Break the Skin (21 page)

It was close to Halloween, and we were on the porch at Rose’s house, carving jack-o’-lanterns. We sat on the porch floor, the pumpkins on newspapers between us, knives at the ready. It was one of those Indian summer days, the kind we get in Illinois in late October when the first cold snap has come and gone and the days have warmed and for a while you can almost believe that winter won’t ever set in for good. The sun was out, and there was just a little breeze stirring the tree branches. All those yellow and orange and red leaves, some of them letting go and drifting to the ground. The sun was warm on my face. A set of wind chimes over at Mr. Hambrick’s was making a merry little song, and if not for the fact that Rose had just made me feel like a fool for worrying over Delilah, that moment would have been just fine.

“Don’t you ever feel sorry for her?” I pressed the tip of my knife into the pumpkin rind. “She’s all alone.”

Rose gave a little laugh. “Nah, sweetie. She’s got Bobby May.”

It was clear Rose knew she was being a smart-ass, and even though I understood that she’d sharpened her tongue on all the bitter seeds she’d chewed with Delilah over Tweet, I couldn’t bring myself to forgive it. The truth was Rose could have had a happier life if she’d only been able to spit out that bitterness. I suppose I could have, too, if I hadn’t let myself get caught up in this feud between her and Delilah. I could have given myself more fully to the love I was feeling for Lester. Rose, even though she was scared about how she and Tweet were going to care for their baby, could have better enjoyed their days together. I won’t speak for Delilah. I think in the end she was all eaten up with jealousy, but frightened, too—scared of a lonely life—and even now, though I sometimes feel sorry for her, I can’t imagine any way things could have been different. She was dead set on making someone pay for everything she’d lost—her father, her mother, and now Tweet. I wish I’d seen that then, but I didn’t. I only thought that maybe, just maybe, something would happen that would bring us all back together—Delilah and Rose and me—and barring that, at least maybe we could each forget the hurt that
the whole business with Tweet had caused, and then we’d go on with our lives. We’d make them happy lives, the ones we’d always longed to have. I truly think it could have been so simple for Rose and me if only we’d been able to forget about Delilah. I couldn’t, though, and I knew Rose couldn’t, either.

“You can be evil,” I told her.

“Aw, Laney. Don’t be like that.”

Tweet came out onto the porch carrying his guitar case. He was getting ready to leave for a string of gigs in Kentucky.

Rose said to him, “I’m going to miss you, baby.”

He went down the steps. He was wearing flip-flops, and the tendons stood up on the tops of his feet as he slapped them over the cement.

“I’ll miss you, too,” he said, but his voice was all flat. He went on out to his van, and with no word or wave of good-bye, he started the engine and drove away.

The problem was, as it always was with Rose and Tweet, money. After he was gone, she told me how he played his gigs, throwing in an old-timers’ class reunion now and then, a supper club over in Vincennes, a wedding reception here and there, and he made what little he could from jockeying cars.

Rose was still sitting with old folks from time to time, so their kin could take off for a while and run to town or have a night out or just take a breath after all that caretaking. The work wasn’t regular, and she didn’t bring in much, but with what Tweet was making it was enough to keep them square. But a baby—that was a whole different ball game. With a baby, Rose explained, he’d probably have to get a real job, maybe hire on at the poultry house in Mt. Gilead or the Kex Tire Repairs factory. Put in his time, seven to three-thirty, gutting chickens or making tire patches and plugs. Same old same old, day after day, just to put the bread on the table, and what would happen to his music then?

“He’s going to have to be a man about it,” Rose said. “We’re not kids.
It’s time we thought about the future. Don’t tell him I told you all this. He’d pitch a fit if he knew.”

I couldn’t help but think about Delilah then and what happened when she tried to play house with Bobby May before.

“Looks like you’ve got everything right where you want it,” I said to Rose. “Got the man you wanted and a baby on the way to make sure he stays.”

It was an accusing thing to say, and the words surprised me. I would have taken them back and stuffed them into my mouth if I could have.

Her face turned hard. “Tweet’s no dummy. He knew a good thing when he saw it.” She laid her knife down on the newspaper. “Honestly, Laney,” she said, like I was a little girl who didn’t have a brain in my head. I could tell she thought I wasn’t made for anything hard, that I’d always be Laney, as flimsy as my name.

“Delilah’s hurting,” I said, “and who knows what kind of stupid thing she’ll do with Bobby May? It might not matter to you, but it does to me.”

I shoved my knife into the top of my pumpkin and let it stick there. Then I got up and walked away from Rose.

“Laney, come back,” she called after me, but I kept walking.

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG
for things to go to hell between Delilah and Bobby. One night in the break room at work, I caught her peering into the mirror, touching a finger gingerly to a bruise on her cheekbone before covering it over with foundation.

“He did that, didn’t he?”

“It’s none of your concern, Laney.”

“Delilah, I—”

She cut me off. “Forget it.” She gave me such a hateful look, I almost turned around and went back out onto the floor.

Then I said, “I’ve still got some things at your trailer. I thought I’d come by for them.”

“Sure,” she said with a smirk. “Come by. We’ll shoot the breeze. It’ll be like old times.”

I could see I wasn’t welcome, but the next day I drove over there in Mother’s Corolla. I had Lester come with his truck on account of I had a cedar chest at Delilah’s trailer I needed him to carry to New Hope. I made it to the trailer park first, but Lester was pulling in behind me as I got out of the car.

The door to the trailer was standing wide open, and I thought that was odd, given that it was now November, and the day was cold and gray with little specks of rain in the air. It was the kind of day when the clouds and the damp seemed to trap in the stink from the poultry factory. The kind of day no one would have a door open unless they were in the midst of some sort of trouble that’d taken them by surprise.

Bobby May came out of the trailer, toting a cardboard box. He didn’t have on a shirt, but he didn’t seem to care. He came out into the cold, that box hugged to his bare chest. He carried it to the big common Dumpster across the parking space in front of Delilah’s trailer, hefted it up, and tossed it inside.

Delilah wasn’t far behind him. She had Mama’s Little Helper with her, that .38 Special. She came up behind Bobby and pressed that pistol to the base of his skull. She told him to get his sorry ass out of there. “Just get in your car and go,” she said.

He put his hands up above his head. “I don’t even have on a shirt. Jesus, Dee.”

“Now,” she said. Her hair was all undone and wild about her face. Her blue polo shirt from work was torn across her breast and I could see the white of her bra. She didn’t care. She had business to take care of. “Move,” she said, and she put more pressure on that .38 until Bobby started walking across the lot to his Camaro.

“You’re some bitch,” he said. “You know that?”

I was moving before I’d even thought about what I’d do. I jerked open the door to that Camaro and I said, “Get out of here before I call the cops, you asshole.”

He stopped walking. He looked at me, and I remembered that look from the first time he and Delilah were together. That tight-jawed look he always had just before he exploded. He let his arms drop to his side. Then he lifted the right one and pointed a finger at me. “Don’t talk big, Laney, unless you can back it up. Little, know-nothing girl like you.”

Delilah took the .38 away from his head, and for just an instant I was afraid she might shoot him. I looked at Lester, who had started to move toward Bobby, and when I looked back to Delilah, I saw her with her arm raised. She was holding the .38 by its barrel, and she brought her arm down with a grunt. She clubbed Bobby on the back of his head with the butt end, and he went down to his knees.

“Oh, Lord,” said Lester. “You’ve killed him.”

“Nah,” said Delilah. “Takes more than that to kill a snake.”

Indeed, Bobby was just stunned. He got to his feet, his hand touching the place on the back of his head where Delilah had hit him, and he stumbled to the Camaro and got inside. I slammed the door shut. He shook his head, trying to get back what little sense he had. Then he started up the car and drove away.

Delilah was crying. She was screaming after him. “You bastard. Don’t come back, you miserable bastard.”

“What in the world?” I said.

“Oh, Laney.” She bent at the waist, and I thought she’d go down. I put my arms around her and pulled her up. “He’s thrown it all away.” The “it” turned out to be mementos from her childhood: schoolbooks, storybooks, snapshots—most of them of her taken at birthday parties, Christmas, school. Things like that. She’d saved them as she’d moved from foster home to foster home, and there were even things that her mother had left for her before she’d put her Impala on those railroad tracks. “Everything that was me when I was a kid,” she said. “My baby
book, locks of hair from my first cut, things I’ll never be able to replace. He pitched it in the Dumpster. That was the last box.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll get it all back.”

She couldn’t stop crying. “It’s down in there on the bottom. It’s too far to reach.”

“It’s no problem for me, Sis. It’ll be easy-breezy.”

All it took was for Lester to give me a boost. He took me by the waist and lifted me up until I could sit on the rim of that Dumpster. Then I jumped in, and from there it didn’t take much to retrieve the boxes, to gather up the few things that had fallen out, and to lift them up to Lester. I did all that for Delilah because she needed me to do it, because somehow circumstances had brought me there at just the right time.

We carried the boxes back into the trailer and shut that door so the cold would stay out, and I never said a word about how stupid it’d been for Delilah to take back up with Bobby May.

“Laney,” she said, smiling at me through her tears, and I told her everything was fine now. She didn’t need to say another word.

I shouldn’t have been so forgiving. I let her back into my life, and though I didn’t know it then, I started down my final road toward trouble—a trouble so big I’d never be able to make it right.

IT WAS JUST
about Christmas when the headaches started. Horrible, raging headaches that left me dizzy and sick to my stomach.

Migraines, the doctor told me.

“Why, I’ve never had a migraine headache in my life,” I said.

The doctor ran tests. Everything came back clean. Migraines, he told me again and gave me a list of foods to avoid and relaxation exercises I should do to keep my stress level at a minimum. If I got worse, he could prescribe a medicine, but first things first. Why take the medicine if I could manage the migraines myself?

“Well, it seems odd to me,” Delilah said. We were at the Town Talk restaurant one morning after our shift, having breakfast, and I was telling her about the headaches. It was Saturday, so Mother wouldn’t need the Corolla to go to work, and I could enjoy this time with Delilah. “Why in the world would you start having them now? All of a sudden when you’ve never had them before?”

“The doctors don’t know.”

“Doctors,” Delilah said with a smirk. “They don’t know shit.”

It was cozy in the Town Talk. Outside, the streetlights were still on, and snow was coming down, whitening the pine flocking and the glittery stars and candles and bells on the poles. Snow was piling up on the sidewalk, sticking to the pickup trucks parked at the meters. Men came into the restaurant shaking snow off their feed caps before hanging them on the peg hooks by the door. The griddle sizzled with eggs and pancakes and sausage and bacon. The coffeepots steamed, and the men called out to one another. “Cold enough for you?” “Hell, yes. Colder than a well-digger’s ass.” They brought in the smell of the cold and the snow on their insulated coveralls. They sat on the swivel stools at the counter and wrapped their big hands around coffee mugs. Delilah and I sat in a booth along the wall. The high back of the red vinyl rolled up above my head. I closed my eyes, worn out after my shift.

“I’m beat,” I said. “I’m a drum just beat to death.”

Still I liked being there in the Town Talk, in the midst of all the chatter. Being there with Delilah, who was buying my breakfast. Just being with people on a snowy morning.

She said, “Rose used to have those dolls, remember? Those poppet dolls?”

I gripped the edge of the Formica-top table with both hands. The metal edge dug into my thumbs. “She still makes them from time to time.”

“Remember what she did with that one she made of Mr. Mank?”

She’d tossed it into the creek, sent him out of her life, but not quite in the way she expected.

I nodded.

“Makes me wonder if she’s made one of you.” Delilah leaned toward me and tapped her finger on the tabletop. “Bet she doesn’t like it that you’ve taken back up with me.”

It was true that Rose, once she knew that Delilah and I were starting to pal around again, said,
That doesn’t make any sense, Laney. Not after how she treated you. That’s like a beat dog going back for more. Aren’t you any smarter than that?
It was enough to keep me uncomfortable around Rose. I stopped going down to see her as much, and then I finally stopped going at all.

The men at the counter burst out in guffaws over a joke one of them had told, and I felt their booming laughter in my head. I massaged my temples, the way the doctor had taught me. I closed my eyes and started counting to a hundred.

“Do you get my drift?” Delilah asked me, but I didn’t want to think about Rose and what Delilah was suggesting, that she’d deliberately try to hurt me. “All I’m saying, Laney, is you better be careful. Lord knows what she’ll do to you next.”