Backseat Saints (12 page)

I took another step to Thom. I was small and he was so very angry. I didn’t understand why Rose felt so excited, almost hopeful.
Why she was putting her hand on his broad chest and why his flesh shuddered at her touch.

“Baby,” I said, “I’m so glad you’re all right. That’s the only thing that matters. That you’re all right.”

It was the right thing. He wheeled back into his lopy pacing. After a moment, Charlotte wrinkled up her nose-peck at me and
said, “It’s nice you’re helping your friend, next door, but you might want to have that shower before you go check on the
dog. Or before you go, well, anywhere.”

Thom’s eyebrows beetled back down as he walked the room. My bullets and his daddy had put him as on edge as I had ever seen
him. His ears pricked and his brow furrowed at every little rumble.

“A shower sounds like a good idea,” I said, treading careful, trying to see what Charlotte had said to rile him. Then I had
it. Me helping my
friend
. Thom and I didn’t have friends, neither of us. He came to me for food, for sex, for talk, for play, for violence, and he
had no other needs. We were closed together like two halves of a clam’s shell. If I had a friend, she would notice long sleeves
and scarves in summer, and unlike Mrs. Fancy, women in my generation had not been trained to look the other way.

It wasn’t as if Thom and I were hermits. We were friendly enough with couples at church, and I was in the Ladies' League and
helped with food and clothing drives. Sometimes I went to lunch with Margie, but her job and her young boys kept her too busy
for it to happen often. Thom hunted with his brothers and his father, and he played on the Grand Guns softball team. Every
other Sunday, we choked down his mother’s dry-meat roast at an all-family dinner. But Thom didn’t like me to have phone calls
or girls’ night at the movies. That sort of thing brought us back to
Who is he
every time.

I said to Charlotte, ultracasual, “I’m going to have to talk to Mrs. Fancy’s son or whoever that is who mows her lawn. She
might need to go to assisted living. She seems like a nice enough old lady, but that house… well, look at me, and you’ll get
a clue how bad it was.”

I could feel Thom’s hackles lowering as I spoke, but his fingers still fisted and uncoiled in angry rhythms as he paced. It
wasn’t good, having me in the room, untouchable in every way that mattered.

I said, “I think I will grab that shower.”

I took silence as permission and got out, fast-walking all the way down the hallway to our master bedroom. Gretel was alive.
I wouldn’t think about her leg now. I couldn’t. She was alive, and I was not alone. Those were the main things. The vet had
said she would be mostly fine. Mostly.

I didn’t realize Thom had followed me until I was inside our bathroom. When I turned and saw him, I almost screamed.

“I told them I’d be right back,” he said.

He came at me and I backed away, but he was so fast. He bullied me backwards to the wall, and I was half-terrified and half-excited,
not knowing which thing he wanted. My hands were flat against his chest, and I looked up, trying to read his face. He kissed
me then, hard, first on my mouth and then on my throat with his mouth open like he was trying to eat me up. Big Bad Wolf kisses.
His hands on my body gripped me hard enough to hurt.

“You smell like lemons,” he said.

“I’m filthy,” I said.

“I don’t care.”

“Your parents are just down the—”

He interrupted me. “I don’t damn care.”

“Your daddy—”

He came back to my mouth again, eating my words, and all at once I was as ready as he was. Kissing him felt slick and secret
and dirty. This was like high school sex, male hands seeking desperate paths through my clothing with a room full of parents
right down the hall.

“Hurry,” I said, and he shoved my jeans down around my ankles. I kicked one foot loose. He jerked his pants down, too, not
bothering with the buttons. He lifted me and flattened my back against the cold tile. His mouth was on me, and he was grinding
into me, hard and good with only the thin cotton shield of my panties between us, and this was like high school, too. I closed
my eyes against the sunshine, and there was Rose Mae Lolley, rampant in my head with her Jim Beverly.

I kept my eyes closed, and the world tilted and was darker, and Rose Mae was in Jim’s car after a game, parked up by Lipsmack
Hill, her shirt pushed up and her bra unhooked. I peeked through my lashes, gasping, and there was Thom in the sunshine with
his face twisting and his eyes open. I closed my eyes, and Jim had one hand between Rose Mae’s legs, rubbing her through her
jeans, and Thom said, “I thought I was going to die, Ro.”

I said, “They missed. They missed.”

All the while in my head I heard Jim Beverly whispering to Rose Mae, and Rose’s hands remembered what it was like to touch
Jim, too, her clever fingers counting the buttons on the fly of his Levi’s, endless crazy-making touching through layers of
denim and white cotton. She would cup and grip the outline of him, learning by feel this thing she hadn’t seen since they
were nine. It was a rigid line of heat that felt nothing like the little-boy pansy blossom she’d seen.

Thom snaked one hand between us and ripped my panties away. Then he was in me, breathing hard, his face buried in my 409-filled
hair. He said, “God, it’s like screwing Mr. Clean,” but he was grinning. I could feel his teeth against my scalp.

I closed my eyes and heard the ten-year-old echo of Jim Beverly’s voice in my head, saying, “I’m going to kill him. I’m going
to kill your worthless daddy, if he lays one hand on you again.” Jim’s hand gripped the undercurve of Rose Mae’s ass, pulling
her against him to grind as he said, “I’ll slip in at night and hold a pillow over his face while he’s passed out.” Jim’s
fingers followed the inseam of her jeans. “Who would know? Some drunk smothers while passed out? That must happen all the
time.”

Thom was in me, each thrust pushing me up the wall, his face in my hair, just as I liked, and inside I was tipping over. Ten
years away, Jim Beverly’s words blew through Rose like a wind, lifted her and sent her into someplace new and dazzling. We
met there, met and melded for one moment, so real that I heard that old remembered whisper in my own ear. “I’ll kill him for
you,” Jim Beverly said. I opened my eyes and saw my husband’s face.

Far away, in a car parked up by Lipsmack Hill, Jim’s hand still worked between Rose Mae Lolley’s legs. He hadn’t known that
Rose Mae had finished. He was still living blindly in the space where her hand cupped him. But I was wholly in the present.
Here in my bathroom, I laughed and arched into Thom in the wake he’d caused. I felt so good. We both felt so damn good.

That laughy sound from me, so happy, and the way I flexed my back up pushed Thom over, too. We breathed in four or five times
together, big cleansing whoops of air, and then his arms lost strength and he let me slide down the wall to thump onto my
bare bottom. He relaxed into a lean against the countertop. I pulled off my shirt. My bra was torn, the cups hung down over
my ribs, and my jeans were in a bunch around one ankle.

I grinned up at him and he whispered, “This is nuts.”

He shook his head and began packing himself away and pulling his shirt down. Half his vinegar was gone, and yet he still smelled
dangerous. I was spent, but Rose Mae was a wild thing in me, rioting and pleased.

As soon as he got his shirt tucked back in, Thom said, “I have to go out there. Take your shower,” and he was gone.

I took my time, letting hot water pound down on my shoulders while my conditioner set for ten minutes. Even after I got out,
I stayed in the bathroom, slowly moisturizing every inch of my skin and then blowing out my long, thick hair.

I think I already knew what Rose Mae wanted to do next. It wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t let myself even think it. I didn’t
let myself think at all. I didn’t want to wreck the good peace I felt in my whole body in the aftermath of sex. I didn’t want
to start again.

I aimed the dryer at my roots to get some volume, staring into the mirror. Rose Mae Lolly stared back at me, not thinking
either. She didn’t have to think. Her day would come, a day when Thom would hurt me bad enough to loose her. I closed my eyes
against her patience. I dried my hair by feel, but she was still there, chock-full of something close to smug. All she had
to do was wait.

G
RETEL CAME HOME. Her empty shoulder was a white cone of bandages. The missing leg seemed to puzzle her more than it distressed
her. She’d try to lay her head down on her front legs, then pop back up and make thinking eyebrows at the place where it used
to be. Five seconds of brain work was enough to make her too tired to keep on; she’d cock her head at an angle that looked
to me like the dog version of a shrug and lie back down to sleep.

She fast mastered a three-beat lazy canter, and she got around the house and yard just fine when she chose to heave herself
up off her favorite snooze rug. I tried to drown my guilt in gratitude to God for the small mercies that had been afforded
me. She had lived in spite of me, and though one leg down, she was exactly her same dim and lovely self.

For the rest of that week, in celebration, I made what I called manfood, the meaty dinners that Thom liked best. Pork roast
with potatoes and baked apples. Turkey pot pie. Stuffed flank steak. The meals were too heavy for me, but if ever a man needed
some comfort food, it was Thom. He stomped around with two creases between his eyebrows that pointed straight up like horns.

While I’d holed up in our bathroom drying my long hair and trying not to think, Thom’s daddy must have kept on force-feeding
him all kinds of crap. One piece in particular had gotten way down
wedged in Thom’s belly. He was grinding and churning at it, but it wasn’t breaking down. I could see how it chafed him from
the inside out, this thing his daddy had stuffed down him. I’d seen this all before.

I’m not sure if Thom understood his daddy’s last visit was the reason he was so set on picking a fight with me, but I sure
as hell did. I owed Joe Grandee thank-you notes for more than one prior bone crack; Thom may have delivered them, but they
were presents Joe had bought and paid for. So I cooked soothing foods that made Thom logy and sleepy, and I tried to live
quiet in the corners of our rooms until he’d worked it out.

On Wednesday, Thom looked down at the meat loaf on his plate with one lip curling, as if I’d served up possum sushi. It was
a beautiful meat loaf, too, made with half ground pork and lots of sage like his mother’s, only I didn’t overcook mine until
it tasted like a chunk of mummy. He didn’t so much as lift his fork.

“I was hoping for that sour cream chicken you do.”

He had his wrists resting on the edge of the table, and I watched his hands flex and unflex. He looked to me like a bad storm
coming. Like a bad storm almost here.

“I’ve bought everything to make it at the grocery,” I said. “I’ll make that chicken tomorrow.”

“I wanted it tonight,” he said, mulish.

I thought,
And that’s the battle cry of every spoiled toddler.

I didn’t say it. I knew this game. Hell, I had helped invent it. But I wouldn’t play. I couldn’t afford to anymore. Rose Mae
was biding her time; she knew that I had glimpsed the path she’d set. It would not take much to get me walking down it.

So I showed him some teeth and kept my brow smooth and my tone mild. “Why don’t you go watch the news? I can throw that chicken
together in maybe thirty minutes. I’ll use the meat loaf for sandwiches. That’ll be so much nicer for you this week than deli
ham and cheese.”

His brows moved inward, puzzling up together, and he looked
at me like he wasn’t sure whose table he’d sat down at. I wasn’t sure, either.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But if you really need that chicken for your day to go right, then I want you to have it.”

Now he looked almost forlorn, as if I’d abandoned him.

“Thom,” I said to him, “I’m trying.” It sounded to me like a plea. I didn’t want the gypsy’s cards to be for us. They fit
her life just as well as they fit mine, and I was doing my damnedest to prove it had been her draw. I couldn’t do that alone.
“I’m trying so hard.”

His gaze dropped to his plate, and he took a big sniff of air into his lungs. I watched his chest expand. I’d always loved
the workings of his thick, sleek body. I loved to put my ear to his chest and feel the boom-thump of his heart, then slide
lower to hear the gurgle and sigh of his belly hard at work on something I had made.

When he finally spoke, his voice came out so quiet that it was like he had a secret he was whispering to the mashed potatoes.
“I see that,” he said. He started eating, so I did, too. A few minutes later, chewing, he said, “This is delicious.” He sounded
surprised.

I said, “Good,” in a truly pleased way. I didn’t say,
“No shit, Sherlock. My meat loaf tastes great and water is wet and your name is Thom.”
I blocked those words in with a bite of salad and swallowed them with a gulp of sweet tea. He watched me struggle to get
it all down. I managed it, barely. We found ourselves grinning at each other across the table like children, while under it,
Gretel thumped her tail against the floor; usually when I said the word
good
, with such sincerity, I meant her.