Lone Stars

by Justin Deabler

  “I see. With a high balance?” she asked tremulously. “The other one? Like, three-digit balance?” She waited. “Four-digit? Or. Five?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Lacy laughed. “It wasn’t that long ago your company wouldn’t even let me on a credit card of my own, remember that? Women?” She brushed away the beginnings of a tear with her knuckles. “Now I’m on one I didn’t even know I had, how about that?”

  “Technically you’re not.”

  “But.” Lacy felt her head spinning. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Mrs. Warner, when I’ve had a hard day and really need to talk, I go right past my friends, right to the source, and talk to God. And when I pray to my Lord Savior Jesus Christ, things never seem as bad as they—”

  Lacy hung up. Immediately she started dialing Aaron’s office, but she paused before the last digit. A freeze set over her. She stepped out of time, numb to everything but a pain in her chest. The beeping of the untended phone drew her back to the kitchen. She returned the handset to the cradle. She made her way to Julian’s room in a daze and stopped in the doorway. “You may live here, Belvedere,” he said into his phone, “but you work for me.” She knocked. Julian turned, his dark eyebrows arched at the interruption. “Are we doing math?” he asked.

  “No.” She put on a smile. “Today’s special. Free play all morning.”

  “OK. I have calls to make.” He turned back to his phone, but then abruptly he stood up and came to the doorway. “All morning?”

  “All morning!” Lacy pulled the door shut.

  She went to the garage, where Aaron spent hours lifting weights. He had a bench and secondhand dumbbells he used sometimes, but mostly he put on tiny nylon shorts—that even for a man of his fitness made Lacy shake her head—and did deadlifts. It clanged and shook the floor when a red-faced Aaron hoisted the bar to his chest, then overhead, and threw it down savagely on the concrete. Lacy popped out some evenings, after eight or nine impacts, to see him finish his set and drop his lifting gloves in a cardboard box of workout gear. He would look at her when she joined him. “It’s not every man,” he said once, breathing hard and giving her a deadly earnest stare. “Not every man can get that up.”

  Lacy headed straight to the box now and pulled out his gloves, bottles of protein powder, a notebook with GOALS written in Aaron’s square script on the cover. She flipped through the journal, past clusters of weights and reps, and felt crazy. What was she looking for? Answers, her heart cried. Where was Aaron that minute? Fired? Since when? Where did he go every day? She shoved the box aside and went into the house. For hours Lacy combed through the newly foreign realms of their shared space, searching the medicine cabinet for suspicious items, nightstands, closets, every box of Aaron’s dress shoes and the pockets of every suit. She toggled between crying and refusing to, because maybe nothing was wrong. The whole time she cursed Aaron’s power to take the most real things in her life—their home and family—and make them feel unreal, as though they were incidental or imaginary.

  She was tired when she got to his dresser and paused to look at the framed picture on top. It was a photo of Aaron getting his Purple Heart at the hospital in Saigon, with crutches hidden and soldiers discreetly propping him up. He was a kid, Lacy saw now, in the picture. When they met. “HR is a dynamic profession,” he said to her the first time he changed jobs after they got married, and then said versions of it all the other times until she lost count. She plunged her hands in the drawers, through piles of white briefs and dark socks, and felt nothing strange buried within. “I give up,” she sighed. How did she do it? Marry a man who lied and hid things, like her mother. The woman she spent her whole life getting away from, yet here she was digging through drawers like when she was a girl. Or maybe it was all in her mind.

  Shutting the sock drawer, she caught sight of a paper corner sticking out from beneath Aaron’s medal case. She tugged, and up came a new MasterCard bill with Aaron’s name, a balance, over eleven thousand, and rows of purchases. Restaurants she had never heard of. A hundred here and there at Kay Jewelers. But mostly two recurring charges: cash advances every Tuesday, the day before she went grocery shopping, and every week a couple of charges for lodging at the Candlelight Inn. She shivered at the sense that her marriage wasn’t what she thought. Not the loving fairy-tale destiny from one of her books. She and Aaron were molecules that randomly brushed under the right conditions, a perfect storm of loneliness and romance and war, now left to deal with the product of their reactants.

  “Mommy?” Julian called. He stood in the doorway. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.” Lacy crossed her arms over the bill. “Cleaning.” She followed Julian’s eyes as they moved across the ransacked bedroom.

  “What about Miss Bonnie?” he said. “Isn’t it lunchtime?”

  * * *

  McNuggets, Lacy repeated in her head as she drove. Chicken McNuggets. She turned the car out of their subdivision onto Lake Houston Parkway, a long, piney cleanse of a road at the end of which lay a shopping center with Bonnie and fried food. Lacy had spent a lot of time trying not to think about them the last few months, but ever since these new McNuggets came along she experienced insane cravings for them, followed by guilt at the example she set for Julian. But on that day Lacy had other things not to think about, or talk about, or never, ever consider telling Bonnie about—unless she should tell her?

  Bonnie was her best friend, though Lacy had never said those words. The first time they met was soon after Julian’s lessons began and Lacy took him one muggy afternoon to the pool in Bonnie’s nicer subdivision, where there was real landscaping and the plastic straps on the chaise lounges weren’t broken. As they tanned beside each other—Lacy mostly covered in a sarong—Bonnie started chitchatting in her bendy bayou drawl. She was from Baton Rouge and taught English at Royalwood High, and Lacy was a teacher too, or had been before Julian was born and they moved out to the suburbs. Bonnie’s boys were older than Julian, and whenever Lacy was with Bonnie she got a hint of something maternal, like her friend saw a younger mom and it made her happy.

  Lacy confided things in Bonnie, secret stuff she never told anyone, and somehow it was OK. Within a week of their poolside conversations, she had shared the whole history of her sex life, beginning and ending with Aaron. How it stopped with the first miscarriage, like he broke her and she couldn’t be fixed with any talking or touching, and having to beg for sex after that, tactically, in the words of motherhood and not just because she wanted it. How she tried to think rationally when they lost the second baby—a natural release of an unfit embryo—and resist the lure of signs. Fears their marriage could make nothing grow. After the two strikes, they only had sex on Lacy’s birthday, she told Bonnie, the one day a year when Aaron approached her that way, pushing through it like he cleaned the storm gutters. Their efforts were brief and, following Julian, stopped for good. The irony settled on Lacy that the more Aaron starved her of sex, the bigger she got, and through all that happened—the grief, a hard pregnancy, forty unshakeable pounds—she learned to stop asking Aaron about sex and lots of other stuff.

  “Why this again?” Julian crowed from the back seat. He had been humming quietly to himself on the drive to McDonald’s—he could hum for hours, such a marvel in the car—but he suddenly started fidgeting against his big-boy car seat. “You said we were done with this thing.”

  “Sorry,” she said, “I wanted you safe and—Golden Arches, here we are!” She checked the side mirror before turning into the parking lot. She saw in her reflection what she usually did around then: the heavy cheeks and round tortoiseshell glasses, her lustrous black hair starting to thin despite the textured bob meant to hide it. She tried smiling, but it looked more like an upset-stomach face.

  The fried atmosphere enveloped her soothingly as they pushed inside. Bonnie waited at the back of the order area, cracking her nicotine gum and reading the menu with a look of focus. She had the sweet, labile face of a
girl from Dr. Seuss, and permed corn-silk hair and a willowy frame. They both wore patterned legging-and-sweatshirt sets, but Bonnie was so lean that the clothes hugged and hung just right on her—like a pretty flapper mom, not the marshmallow profile Lacy cut.

  “Hey, y’all,” Bonnie called and hurried over to hug Lacy.

  “Hi, Miss Bonnie,” Julian said with exceeding poise.

  “Do you know what you want, Julian?” Bonnie asked. “I’m buying today.”

  “Noooo,” Lacy protested. “Why?”

  “Happy Meal, please.” Julian waved goodbye. “I’m off to the bathroom.”

  “Why?” Bonnie grinned. “We’re celebrating your new job! I know what you want and I’m getting you the nine-piece and fries, no arguing. Go grab us a table, would you, hon?”

  Lacy found a booth. She slid in but quickly discovered she couldn’t be alone with her thoughts and got up. She moistened a wad of napkins and gave the table a series of increasingly intense wipe downs.

  “You OK?” Lacy heard and turned around. Bonnie stood waiting with the tray of food. “The table’s clean, but your color—it’s like you saw a ghost. I noticed as soon as you got here.”

  “I’m fine.” Lacy smiled with a dismissive shrug. She couldn’t tell Bonnie about Aaron, she decided on the spot, because what did she know for sure at that point? Nothing. “How are you?” Lacy asked. “How are things at school, since…”

  “This gum.” Bonnie tossed her purse in the booth and set down the tray. “It’s supposed to help me quit, but I’m wired. My students? Ever since last week it’s like they forgot what I’ve been teaching them all year. I said it. Again. Today. Miss Bonnie’s Cardinal Rule of Writing: do not start a sentence before you know how it ends. Same with paragraphs: don’t write the topic sentence till you know the concluding sentence. But.” She covered her face with her hands. “After what they saw.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “How could anybody know?” Bonnie pleaded, dabbing her eyes with a napkin. “The whole school, every class watching live on TV when it caught fire and fell to pieces. The space shuttle! I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Nobody did,” Lacy murmured. For months she read everything about the upcoming launch, and then the Challenger exploded and nothing made sense. She devoured every word about Christa McAuliffe when the papers named the lucky teacher joining the shuttle crew. She envied her bitterly. Lacy Warner, with a master’s in chemistry and knowledge of computing—who hauled her son down to Clear Lake for Space Camp—she was at home, but this teacher was going to space? Except that Julian still had a mom today, and the McAuliffe kids didn’t. Lacy read that NASA engineers told their superiors about the very risk that caused the explosion, but the powers that be didn’t escalate the call. And nothing made much sense.

  “Well.” Bonnie blew her nose, finishing with an angry pinch. “Between the Challenger and Reagan giving amnesty to the Mexicans, I don’t know what the world’s—They’re saying he’s gonna sign that bill! Anybody who’s been here four years can stay, just show the receipt for the inner tube you floated over on, and if says ‘1982,’ well, now you’re a citizen. I swear you can’t watch the news today without something terrible happening.”

  “The bathroom’s clean!” Julian declared as he approached the table. “Toilets flushed. Towels in dispensers. I give it a seven.”

  “That’s a better score than Applebee’s last week,” Bonnie said, “isn’t it?”

  “Ugh,” Julian recoiled at the memory. “The floor was so sticky it made noise.” He scrambled into the booth next to Lacy and opened his Happy Meal.

  “What do we say?” Lacy asked.

  “Thank you, Miss Bonnie,” he recited through a mouthful of fries.

  “Today’s about good news.” Bonnie sinuously unwrapped her fish filet, took a bite, and got a down-to-business look on her face. “You know the principal loves me. And I reminded him what a fancy new teacher he’s getting, used to work at St. John’s Episcopal downtown and so on and so forth, and he better treat her right.”

  “Thank you,” Lacy said.

  “Oh, if you only knew the old geezer you’re replacing? You tell him to find something on the periodic table and it’s like pin the tail on the donkey. Anyways, the principal’s giving you the three-year tenure contract”—Bonnie beamed—“and the district isn’t handing those out much anymore. He’ll call you later today.”

  Lacy sat back while her friend rambled on about the tenure system and health insurance plan. Her mind wandered to the first time Bonnie suggested she go back to work. It had dredged up unexpected feelings in Lacy—about not getting her PhD, taking the easy road spooning out high school science—but over time, with each of Julian’s lessons, her doubts diminished. She was the mother of a gifted child, witness to the miraculous possibility of one human to shape another. And it was teaching, after all, that made her rethink being a mom. Nervous as she was starting out at St. John’s, she saw a few girls awaken to chemistry on her watch—and then they left, and the next ones left, and she started wondering what it would be like to have a baby that was just hers. So, yes, she told Bonnie about a year after her friend broached the idea, she might go back to teaching at some point. But as Lacy dunked her third McNugget in barbecue sauce that day, thoughts of her career were dwarfed by the planetary weight of newer questions. Did she have a partner at home? Was she going back to work just to throw money down a bottomless pit named Aaron? What other future was there?

  “And that’s the whole deal,” Bonnie finished, smiling with a hint of confusion in her eyes. She waited. “Well, don’t look so happy! It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Lacy said, sitting up straight. “Sorry. I’m a little tired today.”

  Julian finished his first phase of eating and crawled under the table to Bonnie’s side. “What do we have here?” she cried and pulled him onto her lap. “You want a Pound Puppy?” Bonnie was a collector of various toy memorabilia, samples of which she hooked to her purse strap—one of many cool teacher notes she hit like a pro.

  “No, Rubik’s cube.”

  “My Rubik’s key chain? OK.” Bonnie dropped it in Julian’s greedy hands. “You got two minutes to solve that.” She studied Lacy’s face. “Don’t apologize. I get it. After five years together at home, it’s hard to say goodbye to your little Einstein. Sad. Headphones for Julian, incoming!” Bonnie flew her hands around his head and pressed them to his ears. “He may have some issues separating,” she said softly, “but he’ll be fine. Maybe he won’t, who knows?” She lowered her hands from Julian’s ears. “But there’s whole chapters of your life you haven’t seen yet, Lacy. I promise. I’ve been there. And I think—” Bonnie patted her friend’s hand and continued in a confidential tone. “It’s good for us girls to make our own money. You know?”

  “Sure.”

  “How’s Aaron?” Bonnie asked.

  “Fine. How’s Bill?”

  “Fine. Traveling, always traveling. He was home two days last week, and I said to him, ‘If you’re just the accountant, why does Shell have to send you to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia and everywhere else?’ But the job’s the job.”

  Bonnie carefully lifted a fry to her mouth without disturbing Julian. Lacy took in the whole picture—her generous friend and her son placidly turning the cube—and her heart nearly burst with love and grief at the secret she kept. “Yeah.” Lacy sighed. “The job’s the job.”

  * * *

  Lacy waved goodbye as Bonnie got in her Camry and reversed, and kept waving until her friend had pulled onto the parkway out of sight. “Come on,” she said to Julian and held his hand while they walked to a pay phone at the 7-Eleven next door. She pulled out the metal-bound yellow pages attached to the booth. “Can you be a tree?” she asked. “Put your arms up?” She set the book on Julian’s hands and flipped to Hotels, scanning with her finger until she found the one she was looking for. She scrounged in her purse for a quarter and dialed.

/>   “Candlelight Inn,” said a low scratchy voice.

  “Oh,” Lacy fumbled as though she was the one who got called. “Are, y’all open?”

  “It’s a hotel, ma’am, we’re open twenty-four hours.”

  “Yes, I guess! And if—how would I get there, going down 59?”

  “Take the Tidwell Road exit, make your first right. There’s a big sign.”

  “That’s easy! Then we’ll—I will be there soon.”

  Lacy strapped Julian in the car seat and drove, past the green medians of Royalwood and onto the highway headed south. As they passed the strip malls in Humble, she saw the Fingers Furniture where they bought their first bedroom set, when they left the apartment on Westheimer for the suburbs. Lacy always wanted a brass bed, she told Aaron, but it cost more so they went with the pine set he liked. And what did a bed matter, she thought as she paid for it, when they had a child? Who cared about saying goodbye to city life, and moving to the cookie-cutter whitest place on earth, if Aaron thought the best schools were out there? He was focused on their son, the future, and everything after would be more loving.

  It had dawned on Lacy, when lunch with Bonnie was winding down, that she might go crazy if she tried to carry on with her day as usual. So she hit the road with a destination and no plan. Had she never thought Aaron was cheating, in a five-year sex drought? Could she deny, during Julian’s subtraction lessons, that she tallied the pros and cons of their marriage, with her thumb pressed habitually on the pros? Like how she never had to pick up after Aaron, who was so tidy? Or when her skin would crawl at the St. John’s faculty parties, how Aaron taught her to make small talk without feeling fake, and laugh off the slights she was so prone to see in the words of others? No marriage was perfect, but theirs worked. They had their TV shows, and they went to the movies on Saturdays—Weird Science for her, those Police Academies for him—and laughed and repeated the best lines for days.