Moments later Courtney entered wearing a bathrobe, her hair still wet from the shower. “Do you need something, Ray?”
Ray quickly sat up, ignoring his racing heartbeat he could now feel in the most swollen parts of his face.
“Whah suh fog er ou doeeg her?!”
Putting her finger near his lips, but careful not to touch them because they were gross, Courtney whispered, “Shh. I’m going to take care of you. And then, when you’re better, you’re going to take care of me.”
“Wheow iz Mawanduh?”
“She took the kids to the grocery. Joan is asleep in the living room and I just took a shower.” She let her robe fall open a little, revealing just enough to give Ray an unwanted erection. “I’m all clean.”
“Yew canno sta hewe! I fowbed it!”
Mocking him, she leaned in close. “Do you? Do you fowbed it? Well, I don’t think you’re in a position to fowbed anything.” She whispered, “I can’t lose my house, Ray. I don’t have anywhere else to go. Besides, how are you and me supposed to raise a family together without a house?”
Ray forced his eyes open wide and tried to sound authoritative. “Listhen to muh vewy cawfuwy. We wiww wuk it owt, but yew muss go now. I’ww caw yew in a dah ow two and we’w have wunch. Go ho now!”
Courtney cackled, startling Joan from her nap in the living room. Thinking a critter might have snuck in the house—and forgetting completely that Courtney was even there—Joan climbed out of the La-Z-Boy to investigate.
Taking a step back, Courtney let her robe fall open completely. Ray was powerless. Looking away from her perfect teenage breasts would have been as impossible as looking away from a pair of perfect teenage breasts.
“Do you want to feel the baby?” she asked.
Ray shook his head. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
Ray nodded, “Yeff. Ah’m suwe.”
“I think you do,” Courtney said, placing his hand gently on her stomach, still warm and damp from the shower. With the back of her other hand, she lightly stroked her nipples and stared Ray in the eye. Slowly, Courtney moved his hand down, over her pierced navel to her freshly razor-burned pubis. Ray closed his eyes and felt his stomach float like he was in a car going too fast over a hill.
“Do you like this?”
Ray nodded.
“Well, remember it,” she said, pushing his hand away and tightly closing her robe. “Because that’s the last time you’ll see it until I have my house back.” She leaned in close and whispered, “You owe me, Ray. I don’t want to tell Miranda about us, but I will if I have to. You need to make this right. It’s what’s best for everyone.”
What else could he say? Courtney owned him, at least for now. Conceding defeat, Ray nodded. “Okay.”
He rolled over away from her and cursed himself for not running to Florida when he’d had the chance.
It was the first time Courtney had consciously used sex to get what she wanted, and she found it oddly empowering. That was so easy, she thought as she breezed down the hallway toward the kitchen. I wonder what fat girls do to get what they want?
From the door of the darkened bathroom, Joan stepped out into the hall, her eyes filled with the burden of unwanted knowledge. Distance and age prevented Joan from hearing what was said between Ray and Courtney, but there was absolutely no mistaking what had just happened. Courtney had tried to seduce him.
Joan’s broken heart went out to Ray. Even in his pained, semiconscious state, he was able to thwart the advances of an aggressive, young, naked woman.
“What a good man he is,” Joan whispered.
With Miranda out of the house, the responsibility of keeping order fell to Joan, and she did not take that responsibility lightly. She rolled a Star magazine into a baton and started toward the kitchen to literally beat the devil out of the young woman, but something stopped her. There must be a reason this harlot had come into her life so unexpectedly, and before Joan confronted her she needed to know what the girl’s purpose was. Then, in a moment of perfect clarity, she knew the answer. Ray’s “accident” in the cemetery wasn’t an accident at all. It was Jesus.
You’re right, Joan, she heard Him say. I am responsible, but don’t say anything yet. I’m going to need your help with this, but there’s a lot I still need to figure out. Just be ready and stay vigilant. You’re my champion, Joan. Remember that.
Joan nodded and crossed to the bed where Ray had slipped into a blissful Vicodin coma. The room was a mess, as usual. Miranda had always been a slob, and despite Joan’s best efforts, nothing much had changed. Mounds of clothes dotted the floor, and Joan nearly tripped over Miranda’s breast pump while reaching for a pile of towels. Noticing Ray’s bloody suit (but not Marvin’s note), she shoved the lot into a dry-cleaning bag and tossed it in the closet.
What would Miranda do without me? she thought, taking a seat on the edge of the bed and gently stroking her son-in-law’s graying hair.
“Don’t you worry about a thing, Ray. We’re working on a plan to save you, Jesus and me. That girl will be out of our lives soon enough. You just rest up. You’re going to need your strength.”
Joan leaned back and peered down the length of the house into the kitchen, where Courtney was trying to figure out how to use the cappuccino machine.
“Who in the world does that girl think she is?”
It’s a problem, Joan, but all problems have solutions.
Giving Ray’s hand a final squeeze, Joan went and lowered herself back into the La-Z-Boy and patiently waited for instruction from her Lord.
chapter twenty
The next few weeks were easier than Ray had expected due in large part to Joan’s (and Jesus’s) tireless efforts to keep Courtney out of the house. Any woman who would attempt to sexually assault an incapacitated married man must be a she-demon, and Joan was not going to sit idly by and let some she-demon destroy her family. She was a warrior and wasn’t afraid to fight. Traps were set, but Courtney proved to be a wily one. When Joan sent Courtney to run a series of errands, she immediately contacted the Board of Education to send a truancy officer to arrest the girl. Much to her disappointment, the school system had not employed a truancy officer in nearly two decades. In fact, it had taken her three calls to locate someone at the Board of Education who even knew what a truancy officer was.
“So, am I to understand that you just allow children to skip school whenever they choose?” Joan asked the insufferably pleasant woman on the other end of the phone. “Don’t you realize that your failure to educate this girl is threatening the safety of my family?”
“I understand your frustration, ma’am, but there is just no money in the budget for things like that anymore. It’s really sad. Last year we had to sell our piano to buy a photocopier. So we don’t even have music classes anymore.”
“Music classes are not going to send this child back to the fiery pit of hell.”
“Well, I reckon not.” The woman sighed. “But it’s still a shame, don’t you think? I really miss our winter musical.”
Joan hung up the phone and said a prayer for America.
Keeping Courtney away from Ray and Miranda was difficult, and since she was hired as a babysitter, keeping her away from the kids was impossible. Joan, however, was steadfast in her mission and volunteered to take on as much child care as possible. Taking care of four children isn’t easy for anyone, but for an arthritic sixty-year-old it was downright punishing. Joan’s knees had become so brittle that every other step crunched like she was walking through a forest on a late-autumn day. But, like Jesus, she accepted the pain because, like Jesus, she knew her suffering would be rewarded.
Ray, however, did not believe his pain came with a reward; his just hurt. After two days in bed, he finally made his way into the kitchen only to find his wife and girlfriend making breakfast while wearing identical pajamas he’d given them each as a gift. They were buy-one-get-one-free at Dillard’s, and Ray remembered thinking when he bought them, W
hy not? They’ll never meet each other.
Miranda thought their matching outfits was providence. “This just proves that she belongs with our family!”
Courtney, however, wore a scowl that made Ray think he probably shouldn’t eat the eggs she put in front of him. An hour later, he was at the hospital reporting for work. Since his face was still a terrifying purple mass, he was relegated to the nurses’ lounge, where he popped an abundance of pills and filled out charts. It was mind-numbing work, but he was happy to have it. In fact, the monotony kept him from thinking about how he hadn’t slept longer than an hour since face-planting in the cemetery. The added stress of having to “save” Courtney’s house and Brixton’s late-night feedings had given Ray a bout of insomnia so severe he considered believing in God just so he could pray for death. His stress was exacerbated by a puckering anxiety he felt every time Miranda called him. Is this it? He thought. Is this the call that starts, “I know everything”?
To settle his nerves, Ray began supplementing his pills with a steady intake of cough syrup with codeine, and while successful in dulling his anxiety (and everything else), it also made him constipated, which did little to improve his overall mood.
When the day finally came for Ray to permanently replace his missing teeth, he decided against it, hoping Courtney would find him so physically repellant she’d lose interest and move on to ruining someone else’s life. It was a desperate, wishful ploy, but with so little hope left in his life, Ray clung to wishes like bottles of cough syrup with codeine.
But there was another reason Ray chose not to replace his teeth. Working in the medical field, Ray had never before been treated like an idiot, and he found people’s new perception of him to be endlessly entertaining. Coworkers he’d known for years spoke slower, as if he was now incapable of following simple instructions. Women stole glances at his mouth the way men stole glances at cleavage. One guy at a gas station asked if he could bum a dip. Ray was truly fascinated by people’s assumptions, especially the ones made by his hospice patients. Bonnie Eskridge insisted he play something on his banjo, and after demanding Ray not smile at him anymore, Bernard Hale asked that he be replaced with another nurse, declaring that no educated man would “walk around looking like an ignorant Mexican.”
Ray couldn’t remember the last time he’d had so much fun. It was a welcome distraction from the nagging pile of bullshit that had become his life. He even created a persona for his toothless self, a stoic simpleton named Daryl. When not at work, Ray would entertain himself by dressing in overalls purchased at Goodwill and a John Deere cap snatched from a dead patient’s hall tree—sometimes forgoing a shirt altogether—and drive around town being Daryl.
Daryl spent his nights at the Brass Ass Saloon, where he’d shoot pool with unemployed coal miners and trumpet bumper sticker politics through a fog of Busch Light and codeine. One night on the way home, he stopped by a tent revival and begged the preacher, a charismatic charlatan in a bolo tie, to cure his dyslexia. As the preacher and his followers laid hands on Daryl, he fell to his knees and pretended to speak in tongues.
“Klaatu barada nikto!”
An elderly man quickly stood up and “translated” Ray’s tongues: “I am the Lord Jesus, and I am coming soon!”
Satisfied, Ray thanked the preacher, dropped a handful of spare change and five unopened blister packs in the collection plate, and went home.
As Daryl, people expected much less from Ray, and it was everything he never knew he’d always wanted. He felt common and anonymous, and it was the most liberating feeling of his life. Finally, he understood why the world was full of so many ambitionless morons. They were the ones who had it all figured it out. Who’s to say that going to college, getting a good job, and working yourself to death is the American dream? Ray thought. Maybe the goal is to have people think you’re stupid and leave you the fuck alone.
The worst part about being Daryl was that everyone assumed he could fix their cars. Because of his complete lack of mechanical ability and general misanthropy, Ray had never paid much attention to how many people he encountered every day who needed help with their vehicles. But when a guy who looks like Daryl says he knows nothing about cars, people assume he must be a criminal: the old lady in the Kroger’s parking lot who clutched her purse when Daryl said he didn’t have any jumper cables; the soccer mom who quickly rolled up the windows of her overheated minivan when he admitted he knew nothing about radiators; the preacher’s wife with the flat tire who dialed 911 and held her thumb over the Send button when it became obvious Daryl couldn’t operate a jack.
Ray realized it was time to get his teeth fixed after nearly getting several more knocked out for claiming Dale Earnhardt was not a hero.
“He drove into a wall. He didn’t die in combat,” Daryl said with a smile, exposing his jack-o’-lantern-like grin.
“You take that back, goddammit!” another toothless man screamed at him over the Brass A’s pool table, knocking a cup of dip spit onto the already stained felt. “He was America’s greatest athlete!”
“He wasn’t an athlete. He drove a fucking car in a circle,” Daryl argued. “Anything my grandmother can do is not a sport.”
When the guy swung a pool cue at Ray’s head, barely missing his recently healed lips, Ray sprinted out the door and never went back.
Implanting Ray’s new teeth was simple and uneventful, although they were nowhere near the same color as the rest of his teeth. They were the whitest teeth in his head. In fact, they were the whitest teeth Ray had ever seen. They were the color of light. Ray’s dentist claimed that over the next few weeks Ray’s diet and lifestyle would “naturally yellow” the teeth until they blended in with the rest of his smile. Ray was skeptical.
“How will they know when they’re the same color as the other ones?”
The condescending sixty-five-year-old smiled. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, if they start yellowing naturally, how will they know when to stop? What if they just keep yellowing until they’re the color of a banana?”
The dentist shook his head. “Because of science, son. That’s how it is now. With computers and whatnot.”
Ray had spent the last several weeks being thought of as a complete idiot, and he was tired of it, but he was also exhausted.
“Fine.” He sighed. “Whatever.”
“And,” the dentist said, laughing, “if they change too much, maybe you’ll look like one of those rappers with the gold teeth.” His face turned grave. “I can’t stand rap music. N-word this and f-word that. Black music used to be so respectful. Remember Johnny Mathis? Good stuff.”
“I don’t know any Johnny Mathis.”
“Really?” The dentist’s disappointment was practically scolding. “Do yourself a favor. Voice like an angel. And he didn’t swear at all. One of the good ones, Johnny Mathis. Anyway, if your teeth don’t change, just come back in and we’ll whiten the others to make them match. You could use a good teeth whitening anyway.”
Surprising absolutely no one, Ray’s new teeth did not naturally yellow as the dentist had promised. After repeatedly refusing to take advantage of the old man’s “once-in-alifetime deal” on teeth whitening, Ray stormed next door to a younger dentist, who explained, “The old guy probably ordered the wrong teeth on purpose so you’d buy his whitening package. He started doing that after his fourth wife sued him for divorce. I can shade these new teeth, no problem. However,” he said, looking in Ray’s mouth, “whitening wouldn’t be a completely bad idea.”
* * *
Courtney’s new schedule didn’t give her much alone time with Ray, which was not ideal, but “now is not the time to be thinking long term,” she confided to Britney. When she wasn’t working for Miranda, she was scouring her attic for anything of value she could sell on eBay. Digging through dusty boxes and Depression-era steamer trunks, Courtney ignored sentimentality and nostalgia and put her grandparents’ entire history up for sale. What had taken Marvin and Zola
five decades to build together was now being passively fought over by faceless strangers on the Internet. Courtney’s grandmother’s antique jewelry, including her wedding ring, went for $1,100. A collector of military paraphernalia from Maryland paid $450 for Marvin’s war medals (including two Purple Hearts and a Distinguished Service Medal), his field gear, and the bloodstained uniform of a North Korean soldier Marvin had killed with a hammer (the incident that had earned him the DSM). That money, combined with what she’d earned from Miranda and whatever she could squeeze out of Ray, had lowered her tax debt to just over eight thousand dollars. It might as well have been eight million. Unless Ray left Miranda soon, or a guardian angel came out of the sky and granted her three wishes, Courtney would be homeless by Christmas.
Since becoming pregnant, Courtney had gained fifteen pounds. But instead of it all going to her belly, the weight had equally distributed itself throughout her entire body, making her look like a homesick college freshman. It wasn’t surprising considering she’d been consuming somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand calories a day. Ray might not have been as available as she’d hoped, but Little Debbie was always there for her.
Her second meeting with Mr. Waxflower didn’t go much better than the first, ending abruptly when Courtney stormed out screaming she was going to sue him for being “a creepy asshole” and knocked a porcelain doll to the floor.
“Ray,” she insisted, “you have got to talk to him.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do?” he legitimately wanted to know.
“Didn’t you go to college?” she asked.
“Well, yeah.”
“So, there you go,” she said, winning the argument.
Pleased to be dealing with an adult, Mr. Waxflower patiently explained Courtney’s situation to Ray.
“The lien holder, in this case the county, has the right to auction off Miss Daye’s house and use the proceeds of said sale to pay her grandfather’s outstanding tax bill. Miss Daye will then receive the balance of the auction price—after fees, taxes, etc.—and the house will no longer be hers.”
Pretty Ugly: A Novel Page 19
