I stopped her then, while I still could.
“What are you doing?” I asked. Anna snuck out from the comforter to rest her head on my stomach and look up at me. “It’s what I do,” she said. “You know, to make amends.”
She was not embarrassed to say this.
“That’s what you do with Jon?”
She nodded.
“God,” I said. “Just finish.”
Jacq was waiting at the airfield outside Alliance the next evening. She was in the gravel parking lot, lying on the hood of the old truck she drove, an F-250 that came with the ranch when she bought it. She adopted that truck like an orphaned child. It suited her.
We bounced onto the bench seat and swung out on the highway to reach full speed, the windows down all the way, seatbelts flapping loud in the gale, tires gripping over the patched pavement. We smiled out over the land. Jacq looked different in Alliance, on our ranch, than she did in any city. She wore jeans and a loose flannel shirt with nothing underneath. I preferred her this way. She rolled her sleeves up. There was paint on her knuckles and dirt under her nails. She tied pigtails so that the rubber band ties snuck out under her straw hat. I saw inside her shirt as she drove, her small breasts swaying, bouncing with the rhythm the road gave them. Her chest pocked with moles, tanned deep and reddish in the big, rusty, Western sunset.
(Lorna Chaplin)
Lorna Chaplin flashed her cleavage over the orange Formica counter when she rang up his total. Aaron was buying a microwavable Rueben and a Diet Pepsi. She worked at a filling station near the interstate in Ralston and had dark freckles around her neck. She wore low-rise stonewashed jeans without a belt. When Aaron looked at her midriff he noticed a pink scar across her navel. She said, “My eyes are up here, honey.”
He came back the next night to ask her out to the burger and gyro place down the road.
She lived in a small white house not far from the filling station. It had been her parents’ house, the place she grew up in. All the old furnishings were still there, worn sofas, porcelain knickknacks on the wall. There were small wooden cups Lorna’s father made in his basement workshop when he was alive. Lorna’s eyes pinched nearly closed when she smiled. It was a nice smile, one that made Aaron think she’d been very pretty in high school.
Aaron liked talking to Lorna about her life. She got nostalgic and teary, muttered “son of a bitch” through dry nicotine lips.
She told him how most of her life was documented in the public record, in court cases and various judgments levied against her, in smarmy newspaper articles. There was a string of charges that ended with a conviction for transporting a minor across state lines — a fifteen-year-old boy listed in the record as N.S. And that’s what she called the boy too, when she told Aaron about him, even though N.S. would be close to thirty by then, a man off living somewhere, with a family to take care of, more than likely. “I was pregnant by him when they picked us up,” Lorna admitted. “But I don’t have children of my own.”
Violate the Leaves
1
I found my mom fidgeting with her uniform in front of the bedroom mirror. The sand-dappled camo tee shirt that bit her armpits it was so tight. The black mascara, the no lipstick. Her hair coiled in a bun to fit under the squarish khaki hat. Her rucksack tied up tight and made to balance next to the closet door. It was early. She noticed me standing in the doorway and kept dressing. She stared into her eyes in the mirror and must have wondered what we were all wondering about, what the next year would bring. She sat to pull her boots on and started with the laces. “Go eat breakfast,” she told me, “if you have to be up so early.”
Downstairs my father was frying eggs. “What’s the deal, Oscar?” he asked. I shook my head, turned away from him. I worried the waistband of my pajamas above my bellybutton. He picked me up and sat me on the counter. “It’s just us now,” he said. “Are we going to be okay?”
Later, I put on my brown suit, the new one from Sears. I’d thrown a fit in the store when my father suggested that some slacks with suspenders would be good enough for the party. I didn’t want slacks with suspenders. I wanted to be as perfect as my mom was. I wanted to look neat and sleek and formal. I wanted a uniform.
2
The relatives drove in from different places. They’d left early in the morning, some of them the afternoon before, and were made lazy by their travels. They leaned on porch railings and sat sighing on the front steps. The smell of them as they lined up for photographs with my mom under the big oak tree in the yard. The Chicago cousins, all girls, announced themselves with sugary perfumes, like a magazine in the mailbox, and the flurry of teasing that burst out in their cutting city manners. Their hair was done up in curls if older, brushed down straight if nearer my age. And the billows of cigarette smoke, the hiked-up Wranglers of my uncles who stood away from the commotion to mumble gossip. I was eight years old and couldn’t really talk to any of these men. They were what remained of my father’s family, all of them bachelors or divorced, journeymen machinery workers in Des Moines. They poked boot tips at the roots of milkweed and tried to remember where the barn used to be, the gate to the hogs, the chicken hutch, the corrugated steel quonset where machinery had been held when this was still a family farm, the farm they grew up on, before all but what the house sat on was sold. They pointed to the oak tree where my Chicago cousins played on their cell phones, and debated about which ancestor it was who planted that tree, a red oak, no, a white oak, back when this land was settled.
There was vanilla ice cream with fresh strawberries after the bratwurst and burgers. There were sopapillas.
Grandpa Amos brought me a goldfish in a bowl. The fish was orange but shined when it spun in its water. After lunch I took the fish to my bedroom and refused to come downstairs.
“Come see your mother,” Grandpa Amos said. He pounded a hand against the stairwell to make the walls thunder. There was no chance I’d come down after that.
I tried to get the goldfish to look at me but it wouldn’t. It swam to the bottom and sucked on the green rocks there. Confused and overhot from the car ride. In the back of the bowl I saw my reflection. A blurrier, darker version of myself. Black circles under my eyes.
I wondered where Grandpa Amos bought the goldfish. It was a long drive from Cleveland to where we lived. We lived somewhat close to Des Moines. There would have been plenty of pet shops along the way.
The fish came from Indiana, I decided.
3
I stayed in my bedroom when it was time for her to leave. I didn’t want to cry in front of my cousins from Chicago. I didn’t want to cry in front of my mom.
4
I’d helped her pack that week. There were charms I stuck in her rucksack, thinking she wouldn’t notice how I sneaked them there. The plastic cowboy that was my best toy. The poem about Santa dying in a sleigh wreck that I wrote for her during the second-grade holiday activities program, on green construction paper shaped like an evergreen tree. When she wasn’t looking I wormed my Saint Christopher medallion deep into the rucksack, under her army clothes, under the magazines and manuals, to keep her safe when she was over there.
From outside the house I heard her calling. “Come to the window, mijo! I want to see you!”
The whole family waited under the oak tree. She was in her fatigues, less neat now, hair in her face, her face red. She was in the middle of the cousins from Chicago, who twisted their feet in the dusty yard.
“Come! This is the last time I’m telling you!”