“Yeah, but my momma was his wife.”
Chuckie turned away and gazed out at the cotton patch for several seconds. When he looked back at her, he said, “You know what, Dee Ann? You’re not making much sense.” He took another sip of beer, then pitched the can out the window. “But with all you’ve been through,” he said, starting the engine, “I don’t wonder at it.”
He laid his hand on her knee. It stayed there until twenty minutes later, when he let her out on the highway right where he’d picked her up.
Sometimes in her mind she has trouble separating all the men. It’s as if they’re revolving around her, her daddy and Chuckie and Jim Wheeler and Lou Pierce and Barry Lancaster, as if she’s sitting motionless in a hard chair, in a small room, and they’re orbiting her so fast that their faces blur into a single image which seems suspended just inches away. She smells them too: smells after-shave and cologne, male sweat and whiskey.
Lou Pierce was a man she’d been seeing around town for as long as she could remember. He had red hair and always wore a striped long-sleeved shirt and a wide tie that was usually loud-colored. You would see him crossing Loring Street, a coffee cup in one hand, his briefcase in the other. His office was directly across the street from the courthouse, where he spent much of his life — either visiting his clients in the jail, which was on the top floor, or defending those same clients downstairs in the courtroom itself.
Many years after he represented her father, Lou Pierce would find himself up on the top floor again, on the other side of the bars this time, accused of exposing himself to a twelve-year-old girl. After the story made the paper, several other women, most in their twenties or early thirties, would contact the local police and allege that he had also shown himself to them.
He showed himself to Dee Ann too, though not the same part of himself he showed to the twelve-year-old girl. He came to see her at her grandmother’s on a weekday evening sometime after the beginning of the fall semester — she knows school was in session because she remembers that the morning after Lou Pierce visited her, she had to sit beside his son Raymond in senior English.
Lou sat in the same armchair that Jim Wheeler had pulled up near the coffee table. He didn’t have his briefcase with him, but he was wearing another of those wide ties. This one, if she remembers correctly, had a pink background, with white fleurs-de-lys.
“How you making it, honey?” he said. “You been holding up all right?”
She shrugged. “Yes sir. I guess so.”
“Your daddy’s awful worried about you.” He picked up the cup of coffee her grandmother had brought him before leaving them alone. “I don’t know if you knew that or not,” he said, taking a sip of the coffee. He set the cup back down. “He mentioned you haven’t been to see him.”
He was gazing directly at her.
“No sir,” she said, “I haven’t gotten by there.”
“You know what that makes folks think, don’t you?”
She dropped her head. “No sir.”
“Makes ’em think you believe your daddy did it.”
That was the last thing he said for two or three minutes. He sat there sipping his coffee, looking around the room, almost as if he were a real estate agent sizing up the house. Just as she decided he’d said all he intended to, his voice came back at her.
“Daddies fail,” he told her. “Lordy, hoto we fail. You could ask Raymond. I doubt he’d tell the truth, though, because sons tend to be protective of their daddies, just like a good daughter protects her momma. But the truth, if you wanted to dig into it, is that I’ve failed that boy nearly every day he’s been alive. You notice he’s in the band? Hell, he can’t kick a football or hit a baseball, and that’s nobody’s fault but mine. I remember when he was this tall—” He held his hand, palm down, three feet from the floor. “—he came to me dragging this little plastic bat and said, ‘Daddy, teach me to hit a baseball.’ And you know what I told him? I told him, ‘Son, I’m defending a man that’s facing life in prison, and I got to go before the judge tomorrow morning and plead his case. You can take that bat and you can hitch a kite to it and see if the contraption won’t fly.’”
He reached across the table then and laid his hand on her knee. She tried to remember who else had done that recently, but for the moment she couldn’t recall.
When he spoke again, he kept his voice low, as if he were afraid he’d be overheard. “Dee Ann, what I’m telling you,” he said, “is I know there are a lot of things about your daddy that make you feel conflicted. There’s a lot of things he’s done that he shouldn’t have, and there’s things he should have done that he didn’t. There’s a bunch of shoulds and shouldn’ts bumping around in your head, so it’s no surprise to me that you’d get confused on this question of time.”
She’d heard people say that if they were ever guilty of a crime, they wanted Lou Pierce to defend them. Now she knew why.
But she wasn’t guilty of a crime, and she said so: “I’m not confused about time. He came when I said he did.”
As if she were a sworn witness, Lou Pierce began, gently, regretfully, to ask her a series of questions. Did she really think her daddy was stupid enough to take out a life insurance policy on her mother and then kill her? If he aimed to leave the country with his girlfriend, would he send the girl first and then kill Dee Ann’s momma and try to claim the money? Did she know that her daddy intended to put the money in a savings account for her?
Did she know that her daddy and his girlfriend had broken up, that the girl had left the country chasing some young South American who, her daddy had admitted, probably sold her drugs?
When he saw that she wasn’t going to answer any of the questions, Lou Pierce looked down at the floor. “Honey,” he said softly, “did you ever ask yourself why your daddy left you and your momma?”
That was one question she was willing and able to answer. “He did it because he didn’t love us.”
When he looked at her again, his eyes were wet — and she hadn’t learned yet that wet eyes tell the most effective lies. “He loved y’all,” Lou Pierce said. “But your momma, who was a wonderful lady — angel, she wouldn’t give your daddy a physical life. I guarantee you he wishes to God he hadn’t needed one, but a man’s not made that way… and even though it embarrasses me, I guess I ought to add that I’m speaking from personal experience.”
At the age of thirty-eight, Dee Ann has acquired a wealth of experience, but the phrase personal experience is one she almost never uses. She’s noticed men are a lot quicker to employ it than women are. Maybe it’s because men think their experiences are somehow more personal than everybody else’s. Or maybe it’s because they take everything personally.
“My own personal experience,” Chuckie told Cynthia the other day at the dinner table, after she’d finished ninth in the voting for one of eight positions on the cheerleading squad, “has been that getting elected cheerleader’s nothing more than a popularity contest, and I wouldn’t let not getting elected worry me for two seconds.”
Dee Ann couldn’t help it. “When in the world,” she said, “did you have a personal experience with a cheerleader election?”
He laid his fork down. They stared at one another across a bowl of spaghetti. Cynthia, who can detect a developing storm front as well as any meteorologist, wiped her mouth on her napkin, stood up, and said, “Excuse me.”
Chuckie kept his mouth shut until she’d left the room. “I voted in cheerleader elections.”
“What was personal about that experience?”