Backseat Saints (4 page)

Thom guttered to a halt, and I watched him understand that this was not someone shooting. This was someone shooting
at
. He wasn’t heading toward a stranger’s dumb mistake. He was heading into bullets, purposeful and aimed. He dove sideways
as I tried to get a bead on him, his body an indignant line that disappeared into the trees on the left side of the trail.

Gretel stopped yodeling. I listened hard, terrified she was gone, and then caught the sound of her ragged breathing. I could
feel a scream building up inside me, swelling, pushing up into my throat. I turned the gun sideways and banged myself in the
head with the flat side, hard enough to daze myself and stop it.

Two bullets past Thom’s ear. Two in my dog. I had two left. I crouched low in the ditch, gun pointing at the lip. I listened
for his creeping sounds to come at me from one side or another. Thom was smart. He would choose a route and come as quiet
as he could to the spot the owl had marked. When he looked down into the ditch and saw that the face of the shooter was his
Ro’s face, maybe there would be a pause in him, a small window where I could finish this. That close, I wouldn’t miss. I would
have to shoot him if I wanted to live long enough to save Gretel.

Fat Gretel moaned. I heard her feet scuffling against the dirt. I poked my head up just over the lip, alligator style, and
there was Thom. He was back on the trail. Bent over her. My hands were steady. My eyes were clear. I lifted Pawpy’s gun and
lined him up, tracking him. My finger tightened. Two bullets left, and I could feel how perfect the shots were, one in the
spine as he bent over, one in the head.

Then he scooped up Gretel. My breath caught and my mouth rounded into a surprised O. He was not creeping through the trees,
seeking out the shooter. He was not turning tail and sprinting away as fast as his strong legs could carry him. He was risking
himself to rescue my dog. The skin on his back shuddered like a horse’s skin, and I knew he felt my sights creeping across
him like flies.

He lifted fifty pounds of dog like she was nothing, adrenaline assisting the hours he’d spent lifting weights and running
this trail. He started loping away, slow, hampered by my crying dog. He ran serpentine, trying not to be an easy target, but
Gretel ruined his balance and his speed, so he was. I could have shot him with no effort. I tracked him, but my finger remained
slack against the trigger. His courage and his weighed-down grace knocked me breathless. I watched him risk his hide for a
dog he’d never had much use for, saving her because she was mine, because I loved her so. He zigzagged away as fast as he
could, all the while feeling the black gaze of the gun on his back.

It was the most romantic thing that I had ever seen.

I’d stopped the Hail Mary a while back, I realized. Now a rhyme was running in my head, from the Grimm’s fairy-tale book my
mother used to read me when I was too small to shoot anything but a BB gun.
Oh Snowy-white, Oh Rosy-red, Will you beat your lover dead?
It was a poem from a prince, trapped in bear form. He slept on Snow White’s hearth, and she and her sister, Rose Red, would
beat the snow out of his fur and roll him back and forth between them with their naked feet. He’d say the rhyme to make those
rowdy girls be gentle with him.

The bear’s poem looped around and around, catching and matching the weaving bob of Thom’s head as he ran serpentine away down
the trail, ungainly but whole.

My finger stayed lax. Only that morning, I’d lifted my face, open like a posy, for him to lean down and kiss. Only that morning,
I’d gotten up early to fix his eggs. Then I’d come out here ahead of him to drop the body I had fed, leave it to keep the
ants company in these green woods. Thom’s blond head set behind the slope. He was gone. I pulled the gun back into two pieces
and dropped them in the bag.

I leaned forward in the ditch and put my face into the earth. I felt roots poking me. I’d starting crying again without noticing.
I was crying for Gretel and for my own spineless love. I wept until my bones went liquid, and then I wept them out. I lay
against the ditch like a tired piece of rag.

An idle part of me began to wonder where Thom was. I felt like I’d been lying in the dirt and crying for hours, but when I
looked at my watch, I saw less than ten minutes had passed. There was a Shell gas not two miles away, and they’d have a pay
phone. I wanted to call Thom and ask how Gretel was, where he was taking her, if she was still breathing, but I didn’t know
where to reach him. Thom’s skinflint daddy had yet to join the rest of the world and replace Thom’s pager with a mobile phone.

He’d take Gretel to the vet, I thought, and then what? Home? The police station? I sat up straight, pulled up in the sudden
understanding that I didn’t have to track him down. He would be tracking me, and soon. Men who got shot at called their wives,
the very first minute they could.

I scrambled up out of the ditch, clutching my bag. I could not have Thom wondering where his wife had been. Not today, of
all days. When his call came, Ro Grandee had to be at home in a daisy yellow skirt and ballet flats, tenderly hand-washing
the sticky yolk off Thom’s breakfast dishes. I took off for the car at a dead run.

I
BLAMED THAT AIRPORT gypsy. I tried to kill Thom Grandee because she’d told me it was him or me. She’d urged me to choose
him. I don’t know how long she’d been lurking around in Amarillo; I caught her just as she was leaving. If Mrs. Fancy hadn’t
asked me to drive her to the airport, the gypsy would have left town without me ever knowing she was here, alive and chock-full
of dire pronouncements. The airport trip was like that nail that dropped the shoe that lamed the horse that lost the battle.
If I hadn’t taken Mrs. Fancy, I never would have been laying for my husband in the woods.

Mrs. Fancy was my next-door neighbor, and her baking pans had been on a mission to make me go up a dress size since the day
Thom and I had moved into the house. She’d come by with a muffin basket, and when she’d handed it to me, she’d taken aholt
of a piece of my arm and breathed up in my face, saying, “It’s so nice to see young folks moving back into the neighborhood!”
She had puppy breath and a pincery grip. Thom had gotten rid of her as fast as possible, and then I’d leaned against our closed
front door, laughing while Thom pretended to nail it shut.

But that didn’t stop her from tottering back across the narrow strip of lawn, bringing me baked goods and small talk. She
showed
me how to feed my sick forsythia bush, and it came back the next spring blooming brighter than ever. She seemed to understand
immediately that she shouldn’t come by when Thom was home. The first time she saw my arm in a sling, she asked, but only the
first time. She accepted my explanation that I’d tripped in the dark with a long blink and a tutting noise. Then she’d made
the chewy brownies she’d discovered were my favorite, and she never asked again. Before we’d lived there a year, I’d grown
a taste for both her pastries and her undemanding friendship. I found myself crossing that strip of lawn almost as often as
she did, carrying homemade lemonade or a pot of flavored coffee. She was my little secret.

Last week she’d come to my porch with a covered plate in one powder-dry paw, asking for a lift to the airport so she could
go see her new grandbaby. “My last grandbaby,” she called him. She’d smiled at me, and the skin around her eyes had looked
like ancient paper, so folded and creased that it might have been used to make a hundred different origami cranes.

“I’d love to drive you,” I’d said, and she’d smoothed a strand of hair out of my eyes and gone home, leaving me with five
thousand pepper-jacked calories and a Tuesday so overbooked that I was going to have to hire a neighborhood girl to go pee
for me.

My plan was to go on my run, grab Mrs. Fancy, drive like a cocaine-addled hell bat to the airport, hurl her and her bags out
as I slowed down in the drop-off lane, then do an Olympic-speed grocery store sprint and get a dinner going in the Crock-Pot
before I jumped in the shower and headed in to work a shift for Thom’s daddy. I ran the cash register at his main store most
weekday afternoons, while Joe Grandee sat on his stool by the door to the offices and watched me with his gaze set low, a
smolder on my hips.

Last week he’d said to me, “It wouldn’t hurt business any if you took that blouse down a button, sugar,” just as if my husband
wasn’t on the phone with a vendor not five feet away.

Even when Thom came over, Joe didn’t stop looking at me like I was hot cornbread, buttered up and dripping honey. He elbowed
Thom and said, “Knowing guns like she does, I bet your wife could outsell my best floor man if she got out from behind the
counter in that tight blue skirt.”

A muscle jumped in Thom’s cheek, but Joe was too busy ogling me to notice. He lumbered off to the back to get a Coke. I smiled
at Thom and said, “Sales out the ass, he means,” to lighten up the mood.

Thom only grunted and said, “Watch your mouth.” He didn’t have much of a sense of humor when it came to his daddy.

Tuesday morning, I ended my run at Mrs. Fancy’s house and rang her doorbell, panting like an animal, my hair scraped back
in a sweat-slick tail. She was packed up and ready to go, with three enormous suitcases waiting by her front door. I dragged
one in each hand out to the car while Mrs. Fancy followed, carrying the third bag. As I stuffed my two in her Honda’s trunk,
she set the last bag flat in the driveway and popped it open to show me.

That suitcase paused me. I stared down into a swamp of rabbit-covered receiving blankets and stuffed animals and those weird
onesie T-shirts with the snaps in the crotch and a whole stack of blue and yellow baby gowns, the kind that look like pastel
lunch bags with drawstrings at the feet.

My gut went soft as taffy. Mrs. Fancy was a widow lady on a fixed income, and she’d bought a whole suitcase full of presents
for this grandbaby, even though it was her ninth. She would have to lay out plenty more to take the extra bag on the plane.
She could probably have sent the presents FedEx for cheaper, but I could see how it was. She wanted to be there when her daughter
opened up that bag. I bent my head and picked up a floppy giraffe doll so she wouldn’t see my eyes had glistened up. As soon
as I could blink myself back right, I helped her tuck all the gifts back in and loaded that last case.

Digging through those presents cost me time I didn’t have to spare. I wove us in and out of traffic in a way that irked the
hell out of me when other people did it. Mrs. Fancy sat in the passenger
seat, too excited to notice her sweet friend was driving like the very devil. She smiled at me as I got on the highway, and
I glimpsed a streak of hot pink lipstick on her teeth.

“Janine only just got married last year,” she said, turning to face forward again. She wasn’t watching the road, though. Her
eyes focused on the horizon like she was already airborne. “She’s forty-two. The babiest of all my babies, in her forties.
Can you imagine?” I nodded and slipped in between two enormous trucks like one of those crazy little remora fish that lives
its whole life darting from shark to shark. “I never thought she’d have children.”

Mrs. Fancy had raised her voice to talk over the enraged blast of honking from the trucker I’d cut off, but there was something
in her tone that made my ears prick up. She sounded sly, and sly wasn’t like her. “A long time ago, she got herself married
to a very bad man. Never even finished high school. When she finally got shut of him, she was done with men and all drove
to get careered. Never thought this day would come.” Mrs. Fancy started rooting in her bag, trying to look anything but crafty,
but I could smell crafty coming off her in waves.

“Don’t,” I said, but she ignored me, or maybe she thought I was talking to the guy in a red Nissan who was trying to slip
into my lane.

“She traded that bad husband in for a spine and started her own business. Spring Cleaners, it’s called, and she had to hire
her own ladies to scrub out her toilet. She got so busy getting other people’s houses clean that hers was about to get carried
off by the bugs. Seemed to me like she hardly noticed she was getting older, but I kept thinking about this
Newsweek
article I read, something about how a woman her age was more likely to get shot by a terrorist than get a husband.

“Then last year, every time she got on the phone, the name Charles would find itself in my ear. Charles this and Charles that
and Charles says. I kept casual because I liked the sound of this Charles. I didn’t want to spook her. He seemed like a door
opener, you know? The kind who helps you on with your jacket. Sure enough, now my Janine’s married, living regular and peaceful,
with a sweet little baby. That’s all I ever wanted for any of my kids.” She was still rooting around in her bag, being careful
not to look at me, because her story damn well did have a point, and she was poking Rose Mae’s craw with it. “Oh dear, I hope
I have my ticket with me. Did you see me get my ticket?”