Valentine(35)

Can’t you even try, Mary Rose, he says. Every day, I’m doing my damnedest to keep us from losing everything out there, land my family has worked for the past eighty years. He follows me into the kitchen and watches me pull out a paper bag and start filling it with cans of food he can take back to the farm. You think you’re doing our family any favors by making yourself out to be the town lunatic?

I kneel down and stare at a shelf full of canned goods, trying to do some math. I could have sworn there were still two cans of Hormel chili in there, and a can of corn too.

Robert’s boot is right next to my leg, close enough that I can smell the cow shit lingering on the leather. In the last forty-eight hours, he has lost more than a dozen cows to blowflies. The ones that didn’t die outright, he had to shoot and because blowflies lay their eggs on fresh carcasses, he pushed the corpses into a pile with his bulldozer and poured kerosene over them.

I stack the dinner dishes in the sink and turn on the hot water. What do you want me to say, Robert? People in this town seem bound and determined to believe that this whole thing is some sort of misunderstanding, some sort of lover’s spat.

Well, how do you know it wasn’t?

I plunge both hands into a sink full of water as hot as I can stand it. The smell of bleach wafts off the water, strong enough that I think I must have measured wrong, and by the time I pull my hands out, they are dark red.

Are you shitting me, Robert? Did you hear what they said about her injuries? They had to take her spleen out, for God’s sake. For that matter, did you hear what I told you?

Yes, Mary Rose. I heard it, all thirty times you told it.

I press both hands into a dishrag, trying to take the heat out of them. Everything in the kitchen stinks of bleach. As calmly as I can manage, I speak to my husband. Robert, Gloria Ramírez is fourteen years old. What if it had been Aimee?

Don’t you compare that girl to my daughter, he says.

Well, why the hell not?

Because it’s not the same, he is nearly shouting now. You know how those little gals are.

I pick up a stack of plates that are still in the dish rack from yesterday and set them down on the counter so hard the cabinet door shudders. No, I tell him. You shut your goddamned mouth.

Robert clamps his lips shut. When his eyes narrow and his hands curl into a fist, I yank the kitchen curtains open and start looking around for my big wooden spoon. If we are going to start hitting each other, I want to strike first. And I might want witnesses, too.

Excuse me, Mary Rose, he says, but I don’t believe I will shut my mouth.

He is still yapping when the phone starts ringing off the hook. Leave it, I tell him, there’s a salesman that won’t stop calling. The phone rings and rings, stops for a few seconds, and starts up again. Robert stands there looking at me like I have lost my everloving mind. Leave it, I yell when he moves toward the phone. It’s a goddamn salesman.

After the phone goes quiet, he asks how long I’m going to keep Aimee under house arrest, and I lie and tell him she has made all kinds of new friends here on Larkspur Lane.

When he sidles up to me at the kitchen sink and asks if I don’t miss him even just a little bit, I grab at my breast and tell him about my milk duct.

Jackpot.

I have watched my husband stick his arm up a cow all the way to the elbow to turn a breeched calf and then cry when neither the cow nor the calf survived the night, but one word about his wife’s nipple infection, and he can’t get out the door fast enough.

He takes his canned goods and one of Suzanne’s frozen casseroles and pulls out of the driveway with a little honk to let me know he means it. I take some aspirin and redraw the dishwater. Across the street, Corrine Shepard is sitting on her front porch. I lift my hand from the soapy dish tub and hold it up to the window, and she lifts hers, cigarette held aloft, the small red cherry dancing merrily back and forth in the night. Hello, Mary Rose.

When the phone starts ringing again, it takes every bit of my willpower not to run over and fetch it off the receiver. Well come on over, you bastard, I want to tell them. I’ll be standing on the front porch with my Winchester, waiting for you.





Glory

Six o’clock in the morning and Alma is tired, as always, after a night spent cleaning the administrative offices and safety department, the credit union and break shacks, the bathrooms where men sometimes piss on the floor next to the toilet and trash cans overflow with rotting food and empty aerosol cans of cleaning solvent. But it is Friday and she, along with the other six women on the crew, is looking forward to collecting her pay—money for rent and groceries, money for all the little things her daughter is always needing, money to send home and, if there are a few dollars left over, money enough to buy something small for herself—hand cream, a new rosary, a chocolate bar—and maybe knowing this makes Alma and the other women feel a little less tired than usual.

The border patrol van is already parked outside the front gate, the sliding door already open and waiting for them, and because they are women, the youngest eighteen and the oldest nearly sixty with half a dozen grandchildren, and because the four agents who stand next to the vehicle are larger and stronger, and each man’s service pistol is prominently displayed on his right hip, taking the women into custody is a quick, mostly quiet affair. The women will be dropped off on the other side of the Zaragoza bridge before Alma can tell her brother about the spare money she has hidden in the bedroom closet, before she can grab an extra jug of water or a second pair of shoes for the long trip back to Puerto ángel, before she can say goodbye to Glory. Alma speaks her daughter’s name awkwardly. Glory—the name she insists on. Glory, the extra beat that has been severed. She misses it.