Valentine(22)
Every book has at least one good thing, she tells Jesse, because she’s pretty sure he can’t read, not really. Love stories and bad news and evil masterminds, plots as thick as sludge, places and people she wishes she could know in real life, and words whose loveliness and music make her want to cry when she says them aloud.
She stands up and wipes the tick’s blood on her shorts, stretches her arms over her head and recites some of the most beautiful words she ever read. The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last forever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year—the days when summer is changing into autumn—the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change. Now see here, she tells Jesse, I can’t even imagine a place where there is autumn, but I guess I can understand sadness and change as good as anybody else. Me too, he says.
*
When school lets out in late May, she visits him every day, at least for an hour before he goes to work at 4:30. While the cat naps on Jesse’s army pack, they sit next to each other on two milk crates D. A. found next to the dumpster behind 7-Eleven. The front porch, Jesse calls it, and she says it’s a pretty good porch, but she is already hatching a plan to invite him over for lunch one day when Mrs. Ledbetter is out running errands. She wants to show him a real porch, let him sit down in a real chair at a real kitchen table, so he can see what is possible.
She brings two forks and it takes them less than five minutes to eat the casserole she stole from Mrs Shepard. Even the frozen parts are good, he says. They taste like something a person made with care and love. When they finish eating, she sets a piece of notebook paper on the cardboard box between them. She hands him a pencil, momentarily embarrassed when she notices the metal band at the bottom of the pencil is covered with small bite marks. Write down everything you need, she says. I’ll bring it if I can.
Could you write it? He hands the paper and pencil back to her. I’m tired.
He could use an old bedsheet. It’s already too hot out for the blanket she brought him last month. He loved those cigarettes she brought, even if he won’t smoke them in front of her. Some more of them would be nice, and maybe some more of that corn bread, if she can get it, and those pinto beans and chow-chow.
You wash a meal like that down with a cup of buttermilk, he says, and you’re standing in tall cotton.
What’s the best meal you ever had? she asks.
Pot roast and potatoes, probably. Maybe the steak they gave me at the base the night I came home from overseas.
Favorite snack?
Chocolate-chip cookies that my mama makes from scratch.
Me too, she says, and they fall quiet for a little while. She stares at his face as if trying to memorize it. I’m going to bring you a toothbrush, she says, and Jesse laughs. The only person who ever gave a tinker’s damn about whether or not he brushed his teeth had been his sergeant, and he rode Jesse’s ass all the time. Now he’s back home in some place called Kalamazoo. That sounds like a made-up place, D. A. says, and Jesse tells her that he used to think so too, but then he looked at an atlas and there it was, barely an inch from Canada.
When the plant whistles at quitting time, Jesse says he has to go to work soon, but he could use a flea collar for the cat if she can get one, and a few more cans of tuna fish. Another jug of water, maybe some bug spray. She writes it all down for him, and when she spots a scorpion coming out of the pipe where he puts his trash, Jesse walks over and stomps it with his boot. D. A. looks down at her thin plastic sandals, the pale-pink nail polish she let Casey put on for her, and she imagines the scorpion scuttling over the lip of her sandal, the tail rising to deliver the hot, agonizing sting. She thinks how nice it is when somebody saves you from something, even if you don’t need to be saved.
*
She can ride her bike the entire length of Larkspur Lane, even around the curve, without touching her handlebars, not even once. She can turn twenty-six cartwheels in less than a minute and hang upside down on the monkey bars until she nearly passes out. She can stand on her hands for thirty seconds, on her head for one minute, and on one foot for ten. These, she demonstrates on the hot concrete at the bottom of the flood canal. She can slip a candy bar into her pocket at 7-Eleven, smuggle a casserole out of Mrs. Shepard’s house in her backpack, and, if her T-shirt is baggy enough, listen to a lecture from Mrs. Ledbetter with a can of chili tucked in the waistband of her shorts.
In a different year, a normal one, she might feel guilty about stealing. But since Ginny left, Debra Ann has thought about what it means to live an upright life. She keeps the kitchen clean and makes sure her daddy gets some rest on Sundays. She checks on Mrs. Shepard and plays with Peter and Lily—she knows they’re imaginary, and she does not care, they have pointed ears and wings that shine in the sunlight, and they fly in from London when she is having a bad day, when she can’t stop picking at her eyebrows and wondering where her mama is, and why the hell she left in the first place. D. A. has given a lot of thought to the matter of petty theft, parsing her lessons from a week of vacation Bible school last summer, and she knows: Stealing is better than letting a man go without food and company.
When Jesse leaves for work every afternoon, she rides her bike over to Casey or Lauralee’s house on the off chance they might be home. She rides home and sits cross-legged on the floor in the garage so she can rifle through Ginny’s old cedar chest. She tries to listen to the Joni Mitchell album she found in the kitchen trash can, but it reminds her of driving all over West Texas with Ginny, killing time and seeing what there was to see. She reads an article in Life about the bicentennial celebration in Washington. She eats a piece of buttered bread with sugar, carefully wiping up the sugar she spilled on the counter. That done, she walks over to Mrs. Shepard’s house with a can of Dr Pepper and bag of chips, and when she sees that Mr. Shepard’s truck is gone, she crawls into the hawthorn hedge and lies down in the gently stippled shade, and thinks about Ginny until her cheeks and chin are muddy with dirt and tears. It’s a good place to cry—cool and private, no eyewitnesses.