Backseat Saints (21 page)

She gave me only my usual lunch, my usual quick kiss good-bye, and I ate that lunch. I brought home the bag to reuse the next
day. My faith that there would be a next day’s lunch was so basic, I didn’t even think of it as faith.

Maybe she
had
gone to a shelter. She’d been a woman, as Mrs. Fancy said, “in my situation.” I had no way to know. She’d gotten out of a
bad marriage, but she hadn’t taken me with her so I could learn the route. She hadn’t even dropped a trail of bread crumbs
for me to follow. She’d only set my mouth, giving me her taste for called saints, good books, and angry men.

My throat felt closed. I couldn’t open it to answer Mrs. Fancy. I’d come here to steal from her, but now a connection formed
in my head, sudden and complete: I would steal from Mrs. Fancy and go to California. It felt true. Predestined, even, as if
my mother had left me a secret something else: her ability to see the future, so mighty a gift that I didn’t need cards.

I tried to keep my face still, to not let my expression show Mrs. Fancy a map that she could read. Not California, I reminded
myself. I had no reason to believe Jim Beverly had landed there.

Mrs. Fancy was waiting patiently for me to answer. I said, “A shelter won’t take Fat Gretel.”

“My son could take Gretel. He has a fenced yard and a lonely German shepherd,” Mrs. Fancy answered promptly, like she’d thought
this out years ago and was five steps ahead with arguments and logic front-loaded to shoot down my objections.

I looked down at my feet and said, harsh and raw, “I only want to borrow your phone.”

She looked like she wanted to say something else, but she read the mulish shape of my mouth correctly and settled for, “Try
the blouse on.”

I pulled it on and turned to the mirror hanging over the old-fashioned dresser. The shirt was soft cotton, long, but it gathered
at the waist with elastic and showed my figure. It had a drawstring neck and bands of pale yellow ribbon and embroidered flowers
near the ends of the sleeves, the conservative side of seventies hippie wear. My mother’d left a closet full of clothes like
this in Fruiton.

Wearing it, I could see that the new haircut hadn’t given me high cheekbones, it only showed them off. They were hers, like
the down tilt to my mouth and the sharp-etched line of my collarbone. I blinked, long enough for it to be more like closing
my eyes against the sight of my mother’s child. Still, it was better than seeing Ro. At least my mother had gotten out of
her marriage alive, something that was utterly beyond Ro Grandee.

“This will work. Thank you,” I said.

Mrs. Fancy was already flipping through hangers, pulling out peasant blouses with angel-wing sleeves and button-down disco
shirts with nipped-in waists. She laid them out on the bed in a pile, six or maybe seven of them, then added a couple of pairs
of embroidered belled jeans and three minidresses in bright, mod patterns.

“What about shoes?” Mrs. Fancy asked.

“I’m good on shoes,” I said instantly. The last thing I needed was for Mrs. Fancy to go digging in her old shoeboxes. One
of them would feel way too heavy and rattle with loose bullets when she lifted it. I felt my gaze flick to the box that held
my Pawpy’s gun. I willed myself to look away, but not before I realized a couple of the shoeboxes on that side stuck out an
inch or so beyond the rest because I’d stuffed my mother’s library book behind them.

Mrs. Fancy did not notice, though. She was caught up staring at her own box of secrets on the other side. Her head was down,
and her body had canted itself slightly toward it. I didn’t much want her thinking hard on that box, either, since I was planning
to loot it.

I said, “Help me carry this stuff back to my place. I’ll make coffee?” trying to pull her away, but she didn’t move.

When at last she spoke again, her voice had changed to something small and strangled. It didn’t even sound like hers. “Did
you know that my daughter, Janine, had another child? Before she had little Robert, I mean. Years ago. She had a baby with
that bad man I told you she had married.”

I’d guessed this. I’d also guessed that it had come to no good end. Mrs. Fancy’s box held mementos from a babyhood and nothing
more: booties and a clip of hair, but no first attempt at ABCs, no child’s ballet shoes, no dried flowers from a pressed corsage.
If my mother, out in California, had boxed up souvenirs from my childhood, then hers would end with a bag of baby teeth shaped
like shoepeg corn and a five-sentence book report on
Beezus and Ramona.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

She turned and walked away to the other end of the room. She twisted open the blinds and looked out the window that faced
the backyard, her back to me and the closet. Our houses were called starter homes, but there were more retired folks in our
neighborhood than young couples. Ender homes, more like. The backyard had a flat space near the back windows where a swing
set could go. Mrs. Fancy had a birdbath there with a pansy patch around it. She said, “That’s why she married so young, hardly
more than a baby herself. Ivy came too early. Poor little thing. Poor little both things.”

Her voice was steady now, loud enough for me to hear her even with her back to me. Each word came out formal and precise,
like she’d been invited to speak to the Rotary Club six months ago and she’d been practicing this talk in her bathroom mirror.

“The baby’s lungs didn’t hardly work, but that sweet thing tried very hard. She’d twine her fingers around my pinky and clutch
on. That’s why Janine named her Ivy. She was born with that fierce grip.”

Now Mrs. Fancy’s shoulders shook, and she paused and breathed deep in and out. Ro would have gone and hugged her and soothed
her into silence with pats and there, theres, but I stayed where I was, smelling useful information and almost hating myself
for it. At last she said, “Ivy lived four months. Janine thought she was in the clear. We all did. One night, Ivy stopped
breathing. She stopped everything. To this day, no one knows why. Babies sometimes do that.

“Janine didn’t leave him. I couldn’t make sense of it. They’d married because of Ivy, and then there wasn’t any Ivy anymore.
He was hell, and I was sure his fists had something to do with the baby coming early. Still, she stayed. I couldn’t fathom
it. Now I see you, no babies to hold you, staying and staying. You’ve stayed years now, so there must be parts of it that
are sweet. There must be other parts that are so regular to you, you’ve come to think this is what life is like. You can’t
see there’s other ways to live.” She turned away from the window and looked at me, and I could see the whites of her eyes
had gone red, but she wasn’t quite crying. “Ro, I’m telling you. There’s other ways to live.”

I held myself still. I had no answer I could say to her.

She said, “My Janine, she cut her hair all feathery down the sides when she was pregnant. Before, it had been all one length,
with bangs. She got heavy with the baby, too, soft in her belly and legs.

“After, she stayed with him, but she started growing the layers out of her hair. She took the baby weight off, too. Slowly,
walking every day, eating more salad. One day, I think she looked in the mirror and saw how she was back to being herself.
Her same long hair. Her same flat tummy. She looked like the girl she’d been before she got stupid in the back of his car
after a dance.” She sighed, a private sound, telling the story with her face to the pansy plants. “That’s when she left him.”

“Mrs. Fancy,” I said, to get her attention. When she turned and met my eyes, I said, “What you said doesn’t sound like shrink
talk. It sounds like good sense. That’s all I’m doing. Trying to remember the girl I was before him, and be that girl again.”

That seemed to make sense to her in a way my stolen
Oprah
explanation hadn’t. She blinked twice and then said, “Fine. If using my phone helps, come over and use it. If I’m not here,
you have my spare key. Just know that I will drive you to my church’s safe house the very moment you are ready.”

She turned, suddenly brisk, and walked to the door. I could see
her wanting out of the room where Ivy’s things were secreted in a shoebox, where she’d said Ivy’s name.

I said, “If you want to try to get to your book club, don’t let me hold you.”

She checked her watch, then nodded. “We read
A Prayer for Owen Meany.
That book has a lot of God in it, but it was quite dirty.” She gave me a slight smile. “I’d like to catch the last half.
You can stay here and finish going through the closet, if you like. Take anything that suits you.”

She left me there, alone in the room with a box that held a perfectly good birth certificate. I was pretty sure I had seen
a Social Security card, too, among the relics. It had been unlaminated, soft around the edges. The certificate and the card,
to me these were the only mementos that mattered.

With these things, I could get a new driver’s license. Ivy Wheeler. The name went with my new haircut, maybe with these clothes.
I could travel under this other name and leave no trace of my comings and goings. If Thom became suspicious, there would be
no trail for him to follow. When I found Jim Beverly, and then when something untoward befell my husband, the police would
find no tattling bus route or plane ticket.

First I got my roll of bills out of the zipper pocket of my handbag and put them in what I thought of as my shoebox, nestling
the cash up next to Pawpy’s gun. The bills would come to smell of gun oil, like the money at Joe’s stores always did.

Then I slid Mrs. Fancy’s box out from its place in the stacks, and I toted it back to the guest bed. I set it down on the
flower-covered comforter by the stack of blouses. Phil, in the automatic inconveniencing way of cats, had moved. Now he was
nested on top of the blouses, shedding.

I felt a faint reluctance when I reached to open the box. I’d looked at Mrs. Fancy through the filter of Ro’s kinder eyes.
She’d pushed my hair out of my face with such sweetness, and though she hadn’t been able to look at my bruises directly, she
had spoken of her daughter’s
husband in a clear response to their presence in the room. I wondered if this shoebox really was Mrs. Fancy’s. Perhaps this
was Janine’s box, too painful to have close, but too close not to have. I wished I believed it. I’d have no problem stealing
from Janine.

I turned from the closed box to the phone on the bedside table. It was easier to pick up the receiver and dial Information.
When the connection was made, I said, “Fruiton, Alabama,”

“What listing?” the operator asked in a bored voice. I said the first name that came into my head. I heard the clack of keys,
and then she told me that there was no Lawly Price in Fruiton. I gave her another. She had plenty of Presleys, but no Charles.
Not even an initial C. The football boys had moved on.

“What about Shay?” I asked the operator, who was already tired of me. “You have a Rob or Robert Shay?” I spelled the last
name for her.

The operator said, “No, ma’am. Is that all?” in an exasperated tone.

I said, “No, ma’am, yourself, that’s not all. Look for a Carson Kaylor.”

“I do have a C. Kaylor in Fruiton.”

“I’ll take it,” I said.

Car picked up on the second ring. He sounded sleepy, like I’d woken him up. He coughed, then made a throwaway “Heh,” sound,
so short that it was almost swallowed, and the “lo” stretched itself out long, tilting up into a question at the end. It was
pure Alabama, and hearing that accent washed off whatever coat of sticky sugar Mrs. Fancy had put on me. I was Rose Mae Lolley,
the prettiest damn girl from Fruiton High. Boys like Car Kaylor had always been as malleable as Play-Doh in my hands.

“Car! I swan, I’d know your voice anyplace,” I said, and flipped the lid off Mrs. Fancy’s shoebox with two fingers.

There was a pause, and then Car said, “Holy smoked hell. This can’t be Rose-Pop Lolley?”

“Right first time,” I said. It gave me a little shiver. No one but
Jim had ever called me Rose-Pop. “I was lying around thinking about old home folks, and I thought I’d see if I could find
you.”

Talking to Car felt like a good kind of creaky; marriage to a man as jealous as Thom had held my flirty girl muscles still
for too long. Now I was stretching them, remembering the moves.

The folded birth certificate was right on top, and I lifted it out and set it aside. I looked down into the box. A rattle.
A square of pink cotton, maybe cut off a swaddling blanket? A soft rabbit with a bell inside him.

I gave the contents a stir while Car yapped about his job laying floor for Home Depot, but it didn’t unearth the Social Security
card. Car was telling me about his job’s great benefits package, but I nudged him off the now, asking about his old high school
girlfriend. I was casting about for a crafty way to bring up Jim, but I didn’t have to. Our star quarterback’s vanishment
was the single largest event that happened in my class’s four-year run. Car brought it up himself.

I poked around in the box, hunting that card, and made the kind of interested, admiring noises that encourage men to talk
more. Car had only the dimmest recollection of running into Jim on his last night in Fruiton, though he confirmed Jim had
been at Missy Carver’s party. “Truth told, I was wasted, Rose Mae,” he told me. “I think Jim was hanging with Rob Shay and
Jenny.”

“I don’t remember Jenny,” I said. I found I’d taken my hand out of the box so I could poodle one finger around in my hair,
just as if he could see me. I dropped my hand and moved the belled rabbit out of the way. Underneath him I found a teeny book
with a picture of a pink rattle on the front. I knew if I opened it, I would see someone’s best penmanship listing Ivy’s date
of birth, weight, and inches. Maybe a page to record her first smile and another for the first time she rolled over. After
that, the pages would be blank.

“Sure you do, pig-faced blonde. Pig-faced in the cute way,” Car said. “Jim was wasted, too, at that party. And he didn’t stop
drinking
there. I remember they found beer cans busted open all over his wrecked Jeep. You never did hear from him?”