Break the Skin (19 page)

Then a black Chevy Suburban came creeping down the alley. The headlights swept over Amos. He lifted his arm to shield his face from the headlights’ glare. Then he turned and ran toward us, ran out of the alley and sprinted down the street. The Suburban sped up. I pulled Donnie out of its way as it roared past us. The driver was Slam Dent.

A block down the street, Amos disappeared into another alley, and the Suburban followed. I listened to the angry growl of its engine, and I felt the whole world start to fall away from me. What would happen with Donnie and me? What would Pablo say when we came back without the money?

All around me, there was the sound of music and people laughing, but for me the night was now filled with everything that wouldn’t happen, and I knew, with a certainty that punched me in the heart and took my breath away, what my
mami
must have felt when she was out on the town and the hours were growing small, and her prospects for love were dim. She must have felt her hope go with a drop so sudden it nearly brought her to her knees, pressed down, as she was, with the knowledge that the only thing real was the life she’d have to go back to, the one she’d left just a few hours before, believing that everything would finally change in a way that would make her happy and blessed forever.

LANEY

S
o there it was, the summer of 2008, and I was back in New Hope, back in the house I’d grown up in, the two-story clapboard house my mother and daddy bought when they were just starting out. He hired on at AMF Wheel Goods, where he painted bicycles and tricycles and brought me home one of each as I got older. He always smelled of the paint and said, toward the end of his sickness, that it was all he could taste. The fumes got down into his lungs and obstructed his airways. It was finally pneumonia that killed him. Mother kept working as a secretary in the Admissions Office at the community college in Mt. Gilead, and she was still there that summer when I came to live with her.

Each morning, she was getting ready for work when I was coming home from my shift at Walmart. I gave her back the keys to her Corolla, so she could take off.

“We’re like a hoot owl and an early bird,” she said once. “Who’s going to get the worm, Missy, you or me?”

She always looked sharp in her skirts and slacks and her bright blouses. She had her hair cut short in a sassy style that looked cute. She favored costume jewelry and a lot of it, always in silver: bracelets lined up her forearms, drop-pendant necklaces, hoop earrings, even rings for her thumbs and, when she wore little strappy sandals, her toes. Miss Bling-Bling, I called her, and she said, “Just a little sparkle to make the old dame feel pretty.”

When she was gone to work, I sat at the kitchen table and ate a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, and maybe some toast, or if she’d left half a grapefruit in the fridge, I’d eat that, too. She’d brought me a brochure about the GED program at the community college, and I looked at it—all those brightly colored pictures of students in classrooms, all those testimonials—
Now that I have my GED, there’s no stopping me!
I’d look at that brochure and tell myself,
All right, Missy, today’s the day you call that office and get back on track
. But I was scared and sleepy from work, and sooner or later I’d crawl into bed and by the time I woke up it was too late to make that call.

A cornfield stretched between our house and Curtis Hambrick’s, and some mornings, before the corn got too high, I’d see Poke out mowing the grass. The Hambrick place was, like ours, a two-story clapboard with a wraparound porch. It was next to Rose and Tweet’s, those two houses the only ones at the edge of New Hope. As the corn grew that summer, a little more of the Hambrick house disappeared until finally it was September and all I could see, when I ate my breakfast, was the peak of the roof and the old-time lightning rods needling up toward the sky. I couldn’t see a thing of Rose and Tweet’s shotgun house on the other side. I still hadn’t made that call about classes for my GED.

Some mornings, Poke came to visit me. He’d wait until Mother left in the Corolla, and then in a little while, I’d see his face at the kitchen window.

“Laney? You there?” he’d say, and I’d let him in.

While I ate my cereal, he crossed his arms on the table and put his chin on top of them. His glasses lifted up toward his forehead a little. He liked to tell me everything he knew about the folks who lived in New Hope. He knew, he said, because he listened. He knew because he kept his eyes on things.

He claimed he peeked in people’s windows at night. At first I didn’t put much stock in that. Where would he get the nerve? I imagined he made up his stories as a way of trying to impress me, and I didn’t stop him. What was the harm? When he talked, his voice was soft and shy—such
a surprise for a big rough-looking boy like him—and I didn’t mind listening to it, didn’t mind the gossip he told, looked forward to it even if I thought it was all a lie. He was company those days I was trying to get used to not having Delilah in my life, and I didn’t really care what was on the up-and-up as long as he kept talking. Sometimes I even told myself there might be some truth in his stories just for the satisfaction it gave me to think on the lives of people who were surely talking about me and how I’d dropped out of school and moved in with some trashy woman in Mt. Gilead only to come back home to Mother with my tail between my legs.

Jess Raymond, Poke claimed, sometimes came outside in the middle of the night and sat inside his car crying. “Do you know why?” Poke asked, and I said I didn’t. “Because his wife doesn’t love him. That’s why. She loves Mr. Goad, who drives the mail truck.”

Poke told stories about the old-maid schoolteacher, Ida Henline, who sometimes took a wedding dress from the back of her closet, a dress she’d once pinned her hope to, and held it in front of her and turned this way and that, looking at herself in her dresser mirror before “what might have been” became too much for her and she put the dress back in the closet and closed the door.

“She was my third-grade teacher,” I said.

“I’m sure that’s a great comfort to her,” Poke said, and I dug my knuckle into his neck until he flinched.

“You can be mean, Laney.”

“You’ve got no idea, Little Man.”

He squinted, sizing me up, and I could see he was trying to decide what to do in the face of this anger that could rise up in me from time to time. The truth was I didn’t very much like myself those days. Despite what I’d promised Mother about going back to school, I felt all at loose ends. “Laney, here it is autumn already,” she said to me that morning. “You know you can get into those classes anytime.” I told her I knew it. I told her maybe I’d call after breakfast, but I knew I wouldn’t. Sometimes
I sang for myself when I was alone in the house. I sang those songs from
The Music Man
, and even though I still had my voice, it made me so sad to think about all I’d walked away from when I’d dropped out of school and gone to live with Delilah, that I couldn’t bring myself to take that first step to getting back to where I needed to be.

“Don’t take it out on me ’cause you lost your girlfriend,” Poke said.

I gave him the stink eye. “How do you know about that?”

“Rose and Tweet. I heard them talking.”

He went back to his stories. The preacher, Luther Gibson, was carrying on a pen-pal correspondence with a woman in Russia, and Rayanne Fines, the State Farm insurance agent, belonged to an organization called The Mutual UFO Network that documented extraterrestrials.

“You wouldn’t even want to know the list of crankers,” Poke said, and went on to name everyone in New Hope who was tweaked on meth.

“What’d they say?” I interrupted him. “Rose and Tweet.”

I could see he didn’t want to tell me. “Not much.” His voice got extra soft, and I felt the hurt it gave him to say what he was about to say. “Tweet said you’d never had to do for yourself. Rose said she felt sorry for you.”

I DIDN’T WANT
Rose MacAdow feeling any kind of sorry for me, so later that morning, I took a walk up the street to pay her a call.

She had the front door open, and when I knocked on the screen door, her voice came from somewhere back in the house. “Laney, come on in.”

I stepped inside and saw her at the dining table. She had a portable sewing machine set up there, and she was working on a swath of blue muslin. Her hair was swept up and clipped at her temples with butterfly barrettes, but a couple of strands had worked free and were stuck to each side of her face. She stopped the sewing machine and tucked those strands behind her ears.

“Hot,” she said, and she had to raise her voice on account of a box fan was running and making noise. “Too hot for any kind of comfort.”

It was one of those September days that was muggy and still, but the wind was starting to stir. I’d seen the storm clouds gathering in the west.

“I hear you and Tweet have got opinions about me.” I said it straight-out, and I could tell it caught her by surprise. She gave me a glance, then got extra busy with undoing and redoing her hair.

“I’m really sweating,” she said, and I asked her if it was true, what Poke had told me.

She said, “That boy gives me the creeps.”

“He told me you said you felt sorry for me.”

She finished with her hair and put her foot back to the pedal of the sewing machine. The needle whirred. “You can’t trust him, Laney.” She lifted her foot, and the needle stopped. She looked right at me. “He looks in people’s windows, you know.”

Just then, the front door creaked on its hinges, a tickle of wind nudging it, and Rose jerked her head toward the noise. I’d remember that look later. I still can’t get it out of my head, that scared look just before the wind blew the door shut, and she put her hand flat against her chest and said, “Lord, God-a-mercy.”

“It’s just the wind,” I said, but that didn’t calm her much.

She had to push her chair away from the sewing machine. Her fingers were trembling. “I’m all a mess,” she said. She had a glass of tea on the table. She tried to pick it up to take a drink, but her hands were shaking too much, and, finally, she set it back down and said, “Jesus, Laney.”

As much as I’d been set on getting after her about what Poke had heard her say, I lost all my steam when I saw the state she was in. She was so spooked, all from a gust of wind, and something about that spooked me, too, like I’d carried the fright inside with me. I couldn’t help myself from going to her. I rubbed her arm. “Rose, what’s wrong?” I asked her.

“I’m going to have a baby. Tweet and me.” She grabbed on to my
hand and squeezed so hard I felt it in my heart. “Oh, Laney, I’m so scared.”

I won’t deny I felt a momentary satisfaction, because I thought, Well, now, there you go, Delilah Dade. You won’t have a chance in hell of getting Tweet back now, despite what you might want to believe.

“How far along are you, Rose?”

“Just barely am. I’m due in May.”

Her voice shook a little, and I could tell she was scared. I felt how much she needed someone to convince her that everything would be all right. I couldn’t bring myself to make a call to the community college about those GED classes, but here was something I
could
do—be a friend to Rose.

“Is it true?” I asked her. “What Poke said. Do you feel sorry for me?”

“Oh, baby.” She threw her arms around my neck and held on. “I’ve always had a soft spot for you.”

“He’s a lonely kid,” I said about Poke. I suppose, give or take a smidge, that was exactly how I felt about myself. Now here was Rose. She was just right up the road, and she needed me. I guess that explains as well as anything why I forgave her for saying she felt sorry for me, why I grabbed on to her as my new sister, the one I had now that Delilah and I were done. Both Rose and my lives were changing, and we were afraid. I thanked my lucky stars that we had each other. I hope that she did, too.

I WENT TO HER
and Tweet’s house all through the autumn. That was pretty much my life. Work and Rose, and, sure, sometimes I hung out with Lester. He never went with me to Tweet’s on account of that business with Helmets on the Short Bus.

“He made it clear he didn’t want me around,” Lester said, and I could see he was still hurt by Tweet claiming he was stealing from the band. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Tweet had admitted that
was a lie. I couldn’t tell Lester that the truth was Tweet just didn’t want him around. “It’s okay that you go there,” Lester said. His heart was always sweeter than I deserved. “I know you and Rose are friends, and I wouldn’t want to take that away from you.”

So there was Rose, and some days Poke found me so he could gab. Mother took me out for supper now and then and sometimes we drove over to Vincennes and did some shopping, and every once in a while, we had supper at the Executive Inn and then ducked into the lounge to watch people sing karaoke. “You should get up there,” Mother always said. “Lord, Laney, you could sing rings around all those drips.”

I usually said I didn’t feel like it, when, really, I was itching to give it a try. What kept me from grabbing that microphone? Somewhere deep inside, I was afraid that singing in front of my mother, even though I knew it would please her, would feel like a confession. I couldn’t bear the thought of looking out at her in that audience, knowing how I’d disappointed her, how I was still disappointing her because I couldn’t bring myself to take that first step with getting my GED.
Now you’re all wrapped up with Rose
, she’d told me.
Honestly, Laney. Do you even want to make something of yourself?

One night, I screwed up my nerve and did it. I got up onstage, and I chose my song—“A Song for You” by the Carpenters. It was their song, hers and Daddy’s. From time to time, as if she’d never done it hundreds of times before, she told me the story of how she had an album with that song on it when she and Daddy started dating, and how one night in her room, she put it on her record player and she held his hand and sang it to him. When she told me the story, she always sang a little of the song. Then she said the same thing she always said—
That was
our
song, Laney. That was our song all our lives
. It was the song my mother put on the CD player in the hospital room, the night my father died. I thought of that when I sang it that night at the Executive Inn.