Where the Heart Is (11 page)

“I’m going to pay you back. Every cent. Even for the window Forney broke.”

“See, the thing is, I want to forgive that debt.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to cancel it.”

“Oh, no. I can’t do that. I owe you.”

“No, I owe you.”

“Why?”

“Because you made me a lot of money.”

Novalee pulled herself up in bed, narrowing her eyes in puzzlement.

“I don’t understand.”

“Look. The whole country’s probably heard about the baby born in Wal-Mart. Now that’s good advertising. People are going to read about Wal-Mart, see it on TV. That’s free publicity and it’s good for business.”

“But . . .”

“And that’s why I want you to forget about the window, forget about your bill. Forget all that. And I want to offer you a job in my store. In this store, right here in town, where you had your baby.”

“Well, that’s awful nice of you and I really appreciate it. I need a job, that’s for sure. But . . . I don’t know.”

“Why? What is it that bothers you?”

“There’ll be people coming in there to look at me, ask me questions and I don’t . . .”

“Oh, not for long. This whole thing’ll settle down in a few days.

Folks will forget all about it by the time you’re ready to start to work.”

“You reckon?”

“I reckon. So, is it a deal?”

“Okay. It’s a deal.”

Sam Walton reached over, shook Novalee’s hand, then pulled an envelope from his pocket and put it on the bedside table.

“You take good care of yourself and when you’re ready, just go to personnel, in the back of the store. They’ll know about you.” Then he turned and in three long strides he was across the room.

“Goodbye,” Novalee said, but she didn’t think he heard her. When he opened the door, the hallway blazed as camera strobes popped and film lights flared. A dozen voices vied for his attention.

“Mr. Walton, what did you say to her?”

“Sam, did you see the baby?”

“Mr. Walton, let me ask you . . .”

Novalee picked up the envelope which had her name printed on it and took from inside it five one-hundred-dollar bills, the most money she had ever held in her hand at one time.

Much later, when the floor nurse came in, Novalee was still holding the money. The woman cut her eyes and glared at Novalee.

“It’s stupid to keep cash in your room,” she said.

Novalee had seen that look before. On the faces of clerks as they watched welfare mothers count out their food stamps. In the eyes of some teachers when kids lined up for free school lunches. Behind the tight smiles of secretaries who patiently explained that the water couldn’t be turned on again until the bill was paid.

The nurse pushed Novalee to her side to give her another shot.

But this one was not like the last. This time she jabbed her twice, her movements hard and punishing.

Forney slipped soundlessly through the door and tiptoed to the side of the bed. Novalee had fallen asleep with one arm shielding her eyes from the glare of a fluorescent bulb; the other was tangled in the IV tubing twisted and caught beneath her shoulder.

He turned off the overhead light, then gently moved her arm from her face, and as he did, she pulled her mouth into a frown and shifted to one side.

Forney eased the tubing from under her, then smoothed it into place on the back of her hand where her skin looked tissue-paper thin. He let his fingers close softly around her wrist, dizzied by the pulse there that throbbed in time with his own.

His lungs filled with her smell . . . soap and milk and roses. He saw her bottom lip quiver with a sudden release of breath and heard the small whimpering sounds she made when she brushed her fingers across her breast. And when her eyelids fluttered, like the heartbeats of baby birds, something tightened in his chest, caught his breath just below the hollow in his throat, and a sound too soft to hear vibrated deep inside him.

NOVALEE DISCOVERED the next morning that Wednesday breakfasts weren’t much tastier than Tuesday breakfasts. She was trying to deal with cold oatmeal and warm Jell-O when a white-haired woman dressed in a pink pinafore brought her a fistful of mail.

At first, she thought it was a mistake, but when she shuffled through the envelopes, she saw they were addressed to THE Wal-Mart BABY, to THE WOMAN ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE TULSA WORLD, to BABY AMERICUS and to THE Wal-Mart MOTHER.

They came from Texas and Arkansas, from Louisiana and Kansas, one from Tennessee, and the rest from Oklahoma.

Novalee opened the one from Tennessee first, afraid it was from someone in Tellico Plains who had seen her on television, someone who knew who she was. Inside was a note that said, “I gave birth to a baby in the back of a VW van where I lived for nearly a year. My baby didn’t make it. I hope yours does.” There was a ten-dollar-bill clipped to the note.

Then she opened an envelope from Texas. Inside was a dollar bill and a note written with crayon on yellow construction paper. It said,

“Dear Americus. I read about you in the paper. I think your a very brave baby and I love your name. My name is Debbie and I am seven years old.”

One letter typed on stiff white paper had a twenty-dollar-bill folded inside it. “Americus. What a wonderful name. I fought in World War II and Korea, my brother died there. We need more Americans like you who are proud of our country and not afraid to show it. Some of them won’t stand up for the National Anthem. God Bless You.”

One woman wrote, “I wish I could send you money, but I don’t have any.” Inside the envelope was a coupon for one dollar off a package of Huggies. A little boy wrote to ask if he could get a baby brother at Wal-Mart. There were offers to adopt, offers of foster care.

One couple wanted to buy Americus. Someone sent an outdated credit card, another a fishing license. One envelope had a check for a thousand dollars, but it was signed, “The Tooth Fairy.” One ad came from a diaper service, one from a modeling agency. One man proposed marriage; one warned of breast-feeding. Two of the letters had no notes, only money. And one said, “I wish you had bled to death on the floor of that Wal-Mart. I wish your baby had been strangled by it’s imbellycal cord. Your nothing but white trash and so is your baby and that’s all it will ever be.”

Novalee read the hate letter again and again, trying to imagine why anyone would want to say those things to her. She wondered who would write it and even tried to get a picture in her mind of what the writer looked like, but every time she did, she saw the face of the killer in Carnage, a movie Willy Jack had taken her to see at a drive-in.

When one of the doctors came in, Novalee shoved the mail under her pillow. She decided when she was alone again, she would tear the letter up and flush it down the toilet.

The doctor was not the one who had stitched her up in the emergency room the day before, but Novalee had seen him there in one of the cubicles. He told Novalee if her temperature remained normal and if Americus had no problems develop, he would release them both the next morning. He said the baby was stabilized and had no sign of infection, but he wanted to keep her in the incubator for another twenty-four hours.

Novalee wanted to ask him some questions, but he seemed to be in such a hurry to leave that he walked backward to the door while he was still talking. He reached the hall just as he said, “twenty-four hours,” and then he was gone.

Novalee didn’t realize she was smiling until she padded to the bathroom and saw herself in the mirror. “Americus is all right,” she said to her reflection. “My baby is all right.”

Then came the sound of a commotion in the hall. An electricity of voices, angry and urgent, crackled like dry sparks. Moments later, Momma Nell charged through the door and into the room.

“Who the hell’s the geek playing bouncer?” she snapped as she flung a red plastic shoulder bag onto a chair near the bed.

Novalee remembered her as round and soft—full, meaty hips, a pillowed belly, fleshy breasts. But that had been ten years ago. There was nothing soft about her now. She was bony, sharp, her body all angles, her features hawklike.

Her skin was threaded with spider veins and her eyes, the color of shale, were as flat and hard as a cheap motel bed. She had bleached hair, yellowed and brittle, like late-summer jimsonweed. Her eyebrows, created with a black grease pencil, were drawn too high, too thin. She reminded Novalee of the pinched, bony victims in slasher movies.

Momma Nell stopped a couple of steps short of the bed, then flashed a smile as full of happiness as a beating. She smelled of rented rooms and cheap perfume and her voice, ravaged by too many Camels and too much Jim Beam, sounded scratched and raw.

“I hope you don’t think this kid’s gonna call me Grannie or nothing like that,” she said as she fished in a pocket for cigarettes and a lighter.

“What are you doing here?”

“Thought you’d be surprised.”

“How did you know where I was?”

“Hell, saw you on television. I was just flippin’ channels and all of a sudden, there’s your face. They was wheeling you down the hall.

Looked like you was dead, but I seen you open your eyes. Then I hear the story about you having a kid inside a Wal-Mart, so I wrote down the name of this town, got me a map and here I am. Drove nearly ten hours.”

“From where?”

“Well, I was on my way to New Orleans.”

“Any woman on her way to New Orleans can’t have too many Lamentations,” Novalee said, though she hadn’t intended to.

“What? What the hell’s a lamination?”

“You live in New Orleans now?”

“No. But I been in Louisiana a couple of years.”

“What about Fred?”

“Who?”

“Fred. The umpire.”

Momma Nell screwed up her face in concentration while she stubbed out her cigarette in a soap dish on the bedside table. She Where the Heart Is

tossed her head a couple of times as she tried to shake loose the name of “Fred.”

Suddenly, she wheeled. “That shithead,” she yelled. “Told me he was a major league umpire. Said he traveled from coast to coast, stayed at fancy hotels in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago. Said I’d get to meet famous ball players. That lying little son of a bitch! He umpired softball games in Little Rock for the VFW.”

Momma Nell lit another cigarette. “Fred. That little bastard.” She blew the smoke through her nose and left the cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth. “What in God’s name made you think of him?”

“Because he was the reason you left.”

“Left what?”

“Me.”

“Well, that’s water under the bridge now,” Momma Nell said as she waved her hand through the air, erasing the past. “That’s not why I come here, to talk over old times.”

“Why did you come?”

“To tell you the truth, I thought you might need some help. Didn’t sound like you was doing too good. Living at the Wal-Mart’s not my idea of success.”

Novalee ran the sheet between her fingers, smoothing it into pleats, working hard to avoid looking at her mother.

“So, how are you going to help me?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You got any plans? Someone to help you out?

You got a man?”

Novalee shook her head.

“Where’s the prick put you in this mess?”

“Gone to California.”

“That figures. You got a place to live? Or was you planning on moving back to the Wal-Mart?”

“No,” Novalee said, trying not to whine, trying not to sound seven years old again.

“Well, you gotta have someplace to take that baby. You give any thought to maybe moving into Sears? How about Kmart? That might be—”

“If you just came here to make fun of me—”

“I told you I come to see if I could give you some help. Look, Novalee, I was working for some asshole at a bar in Baton Rouge, but it was a dump and I wasn’t making enough money. Heard it was easy to find work in New Orleans and the money was better, too, then I seen you on television and I think, ‘Okay, I’ll go see Novalee and her kid.’ And here I am.”

“She’s in the nursery.”

“Yeah?”

“I named her Americus. She’s so beautiful. She has brown hair, real thick and curly.”

“The way yours was when you was a baby.”

“I haven’t got to see her but just a few minutes because they put her in an incubator as soon as we got here. I can’t wait to get out and start taking care of her myself.”

“When do you think that’ll be?”

“Tomorrow. One of the doctors said tomorrow.”

“Any idea where you’re going then?”

“Not for sure.”

“Well, since I’m not in any hurry to move on, maybe I could find a place. A place for you and the baby and me.”

“You mean you’d stay here and—”

“Sure. Help you and the kid till you’re on your feet. Rent us an apartment, maybe a duplex. I’ve got a little money.”

“Oh, I’ve got money.”

Novalee reached under her pillow and pulled out the envelope from Sam Walton and the letters and checks that had come in the mail. She handed them to her mother.

“I’ve got almost six hundred dollars,” she said.

“Where did you get this?”

“People I don’t even know sent me money. And the man who owns the Wal-Marts, he gave me five hundred dollars and offered me a job, too.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. But with my money and your money, we can probably get a nice place.”

“You bet we can.”

“And we’re gonna need some things for the baby. A bed, maybe a cradle. And some diapers and blankets.”

“Sure. She’ll need gowns, and booties and—”

“A rocking chair. I want a strong rocking chair. And get her a teddy bear, too. A white one.”

Momma Nell was pulling the money out of the envelopes and counting it.

“You think we’ll have enough for all that stuff?” Novalee asked.

“Plenty. We have plenty of money.”

Momma Nell grabbed her purse and stuffed the money inside it.

“Well, don’t you worry about anything. I’ll take care of it.”

“You want to go down to the nursery and see Americus? I know they’ll let you see her if you tell them . . .”

“I better get going. I’ve got a lot to take care of today, but I’ll see her tomorrow.”