You’re going out?” I asked.

“I was heading to my reading club up at church. Did you—” She stopped talking and peered at my face. “Did you need something?”

“I need to borrow your phone,” I said.

“Oh, has your phone gone out?” Mrs. Fancy asked. She peered around the door frame to look at my house like a concerned owl,
blinking against the morning sunlight.

“No,” I said. “I need to make some calls, long-distance. I’ll pay you for them, of course, it’s just not something I want
Thom to see.”

“A surprise?” said Mrs. Fancy.

“Oh, yes,” I said, utterly truthful. “I’m planning a surprise.”

She leaned back, and her sparse eyebrows came together. “Come on in,” she said. Her papery hand closed around my wrist, and
she towed me across her threshold. Her living room had a square of parquet by the minifoyer, too, but the carpet surrounding
hers was blue. We stood on the fake wood island, and now she was looking at my clothes. “Spring cleaning day?”

I shook my head, trying to sound sorry instead of triumphant. “A pair of Christmas socks got in my laundry.”

“Oh, honey!” she said. “What are you going to do?”

I waved it away. “Trinity Methodist runs a good secondhand store downtown. I’ll get some things.”

She tutted and said, “That store is run by a bunch of dirty hippies. I bet those clothes are full of lice.”

“I’ll wash them,” I said, impatient. “May I use your phone while you’re at book club?” I came down hard on the last two words,
reminding her she had someplace to be.

“You’ll want to use bleach, or a color-safe bleach alternative,” Mrs. Fancy prattled on, completely unreminded. “Lice eggs
are so hardy.”

“Mrs. Fancy,” I said, “I know how—”

She grabbed my arm and interrupted, her gaze bright. “You know, we’re of a size. I bet I have some things you could wear!”

That derailed me, the idea of heading into my gun store shift later in one of her old-lady pantsuits, stretched out in the
bum and with matching sweaters that had three-dimensional, sequined scenes of forests in the fall and snowmen at Christmas.

It must have showed on my face, because she started laughing. “Not what I wear now, you silly. I’ve kept my favorite things
for years now. You’d look darling in my old peasant blouses or my mod minidresses. I see girls your age in outfits like the
ones I’ve saved all the time. The stores call it vintage, but that’s only so they can charge more.”

She seemed perfectly content to natter on about fashion until I grew old and withered up too much to wear a minidress.

“I’d love to try your things on,” I said, and I grabbed the edges of my shirt and pulled it off over my head. She stopped
talking. Her gaze flicked to my soft cotton bra, then lower, taking in the slow-fading patterns, olive and mustard and palest
sunrise blue, that were still mapped across my breasts and belly.

Her gaze skittered off me sideways, and she put one hand to her throat. I half expected her to close her eyes and loudly chant
a recipe for fruited Jell-O mold or tell me how to get wine stains out of the carpet, some small, domestic spell to ward away
the ugly story my skin told.

Instead she said, “Come away from the windows, or you’ll be giving the postman a treat.”

She walked away from me, through the den and down the hallway that led to the bedrooms. I followed in my jeans and bra, my
old T-shirt crumpled in an angry ball in my left hand, saying, “You’re missing your book discussion.”

“Never you mind,” she said, and went on into the guest bedroom. Phil came in with me, and he jumped up on the flowered comforter.
He yowled at me, sensing the tension that Mrs. Fancy was delicately ignoring.

She opened the closet and started pushing things aside. “I haven’t saved much of anything from the last ten, fifteen years.
My
knees put me in ugly shoes about then, and I stopped caring. Anyway, eighties fashion is like jumbo shrimp or pretty ugly—what
do you call those things, where it can’t be both? But the seventies, that was a fun time for clothes. Look at the colors!
I have quite a few dresses from the fifties and sixties, too.” She flipped through the hangers until she came to a row of
brightly colored blouses. She pulled out a poet’s shirt in bright blue floaty cotton and turned to me. I reached for it, but
something on my face made her hug the blouse to her chest.

“You’re different, Ro.” It was more than Ro Grandee’s own husband had noticed, even when I was naked and riding him. Points
for that, at least.

I steeled myself, and then, more for expediency than for Mrs. Fancy’s own sake, I pulled Ro Grandee’s face on over mine, blanking
my eyes and upping the wattage of my smile. My body curved into her good-girl’s Catholic posture. Immediately I felt the mistake.
I could not empower her this way. Ro was suicide, and slipping her skin on was as delicious and fatal as the first drag off
a cigarette after days of being quits. If I did it enough, I would no longer be able to help it.

In a single moment of looking through the tissue-thin filter of Ro’s eyes, I recalled what it felt like to love Mrs. Fancy.
I could see how each thing she had felt regularly had put lines in her face, all her favorite feelings permanently remembered
by her skin. Now her eyes crinkled up, and the vertical creases around her mouth deepened. These particular lines were so
fixed that she must have made this face at least a million times before I met her. It was concern, tempered with such love
and ready mercy that it had to have originated for her children. She was making it for me now.

I shook Ro off me, fast, and said, “Let me try that shirt on.”

She took the blouse off the hanger and held it out to me, but she did not let go. We stood joined by it, each holding a shoulder.

She searched my face, and then she said, “You’re leaving your husband.” She spoke quietly, but her tone was plain: She was
crowing.

“Do you see me packing?” I said. Good Lord, what an awful choice of words. “My things, I mean. I am not packing my things.”

But Mrs. Fancy’s mind was not on guns and double meanings. Her fingers clutched her half of the blue blouse and she said,
“Who are you calling that you don’t want him to see, long-distance? Someone you can go to? When you leave him?”

“I’m not leaving him,” I said, but her eyes were as bright and round and hopeful as a spring robin’s. “I’m thinking things
over, is all.” Her reaction made me ashamed to be taking advantage of her. But not enough to stop me. A lie came to me then.
It wasn’t a lie I’d planned. I’d heard something like it on
Oprah
once, and it tumbled down out of my memory straight into my mouth. I opened wide and let it out. “I want to talk to some
people back in Alabama, the ones who knew me before I met Thom. I want to remember who I was before.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “That sounds like shrink talk.” She didn’t sound like she held with that. She probably didn’t
hold with
Oprah
, either.

I said, “I don’t have the money for a shrink. I’ve been… talking to my pastor.” The pastor at the Grandees’ church was a wobbly-necked
fellow who dyed his hair shoe-polish black. His office smelled like tuna fish and ranch dressing, and Joe and Charlotte Grandee’s
tithe paid a goodly piece of his salary. He was a social club Presbyterian whose sermons were written to butter open the wallets
of his wealthier congregants; a drunken barn cat could fart out better advice than I would expect to hear coming out of the
other end of that man.

Still, I could tell Mrs. Fancy liked this idea, even though she said, “Are you sure your pastor hasn’t been talking to a shrink?”
She still held tight to the blouse with one hand. The hanger dropped from her other hand to the floor, and she didn’t even
notice. “At least there’s some God behind it. I don’t trust that muddled-up Freud stuff. Such a pervert! Ladies wishing they
had penises. Why, I never heard of such. The only penis I ever wanted was properly attached to Mr. Fancy, where I could get
some good use out of it.”

A muffled squawk of laughter got out of me. She’d surprised me for the second time in as many minutes, and she didn’t look
a bit sorry. She had a sly smile pulling up one corner of her mouth. She leaned in and smoothed back a piece of my hair, tucking
the end behind my ear so she could look me directly in the eye. My surprise held me still for it.

“I had a good marriage, Ro. In all ways good, and it made everything else good, too. I’m not ashamed of that. It’s what I
want most for you.” She petted back the other side of my hair, her fingers lingering as she tucked it behind my other ear.
“Leave him. Today. My church works with some people that would hide you. They run a facility for women in… your situation.”

“Women in my situation, huh?” I said, wry, shaking my head at both the idea and her delicate phrasing in a room where my bruises
were so loudly displayed. I breathed in deep, through my nose, and smelled her baby powder and mothballs and the drifted-down
scent of yesterday’s baking. This was Mrs. Fancy’s territory, and until this moment, I’d assumed only Ro Grandee had a place
here.

In the house where I grew up, the kitchen had belonged to my mother. The air said so with vanilla and cinnamon, the same way
the orange blossom soap in the bathroom made that place hers, too. The den was Daddy’s. He filled it with the smells of salt
and beer and the angry sweat that comes from watching your team lose hard at baseball. The bedroom smelled mostly his as well,
and the hall where he’d worn down the carpet pacing and drinking on the bad nights. My room was mine, so it smelled like me,
which registered in my own nose as nothing.

The day before she left, my mother had gone into her kitchen and packed a PBJ and red grapes into my brown paper lunch bag.
She should have put a hunk of mutton in, or sliced kiwi, feta cheese, some strange food I’d never seen, to prepare me for
her long-planned disappearing act.