“Sad.”
“Sorry. I’ll close the window — ”
“No. No, stay here.” She tightened her grip on his back and buried her face in his shoulder. Her sudden, apparent need brought tears to his eyes.
By her head, Hugh noticed a glass skunk he’d owned for years, wobbling on the night table next to the wine glasses. Paula had given him the skunk after a weekend tryst in Galveston, nearly ten years ago, before they were married. They’d gone crabbing that Saturday, using chicken necks as bait to entice the crabs, who’d scrambled over green and purple pebbles onto blistering sand, and into Paula’s net. He’d seen the skunk in a gift shop on the Strand. It had made him laugh — its big eyes and its pompadour — and she’d bought it for him when he wasn’t looking. She surprised him with it in their beachside motel room. It danced on the bed’s headboard while they made love, a salty breeze riffling the gold curtains around their sliding-glass door, the crabs clattering in a plastic bucket in the bathtub, crammed with chipped, dirty ice.
He missed Paula only intermittently now, though he’d grieved steadily the first year she’d moved back to the Big Easy. Even then, it wasn’t Paula he missed so much as the girls, the reassuring habits they’d established together — cleaning and cooking and gardening. He supposed, now, he hadn’t loved her as much as he’d loved the notion of building a nest and settling in.
But watching the skunk wobble, holding Alice, recalling Paula’s naked body, he felt a pang. He wouldn’t want Paula back, but of all the people on the planet, only Paula knew certain things about him: the way he’d cried the night he’d found a dead bluejay in the yard, one steamy August; his delight when he’d first tasted cilantro at a picnic, just the two of them, on a baseball diamond near Rice; the way he’d laughed when he’d spotted the skunk in the gift shop. Inconsequential moments, hut if not for his memory — and Paula’s — no one could say they had occurred at all.
“Hugh?” Alice whispered.
The bag lady wailed.
He could feel his own heartbeat. And hers. Here. Now. He kissed Alice fiercely.
His best moves were his father-moves: ice cream treats in the middle of the day, an unexpected raise in the girls’ weekly allowance. Granting — or withholding — praise, depending on the girls’ achievements. Once, when Elissa had managed all As in school, his praise had been extravagant. On the other hand, the day Jane shaved the hind legs of a neighbor’s schnauzer with her mother’s electric razor — an impressive achievement, no matter how you viewed it — he thought it best to keep his pride in her ingenuity a secret.
He was his finest self with the girls. With Paula he had been defensive, protective of his time (she could always make his successes seem small — talk about withholding!). When they’d separated, and he’d accepted seeing his daughters only every few months, he hadn’t thought he’d miss much — what could happen in such a short time? But from the start he’d been stunned by the speed of their shifts. He’d drop them off in the fall, and by winter they’d be new creatures altogether. One loose tooth had turned into a gaping chasm in an aching mouth; throbbing joints had stretched into an extra half-inch of height.
Who would they be this summer?
At 9:30 Sunday morning he punched Paula’s number. It was his regular time to speak to the girls. Around dawn, Alice had asked him to take her home. He had hoped for a leisurely breakfast with her. She’d sworn she’d had a good time last night, but she had a lot to do before Monday … yes, yes, of course he could call her. Her stiffness had returned. Self-consciousness after sex, fear of daylight, something. Unable to kid her out of it, he hadn’t tried to talk her into staying.
Now, Jane was saying into the phone, “Daddy, I’m going to be in a play at school.”
“That’s great, baby. Is it a singing play?”
“No.”
“Is it a dress-up play?”
“Daddy. All plays are dress-up plays.”
“I guess so.”
Elissa had learned to play “chest.”
“Chest?”
“You know, kings and queens and pawns?”
“That’s wonderful, honey. How’d you learn?”
“I know how to play, Daddy. I just know, okay?”
“Okay, darling.”
He made no headway with Paula, and after hanging up he felt lonely. He thought of phoning Alice, but calling so quickly would make him seem desperate and pathetic. Was he desperate and pathetic? Still, how could he — or she? — deny how good the sex had been, good enough to feel rare and important?
At a Weingarten’s he bought a New York Times and some orange juice; he went home and made himself some scrambled eggs. Reagan denied the United States was fighting a war in Nicaragua. Hugh dropped the front page in disgust and picked up another section. An article in “Living Arts” said Memphis Minnie, an early blues singer “whose howling, rhythmic calls rose out of the gritty Mississippi Delta cotton fields in the 1920s,” had finally gotten a grave marker in the cemetery at New Hope Baptist Church in Walls, Mississippi, just off Highway 61. When she’d died in ‘73, the “music industry had passed her by, as had any profits from her work,” and she’d been laid in a pauper’s grave. Now, a handful of blues fans — all white — had established a memorial fund to recognize several long-forgotten Southern musicians. Hugh longed to see the Delta again, to hear the old howls. Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, if he could take the girls there?
Outside his kitchen window the kittens romped under the bushes. He heard their loud purrs. He was nearly out of cat food. Now, while he had the day free (except for grading tests, and he could tell already that most of the class had tanked), now might be a good time to check the animal shelter he’d passed last December, when he’d taken the girls to Hobby Airport. He remembered seeing it, and all week he’d been meaning to check it out, to see if it would be a good home for the kittens.
So he did the dishes, then drove out Curry Road. Porno shops, massage parlors, gun stores. Jesus, he’d always hated this part of town, the rent-by-month apartments for cut-rate merchants moving God-knows-what through the Hobby terminal. He was always depressed driving the girls out here to fly home to their mother, and the setting itself saddened him even more. The area reeked of the middle man: the buildings, bland and cheap, as temporary and indifferent as their occupants. Fast food, fast lives, instant entertainment. On the grassy median, a large brown dog lay dead, hit by a car, no doubt. Hugh turned, past a “Five-Minute Wedding Chapel” next to “Nelda’s Super-Hair.” A “Militia Supplies” shop anchored a commercial strip next to a liquor store and three cramped pawnshops. Pickups with Confederate flag stickers circled the lot.
At a gravelly intersection he saw a faded wooden sign; the words were illegible, but maybe it marked the shelter’s path. He couldn’t quite remember where it was. He turned. Sweat stung his eyes. The air smelled of pine and tar from the streets, of rust and filth and waste. He braked hard. The road had ended abruptly. Grit flooded the car, through his window. He felt the heat of the breeze like a light, persistent burn.
In a weedy field in front of him, a bulldozer bashed the roof of a car. The operator tugged the levers, raising the shovel’s arm, then brought it crashing down on the brown and white Toyota. The car lurched; glass exploded from its windshield. No one else was around.
Who was this idiot? A city worker? Why was he destroying an automobile in the middle of a sleazy neighborhood, on the hottest day of the summer? Hugh wanted to yell at him. He stuck his head out the window, and saw, in his side mirror, a bright white building behind him, shaped like a mini-Astrodome.