Backseat Saints (38 page)

As I cross the landing, I hear the shovel-faced one say, “Me first, mama.”

I hear the rustle of bills, and then my mother says, “Rose Mae will call when she’s ready. Shall I turn the cards for you
while we wait?”

The tall, milky one laughs, high and nervous, as I come creeping down the stairs. Shovel Face says, “Why not.”

Halfway down, I can peer between the ceiling and the banister and see the two men sitting at the far end of the room at her
reading table. Their backs are to me. My mother is across from them, eyes on the cards, shuffling. She has not lit her white
sage candles. She is pale, and I can tell from the set of her mouth that she is more afraid than I am.

My mother says, “What’s your name?”

“John Smith,” says the hard case.

At the same time, the one who doesn’t matter says, “Jamie.”

I am four steps from the bottom now. I train my sights on the back of the hard one’s head. My mother looks up from the cards
and sees me over his shoulder. Her face flashes relief. She flips a card and says, “Well, John Smith, I’ve turned the nine
of syphilis.”
She flips another. “Now I’ve crossed it with the four of herpes. The cards suggest that you stop screwing whores.”

“You bitch,” Shovel Face says, and his chair scrapes back as he stands.

“I’m ready for you, John Smith,” I say, sweet-voiced, and he wheels around to face me. He sees the gun, and when he looks
into its round, black eyehole, it becomes all he can see. I am colors and vague shapes behind it. I could take my shirt off,
and he would not address my prescient nipples now. The gun is the whole of me, and it has his complete attention.

I hear my mother say in a steady, even voice, “Jamie, who is Gloria?”

Jamie is staring at the gun, too, mouth open, eyes completely round, sitting with his hands resting on the table where I can
see them. When my mother speaks, he blinks like he is waking up and says, “What?”

“Gloria,” my mother says, steady and so calm. “Who is she?”

“My little sister?” Jamie says, confused.

“Does your baby sister want you out with ‘John Smith’? Would she like to know you are paying to use broken young women in
such an ugly way, catching their sad diseases?” My mother’s voice is the voice of every mother, and Jamie can’t look at her
or even me. Not even the gun can keep his gaze off the floor.

Jamie mumbles, “How do you know her name?”

“I’m psychic, you moron,” my mother says, cool, and then, “Now her phone number is forming… I see a seven. I see… a six? No.
A nine.”

Jamie gasps, but I speak only to the hard one: “I think it’s time for you boys to go.”

John Smith is still staring at the gun, but his mouth sets and he says, “Fine. Give us our money back, you bitches.”

My mother starts to reach for it, but I smile and say, “She read the cards exactly right, honey. You got what you paid for.”

My mother stills.

John Smith’s initial fear is fading. Now he is calculating odds. He’s measuring his brawn and his training against the space
between his body and mine, his body’s speed against my steady hands, wrapped around the old revolver. He hasn’t a prayer,
but he may well be doing the math wrong. He does not know Rose Mae Lolley.

“Or stay,” I say in Rose Mae’s voice, and cock the pistol. The shift and click of the metal draws out her pleased and creamy
smile. “Please stay. I’d love for you to stay.”

I am fervent, sincere, and John Smith is suddenly all done here.

They head to the door, Mr. Smith first and Jamie shuffling shamefaced after. I keep the high ground on the stairs, Pawpy’s
gun trained steady on John Smith’s whitewalled head until they pass me and file outside. The door closes behind them, and
my mother runs across the room to draw the dead bolt. Then the gun gets heavy and points itself down, aiming at the floor
between my socks. My mother leans her face against the door, sides heaving. I uncock the revolver, and at the sound she whirls
to face me.

“Are you stupid?” she says.

At the same time I say, “What was that?”

“That,” she says, “is not uncommon. More than half the signs for readers are a front for whores. When
I
answer the door, johns know this is not a cathouse. But you, three buttons on your blouse open, your hair all mussed, you
look like an ice cream. When I tell you to get upstairs before a reading, then Rose Mae, you get upstairs.”

“Ivy,” I say, but with no conviction.

My mother looks from my feet to the gun I’ve aimed between them to my eyes to the fever I can feel on my cheeks. My heartbeat
booms away inside me like the drums of war.

“Ivy,” my mother scoffs. “Look at you. You are only what you are, Rose Mae.”

I scoff right back, “Then there must be only Lolley women in the room here,
Claire
.”

“Don’t miss my point,” she says, her voice blade sharp. She stalks slowly toward me, coming up three stairs. She puts her
hands over mine on the gun. I cling to it, and we freeze there. “Look at you,” she says. “Look at you. Why is your husband
still breathing, if you have all this fight in you?”

I shake my head. I have no answer. I tried to shoot him and I failed. Ro tried to live in peace with him and failed. Even
now, if it was his head in the crosshairs instead of Mr. Smith’s, my hands would not have been so steady. Even now, if he
pulled his Thom-suit back on over the monster, showed up with flowers, said, “Ro, baby, come home…”

I would not go. But I would feel the tug.

My grip weakens as her hands get more insistent. I let her slide Pawpy’s gun out of my fingers. She turns away, and I sink
down to sit on the stairs.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asks the gun. There’s no safety, so she breaks it expertly into its separate pieces.

“The pin broke,” I say.

“I mean what’s wrong with you, all you young women.” She is pacing up and down her parlor, one chunk of gun in each of her
waving, angry hands. “My friend’s daughter, she cuts open her own skin to let the bad out. She’s a child, barely in high school.
What bad can she have in her? Half her little friends are starving themselves, or puking up all their food. It’s the same
thing, but the starvers say, ‘Oh, I could never cut myself like that,’ and the cutters say, ‘I’d never marry a man who hit
me,’ but it’s all the same thing. You are all killing your stupid, stupid selves.”

I stay slumped on the stairs with no answer for her. I am so tired now. She is still ranting, her voice shaking with anger,
as righteous as Ezekiel.

“My ten o’clock today? Bette? You saw her. She can’t be more than twenty-five, and she’s wider than most walls. She brought
cookies with her, for me, she says, and sets the plate between us. She never took a whole cookie, but she sat there pinching
bits off
one cookie till it was gone, then another, pinch by pinch, until half the plate had been moused away.

“Then she points through the window, to Lilah mooning on the fence outside, and says, ‘I don’t understand how she can go back
to him when he beats her. She might as well put a gun to her own head.’ Meanwhile, Bette is so trapped and hemmed by all the
fat on her that she can’t breathe. She’s killing herself, same as my friend’s daughter with her razors. Same as Lilah.” She
pauses to point at me with one accusing finger, the rest of her hand wrapped around the barrel. “Same as you.”

I stand up, grabbing the banister and hauling myself to my feet. “You are no different.”

She snorts in rude denial. “I earned my new name, Rose.”

“Please,” I say. “Then how come you can’t keep your eyes—or your hands—off that crumpled bit of scrap paper I brought over
from Alabama?” I am gratified to see how immediately her eyes go to my daddy’s note. “The one true princess of Zen, afraid
to read a note.”

“I am not afraid,” she says, but now her righteous indignation has a crack in it.

The doorbell chimes again.

We freeze, then she makes a noise that’s halfway between a laugh and a gasp and says, “That’s just Lisa, my next appointment.
I’ll turn the sign off. You need to—”

“I know the drill,” I say, and head upstairs to my room on shaking legs. I go inside, and the walls seem to have crept in
closer to each other while I was downstairs. The furniture in its familiar configuration grates at me. I need to be someplace
where there is more air. I turn around and around in my room, panting like Gretel.

I can’t stay in here, because this room is full to the roof with the knowledge that my mother is right: I can say that I am
Ivy, but I am only what I am. But I also cannot go outside. I feel it in the bones of me. Not because of her rules, or even
because the two angry
sailors may still be near; my mother’s constant warnings must be getting to me. I can’t go out, but I can’t stand to be trapped
in this room with myself just now.

There is a window over the writing desk. It looks out on a small piece of roof that hangs over the backyard. I go to it and
flip the latch, and it rolls open easy at my touch. I snatch up Saint Lucy’s candle and the rosary and the matches and step
onto the chair. I get on my knees on top of the desk. There is no screen, and I crawl right out the open window onto the slope
piece of roof that juts out under it.

I don’t have much of a view. I can see a slice of Parker’s backyard grass and the backside of the house behind this one. Still,
I can breathe out here on the shingled slope, bathed equally in cool salt air and warm sunshine. I tilt my head up and look
at the bright blue sky. I need to pray, and here I’ve found as good a shrine as any.

I put Saint Lucy down and light the wick, placing her in the corner where the gable offers shelter from the wind. I close
my eyes and take up the beads.

I work my way around the rosary, trying not to think too hard on what it means that my mother is so right. New name or no,
I have brought Rose Mae Lolley and Ro Grandee with me. I do not want to believe that they are in me, always. That they are
me, always. That’s a path of thought that leads me close to Thom, so it has to be a problem for tomorrow. I need to still
my heart and stop my mind from racing. I pray all the way around before the ritual calms me enough to let me open my eyes.

Parker has come into the piece of his yard that I can see. He is centered on the lawn facing my direction with his arms up,
palms facing out, and he is standing very still. He is stiller than I have ever seen a human being stand. Even my daddy, laying
in wait in a deer blind, would twitch more than Parker. He is still wearing those floppy black pants that look like pajama
bottoms, but he has taken off the shirt. He has a sprinkling of dark red-brown hair on his chest. He’s pale all over, and
his skin fits tightly over wiry muscle.

Finally his arms move, slowly. Then his whole body moves into a series of weird, slow poses that look like what might happen
if kung fu and ballet had themselves a baby. He is fighting nothing, in slow motion. It’s completely unhurried, but so controlled
that after only a few minutes he is sweating. He stills and holds, then moves again, deliberate and fierce.

The third time he pauses, he holds for several minutes. I’m exhausted with the adrenaline hangover, worn out from worry, and
it is incredibly pleasant to blank my mind and watch a male body move with such deliberate grace. It doesn’t hurt a bit that
the body in question has taut coils of muscle in the shoulders and a six-pack.

The dogs come streaming through the backyard. The big mutts run past Parker, brushing their friendly sides against his legs,
but it is as if they do not exist. His gaze is turned inward, and his body moves, releasing measured and unhurried violence
on monsters only he can see. Buck and Miss Moogle disappear from my line of sight, lapping the house, but Gretel pauses to
watch Parker with her head tilted to a puzzled angle.

Cesar stops, too, but he’s not interested in Parker. His ears perk up, going on yellow alert. He peers all around until he
sees me on the roof. Then that tattling little shit goes right to red, cutting loose with a yappy string of warning barks.

Parker’s concentration breaks. His hands drop and he follows Cesar’s line of sight up to my rooftop perch. I lift one hand
in a wave, busted. Parker shakes his head at me, chuckling, and I can see what he is thinking. He is trying to decide if I
am rule breaking, if this counts as outside the house. Parker does not want me to end up another Lilah-at-the-gates. I want
to explain, but I can’t call down to him. Mirabelle will hear, and I do not want any more Mirabelle just now, thank you.

I turn and get on my hands and knees. I crawl my top half back through the window. I lie stomach down on the writing desk,
butt humped over the sill, legs outside, and open the desk’s shallow top
drawer. I dig out a piece of the blue stationery and a pen and scrawl, “I came out here to pray.” As I back through the window
to the roof again, clutching my note, I also grab up a stone cat paperweight from the desk’s top. I wrap the note around the
cat to weight it, then toss it gently down in the yard. It’s a testament to my goodwill toward all things canine that I don’t
aim at Cesar.

Cesar and Gret run to my note first and snuff at it, and Parker follows, more slowly. He reaches between the questing dog
noses and picks up the packet. He opens it, but he looks at the cat, as if the note is wrapping paper.

He looks back up at me, puzzled. I shake my head and glare, frustrated with the silence. I blow out my candle and hold it
up. I point at the note with my other hand. In the yard below, my good, dim Gret wanders away after Buck and Miss Moogle,
still clueless that I am present. Clever Cesar stares up at me, more affronted than alarmed that I am on his roof, a place
he knows good and well that people do not belong.

Parker gets it. He reads the note, then looks back to me, impassive. He hefts the stone cat in his other hand, as if weighing
it. He holds up one finger in a “wait a sec” gesture, then he walks toward the house until he disappears from my sight.

I sit another minute, and he comes back out. He holds up a blue sphere about the size of a tennis ball. I spread my hands
and he throws it lightly up in an arc toward the roof. It comes right to my hands as if I’d called it.