Valentine(44)
When I was a little girl, she tells Lauralee, I would have given my eyeteeth to live in a house with carpet, and a bathtub that’s big enough to lie down in, and a piano that my mother had bought by licking and posting four hundred and fifty-six thousand S & H green stamps. Your daddy and I are the first in our families to own a home in five generations, but someday, your house will be even better. You’re going to graduate from college and buy one that is even bigger than this, with a second story and plenty of windows, so you can look out and watch the whole wide world passing by.
They have returned from piano lessons, Check, and Suzanne is hanging a needlepoint above Lauralee’s white wicker headboard. It is the only completed project from Suzanne’s brief foray into crafting the previous spring after a miscarriage, this one so early she isn’t certain if it was another pregnancy that didn’t take or just a particularly painful and heavy period. She has set the needlepoint in a brass frame, and thin green vines and white roses form a loose chain around the words Tidy house, Tidy life, Tidy heart. Clenching a leftover nail between her canines, she stands on Lauralee’s twin bed, lightly tapping the frame, first at one corner, then at another, then at the first again, until it hangs perfectly straight. She steps back to the center of the bed and examines her artwork, then leans forward and pushes gently on the upper right corner. Perfect.
Lauralee sits on the carpet with her legs crossed and her shoulders hunched, listening to Gordon Lightfoot on her little pink record player. Since his album came out a few weeks ago, that damned record has been spinning 24/7, Lauralee moving herself to tears every time she hears the song about the ship that went down in Lake Superior.
See how this little needlepoint is hanging just perfectly, Suzanne says and reaches to touch her daughter’s fine hair. Honey, why don’t you turn that off for a little while? It’s maudlin.
Maybe she and Jon can drive to Dallas to get a second opinion from a specialist. Maybe they can adopt, or the next time one of her brothers or cousins calls and asks if Suzanne and Jon can take care of their children for a little while, just until they sort themselves out, maybe Suzanne will say yes, but only if they’re willing to leave them for good. If she decides to have the procedure done, she isn’t going to tell anybody until it’s over and done with. She will check herself into the hospital, have the surgery and be back in her own kitchen before Lauralee gets home, before the plant whistle blows and Jon comes home from the plant.
Suzanne heads to the kitchen table for her legal pad and the gift bags she brought in from the car earlier that day. When she looks out the kitchen window and spies D. A. Pierce riding her bicycle in circles in front of her house, she drops everything and rushes outside, calling, You there, Debra Ann Pierce, you come here. I want to talk to you. The child lets out a high-pitched squeak and takes off pedaling down the street, sturdy legs moving like two piston pumps. She swerves madly to dodge a truck that has run the stop sign at the corner, and keeps right on pedaling.
*
To avoid being run over by a young man with his eye on the ball, they walk along the edge of the practice field. When Lauralee dawdles, Suzanne reminds her to pay attention. You stop paying attention and next thing you know, somebody’s come and towed the family car away, or you come from church one day and find all the furniture sitting on the lawn, sinking into the swamp.
She carries a plastic food container in one hand and six Avon bags in the other. Three more gift bags are hidden in the heavy purse that hangs from one shoulder. It’s hot as the devil’s armpit out there, but Suzanne’s red hair is tucked neatly behind her ears. Her bright orange pedal pushers are freshly ironed, and her blouse is white as a magnolia blossom. Even out here on a hot and dusty football field, she wants her neighbors to say, Suzanne Ledbetter looks like she just stepped off an airplane.
Lauralee walks a few feet behind her mother with her head down and the baton cradled in the crook of her elbow. She has legs like a jackrabbit and her face is covered with so many freckles it looks like a red pen exploded on it, and although Suzanne curled the girl’s hair again before they left the house this afternoon, it has already fallen. In the center of her forehead, a single, valiant curl hangs on for dear life. Stand up straight, Suzanne says, and Lauralee throws her head back, high-stepping her way across the field and clutching her baton like it’s Judith’s sword.
On the football field, the team is doing its first set of burpees. When they get to fifty, Coach Allen tells them to do it again. Sweat rolls down the boys’ foreheads, and the edges of their pads and jerseys are dark with water. One boy falls to the ground and lies there. When somebody squirts cold water in his face, the spectators laugh. Shit, back when they played ball, Coach threw a bucket of ice water in their faces. They once watched a boy get heat stroke out there, and he didn’t go to the locker room. He played through it.
Suzanne and Lauralee walk up to the bleachers where the fans sit with cold beers or plastic cups of iced tea wedged between their knees, and when someone says under her breath, God love her, Suzanne knows they are talking about Lauralee, who has drifted over to the outer edge of the practice field and begun doing figure eights with her baton.
Good job, honey, her mother calls. Try to do a reverse flash followed by a Little Joe flip.
Lauralee wrenches her arm behind her back and spins the baton until it flies into the dirt and lands with a thud. She is so talented, a woman says. I can’t wait to see her in the halftime show in a few years. And she’s tall, says someone else. Bless her little heart. Try a pinwheel, Suzanne calls out. Try a double spin. Lauralee flings the baton into the sun, spins twice, and watches the baton roll to the sideline.