We didn’t say a word. We just smoked.
We leaned against the fence and looked down toward the house while we dragged on our cigarettes like we had all the time in the world. I imagined the circus going on in there, Abel telling everyone to settle down, Glenda going to her room to sulk, the relatives trying to decide whether to leave or stay. Clouds sailed over the house. A few seagulls circled way high up like they do when it’s going to rain.
“You know, I see that son of a bitch all the time,” Ruby said.
“Who?”
She turned and looked at me, her tweezed eyebrows riding up over her glasses. “Who the hell you think I’m talking about? Edward!”
“I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”
“He moved back to Neosho five or six years ago. Parades himself all over town. Married some mousy thing from up in St. Louis. He has two boys, teenagers.”
“You never told me that.” I gave her a little slap on the shoulder. Somewhere along the line I’d stopped caring about Edward without even noticing it. I laughed at the sheer wonder of it.
“I didn’t think you’d want to know.” Ruby sure could smoke. I turned and watched her wrap those bloodred lips around the filter and suck like her life depended on it. Her cheeks went hollow while she inhaled so long and deep you’d think she’d turn herself inside out. She added in a lower voice, almost like she was talking to herself, “I never run into him but I don’t think of that time back then. All that trouble.”
“Feels good to get out of that goddamn kitchen,” I said. The Tareyton was hitting the spot. For no reason at all, I suddenly felt cheerful. It was like old times, me and Ruby sneaking a smoke together. I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. She had an extra flap of flesh under her chin now, and jowls starting on either side of her mouth, but she was still the finest thing west of the Mississippi.
“What’s he look like?” I asked her.
She laughed her deep rattling smoker’s laugh. “Ugly as ever. Wears his pants up under his armpits. Butt’s as broad as a barn.”
We finished our cigarettes and stomped the butts out in the dirt. Ruby shoved her plaid case back in her pocket, then she grabbed my hand and crushed it in those claws of hers. “I love you to death, Toad,” she whispered in my ear.
We headed back across the yard to the house.
The two women, Abel’s sisters, were bustling around when we came inside. One got the turkey on a platter and the other made gravy. The bird smelled good. Abel set to carving. I was hungry. We loaded up our plates and tied into that food and nobody said one word about what had happened.
THAT NIGHT I was in the bathroom in my slip getting ready for bed when a little knock came on the door. We only had one bathroom for all five of us, so everybody was always fighting to get in.
“I’m almost done,” I called out, grouchy that someone was disturbing my few minutes of peace.
The door opened a crack and there was Glenda, peeping in with those eyes of hers—just like Abel’s, always wanting something. She was his little princess. He was hard on the boys, but Glenda could do no wrong, far as he was concerned. Sometimes I was almost jealous.
“Can I come in?” she said in a meek little voice.
I didn’t bother answering because I knew she’d come in no matter what. She closed the door behind her, put the toilet lid down, took a seat, and there we were, the two of us, shut in the bathroom together.
That poor thing. She was at that age where her face was breaking out. She had pimples across her forehead and chin. Those she hadn’t picked into scabs were whiteheads. She was tall and lanky like her dad. About the only thing she didn’t get from him was that damn kinky hair. Hers was straight as a stick, oily and limp. Her bangs needed cutting. She peered up through them at me like a puppy looking through a fence.
“You put your medicine on?” I asked, meaning the cream she used for her pimples.
She nodded, watching while I used a cotton ball to take my makeup off. I knew what was coming, but I let her do the asking. My feet ached. I was dead tired from cooking all day.
“Dad told me who Alice was.”
Every time I heard that name the swarm of bees started revving their motors in my chest. Thousands of tiny wings fluttered, the buzz building to a roar. I tried not to go off the deep end this time. I took out the moisturizer and started rubbing it on.
“What did he tell you?”
“She was a friend you had. Somebody you loved.”
I kept my eyes on the mirror and took my time smoothing the lotion on my face. “That’s right,” I croaked after a minute. Something had me by the throat. “It’s not something I like to talk about.”
“I’m sorry she died, Mommy.”
You could tell by her face that she really was. I wiped my hands and stroked that poor greasy hair of hers. Her part zigzagged back and forth across her skull. I wondered what Abel and the boys were doing out in the living room. Probably watching Roller Derby.
I bit my lips to keep from crying. “You’re a good girl, Glenda,” I said. “You’re my sweet baby. I’m lucky I have you.”
She beamed up at me. “Alice. I like that name.”
The word, especially in her mouth, pierced my heart. It took a minute before I could answer. “Don’t say that name, honey. It makes me too sad.”
NOBODY DID, IN all these years. I never told Glenda the truth, never ever. I wonder what she’ll think. Soon as I’m gone, the whole world will know what I did and what I lived with, how I kept that secret all to myself, nursing it every day. And if I caused that baby’s death, then so be it. I’ve asked her pardon so many times. I’ve prayed and prayed to be forgiven. I’ll have to answer for it, one way or another. More than I already have in this life.
Edward died in a rest home back there in Neosho, the very same place they put Ruby. She went crazy the last few months she was alive, had to be tied down and sedated because she was living her whole life over at the top of her lungs, unspooling everything that happened in speeches that went on day and night for more days than I care to remember. She hollered about things that were long gone and forgotten. I pray that don’t happen to me. Maybe if I write it all down I won’t have to shout it from the rooftops.
One thing I learned from this whole mess is never to forget that life can slap you in the face any time it feels like it. For no reason at all, it can say guess what and the next thing you know everything has changed, everything that you thought was true and right and forever don’t mean squat. You’ll be doing the most ordinary thing in the world, clipping a hangnail or opening a can, when bam! you’re flat on your back. The world looks different from there, a place you never expected to be, and you never see it coming. People don’t think of that while they’re making their kids’ lunch or bending over to pick up the newspaper.
I still see myself that morning when everything changed. The radiators clanking, the curtain lifting with the breeze. The rungs of the crib and the creases in the blanket covering Alice. That stirring of air from the life just taken, and me there in the room, alone now, the phantom gone, the door closed in my face.
THE RING
I’m fighting this feeling. Trying to think of a way out. An explanation. If I write it here, maybe I’ll understand, notice something I didn’t see before. But all I want to do is scribble all over the page, turn it black, tear it up into tiny pieces. No, I keep telling myself. It can’t be. But I got to do what I been doing all along. Put down one word and see what comes after it. Lay them down like bricks and hope they tell a story.
VITUS HAD BEEN making himself scarce for almost a week. He looked at me across the dining room like he never saw me before in his life. He didn’t talk, didn’t walk me back from meals, didn’t come to my room, didn’t throw me a kiss or pick a flower on his way across the courtyard.
The jitters grew in me ‘til my knees were shaking and I had to slide my feet along the floor
like I did when I first got here. I didn’t realize how much Vitus has come to mean to me until he pulled away. Oh, I knew I loved him. I knew he’d changed my life. Knew I’d never had feelings like this before. I knew all kinds of things, all the ways he’d turned everything I knew upside down. But I never knew, not really, how he’d worked himself into my flesh. How him pulling away was like jerking something out of me, something I need—a heart or a spleen. The color drained from everything like someone had pulled the plug.
Then at breakfast yesterday he passed me on the way out of the dining room and—just like that first time—dropped a wadded-up pellet in my lap.
Be careful, it said. Don’t talk to me. Not now. Wait until I say.
That note made me do exactly opposite of what he wanted. The minute I read it I was desperate to talk to him, so desperate I didn’t care what happened. Soon as breakfast was over, I laid for him like a panther. I cornered him by the elevators when he was going up to his room. “What in the world is going on?” I cried.
“Shhhh, Cora,” he hissed, looking up and down the hall. “I told you. This is dangerous. You need to wait. Let me come to you.” He caught me by the arm and tried to spin me around and push me away from him.
“You need to talk to me,” I said, loud as I pleased. I shook his hand off my elbow. “I’m not about to carry on like this. Whatever’s happening, I need to know. I don’t care what it is, I can’t live like this. This is no way to behave, considering we’re about to get married.”
The laundry room was just around the corner. He took hold of my elbow and steered me toward it. They got ten or twelve machines in there, going all the time. He dragged me inside the hot, noisy room. One of those Mexican girls was taking sheets out of the dryer. She gave us a puzzled look, but didn’t say a word, just went on with her work. Vitus hustled me into a corner.
“What’re you handling me like this for?” I jerked away from him. Tears started in my eyes. “I never seen you like this. What is wrong with you?”
Clothes thumped around in the dryers. A detergent smell hung in a cloud of steam. Vitus clenched the muscles in his jaw and looked into my face like he was trying to see right through my skull to my brain.
“Someone’s after me,” he whispered. He scanned the room like that somebody might be hiding behind the hampers of dirty laundry or the shelves lined with Clorox and Tide. “They’re checking up on me. Sticking their nose in my business.”
“Who is?”
“I don’t know.” He breathed hard like he was spooked, downright scared. His eyes narrowed. “Do you?”
“Of course I don’t! I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Are you sure, Cora?” he said in a low voice as he worked his fingers into the flesh of my upper arm.
“You let go of me, Vitus! No man has ever laid a hand on me. How dare you do that?” I was beside myself. “What’s gotten into you?”
He let go of my arm and leaned in close, searching my face. “Don’t you trust me, Cora? Do you still have your doubts? Haven’t I answered all your questions? Have you stopped loving me?”
“If you only knew how much I love you,” I said, rubbing the place he’d gripped. “I turned myself over to you. I gave you my heart. And now it sounds like you’re the one who doesn’t trust me.”
He stared at me a few more seconds, then turned and watched the girl, who was folding the sheets. When he looked at me again, he must have decided I was telling the truth, because his face had softened.
“Why would anybody do that, Vitus? You sure you aren’t imagining it?”
“Oh, no. It’s happening all right. Something’s going on that I don’t understand. It’s hard to know who you can trust.” He rubbed my arm where he’d squeezed it. “I’m so sorry, Woozy. I never want to hurt you. Will you forgive me?”
The girl started loading her cart with the folded sheets. She kept glancing at us, probably trying to make up her mind whether or not she should call security.
“I just want us to go back to being the way we were when we were courting,” I said.
“We will. Don’t worry. It will be even better once we’re living together in our own home. You’ll see. But right now we have to be very careful. Someone is working against us. Until we’re married, we have to watch our backs. Not make any mistakes. Do you understand, Cora?”
The girl finished loading the cart. She gave us one last look and pushed it out the door.
“I wish I didn’t love you so much,” I said. “I wish you didn’t make me feel like my insides are melting together. If you ever go, or if anything ever happens to you, I’ll never get over it.”
Vitus pulled me toward him. “Listen, Cora,” he whispered in my ear. “I was saving this surprise for later, but I want you to have it now. It’s something that seals the pact between us. Something that means we’re bound forever.”
He stepped back and reached into his pants pocket. “Close your eyes and open your hand. Keep them closed, now.”
I felt its weight, its coldness, when he dropped it in my hand. A shiver went through me. It felt like a dead thing, a lizard or a fish. I almost let it fall to the floor. Oh, I knew what it was. I could tell. But the coldness crept up through my arm to my shoulder. It spread across my chest. When it reached my heart a dread set in, something I couldn’t explain.
“Open your eyes!”
I looked at him first. He was beaming. I let my eyes fall to the ring lying in my hand. The band was gold, set with a square green stone the size of a Chiclet.
“What’s this for, Vitus?”
“It’s a ring, Cora. To show the world you’re mine.”
“What kind of stone is that?”
“It’s an emerald, Woozy.”
“I had a sister named that,” I said, so low he didn’t hear me.
“What are you talking about, Woozy? What’s wrong?”
“Emerald,” I said louder. “I had a sister named Emerald.”
He must have thought I’d quit my senses. “I don’t know what to say,” he stuttered. “I thought you’d like it. I thought you’d be tickled pink.”
He had reason to be flummoxed, and to tell the truth I myself didn’t know why I felt the way I did. It struck me as odd that he just pulled the ring out of his pocket, instead of handing it to me in a nice box, tied up with a pretty ribbon. More than that, I thought of my crystal, the way it felt in my hand. Alive. This stone was so cold, so still, like it was pulled up from the bottom of any icy ocean instead of dug out of the warm earth.
Inside me a faint bell started ringing, like a burglar alarm you hear far away. “Where’d you get this, Vitus?” I asked.
“Why, Cora! I’m just stunned. This ring was my mother’s. My father gave it to her. It belonged to his mother.”
He looked insulted, and hurt, too. Unless he was the best actor in the world, I was way out of line. But I had a feeling, a feeling that wouldn’t turn me loose. The picture of that gift basket riding in on the delivery man’s cart wouldn’t leave me alone.
“Did your other wife wear it? The first one? Because I don’t want no part of a dead woman’s ring.”
He gave me a hard stare, but I looked him right in the eye, didn’t move a muscle.
“You’re taking all the joy out of this, Cora. I had such a different idea of how this moment would be. But if you must know, my mother died after I was married. I’d already given my wife a wedding ring. She never wore this one. Does that satisfy you?”
I couldn’t think with all those machines running, sucking in the fresh air and blowing it out thick and hot. The old feeling seeped in—that I was making a mess of things, that just when my life was starting to turn around I was stabbing myself in the back. It’s a sickness, I told myself. A disease.
I took Vitus’s hand. “I love you. I’m a sorry old woman who’s falling apart. I don’t know whether I’m coming
or going. All this getting-married stuff is putting my head in a spin. I hate to put you through this. It’s not your fault. It’s me. I’m all mixed up.”
“I know, darling. I know. That’s just what happened to me when I brought you in here. We’re both under a lot of strain. It’s almost over, though. Things will get better.”
I still had the ring in my hand. He peeled open my fingers and took it out. “Don’t you want to put it on? Don’t you want to wear it so everyone can see?”
Hard as I tried to talk myself out of it, that ring gave me the willies. “Maybe later,” I said. “I’m too overcome right now.”
I CARRIED IT to my room and slammed the door behind me. I commenced to pacing around the room, waving my arms and muttering to myself. Yes, I was out of my mind. The thought that kept creeping into my head made me want to rip my scalp off. But I couldn’t keep it at bay. That ring was fishy, and it might not be the only thing.
“Abel,” I called. “Get your ass down here. I need your help.”
I’m finding I appreciate him better now that he’s dead. I come to rely on him for big decisions. Makes sense he’s smarter now that he’s in heaven. All his pigheadedness is gone, too.
Well, here he comes. This time his face was reflected in the sliding glass door, instead of floating up there in the curtains.
“You take that ring and you put it way down in the toe of your shoe, Toad,” he said. “Those nice pointy-toe high heels you never wear. Push it way down in there and stuff a hankie on top of it. Don’t say a thing. You watch yourself, girl. Listen to your gut. You’re skating on thin ice.”
Poof! He was gone.
Like always, I felt calmer after seeing him. My mind was peaceful, so I could ask myself questions straight out.
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