Valentine(41)

Within seconds, Glory’s T-shirt and shorts are saturated and sagging, tugging her toward the pool’s bottom, as if to say, go ahead and sink. She isn’t a strong swimmer—the public pools are for the white kids and although her friends often swam in the livestock tanks they came across when they were out driving, Glory never climbed in with them—but now she discovers she can stay afloat, if she holds her arms away from her body and moves her hands in gentle circles. Eyes closed, Tina and Glory float in the pool next to each other, the sun a jackhammer against their eyelids, the heat a dead weight against their bare skin. They drift, and Tina occasionally sighs, goddamn, goddamn.

When the water pushes them close enough that Tina’s hand lightly brushes against hers, Glory jerks her hand away as if she’s touched a snake. In late February, one nurse held her chin and told her to close her eyes while another nurse gently snipped the stitches at the top of Glory’s head. She tugged each stitch with a pair of tweezers, one by one, until they lay in thin black rows in a small bowl next to the table. And that was the last time Glory felt someone’s hands against her skin.

I once burned my mother’s favorite bedspread on purpose, Glory says, and I wish I hadn’t. We were fighting about school. I didn’t want to go anymore. I wanted to go to work with her and make some money. I wanted to buy some clothes and a guitar, maybe take some lessons.

Kids do all kinds of stupid, Tina says. Look at mine. Your mama probably didn’t care one bit about a hole in a bedspread. She stretches her arms above her head. Never has Glory seen a more buoyant person.

So when are you going back to school? Tina says. What do you want to be when you grow up?

Glory lifts her hand from the water and holds up one finger. First question: never. She holds up another. Second question: I don’t know. At school, she often left the building at lunch and didn’t come back for the rest of the day. She and Sylvia would catch a lift to somebody’s house and spend the afternoon there, listening to music and passing a joint around, watching some of the other kids slide their arms around each other’s waists and wander down the hall and slip into one of the bedrooms.

Tina sighs, her large body expanding and contracting on top of the water. No school? Really? Because girl, I can’t wait to get my two little angels back into school. Your mama’s right.

Maybe. Glory drifts across the pool with her eyes closed, arms moving in slow circles. When the water again pushes the woman and girl close, she reaches over and takes Tina’s hand and squeezes real hard. She waits, and after a pause, Tina squeezes gently back.

They will never meet again. This day will feel too big for Glory, and she will retreat back to room 15 for another week. Tina’s husband will get a job making more money on an offshore rig closer to home, and after some discussion they will carry their sleeping kids to the station wagon in the middle of the night. By the time Glory carries her pocketknife and her towel and a bottle of cold Dr Pepper to the pool again, Tina will be back in Lake Charles. But Glory will never forget her kindness, or her throaty laugh, or the slippery warmth of her hand against Glory’s when they threaded their fingers together and Tina asked, When did it happen?

*

In February, when Alma and Glory were fighting every day about homework and money. When Glory said, I want to quit school and go to work, I want some money of my own, and Alma shook her head fiercely. It was her job to work, her daughter’s job to learn. When boys sometimes pulled into the alley behind their apartment and tapped the horn until Glory grabbed her rabbit’s fur jacket and dashed out the door, but not before Mr. Navarro beat on the front door and hollered at Glory and Alma to stop shouting at each other. On Valentine’s night, when her mother cursed Glory in Spanish while they waited for the van that would pick up Alma and drive her to work, and Glory walked into the bedroom and stood over to her mother’s bed for a few seconds and then casually, as if she were standing over a flowerpot, tamped her cigarette out on the new bedspread. I can’t understand you, Alma. You won’t let me learn it and neither will the school, so speak English, goddamn you. And when, two hours later, Glory took a long, last look around the Sonic parking lot and decided she had nothing to lose. When she climbed into Dale Strickland’s pickup truck and pulled the heavy door closed. When the morning is still as a corpse. When tumbleweeds newly torn from their roots are flung across the land. When the wind picks up, when it says stand up. And she stands up. When a mesquite branch snaps beneath the weight of her bare foot and she hears her uncle’s voice in the slight echo that follows. Walk quiet, Glory. When she thinks she will miss this blue sky stretched tight above the earth’s seam because she can’t stay, not after this. When the wind is always pushing and pulling, losing and gaining, lifting and holding and dropping, when all the voices and stories begin and end the same way. Listen, this is a war story. Or maybe, this is yours.





Suzanne

On the first and third Friday mornings of every month, Suzanne Ledbetter and her daughter drive over to the credit union to deposit Jon’s paycheck along with her cash and checks from selling Avon and Tupperware. To avoid the crowds of men who work at the plant across the highway and come on their lunch breaks, they arrive a few minutes before nine. While Lauralee waits in the car or stands in the parking lot twirling her baton, Suzanne fills out deposit slips for checking, savings, retirement, vacation, Lauralee’s college and wedding, and one account that she records in her notebook as charity. It is an account she has had since she worked full-time selling life insurance and nobody, not even Jon, knows about it. It is her safety net. If things go south in a hurry, she will have options.