Everything I Left Unsaid(30)

It was the truck-stop parking lot all over again and everything about Joan was carnal and I couldn’t look away.

“Someone should, don’t you think?” Joan asked. “He’s a son of a bitch and she thinks she needs him.”

“She does.”

“No one needs an * like that.”

“The kids—”

Joan stood up, her dirty-blond hair a slick down her back.

“Would be a whole lot better off if they didn’t watch their mom get beat up.”

“That’s true, but without money, what’s Tiffany supposed to do?”

“Stop looking for excuses to stay, I guess,” Joan said. “You forgot your scarf.”

I clapped a hand to my throat. The bruises were fading. Mostly blue and green smudges now, but someone who looked hard could tell they were fingerprints.

“Look, kid,” Joan said, walking out of the water like Venus on the waves. “Forget the damn scarf—it’s like a fat kid wearing a tee shirt to the swimming pool. All it does is make the kid look fatter.”

I dug into the heart of the bruise just under my chin until it throbbed.

“All it does is make you look more beat up.”

I swallowed hard.

“That’s what you are, right? Beat up?”

No. That’s not what I am. That’s not all I am. I have a hundred more things about myself that I’m figuring out. I like skinny-dipping. I don’t like cake for breakfast. I like grinding my * against my hand until I come.

But what I said was, “I guess so.”

“And you ran?”

“I’m running.”

“Good for you.”

Joan walked back over to the weeds she’d stomped down to make herself a little cove along the shore.

“But I had money. Not a lot, but some. Tiffany has none.”

“I’ve offered Tiffany plenty. No strings. She knows that. She wanted to go she could go.”

“You make it seem like it should be easy for her. Like it’s really black and white.” I was getting angry on Tiffany’s behalf. On my own behalf, too, maybe. Because I’d stayed for years with no reason other than fear. Fear and habit.

With no hope that things would get better. No love I could cling to and pretend about.

Nothing but fear that life without Hoyt would be worse than life with him.

“It’s pretty black and white. Guy hits you, you leave.” She took a drag from a cigarette. “Better yet, avoid them altogether. You want a joint?” Joan asked, holding it up toward me.

I shook my head and she shrugged, sitting down on the thick blanket she had spread out. She had an iPod and a few magazines and…a gun beside her.

“Don’t worry,” Joan said, taking a drag of the weed. She slipped the gun under one of the magazines. “I just keep an eye out for Phil and some of the other shitheads who live here.”

“Are there a lot of shitheads?”

Joan laughed, a plume of smoke sliding out of her mouth. “Enough.”

“You don’t seem so bad,” I said, sort of joking, and Joan laughed again.

“That’s because you don’t know me. And there are plenty more around here worse than me.”

I had no intention of finding out. I was minding my own business. Well, I guess my business and Ben’s business.

“What’s the story with Ben?” I asked, and Joan jerked back.

“Why?”

“He seems nice.”

Joan laughed. “The really crazy ones always do. The guy’s like Phil—they’re thugs. Just thugs. One-dimensional—what you see is what you get.”

“You’re saying behind Ben’s garden he’s a sociopath?”

“Where are you from, kid, that you don’t understand that guy’s tattoos?”

“A farm in Oklahoma.”

Again with the truth. A few more weeks of blabbing like this and I wouldn’t be hiding at all.

Joan smiled. “That explains it. Trust me. Just give him a wide berth.”

“What about his tattoos?”

“That big black square on his back, that’s a biker gang tattoo that’s been blacked over. He got booted. And you gotta do some bad shit to get booted.”

“What did he do?”

“I don’t know, and I’m not eager to sit down and have a chat with the guy. You shouldn’t be either.”

I looked away from Joan, out at the water sparkling in the sunlight, as if diamonds had been scattered over its surface.

“Why are you being nice to me?” I asked.

“This is nice?”

“Nicer.”

“Because I’m high. Because I just saw your tits. Because…those goddamn bruises around your neck.”

Again I reached up and felt them like they were still pounding against my skin.

“You’re a stripper?” I asked and she stared at me blankly, and I wondered if I’d offended her. Or if she didn’t want people to know. “You mentioned The Velvet Touch. I don’t want to make assumptions…”

“Yes, Sherlock Holmes, I’m a stripper.”

I ran out of courage for what I had intended to ask.

“You got something else you want to ask, you should ask,” Joan said.