Backseat Saints (45 page)

“I think it’s great,” he says, and hands me the bowl. He’s put chopsticks in, the optimist. The man’s still in denial that
I’m from
Ala-got-damn-bama. I pass them to him with an arched brow, and he pulls an emergency backup fork out of his jacket pocket.
I find myself gobbling—the man can cook—then set the bowl aside. We wait quietly together. We’re getting good at it. It’s
a comfortable thing, all the waiting we’ve been doing. I feel a good, expectant happiness moving up behind it. It won’t go
on much longer, I don’t think.

It’s after midnight when we finally hear her creeping down the street. Parker stays still, but I stand and step silently across
the yard to meet her at the gate.

Lilah steps into the light from one of Belgria’s bright streetlamps. She stands at the fence like Moses gazing into the Promised
Land. Her left arm is in a sling. Her right arm is full of tulips.

She hears me coming out of the dark yard when I am a few feet away. We have not seen each other since the shooting.

“Hi,” I say. I am on my side of the fence, but the streetlamp spills enough light into the yard for her to see me.

She looks flushed, embarrassed.

“You’re her daughter, they told me,” she says. “Her real one.”

“Yeah,” I say. “They tell me that, too.”

Lilah nods. “I shoulda known. You look like her around the mouth.” She leans down to set her tulips by the fence.

“I told her about the flowers, Lilah. Tulips are one of her favorites.” I have no idea if that’s true, but the information
seems to please her, and I’m pleased, too. I’m learning how to lie to women. Or girls, anyway. She can’t be more than twenty-three
or-four. Her jawline still has a baby softness to it. “It’s chilly out, and your house is not a good place to be living. You
should come inside.”

Her gaze flicks back to me, her eyes impassive. “I’m not allowed back in.”

“Mirabelle’s not home,” I say. “She’s not coming home. Not anytime soon.”

“I know.” Lilah’s eyes fill up with tears. “She made me soup. No one has ever been nice to me like she was. I blew my chance,
but she was so nice to me that I never thought she wouldn’t give me another.”

I nod. “Yes, you blew it. With her. You haven’t blown it with me.” I can’t read her expression. “You need to leave your husband,
Lilah, and your room is standing empty.” Still, she says nothing. “I can try to be nice. I know how to make soup.” She doesn’t
crack a smile. I walk down the fence a few feet, open the gate. “Okay. Maybe not today. I’ll leave it empty, you understand?
As long as it takes. I’m not Mirabelle, looking for a herd of lost sheep. I’m saying that the room belongs to you. It will
always be ready for you. Clean sheets and empty drawers for your pajamas. Just yours.”

She looks away, a shy gesture, as if she is not sure what the right answer is. I walk away, across the yard. Parker has gone
inside. I am not even back to the porch steps when I hear the gate closing. I turn around, and Lilah is inside it. I grin
at her and wait at the steps. We go inside together.

“I’m real tired,” she says.

“Go on up, then,” I say. “My stuff is in Mirabelle’s old room, if you want to borrow a nightie. Borrow anything you like.
Tomorrow, we’ll start making plans.”

She hesitates, but only for a moment, and then she goes on up the stairs. I wonder if it will bother her to find I’ve moved
all the furniture in her room around.

I stand in what is still my mother’s downstairs. I’ve taken her palm reader’s sign down, but I still need to clear out her
store. I’ll pack away the inventory or maybe have a mystical garage sale. This very week, I will put in a full-size sofa,
paint the kitchen red, and buy a television and a radio to break the over-Zenned silence. Then it will be my apartment, and
that’s as far as I have gotten. There will be time for plans tomorrow, like I said to Lilah, and more time the day after that.

I go upstairs and undress, pulling on a clean T-shirt. It is strange to sleep alone in a queen-size bed after years of marriage.
My mother has a puffy duvet, very snuggly, and I call Gret up
from the foot and let her under. I feel like a little girl, tucked into my mother’s bedding with an illicit dog. Her rule
was always that Leroy could sleep with me, but not under the covers.

Down the hall, Lilah is tucked safe into a child’s bed. For now, anyway. For tonight.

I wonder who we’ll both grow up to be.

CHAPTER 1

T
here are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel’s, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus. I left one back there
myself, back in Possett. I kicked it under the kudzu and left it to the roaches.

I made a deal with God two years before I left there. At the time, I thought He made out pretty well. I offered Him a three-for-one-deal:
All He had to do was perform a miracle. He fulfilled His end of the bargain, so I kept my three promises faithfully, no matter
what the cost. I held our deal as sacred for twelve solid years. But that was before God let Rose Mae Lolley show up on my
doorstep, dragging my ghosts and her own considerable baggage with her.

It was the week before summer vacation began, and my uncle Bruster was getting ready to retire. He’d been schlepping the mail
up and down Route 19 for thirty years and now, finally, he was going to get a gold watch, a shitty pension, and the federal
government’s official permission to die. His retirement party was looming, and my aunt Florence was using it as the catalyst
for her latest campaign to get me home. She launched these crusades three or four times a year, usually prompted by major
holidays or family events.

I had already explained multiple times to Mama that I wasn’t coming. I shouldn’t have had to explain it at all. I had not
gone back
to Possett since I graduated from high school in ’87. I had stayed in Chicago for nine Christmas vacations, had not come home
for nine spring breaks, had faithfully signed up to take or teach classes every summer quarter for ten years. I had avoided
weekend fly-downs for the births, graduation ceremonies, and weddings of various cousins and second cousins. I had even claimed
exemption from attending the funerals of my asshole grampa and his wife, Saint Granny.

At this point, I figured I had firmly established that I would not be coming home, even if all of Chicago was scheduled to
be consumed by the holy flames of a vengeful Old Testament–style Lord. “Thanks for the invite, Mama,” I would say, “but I
have plans to be burned up in a fire that weekend.” Mama, however, could wipe a conversation out of her mind an infinite number
of times and come back to the topic fresh as a daisy the next time we spoke.

Burr had his feet propped up on my battered coffee table and was reading a legal thriller he had picked up at the grocery
store. In between an early movie and a late supper, we had dropped by my place to intercept Florence’s eight o’clock call.
Missing it was not an option. I called Aunt Florence every Sunday after church, and every Wednesday night, Flo parked my mother
by the phone and dialed my number. I wouldn’t put it past Florence to hire a team of redneck ninjas to fly up to Chicago and
take me down if she ever got my answering machine.

Florence had not yet mentioned my uncle’s retirement to me directly, although she had prepped Mama to ask me if I was coming
home for it through six weeks’ worth of calls now. With only ten days left before the party, it was time for Aunt Florence
to personally enter the fray. Mama was so malleable she was practically an invertebrate, but Florence had giant man hands
on the ends of her bony wrists, and she could squeeze me with them till I couldn’t get any breath to say no. Even over the
phone she could do it.

Burr watched me over the top of his book as I paced the room. I was too nervous about my upcoming martyrdom on the stainless-steel
cross of Florence to sit down with him. He was sunk hip
deep into my sofa. My apartment was decorated in garage-sale chic, the default decorating choice for every graduate student.
The sofa had curlicues of moss-colored velvet running all over its sage-green hide, and it was so deflated and aslant that
Burr swore he only ever kissed me the first time because of it. We sat down on it at the same time, and it sucked us down
and pressed us up against each other in its sagging middle. He had to kiss me, he claimed, to be polite.

“About how long do you think this is going to take?” Burr asked now. “I’m starving.”

I shrugged. “Just the usual Wednesday-night conversation with Mama.”

“Okay,” said Burr.

“And then I have to have a fight with Aunt Florence about whether or not I’m going down for Uncle Bruster’s party.”

“In that case,” said Burr, and he levered himself out of the depths of the sofa and walked the five steps to my kitchenette.
He opened the cabinet and started rummaging around for something to tide himself over.

“It’s not going to take that long,” I said.

“Sure, baby,” he said, and took a pack of peanut-butter crackers back over to the sofa. He sat down with his book but didn’t
open it for a moment. “Try to keep it under four hours,” he said. “I need to talk to you about something at dinner.”

I stopped pacing around. “Is it bad?” I asked, nervous because he’d said it in such a serious tone of voice. He could mean
he wanted to break up again or he could mean he was going to propose to me. We’d broken up last year over Christmas and both
hated it so much that we’d found ourselves drifting back together casually, without even really talking about it. We’d been
coasting along easy for a few months now, but Burr would not coast forever. We had to be going somewhere, and if he thought
we weren’t, then that would be it for him.

I said, “You know I hate that. You have to give me a hint.”

Burr grinned at me, and his brown eyes were warm. “Don’t panic.”

“Okay,” I said. I felt something flutter down low in my stomach, excitement or fear, I wasn’t sure which, and then the phone
rang.

“Dammit,” I said. The phone was on a crate full of books at the other end of the ugly sofa. I sat down next to Burr and picked
it up. “Hello?”

“Arlene, honey! You remember Clarice?”

Clarice was my first cousin, and we were raised in the same house, practically as sisters. Mama was possibly the only person
on earth who could have asked this question sans sarcasm to a daughter who had not been home in almost a decade. Aunt Florence
would have gotten a lot of miles out of it, and in fact I couldn’t help but wonder if Aunt Florence hadn’t somehow planted
the question in the fertile minefields of my mother’s mind.

It was not unlike the Christmas card Mama had sent me for the last five years. It had a red phone on it, and it said, in bright
red curling text, “Daughter! Do you remember that man I introduced you to the day you were born? Why don’t you give him a
call? I know he never hears from you, and today’s his birthday.” Open it up and there, in giant candy-striped letters, was
a one-word explanation for the terminally stupid: “Jesus,” it said. Three exclamation points.

Mama got those abominations from the Baptist Women’s League for Plaguing Your Own Children to Death in the Name of the Lord
or whatever her service club was called. My aunt Florence was, of course, the president. And my aunt Florence, of course,
bought Mama’s cards for her, held them out for her to sign, licked the envelopes, got stamps from Uncle Bruster, and mailed
them for her. In Florence’s eyes, I was on the high road to apostasy because my church was American Baptist, not Southern
Baptist.

But all I said was “Obviously I know Clarice, Mama.”

“Well, Clarice wants to know if you can drive over to the home and pick up your great-great-aunt Mag on Friday next. Mag needs
someone to carry her over to the Quincy’s for your uncle Bruster’s party.”

I said, “Are you seriously telling me that Clarice wants to know if I’ll drive fourteen hours down from Chicago, and then
go another hour to Vinegar Park, where by the way Clarice lives, and pick up Aunt Mag, who will no doubt piss in my rental
car, and then backtrack forty-five minutes to Quincy’s?”

“Yes, but please don’t say ‘piss,’ it isn’t nice,” my mother said, deadly earnest. “Also, Clarice and Bud moved on in to Fruiton.
So it’s a good forty minutes for her to go get Mag now.”

“Oh, well then. Why don’t you tell Aunt Florence—I mean Clarice—that I will be sure to go pick up Mag. Right after Aunt Flo
drops by hell and picks up the devil.”

Burr was jammed deep into the sofa with his book open, but his eyes had stopped moving over the text. He was too busy trying
to laugh silently without choking to death on his peanut-butter cracker.

“Arlene, I am not repeating blasphemy,” said my mother mildly. “Florence can ask Fat Agnes to get Mag, and you can drive me.”

Oh, Aunt Florence was crafty. Asking my mother to have this conversation with me was tantamount to taping a hair-trigger pistol
to a kitten’s paw. The kitten, quite naturally, shakes its fluffy leg, and bullets go flying everywhere; a few are bound to
hit something. I was, after all, talking with my mama about whether or not I would pick up Mag, not whether or not I was coming.
A cheap trap worthy of Burr’s legal thriller, and I had bounced right into it.