Backseat Saints (32 page)

“What about Claire? I’d need it to read to Claire if she comes back.”

“She’s not coming back,” I said. “I’ll pass it on to her when I see her again.”

“Again? You seen Claire?” he asked.

“Yeah, Daddy,” I said.

“She ast about me?” he said.

There was no good answer to that, so I said, “She lives out west now, and she seems fine. She lays cards.”

“Vegas?” my father said. He must have heard “plays” for “lays.” “I sure can’t picture Claire in Vegas. You’ll give her my
speech?” I nodded, and he handed me the key. “You’ll tell me when she reads it? So I can know I’m done.”

“I guess I could,” I said. “But listen, if anyone comes asking, don’t say anything about this car. Don’t even say I was here,”
I said.

“Is someone going to come looking, Rose?” Daddy asked.

“I’m afraid so. You never saw me, okay?” He nodded, and I climbed in the Bug. “I have to run out and get a few things, but
I’ll be back for Gretel, okay?”

“The pink slip is in the glove box,” he said. I opened the box and found it under a stack of old maps. I had a pen in my purse,
and he signed the car over to me, using its own roof as a desk, then handed me back the slip.

“That Buick, Daddy, you need to get rid of it. You can drive it down the trail and leave it in the woods, or if you know someone
who’ll take it under the table, you do that. Sell it for scrap. But no paperwork, you understand? That car has to disappear.”

“I know someone who’ll take it for the parts, no questions,” he said. I nodded, unsurprised.

I started the VW. It sounded like some fireworks were getting it on with a bag of asthma in the engine box, but it ran. I
backed out and left him standing there, empty-handed in his driveway.

I ran by Wal-Mart for underpants and a new toothbrush. I also got a good-size bag of Purina Dog Chow and some raisins and
hard pretzels.

I got back in the car, but I didn’t head to Daddy’s. I hadn’t come out for underpants. I was glad to have that off my mental
to-do list, but I had really driven out to find a way to say good-bye to Rose Mae Lolley. It was time to peel her off me,
same way Ro Grandee had been stripped away. Whatever she had been or loved or needed, it was time to run from it, fast, never
looking back. The way my mother had walked away, in the shoes she was wearing, taking nothing from her past. Not even me.

The Catholic in me needed something more than a simple resolution. The blessing in the water was meaningless unless I stepped
into the river. Wine to blood meant nothing if I didn’t drink. I needed a ritual, a solemn act to start and seal the change.

I drove first to my old elementary school, but I found the woods behind, my woods and Jim’s, had been shaved away to make
room for a subdivision full of cramped, square houses in pastel colors. I pulled over to the side of the road.

The remains of my childhood were buried here. See-through young Jims and Rose Mae Lolleys must disturb the people’s sleep,
running through the walls to hide and show each other private things. The mortal remains of someone’s calico cat would appear
at midnight to stalk ghost mice across the cheap carpeting, chasing as best she could with her head on backwards.

The homes smelled as haunted as that neighborhood in
Poltergeist
, a movie Jim and I had watched on tape at his house maybe fifty times. “You moved the woods,” I whispered to the pink and
aqua cracker boxes, “but you left the bodies, didn’t you?”

The Rose I was had begun in these woods with Jim, but the woods were gone. Someone’s TV room rested on top of our clearing,
and the blackberry bushes had been poisoned and dug out and dragged away for burning. I put the car in drive and passed the
entrance, spine ashudder. I needed a place less changed.

I drove on out to Lipsmack Hill, my hands steady on the wheel. I found the hard-to-see turnoff onto the dirt path through
the woods, the way still clear enough for the Bug to pass without adding to its scratches. I stopped in the grassy clearing
where, if this had been 1985, in a few hours couples would park to tangle up and get some steam on their windows. I wondered
if this year’s crop of kids still came out here to get rowdy.

I opened the glove compartment and rifled through the maps. I’d seen a flashlight in there, and when I clicked the button,
it surprised me by working.

I hiked the familiar path up through the trees, toward the clearing at the top of Lipsmack. I remembered the path so perfectly,
I doubt I would have needed the light, even though the moon was only now on the rise. I’d been so aware of every inch, the
first time I came up here with Jim Beverly. He’d been carrying that scratchy picnic blanket, both of us too shy and hopeful
and nervous to talk much. My feet remembered how to walk it as my light swept the trail, searching for rocks and fallen branches.

At the top of Lipsmack was a flat patch of lush grass, and it ended in a sharp cliff that jutted out above a valley full of
kudzu. I sat on the lip and clicked off my light, swinging my boots back and forth like Bunny had in my mother’s desk chair.
I waited while my eyes adjusted to the rising moonlight. The kudzu waved and swayed below me in the darkness like a deep green-black
sea.

My mother laid cards. Had they told her I was coming west? The three she’d turned at the airport said a lot about her life,
but only because my life had been modeled in a thousand unseen ways on hers. They were my cards, too, and they’d said that
either Thom or I must die.

I’d played cowboys and Indians in the bushes out near Wildcat
Bluff, but I hadn’t been able to shoot him. I’d gone to Chicago, fooling myself into looking for a lost love because it made
it seem like I was doing something other than staying and staying and staying until the day he killed me. Then I’d come home
to Daddy and found him wrecked. What a pair we were, Daddy and me. I’d followed my chain of bad men all the way back to my
very first, but it was useless. Neither of us was up to battling sugar ants for control of his dirty kitchen, much less the
man I’d married.

I was tired of stalling. If the cards were right, if it was Thom or me, then let it be me. I wanted to leave Thom’s would-be
killer and his victim both to rot in the kudzu. I wanted to be done with the violent, angry girl my mother had created with
her leaving, and I’d long been done with Ro.

I had come up here to say good-bye, but not to Jim Beverly. Not even to Daddy. I was finished here. Rose—and her trail— had
to truly dead-end. I could never come back to Fruiton, Alabama. But I wasn’t sure how to leave her, how to start fresh, to
be someone else. If I peeled Thom Grandee’s would-be murderer away, what the hell lived underneath?

I’d been someone else, before my mother left. A regular girl, maybe like Bill’s Bunny. Jim Beverly and I had not been friends
then. There was nothing in that girl to draw him. I didn’t remember her very well. My mother had left her, so I had left her,
too, not wanting to be a thing whose own mother couldn’t love her. I didn’t know her, but my mother must remember her and
could help me remember, too. If I could abandon Rose Mae Lolley here, the way I’d left Ro Grandee back in Texas, I could start
fresh. And after all, I wouldn’t be the first asshole to try to find themselves in Cali-fucking-fornia.

I took off my wedding band, and the interlocking engagement ring diamond that went with it. My small marquise-cut stone glimmered
in the faint light. I stared down at the sea of kudzu below me. It seemed like it could hold a thousand secrets. I closed
my hand around the rings and reared my arm back, prepping to throw. I’d seen this done before in movies, a diamond hurled
off a bridge or a ship, tossed into the woods from an overpass, or flicked out a moving car’s window. It meant a permanent
break.

I couldn’t do it. I froze with my arm back, rings still fisted in my tight-closed hand. The pragmatist in me was totting up
groceries and gas and even the cheapest hotels. I’d need to stop and sleep in real beds, to let my body heal. I’d been so
sick. I’d need to eat good things, fresh fruit and soup, to get my strength back. I needed cash, fast and untraceable, and
I could get it at any pawnshop with my ring set. I lowered my arm, even though without a sacrament, my resolution to start
fresh as someone wholly new was weak. It couldn’t hold.

I paused, torn, and then, like a gift, I heard voices down at the bottom of the hill. I cocked my head sideways to listen.
I recognized them. Arlene Fleet and her angry fella.

Was she here looking for me? I tried to remember what my note had said, back in Chicago. I might well have mentioned Fruiton.
She had a story to tell, a story that was so ugly she’d run straight up a tree rather than remember it. Her history with Jim
must be haunting her so hard. I knew what that felt like. Perhaps she’d tracked me all the way to Alabama to try to lay it
to rest by telling me, by telling anyone, at last.

I stood up and jammed the rings in my pocket. I could do this for her. I could play the part of a wounded Rose still hunting
for her Jim. I would listen to her story, though I already knew it. It was my story, too. The details didn’t matter. I would
listen and then carry as much of it away for her as I could and dump it, for both of us. I would never think of Jim Beverly
or be his Rose Mae again. I’d go get my good dog and blast out of here. I had a handwritten apology from Daddy and a long
overdue library book that needed to be delivered.

The voices down the hill were getting louder; Arlene and her boyfriend were getting into it. It occurred to me that if I wanted
a
symbolic gesture to seal my transformation, here it was on a platter. Arlene had found her own replacement bad man, and she’d
brought him right to me.

There was no more fitting final act for Rose Mae Lolley than this: I would go down the hill and kick Arlene Fleet’s piece-of-shit
boyfriend as hard as I could, right in the nuts. Then she and I would run. I would listen to her, then be on my way. I felt
my grin go wide and wolfy in the darkness. I started down the steep path in the moonlight, ready to begin.

HANGING IVY

Berkeley, California, 1997

M
Y MOTHER LIVES somewhere in this city, maybe even on the street I am driving down. It is lined with skinny stucco houses,
set close, growing like bright, rectangular mushrooms out of the hills. She could be walking down one of these narrow sidewalks,
making her way between the houses and the parked cars that line the street.

Gret and I took the drive here in four easy days, going first north to St. Louis, then west through cowboy country. I drove
with the windows down all the way. Desert air whirled through the car in a constant cyclone, catching up our hair and rifling
through it, blowing all the Alabama off our skins. I wasn’t halfway through Nebraska before even my regrets had been blown
clean away. I may have kept a small one for Arlene Fleet’s poor boyfriend. He’d turned out to be a decent fella, but I hadn’t
known that until well after I’d kicked his family jewels so hard that I was surprised they didn’t shoot straight out his nose.
Arlene had defended him like a miniature tigress, but after she’d calmed down, she’d confirmed everything I’d come to believe
about Jim Beverly. Everything and more. I’d seen no point in dwelling, though, as I drove away. I was heading toward my lost
mother and the answer to a question I’d been carrying for more than twenty years. I’d had no room for other thoughts inside
the little car. I still don’t.

I coast another slow mile through Berkeley, and the houses give way to neighborhood stores; my mother could be one of the
shoppers meandering from coffee house to stationery shop to the futon store. It should be easy to spot her, given her penchant
for bright and mismatched layers, but her strangeness is eclipsed by a white boy with blond dreadlocks, a six-foot black guy
in a red dress, a turbaned girl dancing on a corner to music only she can hear.