Homesick Creek (16 page)

Hack nodded.

“I’m going to give you forty dollars and leave you a couple of phone numbers where you can reach me, at work and at home. I expect to hear from you every Monday without fail.”

Hack nodded.

“And I’ll stop by from time to time without warning. Also expect me every Thursday night for dinner. I’ll cook.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Hack began to grin.

“Do you have any questions?”

“No, ma’am.”

“All right, then, I believe we understand one another. Do we have a deal?”

“Deal,” Hack said.

She extended her hand and shook Hack’s hard. Then she folded herself into her tiny Volkswagen and roared away.

Bunny was already over at Joelle Burden’s playing bunko, God be praised, when Hack got home from work. He didn’t have the strength for Bunny right now, with her peering eyes and need to know every minute that he loved her best. The truth was, he didn’t love anybody tonight, not really, not anyone he could summon up anyway. He felt like shit, what with the discovery of the book and all, as if his skin were on too tight, or he had cake crumbs under there like one of those
Just So Stories
the Katydid used to read him, the one about how the rhinoceros got his wrinkles.

He made himself a Dagwood sandwich and took it back to the garage. He and Bob had built a workbench there, and built-ins for storage, and a pegboard seven feet long for his tools. They had sealed the floors with gray marine primer and insulated and Sheetrocked the walls. Bunny got mad sometimes when he spent too much time out there, but hell, she had her damn sewing room and piano full of rabbits. He had the garage. Same thing.

He climbed back into the cab of the truck, set his sandwich on the dashboard, and picked up the
Golden Book of Children’s Poetry
. Jesus, his heart was beating like a jackhammer. On the cover there was a drawing of kids playing ring-around-the-rosy. They looked so happy, and no wonder, there wasn’t a grown-up in sight. The Katydid used to tell Hack two of those kids were them, him and her, when they were younger. Hack couldn’t see it himself. He’d never been that young, had never played silly games where even if you won, you didn’t get anything for it. He was all for winning, don’t get him wrong, but only if there was booty at the end: good sex, money, a Caribbean vacation, new household appliances. His idea of a game was What’s Behind Door Number Three. He was glad the Katydid had been more carefree, though.

He began turning pages, memories igniting and burning into ashes all around him. How she’d liked to wear one of his shirts as pajamas; how she’d tucked her feet under his leg when she read to him in bed. How she’d once read “The Puffin” eighty-nine nights in a row. How her hair had always smelled clean, even when all they had to use was cheap bar soap he’d stolen from Howdy’s Market.

“What do you think real families do at bedtime?” he’d asked her once.

“We’re a real family.”

“Like hell,” he said. “If we were a real family, Cherise would be out there in the living room. Not that I’d want her there.”

“I would,” Katy said. She had been almost twelve then, and Cherise had been gone for over a year.

“Why?”

“Because if she was out there, we’d know she thought we were worth coming back for. You know what Jane Sandrini told me at school today? She said,
Your mother’s a whore, and she didn’t
want you in the first place
. Is that true?”

“Of course she wanted you,” Hack said. “She had you, didn’t she? She could have had an abortion if she hadn’t wanted you. Hell, I even think she wanted me.”

“If she wanted us then, how come she stopped?”

“Wanting us?”

“Loving us.”

“She loves you,” Hack said.

“If she loved us, she would have stayed.”

There wasn’t much you could say when someone was right. “I don’t know, kiddo. Maybe there’s just something wrong with her.”

“Was she a whore?”

“Not by the time she had you.” In fact Hack was hazy on the timeline of her retirement, but there wasn’t any harm in tampering a little bit with the truth.

“She was one, though,” Katy said. “A prostitute.”

“Yeah, and Jane Sandrini’s father is a goddamned drunk. He hits her; that’s why she misses school all the time and wears so much makeup. I heard her father was screwing her too. She’s not so great.”

“Maybe we’re not so great either, Buddy.”

“You’re great. You don’t need to have Cherise to be great. You ask Minna Tallhorse. She’ll tell you.”

“Minna?”

“Yeah. She’s your goddamned fan club.”

The Katydid was always closer than he was to Minna Tallhorse. The woman scared the crap out of him with those fierce eyes of hers and her demands that he be honest with her even if it was about something bad. He didn’t believe in total honesty now, and he never had. What was the point of telling the truth about little things that didn’t matter when you knew it would land you in the crapper all the same? When he used to call Minna on Monday mornings from Howdy’s, he always told her they were fine. Tonight, when Bunny came home from bunko, he’d tell her the same thing. It was easy to put a lie over on people when what you said was what they wanted to hear. He’d been getting away with it for years.

He finished his sandwich, closed the book, and looked through the windshield at his tools for a while. They all hung perfectly plumb, lined up with the outline he’d traced of each one on the pegboard. Unlike honesty, he set great store by order. Order kept things from flying apart—kept
him
from flying apart. He’d learned that after the Katydid had died, learned it the hard way, when there was nothing left of him but blood and bone chips and breakage, inside and out.

He opened his truck door abruptly and, leaving it gaping like an escape hatch, reached up into the rafters to pull down an old green army satchel. He rummaged around among the dog tags and compass and field knife and emergency supplies until he felt the cold metal touch of a bracelet. It had been a cheap thing to begin with, Indian silver, but the Katydid had loved it, never took it off. Hack turned it over and over in his hand, read its warped and twisted surface like Braille.

In case of need or emergency, call Minna Tallhorse, (702) 555-3242.

chapter nine

Anita lay down in stages on the bed in room nine of the Lawns Motel and Tourist Cabins. First she stretched across to straighten the sheets, then to position the blankets, then to fluff the pillows, and next thing she knew she’d slipped under the covers and closed her eyes. It would be for only a minute, just for a minute. The place wasn’t busy—it was only the first week in March—and anyway, Barb wouldn’t care just as long as Anita finished her ten rooms by noon. Half of them were still occupied, and she’d finished the rest, all but this one. She still had hours.

When was the last time she’d been this tired? Maybe when the kids were little and had back-to-back cases of the flu; maybe not even then. She’d been feeling puny for a couple of weeks now, nothing much, nothing you could put your finger on; a little fever, a few swollen glands, a little diarrhea were all. That, and this crushing fatigue. She’d begun taking two of Crystal’s Flint-stones vitamins every morning with her coffee, but it didn’t seem to be helping much. She should pick up some of those new women’s vitamins next time she went over to Sawyer to see if that made any difference, but they were so damned expensive. Maybe she should just squirt some of those iron drops into her orange juice like she did when Doreen had had anemia that time. The girl had been so washed out she’d looked like a ghost; even her blood had looked pale when they’d drawn it, though that might have just been Anita’s imagination. Anyway, the iron drops had worked miracles. Anita had also read somewhere that cooking with a cast-iron skillet would do the same thing, and she could do that for free, just about, except for the cost of an old skillet at Goodwill. Bunny had been bugging her the last few days to go to the clinic over in Sawyer, but Anita couldn’t see the point. She knew exactly what she had: a virus, same thing all of them got every spring. It would pass; it always did. The thing to do was just to ride it out in the meantime.

Suddenly the room phone rang, scaring hell out of her; Barb at the front desk must have tracked her down by the whereabouts of her housekeeping cart. Anita rolled out from under the blanket guiltily and picked up the receiver.

“Hon, call Bunny when you get a chance. She wants to know if you’ll have lunch with her at the Anchor, her treat.”

“Why didn’t you just put her through back here?”

“I did, honey; I let it ring five times. You must’ve had the water running.”

She must have been asleep. Lord. She hung up and called Bunny.

“You work too hard,” Bunny said.

“I must have had the water running when you called. Barb said she let the phone ring five times, but I didn’t hear a thing.”

“So what time do you want me to come get you?” Bunny said.

“Why don’t I meet you? Bob went in to work with Hack this morning, so I’ve got the car. What time is it?”

“Eleven.”

“How about eleven forty-five. I should be done here by then.”

“You sound beat,” Bunny said.

“Whoops, I better go,” Anita lied. “Guests just came back, and here I haven’t even dusted yet.”

“Okay. I’ll see you there.”

Yeah.

Thursday lunch at the Anchor in early spring was a very gloomy affair. No one was in the place but Anita, Bunny, and a lone family arguing about whether or not to go to the aquarium over in Sawyer. From what Anita could tell, they seemed to be split fifty-fifty. The husband and daughter said who in their right mind wanted to look at a bunch of fish in an outdoor facility in the first place, not to mention at this time of year in the rain. The son wanted to see sharks, though, and the wife said she’d heard the place had a great gift shop. “It’s always about shopping with you, isn’t it?” the man hissed. “It’s always about spending money.”

“There aren’t really sharks there,” Anita confided over her shoulder to the son, a kid about eleven with a mended harelip. “I mean, besides little ones. The biggest shark they have is probably three, three and a half feet long. It’s not exactly
Jaws.
”

The wife gave Anita a chilly smile that had
Mind your own damn
business
written all over it. Ordinarily Anita steered clear of tourists unless they were in a position to tip her, but the daughter had wet shoes and a runny nose and looked like she could use having something go her way. She was maybe thirteen, a sulker. Doreen had been a sulker too. Anita felt for the wife even if she was a bitch.

Joelle came over to them and said, “So what are you girls having for lunch?”

Bunny said, “I’ll do the clam strips if you tell Manny to make them extra crisp.”

“You got it, doll,” Joelle said, licking her pencil lead before writing. “Nita, what about you?”

“How much iron is there in eggs?”

“Beats hell out of me.” Joelle frowned.

“Don’t look at me,” Bunny said. “They lie on those nutrition labels too, tell you what they think you want to know. Have you ever noticed how whether you’re looking at yogurt or pound cake, the calorie count for a single serving comes out to about one eighty? There must be a study somewhere that says no one worries about a hundred eighty calories, but if it goes over two fifty, they’ll put it back on the shelf. You think I’m kidding? Look at the portions on there. If it’s something fattening, you get about a half a tablespoon, only nobody notices that. The calorie count’s the thing, and as long as it’s under two fifty, people are going to buy it. Then they eat a whole cup of the stuff because that’s how much people really eat, and they wonder how come they’re getting fat.”

Anita and Joelle snickered.

Bunny shrugged. “Well, it’s the truth, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Joelle said. “It is. So, are you doing an omelet, Nita?”

“I’m trying to find iron-rich food,” Anita said.

“Liver and onions would be good, except no one eats that anymore, so we took it off the menu, what, Bunny, three years ago? Four?”

“Four,” said Bunny. “Try broccoli. I heard that was high in iron. Or is that calcium?”

“I could ask if they have some in the back,” Joelle said.

“How does a broccoli omelet sound?” Anita said.

“Disgusting,” said Bunny.

“Yeah. To hell with it,” Anita said. “I’ll just go with a double patty melt and some fries.”

“Good girl.” Joelle thumped her on the back and went off to the kitchen.

“So what’s with the iron?” Bunny said.

“I thought it might give me some umph. I feel like shit.”

“You look like shit. Are you sleeping?”

“Like the dead, but you wouldn’t know it by how I feel in the morning.”

“You should go see someone,” Bunny said. “You really should.”

“Please don’t start, hon. You know we don’t have the money, and it’ll burn itself out when it’s good and ready. Viruses always do.”

Bunny made a noise, but she knew when to change the subject. “So did Barb give you hours for the rest of the week?”

“Yeah, I’ll work tomorrow and Saturday. Dominga has to have her uterus scraped.”

Both women shuddered.

“Remember when I had those fibroids done?” Bunny said. “Jesus, I couldn’t stand up straight for two weeks.”

Anita shook her head. Bunny’s female problems were legendary. By contrast, when Anita had had her hysterectomy she’d hardly been down at all; a couple of days, and that was it except for a weird, hollow feeling inside, like her other organs were dangling in the wide open space where her uterus had been. She had a high tolerance for pain, though; she always had.

“She should ask for Darvocet,” Bunny was saying. “That way at least she’ll have a little fun.”

“No kidding.”

Bunny shook her head. “Well, good luck to her.”

“Yeah. So anyway, Barb gave me her shift.”

“Lucky you,” Bunny said. “You’re a hard worker, Nita, that’s for sure.”

“Have to be. I’ve got kids to feed.”

“Again.”

Anita sighed heavily. “Yeah. Again.”

“How long are her and Crystal staying?” Bunny asked.

“Doreen? I don’t know. She’s going to need a lot more hours at the hospital before she can pay rent again, I’ll tell you that. There’s this cute little apartment she’s got her eye on over there in Sawyer on Thirteenth, that new complex, but right now she doesn’t even have enough for the first and last, never mind the security deposit.”

“It’ll happen, though.”

“Yeah. She’s talking to some people at the community college this afternoon. She’s thinking she might want to be a dental hygienist if she can get financial aid.”

“Her grades weren’t all that good,” Bunny said. Vinny, on the other hand, had been an excellent student.

“Yeah, well, they don’t go strictly on grades,” Anita said. “They include personality and drive and all. Doreen’s real motivated.”

“Well, sure,” Bunny allowed.

“I think it might be a good deal for her,” Anita said. “People are always going to have dirty teeth. Dental hygienists and hairstylists are never out of work, you know? Hair’s going to keep on growing, and teeth are going to keep on rotting.”

“Yeah. So how’s Bob doing? He still on the wagon?”

“Yup. Something’s working on him, though. He’s gone an awful lot, and he won’t tell me a damned thing. He’s got cuts all over his hands, and yesterday he smashed his thumb with something.”

“Maybe he’s going freelance; maybe he’s doing auto repair at people’s houses. Maybe he’s going to surprise you with a new car.”

Anita gave her a look:
Yeah, right
. “Anyway, we don’t have any more damned money around, that’s for sure. I can’t even buy bread until next Monday.”

Bunny tsked sympathetically. “You need a little something to tide you over? We’ve got a few extra dollars right now.”

“Nah, thanks, hon, I’m exaggerating. I can afford bread. Crystal sure loves her cinnamon toast in the morning.”

“She doing okay without Danny and all?” Danny had been convicted and sentenced to twenty months in prison; they’d sent him down to the correctional institution in Salem a couple of weeks ago.

“Oh, I guess,” Anita said. “Of course she doesn’t understand it, poor angel. We’re just telling her Daddy’s had to go away for a while to a camp. She thinks he’s at Vacation Bible School.”

Both of them chuckled. Kids.

Joelle brought over their food. The tourist family was getting ready to leave, and it looked to Anita like the husband’s mood had continued to darken. He slapped down cash at the register and kept on going, leaving the family to catch up. The wife and kids followed him in a tight bunch. Bob never did that. Whatever else you could say about him, he never showed disrespect toward her or the kids, never humiliated them in public or tried to make himself bigger at their expense. She wished she knew what the hell was going on with him. His unwavering sobriety, much as she’d longed for it, was unnerving. She was proud of him, but it wasn’t normal. Plus sometimes she caught him looking at her funny, like he’d seen a ghost. She didn’t think he had a woman on the side. That wouldn’t be like him. Then again, he didn’t want to have sex with her that often these days, and when they did, he’d stop partway through and say he had to use the bathroom. Who had to use the bathroom in the middle of having sex? He’d go down the hall in the dark, and then he’d come back in the dark, and from what she could see, he seemed okay. She’d say,
Better?
And he’d say,
Yeah
, and then it was right back to business. It happened like that every time. She asked him once if he thought he might have a problem with his prostate or whatever, but he just said,
Leave it alone, Nita
, and she had.

The other thing she’d noticed lately was that Warren Bigelow had stopped calling. He and Bob always talked two or three times a week, and they had from the time Warren moved out of town years ago, but now, nothing. Anita had asked Bob about it, whether Warren was in jail or out of work or something, but Bob just said they’d been talking at work lately because Warren could use the phone at his job for free. Anita didn’t buy it, though. Warren was always a stickler for the rules and wouldn’t gab on company time; plus, she couldn’t imagine any business allowing its employees to use the long-distance phone line for free. Maybe something was wrong with Warren’s wife, Sheryl; she’d had a scare with a lump in her breast just last year. They’d told her it was benign, but maybe they’d been wrong and it had come back. That happened sometimes. You couldn’t always trust the doctors. You could be dying, probably, and the doctors wouldn’t tell you squat.

Bunny tucked into her clam strips. “Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked Anita.

“What? Yeah.”

“You were just sitting there.”

“Oh.”

“Look, just let me make you an appointment at the clinic—”

Anita shook her head stubbornly.

Bunny held up her hands in defeat. “When you end up in the hospital with pneumonia or something, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Anita smiled a faint smile. “Doesn’t sound half bad. Someone else does all the cooking and cleaning and laundry, and you get to just lay there. It sounds like a vacation.”

Bunny shot her a skeptical look. Anita suddenly teared up. “Do you want to know the real reason why I didn’t answer your phone call this morning? I fell asleep, right there in room nine on someone else’s dirty sheets. Bob is never home, Doreen cries all the time, and no one has enough time for Crystal. I’m tired. I’m just so goddamned tired,” Anita said, and then she started to cry.

Bunny jumped up and circled the table to put her arm around Anita’s heavy shoulders. “Aw, hon, don’t. You need some rest, is all. Do you want me to talk to Bob for you? He could help out more, you know he could.”

She squatted at Anita’s side, and her knees went off like gunshots.

“Ow,” Anita said, laughing and crying at the same time. She and Bunny, it always seemed to come down to the two of them. How many crises had they weathered, one of them being the strong one, the other breaking down, and then switching so they could each have a good cry? Bunny’s knees always cracked, and Anita always winced, and then one or the other of them found a Kleenex or a length of toilet paper to mop up with, and life went on. And inevitably, when they looked back on it all from a distance of weeks or years, it hadn’t really been so bad, not really. Bob’s drinking, Hack’s infidelities, Bunny’s female problems, the kids. Life went on even when it had looked like there was no clear path through it; somehow they always found a way to the other side. This too would pass, and she would look back from the safety of five or ten years and forget what exactly it was that had been so bad: the fatigue, the worry, the way they all needed her to take care of them even when she was too tired to take care of herself.