Maybe she should’ve gotten out of the house more. It wasn’t his fault she got bored with Cole all day. That she didn’t have any girlfriends and hated visiting her mother out on the lake, that she didn’t have any damn hobbies she could work on when Cole was napping, that all she could do was watch those soaps full of actors better-looking than he’d ever be, wearing suits he’d never be able to buy or even wanted, carrying on in bedrooms bigger than their whole house, so, when he came home, he’d catch her looking at him differently; he’d be on the couch bouncing Cole on his knees and he’d glimpse her watching them. Sometimes she looked happy, but that was because she liked hearing Cole laugh the way he could make him do. And he didn’t know what she saw when she stared at him, just what she looked like—that he was a disappointment to her. Nothing but a plain man who worked hard and wasn’t good-looking or rich and never would be and he didn’t even begin to know the secrets of her heart. Seeing that look, his hands splayed across Cole’s back, he felt it and believed she was right.
He began to scoot back behind the wheel. A vise was squeezing his wrist again and there was his left hand on the door handle where he put it every time he climbed into his truck, the things you do without thinking how good it is you can do them till you’re hurt. That’s what he was banking on with Deena. That she was no goddamned prize herself and after all these weeks she must miss him the way he missed her. Curling up at night to nothing but a pillow. He must look a lot better to her now, even though he’d done what he did.
He grasped the wheel with his right and pulled himself up and in, then reached for the door and barely got it and almost fell out. Marianne’s face. Those wide blue eyes. He could still feel the sweet way she held his hand and listened to him. All that warm skin she showed him, sure, but more than that was how she looked at him when he told her about his boy and the house he’d built him—not like he was a plain man and a nothing, but like he was strong and handsome and something else.
He righted himself, yanked the door shut. He wedged the pint carefully between his legs, put her in drive, and pulled away from the grassy shoulder. A pair of headlights had been coming his way for a while and now they were close and a horn honked long and loud as it passed, a beat-up El Camino that was already gone, and what the hell was his problem? There was this feeling in AJ’s throbbing wrist and arm that he was an easy mark somehow. But he’d never taken any shit from anyone and he wasn’t about to start now; there was Marianne holding her hand out to him for her money, the smell of that big Chinese who’d walked him outside—cologne and hair oil and Coke on his breath—the final shove he’d given AJ out from under the canopy and into the crushed shells. That wasn’t called for. None of it.
His truck lights lit up the road high and far ahead. He drove slow, sipped from his pint, saw under his dash the single blue dot of his brights, and that’s why that sonofabitch had given him the horn and couldn’t cut him a little slack like he never forgot about his damn brights before.
A little slack. That’s all. Couldn’t everybody just ease up and give each other a little slack? Didn’t he work hard enough to expect some of that?
And there ahead, lit up by his brights he wasn’t about to flick off now, was that old sable palmetto at the turnoff to his road home, its palm fronds fanning out high on its scarred and scaling trunk. His lights swept past it, a beacon marking the fort just for him, and again, he felt sure he was doing the right thing coming home. Tired and beat up on. Lonely for what Marianne had promised but only Deena could give.
The road was two tire tracks of packed clay his truck fit right into, carried him forward to where now he could hardly wait to get. He thought of being inside Deena again. That had never stopped feeling good. Even with all the weight she’d put on. It was still a soft, warm place to sink the better part of himself, his desire for her and what they could make together. Him and this woman, the mother of his son. He reached for the pint between his legs but thought better of it and left it there. Steered with his knee and fished his Tums out of the console and shook two or three into his mouth. A breeze swung in from the east, pushing through the high wire grass on both sides of the road. Years since there’d been a fire out here in the dry season and now they were in the wet months again but it was only a matter of time before lightning struck and all the wire grass would go up and he hoped she’d kept it all cut away from the house, which would never burn anyway—still, little Cole.
His and Deena’s son. Cole.
SHE’S CRYING. SHE’S hot and sweaty under this blanket and she cries for Mama. Where is she? She sees the light on the little table and naked mamas in pictures on the wall. Loud sounds and bad yelling in the loud music. Sometimes Mama turns on the radio and they drive to the store. This music. Like that.
Mama?
She doesn’t like this blanket and the floor. Her feet and no shoes. Where are her flip-flops? No knob on the door and her fingers go into the crack and everything is hard to see because she’s crying and where’s Mama? She uses her hands and the crack gets bigger and a naked lady is pulling up her dress and zipping up her dress and the lady looks at her and there’s black all around her eyes. Something shiny on her face and Franny runs back into the crack and onto the soft pillow. The lady with the hard bobbies. Where did she go?
Mama.
Her throat hurts. Everything hard to see. She doesn’t want that naked lady to come inside. She wants Jean. Where’s Jean? She’s afraid of the crack to the room with the naked lady and she covers her eyes so she can’t see her, but they’re all wet and it’s dark and she opens them. She wants Jean. The rug is dirty. The floor makes her feet cold. She wipes her eyes to see. She wants the other lady not there now. She wants her to be gone because Mama went through the crack into the big room.
Now the lady is gone away and she goes into the big room. A pretty mirror, but the lights are hurting her eyes. She smells smoke like Granma made with her mouth when they lived in Granma’s house far away. The pretty mirror, so many lights and her hair is in the mirror. Her nose is stopped up and Jean makes her use tissues and she sees the box with one sticking out, a yellow one. Everything pretty here but messy. All the colors. The shiny necklaces and pretty bracelets. She can’t reach the yellow box and her hand is in the mirror and it looks funny. She wishes she had the tissue for her nose like Jean gives to her all the time. A pretty scarf under makeup like Mama puts on. She pulls it to her nose and wipes her face and the music is loud but it feels good under these lights. Bright lights. Round bright lights.
Don’t look into the sun, honey, Mama says. Don’t look into the sun or you can’t see. She’s scared and blinks her eyes but the big room is foggy, then bright foggy, then bright and Mama must be in that door. Like the door to her room at home. The same kind. She walks over the floor that is very dirty. Dirt sticking to the bottoms of her feet. Where are her flip-flops?
The knob round and gold metal like at home but Jean has glass knobs downstairs in her house. Knobs like big jewelry. And this one is loose and she turns it with both of her hands and it pulls away from her so fast and it’s dark and loud and a big man is looking down at her face.
“Where’re you goin’?”
And she turns and runs. Run run fast into the crack and into the lady’s room. A boom-boom-booming where her heart is and she crawls under the chair under the table with the light on it. She hugs her knees with her arms and waits for the man to come and her eyes are all wet again and she closes her mouth tight and hears the loud music and yelling and laughing.
Mama.
Is the man in the room now? Scratches on the wood under her toes. One is a letter from the alphabet—F—she knows them all. Gums sticking under the table where the lady puts her legs. Is he here? Mama. If she puts her head under the chair and looks, he will see her and that will be bad. She’s not little. She’s not. She goes pee on the toilet now and Jean says she’s a big girl.
Because she’s not even crying anymore and she peeks under the chair and out
the crack and sees the closed door on the other side of the bright empty room. But a new naked lady is coming in from a different door. And she has high shoes like Mama’s Franny put on one day and Mama laughed and then she didn’t like it. The lady opens a door in the wall and puts money there and closes it and turns a round metal blue thing and she gets dressed but her clothes are shorts, shiny shorts, and a small shiny shirt and Franny likes it because they’re the same color—they match.
This one is nice. She doesn’t have black on her eyes. Nothing shiny on her cheeks and she has white, soft ribbons around her legs. But she can’t talk to her. Mama will get mad. Like when she talked to that man in the store by the candy. Mama wasn’t looking. She was putting food on the moving thing and she got mad.
Some grown-ups are mean, Franny.
Now the booming again. In her ear too, she can hear it. The loud loud music. It’s a party. Mama’s at a party and she thinks she’s asleep but she’ll surprise her. She can’t see the lady anymore. Maybe she’s at the big mirror with the hot lights. She wants to ask her where Mama is but Mama will get mad.
She waits. She’s thirsty for water. At home Jean puts water by her bed in a blue cup with orange butterflies on it. Maybe the lady left some on the table by the couch. She looks. Sees the couch, the pillow and blanket, the TV. Now she sees the new lady in shiny shorts walk fast in her high shoes by the mirror to the door with the man behind it. She knocks and the door opens and the man smiles at the lady and says something and the lady is laughing and goes into the blue dark. Her hair bounces like after a bath and Franny’s going to cry but she can’t or the man will hear her and she feels scared again and wants a drink of cold water and her flip-flops. She pushes the chair and crawls out. The floor is dirty on her knees and hands and she has to find Mama but she doesn’t like this dirt against her feet. She lifts the blanket. She looks at the floor by the wall, then turns and sees a high shelf by the door. A shelf with papers up there and big books for the phone and her backpack and flip-flops on top. She stands under and stretches on her toes and touches the air. Mama used the chair from the kitchen to hang pictures on the wall they bought at the store, a picture of the moon and ocean waves. Franny peeks out the crack in the door. Just the big room and no naked ladies and she hurries and squeezes the chair with her hands and pulls on it and it drags over the dirty floor. She’s strong. She is a big girl.
You’re such a big girl.
Jean’s voice in her head. Her smell in her head too so it’s in her nose. Jean’s smell. Pretty perfume and coffee and sweating from working. Franny works too. Climbing onto the chair. A bumpy cushion there with buttons. She puts her foot on it, then the other, and her body slides a little but she doesn’t fall. She reaches for her flip-flops but the chair is too far away so she gets down and pulls on it till the dark shelf is above her and she climbs back onto the chair. The cushion is soft. Her knees feel good on it, but she’s afraid she will slide again and stands slowly, holding her arms out. And now she can touch her backpack. She can feel it all lumpy with her clothes. She tries to reach her flip-flops, but her fingers just touch the backpack and can’t go higher.
The music is loud again and the grown-ups are yelling. She will go out to the party with her bare feet. It’s okay, she thinks. I walk in Jean’s garden with bare feet and it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t.
It feels better to be off the chair. And she’s used to the dirty floor under her toes. She sticks her head out the crack. Nobody there. No naked ladies. No big man. But she can’t go back to his door. She will go the other way. The way the new naked lady came.
She’s still thirsty. Mama will give her something when she finds her. Maybe Jean is here too. But why is the music so loud? Why do the men yell and everybody’s laughing?
She sees a black curtain. Like the one at the haunted house Granma took her to last time and it had skeletons and spiderwebs and two ghosts and she didn’t like it. But there’s a blue crack between them. A pretty blue light.
She touches the curtain. It’s soft and thick. Not like the curtain in the haunted house. Thin and scratchy and smelling like dogs. She makes the blue crack wider and steps inside it. But where is the party? She can hear it better but she can’t see it. Everything dark blue. Her hands and her arms. Her bare feet. She touches the wall with her blue fingers and it’s black and hard. No door.
A blue light is shining on the other side of her because it’s not a room, it’s a little hallway like at home. Mama’s room is at the end of it and down in Jean’s house her room is at the end of it too. The light is pretty blue. And round like a bright moon. She thinks of winter where Granma is. Sledding with Mama down the snowy hill behind Granma’s house when it was almost night and Mama held her between her legs and the wind came cold and fast on her face and her eyes got watery, but it was fun and the snow looked blue. Like this.
She knows she fell asleep when the lady read her about Stellaluna but she misses Mama now like she didn’t see her for a long long time and she walks to the steps under the blue light. One. Two. Three of them. The music and yelling are louder and at the top is another curtain. What if she can’t find her? Or Jean? What if they’re not there?
Her face feels funny. It’s hard to swallow and she’s crying again. She’s crying but she climbs the steps and touches the soft curtain with her blue fingers because just do your best. Always try to do your best.
APRIL GLANCED DOWN at the money, touched the bills lightly with her fingers. Would he give her that as easily as he’d given her the three hundred and then the two hundred for the new hour? Was she really going to make this much off just one customer in one night? The most she’d ever made was eight hundred and that was before having to pay the house and tip everyone.
She was cold. Louis had the air-conditioning cranked too high. Her nipples were hard buds and she began to rub her upper arms and legs. She sipped her Moët, a warm flurry inside her veins and head. She wasn’t as nervous around her foreigner as she was before. Maybe because he was so small. Maybe because he was showing such an interest in her, she didn’t know. She stood and wriggled out of her G-string, then picked up her folded skirt and blouse and rested them on the floor on her side, tucking her G-string between them. She sat back down. Felt awkward in just her garter belts and stilettos, not dancing at all. Back at the Empire, Summer had gotten shit from a drunk customer who’d dropped a dollar on her crotch, then tried to stick his finger in her, and she leaned back and kicked him in the face, her spiked heel ripping through his cheek. But most of the men weren’t like that to dancers the floor hosts were paid to watch over anyway, and unless McGuiness was hard up for dancers, then every dancer started as a waitress first just to tease the regulars for weeks with you topless in a skirt and fishnets so the place would fill up your first night dancing.
McGuiness was young and bigger than most of his floor hosts. He had a shaved head and eyes that made her think of Glenn, soft blue, almost pretty, but they could turn on and off like a light. Her first night at the Empire carrying a tray, after she’d changed in the restroom on the concrete floor with the drain in it, the smells of toilet deodorizer and rusty pipes—the dressing room for dancers only—after she’d zipped up her tight denim skirt and pulled the wrinkles out of her fishnets and cinched the straps of the pumps she’d had to buy with her own money, she stood there and looked at her breasts. They were still heavy from the breast-feeding she’d stopped. She wished she’d worn a light necklace or something. The door opened without a knock and McGuiness came in out of the music, a pager in his hand, chewing gum, looking hard at her breasts, her legs, the slight lip of flesh over the waistband of her skirt.
“Get your hair off ’em.”
She did, her face heating up, a tangle of wire uncoiling inside her. He told her to tie her hair back every night and to lose ten pounds, then he was gone.
She didn’t know what to do with her clothes, her pocketbook. She couldn’t go to her car in the parking lot like this and didn’t want to
walk out into the dark club with them like she had no idea what she was doing. In the corner under a Tampax machine was a tall chrome waste can. She stuck her pocketbook into the dusty space behind it, wedging her rolled jeans and halter top there too.
She stopped at the mirror, didn’t look at her body, just her face, saw the expression she must’ve had as a girl whenever she’d do just what she was told not to. She could feel her heart tapping away, ready to go, and that same voice inside her head: Make me. Just try and make me.
The Champagne Room door swung open. A wave of club music rolled in with it, that and laughter, a woman’s brown leg circled by a red satin garter up high, Retro’s. She stepped in carrying a fresh bottle of Moët, winking down at April, then smiling over her shoulder at the little foreigner, who wasn’t smiling, whose eyes were on April as he closed the door.
FRIDAY
WHEN JEAN GOT home the outdoor faucet was still dripping under the stairs. She’d had to step over a puddle on the inlaid stone and had gone inside for her purse and now she paid the jazz-loving cabbie through his window, tipping him five dollars.
He thanked her and shifted the car into reverse. “You take care of yourself now.”
His headlights blinded her a moment, then he was gone and she stood there in her darkened driveway wondering what he thought of her: Did he see a fat old widow? She didn’t usually think like this when it came to men, but when he’d told her to take care of herself, it was sincere, as if she were as precious as the little girl she was going to take care of now.