“It’s going to be amazing,” she said. “Aldean, you’re going to do it.”
The preacher’s wife hurried up to them with an apron in hand.
“We’ve got the Lord’s bounty of food in the kitchen,” she said, waving a hand in front of her flushed face. “And not nearly enough hands. I thought since you worked at the diner…Aldean, can we steal her?”
In the kitchen, the women talked about what a good boy Aldean was, waiting until his Pops died before moving to the city. A few of the women even patted Marydale on the back and said it was a shame about her mom dying so pretty and so young, bless her, and Marydale’s father, too, although you kind of expected it with a man like that who lived rough for his age.
“They’re with the angels now,” they all concluded with satisfied smiles. “But it’d sure have been nice to have your mother guiding you up, wouldn’t it, Miss Marydale? How many times did you win that rodeo contest?”
They all knew, but she said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, I can’t remember.”
And in some ways it felt like she really couldn’t remember, because it couldn’t really have been her. Instead she remembered the day Gulu had pulled her behind a utility box on the far corner of the grounds. They sat, huddled between the gray metal and the inner fence.
You know what day it is? Gulu had asked, lighting a hand-rolled cigarette with the last match in a battered matchbook.
Marydale had said, No. What day is it? all the while looking around for the guards who would surely catch them.
Last day for you to file an appeal on that case of yours.
What?
Don’t you know about the statute of limitations? It’s run out now. But you don’t mind, do you? ’Cause you didn’t ask for one.
My attorney said I couldn’t get one.
You can’t now.
Gulu had drawn in a deep drag of smoke, the tiny cigarette burning down to an ember. Then she had taken Marydale’s hand, turned it over to expose her wrist, and pressed the ember into her skin.
You’re one of us now, Scholar.
When the reception was finally over, the women urged Marydale to take a restaurant-sized pan of leftover tuna casserole.
“Because you don’t have nobody to look after you out on that farm,” the preacher’s wife said, which prompted another round of how beautiful Marydale’s mother had been and how sad it was that she died so young, leaving Marydale without anyone to take care of her. “But don’t keep the pan. Bring it back,” the preacher’s wife added, as though stealing baking pans was her particular MO.
“I will make that my number one priority,” Marydale said.
The women didn’t seem to hear the bitterness in her voice, and Marydale pretended it wasn’t there as she hugged them, leaning down until she was bent almost in half.
It was after dark when Marydale returned to her house. She bumped the truck door closed with her hip, the enormous casserole in her hands. It wasn’t any heavier than a tray at the Ro-Day-O, but her arms shook. She was tired. The pan smelled of hot mayonnaise and fish. And she smelled like hot mayonnaise and fish. And she had Jell-O on her sleeve. And Aldean was leaving. And the sweet, exquisite moments she had shared with Kristen were as meaningless as a shooting star, just a brief glitter that no one else saw because it existed for only the split second it took to disappear.
She looked up. Someone stood in the shadow of the porch. Marydale whistled for Lilith, who bounded out of her kennel on the side of the house, but Lilith wasn’t growling, and a moment later she was circling the porch, wagging her tail. Kristen stepped out of the shadows into the moonlight. Her dark-framed glasses stood out against her pale skin. She was wearing a suit, and her white blouse glowed. Standing at the edge of the steps with her hands clasped before her, she looked like a woman at a train station, both waiting and departing.
The pan grew heavier in Marydale’s hands. She wished she had come home with someone, maybe Lucy-Anne Beeker with her enormous breasts heaving their grief for Pops in a low-cut dress. As it was, she had a pan of flaccid bow ties. She ran her tongue over the space where her tooth had been knocked out, feeling the sharp edge. In the back of her mind, her mother said, There’s no excuse to let your looks slide.
She set the casserole on the hood of the truck, straightened, and placed one hand on her hip.
“You forget something?” Marydale called out.
Kristen hesitated. “You should have told me.”
“You should be more careful who you sleep with.” Marydale strolled toward her. It was all she could do to keep the tears out of her voice. “You just don’t know, even in these small towns.”
“I’m serious,” Kristen said. “I could have lost my job.”
Standing on the stairs, Kristen was taller than Marydale, and Marydale felt like Kristen had always been taller, although of course that wasn’t true. It just seemed like Kristen had always been farther away than she realized.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Marydale said, “unless being a lesbian is wrong, but you said that stuff doesn’t matter in Portland.”
“I’m not a lesbian. I don’t know what I am. And it matters that you’re a felon. It matters what people think. If you cared about me, you would have thought about that.”
Kristen’s voice was strained. She kept pushing at her glasses.
“I should have told you.” Marydale took a step closer so that she was standing on the step right below Kristen. They were so close she could see the fine weave of Kristen’s shirt. “Maybe I didn’t want you to know. Maybe I didn’t care if you knew. Maybe I wanted to fuck you before you found out, because I knew you’d be gone as soon as you did.”
She wanted to fall into Kristen’s arms, to tell her about Aldean leaving and the ladies in the kitchen and how tomorrow none of them would look at her. Even when they ordered, they would stare at the menu with their hands clasped in little arthritic fists.
“You want me to say you were never here? Is that what want? Okay, I’ll say it. I don’t know you. I don’t know what people said about us, but it’s all lies.” Marydale tipped her chin up.
Kristen stepped back, tripping a little on the step behind her.
“You’ve never been alone,” Marydale added.
“Of course I’ve been alone.”
“Not like I have.”
She reached up to touch Kristen’s cheek, but Kristen turned away and stepped down off the stairs. She didn’t stop until she was standing in the drive a few feet away.
“I don’t know what to do,” Kristen said. Her voice trembled, but Marydale pretended not to hear.
“Go back to court. Go back to Portland and find a lawyer boyfriend.”
Marydale didn’t look back as she let the door close behind her. She didn’t turn on any lights. In the kitchen, she stood at the sink, her hands braced against the cool enamel, staring at the dark silhouette of the oak tree outside. She heard Gulu’s voice in her head, You cry too much, Scholar, and her mother’s voice, You can be pretty or you can be lucky.
Behind her, another, gentler voice said, “Are you okay?”
“Go away.” She felt Kristen’s hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off. “You’re right. I should have told you, but you were never going to stay.”
“I talked to Douglas Grady about your case,” Kristen said.
“Douglas Grady?” Marydale tried to place the name.
“He’s the public defender.”
“Not mine.”
“No. Not yours. He said your lawyer didn’t do his job.”
“Everybody hates their public defender.”
“Douglas thinks you were innocent.”
Marydale felt very tired. “No one is innocent.”
“Do you want to tell me now?” Kristen asked.
Marydale traced the edge of the cracked enamel sink with one finger.
“What part?”
“Any of it. All of it.”
The house creaked around them. Lilith sn
uffled in her bed beneath the kitchen table.
“I was happy,” Marydale said finally, her back still to Kristen. “My parents were part of a cooperative that sold free-range beef to all the big grocery stores out in Portland.” She turned, but she couldn’t look at Kristen.
“And you were gay?” Kristen asked.
“My friend Aubrey, she was, too, I thought. She came out to me after my mother died. We were always talking about the future, how we were going to go to college together. I was going to be a counselor, and she was going to be a nurse. We’d work in the same hospital. But then she started talking about who we were going to marry, like it was this choice we were going to make together. I could have Aaron, and she’d take his cousin Pete. Or we could wait a year and marry the Grossman twins when they graduated. I said I wanted to marry her.
“She went along with it for a while. Then one night she got really serious. She told me she’d started seeing Aaron Holten. He was Ronald Holten’s nephew. They’re the biggest Holtens, the ones with all the land. She said I needed to ask out his cousin Amos or his stepbrother Marcus. I thought she was dumping me, but she thought that we’d always be together, except we’d have husbands. I said I didn’t want to sneak around behind some boy’s back. Aaron was a jerk, but Marcus was a nice guy. I didn’t want to do that to him, and I wanted her. I tried to explain that it’d be different in college. People wouldn’t care. She just said Aaron wouldn’t care. She said what we did didn’t count.” Marydale crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself tightly. “She said she’d even tell him just to prove it to me.”
“Did he care?” Kristen asked.
“He started following me.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“He said no one could find out about me and Aubrey. He said if I got close to her again, he’d kill me and he’d kill her.”
“Oh God, Marydale.”
“I begged Aubrey to leave him, but she wouldn’t, and I stayed away from them both after that. But that year at the rodeo”—Marydale stared at the wall—”he won everything, and everyone kept calling us the king and queen. They said he should dump Aubrey and go out with me. We had to ride on the float together, and I remember sitting there, waving to everyone, and I just wanted to cry. That night there was a big thunderstorm.” She could smell the lightning, the first drops of rain hitting the dust. Her heart beat faster, and an old fear rose up in her throat. “I had to get back to milk the cows. I still had two cows. I was out in the barn. I heard a truck. I got scared, and I climbed up into the loft.”
She saw Aaron: his sharp jaw, his freckles, all sandy-blond and handsome. They had sat together at the sixth-grade lunch table. The other kids had chanted Mary and Aaron sitting in a tree…
“When we were kids, Aaron said he was going to marry me.” She knew she was losing the chronology of the story. “I don’t know why I was so scared that night. I didn’t really think he’d do anything, but I hid behind the bales. I knew it was Aaron before I even saw him. He was looking for me, real systematic, like mucking a stall, getting something done just by doing it. Then he started yelling that I was a dyke and he was going to show me what a real man was. I yelled at him to stop, for someone to help, but there was no one out here. And he started climbing up the ladder to the loft, and I picked up this bale, and I threw it down near him, just to show him that I could.”
Marydale thought Kristen touched her arm, but she couldn’t feel it.
“He came up that ladder, and I was yelling at him to leave me alone, and I threw another bale at him. And I thought, ‘He’s going to kill me,’ but he wasn’t.” It was a question. It was the question. “He was just angry. I knew him when he was a kid. He wasn’t going to kill me.”
“It’s not your fault,” Kristen said quietly.
Marydale closed her eyes and saw the cinder-block walls of the penitentiary, the paint cracking with water and rust, the fence wrapped with razor coils and electrified so that it sparked on humid nights.
“I grew up ranching. You know when a calf’s breeched. You know how to tap a jar to hear if the seal is good or how hard you got to hit a log to split it. I think I knew how high he had to climb before the fall would kill him.”
Kristen tucked a lock of hair behind Marydale’s ear. “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t self-defense,” she said gently. “He cornered you in a barn in the middle of nowhere. He told you he was going to kill you.”
Marydale finally met Kristen’s gaze. She was surprised by how calm her voice sounded. “But I killed him, and when I picked up that bale I knew I was going to.”
“I know.”
“I can’t take that back.”
“I know.” Kristen wrapped her arms around her, and Marydale sank into her embrace.
“His parents split up after the trial,” Marydale said. “They sold everything to Ronald Holten. I think his mother is living with some guy in Ohio. Someone said his father started drinking. I did that to them.”
“Shh.” Kristen stroked Marydale’s hair. They stood together. Finally Kristen said, “I’d like to park my car around back. I shouldn’t be here, but I want to stay with you tonight if you’ll let me.”
Marydale woke slowly. Her face felt greasy, and her hair still smelled of church hall dinner. She rubbed her eyes. Kristen lay beside her. As if sensing her attention, Kristen stirred and blinked.
“Hello,” Kristen said. “Did you sleep?”
“Yes,” Marydale said, although her sleep had been complicated by dreams of trains and wildfires. She snuggled closer to Kristen, rolling onto her side with her back pressed against Kristen’s belly. Kristen put an arm around her.
“I wish we could stay like this forever,” Marydale said.
But the morning light came through the window, blue and cold.
Kristen didn’t say anything for a long time, but she held Marydale tightly. Finally she asked, “What was it like in prison?”
Marydale saw the high-ceilinged breezeways, the tiers of cells going up and up. Once again, she felt the strange wind that blew through the blocks despite the fact that there were no doors to the outside.
She had never told anyone about prison except Aldean. No one else had asked. Now, with Kristen’s warm body wrapped around her and Kristen stroking her arm as she held her, Marydale felt as if she could unroll the whole story like a faded carpet, and it would be okay because Kristen would understand how it was part of her and how it wasn’t. It was her entire life story, and it was just a brief interlude between Trumpet’s elegant canter and the smell of sunflowers in the garden.
“It was lighter than you’d think,” Marydale began. “There were a lot of windows. You couldn’t look out them. They were too high up, but it wasn’t a dungeon.”
“Was it hard?” Kristen asked.
Marydale tongued the gap where her tooth had been knocked out by an errant elbow. “It was hard.” She hesitated. “Especially when I first went in. There was a woman, Grace-Louise, but everyone called her Gulu. She was my daddy for a while.”
“Your daddy?”
“It made sense inside. She was straight, but she was in for a long time.”
“She was your girlfriend?”
“It wasn’t quite like that but kind of.”
Kristen hugged her closer.
“Gulu called me ‘scholar’ because I liked to read. I used to help the girls with their GEDs and their paperwork. We used to work in the laundry together, and she protected me for a while.”
Marydale rolled over so she could look at Kristen. She looked unfinished without her glasses, the skin under her eyes thin and veined with blue. And she was beautiful. You’ll break my heart, Marydale thought.
“It just is what it is,” she said.
Kristen smoothed her hand over Marydale’s hip.
“After I got out, I tried to get my parole transferred to Portland. There were too many memories here, too many people I knew, but you have to do your parole in the county where you did your cri
me. I can’t even cross the county line without permission. But you know that. You went to law school.”
“We didn’t study parole,” Kristen said.
“If I don’t get a sanction for three years, my PO has to consider transferring my parole, but there’s always a way to block it. He can say he didn’t find anyone in Portland to supervise me. He can say he thinks I’ll abscond. He didn’t want me to rent you a room.”
“He knew?” Kristen looked startled.
Marydale stroked Kristen’s hair, messy from sleep. “Everyone knows,” she said. “I’m not allowed to date women. I can date men, but being a lesbian…they say it was an exacerbating factor. If I hadn’t been gay, I wouldn’t have killed Aaron.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“I know, but it still might be true.”
Marydale moved closer, pressing her lips to Kristen’s so that Kristen would not ask any more questions. She was afraid Kristen would resist, but Kristen eased Marydale onto her back, kissing the hollow of her throat and running her hands over Marydale’s breasts, pinching her nipples and sending sparks of pleasure, like bursts of Morse code, through her body. Then quickly, as though it was something she had been wanting for a long time, Kristen slid down the bed, parted Marydale’s legs, and kissed her.
Marydale remembered the first time Gulu had touched her. Gulu had pulled her into a supply room and knocked into an oversized bag of broom heads. Damn it, Scholar. Pick these up. Even then, a new fish, a baby two months in, Marydale could tell Gulu was an actor projecting her lines toward the guard beyond the half-open door.
A second later, Gulu had shoved Marydale up against the shelves. She pushed her hand past the waistband of Marydale’s prison-issue jeans, into the dull-gray underwear that held the smell of cheap detergent and other women’s bodies. Gulu’s fingers dug into her while Marydale stared, unable to speak. Contact with another inmate was an infraction. Masturbation was an infraction. Gulu jerked her hand a few times, her thumb grinding at Marydale’s flesh.
For Good Page 9
