Backseat Saints (22 page)

“No,” I said. Jim had last been seen on the side of the highway, pointing his thumb away from me.

“If you was my girl, I would have called you at least before I took off,” Car said. “Oh, wait. Weren’t y’all broke up?”

That irked me instantly, for no rational reason. I moved the baby memory book and flung it, harder than I needed to, out of
the way. I still didn’t see the soft, unlaminated card I’d clocked before, and this was irking me as well. “Just for a day
or two. We’d have gotten back together,” I said, trying not to let my sudden wash of red temper color my voice.

“Still, that’s probably why he didn’t call you, Rose Mae. Y’all was broke up,” Car said. He sounded now like he was explaining
a very simple thing to someone who was maybe not too bright. All at once, I wanted to reach through the phone and slap him
sideways. Back in high school, he’d had these meaty, round cheeks that were already yearning downwards, hoping to become jowls.
I could imagine exactly what my palm would sound like, smacking hard against one.

“We always broke up when he was drinking,” I said, quiet, trying not to get sharp.

He laughed. “Shoot, you musta ditched his ass three, four times a year. Rob Shay had a nickname for you, did you know that?
He called you ‘Delicious Hitler,’ because you were hot, but you gave Jim righteous hell if he so much as licked the dew off
a beer can.”

“That ass,” I said with forced cheer. I’d always liked Rob Shay, but the red wave of angry I was trying to squelch had put
a shake in my voice even so. I couldn’t help but add, “We always came back to each other, Car. Us breaking up didn’t mean
a thing.”

“Well, it meant he didn’t feel like he had to call you afore he went off,” Car said. He still sounded doggedly overreasonable,
pushing me past my desire to slap and deep into throttling territory. His tone changed to coddlesome, and he added, “What
about you? You still single? You still fine? You was so fine, Rose Mae.”

“Naw. I turned gay and got super fat,” I said. “You take care, Car.” I hung up. I was breathing hard, like I’d taken a sprint
across loose sand.

I picked up the folded birth certificate and felt the slickness of the paper between my thumb and index finger. Official paper.
Legal. A paper that meant something in the world outside my closed front door, if I could find the card that went with it.

All at once I realized how shortsighted I had been: If I took these things, I wouldn’t need to find Jim Beverly at all. I
was dumbstruck by the simplicity. With a new name, with a new identity that clipped four years off my age, with real ID, I
could truly become a different person, a person Thom Grandee would never find.

“Ivy Wheeler,” I said. I didn’t know who that was, but I’d bet she had a razor-sharp bob and never wore ballet flats. The
real Ivy and I already had at least a few things in common. She’d been a southern girl with a shithead for a father, just
like me. I picked up the plushy rabbit with my free hand, wobbling him back and forth to make his tummy bell jingle. I could
see Ivy, living somewhere green and unfamiliar with a few hills and a cool breeze. Fig trees and lemon groves.

Dammit, it was California. Again. I gave the rabbit an angrier shake, but all he had in him was sweet, light bells, muffled
in his stuffing. Ivy’d also had a mother who couldn’t stand to leave. Even after Ivy died, her mother couldn’t bear to leave
the man Ivy had come from, couldn’t leave the rooms where Ivy had breathed and cooed and slept.

“Wonder what
that’s
like,” I asked the rabbit. He had an earnest, cream-colored face; this was not a rabbit who got sarcasm. I tossed him back
on the bed and kept digging, looking for that Social Security card. Screw California. If I was Ivy, I could go anywhere. Thom
could search for his Ro, angry and ready to end her,
but I would have ended her already. He could live out his life in Texas, free of me, with his big red heart still thundering
away inside him.

Ro Grandee wanted this last part so badly: the simple fact of Thom alive and in the world. As soon as I recognized this longing,
this deep yearn of hers to leave Thom breathing, I understood the reason.

Ro Grandee wanted something to go back to.

I pulled my hands out of the box as if it had suddenly gone heated. How long could I stand to be out on my own? After Jim,
heading west from Alabama all the way to Texas, I’d always found myself a man. Patently bad ones, happy to give me a ride
off the edge of the world since they were heading that way anyway. I’d traded them out the same way I traded out cities, never
learning how to trade up. Thom was the best of the lot, the only man since Jim that I had loved.

I had a few hundred bucks and an ancient revolver to my name. I’d be broke and dead lonely in a strange place, trying to scratch
a shallow, safe hole in the chalky dirt. I was getting close to thirty years old, and that would still be true, no matter
what Ivy’s ID would say.

How long until a dark night came when I longed for the devil I knew so badly that I let Ro Grandee creep up over me and call
him? She would tell him where I was. She would say, “Thom. Come and get me,” and let him decide what that meant. The gypsy
had told me there was no simple way out of this marriage, that it would come down to him or me.

I couldn’t find the damn card anyway. I tossed everything back in the box. Stealing from Mrs. Fancy, especially after how
she’d treated me today, felt flat wrong. Tracking Jim, that was the main thing. I put the lid on and picked up the box to
put it away, but Phil had slithered off the bed without me noticing. As I stepped toward the closet, he threaded himself between
my legs, pitching me forward. The lid flew right back off and everything inside the box went airborne, arcing across the room.

The booties separated and dropped, and the birth certificate sailed sideways like a paper airplane that had been badly folded
and thrown all wrong. The silver cup pinged off a baby spoon and rolled until the wall stopped it. The rattle and the belled
bunny plopped down side by side in a chiming patter. Everything hit the floor in a second, two at most. Except one thing.
Ivy’s Social Security card must have gotten stuck inside the baby book, hiding, but now it fluttered out as the book dropped.
It caught the air exactly right and fell slowly, slicing back and forth, riding the air like a moth wing.

As it fell, I had time to think the words
coin toss.

Then it landed. I dropped to my knees, already gathering objects, but I was looking toward that card. It landed writing-side
up. My hands stopped their busy tidying. The day I’d seen my mother in the airport, she’d been tensed to bolt from the moment
our gazes met. She was grabbing her things to run when she fumbled her tarot deck. The cards slid and scattered, and almost
all of them fell facedown. Every card except one fell facedown.

That one card had told her that she had to stay. She’d refused to tell me which card had shown itself and paused her, but
its message had changed her course and then mine. Now Ivy’s Social Security card had fallen faceup, as if it too had something
to say.

I knee-walked to the card and looked at it, really looked at it, for the first time. When I had opened the birth certificate
before, I’d skimmed the name
Ivy
, taken in the birth date, but then my gaze had gone right to the words
Janine Fancy Wheeler
and stayed there. I hadn’t read it carefully. But here the message was, plain and obvious, no mysterious swords or burning
towers. The card’s top and bottom were edged in red-and-blue scrolling. Sandwiched between the curlicues were nine numbers,
dark against the white card, and three words in plain black type: Ivy Rose Wheeler.

Janine had named her baby Ivy Rose.

I left the card where it was and reached instead for the Ziploc bag. I opened it and carefully lifted out the tuft of baby
hair. It was
clipped into a pink bow barrette with tiny teeth, made to hold fine strands. It was dark hair, but a lot of babies are born
with a head full of dead black hair. It lightens as it meets the sun, or it falls out altogether and brown or blond or red
stuff grows in under.

This tuft didn’t look like that. It was a true dark brown, as rich and glossy as mink. I tilted my head forward so the wings
of my bob closed around my face, and I held Ivy’s little tuft up against my own hair. Ivy’s all but disappeared, so close
were they in color.

Half an hour ago, Mrs. Fancy had reached to tuck my hair behind my ear, her fingers lingering in the strands as she told me
all the good things she wanted for me.

“Oh, shit,” I said to the room.

I packed up the rest of Ivy’s baby things with the reverence they deserved, putting the hair back and getting all the air
out of the Ziploc bag, checking the silver cup for dings. I saved out the Social Security card and the birth certificate,
and then I put the box away.

I put Ivy’s papers in my purse. I would go to the DMV tomorrow and get Ivy a driver’s license. I’d need to find a family of
local Wheelers and lift some of their junk mail for proof of address. That would absolutely be a felony, but it would be my
first, because taking these from Mrs. Fancy wasn’t stealing. She’d said, “Take anything that suits you,” and Ivy Rose could
suit me to a tee.

But only if I first made damn sure Ro Grandee had nothing to come back to.

I would use the ID to travel invisibly, to find Jim, and I’d be Rose Mae long enough to get him to burn my bridges for me.
With Thom gone and Jim beside me, I’d be ready to rebuild myself into someone nicer. With nothing to go back to, Jim and I
would be entirely free.

I
FOUND HIM.

It took ten long days. Every night, I played my own version of Scheherazade for Thom, 1,001 pieces of tail, taking the tension
out of his broad shoulders when he came home from Grand Guns. It eased me, too, this endless, brutal sex that left us both
as spent and wasted as a beating, but only an eighth as sore. He did hit me once, but only a glancing backhand. Another day,
after a run-in with his daddy, he shoved me into the wall. These were squalls, though, over before they truly started.

He didn’t get angry enough to flip my mother’s final card and end me, and I didn’t get angry enough to pour Drano into his
corn chowder and go stomping off, vindicated, to prison. When the sun went down, we took the day’s frustrations to our mattress
and hurt each other just enough. The nights bought me the days, and every day, I stole time on Mrs. Fancy’s phone, hunting
for Jim Beverly.

By sundown on the tenth day, I knew exactly where he was.

“You’re different,” Thom told me that night, in the dark. We lay side by side on our bed with four inches of cool air in between
us. I could feel sweat, mine and his, drying on my skin. Gretel, with her usual impeccable timing, had hopped on the bed and
flopped down between my calves two minutes after I’d come like a screaming eagle and thrown myself backwards off him. Her
snores and
the warmth of her had soothed me close to sleep, but when I heard how flat his voice had gone, my eyes popped open wide and
my nerve endings tingled.

“It’s a haircut, Thom,” I said. “It’s a couple of new tops.”

“I mean you’re different here,” Thom said. His big hand thumped the slice of bed between us for emphasis.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. It sounded like a lie even to me.

“Every night, Ro. That’s a lot, even for us.”

“Are you complaining?” I said, boosting myself up on my elbows, incredulous.

He made a short, hard, barking noise. It was a scoff or a laugh, hard to tell in the dark room. “No. But that thing, with
your back to me…”

I lay back down and asked, “Reverse Cowgirl?”

“Yeah, that,” he said at the same time I said, “Giddy-up,” trying for levity.

He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “You never used to like that. And you do that thing with your teeth now, and that scissoring
thing. That’s all new.”

I could see where he was going. When a wife brings home new bedroom tricks, a certain kind of husband starts to wonder where
she learned them. I turned on my side and looked at him. My eyes had adjusted, soaking in the moonlight coming through the
sheers. I could see his profile etched against the windows, but it was too dark for me to get a good read of his expression.
I didn’t need to see to recognize the thought behind the words.
Who is he.

It had always been his most dangerous question. For him to ask it, even obliquely, was a harbinger. It was a more dangerous
question now, because the answer was no longer Ro’s endless, true assurance of fidelity. Now the answer was,
He is Jim Beverly, and in four days, when you head to Houston with your daddy for that gun show, I am going to Chicago to
righteously screw him until he remembers his promises. I am going to reclaim him.

Reclaim was the right word, because Jim was living in sin with a girl from Fruiton High. Arlene Fleet was her name, and she
hadn’t even made my call list, though I remembered that scrawny, dark-eyed weasel quite clearly. Jim had never dated her officially,
but rumor had it she’d put out for every member of the football team and half the county besides. She’d stuck in my brain
because she was the only person at Fruiton High to ever suspect me of stealing.