The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel (11 page)

“Maybe,” I said.

“What you doing nowadays?”

I didn’t want to say
nothing
. “I’ve got a few irons in the fire.”

“Atta boy. That mean you’re picking up the check, or what?”

“Yeah,” I said without thinking. I wasn’t in a check-picking-up state when it came to finances, but I didn’t want to tip my hand to Mack.

“Good. I should come through your way early next week. That cool? I’ll just holler?”

My thought was, Come through on your way to where? Mack sounded adrift. That made two of us.

“Just holler,” I said. “No interesting shit going on in my world.”

He screamed, “Mustang, motherfucker!” and hung up the phone.

*   *   *

I was back at Wal-Mart, my quick in-and-out shopping trip. I always tried to go on Wednesdays, when the store was practically empty. Mowing season was over, so I was in ration mode. After quickly filling the basket with the bare essentials, I scanned the checkout lanes for a quick and quiet exit.

I assumed that most men didn’t like to check out with attractive clerks, where every item is a spilled secret—the toiletries alone advertising,
Here’s what I wash myself with, here’s what I think of my hair, here’s the lotion I use to prevent chafing. Here’s the magazines I read, the subjects I like. Here’s the food that I eat. Here’s the movies I think so much of I want to buy them and watch them collect dust on top of my television for the next decade.
Mine would have been,
Here’s white box after white box after white box of store-brand necessities, here’s ramen noodles, so yes, I’m broke.

Clerks are taught never to make conversation about a customer’s items. You don’t watch a guy check out with a pack of condoms, a jar of strawberry jam, and a case of Red Bull and say, “Looks like you’re in for a fun weekend.” Nope, just “How are you, bleep, bleep, bleep, here’s your total, off you go.”

In the midst of this clerk evaluation, I saw my target, a tall, thick man who wore glasses and the kind of mustache reserved for porn stars or sexual felons. I decided to go to him, a clerk I recognized from my many Wal-Mart trips. He made eye contact with me, giving me a slight smile that was priming the pump for his official, rehearsed “How are you this morning?”

I smiled, but to avoid eye contact, I shot a perfunctory glance into the checkout lane parallel to his, and saw brown hair, the same shade as Regina’s. The same nose. The same cheeks. I could see the unmistakable blue eyes, but before I could even let my mind say, Oh my God it’s Regina Carpenter, my mind pumped the brakes and reminded me it had to be Raeanna.

I hadn’t seen her in almost four years, not since the day before the shooting, passing her in the hallway at school. She had clutched her books that morning, almost afraid to look at me, a girl almost as shy as I was. But those four years were such eventless, empty years for me, the shooting could have happened yesterday. I looked like a dummy, staring at checkout lanes. Finally, mercifully, she looked up and said, “Dale?” I eased up to the checkout counter, a nebula of nerves firing all at once. The name tag read
RAEANNA
. No miracles here, just a smiley face rolling back prices.

“I haven’t seen you in such a long time,” I said, stacking items on her little conveyor belt. “You look amazing.”

I was being slightly generous. She held most of her high school beauty, but her right eye was fucked up, the vessels thick with blood, the flesh surrounding it black and yellow, a kaleidoscope of bruising. That legendary blue iris lurked in the center. It made me think of Regina’s eye hanging against her cheek after her head got blown off. Here it was, alive again, these living eyes serving as a before and after picture. Rae’s skin looked tired and loose against the bones of her face.

Her lip had a scar I didn’t remember. Her hair was messy, not intentionally, but forced by circumstances or time, a huge departure from her high school days when her hair was sculpted, shining, gorgeous like the rest of her.

“That’s sweet of you to say,” she said, her eyes down, fixated on her scanning chores. The messy hair was made to fall into her face, and she would brush it aside, into her bad eye, a dark curtain she kept drawn over the injury.

“So how have things been? What have you been up to?” she said. Small talk—conversation kindling never meant to ignite, rather, meant to just smolder because if we had a real conversation, it would be about the heavy ghost of Regina, and how each of us has tried and failed miserably to move on from her memory.

“Nothing special,” I said.

“What are you doing around here?”

“Nothing special,” I said again, staring at her injured eye. A man was behind this. Women don’t get into bar fights. And no one falls down on their eye. The eye is in a concave area of the skull, designed by evolution for protection against accidents. If someone has a black eye, you can be pretty sure it was intentionally provided by someone else’s fist, or maybe a stray elbow in a pickup basketball game. She didn’t look like she had taken up the sport after her years of cheerleading.

She gave me my total. I paid in cash. She handed me the change and our fingers grazed, the feeling of another’s flesh that she got every time she handed out change, which she then scrubs away with the hand sanitizer prominently displayed on her cash register.

Yet it was a different feeling for me because these were
her
fingers, and the blood inside them was the same blood I saw upon dark pavement. She caught me looking at her black eye and she looked away, the punctuation at the end of our brief interaction. I could have left then, but she touched her face in a nervous fashion and I caught a glimpse of her wedding ring. The diamond was tiny, which in a strange way made me feel good.

“How long have you worked here?” I asked. I already knew it couldn’t have been long.

“Not long,” she said. “My husband took a new job. What do you do?”

“Good question,” I said, and tried to laugh off the fact I had no answer. No customers needed checking out, but she looked nervous.

“Will you get in trouble if we talk?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said, brushing her hair away again. “I’m new at this. I’d rather not get chatty on the job, at least not yet. Sorry.”

I scooped up my bags and headed for the door. “Great to see you,” I said.

“I get my dinner break soon,” she said. “If you don’t mind waiting. Or maybe we can just—”

“No, it’s fine, I’ll wait,” I said.

I went to the snack-bar area and sat in an uncomfortable, swiveling chair bolted to the same trunk that held up the table. I bought a soda with pocket change and refilled it three times with something different at the fountain. No one else showed up at the snack bar. A single Wal-Mart employee hung out behind the counter—a young guy who changed out expired hot dogs and occasionally wiped down a glass surface.

After twenty minutes of steady checkout activity, Rae turned off her register light and left her post. She walked past the snack area and gave me a little half wave. “I just have to get my food,” she said. “Be right back.” She brushed her hair away from her eye again. I got a refill and when I turned around, she was sitting at my table, carefully removing a sandwich from a Ziploc bag.

The sandwich was amazing for its neatness. Neither meat nor cheese hung over the border of the crust of the white bread. The entire works was carefully spliced into two, perfectly equal triangles. She picked up a half and took a bite and you could see the entire contents of the sandwich, like a split pig in a biology class—two slices of cheap bologna, a slice of cheese that came from a standalone cellophane wrapper, and a light slathering of mayo.

“Where did you go, Dale?” she asked. “I thought you might have left school after it all happened. We heard you got hurt bad, but you never know what to believe. Someone said you lost your hand, which I can see was the rumor mill doing what it does. Then I saw you listed with your graduating class.”

“Senior year was pretty much optional, credit wise,” I said. “I couldn’t go back.”

“I went back,” she said. “I didn’t want to, but I’m glad I did. I looked for you.”

“Why?” I said. “I was there at the end. I cared about her. I would have been a constant reminder.”

“I was her sister, Dale,” she said. “I see her all the time. It’ll never stop. At least now when I see her, we just smile at each other.”

She stared at her sandwich and took a contemplative bite. She looked upset.

“Let’s change the subject,” I said. “How about college. You go to college?”

“I started,” she said. “Then I met my husband.”

“Your husband,” I said. “Who is he? Is he from our school?”

“I need to get back to work,” she said.

“How long do you work tonight?”

“Until ten,” she said. I caught her twisting her wedding ring with her thumb.

“Do you need a ride home or anything? Or maybe we can just hang out and talk more somewhere.”

“I’m married. I can’t hang out with you,” she said.

“Right. Sorry.” Embarrassed, I busied myself throwing away my soda and picking up my grocery bags.

She put the remainder of her sandwich in the Ziploc bag and sealed it with patient grace.

“I walk to work,” she said. “I like the walk, so I don’t need a ride, but if you’re outside at ten I guess I can’t stop you from walking with me.”

*   *   *

I dropped my groceries off, took my second shower of the day, and searched for my least-wrinkled shirt. I wanted her to see the change of clothes and smell the soap. I wanted her to know it was important to me, because it was. Just seeing her had made it quite clear the last few years were a crucial mistake—in trying to distance myself from the death that Clint wrought that night, I had essentially executed the survivors. Of course I’d never see Regina again, but it was my fault I never saw anyone else, including Mack. Sure we talked on the phone, but the occasional phone call means the friendship is already brain dead—the only thing left is to pull the plug for good.

I squeezed my regenerated hand—a reminder that beating myself up wasn’t so simple. If I returned in perfectly healed condition, it wouldn’t have felt right. The questions would get uncomfortable when my condition didn’t match any reports or rumors. I was robbed of the injuries I’d earned that night. I needed those scars. I needed physical damage to reconcile it mentally, to tell myself I’d paid the proper price for letting Regina die. The pain of loneliness was all I ever knew. It was the only pain I knew how to magnify.

I sat outside the Wal-Mart next to the Sam’s Choice soda machine. I listened to the buzz and clap of the automatic doors opening and closing as shoppers funneled in and out of the store. People went in empty-handed and came out pushing carts loaded with plastic bags with handles that rattled in the wind, the same way that oxygen-starved cells filtered through a beating heart.

Raeanna emerged just past ten with her blue vest neatly hung over her left forearm. She paused and looked around for me. I jumped up to meet her.

“You actually came,” she said.

“What can I say, I love to walk. Been doing it my whole life.”

I started to cross the parking lot. “Not that way,” she said. She led us behind the Wal-Mart, where it was considerably darker without the streetlights that pocked the parking lot. I could make out a dumpster and a docking area for the trucks. She led me across a grassy median behind the store and we ended up on an access road.

“You go this way, it takes you deeper into the country. Back roads,” she said, pointing west. “This way is parallel to the main drag and it takes you into the residential areas on that side of town.”

“You walk this by yourself at night?” I asked. I could see lights in the distance from the residences she was talking about, but the road itself had no adjacent lighting for the entire stretch. On a cloudy night, you would need the sound of your own shoes to let you know if you were on the road or had wandered off. Luckily, we had a few open patches of starlight to help us along.

“I think when I walk,” she said. “Quiet is good. What, you afraid of the dark?” She took my hand. I legitimately lost my breath. It took me a few awkward seconds to say, “Of course not.”

“Too bad,” she said, and let my hand go.

We walked. I had to slow my normal pace to match hers. I secretly hoped she was sandbagging to give us more time together. We endured a long silence at the start of the march before she said, “Whatever happened to Mack Tucker?”

“He’s finishing up at Carbondale,” I said, leaving out his quest for reality-show fame.

“Good for him,” she said, but she was really saying shame on us for not completing college. “He was always … interesting.”

“That’s a polite way of saying he was a prick,” I said, and we both laughed.

“Regina had a soft spot for him. Lots of girls did.”

“Did you?”

“Not at all,” she said. “He was one of those talkers. Always keeping his lips moving so he didn’t have to spend a quiet moment considering just how boring he really was. No offense, I know he’s your friend.”

“You might have summed it up perfectly,” I said.

“Well, the quiet, smart kids usually do good for themselves—do you have a lucky lady in your life?”

“Just you,” I said, hoping it would sound clever. Instead, it sounded inappropriate and desperate, a reminder of how lucky she was to have survived Regina.

“Dale! That’s not the shy boy that I remember.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Of course you meant it like that.”

We approached the cluster of houses. Porch lights and streetlights converged as we emerged from the shadows. It felt like waking up from a dream.

“I don’t live far from here,” she said.

“I’ll walk you to your door,” I said.

“You can’t,” she said. “Are you forgetting that I’m married?”

“Why did you hold my hand, then?” I said.

“I’m sorry about that. I just didn’t want you to be scared.”

“I’m not scared of the dark,” I said with a self-deprecating chuckle.

“I’m not talking about the dark.”