Valentine(45)

Suzanne climbs up on the bleachers and hands out pink-and-white Avon bags. Each bag holds next month’s catalog along with lipsticks and eye shadows, perfumes and creams and lotions. Each item is wrapped with soft pink tissue paper and carefully tied with a white ribbon no wider than a fingernail. Smiling broadly and taking care to thank each woman individually, Suzanne slips their checks and cash into a small white envelope and zips it into her purse.

Ten to one, Suzanne has a relative who owes money to at least one man sitting at the other end of the bleachers. Ten to one, her mama bounced a check to at least one of their daddies, back in the good old days. They would never hold it against her, but a woman could spend her whole life proving everybody wrong. So Suzanne keeps moving. She gathers, carries, and drops off. She volunteers, counts, plans, and falls to her knees to gather crumbs that no one else can see. There is always something that needs to be cleaned—a table, a window, her daughter’s face.

Hit him harder, a booster yells. Y’all ain’t going to beat Midland Lee with that attitude, says another. Two boys crash into each other with a loud smack and lie unmoving on the field for a few seconds. Oh hell, one of the boosters yells from the aluminum bleachers, you just got your bells rung a little bit. On your feet, boys, shouts the coach, and the boys slowly roll onto their sides and get to their knees and stand up.

After the Avon has been distributed, Suzanne unlocks the sides of the plastic container she sent Lauralee to fetch from the car. The lid swivels up to reveal three dozen chocolate cupcakes she’s made to give to the team when practice is over. One of the women remarks on the container, and Suzanne passes out catalogs. She is having a product party next week. They should come over for pimento cheese sandwiches and iced tea. Y’all bring your checkbooks. She winks at them, just like Arlene would have.

On a good day, Suzanne’s mother could talk the pithy out of a cucumber. Everyone she ever met had high hopes for her. She was a master at reading a situation and becoming whoever she needed to be—Adventist, card shark, desperate mother in need of a little help. In Blanco, she had been a practicing Catholic. In Lubbock, she spoke in tongues and walked barefoot over hot coals. For a time there, when they lived in Pecos, she had everybody believing that she had lost her sight in a gas explosion. The family laughed all the way to the county line over that one.

This all goes for Lauralee’s college fund, Suzanne tells the women, and while that is not strictly true, it is true enough.

I’m sure she is going to be very successful at whatever she makes up her mind to do, one of the ladies says before turning to talk to the woman sitting next to her about the weather, the football team, the price of oil. When one woman gives an update on the Ramírez case, another wonders aloud what the girl’s mother was doing while her daughter was out running the streets. Well, I’ll tell you what she wasn’t doing, Suzanne says. Paying attention.

Mmm-hmm, another woman says.

It could have been any of our daughters, says a third.

Not mine, Suzanne says. I don’t take my eye off her for a minute.

And then, just as one of the linebackers stumbles to the sidelines and begins retching in the grass, Lauralee flings her baton high into the air, spins around three times, and looks up to the sky with a wide grin on her face. The baton smacks her in the eye so hard that even Coach Allen gasps. She lets out a wail that spins across the practice field like a dust devil, a high-pitched scream that is a full-frontal assault on both hearing and reason.

Suzanne runs down the metal bleachers, each aluminum row trembling as she steps hard, her purse banging against her hip, the cupcakes forgotten and melting on the back row. She grabs her daughter by the shoulders and peers into her eye. It is barely red. She is unlikely to have so much as a bump.

You’re okay, she tells her daughter. Rub some dirt on it. But Lauralee wails on and on, and then everybody stops what they’re doing—Coach Allen stops yelling at the team, the women stop peering into their gift bags, the boosters stop armchair quarterbacking, even the team stands still—and all of them, in what seems to Suzanne to be a single, coordinated motion, look at her as if to say, Well, do something.

I hate the baton, Lauralee yells.

Oh, you do not. Suzanne chews her finger and looks back over her shoulder at the row of boosters, still sitting there with their mouths open, still waiting for her to take control of the situation. She doesn’t hate it, she calls to them.

Lauralee wails again and then falls to the ground, rolling back and forth with her hand over one eye, saying Ow, ow, ow.

Stop it, Suzanne whispers fiercely. You want to let these people see you cry? She pulls her daughter to her feet, walks her quickly across the field, and pushes her into the front seat of the car, all while begging her to stop that damned crying and act like a big girl, for heaven’s sake. She turns on the car and points the vents directly at her daughter’s face, and now she can see that the eye has begun to swell after all. She is going to have a shiner the size of a walnut.

Can we go home, Lauralee asks quietly.

In a minute, honey. Suzanne gently closes the door and walks to the back of her car, where she leans against the trunk and waits for practice to be over.

In a few minutes, the boys run into the locker room and the coaches head to their office to watch tape. The boosters climb down from the bleachers and wander to their cars and trucks, still talking about the season, the price of oil, and the concert Elvis played at the coliseum last March. And still her daughter weeps. When three men walk over to her car, one after another, each pausing awkwardly and glancing toward the front seat, Suzanne apologizes for her daughter and then reaches into her tote bag and hands each man a gift bag—one for a wife, one for a girlfriend, one for himself, though she will never, ever breathe a word about it. She smiles and winks and tucks their money into her little white envelope. She shows them the Tupperware she’s got in the trunk.