Ugly Girls: A Novel (23 page)

“Make yourself comfortable,” she told the woman, who was already huffing her way over to the couch, using her cane as a kind of stake to steady herself as she half-spun into a landing, her feet going up in front of her as she sat. Myra sat in the chair opposite, her back straight, hands folded in her lap. This felt more like a business transaction than a visit.

“You’re a godly woman,” the woman said to Myra. “This means the world to me.” Her cheeks were flushed pink, it was spreading down her neck. Myra knew that feeling well, too. Never could get cool enough, it seemed.

“Oh, I’m just being neighborly,” Myra said. She could see now that the woman was flushed partly because she was allowing the tears to come again, that she was quick to cry, that crying was likely an important part of her day. “Get you something to drink? Or a Kleenex?” she asked.

The woman waved her away. “It just overcomes me sometimes.” She smeared both palms down her cheeks, wiped them on her pants. “My name is Lulu,” she said, “in case I didn’t say so before.”

“What a lovely name,” Myra said, though she was thinking about how years ago she’d taken Perry to see Lulu the killer whale when they’d visited her cousin in Orlando, and she wanted to laugh about this coincidence with someone, but who? Jim would find it mean. Perry would say the whale’s name was actually Leelu or some shit. She’d have to save it for one of her regulars at the truck stop. It was something she might even have told Pete. But thinking of him made her shudder.

“And I’m Myra,” she said.

“Mm-hmm,” Lulu said, as though Myra’s name wasn’t all that important or believable.

“So just where do you want to drive to?” Myra said, deciding to keep it all business. She remembered she was supposed to be drinking water, and walked over to the kitchen.

“I don’t know,” the woman said, loudly, as if Myra had walked outside rather than just into the next room. “I ain’t left the trailer park in years.”

“Is that so?” Myra asked, though she wasn’t shocked or even all that interested. She had seen a talk show once where they piped in video of a man who weighed seven hundred pounds, who was stranded in his bed, waiting for the talk show people to cut a hole in his wall and forklift him out of there. At least Lulu was mobile. And in fact it seemed kind of nice, never leaving your home ever again. Never having to go through the motions, pretend you wanted something more in life, when really all you needed was the bed, your home, something cold to drink. Myra held a glass under the tap. Did she really feel that way? Yes, she did. She gulped the water down in three long pulls. She never did like the taste of water, that was one part of the problem.

“Mm-hmm,” the woman answered, and now Myra was beginning to understand that this answer was a kind of tic, like how people said
God bless you
instead of
Thank you
sometimes. “Once my boy had his troubles with the law, I got to where I felt embarrassed to be seen out, and I got everything I need right at home. Used to have a boy bring by my groceries on the back of his bike until Jamey got out and came home.” The woman mashed her palms down her face again, another tic.

“Well,” Myra said, filling her glass back up. “I guess we can go by the truck stop where I work at, then over to the mall off the interstate, and then we can check his favorite bar, if you know where that is?”

Lulu shook her head. “He don’t tell me much,” she said.

“Well, we’ll just do our best, then,” Myra said, downing the glass, forcing each gulp down. This drive would be a waste of time, she knew. She would devote no more than forty-five minutes to it. She put the glass in the sink, grateful not to be beholden to it any longer, and trudged back to her chair. She and Lulu looked around, quietly taking everything in. Lulu seeing everything for the first time, Myra trying to see something she hadn’t already seen a hundred million times before. The water began its work. “Excuse me,” she said, and took herself to the bathroom.

In the mirror she saw how flattened she looked, not sharpened by the beer at all. Flat hair flat eyes flat face flat flat flat. She ran a fingertip around her lips, an old trick she’d do on dates, draw the man’s eyes where you wanted him to look. But they had become wrinkled, lost all their fullness, flat like everything else. She was lucky to have Jim, lucky he’d stuck around, she wasn’t no prize, not anymore. She felt wistful for him, suddenly. When he returned she’d … what? Too many things she had promised to do or be. When he returned she’d just give him a break, that’s what. Behave herself. Do right for as long as she could stand it.

When she came back from the bathroom Lulu was holding one of Myra’s vintage jars in her hand, holding it up to the light, turning it this way and that. How she’d been able to twist and reach where they sat on the windowsill behind the couch was a mystery. This woman was more able than she liked to let on was what Myra was beginning to think.

“That’s a 1929 Mason—” she began to say, wanting to take it from this woman’s hands and put it back where it belonged, but Lulu had cut in.

“Your husband truly out looking for him?” Her eyes suspicious, taking Myra in. Myra took the jar from her, it required a bit of wresting, but Myra wasn’t about to give in.

“I guess so,” she said, and now she did sit next to the woman, it was her goddamn couch after all. “He left right after you did and I ain’t heard from him since.” Challenging Lulu to say otherwise, to doubt her Jim. She nearly told the woman Jim was in law enforcement, but didn’t when she remembered Lulu hadn’t wanted to call the cops in the first place. The last thing she needed was for this woman to lose her shit on her couch.

“So that’s a good thing,” she continued. “He’s out looking, and we’ll look too.” She and the woman stared at each other; neither wanting to be the one to look away. Damned if it would be Myra.

“He’s a godly man,” Lulu finally said, though it was clear this was yet another tic, something she said when she wanted to seem polite, harmless. Again Myra felt for the woman’s son. What a piece of work this thing was.

“Mm-hmm,” Myra answered.

“Oh,” the woman said, pulling something out of the tiny pocket on the front of her shirt. “Here’s that pitcher.” She held out a crinkled Polaroid. “So you know who we’re looking for.”

Myra took it from her, warm and slick with the woman’s hand sweat, barely glancing at it at first, merely wanting to go through the motions, but the man in it caught her eye, the picture coming alive, this blurred, furious attempt at capturing a man who didn’t want to be captured. This man who turned out to be her Pete, there he was in the same
Ain’t skeered
shirt he’d worn that first night, she knew it was him even though she couldn’t see his whole face. She heard her own blood in her ears, her vision seemed to go dark at the edges. What in the hell was going on here, exactly?

“You said your boy’s name is Jamey?” Myra said, and her words sounded hollow, like echoes, like they were being spoken by someone across a big wide ravine.

“That’s right.”

“He ain’t got a brother, like a twin?” Myra asked, her heart thudding like a drunken giant. She already knew the answer.

“Not that I know of,” the woman said, and laughed, a nervous loud giggle that made Myra jump.

“I seen your boy,” she said, before she could stop herself. She stood now, backing away, giving herself some room. “I seen him in my very living room not a week ago, only he called himself Pete.”

“You?” the woman said, like it couldn’t be believed.

“Yeah, me,” Myra said.

“You got a daughter?”

Myra searched the woman’s face. Her bulging eyes, the thin lashes, the juddering open mouth. “Why you asking me that?”

“It’s just they told me he only ever used that name with the young girls he got into trouble with,” the woman said, leaning up on her cane; it was clear she was trying to stand.

And then it clicked. The boy in the hat on Perry’s Facebook, that boy’s name was Jamey. It wasn’t her comforts Pete was looking for, Myra saw now. He had a taste for something different. No wonder he asked after her all the time.

“He was here,” Myra said. She needed this woman to believe her, to see that she held his interest,
her, Myra
, though it only made her feel worse, the beer like a churning river in her belly. “He was here a couple times. He came by the truck stop. He kept me company.”

Now the woman was standing. “What you done with my boy?” she was asking, louder and louder. “What? Huh?” She swept an arm near the pictures of Perry. Baby Perry, Perry in second grade, Perry in braces. “You got a daughter, he try something with her, and now my boy’s laying dead or dying somewhere ’cause of his affliction?”

“I don’t know where your boy is,” Myra said. The woman’s hysteria was like a balm to her soul; she felt as calm as a corpse. In the face of other people’s emotions she often found herself thinking more clearly than ever. So many clues, so many bits of obviousness she had let pass her right on by. “I truly don’t.”

“You smell like a liquor closet,” the woman said, holding up her cane to point it at Myra. “You’re nothing but a nasty drunk
ungodly
woman.”

And where
was
Perry? Was she missing? How long before it meant she was missing? Was she at the bottom of a ravine somewhere? Myra wanted this woman out, away, this woman with the fucked-up son. She had a beautiful daughter who was meant for something. She was nothing like this woman. Was she? Where was Perry? The woman began yelling, but it was like someone had popped Myra’s eardrums. Nothing sounded right. Myra forced herself to tune back in. Focus. Breathe. Get this woman out, find Perry.

“He served his time!” Lulu was screaming. “He served his time!” It was enough to shake Myra, to fully wake her from the ravine. She stood, grabbed the woman’s cane, and threw it out the screen door.

“Go get it,” she told the woman, and it was true that the woman barely needed it, how quickly she shuffled to the door and down the steps. Took her three tries bending for it before she could get ahold of it. Myra shut both doors, walked into the kitchen for her phone, walked to the couch, walked into the bedroom for her shoes, walked back out to the couch. She didn’t know where to begin. Jim would know. She needed to do something. She needed Jim, goddammit. Finally she went back into the kitchen, poured her bottle out, and all the bottles she could find after that. Myra would be damned if she’d go around with a crutch like that dying whale did. She’d be damned if she’d let the world smell it on her for one more second. And it was something for her hands to do while she waited. Perry would be happy to see it when she came home.

NOW BABY GIRL WAS REGRETTING THE TEXT.
If they found him, they’d find his phone, and even if it was smashed to bits or drowned in rainwater, they’d know to check and see who was texting him. And it’d lead them to her. She’d meant it, she’d never been more sorry, even after Charles had his accident. But she was fucked.

Dave was in the kitchen making dinner, and by the smell of it they were having microwave pizza rolls again, Charles’s favorite. She should have told Dave about the cereal, but even if she had, wild horses wouldn’t hold Charles back from eating dinner along with them. She could go in and ask Dave to pray for her. Pray with her. But it had always been a little embarrassing, watching Dave pray.
Lord Jesus
, he always began, and then his voice would catch, like he could cry but was gathering all his strength not to. By the end his hands would be raised up, and once when she was high she’d laughed over the prayer he was saying because he had his hands up so long that it looked like someone had pressed pause while he was raising the roof. She wanted to ask for Dave’s help, wanted to believe what he believed, but she knew she’d be faking.

Charles was in his bedroom, sitting at his desk. Sometimes he sat there to draw or write, though forming letters wasn’t all that easy for him. Today he just seemed to be staring at the wall in front of him. Back in the day, Baby Girl could go to Charles for anything. He had been the one to buy tampons for her the first time she got her period. He had been the one to tell her never to throw the first punch but never to walk away from one either. That Charles would know what to do.

“Charles,” she said, and he jumped. When he turned to face her she could see that he’d been nearly asleep.

“Dayna,” he said, like it was a nice surprise to see her standing there.

She stepped into his room, which still felt like entering a stranger’s room. Old Charles had kept things neat and tidy, everything in its place. Now there was shit everywhere. Clothes all over the floor. Clean and dirty. His dresser drawers stood open, plates and bowls and sludge-filled cups balanced on his desk, on the little stool old Charles used as a nightstand, mixed in with the clothes on the floor. It even smelled different. Before it smelled of Charles’s cologne threaded with weed smoke. Now it just smelled like his body, like his feet, like his breath. Baby Girl waded through the piles that made up his floor and sat on his bed, which smelled sour, like the sheets needed changing.

“Do you remember how things were before the accident?” she asked.

Charles nodded quickly, like he was proud to know the answer. “Yes, I had a whole brain and a girl I loved and fucked and guns in my pockets and everything felt heavy.”

Even the old Charles wouldn’t have said
A girl I fucked
. The new Charles didn’t try to pretty anything up.

“Everything felt heavy?”

“Yeah, everything was on me all the time,” Charles said, putting his hands on his shoulders like he was trying to protect them from the weight.

“I know what you mean,” she said.

“Yes, because you’re fat. I’m fat, too.”

She crossed her arms over her middle, pressing them in to hide the rolls behind her T-shirt. Everywhere she went, even in her own brother’s room, she couldn’t be something she wasn’t. Bald. Fat. Ugly. “That ain’t a nice thing to say,” she said. “Remember? You’re supposed to think how you would feel hearing something, and then if you don’t like it, then you don’t say it.”