You Believers (10 page)

He just nodded like he agreed and said okay because there was no use arguing. He just kissed her and asked if she’d mind wearing his grandmother’s ring. And she kissed him and said it would be great. Or maybe he said that, or maybe he just thought that. But anyway, she was wearing it. He hoped she was wearing it. Wherever she was.

He looked around the bathroom that she’d wallpapered with sentimental-looking little blue cornflowers on a white pattern, girly but not too girly, a clean little print, so fine and crisp you had to look close to know it was a cornflower. She’d pointed that out—he hadn’t even known what a cornflower was. She’d been so proud of hanging that wallpaper, he hadn’t bothered to point out the places where the design didn’t line up. There’d be a row of half flowers jutting up against white space where the row of other half flowers was supposed to be. But that was all right. It was Katy. She always meant to get things perfect, and that was one of the things he loved about her, but sometimes he thought he loved her more because she didn’t get things perfect. It was the trying to get perfect, a sweetness in the trying, that he really liked.

And there on the racks were what she liked to call her “delicates”—had to be a word her mom had taught her, some proper term for panties and bras. She liked good underwear, was always cruising T. J. Maxx for cheap prices. She liked lace, black, white, green. Nothing too trampy, and little thongs, and her little bras that never matched. Now he sat there looking at her delicates, waiting for her hands, her fingers to take them down, fold them, place them in her drawer the way she liked.

She liked everything just so. She’d studied poetry and philosophy and all kinds of stuff in college. And she always had this simple, smart way of talking about things that he liked to hear but didn’t understand. Like the poem she loved: “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” It was a line she liked to say. She couldn’t remember who wrote the poem, or much of the rest of the poem. All she remembered about it was something about laundry.

He couldn’t believe some guy had gotten famous for writing something like that. It was kind of obvious to him that if you liked the world, you liked the things in it, but she said it was all more mysterious, or did she say it was more complicated, than that. He didn’t know, but she liked the line so much she wrote it out in calligraphy letters and framed it. All Billy knew was that the poem was about laundry. Billy didn’t get that either, that some guy could get famous for writing about laundry. But here it was: “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” And there near the bottom corner of the frame was a little drawing she’d done: his shirt and her blouse on a clothesline. She’d said it was their clothes, and the clothes hanging there were a metaphor. He loved it when she talked like that. He loved all the pretty, useless things she made and put all over his house. Their house. But he couldn’t remember what love had to do with laundry.

“Katy,” he whispered, and felt that little rush of anger like when she came home too late from work. But then he felt that knot in his throat. She wasn’t with Frank. So maybe it was this Randy guy. But she would have called by now. She wasn’t that cruel. He thought maybe he should just take her things down, stick them in her drawer like everything was normal. He started to reach, but he couldn’t touch them. Her things would wait for her hands to put them away. “Please don’t touch her things,” he’d said when he’d seen the cop reaching for them. He was glad he’d said “please” because his voice had snapped, and the cop had flinched a little, had given him a look
like
One more word out of you and I’ll bust you just for getting in my way
.

The cop had taken a box of her hair dye from the bathroom trash, studied it carefully, held it at a distance with his latex-gloved hand. “So she dyed her hair before she left,” he said as he dropped the box into an evidence bag. “She was touching it up,” Billy said. And the cop said, “She wasn’t a natural blond, was she?” Billy walked out of the room because he knew there was pot in the coffee can in the freezer, and he knew the cop was just looking for a reason to put cuffs on him, take him in.

He stood and looked in the mirror. He looked like a drunk. Red eyes, crazy hair, the puffed, sagging jowls of a drunk. No wonder the cop was itching for a bust. He looked like the kind of guy who hung around job sites scoping them out for scrap metal, tools, a cooler with some food in it. He heard the twittering of the predawn birds. Another day was coming, another day she was gone. Another day he’d skip work, just go crazy. He washed his face hard with a rag and soap, hot water, then cold, and more cold. Cold water helped hangover skin. Katy had told him that. But he still looked like a drunk. And it was because he
was
a drunk. He’d been drinking solidly since the night Katy hadn’t come home. And he wasn’t even really a drinker. Katy was the drinker—not a big drinker but a drinker. He liked pot. Pot worked to smooth the edges out of any long workday. But whiskey did something more. This guy named Gator who hung at the bar where Katy worked, he believed in the power of whiskey, said, “Pot softens things, but whiskey just blots it all out like a total solar eclipse, man. It all gets still and dark. Just don’t look too long straight at it. You go blind, man.” Gator had this way of laughing like there was nothing better in the world than going blind. Billy thought he was nuts, but Katy liked him. Katy felt sorry for him. But Katy was always feeling sorry for things most
people didn’t notice. Maybe that was all this Randy person was, some other guy she’d taken in.

He looked back at her drawing, his blue cotton shirt, her pink ruffled blouse, like the kind of blouse she liked to wear on days she was feeling “girly.” The last thing he thought of her was girly. But there they were in the frame: his shirt, her pink blouse, framed like they’d be sharing the bathroom and laundry forever. Then he remembered: “Let there be laundry for the backs of thieves.” The other line from the poem. She’d shout it sometimes: “Let there be laundry for the backs of thieves,” and laugh the way some people did when they hollered, “Merry Christmas.”

He didn’t get it. He’d read the poem. It said “clean linen,” not “laundry,” but he still didn’t get it. And he didn’t correct her when she shouted it out wrong. It made her happy. She had told him the poem was about forgiveness, that to love the world was to forgive it. But he’d never gotten what all that had to do with laundry and thieves.

But he figured it had something to do with the fact that she’d volunteered to do laundry for this homeless guy named Gator. He was a Vietnam vet, and he lived in the marshlands across the river. He made what money he could by working as a river guide for tourists and fishermen. He was a good guy, all tanned and blue eyes, not bad-looking when he smiled. But he was just a little bit crazy in that he preferred living his life out there with the gators and snakes rather than with people. Billy just figured that was what war could do.

And Gator was looking a whole lot better with Katy’s care. She cut his hair once a month, and she did his laundry every week. Brought it home in a trash bag from the bar and took it back all folded and neat in another trash bag, a clean one.

Billy thought maybe Gator had some idea where Katy was. He’d been a scout in the army . . . maybe he knew something. Maybe he could help. After three days of solid drinking and steady smoking,
Billy wasn’t blind yet. He could see enough to know he looked like a drunk in the mirror. He could see her panties on the towel rack, the empty wastebasket, the grime around the tub. He took the framed picture off the wall, hugged it to his chest. “Hold on,” he said as he walked to the kitchen. He saw that it was bright with daylight and a wreck of Chinese takeout and uneaten pizza. Flies buzzed all over. “Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry, Katy.” He swatted at flies around the sink and stuck the dishes in the dishwasher. He poured the powder, slammed the door closed, and jammed the button to click the machine on. He opened the back door, used a newspaper to swat flies out. Then he dug under the sink for the last trash bag. That was on Katy’s list. She was going to pick up trash bags at the Rite Aid when she got her prescription. There were other things they needed that she’d been supposed to pick up that day. He stood gripping the sink, enjoying the steady vibration of the dishwasher. As long as he gripped that countertop, he was pretty certain he wouldn’t fall to the floor and be a puddle of hungover mess when that REV lady showed up. He remembered she was coming tomorrow. But tomorrow was today.

“Shit,” he said, and he pitched beer cans, containers, and boxes into the bag. They had company coming, and Katy would want it clean. He sprayed air freshener all around the kitchen. “It will be fine, Katy,” he said, talking to the framed words of the poem. He grabbed a broom. “We’ve just got to go through the motions of looking for you. It’s like that drill bit I thought I lost one time. I was looking and looking, and when I reached in my pocket for some quarters, I found it. It was right there next to me the whole time. I’m gonna look and look for you. And then I’m gonna turn and see you are right here. Where you belong. With me.”

The Luckiest Girl in the World

Molly Flynn panted hard in the last stretch of her five-mile run. Her house was in sight. Time to sprint the last quarter mile. Then she saw the guy with the dog at the end of the street. She stopped, slowed to a walk. If she sprinted, she’d meet up with him, but if she went real slow, he’d have to keep moving and be on the side street if he really was out just to walk that dog. He lived just a little ways over, and of all the trails and streets he could take, he always seemed to pick her street. She didn’t like the way his eyes traveled up and down her legs, over her arms, her chest. He never really did anything she could say was wrong, but it was like he was making fun of her somehow. She knew without speaking to him that he was a jerk.

She saw him look her way as if he might wait for her. She pretended not to notice and crouched down to retie her shoes. For God’s sake, it was a nice neighborhood. A girl should be able to run in shorts and a sports bra without feeling like the neighbors would jump her bones first chance they got. She looked up, saw him bend and pat the dog like he was speaking to it. Then, without another look her way, he moved on. Thank God. He was so not her type, cute but a little too lean with these tight muscles, like all he was made of was muscle and
bone. He looked like some kind of guitar player, wannabe rock star. He had the looks, all right. “But not my type,” she said out loud as she walked toward her house. She hoped he’d gotten that message by now. She ignored him whenever she drove by him while he was walking that damned dog on the sidewalk. He’d let the dog shit anywhere, never once picked it up. He might live in the neighborhood, but it was clear to most everybody that he didn’t belong.

By the time she reached her house, he was out of sight, so she didn’t pretend to fiddle with the lock; she just pushed the front door open and walked in. Her mother had fussed at her for not locking the doors. But a five-mile run with a house key dangling from your wrist, who needed that? She was sweaty, and the sudden rush of air conditioning gave her a chill. She grabbed her hoodie from where she liked to leave it on a chair by the door—her mother didn’t like that either, said the living room was a place for greeting people, not a place for throwing down your clothes wherever convenient. She pulled the hoodie on as she headed to the kitchen for a bottle of water. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate, her coach always told her, so when she wasn’t running or drinking water, she was usually needing to pee.

She went to the bathroom, washed her hands, studied her face in the mirror. She’d forgotten to put on sunscreen, and her skin was so delicate. It was something her mother had told her: “Freckles are cute on a girl, but not on a woman. They start to look like age spots after a while, and you’re too pretty for that.”

Molly Flynn had the face of a Botticelli angel. People often told her this. She was striking in a way that could make strangers walk up and say things like, “You have the face of a Botticelli angel.” It always made her blush, but she’d learned to just shrug, say “Thanks,” and turn away. She had looked up Botticelli’s art at the library one day and had to admit there were similarities: the fair skin, round face, delicate lips, long hair that kind of rippled down the shoulders, and
big, dreamy eyes. Yeah, she was kind of like that. But she wasn’t impressed. It was just a lucky mix of her mother’s Italian and her daddy’s Irish genes. And these days, looking like a Botticelli angel wasn’t exactly the hottest thing. She’d studied the magazines for what was hot, and she was not. Her thighs were too thick from all the running and gymnastics, her ass just a little too, well, round. They’d never pick her for the J. Crew catalog. She was glad Matt loved her just the way she was. He said women in the fashion magazines looked scary, while she looked real and hot and sweet.

So she looked like some old Italian painter’s idea of an angel, the same painter who would’ve painted Jesus with blond hair and blue eyes. What did art know about anything anyway? It was all just somebody’s idea of things.

Molly wasn’t big on angels, like many of her friends. They’d buy little statues of angels to keep on their bedside tables, little angel bookmarks, posters; one of her friends even had an angel tattoo on her belly, a sexy little angel. “Great place for a guardian angel,” Molly had said with a laugh. “Think that will keep the boys out of your pants?” But her friend had just given her a sly look, said, “Oh, no, it’ll make ’em want to come a little closer for a good look at what I have.”

Molly thought that was trashy, but she didn’t say so. She knew the way to keep her friends was to keep half her thoughts to herself. Like church. Most of her friends went to church. Mostly Baptist, and they were always trying to bring her along. But she got out of it by saying she was Catholic; she had her own faith. Right. They used to be Catholic, which meant her dad could run around all he wanted as long as he confessed, said a few Hail Marys. All that faith in God hadn’t done her mother any good with the breast cancer. No, it was a good doctor and a plastic surgeon who’d saved her from that. Her mother had learned a few things from how the church and a husband could fail you. She went to a women’s support group every Wednesday
night—an excuse to drink wine and gossip, but it made her mom strong. She’d learned a few things there and kept repeating them to Molly: “Believe in this world, not the next, Molly. Keep your body fit, your mind sharp, and your money invested. If your wits don’t save you, nobody will.” With her mother’s words in mind, she remembered what day it was and hurried down the hall to her room. Molly sat at her computer to log on to the college website to see if the class she wanted had any openings yet.