The Next Time You See Me

by Holly Goddard Jones

  Chapter Thirty-One

  1.

  Sam Austen’s Dodge Ram stopped at a red light, then pulled out to the right without signaling. Wyatt did the same.

  “I got two boxfuls of boys’ baby clothes, all of it in good condition. I’ve also got a crib with a good mattress and all the bedding, a stroller, and some other odds and ends. I’ll sell it all for a hundred dollars, but I can negotiate on just the furniture, too.”

  “Sounds like a great deal, listeners. Amanda, are you sure you’ll never need that stuff again?”

  “Lord, I hope not!”

  Wyatt had always liked the Swap Meet. He never called in and bought anything, and he’d sure as heck never tried selling, though it had crossed his mind a few times that he might fetch a few dollars for his mother’s old serving ware, the stuff that had always seemed too impractical to him to actually use: the jade mixing bowl set, the sterling coffee urn, the crystal punch bowl with wispy little cups that hung from it on crystal hooks. He liked hearing what people wanted, what they were trying to get rid of. He liked imagining the dramas of their lives. Occasionally some desperate soul called in offering his television set or VCR, or something random and of little value such as a used vacuum cleaner, and you could tell in his voice that he needed cash, any he could get his hands on. These calls inspired in Wyatt a coarse curiosity. Maybe they were about to get turned out of their house, he’d think, and he’d feel more content with the home he was driving to. Maybe they were addicted to drugs or drink, and he’d send up a little prayer of gratitude that he’d never taken to an addiction himself, not even cigarettes.

  He knew, in the way that everyone at Price knew, that Sam still lived with his father and mother at their farm out on 68–80 heading toward Hopkinsville. Russell Austen was a magistrate, and he was a district manager for Valu-Ville, the regional chain of grocery stores, so the house was practically a mansion by local standards: built new in the eighties, two stories, a kind of hybrid in style between a German timber frame house and a horse barn. When Sam turned left going out of the factory, Wyatt knew he wasn’t going home—or not yet, at least. Wyatt, too, signaled left and followed him, not bothering to fall back and try for inconspicuousness. His only object was to keep Sam’s truck in his sights, and the consequences beyond that did not concern him. He had wondered since leaving home today if he could trust this sudden steadiness, this acute sense of purpose that had fallen on him after Johnny Burke’s phone call. If what had happened that night after Nancy’s proved anything, it was that Wyatt didn’t know himself, that maybe no man knew himself, and so the emotions of a moment were fragile, shifty, untrustworthy things. You could only ride them as long as they let you.

  “Let’s get a couple more buyers on here before we wrap up for the day. Call me at 726-WRMA if there’s something you want, and who knows? Maybe one of our listeners will have it. What do you want, listeners?”

  Left. Right. Right. The truck glided through a stop sign, and Wyatt also glided, unconcerned that his path might cross with that of another unsuspecting driver, or that a police officer parked just out of sight would notice him. He was invisible. Untouchable. The truck sped up to sixty in a thirty-five, and Wyatt pressed down on his own gas. An almost sleepy calm had fallen over him. It was only four o’clock, but the sky was already getting gray, the sun low and distant and obscured by a haze of clouds. A single band of bright pink cut through them, visible in his mirrors. They were driving east now, back toward town. Sam had made a circle.

  “It’s me again, Spencer. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.”

  “Go ahead, Mrs. Miller. You never know.”

  “Well, I’ve been looking for a long time for a baby doll like I had as a little girl. My sister and I both had one, and we lost them when our daddy moved us to Kentucky in 1935. I’ve always missed that baby doll. It was a Kewpie doll with a ceramic head and a soft body, looked like it was wearing onesie pajamas. It had a hood on and a long tassel coming off the top, like a sleep cap. I have been looking for a baby doll like that all my life.”

  “Our regular listeners will know that Mrs. Miller has been calling in to Swap Meet for—how long is it?”

  “Probably ten years.”

  “Ten years! So if you know of a doll like that Kewpie, call in. I’ll take up a collection to pay for it if I have to.”

  “It’s all I can think about now that my sister’s passed. I’d really like to have that baby doll.”

  The Ram braked suddenly and whipped into the parking lot of an Advance Auto. Wyatt turned in, too, shifted to neutral, and set the key to “Accessories” so that the radio could still run. He’d heard Mrs. Miller many times, and he thought that she sounded like a good person. He sometimes went to the flea market on weekends—it was something to do—and he always looked at the dolls, hoping to see the Kewpie with the pajamas and the sleep cap, wishing that he could be the person to call in one day and tell her he’d found it, that he was making it a gift to her.

  “I’ve never got over the loss of that doll. I miss it every day.”

  He waited, not wanting to emerge before Sam did. Finally, the door on the Ram opened and Sam stepped out, looking furious at first and then, recognizing Wyatt, perplexed. Finally, something else settled on his face. He was trying for amusement, for the same shit-eating grin he usually wore when he was teasing Wyatt, but there was a flicker of something else. Uneasiness. Perhaps even fear. Wyatt felt a surge of pleasure. He shut the radio off, pocketed his keys, and exited his truck cab. The lot was quiet, not secluded. There were two other cars, lights on in the building.

  “Tubs,” Sam said. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  2.

  That night—the night that ruined everything—Wyatt had sat at the kitchen table in Ronnie’s little house, eating from his paper basket of livers and gizzards methodically with both hands; every now and then he stopped to lick his fingers, hesitated, and wiped them on a napkin instead. Ronnie had gotten strangely quiet, all of her earlier playfulness dissipated, as if Wyatt had imagined it in the first place. You brought me here, Wyatt wanted to blurt out. It was your idea.

  “I’m going to pay you back that money,” he said for the third time. Maybe she was brooding over it. Maybe she hadn’t had it to give.

  “Hon, it’s fine.” Her voice was flat. She popped a liver into her mouth and chewed, her eyes fixed on some point behind and to the left of him. He craned his neck blearily, thinking she might have turned on a television, but saw nothing. Just the paneled wall of her living room, the back of the couch. An old clock hung on the wall, its pendulum swinging jauntily.

  “Thanks for bringing me here.” He had said this already, too.

  She lit a cigarette and took a deep drag, her foot jogging a little under the table. He could feel the vibration through the soles of his shoes. “Yep. It’s no problem.”

  He finished the basket and sat back. “Well, I’ll probably regret that later.”

  “It’s good for you,” Ronnie said with what felt to Wyatt like forced cheer, like a last surge of perfunctory politeness from an otherwise rude DMV or fast-food employee, but even forced cheer was better than none at all. “Grease soaks up the alcohol.”

  He looked down at his empty container, embarrassed. He hadn’t even been hungry, really—just nervous, unsure of what to do with himself. The salt and grease roiled in his stomach. He imagined it as a shiny slick on an ocean of beer.

  Ronnie yawned pointedly, and Wyatt felt the motion of the clock’s pendulum behind him. “You said you’d had a bad night,” he said in a rush, hoping to restore that little pocket of intimacy from before. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” she said. She crooked a shoulder. “A fight, sort of.”

  “With a friend? A boyfriend?”

  “I smacked the closest thing I ever had to a boyfriend upside the head tonight.” She blurted this out with forced bravado, daring Wyatt to chastise her. But he laughed stupidly, playing along.


  “Smacked him, huh?”

  Ronnie finally met his gaze. Her eyes, so wide and round, glittered within their dark frames of mascara. “Yeah,” she said. “I did. Anyway,” she added, blinking rapidly, “we’ll probably make up. We always do.”

  Wyatt leaned forward a little, put his hand on the tabletop. It was a plump, almost feminine hand, even after all of those years he worked in the winding room, the bones delicate, the skin milky. He hated his hands, had always felt that they gave away his weakness the way some people were betrayed by blushes or nervous tics. No wonder he was pushing sixty and alone. No wonder those boys from work had known they could make a fool of him.

  “Maybe that’s not a man worth making up with,” he said, the hand beached awkwardly between them. He tweezed a plastic Fill-Up bag between his index and middle fingers, as if that had been his intention all along. “What did he do? Cheat on you?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Ronnie said.

  “Hit you? You don’t want to be with a man who hits.”

  Ronnie laughed. “Did you even hear my story? I hit him.”

  “Whoever he is, he’s a fool to piss off a beautiful woman like you,” Wyatt said in a rush. “If you were mine I’d treat you right. I’d take care of you.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Ronnie said. The corner of her mouth twisted a little.

  There was a silence. Ronnie stumped out her cigarette, and Wyatt noticed it was only half-smoked.

  “You getting tired, Wyatt? You look tired. Why don’t you let me take you home.” Her leg was jogging again, making her half-empty bottle of High Life rattle on the Formica tabletop, and Wyatt felt the first tremor of something other than shame and desperation, thinking again, You brought me here, wondering what kind of woman would invite a man home only to sneer at him, to show him to the door. What kind of woman would do that to a man on a night like this one, when she’d already witnessed his humiliation? He wondered suddenly if she was in on it, if the joke was still happening. He looked over his shoulder again, where she’d leveled so much of her gaze this night, and saw the old clock, marking off the remaining moments between them, and a picture window off to the side. Lace sheers hung down, obscuring his view of the driveway, and Wyatt imagined Sam and the rest out there waiting for him. Getting ready for one last laugh.

  “I thought you said something about me taking the couch,” Wyatt said.

  “I did. But, you know, sometimes it’s better in your own bed. More comfortable.”

  “Maybe you could show me your bed,” he said. His voice was hoarse—he hardly recognized it. It was your idea, he thought, and then he found himself saying it aloud: “It was your idea.”

  “What did you say?” The expression on her face wavered between amusement and annoyance, not committing to either.

  “Your bed,” he said. “You could show me your bed.” He added, almost wonderingly, “You brought me here,” because that was the part that got him, the part that made him want to draw his smooth, weak hand into a fist, to make at least one part of himself hard and powerful and impervious to harm. He knew she would say no. He knew, though she had invited him into her home, that he had no claim on her body, her favors. He wasn’t entitled to anything but her respect, he thought. And she owed him that. Respect, he lectured in his head, thinking of not just Ronnie but Sam, Gene, Daniel Stone, all of those guys. Thinking of Jusef, who would sometimes shove him to the side to get a pallet loaded, and Meg Stevens, glaring at him for taking a bathroom break, too young to understand the reality of a fifty-five-year-old prostate, too young to give a damn. Respect. Not just because I’ve earned it. But because you owe it. Because I’m another goddamned human being, and I need it, and it don’t cost you nothing to give it.

  “Old man,” Ronnie said, “I’m not interested.” She pulled a fresh cigarette from her pack, smiling around the filter. Lit, puffed. “I’m not even the least bit interested.”

  His face prickled with heat; it streaked across a wedge of his scalp like a grass fire. “You asked me here,” he repeated. “You drove me here.”

  “Yeah,” Ronnie says. “And now I’m asking you to go.”

  “And you’ll drive me?”

  “I would have.” She pushed back her chair and stood. “But I think it might be best now for you to just hoof it. I need my sleep.”

  Wyatt was still sitting. His fingers extended a bit and grasped more of the plastic grocery sack that the food came in; there was a crackling as he worked the bag between his fingers and thumb.

  “Wyatt,” Ronnie said. “Do you hear me? Time to go.”

  “And you can’t even give me a ride,” Wyatt said. “I live on the other side of the hill, at least a couple of miles. And you can’t even stand me long enough to get me there?”

  In the quiet that followed Wyatt could hear his own breathing, the eerie speed of it. As if there were a third person in the room. He was panting like a dog.

  “No,” she told him, her voice softening a little, becoming almost tender. Pitying. “I couldn’t stand you that long. I can’t stand you another minute.”

  He swallowed against what felt like a knife blade, and when she leaned down to ash her new cigarette, his fist closed around the plastic sack. “You shut up,” he said.

  “Get out,” she said. “I’m not kidding.”

  He squeezed the bag—it seemed to sigh, and then a little bubble within it burst like a popcorn kernel. His only thought when he felt himself moving toward her was that he would shut her up, that he wanted to know what her cruel, leering face would look like if he scared her, if he hurt her like she had hurt him. The beer and food sloshed in his belly, and his heart seemed to be rapping on his chest from the inside, protesting, but he grabbed her by the jaw and pushed her against the wall, and she managed to shriek once before he remembered the bag in his hand—it was there as if he’d known all along what he’d need it for—and then her cries became muffled, their grappling strangely quiet, so that Wyatt could hear the cartilage in her nose shifting under his palm, and what he would remember most, later, was the way the bag between her lips crackled, and then three high, sharp inhalations, and then the strangled sound of her gorge rising. Her long fake nails scrabbled against his shirt collar and sliced a painful line across the tender skin of his collarbone, and then, after a long while, the hands simply quivered against his chest, and she was sliding heavily into the floor. Then nothing.

  When he emerged from the house thirty minutes later, her body slung over his shoulder, he remembered his sudden certainty that Sam and the guys would be waiting. They weren’t, of course. No one was.

  3.

  “What are you doing?” Sam repeated.

  Wyatt rubbed his chin. He hadn’t shaved this morning, he’d forgotten to, and his whiskers rasped against his hand. “I’m just out for a drive,” he told Sam, whose hands had drawn into loose fists at his sides.

  “You’re tailing my ass, is what you’re doing. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

  Wyatt appraised him silently.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be laid up?” Sam’s eyes darted between Wyatt and the building. “That’s what I heard.”

  “I’ve had a rough week.”

  “That’s too bad,” Sam said. “Folks have been asking about you.”

  “I hear,” Wyatt said, “that you’ve been telling them all about me. That was real helpful of you.”

  Sam swallowed, looked at the Advance Auto again. He backed up a step. “I’ve got to go, Wyatt. I’ve got to meet a girl.”

  “You called me Wyatt.”

  “Well, that’s your name, isn’t it?”

  Wyatt placed his hand on the lip of his truck bed. “I thought it was Tubs.”

  “That was a joke.”

  “You like jokes,” Wyatt said. “You should have been a stand-up comedian.”

  Sam licked his lips and took a shaky breath. “You’re giving me the creeps. And this ain’t a good time for you to go around giving people
the creeps, if you know what I mean. I’m just saying.”

  Wyatt grinned. “I’m sorry, Sam, but that’s funny. I give you the creeps. I had no idea I had that power over you.”

  “You ain’t got power over shit.”

  “Maybe I don’t.” Wyatt turned, leaned over the side of his truck bed, and inspected its contents. “But I have got absolutely nothing left to lose, either. You know that?” He grasped the handle of his shovel and pulled it out, enjoying the way Sam’s lips parted at the sight of it.

  “Put that thing down.”

  Wyatt dropped it, lifted his hands. “All right, then. Fight me fair.”

  “I’m not fighting nobody.”

  The calm had seeped away, but it had not been replaced by the old cowardice, nor was Wyatt feeling exactly what he’d felt that night with Ronnie, when his loneliness and humiliation had sparked something hidden and dormant within him, a thing that might never have awakened if not for Sam Austen. It was Sam’s fault, all of it. He would never have been at Nancy’s. He would never have been left behind. He would never have met Sarah, true, but he never would have lost her, either. He never would have taken that ride with Ronnie, and he never would have hoped for more than his quiet life of observing and imagining the pleasures of others.

  “If only I had known then what I know now.”

  Sam narrowed his eyes. “And what’s that?”

  “What a chickenshit you are. Just a spoiled daddy’s boy who won’t ever get out of Roma and knows it.”

  “You want to shut up now, you fat bastard.”

  “Shut me up,” Wyatt said.

  He let him have the first swing and took it in the shoulder. It stung, and the muscle in his bicep went hot and loose, but he could tell already that Sam didn’t know what he was doing. There was no force in it. No conviction. Sam was huffing a little and bobbing in place, his hands lifted up in defense. Wyatt could smell the acrid tang of Sam’s sweat—it was sudden, ripe, rising up between them like steam from a sewer grate. Fear sweat, coming in on a wave of adrenaline. His armpits were all at once dark with it.