Backseat Saints (3 page)

And meanwhile here was Rose, prettier and smarter and nicer in public, drifting motherless from town to town. Rose lived alone
in her dank room with no lock on the door. Even Kim’s damn cat, Boo, could open Rose’s door. He’d stand on the back of the
couch and bang the knob with his scabby paw. He was all over scabs. A flea allergy, Kim said, but she never took him to the
vet. He’d creep into Rose’s room when she was sleeping and slide under her blankets to press against her side, desperate and
moist. Rose was allergic to cats, but she dry-swallowed Benadryl and let Boo press and press against her, because she was
that desperate right back.

She acted like a girl in hiding, but her father was too busy, what with his part-time construction work and his full-time
drinking, to ever come looking. No one else came, either. She daydreamed her long-gone mother would burst in, crying, “I’m
so sorry! This time I’ll take you with me!” or that her high school boyfriend, Jim Beverly, would reappear to shoo the foul
cat away and say, “Here you are! Thank God, I finally found you!” They never came. The room, the cat, the diner, the chafing
mask of a happier girl, they were her whole real life, and she was living it.

It should be me in that booth
, Rose thought, a college girl like Bangs, smart and busy and worthy, going places with a sharp-looking sports boy watching.
For half a minute, bantering about football, the smiling girl with the sass and the bouncy step hadn’t been a skin. Rose had
really been her, and it had felt like coming home to someplace new and clean.

Bangs could have spared her that thirty seconds, because Bangs had all night. Hell, Bangs had all year, and more years coming.
Rose poured hot water and watched the cocoa foam to life. All Rose had was prettiness, a spoon, and the right to stir the
cocoa of bitches until it was smooth. It was too much to swallow, and Rose found she had literally built up a fine and bitter
coat of spit inside her mouth.

She couldn’t help it. She had nothing, and her thirty seconds had been ruined. She crouched down, her sweet second skin finally
off, disappearing behind the counter. She pursed her mouth into a kiss and bent her head over the mug. The long wad of spit
drooled down into the cocoa. Rose stirred it in. She was smiling now, a genuine and ugly thing, so wide that it showed her
back teeth.

When she looked up, Thom Grandee was leaning over the counter. She froze, more naked in that moment than she had been the
day Kim came barreling into her room. He saw her. He saw the real Rose Mae Lolley, no longer hidden by Ro-the-perky-waitress.
His face wasn’t readable.

She stood up, slow, holding the mug, trying to call back her sugary smile.

He said, “I came to get change,” and his smile was plain and open.

She blinked stupidly at the dollar he held out, uncertain. Maybe he had only just poked his big head over the counter when
she looked up?

“For the jukebox?” he said.

“It takes dollars,” Rose said, her voice rusty. “It’s one song for a quarter, but if you put in the dollar, you get five.”

“That’s cool,” he said, retracting the money.

The closest drunk said, “Refill?” It seemed he was blessed with the power of speech after all. The red vinyl on his stool
creaked as he shifted his butt, backing away from the surprise of his own voice.

Thom said, “Want me to tote her cocoa back to the table for ya?”

He couldn’t hold the plain face he was making anymore. His
eyebrow quirked and his bland blue eyes changed. They filled up with enough devil to match her. He had seen.

She felt another blush coming. “I’ll make her a new one.”

She pulled the spoon out, but he was already reaching for the mug.

“I’m Thom Grandee,” he said.

“Ro,” she said. She let him take the mug.

“I saw that,” he said, and for a second she thought he meant the spit. Then he gestured with his free hand to the gold name
tag pinned north of her left breast. “Rose Mae,” he read. “Go ahead and get that guy his coffee. No worries. I’ll take this
over.”

She went to pour for the drunk, peeking out from under her lashes as Thom Grandee walked back to the table with the cocoa.
He handed it to Bangs.

The second drunk was pointing at the doughnuts in the cake stand. Rose got him one and then picked up her pad, prepping to
check on the couple in the back booth and then go take Thom Grandee’s order. All the while, she watched him watching Bangs
sip spit.

As she came across to their booth, Thom pried the mug from Bangs’s fingers. All four were laughing and talking now. As she
came toward them, Thom was saying to Bangs, “Didn’t you go to kindergarten? Didn’t you learn to share?” and as Rose came close
he lifted the cup and drank, and his eyes met hers over the rim. He was drinking in her spit, greedy, taking all of it, though
the cocoa was still so hot that it must have been scalding him. He opened his throat and drank it down and didn’t for one
second look away from Rose.

“Oh, my God! You hog!” Bangs said, laughy-teasy. “Now you have to buy me another.”

“What can I get y’all to eat?” Rose asked cautiously.

They ordered their breakfasts, and at the end Thom Grandee said, “And Caroline wants another cocoa.” He grinned at Rose. “Exactly
like the first.”

She recognized him then. He was every boy that had ever belonged to her, from her daddy on down. He’d recognized her, too,
when he’d peered over the counter and seen what was under the sweet waitress. He liked the whole package. He would be back.
Rose smiled and walked away.

She’d been the prettiest girl in her high school, too. Maybe she didn’t get her diploma, but she’d damn well learned how boys
worked. He’d come back to the diner alone, soon, hoping to follow the blush he’d seen on the backs of her legs all the way
up, as far as she would let him. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, she would see him coming toward her through the big front window,
moving fast in his swingy athlete’s gait. She would have to stay ahead of him and keep him coming toward her, fast and sometimes
angry. She’d stay in sight but out of reach. If she kept him on the far side of that window glass long enough, she could keep
him always coming toward her.

He was coming toward her now.

I could hear him, his big feet pounding up the trail.

My lips were moving soundlessly, but I recognized the shape of the words.
Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee.
My mouth was getting a jump start on the thousand rosaries I’d have to say to get clean after killing him.

I felt the vibrations of his pounding run, heard his sure and steady gait. I socketed the barrel into the well-oiled cradle
of the gun. I felt more than heard it slide home while my lips shaped,
Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

I saw the top of his head clear the gentle upslope of the trail. I pulled the hammer back, waiting for the cool metal to shift
in my hands and come alive. This gun, put together, was stronger than the sum of the lumps that had bounced around in the
bottom of the bag. I’d brought it with me all the way from Alabama, an object stolen directly from my childhood. It belonged
to Rose Mae Lolley, not to me. Rose Mae had held this gun a thousand times, and each time, it had felt as if her blood was
circulating through it. It had always done her will as surely as her own hands did.

But not today. Pawpy’s revolver was a dead bird cradled in my fingers. No heartbeat.

I could feel the air Thom Grandee pushed ahead of him wafting past me, bringing me his scent. I looked down the barrel and
saw that it was shaking. I was Ro Grandee, righteous in my bruises, shaking my hands to save my husband from myself. I tried
to steady them, breathing in so deep it felt like I pulled the air past my lungs into my stomach, swallowing the next words.
Pray for us sinners, now, and the hour of our deaths.

As the prayer ended, I thought to myself,
Put the gun down. These days even Catholics get divorced.
But if I left or started up with lawyers, he would kill me. The airport gypsy had told me so, and I’d believed her to the
marrows of my ill-mended bones. God help me, I believed her still.

Thom Grandee himself had told me he would end me, many times: Across the table during breakfast. With his big hands wrapped
around my throat, flexing to close me at his will, then granting me the barest sip of air. When he moved inside me like a
savage and I wept with it, it felt so good. Those times it sounded like the sweetest promise ever made.
Don’t you ever leave me, Ro. I’ll see you dead before I’ll let you leave me.
I’d long known I couldn’t simply pack a bag and call a lawyer.

But the gypsy had told me he’d also kill me if I stayed. I hadn’t ever allowed myself to think that. When she said it out
loud, I heard it ring in the deeps of me, true as gospel. One day, and soon, I’d push him so far he couldn’t come back. He
would put all of his big weight behind his fists and break me and be sorry later. Shooting him was only jump-starting some
self-defense. Yet my weak hands shook, and my fingers felt rigid, unable to squeeze, and my mouth was shaping out another
silent plea to Mary.

He was rising over the slope like the sun. Two more of his huffing steps and I could see his shoulders. Two more brought me
a view
of his trim waist, and it was then I realized that he sounded wrong. Thom kept fit, so why that huffing breath? Was it my
breath? Was I so loud? His footfalls had a shuffling echo.

I had no time to be distracted by his noises. I sighted him down the length of my trembling barrel, and my vision blurred.
I might have been crying. It seemed to me that he left a thin red wake, like he was trailing a single, mournful streamer.
I let him be blurry, let the gun come into sharp focus. When I was little, before he even let me shoot a pellet gun, Daddy
had shown me this very revolver in two pieces, innocuous. He let me look down the hole and put my finger in it.

“Rose Mae, this is the only safety lesson you will ever need,” Daddy said. “But I’m going to tell you ever’ time you shoot.
Until you know it in your guts. You see down that hole? You must never, never point that hole at anything, at anything, ever,
unless you want to see it utterly destroyed.” He said it with no irony, while he and I together looked down that very hole,
its dark eye looking back at me, the barrel cradled in my daddy’s hands.

Now I was sighted on the center of Thom’s chest, where I had so many times pressed my ear to hear the boom of his large, red
heart. He was ten feet away. I was stiff, half-blind with tears, and I knew then that I would let him pass, unharmed. I was
spineless enough to let him kill me, when it came to that. My eyes closed, the gun pointing at air or the owl or Thom or nothing.

I could see my own death, accept it, see his hands close around my throat too hard, too long. But I could not see Thom. At
once my hands were loose and easy and my own, and I could squeeze the trigger. So I did.

It seemed only half a second passed between aiming and my eyes closing, between looking at the backs of my eyelids and my
hands easing enough to let me pull. I was squeezing even before I felt the scalding tears that were pushed out of my closing
eyes on my cheeks. The suddenly living gun contracted in my hands, once, twice, spitting bullets that I felt leave me before
I heard the
fierce crack of splitting air. Eyes still closed, tears dripping off my jaw now to spatter down my shirt, I heard a terrible,
hupping yelp, surprised and not quite human.

A great calm took me, and the gun became so massive and heavy that my hands dropped. The hole pointed into the earth.

I opened my eyes. For a minute I could not understand what I was seeing. Thom was standing, jaw unhinged, still trailing his
thin red streamer. He was whole and unshot, upright on the trail. The noise grew, became a howling, and as Thom yelled, “Hold
your fire! Hold your fire!” I saw the streamer was my old red leash, saw the tan, crumpled body behind him, at the very apex
of the slope. I had missed him, missed him entirely. I had shot my dog.

The noise was Fat Gretel’s noise, and I had shot my good, good dog. Time stuttered and slowed so abruptly that the next eight
seconds was a series of Polaroid pictures. The first one was Gretel, kicking on the ground, and I understood that Thom had
brought my dog with him, running. Gretel had been that huffing echo, and now she was the wretched howling, and all at once
I was so angry that the tears stopped.

He was supposed to drop her at the vet, but he must have waited there until she had her shots and then brought her along to
make her run. He was always wanting me to run the fat off her, even though I said to leave her be. I got Gret from the pound
soon after we married, and she’d lived a sinless life with me for five years now. I didn’t often cry, but when I did, she
padded around and around me in worried circles, making houndy sorrow-groans in her throat, keeping vigil till I stopped. She
had earned the right to spread out happy on the floor and be as fat as she wanted.

We moved forward, all of us, one frame. The owl burst upwards in a panicked ball of feathers, like a flare marking my spot.
Gretel howled. Thom, spooked by the owl, yelled, “You fucking moron, hold your fire. We are here!” My mouth gaped open and
nothing came out but a thin whine of released air.

He couldn’t possibly have heard my breath, but Thom started
toward me. Gretel’s howl broke and wavered, becoming a long, betrayed yodel. This lower sound went on and on, as if she would
never inhale again. I squatted in the ditch, inert.

He reached the hairpin in two elongated lopes that ate up the ground between us. He was coming to drag me out and kill me.
Now. For one frame, I was helpless skin half-filled with air, floppy and useless. In the next frame, I was Rose Mae again.
The separation I’d felt earlier ended, and there was no girl inside a girl. I was Rose and here was Thom, coming toward me
like always, this time to kill me. There was my dog, hurt on the ground, needing my help, and Thom stood between us. My hands
lifted the gun, rock steady, one eye squinched shut, and I went for the head shot. Twice. I had no time for true aim; my bullets
whined past his left ear. They came so close that he must have felt the heat of their whistling trail.