That was how we spent most of our nights together, watching movies. I’d quit the 7-Eleven job at that point — it was too dangerous, Del said — ironically, he said — and got a job at one of the gift stores in town, so I was home nights more. Home meaning Del’s trailer, that is, because it wasn’t long before I’d moved in with him.
We’d make dinner — something out of a box because I’m not much of a cook, I’ll admit — and I’d watch Court TV, which I love, while he did some of his homework for the business classes he was taking over at the college, balancing work and school and me. And then we’d watch a movie, usually something with a crime element like Ocean’s Eleven or Mission: Impossible or some old movie like The Sting or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or all those Godfather movies like every man I’ve ever been with. I suggested Bonnie & Clyde a couple of times, for obvious reasons, but he said it would be disadvantageous for us to see it and so we always watched something else.
“Is that all you do, sit around and watch movies?” Mama asked on the phone, more than once.
“We go out some, too,” I told her.
“Out out?” she asked, and I didn’t know quite what she meant and I told her that.
“He surprises me sometimes,” I said. “Taking me out for dinner.”
(Which was true. “Let’s go out for a surprise dinner,” he’d say sometimes, even though the surprise was always the same, that we were just going to Our Place. But that was still good because it really was our place — both literally and figuratively — and there’s romance in that.)
“He loves me,” I’d tell Mama. “He holds me close at night and tells me how much he loves me, how much he can’t live without me.”
Mama grunted. She was in South Carolina. Two hours time difference and almost a full country away, but still you could feel her disappointment like she was standing right there in the same room.
“That’s how it starts,” Mama would tell me, “ ‘I can’t live without you,’ ” mimicking the voice. “Then pretty soon, ‘I can’t live without you’ starts to turn stifling and sour and...”
Her voice trailed off. And violent, I knew she’d wanted to say.
And I knew where she was coming from, knew how her last boyfriend had treated her. I’d seen it myself, one of the reasons I finally just moved away, anywhere but there.
“I thought you were going to start a new life,” she said, a different kind of disappointment in her voice then. “You could watch the tube and drink beer anywhere. You could date a loser here if that’s all you’re doing.”
I twirled the phone cord in my hand, wanting just to be done with the conversation, but not daring to hang up yet. Not yet.
“Frugal,” Mama said, making me regret again some of the things I’d told her about him. “Frugal’s just a big word for cheap.”
“Are things gonna be different someday?” I’d asked Del one night, the two of us laying in bed, him with his back to me. I ran my fingers across his shoulder when I asked it.
“Different?” he asked.
“Different from this,” I said.
He didn’t answer at first, and so I just kept rubbing his shoulder and then let my hand sneak over and rub the top of his chest, caressing it real light, because I knew he liked that. The window was slid open and a breeze rustled the edge of those thin little curtains. Just outside stood a short streetlight, one that the trailer park had put up, and sometimes it kept me awake, shining all night, like it was aiming right for my face.
After a while, I realized Del wasn’t gonna answer at all, and I stopped rubbing his chest and turned over.
That night when I couldn’t sleep, I knew it wasn’t the streetlight at all.
For this big one, this last last one, Del roamed those art galleries in downtown Taos after work at the garage. He watched the ads for gallery openings, finding a place that stressed cash only, real snooty because you know a lot of people would have to buy that artwork on time and not pay straight out for it all at once, but those weren’t the type of people they were after. He’d looked up the address of the gallery owner, the home address, and we’d driven past that too.
I liked watching his mind work: the way he’d suddenly nod just slightly when we were walking across the plaza or down the walkway between the John Dunn Shops, like he’d seen something important. Or the way his eyes narrowed and darted as we rode throughout the neighborhood where the gallery owner lived, keeping a steady speed, not turning his head, not looking as if he was looking.
We had a nice time at the gallery opening itself, too. At least at the beginning. Delwood looked smart in his blue blazer, even though it was old enough that it had gotten a little shine. And you could see how happy he was each time he saw a red dot on one of the labels — just more money added to the take — even if he first had to ask what each of those red dots meant. I hated the gallery owner’s tone when he answered that one, as if he didn’t want Del or me there drinking those plastic cups of wine or eating the cheese. But then I thought, He’ll get his, if you know what I mean. And, of course, he did.
“I like this one,” I said in front of one of the pictures. It was a simple picture — this painting stuck in the back corner. A big stretch of blue sky and then the different colored blue of the ocean, and a mistiness to it, like the waves were kicking up spray. Two people sat on the beach, a man and a woman. They sort-of leaned into one another, watching the water, and I thought about me and Del and began to feel nostalgic for something that we’d never had. The painting didn’t have a red dot on it.
“With the money,” I whispered to Delwood. “We could come back here and buy one of them, huh? Wouldn’t that be ballsy? Wouldn’t that be ironic?”
“Louise,” he said, that tone again, telling me everything.
“I’m just saying,” I said. “Can’t you picture the two of us at the ocean like that? Maybe with the money, we could take a big trip, huh?”
“Can’t you just enjoy your wine?” he whispered, and moved on to the next picture, not looking at it really, just at the label.
“Fine,” I said after him, deciding I’d just stay there and let him finish casing out the joint, but then a couple came up behind me.
“Let’s try s on this one,” the woman whispered.
“S,” said the man. “Okay. S.” They looked at the couple on the beach, and I looked with them, wondering what they meant by “trying s.” The man wrinkled his brow, squinted his eye, scratched his chin — like Del when he’s thinking, but this man seemed to be only playing at thinking. “Sappy,” he said finally.
“Sentimental,” said the woman, quick as she could.
“Um... sugary.”
“Saccharine.”
“Okay. No fair,” said the man. “You’re just playing off my words.”
The woman smirked at him. She had a pretty face, I thought. Bright blue eyes and high cheekbones and little freckles across them. She had on a gauzy top, some sort of linen, and even though it was just a little swath of fabric, you could tell from the texture of it and the way she wore it and from her herself that it was something fine. I knew, just knew suddenly, that it had probably cost more than the money Del had stolen from the 7-Eleven the night I first met him. And I knew too that I wanted a top just like it.