Valentine(16)
One of the men holds up his hands in the shape of a door, showing how wide, how tall, and the woman shakes her head. One hand moves to her forehead, the other to her belly, and then, as the man points again at the doorframe, her upper body drifts toward the door, a boat listing ever so slightly, then sinking fast as she folds in half. A cry rises up from the men. Corrine sets down her drink and smacks her lips. By the time she has hauled herself to her feet and pulled on her slippers, the woman is on her hands and knees in the front yard, her belly skimming the dirt. The child hovers anxiously around her mother’s head. Words in both Spanish and English fly around the yard like sparrows. A man runs into the kitchen and returns with a plastic cup filled with water.
Corrine introduces herself and points at her house across the street while the girl, Aimee, plucks at her mother’s maternity blouse. She is a jowly child with eyebrows and eyelashes so pale they are nearly invisible. The mother, Mary Rose, gasps as her blouse rises and falls with a contraction, and Corrine thinks she might have seen her back at the high school, just another girl who dropped out and got married. It’s impossible to remember them all.
Corrine tries and fails to remember a single useful detail from the hazy twilight sleep of her labor with Alice, some thirty years ago. Can I drive you to the hospital?
No, thank you. I can drive myself. Mary Rose presses both hands against her belly while she looks up at Corrine. I saw the wreath on your front door. I’m sorry for your loss.
My husband died in February. I just haven’t taken it down. Corrine narrows her eyes and looks at the men and boys who stand quietly in a row, shifting back and forth on their feet, eyeing the rancher’s wife who has gone into labor in the middle of their weekend job, whose husband is well known to them and theirs.
It was a hunting accident, Corrine says. She might as well have swallowed a shovelful of scorpions, the way those words tear at her throat, poisonous, claws out.
A hunting accident. Mary Rose rolls over and sits up, and Corrine is surprised to see tears in the woman’s eyes. I am so sorry. Listen, we’re still waiting for them to turn on the electricity and I don’t want my daughter sitting around the waiting room by herself. Would you mind if she came to your house for a few hours, just until my husband returns from a livestock auction in Big Springs?
No, ma’am, Corrine says without hesitation. I cannot have anybody in my house right now, sorry. Can I call your mother, or maybe a sister?
No, thank you, Mary Rose says. They’ve got their hands full already.
I want to stay with you, the child whines at her mother. I don’t even know her.
I’d be happy to drive you to the hospital and wait with—Corrine pauses while the child glares at her and clutches her mother’s smock—Aimee.
I don’t want her in a waiting room with a bunch of strange men, Mary Rose says.
The women look at each other for a few seconds, the younger woman’s lips a tight seam. She pulls herself to her feet and tells her daughter to run and fetch her car keys, and the little ditty bag she has set in the hall closet. After Aimee scampers into the house through the open garage, Mary Rose asks the foreman to lock up behind them when they have emptied the moving van, and when Corrine starts back toward her own front porch, already longing for the rest of that bourbon and iced tea, hoping that cat didn’t stick its nose in her glass and lick the ice, Mary Rose yells at her, too. Thanks for nothing, she says, but Corrine pretends not to hear. She keeps walking and when she is safely across the street, she dumps her drink in the hedge and goes inside to fix herself a fresh one.
*
It’s not quite dark outside when the phone rings again. Corrine, who is well into that bottle of bourbon, rushes to the kitchen and grabs the phone with both hands. Every goddamn thing in this house buzzes, rattles, or rings. She wraps the cord around the phone’s base and props open the door between the kitchen and garage with her foot. The loose skin on her arms wobbles madly when she lifts the phone over her head. The phone soars into the garage, strikes the concrete and rings twice when it lands next to the Lincoln Continental that she has forsaken in the forty days since Potter chose to remove himself from what he had once described as his situation. It was our situation, goddamn you.
The kitchen is quiet now, save for the ticking of the wall clock next to the kitchen table. Corrine narrows her eyes at it, considering. Empty liquor bottles lie atop the full trash can, along with a stack of unopened doctor’s bills. She picks up a full ashtray and slowly dumps it on the envelopes in the center of the table. Cigarette butts roll slowly across the pile and fall onto the puzzle pieces. The icemaker dumps a batch of ice cubes. Outside the sliding-glass door, the western sky is the color of an old bruise. A mockingbird perches on the back fence, its voice persistent and sad.
Fetching up the trash can and stepping outside, Corrine jerks the sliding door closed with such force that Potter’s cane clatters to the linoleum and rolls in front of it. The thin sole of her house slipper gives way when it presses against a soft body and she cries out, jumping backward and looking down to see a small brown mouse. She closes her eyes and sees Potter standing by the back fence, sees him struggling with the shovel while he digs the hole, sees him set the animal gently inside.
She wishes she could do that, bury a little creature, act as if it matters. But the ground is hard and her arms are flabby, and she has to stop and catch her wind when she carries groceries in from the truck. She isn’t nearly as good as Potter, never has been. She grabs a shovel out of the garage anyway and slips the blade under the soft, small body. Nearly choking with rage, she carries the mouse into the alley and flings it into the open dumpster. They could have talked about it, how and when he would die. Potter said he wouldn’t have her taking care of him, and she had promised she wouldn’t ask him to hang on until he was unrecognizable to himself, or her. But in the end, he had chosen to go it alone.