Valentine(28)
It is the same cry I hear now, his cry of hunger, and even though my breasts ache at the sound of it, I go to him. In half an hour, we will all be asleep—the baby’s mouth still pulling at my nipple, Aimee pushing up against my back, her feet across my ankles, her arm trying to wrap itself around my throat. Yes, day in and day out. Always.
The clock radio reads 5:30 when I again untangle myself from the baby and head back to the kitchen. Sun’s up in less than an hour, so I might as well have another cigarette and hope the baby doesn’t wake up. At our old house in the desert, I used to sit outside and listen to the little creatures move in the brush while the desert turned pink and orange and gold. Once, I watched a pair of roadrunners work together to kill and eat a small rattlesnake. The noise out there was, it seemed to me, the true noise of the world, the way the world ought to sound. I felt that way right up until the morning Gloria Ramírez knocked on my front door. Even the pumpjacks switching on and trucks hauling pipe through our property didn’t bother me as much as the noise here in town—honking and shouting, sirens and music from the bars on Eighth Street.
A load of towels in the washing machine has turned sour, and the kitchen table is covered with scissors, crayons, and scraps of construction paper, the remnants of Aimee’s final school project, a diorama about the siege at Goliad. I clean it up while the coffee brews and I am just sitting down at the table when I remember the bucket that’s catching a slow drip under the bathroom sink. After I drag it out and dump it in the bathtub, I pause for a second. When was the last time I took a bath or put my makeup on in the morning? I am letting myself go, as my mother would say, but for whom would I keep myself up? Aimee and the baby don’t care, and Robert is still so mad I answered the front door and let that girl into our home, he can hardly see straight. He blames her for our troubles.
In the church where I grew up, we were taught that sin, even if it happens only in your heart, condemns you all the same. Grace is not assured to any of us, maybe not even most of us, and while being saved gives you a fighting chance, you must always hope that the sin lodged in your heart, like a bullet that cannot be removed without killing you, is not of the mortal kind. The church wasn’t big on mercy, either. When I tried to explain myself to Robert in the days after the crime, when I told him I had sinned against this child, betrayed her in my heart, he said my only sin was opening the door in the first place, not thinking of my own damned kids first. The real sin, he said, was some people letting their daughters run the streets all night long. Since then, I can hardly stand to look at him.
The sheriff’s deputy had taken Strickland without a fight. When Aimee called the sheriff, she gave the dispatcher an earful about the girl sitting across from her at the kitchen table and the man she could see through the window. Where is the man now? the dispatcher asked, and when Aimee said out front with my mama, they put a rush on it. The sheriff’s deputy walked up to the young man and jammed the barrel of his revolver into his sternum. Son, he said, I don’t know if you’re stupid or crazy, but wipe that goddamn grin off your face. You are in some serious shit.
The deputy was right. The new district attorney, Keith Taylor, charged him with aggravated sexual assault and attempted murder. Mr. Taylor’s secretary, Amelia, calls me every few days to tell me about a new delay in the trial or ask me questions about Gloria. Did I know her before? What did she say to me? Did I feel threatened by Dale Strickland?
You go into that house and get her, he told me. Do it right now. Don’t wake up your husband who is sleeping upstairs, who is not sleeping upstairs, who is not even at home, you go in there, Mary Rose, you take that child by the arm and stand her on her own two feet and bring her to me.
And I was going to do it.
When morning comes, I walk around the house and turn all the lights off. Robert will pitch a fit when he sees the electric bill. We can’t afford to rent a house in town, he will say, especially not this year. We already have a house. Yes, but out there, I say, and you wanted us to move into town before all this happened, and then Robert will remind me that I used to love that old place, and that now he can’t afford to be away from his cows. When he left a hired man in charge for the three days it took me to have our son and heal up enough to come home, the man took off for a job in the oil patch. Screwworms infested the animals’ open sores, their ears, even their genitals. Robert lost fifty head of cattle. Shot this year’s profit margin to hell, he says bitterly every time it comes up, which is every Sunday when he comes into town with a bag of candy for Aimee and flowers for me.
Thank you, I say. After I’ve put them in some water, we stand across the room from each other—him thinking I ruined our family, me thinking he would have preferred me to leave that child alone on the front porch while Aimee and me stood on the other side of a locked door.
Sundays, Robert looks at the baby like he’s just bought a prize bull at auction. He holds my son on his lap for a few minutes, marveling at the baby’s big hands—a quarterback’s hands, he says—and then gives him back to me. In a few years, when he’s big enough to catch a football or throw a bale of hay from the back of a truck or shoot snakes out at the ranch, the boy will be more interesting to him. Until then, he’s all mine.
After the kids are asleep, I give Robert a couple of casseroles for his week’s meals and he either leaves directly, or we have a fight and then he leaves. It’s a relief to hear his truck door slam and the engine turn over.