Going Away Shoes (4 page)

Now Rose turned, hands clasped tightly to squelch her desire to grab and twist that dimpled sunburned arm. “Stop that,” she said through gritted teeth, surprised herself by the harshness of the sound. “Stop.”

“My mama said I can draw.” The child stared back without blinking, stuck out her tongue but then licked her lips like that was all she meant to do.

“So fine. Draw. But don’t draw me.” Before Rose could even
turn away, the child had reached for a new piece of paper and begun again. She always gave Rose an enormous nose and mouth and then itty-bitty eyes, and that was what she was working on first —little red eyes, like a pig’s, in a massive moon face. How would Hank handle this when it was his turn to tend to her? He agreed before Rose could even open her mouth that the child could stay with them anytime at all, making it sound like they could run a twenty-four-hour daycare center, and now where was he but off running errands, getting fence supplies, dog food, something good for supper “to go with the surprise I’ve got your grandma baking just for you,” he had told the child, leaving her to clap her hands and dance around before settling back into her demon-driven drawing. Hank was good for his word. He would come home having done a lot, but he would have also taken his time, riding along in the sunshine with some country music station playing. That left arm of his stayed mighty tan, proof of all those hours he hit the back roads. He called it his “meditation time,” and there was a part of her that envied his ability to so easily calm and collect himself even through the worst and most frightening times. Still, he wasn’t there for the art gallery of nudity, and she was.

“Some people call these nursers,” the child said and pointed to the purple circled breasts she had drawn. Rose’s hair looked like a rat’s nest in this particular drawing and the child had put two dark little horns there on the top of her head. “Some people say
titties, bosoms, boobies.”

“Well, I say stop!” Rose put down the book she had tried unsuccessfully to read all day long, a book about learning patience and forgiveness, but so far she hadn’t been able to concentrate on a goddamn bit of it. “What kind of girl are you, anyway?”

“I’m not a girl.”

Sweet Jesus. Last week the child had pretended to be a pony and whinnied and trotted and carried on all day long, snorting and stomping, eating only carrots and licking sugar right off the dining room table where she had poured herself a little pile from the sugar bowl. She would not listen to Rose unless Rose called her My Little Pony, and then she’d stop as if perking her ears, cocking her head first one way and then the other.

When Drew was little he had pretended to be Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Bullet. His child bride probably didn’t know any of those things about him and how could she? She was half his age and half his intelligence. All those years Rose and Hank had watched him go through girlfriend after girlfriend, many of them perfectly lovely and fine, wondering when he’d ever settle down, and then this was it. Forget birth control and have yourself a wedding. He met her line dancing for God’s sake and the boy had never liked to dance in his whole life. And then here she was, this girl whose big ambition in life was to get to be social coordinator for the clerical staff down at Toyota, where she worked as a receptionist.
A girl who liked to give cute little titles and names to everything as if her experience walking the earth was so unique and almighty important it had to be documented. She referred to where she sat there by the automatic door of the Toyota showroom as “my Toyota throne,” as if she ruled over the whole dealership kingdom. She called her car “Backfire Betty” and she called Drew “my maverick man,” in a way that dripped with sexual residue, right there in Rose’s living room. It was like the girl was mentally stuck in adolescence probably drawing little hearts over her
i
’s and naming various body parts.

Drew used to follow Rose from room to room, pant and bark, lick her hand. He liked to circle and circle like their old sheltie did before flopping down and pretending to sleep. Sometimes she lifted and carried him to bed that way, plopping him down like a lump of dead weight on the bedspread. He’d let her get all the way to the door and then set in whimpering like the last mongrel left at the pound, knowing that she would never leave him that way, that she would return to tell a story or to bring him some milk, stroke his head and ears as if he really were a dog until his make-believe growls and snores lapsed into the breath of a sleeping boy.

But this child was nothing like Drew.

“She needs to be seeing a doctor,” Rose said just yesterday when the child’s mama showed up an hour later than she’d said, her skirt too short for anybody other than a Barbie doll or Hooters waitress or whore. “She needs to be talking and getting some
help.”

“Why do you think so?” The girl’s eyes widened in a way that accentuated the dark circles below even though she had caked on plenty of makeup in an attempt to hide them.

“Her daddy died? She thinks she’s a horse?” Rose drew a deep breath. She had worked as an administrative assistant out at County Mental Health for years and had picked up a lot of information along the way. “She draws people naked. No respect.”

“She’s a kid. And yeah, it’s a real hard time.” She had Drew’s wedding ring strung around her neck on what looked like a piece of rawhide, her fingers clutching and rubbing it the whole time she talked. “If you didn’t get so upset with her, she might quit.”

“Let her draw you then.”

“I do. She likes drawing my scar from where she was born.” She rubbed her hand over her abdomen and Rose was afraid for a minute that she was going to show it. “She loved Drew’s scar that went up his shin. She liked to call it “Daddy’s little street.’ ”

Rose couldn’t bear to think of Drew’s scar, especially as “Daddy’s little street”; just the mention of that scar made her shudder. She had been with him when it happened, there at the community center, where he was playing with a bunch of kids, running around the big L-shaped pool even though they’d been asked not to over and over by the lifeguards. “Horseplay,” they called it. No running and no horseplay. She was standing in the three-foot area with some other women, their bodies oiled in Hawaiian
Tropic, heads tied in bandanas. One of the women was telling about the affair she had had, how she never in a million years would have believed that she would do such a thing and yet there she was doing it, all the while thinking that life was just too short not to do it, all the while feeling like she was being pulled by an unseen force, something completely beyond her will and control. The woman confessed, too, that it was a lot easier knowing her husband had already cheated on her at least once. Rose had sometimes wondered if Hank was happy with her. Was it enough that they sank there side by side, hip bones brushing, at the end of a long day? Was it enough that they made an annual pilgrimage to some godforsaken Civil War battlefield instead of one of those romantic-sounding trips all these other people seemed to crave? Luaus on islands she would hesitate even to pronounce, bed-and-breakfasts where you paid a lot of money to share a bathroom and eat breakfast with strangers. It made her anxious that her friend had had an affair, not to mention sleeping there in a bed-and-breakfast in Asheville, and it was in the midst of all these facts and details and wonderings that she felt a surge of panic. She felt it rise through her body, adrenaline pumping, and it was beforehand —a premonition, that split second between lightning flash and the deafening sound of thunder —so that she looked up and was already moving slow motion through the water to the ladder when Drew went down stomach first with another boy, sliding over the concrete, his forward motion
slowed and then stopped by a rusted metal wire at the base of the chain-link fence. Her vision blurred from sun, chlorine, a flood of fear as she watched a young frightened teenager leap from the lifeguard stand and try to remove the wire. She had never seen so much blood, the bone-white line up his leg that dotted and then filled suddenly, spreading around him in a pool on the wet concrete. She didn’t even remember riding to the hospital, a different lifeguard driving, Drew’s head in her lap in the backseat, leg elevated and pulsing through the large beach towel already soaked. Over a hundred stitches and hours later, they waited for Hank to arrive and drive them home. It was a beautiful day, clear sky and low humidity. Drew was telling the whole story like a battlefield account to anyone who might want to listen, what he felt, what he remembered, how many stitches, how much blood, how his mother threw up three times while he was being stitched. She focused on the sun setting over the pines and she listened to the whir of the inground sprinklers of the hospital lawn, how they arced a fine misted spray in near silence and then returned with a harsh low grinding sound only to then release and once again go easy. Soft and then harsh and then again and again.

“Do you have
a door like my mama?” Now the child pressed on Rose’s stomach and then with no warning lifted her shirt and pressed that damp sticky hand against Rose’s flesh. “I needed the front door to get out. Right here near your winkie.”

“That’s a navel.”

“It’s a winkie.”

“There’s no such thing as a winkie.”

“Yeah there is, too.” She pulled up her own shirt and stuck her finger in her navel. “This is my winkie and that,” she reached one finger and poked at Rose, “is your winkie.” The child put her hands on her hips and twisted back and forth, made little
nananananana
sounds. “And
you
don’t even have a front door.”

“No I don’t.”

“My daddy said I was important.” The child spit the word at Rose, a black permanent marker clutched in her hand. “I got my
own
door just for
me
.”

“Well, good for you.”

“So how did my daddy get out then?”

“Lord.” Rose pulled away and walked over to the window hoping to see Hank’s truck in the drive. “Who’s minding the shop?” he used to ask in those early years when something went wrong —a pot of rice burned and stuck, a bill forgotten, a bag of trash left where a dog could get in it. But he hadn’t used the phrase since that day Drew got hurt when she used it to berate herself again and again. And now it seemed he was overprotective about all their belongings to a degree that preoccupied his every moment. He couldn’t bear to lose anything, not an old mangy barn cat, or a plant to the cold, not a dime on the floor. Nothing made him angrier than to lose his train of thought.

“My daddy probably come out the back door,” the child said.

“
Came
out the back door,” Rose corrected, horrified that she was even participating in this discussion.

“Women have three different doors, you know.” The child waited, testing her. The marker was now uncapped, strong fumes that probably weren’t good for a child to breathe all day long.

“Why don’t you go see what’s on television?” Rose asked, desperate to escape. Hank had promised the child monkey bread and he would be disappointed if Rose didn’t fix it. “I’ll get you a snack.”

“I drew a picture of your door,” she said and rifled through that stack of messy papers. “Grown-ups have hair, you know.” She pulled out a page and Rose stared back in shock. A tangle of purple atop two orange stick legs, legs too thin to ever support the enormous mouth and breasts that filled most of the page. “I drew your fanny, too.”

Rose turned back to the window, wondering what Hank would do with this. She thought of the way he cradled and carried Drew in from the car that day after the accident. He placed him on the sofa in the den and they brought him milk shakes and cookies and comic books. He wanted Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner and she drove across town herself and waited in line, noticing only then in a warped chrome reflection that her sneakers were all bloodstained and that mascara streaks smeared her cheeks like war paint. She tried to change the bandage the first time
and got so lightheaded she had to call Hank to help her. The long scar stayed white, so noticeable in the summer against his olive skin and the dark hairs of his legs. Drew loved to roll up his pants and show it, to tell the story, Rose wincing every time.

“Do you have a boo-boo place?” the child asked, and Rose shook her head, thinking,
Not really, not one that you can see
. “Does he?” she pointed to a photograph of Hank on the shelf. He was young then, bare chested and leaning up against that old blue Ford he had when she first met him —smooth, flat stomach —no trace of the emergency appendectomy he had the summer before they got married. She liked to trace her finger over the slick shiny skin, stretched tight and hardened. It reminded her of the silver trail of a slug, like the one the child had delighted in a week ago when a neighbor kid from across the street, a ten-year-old who dressed like she might be seventeen, tried to talk the child into pouring salt on the creature so they could watch it shrivel up. The child was intrigued right up to the moment the salt shaker was raised, and then she fell all to pieces, throwing her body over the slug like a shield and screaming, “He’s mine, he’s mine.”

The child’s mother did something very similar at the funeral. She crumpled there in front of half the town and squatted by the grave, the box of ashes in her arms. Rose had to look away then. Some part deep within said she should move forward, to touch and comfort. The girl had no family to speak of —an old father in a veteran’s home somewhere and a sister who left early during
the graveside service to catch her flight to Texas. Drew had told them that he wanted her to feel like she had a real family. He called her his “little orphan girl,” “my waifish wife, my little discard.” Hank had moved close and knelt there beside her, his arm around her shoulders, but Rose was frozen. Instead she looked out at the pines, at the bright cloudless sky; she focused on the sound of cars on the interstate, the rise and fall, near and then far, as rhythmic as the ocean. Now there was a jet stream across the sky, the child there beside her as she stared out the kitchen window, waiting for Hank.