Break the Skin (6 page)

“Delilah,” I said, following her. “She didn’t mean to break it. We can put on new hands.”

Rose was on the deck, her back to us. She was playing with one of the wind chimes, pushing at the paddle with her finger to set things to jangling. Since she’d lost her job, she’d been at loose ends. Delilah and I would come home from work and see the messes she’d left in the kitchen (dirty dishes, cooked food sitting out on the counter, stains on the stove and table) and in the bathroom (hair in the sink, wet towels on the floor, hairs from her shaved legs sticking to the bathtub). She wore the same clothes, day after day—sweatpants and a T-shirt that said
I’m the Best You Never Had
in hot-pink letters. She was just scraping along, and it was starting to get on Delilah’s nerves, not to mention causing a problem with our rent.

“You owe me,” Delilah said when she stormed out onto the deck. “You’re behind on your share of the rent, and I’m not going to let you float much longer. Are you even looking for work?”

“I’m looking,” Rose said. She wouldn’t turn around, and she said it in a quiet voice. It was a voice full of hurt. We knew she was lying—she was collecting her unemployment, but not chipping in much for our expenses. She was mooning around over her broken heart. I found a piece of notebook paper in the trash one day. She’d written Tweet’s name over and over, had written it with hers inside a heart, like she was a schoolgirl. It was enough to make me feel embarrassed for her, and to make me swear never to be like that over a man. “Just give me a little time,” she said. “Please.”

It was the way she said that last word—like she was lost and needing someone to bring her back to a happy way of living—that must have grabbed Delilah’s heart as much as it did mine. She didn’t even mention that broken clock hand. She just turned around and went back inside the trailer.

I went to Rose and stood there beside her. It was one of those pretty days at the end of May, one of those days when the summer heat hadn’t
yet hit us full in the face, and it was nice there on the deck, shaded by those privacy screens, birds singing in the trees. Someone had a barbecue grill going, and the smell of the charcoal was enough to almost make me forget the stink of the poultry house. Kids were playing outside the trailer across the way, and their laughs and bright voices gave me a happy feeling.

“It’s going to be all right, Rose.” I slipped my arm around her waist. “You’ll see.”

She sort of leaned into me then, and something about her weight against my body let me feel, at least a little, what it was like to be her. I held her tight. I wished for something to do or say that would make a difference.

Finally, she broke the silence. “I’m happy for you, Laney. Really, I am.”

But her voice was sad, and I felt my heart break. “I wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t.”

“But I am,” she said, and although I knew she was hurting, I could tell that she meant what she said. I’d never felt closer to her than I did at that moment, but still I couldn’t find the words to say as much. All I could do was keep holding on, thinking about how Mother and I did the same in the days after my father died, and it was just the two of us, alone. Everything we carried with us got said with our bodies—a hug, a gentle touch on the back, a hand reaching out to find a hand. Until this moment with Rose, I hadn’t realized how much I missed my mother, and I was sorry in a way I hadn’t been before that I’d hurt her by dropping out of school and moving in with Delilah.

“I’m going to go for a walk,” Rose said. “Want to keep me company?”

Delilah was slamming kitchen cabinet doors inside the trailer.

“I’m just going to sit out here a little while,” I said.

Rose pulled away from me then. She glanced back at the trailer before looking me straight in the eyes. “You know she doesn’t own you.”

There was that part of Rose, too, the part that crowded its way into her heart from time to time, no matter how hard she tried to keep it
out—the part that made her tell you exactly what she thought. It was always there alongside all that love she could feel, all that love that left her prone to disappointment and then anger.

“Go on,” I told her. “It’s a pretty day. I’ll still be here when you get back.”

I SAT OUT THERE
on the deck thinking about Rose and how, out of the three of us, she was the one with the biggest heart, the one who wasn’t just looking for what she could get from a man, but instead what she could give him.
I want to make a nice home for someone
, she’d told me more than once. She wanted to take care of a husband, wanted him to know every day what he meant to her, wanted to make his life easy. Do all the little things like ironing shirts and putting good meals on the table. Do all the big things like encouraging him if things got rocky, or standing up for him when he needed that. Partners.
If you love someone like that, Laney, they can’t help but love you back
.

Such
a different way of thinking than Delilah, who, the first time she saw Tweet, promised she was going to rattle his bones. Delilah, who wanted, wanted, wanted. And yet I loved her because I always knew the orphaned little girl she was deep down inside. A girl like me, who’d lost her father, who was on the outs with her mother. Laney and Delilah—two stray hearts looking for home.

Finally, she came out on the deck to sit with me, and at first we didn’t say much at all. We sat on the steps and didn’t even look at each other.

Then she said, “I didn’t mean to get mad at her. She broke my clock.”

“We’ll fix it.”

A breeze kicked up and set the wind chimes going. Somewhere across the trailer park, a car door slammed shut.

“Mama left me on a swing in the park.” Delilah bent at the waist, her hands clasped between her knees. “Right before she went off and got
herself killed. I ever tell you that? She had a note in my pocket that said, ‘Please take care of my little girl.’ ”

For a few seconds, I couldn’t find my voice, overcome with the thought of Delilah swinging in that park, wondering when her mother would be coming back to get her.

“I don’t like that story,” I finally said.

“It’s not a story.” She straightened and looked at me. “It’s my life. It’s everything about who I am.”

A horn honked, and I looked up and saw the white Ford Econoline van that Tweet used to haul his band and their equipment from gig to gig turning into the trailer park.

“Didn’t know he was running a taxi service,” Delilah said.

I took a closer look, and I saw that Rose was riding in the van with him.

Delilah shoved up from the deck and went down the steps so she was standing on the patch of grass in front of the trailer, hands on her hips, when Tweet and Rose came out of the van.

Rose was laughing. “That is so true,” she said.

Tweet clapped his hands together. “I told you, didn’t I?”

“Told her what?” Delilah threw her arms around Tweet’s waist. She had on a short denim skirt and an orange peasant blouse that dipped off one shoulder. When she hugged Tweet, she came up on her toes, and the muscles tightened in her calves and along the backs of her thighs. “Hey, good-lookin’,” she said.

She pressed herself into him so hard, he stumbled back a step or two. “Whoa, lady,” he said. “Easy there.”

I felt a little embarrassed for her, the way she was hanging on to him. It was obvious how desperate she was to impress upon Rose that this was
her
fella.

“Tweet do you a favor?” she said to Rose, who was sort of hanging on to the van door like she didn’t want to close it and come back to her regular life.

“I saw her walking,” he said, “and I gave her a lift.”

“That was sweet of you, baby.” Delilah kissed him for a long time, so long that he finally pushed back from her.

“I was just coming by,” he said. “You know, to say hey.”

Delilah hadn’t forgotten her original question. “So what were you two laughing about?”

Tweet and Rose glanced at each other and then looked away, and I knew that they were feeling guilty about something.

“A joke,” Tweet said.

For the first time, Rose spoke. “That’s right, Dee. Just a funny.”

I could tell Delilah wasn’t buying it. “You said you told her something,” she said to Tweet.

“That’s right,” he said. “A joke.”

“No, you didn’t say it like that’s what you were talking about. You said it like you’d been playing footsies. Getting chummy, are you? Sharing secrets?”

I could tell this was heading somewhere bad in a hurry. I came down from the deck and I said, “Hey, Rose. Hey, Tweet.”

“Laney-Girl!” Tweet said. “Tell me something good.”

“What can you tell me about Lester Stipp?”

Tweet glanced over at Delilah. “They’re sweeties,” she said.

“Now, Laney-Girl, you want to be careful with him. He’s not to be trusted.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “He seems all right to me.”

“That dude.” Tweet shook his head. “He’s got bad juju following him. He was in the war, you know. Iraq.” He said it “Eye-Rack.”

“So?”

“He won’t talk about it, but something bad went on. I felt sorry for him at first. Then he started to give me the willies. I told him to quit sniffing around the band.”

“Was he really stealing?”

“Nah, that’s just the reason I came up with.”

“That was mean.”

“Meaner than saying ‘I don’t want you around anymore’?”

Rose took her chance to slip inside the trailer, avoiding Delilah’s questions. Delilah, though, hadn’t forgotten them. “What did you tell Rose?” she asked Tweet when it was just the three of us standing there. “Was it something about me?”

“Jesus, Delilah.” He slammed the door of the van. “Leave it alone, okay?”

“I most certainly will not leave it alone.” She slapped him across the back. She tried to let on that she was playing, but I could tell she was serious. “You act like you’re hiding something.”

He spun around. “All right, you really want to know?” He gave her a chance to say no, and when she didn’t, he went on. “Rose and I were talking about your wind chimes.”

Delilah swiveled around to look at the wind chimes hanging from the latticework around the deck. “What’s so funny about my chimes?”

“Look at them,” Tweet said. “You must have a dozen of those things. I’m surprised the neighbors haven’t complained.” He gave a little laugh, trying to turn this into the joke he must have told Rose as they were pulling up in the van. “I told Rose we’re going to have to start calling you Tinkle Bell. You know, like the fairy in Peter Pan, only instead of Tinker, we’d call you—”

Delilah stopped him. “You don’t have to explain. I’m not stupid.”

“I didn’t say you were stupid. Who said anything about that? I was just having a little fun, that’s all. No harm in a little fun, is there? I’m sorry if you took it wrong.”

“Oh, I didn’t take it wrong.” She reached up and gave his cheek a little pat. “Like I said, I got it. Baby, I got it just the way you meant it.”

She turned and walked back to the trailer, taking her time, putting more of a swish to her hips than normal. She climbed the steps, that short denim skirt inching a little higher as she went.

Tweet looked at me. He raised his eyebrows, curious about what had just gone on.

“Yes, she’s mad,” I told him, “and yes, you better make it up to her. She doesn’t forget.”

“It was just a joke,” he said.

I owed him the truth. “You should have told it to her when she first asked you. That’s when it was a joke. Now it’s something else, something that hurts.”

INSIDE THE TRAILER
, he told Delilah he had to run a Mustang GT up to Terre Haute in the morning.

“You want to come along?” he asked. “I could take you to the mall, and then we could get lunch somewhere nice.”

She was wiping the stove top with a dish rag. “You going early?”

“First thing.”

“I work till seven.”

“If you want to sleep …”

“I can sleep when I’m dead.” She threw the rag in the sink and put her arms around him. “What kind of ride will we have coming back?”

“SUV.”

“Oooh,” Delilah said, with a flirty tone. “Sounds good. Roomy in the back? Seats fold down? Maybe we’ll get lost somewhere and have a little you-know. Right, Tweet?”

He glanced at me, and this time I was the one who raised her eyebrows, telling him to say yes.

“Right, baby,” he said, and that, for the time, was that.

So the next day, they went to Terre Haute and back, and then that night on our way to Walmart in the Malibu, she told me how wonderful the day had been. They hummed right along in that Mustang and had it swapped out all before noon. Their ride coming back was an Explorer. “Seats seven,” she’d pointed out to Tweet. “Mom and Dad and five kids.” She told him she wanted more kids than that. He didn’t say anything, just reached over and took her hand. It was nice, she said, just riding
along, imagining one day they’d be husband and wife with a fine ride like that, and a house somewhere nice.

“You don’t even like kids,” I said to her. We were driving past the city park, and through the dark I could see the gaslights along the walk-ways. “You’ve said as much a hundred times.”

She gave a little wave of her hand like she was shooing off a fly. “I was just telling him what I thought he wanted to hear. Something wrong with that? We were just playing pretend, anyway.”

“Don’t you believe in telling the truth?”

“Only if I have to.”

Much later, I’d remember this moment and I’d wonder whether she’d invented other things to tell me, lies to get what she wanted, but at the time it didn’t matter to me. At least that’s what I thought.

“Go on and play make-believe all you want,” I told her. I couldn’t get the picture out of my head of the little girl she was that day in the park when she swung back and forth and waited for her mother to come back for her. I guess she deserved a little make-believe now. “Go on,” I said again. “Dream a little dream. Really, Delilah. What harm can it do?”

MISS BABY

September 2009
DENTON, TEXAS