Valentine(15)
Twenty minutes later, when the sheriff’s deputy came to the front door, and before Corrine even had a chance to ask where they had found him, the deputy told her there had been an accident, a terrible accident, the kind of accident you never saw coming. It happens more often than you would think, he said.
*
When Debra Ann returns fifteen minutes later, her mouth is ringed with chocolate and she is no longer carrying the horny toad. She clutches Corrine’s cigarettes in one grubby hand while she explains that her daddy won’t be home until eight o’clock, and she thinks there might be some leftover goulash at home, but she isn’t sure. Maybe Lily and Peter ate it all. Debra Ann leans toward Corrine and cranes her neck as she tries to see down the hallway, the smell of mildew rising from her hair and clothes. Stomach lurching, Corrine holds out her hand for the cigarettes. She knocks the box against her palm, nods gently while Debra Ann jabbers on about the horny toad, how the clerk at the 7-Eleven made her let him go before she could come into the store, and although she told the animal to stay put in her bicycle basket, of course he was gone when she came back.
They are wild animals that will give you warts, Corrine told her. Get a better pet next time.
I saw Mr. Shepard’s cat out there in the alley behind your house.
That is not Mr. Shepard’s cat.
Well, he used to feed it.
Oh, he did not.
I know for a fact that Mr. Shepard used to let it sleep in the garage sometimes when it was cold outside.
Oh, bullshit, says Corrine. We didn’t even have so much as a sleet storm last winter.
It still got cold, says Debra Ann. He might be good company.
Corrine tells the child that she does not want to feed anything, or water it, or clean up its shit or pull ticks off its ears, or vacuum fleas out of her draperies when it gets into the house. I’ll tell you what, D. A., she says, if you can catch that cat, you can take it home with you.
I wish I had a cat that wanted to come live with me, Debra Ann says, but my daddy only wants pets that will live in a box. I wish we had something to eat other than goulash. I wish—but Corrine interrupts and asks if D. A. remembers what Corrine’s old daddy himself used to say.
Wish in one hand and poop in the other, see which one gets full faster? she says glumly.
Yes, ma’am, Corrine says as she steps backward into the house and gently pushes the door closed in the child’s face.
While the phone rings a dozen times, Corrine fixes herself an iced tea with a smidge of bourbon. When she’s sure Debra Ann isn’t hanging around the yard, she heads back outside for a porch-sit and a smoke. She will stay low, sitting on the concrete step next to the hedges, where she can see what’s going on without anyone noticing her.
At least once a week since Potter died, Suzanne Ledbetter shows up at Corrine’s door with a casserole and an invitation to participate in some damned crochet circle or one of those god-awful recipe swaps where each woman makes the recipe and writes down her observations on a 3x5 notecard before passing it along to the next woman, who also makes the recipe and adds her notes to the card. And so it goes. In this way, the women are able to make a good recipe even better, says Suzanne Ledbetter.
Corrine has learned over the years to say no thank you to get-togethers and recipe swaps. Still, by the time she sits down on her front porch with a drink in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other, she has a freezer full of casseroles. And a head full of bullshit too, she thinks as she lowers her bottom onto the concrete step and scoots over to peer through her scraggly hawthorns. Across the street, two young men are carrying a large television console into a rust-colored brick ranch that is a mirror image of Corrine and Potter’s—nine hundred square feet, three bedrooms, one full bath plus a powder room off the dining room. The kitchen window faces the backyard, same as Corrine’s, and the same sliding-glass door leads to a back patio, she imagines, though she never knew the previous tenants, three young men who kept a large mutt chained to a dead pecan tree in the front yard and who, mercifully, took the dog with them when they moved out in the middle of the night.
A white sedan pulls up, and a young girl and her mother start taking several small boxes from the back seat. The woman is heavily pregnant, swollen as a deer carcass on a hot road, and there is no sign of a mister. When the car is empty, the woman stands in the front yard while the child hops around the dead tree. She is the spitting image of her mama—white-haired and round-faced—and from time to time she walks over and hangs on the woman’s maternity smock as if one or the other of them might lift off the ground and drift across the sky, should she let go.
The woman—she looks too young to have a girl that big—rubs her daughter’s back while they watch three young men carry furniture and boxes up the driveway, through the open garage, and into the house. They are still boys, Corrine sees now, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, with sneakers, crew cuts, and cowboy hats in varied shades of brown perched on their heads. Two middle-aged men, wearing the same brown steel-toed boots that Potter used to lace up before he headed out to the plant in the mornings, stand by the front door measuring and re-measuring the doorframe against a massive mahogany door that is leaning against the house like a drunk. Corrine swirls her pinkie in her drink and looks at the pregnant woman with amusement. The front door that’s already there wasn’t good enough for her? Well! She sucks the liquor off her finger.