Backseat Saints (37 page)

I have just picked myself out a beautiful green rosary with
hand-carved wooden beads when the doorbell chimes again. Her next supplicant has arrived. She starts to speak, but I know
the drill by now. I am already heading upstairs. I put the candle and the rosary in my room, unpaid for. I rummage around
my room for matches and find an old hotel pack in the writing desk, stuck way back behind some pale blue stationery and a
veritable host of pens. Even the frickin’ ink in them is blue.

I follow her rules all day: I don’t go back to my husband. I don’t use drugs or shoot anyone. I don’t poke my nose outside
the house. I use the back door in the kitchen to let Gret in and out to play with the other dogs or use the lawnly facilities,
piously careful not to let a single toe over the threshold when I open it for her.

Gret spends the afternoon with Buck and Cesar and Miss Moogle, but at her regular dinnertime, I go into the kitchen and hear
her single-footed scraping at the back door. When I let her in, I bend down to ruffle her ears; she smells strongly of curry.
She must have availed herself of Parker’s dog door while he was fixing his own dinner. I squat down and scratch her head in
earnest, saying, “That’s very naughty.” She pants into my face, and she even has curry on her breath. Parker is encouraging
her.

I eat my own dinner with my mother. She fried catfish in cornmeal, and she serves it with hush puppies and buttered peas.
She may have lost her accent, but she still cooks like a southerner. We eat and bristle at each other on either side of the
butcher-block table in her blue-and-cream kitchen. We are almost all the way through dinner when I finally realize that she
isn’t speaking to me, either. The silence I thought was my choice has, in fact, stretched both ways, and she has been as purposeful
about it as I have been. I take a sip of sweet tea to clear my throat. I am now perversely ready for conversation.

“What really happened the day you left Fruiton?” I say casually, as if these aren’t the first words I’ve said to someone besides
Gretel and a glass unicorn in over twenty-four hours.

Her lips thin and her eyes narrow. She tilts her head sideways
and speaks to her peas in an irritating singsong, like she’s saying a catechism. “I went to mass and then confession. I prayed,
and Saint Cecilia answered, telling me—”

I interrupt her with a loud snort, unladylike as I can manage, and say, “Cecilias. Plural. They’re activists, Momma, not deities.
You’re telling me your underground railroad doesn’t have kid tickets? You have to be this high to ride that ride?”

She glares at me and drops the singsong. “I was praying. It was an answered prayer. I had to shake the dust from my sandals
and go, right then.” It sounds rehearsed, a thing she has told herself over the years. She hasn’t said it enough yet, though.
Not even she believes it. But her voice gains conviction when she changes the subject, saying, “He’s going to find you. He’s
going to come here and kill you in my house.”

I shrug, unmoved. “It’s good that you have hardwood floors, then. Easy cleanup.”

She slams her fork down. “Stop it.”

Now I understand why she’s been mad at me all day. This is about Thom. She told me to do something, and I have blatantly not
done it. The last time this happened, I was eight and she ordered me to clean my room. I chose to scrunch up in a blanket
and reread
Charlotte’s Web
instead, and when she came and saw I’d disobeyed her, I was grounded. I’m grounded now, too, in a way.

We finish our meal and go off to bed, reenshrouded in our separate, angry silences.

A second day passes, much the same, and then a third. Each night at dinner I play Beast to her Beauty, asking my single question,
asking why she left me behind. She sticks with her story about being told in a vision to go at once, alone, and my dinners
all stick in my craw.

By the morning of the fourth day, I’ve exhausted all my adrenaline. It’s hard to stay angry when the sameness of every minute
nibbles away at my resolve. My mother is waiting for a client at her table, and I am back in her store. I’ve practically memorized
her
limited inventory. I step to the blinds and stare out into the front yard.

Lilah is back. She’s beside the gate, begging hands folded over the top of the fence, looking yearnfully toward my mother’s
place. I am so desperately bored that I think she might have the better spot.

“Come away from the window, Rose Mae,” my mother says.

“Ivy,” I toss over my shoulder. I do not move.

Lilah sees me, or at least my shape in the window. She straightens, craning forward. “Mirabelle!” she calls, plaintive and
hopeless. “Mirabelle!”

I hear my mother get up from her table and come over. She’s moving quickly, and when she comes up even with me, she grabs
the cord and jerks her wooden blinds closed with a clack. We stand side by side, no view but the slats, and we both choose
to stare at them rather than each other.

“You should go talk to her,” I say.

“Why?” she asks, dry-voiced. “Do you no longer require the room?”

I make a slit through two of the blinds with my fingers. I see Parker has come out, trailing his pack of rowdy dogs. Gretel
is among them, tripping along on his left heel. He’s wearing a crumpled button-down shirt, extremely faded, with black cotton
pants that flap around his ankles like pajama bottoms. The man should clearly not be allowed to dress himself. He’s crossing
the yard to talk to Lilah in that weird Shaggy-style walk, slumped down to be shorter, hands where she can see them.

“Come away from the window,” my mother repeats.

I ask, “Doesn’t he have a job?”

“Who?” my mother says. When I don’t answer, she reaches to make a peeping slit between two blinds for herself. “Oh, yes. Parker
teaches anthropology over at Berkeley City College. He keeps odd hours,” she says. We watch Parker standing a good foot back
from the fence, talking to Lilah, who is gesturing wildly and weeping.
My mother watches me watching, and then she says, “Why do you ask?” Her voice has sharpened.

“Just curious,” I say. “He seems nice.”

She laughs, but it is a hard sound, not at all amused. “No, Rose. Just no.”

“Ivy,” I say.

“When that man you married comes, he will eat Parker alive,” she says. “From the feet on up.”

“All I said was, he seems like a nice man,” I say, and she says, almost running over my words:

“Exactly.”

Parker leans earnestly toward Lilah. He must be repeating his offer to get her into a shelter because she shakes her head
at him, vehement and angry.

“I’ve never really known one of those,” I say in musing tones, mostly because my interest seems to bother her. “A nice man.
I wonder what that’s like.”

“I’ll thank you not to experiment on Parker. He lost his wife to breast cancer, and she was so young—still in her twenties.
They were crazy about each other, too. It was a complete tragedy. He’s had enough hard times without your mess.”

Lilah is turning away, trailing disconsolately back up Belgria. Parker stays by the fence, calling after her.

“How long ago did she die?” I ask.

“A while,” my mother says, cagey.

“A year?” No answer. “More than two years?” I ask. Nothing. “More than three?”

Parker turns away from the fence and walks back toward me, spine straight, sure-footed and easy. Shaggy-Doo is a costume,
so familiar and well used that he can pull it on and shake it off between heartbeats. I’m intrigued now for real, not only
because it bothers her.

“She died six years ago,” my mother says, begrudging me the information. “But it could be six months or six decades and it
wouldn’t change
your
situation, Rose Mae.”

“Ivy,” I say automatically.

Parker is angling away from the porch stairs. It looks as if he’s heading around to the backyard, with the dogs surging around
his feet in a cheerful four-pack. He disappears from my line of sight.

“He wouldn’t do you much good anyway. He’s been celibate since Ginny died,” my mother says, changing tacks. I make a piffling
noise, frankly disbelieving, and she adds, “It’s a euphemism, Rose Mae.”

“Celibacy is a euphemism?” I ask, but then I get what she means. “You mean he’s impotent?” I take her silence as confirmation.
“How interesting, Mother mine, that you would know that.”

“He is my good friend,” she says, prim-voiced. “And he is not for you.”

I turn away from the window and face her. “Who is he for, then,
Mirabelle?
” I ask. “Is he for you?”

My mother draws back, affronted. She turns away and stamps back toward her table, saying, “Don’t be ridiculous,” over her
shoulder.

“I’m not. You two clearly get along, and he’s not at all bad-looking,” I say. “As for what’s not working, they have pills
for that these days. You could—”

“Rose Mae! Don’t be vile,” she says, hurling herself into her chair and glaring at me over the cards. “He’s young enough to
be my—” And then she stops. I feel the word she hasn’t said like an X-Acto knife, slim and sharp, opening my gut.

A heated silence stretches in between us. I change the subject. “What happens if I leave? If I break your rule and step outside?”

“Don’t test me,” she says.

“I could go out in the yard, play fetch with Gretel.”

“Do it,” she says, the temper she’s been low-boiling for days finally roiling and foaming over. “Hell, go out the front. Run
after Lilah and tell her you’re allowed outside though she was not. Hit
her in the face with it, why don’t you? Dance and holler. Call attention. Make it easy for that man who is coming here. Help
him find you, so he can snap your neck like an eating chicken’s.”

She’s so angry, she’s shaking with it. I’m surprised at how much southern has come out in her speech. We stare at each other,
and she’s panting. My breath speeds up to match hers, and in this tense and ugly silence, her mellow doorbell chimes.

It’s a hugely inappropriate noise. It startles her. We both look automatically to the other window and see the red glow of
the sign seeping through the slats. She’s left it on, and it has attracted a walk-in.

“Shall I get that for you?” I ask, as sugar-voiced as a flight attendant offering a blankie. I am at the front of the room
by the store’s display shelves, much closer than she is to the door. I step out and put my hand on the knob, mostly to prang
her. But she draws herself upwards, setting her shoulders, saying, “No, Rose Mae,” in the “thou shalt not” commanding tones
of some risen minor prophet.

“For the love of Jesus Christ, Claire,” I say, “can you not get that my name is Ivy?”

She takes a long stride toward me, not listening, intent on stopping me. I spin fast and swing open the door. Wide.

A pair of servicemen stand on the porch. They aren’t in uniform, but they are young, with whitewalled hair. Navy or maybe
marines. One is short and broad with a hard face shaped like a shovel, and when he sees me he whispers, “Hallelujah,” through
his teeth.

The other one is tall and skinny, and he hardly looks old enough to shave. He has milky skin and chocolate-colored puppy eyes
that tilt down. He’s swaying, as if his sea legs are telling him the porch is moving. They are sweating, both of them, and
the potent smell of hops and tequila rises off their skins.

The shovel-faced one crowds the doorway, saying, “What’s your name, honey?”

I lean back and say, “I think you have the wrong house.”

The tall one smiles at me, too wide, his mouth shaping a leer that is almost comical. He crams in close behind his friend,
filling the doorway. “We want to get our palms read.”

I shake my head and say in quelling tones, “You boys do not want to get your palms read.”

The one with the hard face thinks I’m being funny. He crowds in even closer and says, “You can tell
my
fortune, honey.” He speaks directly to my breasts, as if he believes my nipples know the future.

The tall one smiles even wider, goofy drunk and harmless, but his friend muscles forward again, coming so close to me that
I move back. He closes the space I make between us immediately, like it’s a dance step, and now he is across the threshold.
His friend follows, but it is not the friend who matters in this room. It is this short, broad fellow with his bull shoulders
and thick neck, one hand reaching to cup his own crotch and give himself a squeeze, hot eyes on my waist and hips and breasts.
I step back again, fast, almost stumbling as my heels hit the lowest stair. I step up on it to keep from landing on my back
in front of him. The tall one pulls the front door shut.

My mother glides quickly across the room, inserting her small body into the space between me and the sailors. “Rose Mae. Go
upstairs.”

I back up another step, instantly obedient. I don’t even correct her. I want to go. I’m afraid. It would be stupid not to
be, but at the same time my fingers are tingling and adrenaline has been dumped into my veins and I am not bored now, oh no.
Rose Mae Lolley only needs a little lead time. I keep backing up the stairs, and my eyes feel hot and gritty and alight, as
if I have come on with a sudden fever. I keep my gaze and my feral smile on the short fella, promising him things, but maybe
not the things he is expecting.

My mother is still between us, blocking the base of the stairs. She is small, like me. He looms over her and around her, but
her words hold him more than her small presence. “Not so fast, sailor man. You have to pay to play. Come sit down.” She glances
over her shoulder to see I am not quite to the landing. “Rose. Go. Up.”

I turn and run lightly the rest of the way into my room. Pawpy’s gun is in the drawer of my bedside table. I snatch it up,
the weight of it familiar and sweet in my hand. I slot bullets into the barrel, fast and slick, and then fit the barrel into
its cradle with a satisfying snap.

I set the gun down long enough to pull off my boots. My sock feet whisper against the hardwood floor as I slip fast and quiet
back to the landing.

I can hear my mother saying, “… two hundred dollars for the full read.” It’s a lot more than the price she quoted in the airport,
but no one at the table is thinking about tarot readings. She is pretending to sell my sweet ass, while truly she is buying
time. I know it’s only a ploy, but I’m still offended that she doesn’t charge more.