Backseat Saints (5 page)

I glanced down, and I could see that ticket right in the middle. She was digging all around it, though it was one of the three
biggest things in her jam-packed handbag. I reached over and jerked it out of her bag and threw it into her lap. I toted her
big trash can down to the curb every Tuesday. I fed her cat when she was out of town. In return, she talked to me about her
knitting club and her reader’s circle at her church, and she made it a point to never ask me why I wore long sleeves all summer.
She was deal breaking, I felt like. She was ruining something.

“Thanks, honey,” she said, so warm, showing me her lipstick teeth again. I looked at her frail shoulders, her soft lady belly
setting on her lap, and mad as I was, I knew I had to help my friend. There was no way she could manage those three suitcases
alone, even across Amarillo’s teeny airport.

I could feel my tightly scheduled Tuesday start to pull ahead and leave me behind, and that made me madder. I put my blinker
on and swapped lanes again, taking the fork that led to hourly parking.

“I’ll walk you in,” I said, snappish.

“Oh, no, honey. You can just drop me,” she said.

“I want to take you in. Really. I like airports,” I said, like I’d been born stupid. No one likes airports.

But she brightened and said, “I like them, too! I love to see folks so busy and going places.”

I parked and got the trunk unloaded in one-sided silence while Mrs. Fancy hummed and peered about, blind to the smoke leaking
out of my ears. I got a cart and trundled all her luggage in. Once
inside, she stood blinking, round-eyed as an owl, then started digging in her bag for her ticket again.

“You need to be in this line,” I said, impatient. I’d already given up groceries. I could feel dinner and the shower escaping,
and I wondered if Joe would still think I could outsell his best floor man if I smelled like a walking armpit. On the other
hand, it might get me out of doing the damn shift. “Come with me.”

I got her into the right line, but then she couldn’t find her ID. I decided I better stay and make sure she got properly checked
in. I dug her wallet out from under her travel-size tissue and a herd of Trident gum packs and handed it to her.

She took it absently, peering all around her, and then she poked me with her elbow and whispered, “Look, that’s me! That’s
me at thirty!” She nodded sideways at a slinky brunette who was standing two lines over.

I looked at the brunette, mystified, and then back to Mrs. Fancy.

She said, “It’s a game, silly. Mr. Fancy and I used to play it all the time, in airports. We would try to find us, how we
would be in twenty years, or thirty, and maybe eavesdrop and see if we were going anyplace interesting. He liked to tease
me with his picks! He’d find old crabby couples bickering, and he’d say, ‘There we are in fifty years!’ Or he’d play sweet,
and find the prettiest girl you ever saw and say, ‘Now that one is almost you, only not so cute, not so cute.’ These days
I don’t travel much, but when I do, I try to find me when I was a young mother or a newly married lady. I can’t hope to find
me older, unless someone is being flown home in a box!”

She laughed, but I shifted my feet, uncomfortable. I said, “You have plenty of kick left in you, Mrs. Fancy.”

She waved that away. “Only thing older than me in this airport is God,” she said. “But I’m telling you, I looked a lot like
her when I was thirty.”

She nodded her head at the dark-haired lady, a leggy object with
a hint of a cleavage and a saucy way of standing. Mrs. Fancy’s powdered cheeks hung down off her face in ladylike jowls. She
wore walking shoes with high-waisted polyester slacks and a blouse in a fussy floral print, but under, I could see good bones
and the ruins of a tight and curvy figure.

I sized up the brunette and said, “Welp, you at thirty is…” I paused. I couldn’t quite bring myself to say “dead sexy” to
someone who smelled so strongly of talcum powder, so I ended with, “a looker.”

“I turned some heads,” she said, matter-of-fact, and then peeped at me through her lashes, like she knew I’d been thinking
dead sexy. Then she spun in a slow circle, peering around until something stopped her.

“I found little you, I think.” She tilted her head over to the water fountain where a black-haired girl was standing with
her parents. The child was about nine, wearing a stiff, frilled dress that told me there was someone to impress waiting at
the other end of the flight. The dad looked relaxed, slouching beside the bags in chinos, but the mother was gussied up in
a full face of makeup, and she had teased and sprayed her hair into a shining hump. My guess was she was flying toward in-laws.
The mother kept sending one nervous hand down to smooth her girl’s pigtail, but it was more like a love pet than grooming.

I looked away. The mother’s hair would fall on the plane, and the child’s girly dress would be a mass of crumples and likely
stained with juice by the time they arrived.

I said, “That’s me all right,” tight, still too annoyed to play with her. In truth, she’d got me all wrong. At that age I
had a long rat of unbrushed hair and hand-me-down clothes from the church box. I spent all my free time with a book, up trees
or under the crawl space, reading and hiding from all the chores my mother wasn’t there to do.

“Let’s find you older,” Mrs. Fancy said. “Let’s find you, say, twenty years from now.”

She rocked faintly up onto the balls of her feet, lifting herself, having a fun time playing line games like she was no older
than that starchy little girl.

She couldn’t find an older me, and I didn’t look, just stood by her as we wound our way slow to the head of the line. The
man in front of us had been called to check in when I saw Mrs. Fancy wasn’t looking anymore either. She was staring straight
at the me I was right then, and her eyes had gone dangerously soft. It was a look so close to pity that I could feel my mad
cresting again even before she spoke.

“Maybe there’s a reason we don’t see you older, Ro,” she said.

“Don’t. I told you,” I said, but her eyes stayed all melty chocolate colored. I blinked hard and said in a fierce whisper,
“Don’t say things. You’ll wreck it. You can’t wreck it. You’re my only friend.”

She darted out her hand and put it on my cheek. I could feel her age in the folds and creases of her palm. She said, “Then
I’ll only say, I pray better things for you, like I used to do for Janine.”

An airline girl called, “Next,” right then, so I didn’t have to decide if I was going to yank her hand away so hard that the
hollow bird bone in her wrist would snap, or drop my head down on her shoulder and bawl like a toddler. I bent down and jerked
up her luggage, practically hurling it onto the scale, piece by piece. The girl checked it, and I watched it roll away down
the conveyor.

Mrs. Fancy said, “I land at eleven o’clock on Friday.”

“Fine,” I said. Three days, and by then I would have put this conversation away. I could be Ro Grandee next time she was in
my kitchen, helping her get enough cans for her church’s food drive with my skirt swirling around my knees and my happy smile
tucked firm into place. “That’s fine.”

I turned to go, but she said, “Wait, Ro! There you are, at last! The face is you in twenty years to a dime, although I can’t
imagine you would ever wear those clothes.”

I was already walking back toward my life, ready to pick it up and keep living it as if Mrs. Fancy hadn’t spoken, but I couldn’t
help but glance the way she was pointing.

That’s when I saw the gypsy, and the gypsy was me.

Me in twenty years, exactly as Mrs. Fancy had said. She stood across the small expanse of the airport by a coffee stand, a
slight figure in her forties with long dark hair. At first glance, I thought I’d turned out to be homeless, because the woman
was wearing so many layers that she looked like she’d wound everything she owned around her. All her layers were clean and
well tended, though, and her face was clean, too. She had a long red paisley print skirt tied up in a knot to show a yellow
flowered skirt under. She wore a simple purple top, but at least three shawls were layered over it: a blue one slung around
her waist and tied, a green one, and then another, in an entirely different green, knotted haphazardly around her shoulders.
She had a suitcase and a huge cloth handbag with bamboo handles, the kind of thing a different sort of woman might keep her
knitting in. Both bags sat at her feet, and her hands were busy shuffling through a deck of outsize cards, as if she was setting
up a magic trick.

She must have felt my stare because her hands stilled, and she looked up, straight back at me. Her eyes were so black that
I could see their darkness from halfway across the airport. They were magic eyes, nothing like the lavender-blues I’d gotten
off my daddy. Even so, her gaze left me poleaxed with all my breath pressed out.

Her mouth dropped open when she saw me staring so intently, and she fumbled her cards. They went sliding in a fall to scatter
at her feet.

Mrs. Fancy had her back to me, checking in. I said a vague good-bye, and I started to walk toward the gypsy. My feet went
toward her like called dogs. She dropped into a crouch and scrambled to gather up her cards, breaking eye contact, scooping
up the deck as fast as she could.

As I got closer, I saw her quick hands pause over one card. Most of the deck had landed facedown, but the card that paused
her had flipped over as it fell. It lay faceup, directly between her feet.

She stared from the card to me as I approached her, then back
to the card. She picked it up last, tucking it into the deck, her movements slower, more deliberate now. She seemed somehow
reconciled, waiting for me to reach her. Her hands busied themselves straightening her deck back into a neat packet.

I found myself slowing down, too. All at once I was at a creep, like the air around me had turned thick as honey. It felt
both familiar and strange to move this way, so slow. I realized I was doing a kind of float-walk I’d perfected back in high
school, back in Alabama, where I’d been Rose Mae Lolley, the prettiest girl at Fruiton High.

Rose Mae had called this kind of going “walking underwater,” and she had thought of it as the opposite of what Jesus could
do. She would imagine herself upside down, her feet touching the surface and the whole world way above her, dizzy from having
her head pointing downward into blue depths that chilled and darkened.

I wasn’t that girl anymore. I was Ro Grandee. Married lady. Cashier at my in-laws’ gun store. Texan. But walking this way
called up that girl again. Back then, boys were always watching Rose’s body, and girls had watched her face. Rose had figured
out that slow, underwater movements bored the eye. Everyone turned and looked when she first came into a classroom or the
cafeteria, but as long as she kept moving in a consistent, almost continental drift, people’s attention would slide away.
Ten minutes after she came into a place, Rose learned, was the best time to steal things.

Not to keep. It was more about moving things, getting objects to the place they most belonged. Rose had an eye, even then,
for what went where.

Rose was the one who hooked Dana Ostrike’s copy of
Forever
and took it to the Baskin-Robbins. With a smooth sleight of hand, she deposited it in Esther Jenkins’s purse. Esther was
head dog in the small pack of homeschooled Pentecostal Holiness girls that marched through Fruiton’s tiny mall in formation,
wearing a uniform of white Keds and long denim jumpers. The ends of their hair were ratty and fine. It was their baby hair,
never once cut. They
were a wedge of ignorance and virtue that pushed through the Fruiton Baptist kids in a viceless unit, except that every single
one of them was addicted to orange-flavored baby aspirin. The weight of so much uncut hair gave them all near constant headaches.

Esther had a pretty face with a pointy mouse nose, and the next two times Rose saw her around town, the nose was pointed down
at that book. Her gaggle of dowdy friends were crowded around her, all of them listening as she whisper-read the dirty parts
to them. They probably had no more than an inkling about what might go where before that book, but lucky for them, Dana had
dog-eared the sex parts.

Rose also spent a solid week hooking the wallets of every boy on the football team and removing the hopeful condom. In one
fell swoop, she transferred the entire handful to Myla Richard’s lunch box. She’d gotten ribbed and plain, latex and lambskin,
even one exceptionally optimistic Trojan Magnum XL lifted off a jock whose ex-girlfriend had once said, in an unrelated conversation,
that he emphatically did not need the accommodation. “I can tuck the whole thing in my cheek, like a Tootsie Pop drop,” she’d
told Rose, her tone fond. “I call it Little Turtle Head, but not out loud anymore. He gets mad.”

Myla found a condom assortment in her lunch that was as plentiful and varied as the boys she took up to the old tree fort
behind her house. She made a fuss when she found them, though, demanding to know who had put them in her food. Then she made
a big show of dumping them out in the trash with her sandwich rind and empty fruit cup. She should have shut her pie hole
and used them; by the end of the year, she’d dropped out to have a baby.

Ro Grandee had no reason in her life for Rose Mae’s brand of object-shifting thievery. I’d lost the habit of moving with sleepy
slowness, but as I walked toward the waiting gypsy, it came back to me. As I got close, I had time to see all the ways that
we were different. Her long hair had salt white stripes running through it, and it was chocolate brown, not dark as mink.
She had my small-framed,
curvy kind of figure, but even with the layers I could see she was bigger on top. Her skin was olive where mine was paper
white. Still, she had a tippy-tilt nose and my same kind of bowed, fat-lipped mouth. We were so alike, and even before she
spoke, I believe I must have known her.

As I reached her, she gestured toward a table near the coffee stand. Her hands were bare of rings. No bracelets, and no watch,
either, as if all her extra clothes had made jewelry unnecessary. I could see beads at her throat, though, peeping through
the scarves. A rosary.