Can I help, Momma? Need me to make the toast?
Her mother turned and pushed her hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ears. She’d had long, dark hair for as long as Connie could remember. It always seemed to be falling from whatever knot or twist she’d made to hold it.
She was beginning to look old. She had never seemed youthful, never beautiful or fresh, but had seemed solidly middle-aged for all of Connie’s life—her breasts and hips matronly, her waist thick, her face broad and plain and unwrinkled. Now, Connie could see crow’s feet around her eyes and wrinkles in rings around her throat. She was growing thinner, the chest of her dress sagging where it used to burst.
Her mother shook her head. No toast today. Your brothers used up the last of the bread last night when they came in late. You can get out the milk, though.
Connie placed the bottle on the table, the glass sweating.
Connie wanted nothing more than her old life back. This was the first step, doing something normal and small. Her old, miserable life, the one she’d complained about so often. It seemed very small and precious now.
Her mother stood over the steaming pot, cursing under her breath when the bubbles pooped and burned her hands. She didn’t seem to notice Connie in the room, didn’t marvel at her return to the normal world.
So maybe it was over. Her life could resume again. She’d go back to school. People would forget.
The newspaper sat by the milk jug. Connie smoothed it out so she could see the front page. A young man’s face was on the cover. The photo lacked detail. It could have been almost anyone, the picture being mostly shadow. But she knew who it was immediately—the hair as dark as the eyes, the severe line from just below the cheekbone down to the chin.
She touched the picture. Above it, the headline said
Young Man Found Dead
. It took her a moment to reconcile the picture of a man she’d known alive with the headline. It had to be him.
Her stomach dropped and her knees gave. She sat down so heavily on one of the rickety kitchen chairs that her mother turned and scolded her.
Connie, don’t plop down like that. Mind the chairs or you’ll be eating from the floor.
Connie nodded, not hearing. She read the story. It was sketchy and said little about the murder. That’s what it was, murder—he’d been shot in the head and then thrown into the river.
A former inmate of McCallister maximum security prison
, the article said, incarcerated for armed robbery, just six months out. Drifter. Estranged from his family.
Probably some trouble with drugs or alcohol, the sheriff said in the article. He was well-known as a thief and a drunk. Its a shame that such a thing should happen to someone so young, but I can’t say that he’ll be missed, the article reported in the sheriff’s words. Connie had seen the Sheriff in the newspaper, a thin, balding man with a craggy face much like James’ had been. Connie read the quotes, hoping to see some glimpse of the James that she remembered. His mother and father did not send in a comment, nothing to say that he had been a son, once, a baby, perfect in the ways that all babies are perfect. She searched for some hint that others understood that he had been a person. But she could find not a single kind word. Not a single mention of something he had done that might make him less than the black words on the page—former inmate, armed robbery, drifter, estranged.
•
Connie waited for Frannie. She’d called her that morning right after breakfast, waking her from her late sleep after the night shift. Frannie was the only one who knew about James. Frannie grew angry quickly: Connie had once seen her throw a glass jar full of pennies at her mother when Frannie was drunk and her mother had said
Frannie, why don’t we make a pot of coffee for you, get you sobered up?
And Frannie knew people. She loved talking about her connections, the men and women in town who she knew who were important. She knew where to buy the purest everclear, where to go to get a new license plate for a car if you needed to ditch the old one fast, and where to get televisions for cheap.
Connie’s mother had hinted that Frannie had connections beyond electronics and alcohol. She worried that Frannie was going to
get a reputation
.
Frannie arrived smoking a cigarette, her hair up in a
messy bun.
Before she could speak, Connie shook the newspaper at her. Frannie set down her magazines and purse. She nodded.
You saw it, that boy’s death.
Connie nodded.
So what do you think of it? Frannie squinted and began to unpin her hair.
Connie set the newspaper down. Do you know what
happened?
Frannie smiled. The smile made Connie’s stomach turn, and she feared she’d begin to cry if Frannie didn’t say something soon that would soothe her, that would let her know that it was just a coincidence.
Now why would you think I know about something like that? Looks like the boy made somebody angry. She dropped her smile and unwound her hair, which fell in a coil down one shoulder. She began to separate it, breaking up last night’s hairspray.
Looks like he was probably asking for it, she said.
Connie set the newspaper down. Her throat closed up. She looked down intently at the pattern of her blanket, following the zigzags of stripe until she felt she could lift her eyes.
She wouldn’t cry, not in front of Frannie. There wasn’t any point. She’d have to explain everything if she cried—she’d have to say she wasn’t raped, just treated badly, that she didn’t hate James (hadn’t hated him: was everything in past tense now that he was dead?), and that Frannie had gotten somebody killed for nothing.
Family was all she had now. James was gone, and she’d never had him anyway.
Looks like it, she said, when she finally looked up. A few tears slid down her cheeks, but that was all. Frannie came to the edge of her bed and sat down.
Listen, Frannie said, you don’t need to feel bad about this. You didn’t have anything to do with it, okay? You didn’t know nothing, you didn’t do nothing, and you don’t know nothing now, you hear me? There’s nothing to know.
Connie nodded. She swallowed until the tightness in her throat passed.
Frannie put her hand on Connie’s knee. I love you, she said. Nothing’s gonna happen to you again with me looking out for you.
•
For a couple of weeks, things were quiet. Connie went back to school when the bruises faded. People treated her differently, but not as she had expected. They treated her delicately, as though she were very sick and only appeared well. Her teachers allowed her to bring home the work she had missed. She wouldn’t fail this year, but it was close. She came home and did homework each night until bed until she had made up everything she’d missed in the weeks she was out. Before, she wouldn’t have worked hard—being held back didn’t scare her. But now it did. She wanted to get away, and if you failed school, you could never get away. The careful, distant way that people moved around her made her feel lonely. This wasn’t her home anymore.
Billy nodded to her in the hallway, and once he spoke to her after school, explaining why he hadn’t called, why he hadn’t visited.
You know we can’t anymore, he said. He didn’t meet her eye. Whatever we were doing before, that has to end. My mom, she, she just wouldn’t let me, you know?
She knew. He was kind, but whatever they had had before, that undefined thing, was over. She had not expected anything else. Something had happened to her, everyone knew, even if they didn’t know what, and whatever had happened had made her unsuitable for him. She understood that, though she couldn’t have articulated it. It was understood the way that James Blackshaw’s death was understood—something had happened and now the world was being set right, even if it hurt.
She did not doubt that the night she’d spent away from home, and what had happened in that night, meant that she must somehow pay. Now that James was dead (it was her fault, she had no doubt about it, though she didn’t know how it had happened and hadn’t wanted it to happen, it was her fault), she willingly took whatever unhappiness that Heartshorne decided to give her. It seemed only fair.
Suddenly, she was a quiet girl, timid even. The girl who didn’t take bullshit, the girl who pushed first in a fight, that girl was gone. Connie pulled her hair back tight so that her face was open and the skin thin around her hairline. Her skirts were well below the knee. She was always too warm in sweaters and sleeves.
•
The rule is that you don’t speak about it. You don’t brag about it. You don’t threaten anyone with things you should not know and give details of deaths that you should know nothing about. When Frannie told the man at the bar who pushed her against the wall and pressed the his sharp hipbone against her stomach that he would
end up like Blackshaw
at the bottom of the lake, a hole in his head, and when she went back inside the bar, crying, saying that he had tried to
force her
, she was drunk and hardly knew what she was saying.
Motherfucker will end up like Blackshaw,
she told the room as she rubbed the makeup from under her eyes and re-buttoned her blouse.
People heard her. In a different town, her words would have gotten her arrested and questioned until they extracted the answers they needed. In this dive bar, the problem wasn’t what she had done or arranged to be done, but that she had broken the rules about how to handle such information. What if word traveled out beyond Heartshorne?
When Frannie left the bar, she knew she had said too much. She hoped nobody would talk. She hoped it wouldn’t get back to her family.
But it did. Frannie got an anonymous call the day later, saying that the sheriff’s office was going to give her a call soon, that she best prepare her alibi. Connie’s mother got a call asking if she’d heard of Blackshaw, if she could explain her whereabouts on the night of his murder. Her father, at work, heard that Frannie had talked. He heard that some people wanted to get to the bottom of the murder. Even Blackshaw had a few friends, and it only took a few friends to get the police involved, even for a no-good person like Blackshaw, a person who was better off at the bottom of a lake.
Of course, they all had alibis, they were all somewhere else that night. But still, it was too close.
Connie wasn’t given much notice. She never understood quite how word traveled. Her parents called her to the kitchen. Her brothers and sisters had all cleared out. They said that they knew what had happened to her, and that Frannie had run her mouth about the Blackshaw boy, making it unsafe for them to stay in town. They said that the family was moving.
It’s not good to keep you here, her father said, with what with what happened and all. It’s not good for your brothers and sisters. We don’t need the police down here. We don’t need any trouble from Blackshaw’s family or friends or any of those prison people he knew. Her father spoke quietly but firmly. She did not argue. He didn’t look at her. Her mother kept her lips pressed together. She seemed angry, though she continued to treat Connie carefully, as she had before the knowledge of what had really happened, though her lips remained shut.
They didn’t say it, but it was clear that the whole thing was her fault. They had to leave Heartshorne because of her.
As they packed their belongings—everyone except Frannie came along, even her older brothers and sisters—her mother managed to say few words to her, nothing more than
label the box “fragile”
or to shout at her for folding the linens sloppily and not along the seams that had developed over the years from folding and ironing and folding again.
•
They moved to Kansas, a nondescript town and a smaller, more dilapidated house than they’d had in Heartshorne, where good land was cheaper and easier to come by. They felt like strangers in Kansas. They missed the hills. They were not Midwesterners by nature, not friendly, not religious, not interested in their neighbors or the local football team. The flatness made them feel exposed and lonely. They didn’t understand neighbors visiting with food and asking questions about where they had come from, why they lived where they lived, and what the children hoped to do when they grew up. It seemed nosey, sneakily unkind.
Connie’s father died of heart failure after working for ten more years for the telephone company in Coldwater, Kansas. He died almost a year to-the-day after his retirement, for which he received a plaque and a cake, delivered to the house with his name spelled on the front. He had not worked long enough to earn a pension.
In Kansas, Connie began to think of herself as always on the verge of leaving. She wasn’t there, really. She moved through school and jobs and dates with a detachment. She wasn’t unhappy. She didn’t miss the girl she had been before she had met James Blackshaw, that girl who had been lost somewhere between the school and the general store. That girl was gone, so why mourn her? She’d been stupid, anyway, and had been too innocent. Look where innocence had gotten her.