by Barb Johnson
“We were having problems before the DNA test,” Tina tells Dooley, as though the test is what made Gracie not his. “You knew that.” But, of course, he hadn’t known, and he wondered how anyone ever knew anything, how Tina knew, for instance, which were the end-of-the-line problems and which were the par-for-the-course problems.
“I need your keys,” he says when he’s ready to go to the mall.
“Put the car seat in your truck, Dooley. I need to go across the lake and see Mama.”
Tina’s a pretty competent woman, but driving a stick is not among her many talents, and Dooley’s truck is a standard. There’s only the one car seat, and Dooley is a little afraid of it. Tina usually puts Gracie in it and takes her out, and he’s already nervous about having to do that without the added hassle of having to uninstall the stupid seat and put it in his truck.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to put the car seat in a truck.”
“That’s just if you have airbags,” Tina points out. “You don’t have airbags.”
“Maybe I should get a car seat for my truck, then, so we don’t have to switch back and forth after I move.”
“What for?” Tina says, and Dooley begins to grasp the size of the changes ahead.
He goes out and unhitches the car seat from Tina’s car. He bought the little Chevy for Tina when Gracie was born. Cost him five hundred bucks, but he fixed it up and it rides fine now. Both vehicles are parked on the street, and the air inside them is hot and thick. By the time he gets the car seat installed in his little low-rider truck and Gracie strapped into it, they’re both sweating so much that he thinks maybe they should just have their little conversation right there and be done with it. His AC is broken, but the fan still works, and he turns it on high. The sudden blast of hot air blows Gracie’s damp black hair straight up. Her long lashes lower to protect her eyes, and a bright, even line of teeth light up her happy toddler smile. Dooley wonders how he could’ve thought he had anything to do with such perfection.
Tina comes out carrying her lunch pail of a purse, which Dooley calls the Bottomless Can of Infinite Mystery. Are the DNA papers in there? She leans in Dooley’s window and tells him that he needs to get Gracie home by two, so she can get a nap. “I don’t want her waking me up in the middle of the night because she fell asleep too early,” Tina tells Dooley in a pissed-off kind of tone, like he’s already failed to get Gracie home in time.
Dooley fiddles with the air vents.
“Dooley?”
“Two o’clock. Nap. I got it, Tina.” Dooley turns the steering wheel toward the street and pulls off.
At the mall, he leaves the truck’s fan running so it can blow on Gracie while he tries to disengage her from the car seat. The buckle had clicked shut easily enough, but getting it open is another thing altogether. Tina always makes it look easy. Because he’s tall, Dooley has to stand outside the low truck, bend his knees and lean over nearly double to reach his daughter. His hands are big, and he fumbles with the clasps while Gracie wiggles and kicks the dashboard. It takes a few tries before he finally gets the contraption undone.
“Come on, Gracie,” Dooley says, wiping his sweaty forehead on his sleeve. “Help Daddy help you.” No, he decides, he will never in a million years let her call Toby Tidwell Daddy. “Airplane!” he says, holding his hands up in the air.
Gracie raises her arms and leans toward the door so Dooley can pull her out and fly her around the parking lot.
In the food court, there’s a row of flashing, blinking machines along the back wall. Dooley holds Gracie up so she can play a game of Whack-A-Mole, which she’s better at than Dooley would’ve guessed a three-year-old would be. After a few games, they go surfing for food. Gracie chooses pizza, which she loves but still can’t pronounce. “Peace,” is what it sounds like to Dooley when Gracie points at her food of choice.
“Right on,” Dooley says, showing Gracie the peace sign.
In the middle of their meal, Dooley’s phone rings. It’s Tina.
“Did you get her shoes yet?”
“We’re still eating.”
“Goddammit, Dooley, it’s one-thirty. Don’t pull this on me today. Just skip the shoes. You’re not going to be the one who has to get up with her in the middle of the night.”
Tina hates that Dooley never hears Gracie calling from her room at night. He’s a sound sleeper, or pretends to be, an accusation that is included in the call to his cell phone. Tina’s exhausted, Dooley can tell. They both are. She says a few other things to him, and Dooley picks the olives off of his pizza while he waits for the talking to end. “Okay,” he says when it does, and he hangs up. He watches Gracie pull wads of cheese off her pizza then gnaw at them with her itty-bitty teeth. She’s too little for the moving-out speech. He’ll have to find some other way to tell her what’s what.
After lunch, Dooley takes Gracie to the self-serve shoe store where he lets her try on whatever interests her, including a pair of sparkling stiletto heels across the aisle from the children’s section. She puts her hands on a chair, steps into the twinkling shoes, and Dooley walks her around the displays before going on to more sensible selections. Finally, she chooses a pair of miniature pink high tops. Dooley and Tina have been teaching Gracie how to use Velcro, and she’s excited to be able to fasten her new shoes.
“Pink!” she says as they walk across the mall’s vast parking lot.
“PinkPinkPink,” Dooley says in time to Gracie’s quick little steps.
Dooley opens the passenger door and lets some of the heat out before he feeds Gracie into the foot well. He pats the car seat. “Giddyup now.”
Gracie squats in the foot well, messing with the Velcro on her shoes.
Dooley lifts his squirming daughter—Toby Tidwell’s daughter? Impossible—into the car seat, which seems to have worked loose from the seat belt that is meant to hold it in place. Why has Tina put up with this piece of shit for so long? Dooley puts Gracie back in the foot well and struggles to rethread the seat belt. Sweat soaks his shirt while he fumbles with the clasps of the pain-in-the-ass seat.
Half a mile from home, on Magazine Street, Dooley notices a store called Wonderful Baby in a row of old shotgun houses that have been converted into upscale boutiques. How is it that he’s never noticed it in all this time? In the shop’s window, Dooley sees what is surely the Cadillac of car seats. He turns into the crumbling brick parking lot, which runs down the side of the boutique. He’s not all that late. If he has his own car seat, he can take Gracie out more, and Tina can go visit her friends. Design for success, that’s what Dooley’s sister always tells him. No way is Toby Tidwell just going to waltz off with Dooley’s baby girl. Fuck that noise. Dooley will have the car seat all ready, and his relationship with his daughter will go on just the way it is.
He turns to Gracie, who has been playing with the slide for his guitar, smacking it against the metal clasp of the car seat. She has fallen asleep with her fingers wrapped around it. Perfect, Dooley thinks. Tina can’t yell at him about the missed nap after all. He kisses Gracie’s sweaty forehead and tugs the metal slide out of her fist so she won’t hurt herself. He rolls the windows up, leaving a couple of inches for air, then locks the doors so Gracie will be safe.
Inside Wonderful Baby, the salesladies all say that the car seat in the window is the best one on the planet. The best. And they offer to take Dooley’s order because the one in the window, the last one in the store, is bolted to a two-by-four. Dooley says he wouldn’t mind getting it loose if it means he can take it home today. And he’ll pay full price, too. He’ll show Tina that he isn’t going to just step aside. He’s Gracie’s daddy. Nothing can change that.
When Dooley bounces down the front steps of the boutique, it’s with the best car seat on the planet tucked under his arm. He rounds the corner of the building and starts into the little brick parking lot, where he sees a woman trying to break the driver’s side window of his truck. Before he can call out to her, the window shatters and a se
cond woman reaches in and opens the door. She pulls Gracie out of the car seat in what seems a single motion. How? Dooley wonders first, and then why. Why?
Within seconds of reaching his truck, a cop car and an ambulance scream into the parking lot, spewing uniformed men. The woman won’t let Dooley touch Gracie, who is limp in her arms. His daughter has been sick on her brand-new shoes. Dooley tackles the woman holding his child, worried that she will get away before the cops can catch her. The cops pull Dooley off the woman and cuff him. The other woman, the one who broke his truck’s window, hauls off and punches him in the chest. “Jackass!” she yells and then busts out crying.
Dooley screams bloody murder in the back of the hot cruiser, where they’ve hog-tied him. Gracie is taken away in the ambulance, and the cops want to know how to reach Dooley’s wife. No one will answer when Dooley asks why. On the way to the police station, the cop who isn’t driving looks over the back of his seat at Dooley. “You know how hot it was in that truck?”
“I wasn’t gone but a few minutes,” Dooley says, though he knows getting the car seat loose from its display had taken a while. “And I left the windows cracked so air could get in.”
The cop shakes his head. “Windows open, windows closed. Doesn’t make much difference in this heat. Especially in a black truck like that. Don’t you watch the news?”
Dooley remembers a story about a baby dying from heatstroke in a car earlier that summer. The mother had left her infant in the backseat while she went gambling. But she’d been gone for hours. Dooley hadn’t been gone long at all. “Gracie was sleeping,” Dooley explains. “She has to have a nap, or she wakes my wife up at night.”
“In this kind of heat, it doesn’t take but ten, fifteen minutes,” the cop goes on. He’s pretty worked up. “A baby like that gets overheated, you know what happens?” the cop asks. “Her little heart explodes, that’s what.”
Dooley feels himself float up out of his body, up to the ceiling of the cruiser. He looks down on his pathetic form where it’s hog-tied in the backseat. It’s just a body down there, he thinks with his brain, which he can’t get away from. It’s just a body.
The next day, Tina bails Dooley out of jail with a credit card she borrowed from her mother. When Tina suggested that Dooley call his sister for the money, he begged her to leave Delia out of it. “I’ll tell her myself, Tina,” he says. “Just not yet.” Dooley’s sister is crazy about Gracie. And about Dooley, too, though he guesses that’s all over now.
At the hospital where they go to sign for Gracie’s body, a social worker suggests they get some grief counseling. When they get in the car to go home, Tina has a suggestion of her own. She suggests Dooley move out. Immediately. “You did this to get back at me!” Tina yells, leaning forward and jabbing her finger into Dooley’s chest. “And now you’re going to have to live with it!” There’s something unhinged, something Dooley has never seen, in Tina’s eyes. When she finally gets to the end of the awful words, she begins to sob. She punches on Dooley’s arm like a tiny boxer at the end of a too-long workout. Dooley half wants to give her his face to beat on, but he stays curled up in the corner of the passenger seat bawling.
It turns out Tina meant what she said about Dooley moving out. The day after Gracie’s funeral, Dooley staggers up the steps just before dawn. He’s put in a long, long day on a barstool where he attempted to get some relief from the bad pictures in his mind. When he puts his key in the lock, nothing happens. Well, one thing happens. The key gets stuck, and Dooley twists it until the metal shears, leaving the business end wedged in the keyhole. Tina, who is very handy, has apparently changed the lock.
Dooley falls to his knees, leans over and hollers his confusion through the mail slot and into his dark house. “Tell me what I should do,” he yells, even though he knows Tina hates yelling.
“I’m not deaf yet,” she always says. Because of the bad-hearing gene, most of the people in Tina’s family, young and old, are somewhere on their way to being deaf, so family gatherings are loud. Outside those gatherings, Tina can’t stand the sound of a raised voice.
Dooley sits down next to the door and smacks his head on the jamb until a lamp goes on inside, and he hears the shick-shick-shick of Tina trying to light the near-empty Bic that Dooley keeps on the key rack. He sits in the dark and the mosquitoes, facing the mail slot in the door. The door groans a little when Tina sits down and leans against it. Dooley smells a cigarette.
They’ve never smoked inside, and they both quit altogether when Tina got pregnant with Gracie. That’s when she dropped out of college, too, and Dooley stopped playing with the band so he wouldn’t have to travel on the weekends. He wonders, sitting on the doorstep, not why Tina is smoking inside, but why she’s smoking at all. Isn’t it important to go on taking good care of herself? Dooley wonders why everything has to change at once.
“Tell me what I should do,” Dooley whispers through the mail slot.
“You’ve got to move on, Dooley.”
Dooley asks her how. How can he move on? Tina always has opinions.
“You’re the only one who knows for sure, Dooley,” she whispers back, a stranger.
Every time Tina exhales, smoke curls at the brass lips of the mail slot like an answer, but then a back draft sucks most of it inside, where Dooley imagines it falls apart.
“Just tell me what you think,” Dooley says, trying to get the old Tina, his bossy girl, to talk to him.
“What I think,” she says, “doesn’t have a thing to do with it anymore.” Tina’s smoky reply hangs there in the humid July air. She sounds broken, and Dooley wishes he knew something to say besides sorry. The week before, after she bailed him out of jail, she told him he was going straight to fucking hell. And then the thing about how Gracie’s death was just Dooley’s way of getting back at her. She apologized later. She said sorry. But it just about ruined Dooley for good the way something as big as what has happened to the two of them could end with the same word you’d say to a stranger you’d knocked into accidentally. He wasn’t interested in ever hearing sorry again.
“You’ve got to find some other place to go,” Tina says now. “You don’t live here anymore.”
Though her mouth is only inches away, Dooley can barely comprehend what she’s saying. There’s a buzzing in his ears, like his head is a jar of bees.
“Go to Delia’s house, Dooley,” Tina says. “She’ll take care of you.”
Dooley can’t stay at his sister’s. He can’t stay anywhere. Everywhere he goes, there’s always the look and then the whisper behind the hand, Can you imagine?
Dooley walks the half mile to his truck, which is still parked on the side of Wonderful Baby. He lets the tailgate down and crawls into the bed, where he stares at the big blank sky until the bees in his head buzz him to sleep.
Tina’s car is gone when Dooley scales the fence that surrounds what used to be his backyard. He’ll have to leave before Tina comes home because if she finds him there again, she said, she will personally shoot him. He wishes someone would shoot him, but not Tina. She doesn’t know how her life would change in an instant if she did such a thing, even if a judge says it wasn’t on purpose and gives her community service.
When he gets to the tall windows at the back of the house, he peers in. He’s hoping to catch sight of some clues as to how it is that everything he understood to be true a few weeks ago could have vanished so quickly and with so little warning. He looks with longing at his old blue recliner and the Gibson acoustic that Tina gave him last Christmas. “He’s got killer heart,” she used to tell her friends about his guitar playing. “When he sings, it just breaks me into little pieces.”
He’s sweating so hard in the moist heat that he has to sit on the back steps to rest for a minute. The bees in his head have gotten worse. They get upset easily now, and Dooley spends his days trying to keep them quiet. At this particular moment the whole hive is pulsing with sound. Dooley shakes his head, but they keep at it. He turns and lean
s just a little so he can see into his old living room. In the corner nearest the window, stuck behind a potted rubber tree, he catches sight of a single sock, a tiny yellow one with ducks around the top. The bees object and start a steady drone in A-minor. Their dark chord of disapproval makes his heart go all speedy despite the twelve-pack of beer he drank this morning in hopes of keeping it still. When the bees get as loud as they are now, it sounds like a thousand people all saying, ohhh. Not the good ohhh of understanding, not the ecstatic ohhh of sex, but the tail end of the N-ohhh! of disbelief.
Suddenly, the buzzing is drowned out by the familiar squeal of the slipping power-steering belt on Tina’s car. Dooley gets up too fast, and the beer and the heat pull his legs out from under him. He lands bony-ass first on a tree root. Once he gets upright, he skitters across the yard and hurls his lanky frame up onto the back fence, a maneuver that goes better than he expects. He lowers himself onto the deck that runs all the way around his neighbor’s pool. The noonday sun blasts off the water in a hundred tiny lights that flash at Dooley like a mob of newspaper photographers. “Why’d you do it?” the reporters all want to know.
The monster Victorian faces Magazine Street and, along with its neighbors, blocks tourists’ view of the run-down rental properties of the Irish Channel, among which is Dooley and Tina’s little rented shotgun house. Dooley has often studied the elaborate landscaping through the gaps in the wooden fence. Up close, it’s really, really nice.
He cuts down the Victorian’s side yard and walks right out to the front of the house without anyone saying boo. He goes up the house’s steps and rings the bell. Jeffrey Mathers, it says on the mailbox. Jeffrey is gone today, or maybe he’s always been gone. Maybe it’s only his name that’s here.
Dooley goes back down the alley to the deck, to the pool. He can stay here, he thinks. Just hang out by the pool and keep an eye on his old house and his former wife. Maybe Jeffrey would prefer that Dooley not hang out in his pool, but it’s not like Dooley’s stealing anything. He just needs someplace clean and uncomplicated where he can make a plan. He’ll have to move on. He knows that. He just doesn’t know how yet. Or where.
