Backseat Saints (14 page)

She looked down at her own hands, and they were as scratched as his arms. The blackberries, she remembered. She was better
protected, was all, in long sleeves that hid the bruises her daddy had put on her. It was from the blackberries, and she knew
her father would be passed out safe and whole when she got home, ready to wake up even more hung over than she was, ready
to start another got-damn ugly day.

Something in the woods had gotten the little cat, had picked it up and turned its head backwards and put it back. It was sad,
and that was all. Nothing to do with them.

But Rose Mae and I both knew that the story would have been different if she had only said yes. If she had had one less drink
or one more, whichever would have made her head nod, even slightly. If she’d said yes, she knew where Jim’s feet would have
taken him once she was passed out safe in the needles.

When they came to the fork where they split to go their own ways home, she said to him, “We’re not doing that again.”

“No,” he agreed.

“I don’t like you like that,” she said. “I won’t be with you like that.”

He said, “I don’t like me like that, either,” with such a ring of trueness in it that she reached for him, but he was already
turning and walking away.

Not even a year later, after they’d taken a blanket to the top of Lipsmack Hill to become lovers for real, this offer to kill
her daddy would come back. It was something he would whisper to her, his mouth warm and wet against her hurt places. He lapped
them like a cat. It would not sound true. Sometimes it sounded like comfort, and other times it was young and angry, blustery
even. But she never forgot seeing the Jim who had meant it, that capable thing the whiskey had let loose, and these nights,
I was dreaming of that capable thing, too. I woke up smelling the green woods where I had waited for him.

Whenever the dream woke me, I would stand up and get a drink of water. I would pace the hall and plan the next night’s dinner,
maybe make a shopping list, until the last lingering smells of those long-ago woods were gone from me. I had to fill my head
up with right-now things.

A clean home, good gun sales, better meat loaf, best sex. These things let me stay inside each minute as it happened. I trained
my thoughts away from the future, and I didn’t dwell on gypsies or cards, especially not the hanged man with his snarling
wolf hat, his bound hands. “
Those were for the gypsy,”
I whispered when my imagination tried to make me be the girl inside that burning tower.
If I had a marriage made of swords, then we were both trying our damnedest to stand shoulder to shoulder only, weapons pointed
outward, watching each other’s back.

Spring waned, the blooms full-blown and readying for summer, until one day I barked my shin on an end table. It hurt like
a son of a bitch. I sat down to rub it, watching my skin swell, the flesh already darkening. Pale skin bruises easy, and I
knew it would be purple by tomorrow. I nursed my rising lump, and out of habit, I found myself checking all over for other
parts that might need ice or attention. I couldn’t find so much as a twinge. I realized I was milk-colored and smooth all
over.

We’d never gone so long before.

T
HE DRY AIR GOT crisp with heat around the edges, and we were coming to what I’d always called icebox weather. Late spring
was my favorite time of year. I wasn’t much of a baker, though thanks to the stream of goody plates Mrs. Fancy brought to
morning coffee and left behind, Thom thought I was. Still, I could make a decent lemon chess pie, and the weather was right
for it. I got a pan of lasagna in the oven and then put my Cuisinart together and made the pastry. I was rolling out the crust
when Thom came into the kitchen and boosted himself up onto the counter across the room from me.

Before I could speak, he said, “Why don’t we have a baby?” with the emphasis on the word
don’t
, so it didn’t sound like a suggestion. It sounded puzzled, like he was looking to understand why one of the spare rooms wasn’t
already covered in teddy bear wallpaper and piled high with Huggies.

“Hey, what’s in your jeans?” I shot back. It was the familiar start line to an old conversation I liked to have with him.

He grinned and said, “Why, Mrs. Grandee, that’s where I keep my fine ass.”

I said, “That’s right. Why are you fine ass–ing up my countertop, the very place I’m going to fix our salad?”

He hopped down onto his feet and leaned instead. “Excuse my buttocks, ma’am, and tell me, why don’t we?”

I said, “There’s a lot of reasons why.”

He nodded, slow and thoughtful, and then he said, “The Catholic thing.”

“That’s part of it,” I said, surprised that this was what he’d bring up first. Back in Kingsville, where we got engaged, my
Catholicism hadn’t seemed like such a big thing to him. At college, he’d had the whole of Texas stretched between him and
his stick-up-the-butt Protestant family.

Charlotte, who’d been born and raised in a border town, believed it was the excessive Catholic breeding of Mexicans that was
wrecking Texas. Joe was a more practical racist, who understood that without illegal immigrants he might have to pay a decent
wage to get his yard done. But he agreed that it wasn’t a religion for upright, gun-store-owning white folk. Things had looked
a lot different to Thom once we were in Amarillo with his daddy asking me across the dinner table, “Are you a
practicing
Catholic?” in the same tone he might use to ask if I was a practicing cannibal.

“You don’t go to mass,” Thom said. “You don’t go to confession.”

I’d gone a few times, when Thom’s daddy took him to a big gun show in Houston or Atlanta. It had caused a lot of friction
early on, so confession, like coffee with Mrs. Fancy, was something I did on the sly.

I said, “Give us a child until he is seven…”

“And he’ll be a Catholic forever,” Thom finished for me.

“The church had me till I was eight. It’s easier on everyone if I go to y’all’s church on Sundays, what with your folks acting
like incense and praying to the saints and votives is straight up witchcraft. But you don’t stop being Catholic because you
stop going to mass. I may be in your church, Thom, but don’t ever think I’m of it.” I stopped pinching the edges of my crust
into a ruffle and turned to face him, leaning back on my own piece of counter across the kitchen. I kept my body relaxed and
my tone light, but I looked him in the eye, and he knew I meant every word I said. “I am not going to wreck my figure and
squeeze seven pounds of baby out
my personals and spend the rest of my life raising something up unbaptized, just so it can get old and die and go to hell.”

Thom was nodding, but it was thoughtful-like, not agreement. When he talked he sounded easy, but he was as serious as I had
been. “You’re on the pill, Miss Catholic, so where are you going?”

“Purgatory, for my sins,” I said. “I hope I squeak into purgatory. And I’ll have earned every damn millennium I spend there.”

I turned to the fridge and got out my bowl of filling, beating it with a fork to refluff the beaten eggs. He didn’t go anywhere,
but he didn’t say anything, either, not until I was pouring the mix into the crust.

“Do I have to be Catholic?” Thom asked. “Or just him?”

I heard it as an echo of Thom’s old, favorite question.
Who is he.
There had never been a him, but just the asking led toward fists and fury. I could feel little hairs pricking up on the back
of my neck, and my hands slowed down. “Who is him?”

“Or her. It could be a her,” Thom said, and I realized he meant the baby. “But Grandee men, we tend to throw boys.”

I found my spine relaxing, and I said, “I gave you up as hellbound years ago, sugar. But I can’t raise a Presbyterian baby.”

“I can live with that,” Thom said. “I mean, I’m good with that.”

I shot him a skeptical look over my shoulder and scraped out the last of the filling with my spatula.

He said, “I’m not converting, but if you need me to go sit through mass with you on Sundays to be a family, I can do that.
It’s not that important to me.”

“It’s important to your daddy,” I said, peeking over my shoulder at him again.

All at once those two spiky creases were running up the center of Thom’s forehead, and I gave all my attention back to my
pie. But his voice came out even as he said, “This won’t be his kid, Ro. I don’t see as how he has a say in where our baby
gets his preaching.”

I had to bite back words then, about how Joe stuck his Roman nose into everything and Thom let him. Instead, I swallowed and
said to my pie, “Church is not the only reason, Thom.”

“I know,” Tom said. “Money.”

I’d been thinking of Thom’s temper. But more than half of Thom’s rages and all our money came from Joe. I figured money was
a back road in to what we both knew was the real subject. When he spoke, his voice had settled into serious tones.

“I’m going to talk to my father on Monday. We can’t raise kids living in this school district, so there’s a move to consider.
You’ll want to be home, and that means we’ll be losing your little checks, too. He has to see that.

“I’m going to tell him straight up how much I ought to be making. I’ve asked around, and I’ve even been down at the library,
doing some research. I have a pretty good idea what I’m worth, and it’s a helluva lot more than my current salary. I have
it all on paper. I made a graph to show him what other men doing my kind of job here in Texas get paid.

“I made an appointment. I put it in his book for next week, like any employee would. When I began, he said he didn’t want
to start me out high because I was his kid. He wanted me to earn my way up, and I respect that. I think that was even good
for me, because now I don’t take anything for granted and I know what work is, which I sure didn’t learn in college. But I’ve
put five good years in, and these days, he’s doing less and less as I do more and more. I’ve grown into doing a pretty big
job.”

“I’m not the one you have to convince,” I said, turning back around to face him.

He was smiling, and his posture was loose and easy. He said, “Sorry. I’ve been practicing this in my head for days, getting
myself ready to say it to him.”

“What if he says no?” I asked carefully. “If he starts in on that ‘Boy, you’re building your own future, this is sweat equity’
stuff, and all it really means is no, what then?”

Thom said, “Then it’s time for me to find another job. I’ve been practicing how to say that to him, too.”

He sounded so sure of himself, so calm and confident. I was close to believing him, and I realized my floury fingers had come
up to worry at my bottom lip. I made my hand drop and I said, “You are going to give your father an ultimatum?”

“I wouldn’t put it like that,” Thom said, but he shrugged with the easy jock confidence that had always before deserted him
when confronted with his father. My jaw dropped and my eyes went wide.

“You are!”

“About time,” he said, shrugging, so cool. I realized I was staring at him like a middle schooler with a way bad crush. “So
what do you think?”

I blinked. The most important things were still sitting unsaid in between us. I was on the pill because it seemed to me the
lesser sin. I’d never let him put a baby in me, on purpose, when I knew with such certainty he would punch it right back out.
I couldn’t see a single way that it would be any different from penciling in an abortion and then trying to get pregnant in
time to make the appointment.

But I thought of the sole purple bruise on my shin, lonely in this new marriage we’d been making ever since I had hidden in
the woods and taken those shots at him. It reminded me of a line from a story I must have read a thousand times as a girl.
“She would of been a good woman,” a character says, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

The story was by Flannery O’Connor, and she’d been a southern Catholic, too. Like my mother, who had left O’Connor’s stories
and a hundred other books behind when she left us. And like me, who’d read each of those books over and over. We were rare
things, southern Catholics, swamped in Baptists and hemmed in by Methodism. Maybe O’Connor had been telling me something,
one pope’s girl to another.

Six weeks was such a small time, for Thom and for me, especially when I held it up against the years that had come before.
Still, it wasn’t only the time I had to measure. Thom was offering me my religion back, like it was a gift. Presbyterians
skipped a step, going straight from group confession to communion, as if absolution was a simple thing that slept at my feet
like Gretel, waiting to be called. They didn’t understand penance.

When Rose Mae brought me back to that crazy place where I called violence to me like it was my lover, if I had my religion
back, I could learn to go to the priest instead of Thom. A few hours on bent knee with a rosary might still even Rose Mae
Lolley. Hell, worst case, I could go dredge me up a nun. I still remembered the precision of Sister Agnes’s ruler stinging
my palm from catechism classes long gone; no one understood crime and punishment better than a savage little nun.