Tessa sent up a hasty prayer for forgiveness as she slipped on the dress Mama had bought her in exchange for a promise not to see Al.
She opened the closet and squinted into the narrow mirror taped to the door, a gift her mama got at the Dollar General last year for her fourteenth birthday. It was crooked, a fact she hadn’t noticed before, since she’d never looked into it until now.
“That’s sure purty, Honey.”
Tessa whirled around. Her mama stood there, in the one upstairs room they and her daddy shared in the popcorn farm’s old farmhouse, hugging a basket of clean clothes from the Laundromat. Her mousey brown hair, plastered against her head with sweat, divided over her faded dress’s shoulders. She set the basket on the unmade double bed she shared with Tessa’s father and flipped her hair back with bony fingers, exposing deep wrinkles that held her thin mouth in a perpetual frown.
“Mama, you scared me.”
“You feelin’ better? You didn’t look any too good this morning.”
Tessa grunted a “yes” and tugged the dress’s zipper up as far as it would go. The floor squeaked as her mama dropped Tessa’s folded clothes on her cot under the window.
“It was the purtiest one they had at the Goodwill, Honey. They called it a ‘bridesmaid’ dress. Here–let me fix that collar.”
Her mama’s rough, cold fingers forced their way under the stiff collar and straightened it. She gripped Tessa’s shoulders and held her out at arm’s length. “There. Now that looks real nice. Don’t that look nice?”
Tessa nodded and twisted away from her mama. She leaned slightly and squinted to see more of herself in the mirror’s crooked length. The room’s one window faced south, and only indirect light came in from the sun setting over the aluminum grain bins to the west. Muffled tractor noises came from that direction now, along with an occasional high-pitched voice of one of the high school kids riding the wagon coming in from the popcorn fields. Was that her daddy’s detasseling crew? Or Al’s? She felt a chill.
The dress was too tight. She stared into the mirror at the two huge bumps poking out of her chest. Just three months before, when they drove into the barnyard and asked Mr. Peterson for work, they didn’t seem nearly that big. They were just buds, easily hidden by a loose-fitting blouse. But soon after, the male workers started ogling her.
That’s when Al first noticed her. He was a drifter in his twenties who had hired on a month before she got there. She’d been assigned to his crew, and one day her mama brought water to the field and overheard him say he wanted to see her tiddies. The next morning she made Tessa wrap them real tight, and for a while that helped. But finally they exploded all over the place and Mama went to Plan B and got her a brassiere at the Dollar General. Every day after that she made sure Tessa buttoned her blouse all the way up. Even this dress–this straightjacket–had buttons all the way up to the collar.
“They had a blue one,” her Mama said, watching her. “It was just like this here green one, but it was blue. Do you like the green one?”
“It’s fine, Mama.”
“I could take it back and get the blue one. I ‘magine they still got it.”
“No, this is fine.”
“Well, I could probably still get it.”
They stood there looking at each other, then each turned away. Mama leaned over the bunk and stared out the dirt-streaked window toward the grain bins. “Your daddy’s back,” she said. “Guess they’s the first ones in.”
Tessa said nothing. She took advantage of her mama’s distraction to take the dress off and put on her blouse and faded jeans. She, too, looked out the window. Her daddy stopped the tractor and wagon next to the big truck and the kids jumped off the wagon. Some climbed onto the truck bed and sat along the sides, but most just stood there and talked, or sat in the shade. Pretty soon the truck would take them back to town.
Another tractor and wagon came in from the fields at the left that Mr. Peterson called The Bottoms. It was Al. He stood up on the moving tractor, revved the engine, cut the accelerator way back, and let it pop and die as he stared up at her window. He was tall and thin and wore a ragged straw hat that threw a shadow over his bearded face. Tessa couldn’t see his steely blue eyes, but she could almost feel them drill holes into her. She jerked back from the window. Her mama stared out at Al, then at her, and stiffened.
Tessa turned away. “I got to get some air,” she said. She stepped out onto the stairs landing and cocked her head, listening for noises downstairs. She heard nothing but the kitchen faucet dripping. She breathed a long sigh and eased down the steep stairs, gritting her teeth at the squeaks the steps made. Two weeks ago the Dobson boy, who lived with his ma and pa on the first floor, cornered her there and ran his hand down inside her pants. She screamed, and he slapped her so hard she slammed against the wall, and he said if she ever told anybody he’d kill her.
She stepped outside. The setting sun threw long shadows from the grain bins and equipment shed. A hot breeze came from that way, bringing the suffocating stench of used motor oil and flowering weeds, and of smoke curling from the cigarettes of teenage boys who flipped ashes like old men. They watched with gleeful grins as she walked stiffly past them and entered the shed.
It was dark inside, except for the brief chrome glint from Mr. Peterson’s vintage sports car, which flickered out as she slid the door closed. She sidestepped around the car in the darkness, touching it to keep her bearings, until she felt the metal cleats of the old tractor that sat in the back corner. Al said it was the first tractor Mr. Peterson’s grandfather got to plow the farm back in the thirties. It smelled of dust, grime, oil, rotten rubber, and fabric, all mixed up to make a gagging decay odor. She knelt on the dirt floor and crawled under it to the back wall.
It must have been an hour later when her mama called her. Her shaky voice started by the house, moved to the grain bins, was now in front of the shed. Tessa scrunched up against the wall and held her breath. The door rolled open and a jittery light beam poked into the darkness.
“Tessa? Tessa, you in here?”
She sounded scared. Tessa bit her fisted hand and fought against answering, as tears hit her knuckles and rolled down her arm. The feeble light pried into murky corners and bounced against rough timbers and finally went away when the door closed.
Another hour passed. The night was moonless, and little light seeped in between the wall boards. Tessa kept thoughts about what she was about to do hidden from herself by squeezing her eyes closed and thinking of happier times, like when she was a little girl playing in the dirt while her mama and daddy worked next to her in the Texas cotton fields. She remembered the time they got paid and ate so much ice cream at the Dairy Queen in town that she thought she could never face another ice cream cone in her whole life.
A sound came from outside. It was the squeaking that came from Al’s old pickup truck.
“Tessa?” The door rumbled open a crack on dry, metal wheels.
She crawled from her hideaway and stood in the oppressive darkness. She touched the old tractor and moved slowly along it until her fingers found the engine’s cover latch. She pulled the cover up and got the three plastic Wal-Mart bags she’d hidden the day before. She wished she could have brought those clean clothes her mama put on her bed earlier.
“Tessa? Answer me.”
“I’m coming.”
Three overhead mercury lights outside threw bright light slivers through the barnyard’s darkness, silhouetting Al and his pickup. He stood back as she stepped out onto the gravel.
“Here.” He grabbed her bags and tossed them into the pickup’s bed. “Your mama’s looking for you.”
Tessa ran around the truck and got into the passenger seat, which vibrated in time to the squeak coming from under the hood. Al climbed into the driver’s seat and shifted gears, and the truck lurched against the brakes. He reached over to Tesse and gripped her stomach and massaged it, roughly.
“How’s Junior?” he said.
She said nothing.
The weight lifted from her stomach, and he let off the brake. The truck rolled forward.
“I figure we’d go to Florida,” he said. “Pick us some oranges.”
They drove up the lane to the highway, paused, and turned left. Toward Kentucky, she remembered. Less than an hour away, across the Ohio.
She glanced at the farm buildings as they passed, lit from above by the mercury lights. Nothing stirred. Nothing–but wait! Something appeared to the right of the house. A person. The silhouetted figure stood stark still under the lights. Tessa couldn’t make out her features, but it had to be her mama, checking on the revving of Al’s engine. Now listening to his truck speeding south, away from the farm. Carrying them to–
To what?
Tessa glanced at Al’s rough features glowing in the yellow dashboard light. She stared out the cracked windshield into the darkness beyond the headlights.
Yes, to what?
Panic struck her. Mama! She whirled around and stared through the dirty rear window. Her hand gripped the door handle with deathlike strength.
But her mama was gone. Nothing was there but blackness. Nothing but three small specks of light she knew were the barnyard lights. She watched them disappear behind a curve in the highway. Tessa thought again about her mama and the green bridesmaid dress. Tears came, and went, and finally the motor’s hum lulled her into a troubled sleep.
The Liaison
Richard Smith was ready for a midlife fling.
Or was he?