Valentine(10)
City traffic made Corrine nervous, so Potter took the loop around San Antonio. I’m sorry, she told him, for adding time to our drive. He smiled wanly and reached across the seat for her hand. Woman, he said, are you apologizing to me? Well. I guess I really am dying. Corrine turned her face toward the passenger window, and cried so hard her nose clogged up and her eyes swelled nearly shut.
*
Not even nine o’clock, and it is already ninety degrees outside when Corrine looks out the living-room window and sees Potter’s truck parked on the front lawn. It was his pride and joy, a Chevy Stepside V8, with a scarlet leather interior. It has been a dry winter and the Bermuda grass is a pale brown scarf. When the breeze picks up, a few blades of grass that weren’t flattened beneath the truck’s wheel tremble under the sunlight. Every day for the past two weeks, the wind picks up in the late morning and blows steadily until dusk. Back when Corrine gave a shit, that would have meant dusting the house before she went to bed.
On Larkspur Lane, the neighbors stand in their front yards, water hoses in hand, staving off the drought. A large U-Haul turns the corner and stops in front of the Shepards’ house, then backs slowly into the driveway across the street. If you really want to know, Corrine would gladly explain to anybody who cared to ask, I am not a drunk, I’m just drinking all the time. There is a world of difference between the two.
No one will ask, but they will sure talk if she doesn’t move Potter’s truck off the lawn, so Corrine swallows an aspirin and puts on a skirt suit from her teaching days, an olive-green number with brass buttons shaped like anchors. She puts on pantyhose, perfume, lipstick, and sunglasses then creeps outside wearing her house slippers, as if she has just returned from church and is settling in for a busy day at home, doing something.
The day is lit up like an interrogation room, the sun a fierce bulb in an otherwise empty sky. Across the street and down the block, Suzanne Ledbetter is watering her St. Augustine. When she sees Corrine, she switches off her hand sprayer and waves, but Corrine acts as if she doesn’t see. She also pretends not to see any of the neighbor kids who have spilled out of houses and across lawns like pecans from an overturned basket, and she barely registers the crew of men who have climbed out of the moving truck and are standing around the yard across the street.
When she opens the door to Potter’s truck and spots a cigarette lying on the bench seat, broken but repairable, Corrine gasps with gratitude. Quick, quick, she shifts the truck into reverse and pulls it squarely onto the driveway, then fetches up the cigarette and makes for the front door, pausing for just long enough to turn on the faucet. A water hose is stretched across the lawn like a dead snake, the rusty nozzle lying facedown in the dirt beneath the Chinese elm she and Potter planted twenty-six years earlier, the spring after they bought the house. Ugly and awkward, the elm reminds Corrine of dirty hair, but it has survived droughts, dust storms, and tornadoes. When it grew three feet in a single summer, Potter, who had a nickname for everything and everyone, started calling it Stretch. When Alice fell out of it and broke her right wrist, he started calling her Lefty. Every other damn thing in the backyard is dead, and Corrine couldn’t care less, but she can’t bear to let this tree die.
And even if she wanted to, Corrine knows, if she lets the tree go, or she makes a habit of parking Potter’s truck on the grass, or people see her in the front yard wearing the same clothes she wore to the Country Club last night, they might start feeling sorry for her. Pity. It makes her want to kick the shit out of someone—namely Potter, if he weren’t already dead. She thumps his funeral wreath and slams the front door behind her. In the kitchen, the phone rings and rings, but she is not picking up. No way, no how.
*
At three o’clock in the morning, they stopped to gas up at the Kerrville truck stop and wandered into the restaurant for coffee and an ice cream cone. After they ordered, he told her that radiation therapy was just a bunch of poison they pumped into your veins. It burned you from the inside out, made you even sicker, and what kind of months would those be?
I won’t do it, Corrine. I’m not having my wife wipe my ass, or run my steak through a blender.
Corrine sat across from her husband with her mouth hanging open. You always told Alice that getting hurt was no excuse to quit playing a game—her voice rose and fell like a kite in strong wind—and now you’re going to die on me? A couple sitting in the adjacent booth glanced their way then stared down at their table. Otherwise, the restaurant was empty. Why on earth had Potter chosen to sit here? Corrine wondered. Why must she share her grief with total strangers?
This is different, Potter said. He studied his ice cream for a few seconds. When he looked out the window, Corrine looked too. Between the diesel stations and eighteen-wheelers and a neon sign advertising hot showers, it was bright as high noon out there. A trucker pulled away from the diesel pump, honking twice as he merged onto the frontage road. A cowboy leaned against his tailgate and gulped down a hamburger, his belt buckle sparkling in the light. Two cars filled with teenage girls rolled slowly through the parking lot.
Potter and Corrine leaned back in their booth and looked at the ceiling. The plaster tiles directly above their heads were covered with piss-colored water spots and a smattering of holes about the size of No. 8 buckshot, as if some jackass had thought it might be funny to discharge his weapon while people were trying to eat their supper. When there was nothing left to look at, they looked at each other. His eyes filled with tears. Corrie, this is terminal.