Lone Stars

by Justin Deabler

But this was too much, Lacy thought, and pressed her foot on the gas. The rows of CANDLELIGHT INN on the bill had seared her brain. She needed answers. She would summon her best Loretta Lynn and carry Julian through the inn like a woman whose man would not be taken. She’d set him on a plush chair, tell him to look for shapes in the crystal chandelier above, and approach the tuxedoed concierge. He’d be slick, hair slicked like the rat enabler he was, and feign ignorance when Lacy asked if he’d seen the man in the picture she took from her wallet. When you do see him, Lacy would reply and point at Julian, tell him you’re taking that boy’s college money as you deliver that champagne.

  Lacy was startled from her planning by a sign for the exit a mile away. She looked at the feeder road and, with a wrenching sense of déjà vu, knew exactly where they were. It was a part of 59 just before the loop that Aaron and Lacy joked about when they went downtown. There was a megachurch, followed by a strip club, then another church and strip club all in a row, a jarring ode to the city that would not zone. “Sin-Repent-Repeat,” Aaron named it one day when they were taking baby Julian to his first Oilers game, and they chanted it every time they passed by even after Julian started talking. In this wasteland, the butt of their private joke, Lacy noticed for the first time a gray billboard for the Candlelight Inn with an arrow pointing to the exit.

  It was easy to find and nothing like she pictured. The block was full of potholes and strewn with trash. Lacy parked down the street and scrunched low in her seat. When she peered out the window, it wasn’t a romantic inn she saw but a fleabag motel. Gray shingles, black with mold in spots, a slide-open cashier’s window with security bars, and a pink neon VACANCY sign flashing above. The place looked empty except for a scrawny woman in cutoffs struggling with the door of an ice machine in the parking lot.

  Why had she imagined chandeliers? To gild the sordidness? Because of the enormous balance on the MasterCard—built up over years, it now seemed, blown in a dump like this—or was it something deeper and more messed up about her? A black man emerged from the motel and berated the woman in cutoffs, who skittered into a room. Lacy hadn’t thought of the motel man as black. He didn’t sound black on the phone. She winced, thinking of her mother—how she spoke of people in generalizations, especially Mexicans, and how Lacy had to teach her own child to think critically. From some pocket of her mind floated the memory of a black man in Aaron’s company in Vietnam—Williams, she thought, but she never met him—and his pretty fiancé, who passed Aaron’s address through her dorm room door years ago.

  “This isn’t the grocery store,” Julian observed behind her.

  “No.” Lacy sat up and turned the ignition. “We’re going a different way today.” She scolded herself brutally as she got back on the highway. She had endangered her son, lost track of the one soul who was never out of her mind, not for a minute since he was born. But there he sat in the back seat, a sponge soaking up the air of vice, prop to some vague revenge fantasy of hers. “Jules,” she said, “name the five kingdoms of life.” The whole drive back she quizzed him on biology, amping up her voice with praise and speeding like a NASCAR veteran.

  When they reached the main entrance to their suburb, Julian craned his neck to see. It was marked by a wooden welcome pillar emerging from a man-made turquoise lake, with the community’s logo of trees and deer and the motto beneath: ROYALWOOD—A LIVABLE FOREST.

  “Home sweet home,” Julian sang.

  Lacy’s eyes welled up. It was three o’clock. She couldn’t go home. There was something toxic inside her that she couldn’t say to Bonnie or the motel guy but also couldn’t keep inside without imploding. Up the block she saw the stone spires of St. Martha’s, the prettiest church in Royalwood and the only building in the suburb that looked remotely royal.

  “Just one more errand,” she said and turned into the church parking lot.

  It was dim and smelled of incense when Lacy and Julian entered. She smiled at an old woman in the lobby and asked, softly in her ear, if it was a good time for a confession-type thing. The woman furrowed her brow, trying to place Lacy, and said Lacy should take her time while she and Julian had a tour of the organ, and maybe he could guess the number of pipes in it.

  “OK,” Julian said after getting the nod from Lacy. “Is there candy if I get it right?” he asked as the woman led him into the sanctuary. “My mom teaches me. I’m pretty smart.”

  Lacy followed them in. She approached the carved wooden box at the far end, a cross between a phone booth and retro time machine. She drew back a maroon curtain and sat down inside. She waited. She thought of a rosary she’d found as a girl, and felt afresh a guilt she had carried with her since that time—a sense that she’d harmed the foreman on her dad’s farm, Xavier, got him deported without meaning to. She wondered if her marriage was some cosmic payback for that sin, or some sin of her mother’s, who turned away her family when a man came to their door. A shadow flickered across the grate in the booth. She waited for something to happen.

  There came an irritable sigh and a deep voice: “My child?”

  “Yes?” Lacy whispered.

  “Do you seek forgiveness for your sins?”

  She knew some words to say from TV confessions, but her gut told her honesty was the best policy. “I need someone to talk to. Someone to listen.”

  “About what, daughter?”

  It was the priest’s warm tone, or the rush she got at his fatherly diminutives, and though she wasn’t sure she could even speak the words, Lacy opened her mouth and out they tumbled: “Someone’s been calling our house but won’t talk. I found a credit card bill of my husband’s. I think he’s having an affair. Not for the first time, or maybe one for a long time, I don’t know. I think he lost his job again. We’re in debt. He’s lying to me, about all of it.” She squeezed her eyes shut to keep from crying.

  “You are being tested as Job was.”

  “I’m so ashamed,” Lacy mumbled at the grate.

  “Does your husband come to services with you?”

  “Services?”

  “Here at the church.”

  “No,” Lacy said. “We don’t—No, he doesn’t.”

  “You let him stray? We must bring him back.”

  “OK.” Lacy didn’t know how they got there, or what to say.

  “If he has sinned he will need his flock around him, to guide him.”

  “But. What about me?”

  “You,” the priest replied, “play the biggest role in his salvation.”

  “I don’t mean about his—He betrayed me and our marriage and son. Am I supposed to keep sleeping next to him?” She could hear her voice rising. “Living with him? Just forgive and forget, and he’ll keep doing whatever he wants?”

  “You don’t think of dissolving the union, surely. You have a son? Think of him. A broken home that will shape his character for life?”

  “Yes,” Lacy said haltingly, “but if it weren’t for Julian I—It’s for him. Partly. He needs a stable home where there isn’t—”

  “A stable home has a mother and father. You’re a wife and mother. These are the roles God has chosen for you, and the challenges He presents for a reason.”

  “But.” Lacy pressed her hands against the sides of the booth. “That doesn’t make sense. It’s not fair.”

  “You came to speak to God. The Almighty speaks to you through me. Trust in His plan. I hear the kindness in your voice and know God loves you. Think of this when you go home today and see your husband. Ask yourself: where will you ever find a greater love than His?”

  * * *

  On the drive home Lacy talked a mile a minute. She told Julian how he charmed the old lady at the church. He was so polite, the woman reported to Lacy when they met back in the lobby, and could you believe after he guessed within ten the number of pipes—a record!—and she offered him a candy, Julian said, “No, thank you, ma’am, the organ was enough of a treat.”

  “Butterscotch is gross,” Julian announced tensely from the bac
k seat. “What about the grocery store?” he asked as they turned onto their block.

  “Tomorrow.” She parked in the driveway. “You want pizza tonight?”

  His face lit up with cautious wonder. “But. It’s not—Saturday?”

  “Pizza tonight—if. Nap time now. One hour. No books, no phone.”

  “OK,” he said. “I just have to check my messages first.”

  Inside Julian shuffled to his room. She stood in the foyer, surveying the three-bedroom two-bath owned by Aaron and Lacy Warner as tenants in common. She plopped on the couch and shut her eyes, so tired of seeing. Defiantly she seized on a new thought, a true memory of Aaron from years ago. It was Halloween night, after the second miscarriage, and he said they didn’t need trick-or-treaters knocking, so he took her to the Shepherd Drive-In for a sci-fi double feature, and bought popcorn and held her hand through Close Encounters and The Andromeda Strain. For a few hours she lost herself in the pull of stories, with Aaron by her side. And maybe the priest scared her that afternoon, she thought, maybe fear had made her stupid, but what if it wasn’t just delusions that kept her with Aaron for this long? He knew how to care for her in her darkest hour, a care he never learned from his own parents. She had seen it. The moment she spotted him in the crowd at UT? The one person to show up for her graduation? She had no rhyme or reason for it, knew he’d never be consistent one day to the next. But there was good in him to root for, wasn’t there? Worth working at, for everybody’s sake?

  She sat up straight on the couch. She needed something, Bonnie’s gum or a stiff drink. Soon Aaron would return from wherever he went. She didn’t know how to look at the beautiful stranger she once felt so lucky to marry. She flipped on the TV. It was local news, a city councilman screaming about Reagan and amnesty and illegals coming out of the woodwork, all of them criminals and rapists. Quietly Lacy started to cry. About how cruel people were, and about the many things she didn’t know. Like when her mom crossed over into Texas, or how, or what she dreamed she’d find. Or her best friend’s views on Mexicans, unknown to her until lunch that day. It felt so unkind, she wanted to go out in the street and scream No! to the sky. But who was she? A mom in the middle-of-nowhere suburbs. Wasn’t her first duty to her child? To raise him, not fix the world? What if they never moved here, she thought, what if St. John’s gave faculty kids free tuition and they never left the city and things were different? Lacy and Aaron had promised each other once, the day they married, never to bring a child into the world only to leave him alone. And here she sat crying, imagining terrible new solitary futures.

  “Are you sad?” she heard a whisper. Julian stood timidly in the hallway, peering into the living room with his toy phone cradled in his arms.

  “I’m OK!” Lacy replied, too loud, wiping her eyes. “Are you sad, Jules? What do you do when you’re sad?”

  “I call my mommy.” He watched her. “You should call your mommy.”

  “My mommy is hard to reach.”

  “Call me. Brrring-brrring!” Julian crossed the room and handed her the red receiver.

  “Hello, Lacy Warner. Who is this?”

  “It’s Julian. Why are you sad?”

  She watched him, her greatest creation and the love of her life. She remembered the moment she saw him in the hospital, shrieking and wet and alive. A shot of absolution and pure joy, as strong as a drug. “Well.” Lacy felt a tear crawl down her cheek. And without a sense of where she was headed, she broke Miss Bonnie’s Cardinal Rule of Writing and said, “Well, Jules, it’s about your daddy.”

  5

  The Dragon’s Egg

  There were few events Aaron loathed more than the Saturday each fall when he carted his family to the Texas Renaissance Festival. It had the awful inevitability of tax day mingled with the quiet embarrassment, since he turned forty, of a prostate exam. Every year around mid-September the Warner house trilled with terrible British accents as Lacy and Julian mentally prepared for the outing, swapping “cheerio”s and “pass the sowlt”s and the occasional random “g’day, mate.” Aaron remained mute to these provocations. “Speak English,” he would say when he hit his limit, “no, American English,” until his wife and son stopped bothering him altogether and treated him like the third wheel and driver on their Renaissance date.

  But this year was different. The day arrived and Aaron felt good. When he steered the family minivan out of Royalwood, not a thing could spoil his mood. Not the accents, or Lacy’s big peasant blouse, not the loud plan of attack she and Julian were brainstorming over a preordered map of the festival grounds. None of it could drag him down because this year he had Crystal on the brain.

  It didn’t strike Aaron as ironic, while he drove, that the route to the festival was the same one he took to see his girlfriend. If that’s what Crystal was. Mistress, side piece—he didn’t talk about her to anyone, so he’d never put her into words. Aaron pretended he was heading to her place as they passed the Hot Biscuit Diner and other familiar sites on 99, and the pretending made him smile. He knew a point would come when he had to turn the van toward the festival, while his heart would keep fluttering up I-45 to her. But he trusted in the image of Crystal at the fridge in zebra panties to keep him at attention the whole day through.

  “And what would you like to see?” Lacy asked. She had stopped gabbing with Julian in the back seat and turned to face Aaron. “At the RenFest?”

  “Y’all are the experts,” he replied. “Don’t want to mess up the plans.”

  “We have plenty of time,” she said with a soft hint of resignation. She patted his hand on the gearshift. “So?”

  Aaron nodded. Sometimes his wife touched him and it felt like a hand reaching from a crypt or raw meat. He never winced or pulled away, just nodded, and it usually helped. There was a deep-dish pizza Aaron ate at the festival every year that he hadn’t found anywhere else, despite some looking. “Lunch,” he said. “When do y’all want to eat?”

  Lacy sighed. “Twelve. One. I don’t know.” She shut her eyes and conjured an epic silence, as though the day was pre-ruined courtesy of Aaron. “The court jesters!” she cried, and whirled around to the back seat. “We forgot the comedy show.”

  “Omigod,” Julian chirped in his girliest tweenage voice. “This changes everything.”

  Aaron nodded at the road ahead.

  * * *

  The festival grounds always impressed Aaron. Gray stucco walls with muscular turrets, a real-looking drawbridge out front, the pine-scented acres inside done up like an old village with dirt paths and thatched-roof cottages—it was truly something to look at. And for a moment as he neared the entrance, the majesty of its construction distracted Aaron from the loser freaks they were about to encounter in droves.

  “This way!” Lacy cried, and the Warners plunged into the dense human river flowing through the grounds. It was the usual mix. Grown-up drama club rejects decked out in costume, kids in black with pierced noses and mascara, leering for maximum effect as they passed, a few Asian tourists taking pictures. Through the moving bodies Aaron monitored Julian going in and out of sight ahead of him. On the drive over Lacy instructed them to watch for her Wonder Woman hand fan if they lost visual contact, and Aaron saw it shoot up over the crowd and gesture at the sign of a cottage, THY KINGDOM’S CLAY.

  He followed Julian into the dim cottage. It was packed with fairies, gnomes, and other ceramic doodads, and a crystal ball in the middle where Aaron saw his distorted reflection come and go. Lacy was ogling something in a display case by the counter. Right away Aaron knew the drill. The festival had shows and food, but it was really a shopping mall in the woods, and every year the same Lacy who brought a Ziploc of coupons to Safeway would splurge on a big-ticket item—a giant bubble wand or the dulcimer she strummed once at Christmas. But no purchase could ever be consummated without the husband-wife dance first. Oh, she couldn’t possibly buy it, she would say for the whole shop to hear, until Aaron insisted she had to and he was going to buy it for her, wh
ich she always refused just sharply enough to remind Aaron he wasn’t much of a contributor to their household, before she bought it herself.

  “A work of art,” Lacy whispered to Julian, pointing at the case. “Can you take that one out?” she asked the shopkeeper.

  “What’re you looking at?” Aaron asked, coming up behind them.

  “The dragon’s egg,” Julian said in a hushed voice.

  The shopkeeper laid down a purple velvet cloth and set the sculpture on the counter. It was a dark blue-green ceramic egg the size of a football. At one end the shell was cracked, and a terra cotta dragon’s tail and hind leg were pushing out of it, emerging into the world in scaly, taloned glory. Lacy ran her fingertips along the shell and turned the price tag. She flinched. “No,” she murmured, “lovely, but no.” She shook her head and said loudly in the shopkeeper’s direction, “I wish, but there’s just—no—way!”

  Julian let out a sigh of support. Aaron knew his cue. But the sunny new Aaron—the one with Crystal on his mind and proverbial fingers—decided it was time for a new move in their money politics.

  “Nice egg,” he said, and said no more.

  Lacy watched him. Aaron nodded vaguely at it. She waited; he nodded.

  “Y’all come back anytime,” said the shopkeeper, bringing the silent standoff to a close. “We’re open till eight.”

  Lacy didn’t look at Aaron as she went out the door. And something changed in her browsing after that. The rest of the morning, when she and Julian would have normally plunged into one cottage after another, Lacy glanced absently from the path and barely touched the wares. She didn’t stick her hands in the Merlin and Arthur puppets or tickle the wind chimes into song. By the time they finished their initial loop and reached the food stalls, Lacy seemed preoccupied and restless.

  “Over there!” Aaron seized the moment and pointed at an open table and chairs. “Grab those. Let me guess: turkey leg for mom, chicken fingers for Jules?”