Valentine(34)

Can I bring you a glass of iced tea? Mrs. Cowden says.

No, thank you.

Listen, she says, people know what that little gal is saying happened out there. We just don’t need to be reminded of it all the time. And that word is so ugly.

I turn off the water and stand up straight to face her. You mean rape?

She winces. Yes, ma’am.

When I went into labor several weeks early with unpacked boxes at the new house and Robert losing his mind over a missing bull, Grace Cowden brought over a week of dinners and a stack of Archie comics for Aimee. She hasn’t spoken a single unkind word to anybody in her life, as far as I know. I hold my hand out to her. I’m sorry, Grace.

She takes my hand and presses it to her heart. Well, I’m sorry too, Mary Rose. She chuckles gently. What a few months it has been. A preacher’s son sitting downtown in a jail cell. Ginny Pierce running off to God knows where, leaving her family like that. And you with a new baby son, and a trial to boot. And this heat, it’s mean as a snake.

She holds my hand while she wonders aloud if the judge might let me just write a letter or something. It might be less upsetting for my family and me. Besides—she leans in close—Lou Connelly heard the girl’s mother was deported and the girl had been sent to Laredo to be with family. Heck, she might not even come back for the trial. Not unless there’s some money in it for her.

I gently remove my hand from Grace’s heart and turn back to the sink, my fingers working the faucet, while she yammers on. As for the Ladies Guild, she says, well, these meetings are supposed to be fun. Nobody comes to these meetings to feel bad about herself.

Mrs. Cowden says she and some of the other ladies have been thinking that I might not want to come to any more meetings for a little while, just until the dust settles and all this ugliness is behind us. Just until I start feeling a little more like myself.

Yes, I think, the old Mary Rose. I hold my fingers beneath the tap for a few seconds and watch the water meander across my skin, the smell of sulfur and dirt rising from the basin. That morning on my front porch, when he was already cuffed and sitting in the back seat of the deputy’s sedan, one of the paramedics, a young man with eyes the color of sandstone, pressed his fingers against the knot on the back of my head. The other handed me a glass of ice water that smelled like cold and sulfur. What the hell happened, they both wanted to know. And I shook my head. I shook and shook, but I could not find one word to say. The medics told me they couldn’t get the two little girls to open the front door, and once they did, Gloria wouldn’t let either of the men near her. I drank the glass of water, and the two men waited on the porch while I went inside and dampened a washrag and held it gently to her cheek.

You’re going to be fine now, I told her, as my daughter stood silently at the edge of the room, watching. You’re going to be fine, I said again, and this time I made sure to include both girls in my glance. I kept washing the child’s face and telling her that we were going to be fine, we were all going to be just fine.

Out there the water flows out of the faucet ice cold, even in the summer, but here in town it comes out warm, with none of the debris and grit of well water. Clean water, clean start, clean slate. She had not cried, not even once, but when the paramedics tried to get her to climb inside the ambulance, when one of them put his hands on the small of her back, she screamed as if she’d been stabbed. We might as well have stood her up on a tree stump and driven an ax through her longways. She fought and kicked and screamed for her mother. She ran over and held on to me as if she were caught in a tornado and I was the last fence post still standing. But by then, I was worn out and heartsick, and I turned away. Even as she was reaching for me, I turned away and stepped inside my house and closed the door. I listened while the men grabbed her and wrestled her into the back of the ambulance and slammed the door closed.

And now, here in town, people are making this child out to be some kind of liar, or blackmailer, or slut. Forgive us our trespasses, all right. I cup my hands together and allow the water to pool in my palms. What will I be a part of, here in Odessa? What will my days look like now, and who will I become? Same old Mary Rose? Grace Cowden? I smile just a little and when the water begins to seep between my fingers, I squeeze them tightly together. I can drink from it, this cup made with my own hands, if I hurry up—and so I do. I slurp loudly, water dribbling down my chin while Grace makes little sounds in her throat. Again, I bend down and allow my hands to fill back up. Maybe discretion is the better part of valor. Then again, maybe it isn’t. And knowing that I have failed another woman’s daughter in all the ways that matter, I now want badly to be a person of valor.

And what will my great act of valor look like?

This: Just as the esteemed Mrs. L. D. Cowden begins to talk about how I should get more rest and maybe think about supplementing with baby formula, I lift my face from the lavatory, hold up my two cupped hands, and fling the water into her face.

Grace stands perfectly still. Finally, she has nothing to say. After a few seconds she lifts her hand and wipes the water from her forehead and flicks it to the bathroom floor. Well, she says. That was rude.

Go to hell, I tell her. Why don’t you go pack boxes for those poor people y’all can’t quit judging?

I could have two sick kids and a pantry full of nothing, and Robert would complain about having to leave the ranch. But the moment he hears about this, he drives into town. It takes nothing for me to close my eyes and imagine the phone ringing off the hook in our farmhouse kitchen, Robert standing there with a bologna sandwich in his hand while some woman, or her husband, expresses grave concern for my well-being. After the kids are in bed, he follows me from room to room hollering and raging while I pick up Aimee’s books and toys. My breast feels like someone is holding a lit torch to it. I fight the urge not to tear off my nursing bra and fling it on the living-room carpet.