Back Roads

by Tawni O'Dell

  I finished unpacking eight boxes of Toaster Strudels, closed the freezer door, and stepped back to take a look at myself in the glass. There was nothing wrong with me. No glaring errors. But there was nothing incredibly right about me either.

  My hair wasn’t any definable color. People called it brown and strawberry blond and even auburn. Jody once told me it was the color of a pile of raked-up leaves.

  My eyes were blue but not a startling gas-flame blue like Amber’s. When I was a kid, I used to think they looked like blue construction paper when it got wet, and I used to think that was good.

  I had an okay body. I didn’t pump iron, and except for some amazing midlife crisis I never would; but heavy lifting was one of my vocations so I had strong arms and a good chest. Dad probably knew what he was doing, thinking I could have been a football player.

  Admiring my adequateness got me all fired up. I went straight from the freezer section to the pharmacy. The prescription counter had closed at eight and no one was around. I grabbed a box of condoms. The sight of it in my hand made all my concerns about Ashlee fly right out of my head. She could still have her baby teeth for all I cared.

  I stuck the box in my pants pocket. I only had fifteen minutes left on my shift. Rick wasn’t around to make me work them so I decided to go change out of my Shop Rite clothes early. I headed for the storeroom, dragging my dolly behind me, and had to pass by the produce section. I stopped in front of the bananas.

  I had practiced putting rubbers on countless bananas ever since the night with Brandy Crowe when I had unrolled one before trying to put it on. And I did try to put it on. A little thing like that wasn’t going to stop me.

  Unfortunately, Brandy didn’t try to stop me either. At the time I thought that meant she was as inexperienced as I was, but it turned out she was just stupid and horny and cruel. She told me I could go ahead and do it anyway even though the thing was barely on and so full of air it looked like a balloon some clown might twist into a wiener dog at a kid’s birthday party. I tried, and I think I achieved about a half-inch of penetration with my dick feeling nothing but inflated latex, then the rubber fell off. At that point I was willing to risk pregnancy, disease, and even death but Brandy put a stop to everything including the alternatives I suggested that couldn’t result in pregnancy. I knew right then she didn’t love me like she had been saying ever since she let me unfasten her bra. If she had loved me she would have wanted to put me out of my misery the way a tortured wife gives a cancer-racked husband a suicide dose of pills. A mercy hand job—that’s all I was looking for.

  I wasn’t going to let any of that happen again. Practice made perfect and I had some time. I eyed the bananas but grabbed a good-sized cucumber instead. My optimism was running at an all-time high.

  I put it in my pocket along with the box of rubbers, made a wide berth around the artichokes, and wandered toward the meat and seafood counters.

  We were having a sale on salmon fillets. $4.99 a pound. Jody loved salmon. Not the taste. None of us had ever eaten it. She loved the shiny silver scales.

  I remembered her when she was real little sitting in the front of the cart pointing at the bright pinkish-orange and silver layers stacked on ice chips in the display case and babbling baby talk. Mom would smile and tell her it was too rich for our blood and try and get her interested in a slab of something colorless or the trout and catfish with their eyes still in their heads. It never worked, and Mom would end up laughing and telling Jody how she hoped she would always stick to her convictions like that. How she might grow up to be a Supreme Court judge.

  I could see it now. A copy of Jody’s first decision from the bench stuck to a prison cafeteria wall with tapioca.

  Sometimes I wished Mom would get that lethal injection. She’d make a better ghost than a spectator.

  “Hi, Harley,” a female voice said.

  My heart jumped. My head was crammed full of women: Mom, Jody, Ashlee, Brandy, the cashier’s sister-in-law with her scraped-out uterus; it could have been any one of them and I wasn’t prepared.

  Callie Mercer came up beside me. She was wearing the pink shorts but not the crop top. She had on a T-shirt instructing the world to save the tigers.

  “Hi,” she said again.

  “Hi,” I said back.

  She gave me a funny look, then a smile crept onto her lips. She tilted her head and glanced at me from the corner of her eyes. “Is that a cucumber in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m sorry.” She laughed. “I had to say that. There’s a cucumber in your pocket.”

  I looked down, panicked, forgetting if I had put the rubber on it or not.

  “I found it on a shelf,” I explained in a hurry. “I was just putting it back.”

  “What else would you be doing with it?” she said.

  “Right,” I said.

  “So how are you?” she asked with a throaty hopefulness that made me think of random destinations on long, lean, gray highways.

  “Fine.”

  “I stopped up at your house last week. Did Amber tell you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wasn’t sure she would. I don’t think she likes me very much.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Did she say something to you?”

  “Let’s just say she wasn’t very hospitable. It’s not a big deal. I don’t blame her for thinking I was snooping around.”

  “Snooping around? Is that what she said?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Harley.”

  She started to reach out her hand to touch me but stopped. “It’s okay. I understand. It must be very hard to deal with people sometimes after . . .” she struggled to find the least alarming words, “after what happened.”

  “No, you’re wrong,” I answered sharply. “What happened doesn’t give us an excuse to act any way we want. It’s not an excuse for anything.”

  “Well, let’s just forget about it.”

  She stared into the display case, checking out the salmon. They probably had it once a week, sale or no sale. She probably had some remarkable marinade she would write down for me if I asked. I could smell that night’s dinner in her hair and on her hands: ginger, garlic, and brown sugar.

  Then I realized she was staring at her reflection in the glass. She studied it, confused and irritated, like she had been handed a bunch of parts and instructions in a foreign language.

  “Thanks,” I thought to tell her. “For the stuff you brought.”

  She turned back around. “Did you look through the book at all?”

  “Yeah. I checked out that Pierre Bonnard painting. ‘Earthly Paradise.’ They were supposed to be Adam and Eve, right?”

  “Right. What did you think?”

  “It was pretty accurate, I thought. Eve stretched out sleeping in the woods like she wasn’t worried about anything. Adam standing at the edge of the woods looking like he’s trying to figure out where to build a house.”

  “Why do you say that’s accurate?” She laughed.

  “I don’t know. I guess because women seem better at accepting things the way they are and dealing with shit while men are always trying to figure out ways to change things and when they can’t they get pissed.”

  She watched me like she wanted more. I searched my brain for something else I could offer her.

  “Like in the Garden of Eden,” I went on. “I always felt like, even after Eve became enlightened and realized she was naked, she would have been fine with it. Adam was the one who got embarrassed and couldn’t deal with it.”

  She smiled deeply and gave me a familiar sparkling appraisal with her dark eyes. I pictured her giving the same look to her husband and him totally missing it and giving her a dry peck on the cheek on his way out the door for his night with the boys.

  “A lot of people think that’s one of the things Bonnard was trying to show in his painting,” she said. “That Eve reveled in her natural state while Adam became awkwardly awar
e of his nakedness. He’s standing alone because his consciousness has separated him from her.”

  She paused.

  “I’d be curious to know who you think was to blame for their fall from grace: Adam or Eve?” she asked, kind of joking.

  “Both,” I said with a nod of my head. “They were both selfish.”

  “Selfish?”

  “I always felt like that’s why God wanted rid of them. Not because they broke a rule. Because they turned on each other. I bet they could have smoothed things over if they had just gone to Him and admitted they were both stupid instead of trying to blame it on each other. If He thought they loved each other, God probably would have given them a second chance instead of damning the entire human race for all eternity.”

  She was smiling at me again. I glanced down at the cucumber sticking out of my pocket.

  “So what does your husband do on his night out?”

  I asked it kind of snotty. There was a part of me that didn’t care about offending her. What would it matter? She was as much a fantasy as a lingerie model; the only difference was I could smell her and I knew where she lived.

  The question was absolutely none of my business and I half expected her to tell me but she answered me.

  “I don’t know,” she said, fanning her fingers in the air. “He has a couple friends from work he goes out with. They went through a racquetball phase a couple years ago. Then a basketball phase. I didn’t mind those so much because at least he was getting exercise. Now I think they just sit in the country club for hours on end complaining about how their wives and kids make so many demands on them and how they can’t golf at night.”

  She stopped, bit her lower lip, and spit it out like it tasted bad.

  “That didn’t sound too bitchy, did it?”

  “No,” I said.

  She put her index finger lightly on her lips. She seemed to like the taste of it better because she slipped the tip in her mouth and started lightly chewing on the nail.

  “What would you rather be doing on your night out?” I asked her. “Besides grocery shopping?”

  “Besides grocery shopping,” she said, giving me a sly smile around the finger before hooking it into an empty belt loop in her shorts. “That’s a tough one. Well, I suppose on a warm, clear night like tonight, I’d take a book and a blanket and a couple beers and go to this clearing behind my house on the other side of the railroad tracks. It’s this huge open field surrounded by trees about a mile up the hill. You feel like you’re in a completely secluded world up there. I bet tonight it’s as bright as day with that big full moon.”

  “You’d take beer?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Not a bottle of wine?”

  “I like beer.”

  “I kind of had you pegged for a wine drinker.”

  She laughed. “Somehow I don’t think that’s a compliment.”

  “Why can’t you do that?” I wondered. “Go read in the woods?”

  “I suppose I could if I lobbied hard enough. It’s just not worth it.” Her face fell and her mood with it.

  “Well,” she sighed, “I should let you put your cucumber away. By the way,” she started as she positioned her cart to leave, “what happened to your couch?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “It caught on fire.”

  “My God. You’re lucky the whole house didn’t burn down. Was someone smoking on it?”

  “Yeah. One of Amber’s friends.”

  “Thank God you were home.”

  “Yeah, thank God.”

  “Well, I’ll see you around.”

  She started to go.

  “I’m sorry about Amber,” I called after her. “I’ll have a talk with her.”

  “No.” She stopped dead in her tracks and shook her head at me. “Please don’t. It’s okay. Really.”

  I waited for the pink shorts to make a turn down the cereal aisle and went and put back the cucumber.

  I didn’t want Callie Mercer or anyone else cutting Amber slack because our family had experienced a tragedy. People were always making excuses for stupidity and a lack of basic decency. They were always looking for someone else to blame.

  Mom’s lawyer blamed Dad for his own murder. He practically came out and said he deserved it for beating us kids. He painted Mom as the ultimate martyr who sacrificed her freedom to save her children, but anyone looking at Mom sitting stunned and dry-eyed staring at her wedding ring knew even she didn’t buy it.

  The lawyer purposely left out some very important facts like Dad married Mom when she got pregnant instead of running out on her, and he worked hard every day of their married life to provide for us.

  He didn’t talk about the PHYSICAL STIMULI that shaped Dad’s world. How he didn’t like his job, but he went to it every day. How he didn’t like to shave, but Mom couldn’t stand stubble. How he didn’t like Bill Clinton, but he had to vote for him anyway. He wasn’t a monster. He was a flesh-and-blood man who couldn’t stand it if you spilled something.

  I tried explaining these things my day on the witness stand, but the judge kept telling me to stick to the questions. Even the prosecutor, whose job it was to convict Mom, wasn’t interested in making Dad look good so Mom would look worse. He didn’t care at all about the individuals involved. He latched onto the big philosophical questions, “Is it ever right to take the law into our own hands?” and “What happens to the fabric of society when we do?” I thought he was crazy trying that argument with a jury box full of people who all had gun cases in their living rooms instead of bookcases but I had forgotten the reason they did was because they loved killing, just not their own kind. The prosecutor hadn’t forgotten. He twisted his line of reasoning into a big knot of paranoia.

  Where do you draw the line? If it’s okay to shoot him for beating the kids, is it okay to shoot him for staying out too late drinking? Today it’s a wife shooting her husband for beating the kids, tomorrow it’s a stranger shooting you in your car because he doesn’t like your bumper sticker. By the time he was done, everyone in the courtroom believed freeing my mother would be signing their own death warrants.

  My good jeans and a clean blue T-shirt were waiting for me in the storeroom. I changed my clothes behind a stack of Heinz ketchup boxes, put on my cap, and transferred my box of condoms.

  Callie was already checking out when I strolled up front. I hung back and watched. She was chatting up a storm with Bud. He knew everybody, but he seemed to know her on a personal level.

  I waited until she left. I hadn’t been planning on talking to anybody on my way out, but I had to walk past all of them to get to the doors anyway. I slowed down as I neared Bud. He blew a bubble at me.

  “Ready for your big date?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Movie.”

  “That’s a good idea, Harley,” Church commented.

  I stepped up closer to Bud. I didn’t want the cashiers hearing me mention Callie and launching into the history of her reproductive organs.

  “How do you know her?” I asked him.

  “Who?” he said. “Callie Mercer? I used to work with her.”

  “She buys too much peanut butter,” Church volunteered. “I told her so. I’m not kidding.”

  “Where?” I asked Bud.

  “At theGazette . She used to work there summers when she came home from school.”

  “You used to write for the newspaper?”

  “Don’t look so amazed,” he told me, popping his gum. “Writing for it’s only slightly more impressive than being able to read it.”

  “Peanut butter’s full of fat,” Church said. “People don’t believe you when you tell them, but it’s true. Just like olives. Full of fat. People never believe me when I tell them.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  “Well, one day I was going through my clips and realized the most important story I had ever written was ‘Man Dressed in Groundhog Suit Assaulted.’ ”<
br />
  “Was that the Roebuck boy who got jumped up in Punxsy during Groundhog Days?” one of the cashiers asked.

  My attempt at being discreet hadn’t worked.

  “Up on Gobbler’s Knob, wasn’t it?” another cashier chipped in. “He was the groundhog who worked the crowd in town. The other one worked the mall, but he didn’t have the big top hat.”

  “Yep, that’s the one,” Bud said. “They caught the guys who beat him up. I still remember the quote they gave me: ‘We got that damned groundhog.’ ”

  “So you quit because you got disgusted?” I said.

  “I quit because they made me. Mandatory retirement. But I like to think I would’ve quit anyway.”

  “Why’d Callie quit?” I asked. “Because she had kids?”

  “Well, let’s see. She worked there summers during college.” He paused and brought an age-spotted hand to his chin and rubbed it thoughtfully. “And then she worked there for a couple years after she came back here to live permanently. Yeah, I guess she did stop after she got married and started having kids.”

  “Why would she want to come back here and live?” I wondered. “Doesn’t seem like she’d want to.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She seems different. That’s all.”

  “I don’t know,” Bud said. “You might be confusing different with dissatisfied.”

  Church stepped up between us. “She buys too much peanut butter.” He gaped. “She doesn’t even buy it for her kids. She buys it for herself. I’m not kidding. She told me she likes it.” He shook his head. “It’s full of fat. I told her so.”

  “If she grew up here,” I went on, ignoring Church, “she had to know what this place was all about. She had to know she’d be dissatisfied with it. Why would she stay?”

  “I’m pretty sure it was simply a case of love.”

  “For her husband?” I asked, feeling a pang of disgust at the question.

  “For her grandpa,” Bud answered me. “She came back to take care of him after he had his first heart attack. He lived for another year, then had the big one that killed him. She inherited his land and stayed on it.”