Valentine(12)

*

While Karla polished glassware and cut limes, Corrine smoked one cigarette after the other. She ran her thumb across the names and phone numbers carved into the mahogany bar. On one side of the room, large plate-glass windows overlooked the golf course. The wildcatters who bankrolled the project in the late sixties had originally planned on eighteen holes, but construction ceased abruptly amid a sudden glut in the oil markets. While a bulldozer and irrigation pipes sat rusting on what would have been the tenth, club members made do with nine holes. And now, seven years later, with the price of oil ticking up, they might finally get those other nine.

When Corrine folded her beverage napkin and slid her glass to the edge of the bar, Karla brought another Scotch and Coke. Was it her fifth, sixth? Enough that she hooked her toes around the bar rail when she reached for her drink, enough that Karla set a bowl of cocktail peanuts on the bar in front of her.

One man said, just as plain as day, What we have here are two competing stories, a textbook case of he said, she said.

A second sipped his beer and set it down hard against the bar. I saw that little Mexican gal’s picture in the newspaper, he said, and she didn’t look fourteen.

Corrine paused on the number she had been tracing with her finger. They were talking about Gloria Ramírez, the girl she and Potter had seen at the Sonic. We watched her climb into that truck, Potter said, and we sat there like somebody had sewn our pants to the seat.

You okay, Mrs. Shepard? Karla was watching her from the other end of the bar, dishrag in one hand, empty mug in the other.

Yes ma’am. Corrine tried to sit up a little straighter, but her toes lost their grip and her elbow slipped off the edge of the bar.

The men looked at her briefly and then decided to ignore her. It was the best thing about being an old lady with thinning hair and boobs saggy enough to prop up on the bar. Finally, she could sit down on a barstool and drink herself blind without some jackass hassling her.

That’s how they are, a third man said, they mature faster than other girls. The men laughed. Yes, sir! A lot faster, said another.

Corrine felt the heat climbing up her neck and spreading across her face. Potter must have talked about Gloria a dozen times, usually late at night when the pain was so bad he got out of bed and went into the bathroom and she could hear him moaning. All the things he wished he’d done. Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve, she had told him. That’s all we needed, you picking a fight with a man half your age.

But Potter insisted that he had known right away something wasn’t right. He’d worked alongside young men like that for twenty-five years, and he knew. But they sat there and watched the girl climb into that truck, and then he and Corrine drove home. Two days later, when they saw the man’s mug shot in the American, Potter said that he was a coward and a sinner. A day after that, when the newspaper published Gloria Ramírez’s school picture, he sat in his recliner for a long time looking at her straight black hair and tilted chin, the gaze she directed at the camera, the little smile that might have been a smirk. Corrine said there ought to be a law against putting that girl’s name and picture in the local paper—a minor, for God’s sake. Potter said she looked like a girl who feared nothing and nobody, and that was probably all gone now.

While Karla eyed the tip jar, Corrine downed her drink in several long, throat-searing gulps. She signaled for another. Karla Sibley was barely seventeen, and she had a new baby at home with her mama. She was still trying to decide whether to cut Corrine off when the old woman pushed her barstool away from the bar, wobbled mightily and tugged at her shirt until it hung straight against her large chest and hips.

Never mind, Karla, she said. I’ve had enough. She turned to the men. That girl is fourteen years old, you sons of bitches. You gentlemen have a thing for children?

She drove herself home, keeping her eyes on the centerline and Potter’s truck ten miles under the speed limit, and it was after three when she finally lay down on the sofa. She pulled an afghan over her legs—she still couldn’t sleep in their bed, not without Potter—and though she would struggle to piece it together, at least until the first rush of nicotine hit her bloodstream the next morning, she had fallen asleep replaying what she said to the regulars and the last words she heard before she slammed the heavy door behind her, Karla whining at the men, It’s not my fault, I didn’t bring it up. You can’t tell that old lady anything.

Fourteen years old. As if there might have been some moral ambiguity, Corrine thinks bitterly, if Gloria Ramírez had been sixteen, or white. She carries her ashtray to the kitchen table and sits down at the table, where she fiddles with a loose puzzle piece and glares at the envelopes filled with money. Potter had worked on the puzzle for hours, his left hand sometimes shaking so hard he had to prop his elbow on the table and form a brace with his right. All those hours, all that effort, and still he had completed only the border and a couple of brown and gold cats.

When the stray wanders across the patio and sits outside the sliding-glass door, staring at her, Corrine picks up Potter’s cane and shakes it at him. She might give the little son of a bitch a pretty good knock on the head, if he doesn’t quit coming into her backyard and killing everything.

*

In late February, the cat caught a large male grackle and tore it to pieces, and Corrine nearly slipped on the shiny blue-black head when she took out the trash. The next morning they found a warbler—its head a tidy tuft of gray and black, the bright yellow breast a shock of color against the concrete. Potter paused and watched its feathers tremble in the wind. By then, he had begun to stammer sometimes. Cor—, Cor—, Cor—, he would say, and Corrine wanted to clap her hands over her ears and shout, No, no, no, this is a mistake. But it had been a good morning, no seizures, no falls, and when Potter spoke it was the same voice she had been hearing for thirty years.