doesn’t work, does it?” She giggled. “Has to be a son, right? ’Cause that’s the way it is in the Bible.”
She laughed then, sharp brittle sounds that carried heat.
“Oh, watch this.” She pointed to the TV. “This is where Andy tells Opie about the birds and bees.”
“Let me fix you something to eat,” Molly O said. “I’ve got some soup in the box, or I could make you a sandwich.”
“No.”
“When did you last eat? You look so—”
“Let me see.” Brenda screwed up her face to let her mother know she was thinking. “I had breakfast at seven, dinner at noon— straight up, and supper at six. Three balanced meals, too. Milk, lots of milk because it builds strong bones and healthy bodies.
Bread, which is the staff of life. Spinach, too. You know I always eat my greens ’cause they clean you out. You taught me that.
And—”
“Brenda, are you—”
“Wait, I’m not finished. Fruit. Fresh fruit. None of that canned stuff for me. And meat, of course. Piles and piles of flesh.” She nodded. “Yep, something from each of the basic food groups. I learned that from my home ec teacher, Miss Twitchface. Oh yeah, vitamins. I dropped a whole fistful of vitamins today, just to be on the safe side. B1, B2, B3 . . .”
“Honey, I wish you’d—”
“And acid. The body needs acid. Nitric acid, folic acid, benzi-dine acid. I make sure to get my minimum daily requirement of acid.”
“Brenda, are you okay?”
“I’m great! Just great! Don’t you think I look great?” she asked as she jumped off the couch. Pushing her tangled hair back from her face, and hiking up her dirty jeans, she struck a model’s pose.
“So what do you think? Huh? Don’t I look great?” With her hands on her hips, she paraded around the bar to the kitchen. “Don’t I look like one of them Las Vegas showgirls? Might need to get a tit job, but—”
“I think what you need is some sleep. I’m gonna fix you a bed here on the couch.”
“What happened to my old room? You rent it out?”
“No. I took your bed out and—”
“Oh, heave the bed out and the little bitch won’t come back
’cause she’ll have no place to sleep. That it?”
Molly O eased herself to the couch as if sudden movement might make her break.
“Brenda, why are you talking like this? Are you mad at me or something?”
“Me? Mad? Just because my mother threw out my bed?”
“I took the bed out because I turned your room into a nursery.”
Then, trying for a brighter tone, Molly O said, “You want to see it?
I fixed it up real cute. Put in some—”
“I don’t want to see it.”
“Found a sweet crib, made some curtains. And look.” She dug in her knitting basket on the floor beside her and pulled out the bootie she had started. “I’m making—”
“There’s not any baby.”
“No! No, that’s not right.” Molly O held up the bootie, proof that a mistake had been made. “Honey, you’re just run-down, that’s all. Have you seen a doctor? Brenda, you promised me you’d see a doctor.”
“I did. And now . . . there’s no baby.”
“Brenda, what are you saying? You didn’t . . . Oh, God, Brenda.
Are you telling me that you . . . that you . . .”
The room was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator.
Finally, leaning against the kitchen sink, staring out the window into the darkness, Brenda said, “No. No, the doctor said it was because I’d had too many greens. You know, that’s the thing about greens. They just clean you out. Clean as a whistle. Don’t leave anything behind, do they?”
But Molly O didn’t answer. And though she didn’t know it, her fingers were moving mechanically, pulling the stitches from a bootie that never quite took on the shape of a tiny foot.
M
OLLY O CAME BACK to work three days after Brenda got home, even though Caney had threatened to shoot her if she did.
They’d argued about it in a half dozen phone conversations, but finally reached a compromise when she agreed to take off early, promising to leave as soon as the lunch trade wound down.
She convinced him that getting out of the trailer for a few hours would be good for her and he couldn’t argue with that. Being with Brenda twenty-four hours a day would be an endurance test he feared Molly O couldn’t pass right now.
He tried to talk to Brenda once, but Molly O couldn’t get her to come to the phone, so he didn’t try again.
By the time Molly O returned to the Honk, the regulars already knew Brenda was home because someone had spotted Molly O
shepherding her into Doc Warner’s office. But they didn’t know what was going on, and Caney wouldn’t tell them. He figured Molly O would find her own way of breaking the news, and he was right.
When they asked her about Brenda, she said she’d lost the baby, but she offered no details. And because they remembered that Molly O herself had suffered several miscarriages, they accepted her explanation and quietly offered their condolences.
The only strange reaction came from Bui. When he heard what happened, he went out to his car where he sat slumped behind the wheel and wept for nearly an hour.
During the lull between breakfast and lunch, Caney fixed her a plate of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, but she didn’t do much more than push the food around with her fork.
When Vena sat down beside her, Molly O included her in a conversation which, until that moment, she’d been having inside her head.
“She needs some time alone, you know, time to think, to pull herself together.”
Vena nodded, a good listener.
“She’s not herself right now. Sleeps most of the time, but even when she’s awake, it’s like she’s not there. She doesn’t talk. Never turns on the TV or picks up a magazine or newspaper. I went to the library and checked out some books I thought she’d like, but she hasn’t even touched them.
“Doc Warner’s got her on an antibiotic for the infection. And he gave her some pills for depression, but he says it’ll take a few days for them to kick in.
“I can’t get her to eat much of anything. I’ve tried all her favorites. But she just doesn’t have any interest in food. None at all.”
Molly O pushed her mashed potatoes into the shape of a hill, then made an indentation in the top, transforming it into a volcano.
“I try not to think about what she did, destroying her baby.
How can anyone do that?” Lifting her eyes from her plate, she looked surprised, as if she’d only just noticed Vena. “How could she do that?”
“I don’t know, Molly O. Maybe she couldn’t see any other way out. It’s hard when you’re scared and alone. It’s real hard.”
“No,” Molly O said, speaking to her food again. “I just can’t understand it.
“That reminds me of a song my mother used to sing. ‘We’ll understand it, all by and by.’ But I don’t know. There’s so much I don’t understand about what’s happened. Guess I still haven’t reached the ‘by and by.’
“Brenda got her voice from my mother, you know. She sure didn’t get it from me, ’cause I can’t sing a lick. But you ought to hear Brenda. The sweetest voice you ever heard.
“She started singing before she could talk, humming tunes she made up. By the time she started school, she knew every country song on the radio. Won a talent contest when she was only ten. Got to sing on a TV show in Tulsa.
“She’s loved music her whole life. ’Course, at her age, it’s pretty hard to think about a whole life, ’cause seventeen’s just a little tiny piece of life, isn’t it?
“But you know what worries me most?”
Vena shook her head.
“She’s just so . . . so
angry.
Now I don’t blame her for being mad at that Travis. I’d like to kill him myself. But Brenda’s mad at the whole world, including me. Lord knows I haven’t been a perfect mother, but I’ve loved her to death since the day she was born.
“But maybe something more happened to her out there in Las Vegas, something I don’t even know about. Maybe even meaner than I can imagine. Oh, I wish I could stop thinking like that, but my mind just won’t leave me alone. Seems like—”
“Miss Ho?”
Molly O turned to Bui who was offering her a cup of tea, but his hands were trembling so badly that most of it had sloshed into the saucer.
“Miss Ho,” he said, his voice as shaky as his hands. “Very sorry for baby. Very sorry . . . and I . . .” With his eyes tearing up, he placed the cup and saucer on the counter, then hurried away.
“Poor Bui. He’s a sensitive soul, isn’t he?”
“He’s been pretty strange the last couple of days,” Vena said.
“Don’t know what’s going on.”
“I suppose it’s hard for him here without his wife, his family. No one who speaks his language. And he doesn’t understand us most of the time.” Molly O shook her head. “I guess he hasn’t got to the ‘by and by’ yet, either.”
*
Caney was fixing himself a sandwich while Bui loaded the dishwasher, so Vena figured it was a good time for her to disappear for a while.
She was sorting through her tips to make sure she had enough quarters for the phone at the Texaco when a shiny new van pulled in and parked. She waited for the driver to open his door. When he didn’t, she headed outside to take his order. As she approached, he rolled down his window.
“How you doing today?” she asked.
“Well, my prostate’s enlarged and I’m legally blind,” he said as he removed a pair of sunglasses. “But my urologist is out of town and my seeing-eye dog died.”
Vena grinned. “Can I get you something?”
“I’m coming inside if your door is wide enough for my creepy-crawler.”
He winked when he saw Vena’s confusion, but it didn’t take her long to catch on as he swiveled the driver’s seat around, then hoisted himself out of it and into a wheelchair beside him. Almost immediately, the van door swung open and a hydraulic lift began lowering him to the ground.
“Elevator going down,” he said. “First floor—shoes, blues and bad news. Mezzanine—bloomers and rumors. Ground floor— everybody out.”
A few seconds later, he was rolling toward the front door of the Honk with Vena walking beside him.
Like Caney, his upper body was powerfully built, but both legs ended at his thighs where his khaki pants were doubled beneath his stumps.
“Don’t suppose you have a cup of coffee so strong it’ll make me howl?” he asked.
“That’s the only kind we serve.”
She held the door open as he came inside. Caney, just coming out of the kitchen, slowed when he saw them.
“Hey, looks like you and me drive the same kind of jalopy,” the man said. “They get poor gas mileage, but they handle well.
Name’s Austin Tyler. You must be Caney Paxton.”
“Yeah,” Caney said as he shook the hand that was offered.
“I’m from Farmington, Missouri. On my way to San Diego. Got a date out there with a little chick named Lily Rene Tyler, four days old. My new granddaughter.”
Vena set a cup of coffee on the counter.
“Thanks.”
“You’ve got a long drive in front of you,” she said.
“Well, I’ve got plenty of time. Just so I get there before she graduates from college.” He blew on his coffee, took a cautious sip.
“Anyway, I’m not traveling fast. Thought since I was going to make the trip, I’d get off the interstates, see a little of the country, meet some new people.”
Austin Tyler offered a Marlboro to Vena, who shook her head, and to Caney, who pulled out his Camels.
“I stopped at the edge of town to fill up with gas and an old boy at the station, we got to talking about Nam and he said I ought to come by here and meet you, Caney.”
He took a more aggressive sip of coffee as he waited for some response from Caney, but he didn’t get one.
“Said he thought you were at Cam Ranh Bay.”
“I don’t know where he heard that.”
“I was there from ’69 to ’71. 21st Infantry.”
“That right?”
“You ever at Long Binh, Caney?”
“No.”
“What outfit were you with?”
“I wasn’t.”
Austin Tyler was thrown off for a moment, then he grinned.
“Special Forces, right? You guys.” He shook his head. “Still doing that covert thing, aren’t you?”
“I wasn’t in Vietnam,” Caney said, his features immobile, showing nothing. “Never been in the military.”
He shot a quick glance at Vena, but stunned by the lie, she turned away and busied herself at the coffeemaker.
“But that fella at the Fina station told me you were. Said that’s how you . . .”
“This?” Caney patted the arms of his chair. “No, I did this water-skiing.”
“Then why’d he say you were in Nam? Why the hell would he do that?”
“Maybe he was pulling your leg.”
Tyler thought about that, then he laughed.
“Sorry you came out of your way,” Caney said. “But since you did, coffee’s on the house. I’ll throw in a piece of pie, too, if you like cherry or apple. And I won’t even lie and tell you it’s home-made.”
“I thank you, Caney,” Tyler said, crushing out his cigarette. “But I guess I’ll get back on the road.”
“I’ll talk to that guy at the Fina. Tell him to get his facts straight.”
“Aw, I needed a break anyway. And besides, it was good to meet you. Good to meet both of you. Here.” He pulled out his billfold.
“Let me give you my card. If you’re ever in my part of the country and you need your TV fixed, you give me a call.”
“Sure.”
“And thanks for the coffee.”
Vena and Caney watched as he returned to his van, rolled onto the lift and disappeared inside. Neither of them spoke until he was at the wheel and pulling away.
“Caney, why did you tell him you weren’t in Vietnam?”
“He was there. He didn’t need me to tell him what it was like.”
“But you—”
“Vena, that guy served two tours over there. You know how long I lasted?”
“No.”
“Forty-two days.”
“Are you ashamed of that? That you got hurt after forty-two days? Caney, a lot of boys didn’t make it that long.”
“You’re right. And you know why? Because they stepped on mines, walked into ambushes, got their heads blown apart. But I never heard about a damned one of them fell out of a helicopter.”