Backseat Saints (10 page)

We neither of us told, not ever.

“He was the loss,” I told the gypsy. I hated her for not being present to hear.

I was exiting 40 now, in Amarillo proper, three minutes from home. I should have kept that baseball cap. I was too recognizable
with my hair down. My cheeks felt flushed and I had a familiar coiled feeling winding itself up inside my belly. I hadn’t
noticed it happening under the anger, but I could trace it back. It had started when I thought of Jim Beverly and his brown,
square bottom, how it looked like toaster pastry tabs.

That ass never changed as he got older. It hardly got bigger, and as he grew up, it stayed his narrowest point. By high school,
his short, muscular thighs had been wider. Above that tight ass, his spine had dipped into a smooth slope of ribs and ropy
muscle that led up to his broad shoulders. The thing in my belly coiled tighter.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I said aloud. I’d spent the morning shooting at my husband, and now my body was readying
for sex. After a moment, I nodded. My body was wise. It knew how to handle Thom Grandee.

I was turning onto my own street now, heading for our squatty ranch house in the middle of the block. I was almost to Mrs.
Fancy’s when I saw Thom’s familiar blue Bronco with its wide white
stripe was parked in the middle of our driveway. Worse, there was a Chevy truck pulled in behind, huge and black and gleaming
like a custom job for the devil himself, if the devil bought domestic. It belonged to Thom’s parents.

The Grandee clan was gathering, and Thom had beaten me home.

T
IME KEPT ROLLING FORWARD, and Mrs. Fancy’s car kept right on rolling with it. I sat helpless on my butt inside of both, toted
forward in a horrified, slow-motion promenade down my own street. I was almost to Mrs. Fancy’s drive now, with my own driveway
up next. Tom’s Bronco and the black truck stood out in my vision, crisp and sharp-edged. Our house looked brighter, too, more
real than the rest of the neighborhood. It was a fifties ranch house, built flat, but even so, it was doing its damnedest
to loom at me.

The previous owner had ruined our brick by coating it in sickly pastel paint. It was like Crest toothpaste, a matte, grained
aqua that looked pure icy with mint. Now that color stung at my eyes, and I felt them watering up. I forced my head to turn
away and found myself looking up Mrs. Fancy’s drive. My hands followed the way I was looking, and the car turned and started
up the slope.

My left hand reached up to the sun visor, and I pushed the button on the automatic garage door opener. I rolled smoothly into
the garage, snaking under the rising door. I didn’t wait. I double-punched the button and had the door heading back the way
it had come the second the Honda’s back end was through the opening. It took that garage door a solid year to grind its way
closed, but finally it touched down, blocking out the sunlight.

I sat listening to the Honda’s engine tick its way toward cool, watching the digital clock on the dash: 10:37. Thom and his
parents were probably powwowing in the living room, smack in the middle of the house. That room had a huge picture window
that faced the street, and if one of them had happened to be peering out from between the curtains, I wouldn’t have to wait
long. Even if they hadn’t been watching, the garage door’s noises might catch Thom’s attention; he knew Mrs. Fancy was out
of town. To my ears, the damn door had roared and growled like a bear on fire, hollering to get word about his predicament
to his relations in Alaska.

The clock’s last number changed: 10:38.

I didn’t hear Thom’s big feet lowering the sea level of Mrs. Fancy’s yard as he stamped across to kill me. I didn’t hear him
bellowing my name. It was quiet and dim in the tidy garage. I waited to be sure. If any of them had seen me driving Mrs. Fancy’s
car, the best place for me was behind the wheel, ready to drive like hell. There was no way to explain Pawpy’s gun or where
I’d been while someone was shooting at the Grandees’ eldest boy.

The clock numbers rolled over again. Still no Thom. No rumble of Joe Grandee or Charlotte, his shrill, piping wife.
Clear,
I thought, and felt my body break out in a wash of fresh sweat, as if my skin had been holding it in like breath.

I was already moving, snatching Mrs. Fancy’s keys out of the ignition and grabbing up my book and the bag of gun chunks. I
fumbled and almost dropped the whole armload as I scrambled out the car door. I clutched my things to my chest and struggled
upright. Every minute counted now, as each was one more minute’s absence I had to explain.

What the hell was Thom doing home? And with his parents? I had thought he’d be at the vet, unless Gretel was— I couldn’t bear
to finish the thought.

The garage had a door that opened into the peachy-colored kitchen. I went inside and spilled my things across Mrs. Fancy’s
countertop. Thom had been shot at, for the love of holy God, didn’t he have some things he needed to do? But no, he’d come
home and holed up with Joe and Charlotte, and he must be wondering where the hell his Ro was, especially since the ancient
Park Avenue I drove—monkey-shit brown and wide as a tugboat—was still parked in our garage. That car was a hand-me-down from
Thom’s mother. Joe called it a courtesy car, because we’d gotten it for free. Considering the gas it ate and the sheer number
of abrasive Fifth Amendment bumper stickers Joe had plastered across the back of it, I thought it might have been more of
a courtesy to simply tell me that walking everywhere would keep my ass toned.

Mrs. Fancy’s yellow cat, Phil, came barreling up and started hollering at me. I blinked stupidly. I’d forgotten to feed him
this morning when I was over here stealing Mrs. Fancy’s car. He spat out a row of short, urgent mews, like his stomach was
a bomb that needed to be defused and we had to get to the Purina bag. Now.

Thom should be at the police station. He would have called the police, no doubt. He had to have. I had seen it on his face,
that moment when he realized this wasn’t someone shooting, it was someone shooting
at.

Also, I’d hit Gretel at least once. Wasn’t the vet obliged to call the cops? Or was that only people doctors? I’d logged enough
time at the ER to learn that they had to call the cops for any gunshot wound. Hell, they wanted to call the cops for me every
time, and that was only bruises and cracked bones, not bullets. By now they knew me so well, I figured I could show up with
a sinus infection and the charge nurse would ask if I wanted the police out of sheer habit.

There was this one poky-nosed nurse in particular who always pushed me to “notify the authorities.” She was a skinny, pale
thing with permanent yogurt breath, as if she herself might be fermenting. Last time, she’d laid one of her hands, pink and
soft as a mouse paw, on the wrist that wasn’t broken and said, “You don’t have to live like this,” while my very flesh tried
to creep off me to get out from under her touch.

“I fell downstairs,” I said in my best bored voice, staring through her.

“Last time you said you had a ranch house, Mrs. Grandee,” she said, and I was so surprised she’d remembered that I almost
met her eyes. But I didn’t. I’d come to this ER two or three times a year since my marriage. Our third year had been hard;
I’d been in five times. I was a pro by now, and I kept my stare aimed at the wall over her left shoulder.

I said, “I fell down someone else’s stairs,” in that same bored voice, shuddering my good arm out from under her palm. I almost
would have preferred the cops. Cops didn’t get all moist and mothery.

Phil blurted out another desperate meow, winding through my ankles like a furry serpent. “I’m working on it,” I told him,
but I was staring at the outline of the gun chunks in the plastic bag.

I needed a hiding place for Pawpy’s gun, and a damn good one. I couldn’t sneak it home, not with Thom and a herd of God only
knew how many Grandees over there. I tried to think of a place Mrs. Fancy never used, but it also had to be someplace I could
get to easily and retrieve it without notice. “Guest room closet,” I said, and I didn’t realize I’d spoken out loud until
Phil answered me with a squeak of aggrieved sound that was too bitchy to be called a mew.

“Wait your turn, Phil,” I said. I grabbed the bag and the book and went on through the archway to the living room. Phil ran
on ahead of me, all the way to the hallway with the bedrooms on it. His sides joggled, giving chubby testimony that late breakfasts
were a new injustice in his life.

Mrs. Fancy’s house was laid out like ours inside, only exactly backwards. There were two bedrooms besides the master, one
she kept made up in case of company and one she’d turned into a sewing room. I went into the guest room. My first thought
was to jam the bag under the bed, but Mrs. Fancy kept her house spotless. I could imagine the clunk she would hear the next
time she ran the vacuum under it.

I slid open the closet door. Bingo. The bottom was lined with shoeboxes. I dropped to my knees and lifted the lid of a box
on the top row. It held a pair of black suede peep-toe pumps that were a good two decades out of style. The box beside it
had a pair of strappy red sandals with a high, jeweled heel. These must have belonged to her younger self, the one who looked
like the dead sexy woman at the airport. It wasn’t likely Mrs. Fancy would come digging in here anytime soon. I closed the
lids and got on all fours to choose a box from the bottom row. Phil came up behind me and butted my hip with his head, insistent.
I couldn’t push him away; if I got cat dander on my hands, I’d spend the rest of my day sneezing.

“Phil, you asshole, give me a sec,” I said. The shoeboxes were in nine stacks, each four or five boxes high, all the way across
the bottom of the closet.

I chose the lowest one in the farthest back corner and pulled it out. I didn’t register that it felt too unbalanced to hold
a pair of shoes until I was already knocking the lid off.

The box was full of baby things: a silver cup, handmade pink booties, a baby book. There was a spritz of dark hair, fine as
silk, in a Ziploc bag. A folded piece of old paper rested on top.

I’d gone looking for a hiding spot for me, but I’d discovered Mrs. Fancy’s. I rocked up to a kneel and picked the paper out
and opened it. It was the birth certificate. In the first-name slot, I read the name Ivy. I glanced down it, looking for a
date. The certificate had been issued in 1972, four years after I was born. Ivy’s father was listed as Harold James Wheeler,
and her mother’s name was Janine Fancy Wheeler. Janine was the daughter Mrs. Fancy was visiting right now. The one who had
supposedly had her first baby last week.

I’d stumbled upon the secret flotsam of a sad time, and now I was digging in the private pieces of a grief that belonged solely
to my friend. I put the birth certificate back. I put the box back, too, exactly as I found it, and then I moved to the opposite
side of the closet.

I pulled out two shoeboxes from the last row on that side and
found some sleek red pumps. The other held cloth espadrilles. I wedged one of the pumps into the other box, and then I wrapped
the Target bag tight around the pieces of my gun. I put that bundle in with the single shoe. Phil weaseled up beside me and
poked his sniffy head into the box that held the gun. I herded him away with the lid so I could close both boxes up tight
and slide them back into their places.

I slid the Stephen King book behind all the boxes, resting on its spine with the cover pressed flat to the back wall. I got
up and closed the closet door. Phil ran ahead of me down the hallway back to the kitchen, anxious and yelling. I took a minute
to fill his bowl up—it was that or get Pawpy’s gun back out and shoot him—and at that thought my hands shook, scattering pellets
that Phil hoovered up immediately. I wondered where Gretel was. If Gretel was.

I couldn’t walk across the yard and home and find out, though. Not while I stank of shooting and flop sweat and green woods.
The truth was all over my skin.

I went to Mrs. Fancy’s green-tiled guest bathroom and borrowed a washcloth. I didn’t have time for a shower, and damp hair
would be suspicious in its own way, so I took a whore’s bath in the sink. I washed the gun smell off my hands with Mrs. Fancy’s
apple-scented soap and then swabbed out under my arms and between my legs. The mirror told me I still looked like sweaty hell,
but that was a good thing. That could work for me. I threw the wet washcloth into the hamper and headed back to the kitchen.

Mrs. Fancy kept all her poisonous Comet and Pine-Sol in easy reach under the kitchen sink, like me. Neither one of us had
babies to worry about. I opened the cabinet and grabbed the first thing that came to hand: Lemon Pledge. I sprayed a fine
mist of it into the air like it was perfume and walked through. I grabbed the 409 and sprayed a jet directly on my hands and
wiped them through my hair, hiding the smell of shooting as if it were a lover’s musk.