“That was from Keith’s mama. Sally come after her.”
Rain had begun falling again and the wind was whipping wet leaves across the pavement. The pickup might be old, one door might be a different color and the other hanging on by a C-clamp, but the wipers swept the windshield cleanly and the engine purred like a happy kitten. Those two boded well for my new alternator.
“So how long had you been divorced from this Sally?”
Another hesitation. “Well, now, darlin’, I don’t want you to get all fussed over something that’s long done and finished with.”
“I’m not your ‘darlin’,‘ Allen. How long done and finished was it?”
“Actually, we only got it finalized about four years ago when Katie came up pregnant.”
I sat bolt upright. “Wait just a damn minute here! You saying you were still married to this Sally when you married me?” My hand slammed down hard on the dashboard. “You committed bigamy?”
“See? I knew you were going to get upset.”
“Upset?”
“Well, what was I supposed to do? You were the one so hot to get married that—”
This time it was my fist hit the dash and he gave me an apprehensive look.
“You ain’t got a knife in that handbag, have you?”
“If I did, I’d cut your lying tongue right out of your head,” I snarled. “My daddy paid you five thousand dollars not to contest the annulment and to keep your mouth shut about it and it wasn’t even a legal marriage?”
“You ain’t gonna tell him, are you?” Allen asked as he pulled in at the auto parts place. “I’d sure hate for you to get him mad at me all over again.”
I was so outraged that I jerked at the door handle a couple of times before I remembered that it was broken. Meekly, Allen got out on his side and held the door for me, but he made sure he stayed well out of my swinging range as I stomped into the store ahead of him.
“How ’bout I don’t charge you nothing for fixing your car?” he called after me.
The trouble with small-pond life is that it’s awfully hard to go anywhere without bumping into a relative. When I stalked into the store, my nephew Reese was there at the counter talking to the clerk about the merits of different floor mats.
“With winter coming on, I got to do something to keep the mud off my carpet,” he said with an inquiring look at Allen.
I swallowed my anger and introduced the two of them after Allen had told the clerk what we wanted. While the clerk went off to find an alternator that would fit my engine, they talked carpet cleaners and the care and feeding of vinyl interiors.
By the time the clerk came back and I’d handed over my credit card, Allen had convinced Reese he was the one to help him install his new stereo speakers in the door panels.
“You might want to see how he fixes his own doors before you turn him loose on yours,” I said nastily.
Allen just smiled. “Everybody knows the shoemaker’s children always go barefoot.”
When we were in the truck again and heading back to Mr. Jap’s, Allen looked over at me warily and said, “You ain’t gonna stay mad at me, are you, darlin’?”
I knew my outraged feelings didn’t really concern him. He was only worried what Daddy or some of the boys might do if I told them. Well, he could just keep on worrying.
“So who’s Katie?” I asked.
“Nobody special. Just a gal I stayed with for a coupla weeks one time when Sally threw me out.”
“And she had your child?”
“Won’t mine. I tell you what’s the truth—between paying for Keith and paying for Wendy Nicole, I quit taking my pecker out of my britches without putting on his raincoat. No way that baby was mine. She took me to court, but I got a blood test and it proved that little girl was somebody else’s.”
“Lucky you,” I said, remembering the relief of Portland Brewer’s client when the blood test let him off the hook.
“Won’t luck, darlin’. It was science. You know how much I’d’ve had to pay if they’d proved it on me?”
“Depends on what you’re making. In your case, probably a hundred dollars a week?”
“I keep forgetting you’re a judge. You know all about laying child support on a man, don’t you? Busting his balls?”
Takes two to make a baby.”
“So how come it’s always one that has to pay?”
“Sometimes it’s the mother,” I said.
He snorted disdainfully. “Not very often, I bet”
“No,” I agreed. “Most times it’s the father that takes off.”
“Hey, I paid for Keith. And I’m paying for Wendy Nicole, too. But damn if I was gonna let ’em lay a court order on me for another eighteen years just because Katie can’t keep up with who she’s sleeping with.”
Which sounded an awful lot as if he was under a court order for ol’ Wendy Nicole.
“Not behind on your payments, are you?” I needled, wondering if that had anything to do with why he was hanging around over here instead of heading back to Charlotte.
“Sally knows I’m doing the best I can. I send her money ever chance I get. Hell, I even send Katie something when I have a little extra. Poor girl never did figure out who’s Tiffany’s daddy.”
Allen might not’ve fathered her child, but I was willing to bet even money that he’d left that Katie with a tiny black star on her left shoulder. And Sally, too. I knew Keith’s mother had one and God knows how many women before or since. I was just young enough and dumb enough to be flattered when Allen hauled me into a tattoo shop and had the guy do me.
When we walked down the street together, my right thumb was always hooked in the back pocket of his jeans just as his left hand always rested on my left shoulder. At eighteen, that tattoo had seemed so romantic, as if the heat from his hand had magically burned through to my flesh and marked me as his woman forever.
Hard to believe I’d been so stupid. What on earth made me pick such a bad-news womanizer to go to hell with?
I was still getting used to the idea that my one fling at marriage hadn’t been a marriage at all and wasn’t quite sure whether this was something that would help me or hurt me if the whole shabby mess ever came out in public. One thing was certain though: the sooner Allen Stancil got out of n’ County, the sooner I’d breathe easy again.
I decided maybe I’d give Charlotte a buzz and see if his ex-wife Sally really was as understanding about those erratic support payments as he made out. If I was lucky, maybe there’d be a nice little warrant out for his sorry hide.
8
« ^ » … the very first year the purchaser made 11 hogsheads of brandy of the peaches and apples in his garden and some cyder…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
Annoyed as I was with Allen, though, I had to admit he was handy with a wrench.
While he wrestled my faulty alternator out of the engine and installed the new one, I stood at the front of the shabby cinderblock garage and talked with Mr. Jap, who’d come over from the house when he saw that Allen’s truck was back.
I noticed that someone had painted over the purple cross on his front door and I guessed that the “Holyness Prayr Room” was out of business.
“Yeah,” said Mr. Jap with a sheepish smile on his grizzled face. “Religion never does take on me, it don’t. I just can’t seem to stay right with the Lord. And anyway, them Mexicans has gone back to Florida, they did.”
The rain began again as he came in, and the old man pulled a slat-backed chair over to the open doorway so be could sit and watch it fall. There was no wind. The heavy drops came straight down, hammered the tin roof, then sheeted off the edge of the front shed like a waterfall. Inside, cigarette smoke mingled with the smell of steel tools and machine oil and gasoline fumes—masculine smells I would always associate with my father and brothers as they endlessly tinkered on cars and tractors, tobacco harvesters and bean pickers, mowers and hayrakes.