Backseat Saints (18 page)

He looked up, his mouth already shaping the word
no
, but when he saw me, his lips froze into a kissing shape around the unsaid word. I had the long rope of my former hair coiled
around one wrist, and I lifted it and let it unfurl and dangle.

The air came out of him so fast that it made a woofing noise, and he said, “What did you do?” He sounded slightly awed.

“I had a bad idea,” I said.

“I’ll say,” he agreed, fervent.

I was used to men looking at me, but not like this. I felt my eyebrows come together, and I blinked hard. “I’m not getting
out
of the house much, these days. I haven’t…” I swallowed so loud that it sounded like gulping, and then I felt my mouth opening
up again. “My husband died. Quite recently.” Instantly I had to fight to keep an inappropriate grin from spreading across
my face.

I had not spent my week on bed rest making up drug-induced, cheerful Disney-rip-off songs about a world with no Thom Grandee
in it. My only thought had been how to find Jim. Test-driving widowhood with the salon’s tanned godlet-style receptionist
as my witness was my way of saying exactly and out loud why I was looking for my lost love. The boldness of it, the truth
of it, moved through my body like a wave of black pleasure. It was the confirmation of a thing that had already been decided,
a long time ago, in an airport. Maybe even by someone else.

The receptionist said, “This is clearly an emergency.” He had big hazel eyes, shaped very round, with a down tilt to them
that made them seem sadder for me than he probably was. “Let me see what I can do.”

The blonde said, “Rexy, I am in a hurry today…,” giving me a sidelong glance. It was the look a well-fed person who was enjoying
an excellent cold lamb sandwich might give a homeless fellow or a hungry dog.

“Faye will be ready for you in five,” Rexy told her. “Maybe four.” He turned back to me and said, mostly for her benefit,
“You, my dear, you are past what Faye can do. Miles past. I suspect you’ve crossed the border and left Faye-country altogether.
You require Peter.”

The blonde’s eyebrows lifted and she looked me up and down, clearly wondering what made Rexy think I rated. I looked back,
bottom lip atremble, and I made my eyes go big and soulful, like those single-teared orphans that get painted onto black velvet.
Her gaze broke first. She picked up a glossy magazine and put it up in front of her face, a wall I couldn’t climb over. It
was
Architectural Digest
, and Charlotte Grandee got that chichi rag every month. I realized this blond thing probably knew Charlotte. They certainly
looked of a set, and this was Charlotte’s spa.

I wasn’t worried, though. I currently looked nothing like the pretty Ro Grandee in the wedding photo at Charlotte’s house,
and the godlet hadn’t asked my name. If I so much as whispered the word
Grandee
, though, I had no doubt this blond creature would be on the phone with Charlotte before the door had closed entirely behind
me. She’d be delighted to reveal that Charlotte’s low-rent Alabama daughter-in-law had been seen poor me–ing her way into
Artisan via the fictional death of her eldest boy. I might enjoy that, actually. But it would be tempting fate to let Thom’s
mother hear this fiction right before I made it fact.

Rexy came back and said to me, “Follow me now, hon.” The blonde made a huffy throat noise, and Rexy gave her a shit-eating
grin, his teeth as white and square as peppermint Chiclets. “Faye will come for you in bare seconds, Sheila. She has sworn.”

I followed him through the archway down a long moss green hallway lit by wall sconces. There were doorways on both sides,
some closed with signs on them that said things like “Shhh… Massage in process!” and “Aromatherapy Room.”

I whispered, “I’m sorry about…”

“Pish, Sheila? Bottle blondes on the wrong side of forty need us more than we need them, believe it. She’s about sixty percent
spackle as it stands.”

I chuckled, but now I was thinking about how much folks like to bond over a bit of gossip, how nasty good it could feel to
talk ugly about outsiders with your own kind. That must be how my mother had found me. She’d asked her own kind.

Fruiton was a small town, and if a single person had seen me toting my gun-stuffed duffel bag to the Greyhound station at
dawn, stomping away from the remains of my life, then the whole town as good as knew. The right people, if asked, would have
been happy to relay this information to her.

I followed Rexy all the way to the back, to a more brightly lit, deeper green room with a gleaming sink and a sleek black
stylist’s
chair. He presented me to a short, slim man beside it who looked way too young to be cutting hair.

“This is Peter. I leave you in his capable hands,” Rexy said.

Peter’s hair was an artful tousle of multishaded gold. Up close, I could see fine lines mapped around his eyes and two deep
creases framing his full lips, so he had to be at least into his thirties.

He looked at me and tsked, then said to Rexy’s back, “You weren’t exaggerating.” He walked forward and circled me, then reached
down and grabbed the braid I was still holding in the middle. He lifted it without taking it out of my hand, feeling the weight.
Then he let the hair go and touched the ragged ends where I’d cut it off, his soft fingers brushing my cheek. I found myself
leaning into the touch like a petting-hungry stray cat.

He said, “Poor sugar. What do you want?”

That stopped me, because I hadn’t a clue. I only knew what I did not want.

“I can’t look like this,” I said.

“No. It isn’t good for America,” he agreed, so overly grave that it made me laugh. He led me over to the sink and settled
me in the chair. I leaned back and rested my head in the sink while Peter washed what was left on my head. His fingers moved
in a vigorous, painful rumple across my sore scalp.

“So, you want to look ‘not like this.’ That’s not terribly specific, is it?” Peter said, rinsing the shampoo and reaching
for a bottle of conditioner. “Why don’t you tell me how you think you look, and I’ll go the other way.”

“Skinless,” I said.

He laughed out loud. “I meant your hair, sugar.”

“Ruined. It looks like angry hair.”

“It does look a little… fraught,” he said, smiling down at me, then he shrugged and said with perfect confidence, “Whatever
you did, I can fix it.”

I believed him. With his low-down, slinky voice, he could say anything and most people would believe him. I let my eyes drift
closed as he worked a thick cream that smelled like gardenias through my hair.

My mother was in California. I thought of it as her place now, like she’d walked all the way around the state, peeing endlessly
to seal the borders so that nothing from the life she’d left could follow. She couldn’t have gone all the way back to Fruiton
to track me. Coming halfway, just to Amarillo, must have nearly killed her. No. She would have called folks in Fruiton who
were her kind. This would be both the admittedly sparse ranks of southern Catholics and shitty mothers, of which there was
no shortage.

One of them must have tattled, told her I’d gone to the bus station. I’d had a crap waitress job near the bus station in every
town I’d paused in. She’d simply tracked me from Greyhound to Greyhound across the country, all the way to Amarillo, without
ever leaving her new territory.

This was how I could find Jim. I could call the kids I had gone to high school with, and they would talk to me, because I’d
been one of them. They would tell me, their peer, more than they would have told the cops or their parents back then. Telling
cops or parents would have been ratting him out; it was obvious Jim had not wanted to be found.

“Let’s promenade,” Peter said, and I started, my eyes popping open. I stood up and let him drape me in towels and a slick
black poncho. As he led me across the room, I hung my braid over one arm and rummaged in my purse for a pen and a piece of
scrap paper. I needed a list of people back in Fruiton who were my kind, who would talk and tattle to me.

Peter took me straight to the chair and sat me down. The leather was butter soft and the seat gave under my weight, cupping
my ass like a lover and supporting my sore back better than my own bed at home. Charlotte Grandee was used to sinking her
pointy back end into chairs like this. Artisan was giving me a taste of the life she took for granted. I settled myself down
in the seat, acting like
it was rightfully mine, as if my mother had given birth to me while sitting comfy in this very chair and I’d never yet moved
off it.

Peter picked up a pair of slim silver scissors and then paused, considering me. He walked around me, looking at me from every
angle.

I braced my paper on my purse and wrote, “THE LAST PARTY,” at the top. I wrote Missy Carver’s name first, because the party
had been at her house. Missy had a divorced mother who went on lots of dates, so the party had almost always been at her house.

“I’m ready. Are you ready?” Peter asked. He made it sound the right kind of dirty. Like I was beautiful enough to tempt him,
but he was much too gay to be a real threat.

“Hell, yeah,” I said. This was part of what rich wives like Charlotte and the blonde outside paid for, this safe, flirty assurance
that they still had it.

“No input? I’m taking blades to your head, sugar-pie. Are you comfortable saying, ‘Go mad, Peter, and make me a goddess’?”

“That sounds great,” I agreed. “Let’s go with that goddess thing.”

Peter went to work with the scissors, the blades rubbing up against each other like cricket legs. I didn’t watch him cut.
I didn’t look at him at all, and he seemed to feel me being finished with the conversation, because he dropped the flirt and
went quiet.

Under Missy’s name, I wrote down all the varsity football players that had been in our grade. They would have been at that
party, certain. Those names came easy: Rob Shay. Chuck Presley. Benny Garrison. Car Kaylor. Lawly Price. Back then, we always
called the football boys by their first and last names, as if they were rock stars instead of boys we’d known since grade
school.

I looked up, thinking, and accidentally met Peter’s eyes in the mirror.

“Prospectives?” he asked instantly, like I’d hit his on switch. He glanced down over my shoulder at my list.

“Guest list,” I said. “For a party.”

“Lots of boy names. Looks like my kind of shindig.” He waggled his eyebrows at me.

I looked deliberately away. The girls’ names were harder to recall. I hadn’t been the kind to have close girlfriends. Hell,
I still wasn’t. I never got in the habit. This was partly because most of my wardrobe came from Fruiton Baptist’s annual clothes
drive. The popular girls, with their pom-poms and sleek ponytails, recognized my outfits, and some were crass enough to greet
the pieces in public like old friends. If I hadn’t been the quarterback’s girl, they wouldn’t have talked to me at all. I
wouldn’t get much from the girls, anyway. Pretty had bought me an in with the fellas, but I had never been
their
kind.

Peter watched as I added the name of every girl Jim Beverly had taken out during the couple, three times a year that we’d
been broken up. I wrote quickly. My hand could barely stand to shape the letters. I remembered all seven effortlessly, because
for the short time each had been with him, I’d chanted their names under my breath all day long.
I hope you get run over, Dawna Sutton. I hope bears eat you, Louisa Graham. I hope you get run over and
then
bears eat you, Clarice Lukey.

“It’s still a mister-heavy list,” Peter said. “And why not? A good mister-ing will do more for your pores than any product
I have here.” He cocked his eyebrow to a rakish angle, so charming, but I wasn’t as easily seduced as his regular Sheilas
and Charlottes.

I said as kindly as I could, “Stop.”

“I’m sorry. I’m a horror,” he said, sounding more pleased than apologetic. He gathered the front of my hair and clipped to
the top of my head. “Your lips say stop, but your eyes say you’re half in love with me already. You’re the kind who likes
bad boys, I can tell.”

Bad boys
, he’d said, and our eyes met in the mirror again. I found myself staring at him as if I were looking down a deer gun barrel,
like I saw his handsome face framed in sights. I wasn’t Charlotte’s kind, and in that moment, he knew it.

“Sugar,” I said, grinding the word into him, “you have no idea.”

I saw whatever lived under his hypercharming ease flash recognition, and then he drew back like he’d been bitten. His gaze
dropped. He coughed and shook his shoulders, then his hands got busy in my hair again. I finished my list in silence, but
not an angry one. I was more comfortable than I had been since I’d walked in and Sheila had given me that bitchy once-over.

When he finally spoke again, his voice had lost its indulgent purr. He sounded less Hollywood gay, less flirty, but somehow
warmer. “What are you going to do with that long braid of your ex-hair?”

“I’m not sure.” I packed my list and pen back in my bag. “Maybe I’ll make a lanyard.”

“Is it virgin?”

“Virgin?” I asked. I found myself smiling at him as I said, “I was married five years, so it’s certainly seen a few things.”

He chuckled and said, “All at once, I’m glad my own hair can’t talk. I meant, do you use any kind of chemical on it, to straighten
or curl it? Or do you dye it?”

“No,” I said. “That’s the color I was born with.”

He set down his scissors and said, “May I?” I handed over the cable of hair. He lifted the braid and smelled it and said,
“No one in your house smokes, and I would know. You can’t get that smell out of hair. This has got to be five inches around.
And so healthy. You must take vitamins. Do you drink? Do drugs?”

“You mean other than my pet heroin addiction?” I said, a little put off, and he laughed.

“I’m not asking these questions to be nosy. Hair this thick and long, gorgeous color, virgin, this can be worth a lot of money.”