Backseat Saints (35 page)

I’m floored enough to speak the simple truth. “I met Mirabelle in an airport. She told me I was welcome.”

He nods and falls into a small, comfortable silence. I sit beside him, trying to keep my expression plain even though my heart
is racing. Back at Cadillac Ranch, I’d dismissed my mother’s message as meaningless, even heartless. But she had left me the
directions I craved, after all. On the same car, under her past-tense love note and her insulting instructions to pray, I’d
noticed silver letters telling me,
The Fun’s at RODEO!
I’d assumed that was the gay men for peace, but now I’m wondering what would have happened if I’d put it together, if I’d
thought to call that bar and ask to speak to Cecilia. Would I have been offered the chance to disappear?

My chill heart almost warms a speck toward my mother, but in its next beat I realize that if I hadn’t run into her at the
airport,
I never would have known that message was there. Even when I found it, it was so obscure that I hadn’t understood it. It wasn’t
really for me. It was for her. A balm to her conscience, a way to tell herself she’d drawn a path for me and put it in fate’s
hands.

I’m breathing too hard, and the silence feels strained to me. It doesn’t seem to be bothering Parker, though. He is stretched
out on the steps with his face to the sun. I try to shake it off. So my mother has made an asshole move; by now, this should
not surprise me.

Finally I turn to Parker and say, “So you have house rules—”

“No, no,” Parker interrupts. “It’s my house, but definitely Mirabelle’s rules. I’m not really much of a rules guy.” That’s
so obvious it makes me smile, even through my anger. He grins back, but when he speaks again he sounds serious. “I’m sure
she’ll tell you. I know you spend the first seven days inside. She kicked one girl out for being on the porch.”

I snort, and I have to work to keep my tone mild. “Mirabelle’s kind of a bitch, huh?”

Parker shrugs. “It’s hard-core, but it makes sense. That girl’s boyfriend was driving all over Berkeley with a harpoon gun,
looking for her.” I catch him stealing a glance at my left hand. I have no tan lines, but the skin at the base of my ring
finger has a faint indentation where my rings used to sit. I fist my hand and sneak a glance at his. No sign of a ring there.
“After a week, even the maddest man quits looking. Or at least they are less likely to come in swinging.”

I nod. In seven days, a temper-driven man cools off. If only Thom Grandee were running on temper instead of something so much
colder. What Thom is carrying around is practically immortal: a pure desire to put me in the earth. I have a sudden snapshot
memory of his dead-eyed face at the gun shop, all his layers stripped away and only the reptile left, cold-blooded and foreign.

I remind myself he’s looking for a girl who no longer exists. Even so, my hand jumps to the top of my bag, pressing in to
feel the comforting hardness of Pawpy’s gun.

“That makes sense. Any other big rules I should know?”

Parker shrugs. “The usual stuff. No drugs or weapons, like that.”

My hand is pressing Pawpy’s gun, and I startle when he says no weapons. He catches it, and his eyebrows rise.

“I have some chunks of an old gun,” I confess.

Parker sits up straight. “You have a gun?” He says the words with the same vehement disbelief I would use to say, “You have
a rotting snake carcass?”

“I have
pieces
of gun,” I say. “Pieces can’t shoot.” Technically that’s true. Pawpy’s gun can’t work until I load the barrel and slot it
into place. But anyone who knows guns, my mother included, could have this revolver ready to fire in thirty seconds. Still,
if this fella has ever touched a gun, I’ll eat my boots. I open my bag and dig it out to show him.

His eyes are wide, watching me unfold the T-shirt I’ve bundled around the gun. I hold it over for him to see, resting my hands
on the top of the bag.

He says, “I’m not sure Mirabelle likes people to have pieces of gun. I’m not sure I do.”

“Not a shooter, huh?” I say. “I kinda guessed that from the shoes.”

He looks at his own feet, then over to Ivy’s scuffed cowboy boots, then back.

“What about my shoes?” he asks.

“They’re pacifist shoes,” I say. “You ever see a soldier wearing mandals?”

He laughs at that. “Okay, Boots, so your feet are saying you’re an expert marks-lady-person?” He sounds more interested now.

I meet his eyes, direct and steady, and I say, “Oh yes. My boots say I’m fantastic.”

His floppy awkwardness is dropping away. He’s gone all comfortable inside his wiry body. Sandals or no sandals, now I am sitting
with a man, the kind that Alswan might not so easily dismiss.

He leans in toward me. “Why would you want to be a fantastic gun shooter?” It’s not rhetorical; he really wants an answer.

“It’s fun,” I say.

He shakes his head, doubtful, and says, “I’ve never had to fight off a ‘fun’ urge to go shoot Bambi in the face.”

I say truthfully, “Oh! Me neither. Not that I have a problem with it—my daddy hunted to feed us. I went with him dove hunting,
but I didn’t shoot, and if he was after deer or rabbits, I stayed home. I can’t eat an animal once I’ve met it all up close
and fuzzy.”

“So you’ve never shot at anything alive?” he says.

I picture Thom Grandee rising over the slope on the running trail at Wildcat Bluff, his Roman nose centered in my sights,
but I meet Parker’s gaze and do not blink or hesitate before I say, “Of course not.” I have not lost my facility for lying
to men, thank God. “Anyway, rifles don’t do much for me. I’m a pistol girl, and I purely love to target shoot. As for these
pieces, this gun used to be my grampa’s. All I have left of him.”

“A sentimental gun? That’s bizarre.” He reaches over and rolls the loose barrel doubtfully.

“Chunks of sentimental gun,” I say. His fine-boned finger touches the barrel, which touches the shirt, which rests in my hand,
and he puts out a spark strong enough to travel through all that and reach me. I feel it like a buzzing in my palm. “Maybe
sometime when I’m out of quarantine, I’ll take you to a range to try some shooting.”

“Ha!” he says, like the very idea is absurd. He takes his hand away, but then he rubs his fingers together, as if he’s setting
the feel of the cool, slick metal into memory. After another ten seconds he says, “Maybe.”

The door on the far end of the porch swings open. We both jump, as if we have been caught out doing something naughty. I rewrap
the gun and stuff it down under a few of my mother’s old clothes.

A well-dressed middle-aged woman in pricey shoes comes out. Parker stands up and slouches off sideways so she can use the
stairs. Flirting over guns is my oldest and most comfortable territory.
While we were there, I forgot to be angry and sick with nerves, and he forgot to be nonthreatening. Now we are back where
we began.

The woman nods to Parker and me as she passes us. The dogs have been tussling in the side yard, and they come running around
the house in a pack to investigate as she steps around my bag and walks down the steps. They’re covered in each other’s suck
and hair and look like they’ve been rolling each other through dirt and dead leaves. She takes one look and dashes out through
the gate before they can leap on her and coat her in a filthy greeting.

“I should just go in?” My voice comes out shaky.

“Take it easy,” Parker says. “She’s expecting you. It’s going to all be fine.”

I have good radar for when a man’s attracted to me, but now there’s nothing but vague, innocuous friendliness. Shaggy-Doo
is back. He stands up and puts a hand down for me. His fingers are cool, and he lets me do all the gripping and pulling as
I stand up. He steps back from me at once, the second I am on my feet. This is a man who has spent a good bit of his time
around women who are, as Alswan put it, gun-shy. He nods good-bye and shambles to the center door, going into his part of
the house.

I pick up my bag and walk to the other door. I hesitate, raising my hand to knock, then putting it down. I square my shoulders.
I live here now, after all. This is my mother’s house. I will not stand by the fence like Lilah, wringing my hands. I will
not knock to beg entry. I put my hand on the knob and it turns, unlocked.

Gretel is suddenly beside me, jamming herself in front of my feet to stop me from going through a door without her. I let
us both in. My mother stands in the center of a large parlor. She is facing the door, waiting for me to walk through it. I
do. I close it behind us.

My mother looks much the same as she did in the airport, in shawls and multicolored layers with her hair unbound. There’s
a knot in the hem of her floral overskirt, holding it up to show a
blue skirt under. She’s too old to wear her hair so long and all one length. It hangs straight down like Witchie-Poo hair,
drawing my eye to all the places where her skin is beginning to sag. I set my bag down. We look at each other, holding silence
between us. I am breathless.

“You brought your dog,” she says. She would probably sound more pleased if I had brought in the Ebola virus. “Where did her
leg go?”

Gret starts sniffing her way around the unfamiliar room, and I say, “I shot it off.” My mother blinks, and I add, “It was
an accident.”

She does a faint double take. “I had a blouse like that.” I touch the lace-trimmed edge of her old hippie shirt and she says,
“And I had jeans like…” She stops, doing math in her head. “Those
are
my jeans.”

“Yes.” I pull at the waistband. I can’t believe this is the conversation she is choosing. It fills me to the rim with instant
bitchy. “I’m a little thinner than you were.”

“Well,
you
never had a baby,” she snaps, bristling up.

“
I
still have time,” I volley back.

We stare at each other, surprised at ourselves, and she says, “This is absurd.”

It is. She’s right. But I can’t think of a light conversation we could have that would not be absurd and that would not enrage
me. If she mentions the weather, I will have no choice but to slap her. We can’t talk dogs and jeans, not with all the history
between us.

“So you went back to Fruiton. I assume not just to raid my closet. Was that wise?” she asks. Behind her, Gretel has found
an open doorway at the far end of the room. She follows her nose through it.

“Probably not,” I admit, and I can’t resist adding, “Daddy says hey.”

My mother’s eyes narrow and then go all the way to slits as I reach into my back pocket and pull out his rumpled piece of
paper,
now folded neatly into a closed quarter sheet. It’s been partially ironed by the pressure of my butt as I sat on it to drive.
“He sent you a note.”

She stares at the paper with a chain of fleeting expressions flashing across her face, as if I have first pulled a live rabbit
out of my pocket, and now it is peeing on her floor.

I hold it out, and she says, “I’m not reading that.” She sounds affronted by the very idea.

I shake the paper at her, rattling it. She makes no move toward it, so I look for a place to put it. It’s a big room, done
all in ocean colors, fifty shades of blue and a sandy beige. Behind my mother is a good-size wooden table with chairs on either
side. Her tarot cards sit on top in a neat stack, flanked by lit candles. I am standing in what looks like a mini-store. By
the front windows are delicate display shelves full of jewelry and gift books. Directly ahead of me, a staircase with a heavy
banister leads up. Beyond the stairs, in the middle of the room between the mini-store and her reading table, a love seat
is grouped with footstool and a small recliner. The wall opposite the stairs is lined with overflowing bookshelves. I cross
the room to them and set the folded note down in front of what looks like a full set of Austen’s novels.

“I told him I would give it to you,” I say. “What you do with it now is not my problem.”

I don’t tell her about step nine or how badly he wants her to read it. If she’s tempted to open it at all, that information
would stop her cold. Knowing how badly he wants me to read it has certainly stopped me, for days and nights and thousands
of miles. I have not so much as peeked at the salutation.

I suspect it will be different for her, though. If it was a note from Thom Grandee, even if it was given to me ten decades
from this moment, I’d have torn into it already. Marriage is complicated, and Daddy’s note is working on her in some underhanded
way. Now I can see, under her layers and between the dark curtains of her hair, some vestige of the woman who tucked me in
each night. The one
who made my bologna sandwiches with extra mustard, just as I liked them. That woman’s gaze flicks to the note and then away.

“He’s fine,” I say, as if she has asked and I am answering her question. “He got his five-year pin. AA.”

Her eyebrows rise, and then she passes one hand across her forehead, as if manually wiping any interest away, pulling the
expression right off her face. But I can see my mother coming more sharply into focus with every piece of history I invoke.

I say, “I saw where you wrote my name on the wall. I saw the marks you made, behind the ship painting.” I’ve surprised her
yet again, but she remains silent. I say, “I know, Momma.”

That final word undoes her. It hits me, too, this awful name I have not uttered now for more than twenty years. She can’t
look at me. She’s gulping air in little pants, trying to get it down into her lungs.

“What happened?” I ask, because it is time. This is the question that has pulled me all the way across the country. There’s
plenty more I want to know. I want to know how she found me and when she started spying on my life in Amarillo. I want to
ask about the Saint Cecilias and the impossible-to-decode exit strategy she spray-painted onto the car out at Cadillac Ranch.
I want to know which tarot card fell faceup at the airport, stopping her when every line of her body told me she was going
to run. But this first question eclipses all the others.