Valentine(14)

Where did you go?

That’s none of your business. D. A. Pierce, why are you calling my house?

It wasn’t me, I swear.

Do not swear, Corrine says and regrets it immediately. What the hell does she care what this child does, as long as she gets off the front porch and leaves Corrine be?

Yes, ma’am. Debra Ann reaches around and pulls her shorts out of her butt crack. She looks across the street and frowns. Are those Mexicans moving here?

Maybe, says Corrine. That, also, is none of your business.

Some people ain’t going to like that one bit—Mr. Davis, Mrs. Ledbetter, old Mr. Jeffries—

Corrine holds up her hand. You stop that. Those men have as much right to be here as you and me.

They do not, the girl says. This is our street.

What do you think Mr. Shepard would think if he heard you talking like that?

The girl looks down at her bare feet and flexes both big toes a few times. She adored Potter, the only adult who never corrected her grammar or undercut her plans, who listened attentively to her tall tales about her imaginary friends Peter and Lily, who flew in from London and regaled D. A. with stories about the London Bridge and the Queen of England. Not once had Potter suggested that she was too old for make-believe friends, never did he tease.

Corrine pats the several pockets of her suit jacket and discovers a box with one cigarette. Well, hot damn. She pulls it out of the box and lights up, blowing the smoke just above the girl’s head. Where’s your daddy today?

Working in Ozona—Debra Ann pushes out her bottom lip and blows upward so hard her bangs tremble—or Big Lake. The girl turns the horny toad around and holds it close to her face. I’m gonna take you home with me, she whispers ominously and grabs hold of her eyebrow. She yanks several hairs out and flicks them into the hedge next to the porch. There are small bald patches in each brow, Corrine sees now. In the days after Debra Ann’s mother left town, Corrine carried food over to Jim while Potter and D. A. sat on the couch and watched cartoons. At Potter’s funeral, the girl had leaned over the casket and peered into Potter’s face for so long that Corrine wanted to knock her in the head with the flat of her hand and say what the hell do you think you’re looking at, little girl?

Debra Ann tries to see if the toad will fit in the pocket of her shorts, but it starts clawing at her hands. I thought you might like some company, she tells Corrine. We could finish Mr. Shepard’s puzzle.

I do not care for any company, thank you.

The girl gazes at her, and after a few seconds Corrine sighs. Well, I’m out of cigarettes. Do you want to ride your bike up to 7-Eleven and buy me a pack?

D. A. nods and smiles. She is missing two baby teeth, one canine up top, one canine on the bottom, and the gaps are red and inflamed. The remaining teeth are yellow and dingy, and there are pieces of food, bread maybe, along her gum line. Her black hair is jagged and matted at the ends, as if she started to comb it out and got bored, and Corrine could swear she sees a few nits. Wait here, Corrine says and goes inside to fetch her purse. When she hands the girl a dollar bill, D. A.’s eyes widen with pleasure.

Here’s fifty cents for a pack of Benson & Hedges, she says, and fifty cents for your time. Make sure you get the right brand—Ultra Lights.

D. A. shoves the bill into her shorts pocket and asks if Corrine has a shoebox so she can leave the horny toad on the porch. Corrine tells her no, there is a stray running around killing anything it can catch, and the child takes off running across the lawn, the toad clasped in her left hand. When Corrine yells at her not to talk to strangers, D. A. lifts the animal above her head and waggles it in the old woman’s direction. Even from a distance, Corrine can see thin streams of blood leaking from both the creature’s eyes, its last and most desperate line of defense.

*

Potter had written his letter on a yellow legal pad he found in Corrine’s desk. He had tried hard not to nickel-and-dime the Almighty, he wrote. He had prayed for help only a handful of times that he could remember—when his B-29 lost an engine over Osaka, when Corrine had some trouble with the morphine in the moments after Alice was delivered, when they all had pneumonia in the winter of 1953. In 1968, he prayed for the price of oil to go back up, and he might have prayed to catch a bigger catfish once or twice when they were fishing Lake Spence, but he was mostly joking. And now, Potter wrote, he was counting on the Almighty not to nickel-and-dime him—because he was not willing to ride this train to the end of the line.

He wrote that he would miss their long drives and their camping trips, and the way Corrine moved her feet up and down against his calves at night after they had crawled into the tent because she was always cold and he was always warm. He would miss all the little critters they listened to, as they lay in the tent with their sleeping bags zipped together.

There were some things he regretted. He wished he had gone to college when he came home from the war, even if it had meant accepting help from the government. He wished they had gone to Alaska to see Alice, and he had sent their daughter a letter saying as much. But most of all, he wished he’d done things differently on Valentine’s night. All this, from a man who had hardly written so much as a grocery list since he came back from flying bombers over Japan.

He left the letter on the kitchen table, along with several envelopes that contained ten thousand dollars in cash. He had been worrying for weeks that the life insurance company would find some way to cheat Corrine out of the policy, and she correctly guessed this was emergency money he had stashed somewhere. At the bottom of the note, a sentence had been added, scrawled quickly with a red pen. Make sure Dr. Bauman writes hunting accident on the death certificate.