She didn’t want to get even. She didn’t want to get anything, except away. She was surprised, in fact, by how little anger she felt. By rights, she should be furious. An hour ago, she’d received a near-hysterical call from a woman claiming to be her husband’s girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, or ex-
mistress
, she supposed you could say, though Elizabeth always hated the formal and prissy sound of that word, as though an adulteress was a woman of means and elegance, not some trashy, implanted hoochie like the one she pictured on the other end of the telephone line. Seems Carson had told this woman, who identified herself as Holly, that her services were no longer required, so she’d responded by dropping what she supposed was a bombshell on Elizabeth, evidently in hopes of generating sufficient venom as to make her former paramour regret his actions.
“Three months,” Holly had said over the phone, and she exhaled noisily in a way that Elizabeth could tell she was smoking. Hilarious, really, because Carson hated cigarettes. “That’s how long he’s been fucking me.”
Elizabeth had looked out into the yard, where Bell was making two Barbies wade in the birdbath. It was a pretty yard, off a pretty house, on a pretty street in a pretty city. St. Augustine. All so very pretty, though she felt strange here, sometimes, having grown up in Utina, a place where not much was pretty but where a lot of things were pretty good, if you looked at them the right way, which Elizabeth usually did. When she and Carson had married, he couldn’t get out of Utina fast enough, and she acquiesced, thinking nothing could be more important than making him happy. Thus the pretty house in St. Augustine, and Carson’s investment practice, and the growing feeling of disconnectedness she’d been fighting for what felt like a long, long time.
They’d gotten home late last night, after the fireworks at Uncle Henry’s, and Carson had risen before dawn this morning. He’d taken the boat out to fish, or at least that’s what he said he’d be doing, what he said he’d been doing every Sunday, come to think of it, and he’d be gone till dusk.
“You have my condolences,” she’d said to Holly, and then she hung up. She called Bell in and poured her a bowl of cereal. She’d walked into her bedroom, dug in the closet, and found a suitcase, which she placed on the bed. She stared at it for a moment, then put it back in the closet, turned and pulled it out a second time, and then kicked it, thrust it back into the recesses of the closet again.
Oh, Jesus. How stupid is this? She closed the closet door.
She felt no surprise, really, to learn so definitively of Carson’s infidelity. She’d suspected, after all, for years. She did feel, ironically, a small measure of pity for Holly, who was naïve enough to think Carson and Elizabeth had a marriage worth fighting for. Or that there could be such a thing as a marriage worth fighting for.
Now, staring at the lawyer ads in the phone book, she was again struck not by sadness or anger but by a feeling of perplexity —all these attorneys, pitting all these wives against all these husbands, and for what? Money? Revenge? You’d never make someone love you again. So what was the point?
She ran her finger down the list of lawyers. Maybe divorce was all wrong. It seemed like such a bother. Such a lot of paperwork. Maybe all they needed was to shake hands, walk away, live and let live, put the last two decades out of their minds and start over.
C’est la vie
. Such is life.
But there was Bell. And this was the part of the equation Elizabeth found flummoxing.
“What’s a att-or-nay?” Bell said now, staring at the open pages, and Elizabeth was once again startled by how the child could materialize, soundlessly, at her elbow and immediately discern the content of her mother’s thoughts. Elizabeth’s hands had begun to shake, and she took a deep breath and cleared her throat.
“You know what?” she replied, closing the phone book. “I really couldn’t tell you.” The hell with these St. Augustine lawyers. Maybe she would call Mac Weeden in the morning. He might be disbarred, but he was Utina, UHS class of 1986, just like her. She trusted him. He’d know what to do. She pulled Bell against her hip, hugged her shoulders tight.
“Can’t, or won’t?” Bell said. The freckles on her nose were more pronounced than usual; they were overexposed, it seemed, from her time out in the sun. She gazed at Elizabeth with such a knowing expression that Elizabeth was momentarily rattled. How much
did
Bell know, anyway?
“Both.”
Bell opened the refrigerator, too hard, and a plastic bottle of ketchup shook loose from the door and bounced across the kitchen floor.
“Shit,” Bell said.
“Bell! What are you doing, talking like that?”
“Well, the damn ketchup . . . ,” Bell began.
“That will
do
. One person in this house with a potty mouth is quite enough,” Elizabeth said.
“Do you mean Daddy, or you?” Bells said. She tilted her head and looked at Elizabeth with what could only be feigned innocence.
What could you do with a kid like this? Elizabeth stifled a smile, turned away before Bell could see her face. My God, the girl could see right through her. Always could. She remembered when Bell was an infant, barely even able to raise her head, and Elizabeth would sit up with her in the night, nursing her and rocking her in the pale light of the nursery while Carson slept down the hall. She didn’t mind getting up with her. She never minded. And then Bell started doing such a funny thing—and so tiny she was!—she would turn her face toward Elizabeth, her lips still glistening with milk, and would smile a funny, secret smile. Because she knew what Elizabeth was doing. She knew, even then, that Elizabeth was hoarding her, holding her close, savoring the moments they had alone together. Without Carson.
Not that Carson didn’t dote on her, too. From day one: cradling her small head in his hands, cooing in a voice Elizabeth didn’t know he’d had, gazing at his little girl with an expression Elizabeth had never seen before. He adored her, Elizabeth had never doubted that. He might let Elizabeth go. But never Bell. Elizabeth took a deep breath and turned back to her daughter.
“Let’s go do our nails, Beetle.” She led Bell to the bathroom, where they rummaged through old bottles of nail polish, and Elizabeth pulled out her favorite, a deep red labeled:
I’M NOT REALLY A WAITRESS
.
“But no nail files,” Bell said.
“No nail files,” Elizabeth agreed.
“I don’t like nail files. They make little footsteps run up and down my spine.”
“Certain things will do that.”
“Like att-or-neys?”
“Like attorneys is right, sister,” Elizabeth said. “And don’t you forget it.” They walked back to the kitchen and sat at the table, where Bell picked up a piece of paper she’d been writing on earlier in the morning.
“Making a birthday list?” Elizabeth said. “Just a few more weeks, you know.”
“Not a birthday list,” Bells said. “Just a list. Want to hear it?”
“Go, girl.”
“‘Things I Like,’ by Bell Bravo.” Bell was still wearing her pajamas, which consisted of a T-shirt from the Alligator Farm and a pair of loose-fitting cotton pants imprinted with SpongeBob. She spoke with a lisp, her two front teeth having taken their leave earlier in the summer, and Elizabeth loved the way her daughter’s face looked now, the funny little gap in her smile like a charismatic flaw in an otherwise perfect sculpture. “You ready?” Bell said. “Number one: Little Debbie honey buns. Number two: snow.” Elizabeth smiled.
“You’ve never seen snow, Bell.”
“But I like it anyway. I
would
like it. Number three,” she continued, “chocolate milk. Number four: the brown kitty at Uncle Henry’s, but not the white one, who is mean. Number five: Mama.” She put down the paper, businesslike, placed her pen across its surface and spread her tiny hands out on the table’s wooden top.
Elizabeth smiled, painted a tiny drop of red lacquer on Bell’s pinky. “I like you too, Bell,” she said. “A lot.” She finished painting her Bell’s fingernails, then leaned back, examined her work. “Should we do our toes, too?” she said.
“
Hell
yes,” Bell said. My God. She was her father’s daughter.
The next morning, after Carson left for work, Elizabeth took Bell and drove up to Utina. She’d said nothing to him about Holly’s call. She pulled off Seminary Street, drove down a narrow alley, and parked at the back entrance of Tony’s Hair Affair. She and Bell walked into the salon, where Tony Cerro was leaning on the front counter, talking on the phone. He waved at Elizabeth and held up an index finger.
Tony. Elizabeth felt a wash of comfort just walking into the salon. She’d known Tony since she was a teenager, when he’d been one of a string of paramours her mother, Wanda, had paraded through their trailer in South Utina. Elizabeth had never known her father, and in truth she doubted her mother knew who he was. Most of the men Wanda brought home Elizabeth hated—opportunistic drunks who turned ugly and angry when the romance fizzled or the booze ran out, and Elizabeth had spent more than one night running from the chaos of her mother’s dirty little trailer, hiding in the backseat of Wanda’s car for hours until the sun came up or the bastards passed out, whichever came first.
But Tony was different. The first time she met him, when he’d come walking out of Wanda’s bedroom early one morning, Elizabeth was fourteen. When he saw her there in the kitchen his face had clouded over. He sat down at the table.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” he’d said. “This ain’t right, is it?”
She stared at him, and he’d apologized again, and then he got up, rummaged in the refrigerator, and scrambled an egg, which he put in front of her with a piece of toast and a Coke.
“You really should have some OJ,” he said. “But I see Wanda’s not so hot in the grocery shopping department.”
He’d never come back to see her mother after that, but he offered Elizabeth a job in the salon, and she took it. When he came out a few years later and told her he was gay, she wasn’t surprised, though she did look at him quizzically, thinking of that one strange night he’d come home with Wanda. He read her mind. “Oh, that,” he said. “I thought your mama would cure me,” he said. “Was I wrong! Honey!” And she had to laugh, though now the memory of her mother, so broken and aloof, was one she kept neatly stored in a locked box in her mind and rarely took out. The last she heard, Wanda was living with an ex-con in Satsuma, but Elizabeth hadn’t seen her in years. She didn’t plan to.
Elizabeth had worked at the salon all during high school, until she married Carson, in fact. She missed it, missed the way Tony would gossip with her and nag her about her homework, would take her down to Sterling’s for lunch and pick up the tab every single time, pretend he was putting it on some sort of corporate salon account, when she knew damn well it came from his own modest income. He looked out for her, all those years, when Wanda wouldn’t. Or couldn’t.
“I know, sweetie,” he said now, speaking into the phone. Elizabeth waved back at him. “I know,” he said.
Tony parked the phone receiver between his shoulder and chin. With his right hand, he chattered his thumb against his fingers, rolled his eyes at Elizabeth, pointed at the phone.
“I know, baby,” he said.
Elizabeth settled Bell into a chair near Tony’s station with a coloring book and an iPod. Then she wandered through the salon, reading the labels on the bottles of hair products on the shelves.
BRILLIANTE BOY POMADE. BODY LUXE THICKENING ELIXIR
. It seemed there was a product for everything.
CURL FORMING POLISH. HAIR DESIGN FOAM. DAILY LEAVE-IN DETANGLER
. That’s what she needed. A detangler.
“I hear you, baby,” Tony said into the phone. He made a circling motion with his hand. “Because he’s an asshole, that’s why.”
Last night, Elizabeth had put Bell to bed, left Carson staring at his laptop in the kitchen, and pulled an atlas off the shelf in the living room. She’d let the book fall open to a random page, then closed her eyes, pointed her finger, and let her hand drop onto the map. She opened her eyes. Flemington, Missouri. She imagined it: dry and open and flat, a white church on a corner, a row of red brick buildings, a small wooden house with a blue kitchen and a glass of daisies on the table. Everything smelled like cinnamon. Why not? But good God in heaven, did people even
live
in Flemington, Missouri? It was so hard, sometimes, to see outside of North Florida. It was like living in a sinkhole, descending, the surface of the Earth growing farther out of reach with each passing year.
“All right. Listen,” Tony said to the person on the phone. “Lemme go. I got a client.” He hung up, sighed. “I tell you, honey,” he said to Elizabeth. “Some people. Yaketty, yaketty, yak.”
Tony settled Elizabeth into the chair at his station, stood behind her, and looked at her hard in the mirror. His face had grown looser over the years, but his beard was neatly trimmed and his eyes were bright. A gold necklace shimmered under his open collar. He fluffed her long hair in his hands, cocked his head to one side.
“Talk to me,” he said.
And then she didn’t know how it was happening, but she was crying. Tony spun the chair around and hugged her, and she loved him for his clean white shirt, the clucking noises he made into the top of her head.