What's Mine and Yours(73)

“All he does is say, No, I won’t be the one. I won’t be caught up, and it saves him. It saves him.”

“That’s nice,” Gee said. “But it doesn’t sound like real life.”

“It’s real for Barnardine.”

“It’s all made up anyway.”

“You’re too serious.”

“Then make me laugh,” Gee said, flirting before he knew it. It wasn’t a line, and he wasn’t imitating anyone. It had slipped out of him. It was what he had wanted to say.

Noelle smiled at him. “Too much pressure. Besides, I think it’s your turn.”

Linette returned, and Gee was relieved to see her. Looking at her dissolved the heat he was feeling all over, the heat he worried Noelle could sense radiating off his body. He was loose and buzzing, happy. He wanted her to stay, but Noelle announced she ought to head back. Linette offered to drive her, and she said she’d make her own way. She hugged Linette as if they were old friends, and waved good-bye to Gee. She started walking slowly uphill, along the old baseball field, dusty and fenced in, back toward the school.



Lacey May was waiting for her in the parking lot. She yelled at her for a good long while, and Noelle looked at her serenely, refusing to say where she’d been.

“You knew I had a meeting. You knew, and you held me up on purpose.”

“A meeting?” Noelle said innocently. “What kind of meeting?”

“You know what kind.”

“The campaign is dead. It’s October. It’s too late. What are you going to do now?”

“We’re talking strategy.”

“You going to make your signs and stand in front of the school yelling at all the black kids? Is that your plan?”

“You get in this car right now,” Lacey May ordered, and although Noelle obeyed, Lacey May knew that she had lost.

They sat, waiting for the engine to warm up, and Noelle extracted a big stack of papers from her backpack, and started sifting through them. She was pretending to go over the pages.

“You have no idea what’s going on,” Lacey May said. “You’re focused on this dumb play, and your life is hanging in the air right now.”

“Is that cause of the transfer kids or cause of Papi?”

“You shut up,” Lacey May said and yanked out of the lot. She tried to focus on the road, the wheel, the pattern of clouds overhead. If she didn’t fill her mind with something, she’d lose control and slap Noelle, and the girl was too old for that. She wouldn’t stand for it.

“You shut your mouth,” she said again.

She hadn’t spoken to the girls about everything that had happened, but she knew they’d overheard her talking on the phone to Robbie and Ruth and the lawyer. It was her mistake not to keep it a secret. She’d been too caught up in her anger and confusion. She should have explained it to the girls after everything was settled. She should have been calm; she should have comforted them. But Lacey May hadn’t been thinking of the girls, even if she’d held on to the house for them, their inheritance. She’d mostly felt pity for herself, pity that Robbie had wronged her, again, and that she’d become a woman so scarcely loved.

When she had confronted Robbie, he played dumb. He said he didn’t know what she was talking about, he hadn’t been the one to sell the house. It had been the same way when she figured out he was using. He’d denied and denied, tried to make her feel the fool. She left his apartment, crying, in a rage. He called her a few days later, high, and she went during her lunch hour to see him. She found Robbie curled up on the floor of his kitchen, weeping. He told her the truth. He said he was sorry. He owed rent, he owed other money, he was in trouble. He’d needed it. She had held him, and he’d wet her work vest with his tears. No one else knew what it was to see a man you loved so reduced, to be in the presence of the one you’d chosen and still to feel him as an absence, a missing thing, although you had him close. The last thing he needed was to be punished, no matter what Hank or Ruth said. Every time she punished him, she punished herself, the girls. Hadn’t the years taught her that?

She had kissed him once, softly, and then again. She stopped before he could get the wrong idea, before she could get carried away. It wouldn’t take much. His smell, his warm skin, his yawning need—it tore through her. Maybe that’s what it was like with his drugs. If she gave in, she knew she would never be able to say no again.



At home, Margarita and Diane were watching a teen drama with their arms wrapped around each other. The show was about teenagers climbing into each other’s bedroom windows, and Lacey May didn’t have the heart to object. Hank was in the bedroom avoiding her, Noelle already downstairs. Lacey May poured herself a coffee, lit a cigarette. She called Ruth just to have someone to speak to, but no one answered.

Margarita pretended not to watch her mother from the couch. She had never known her mother to smoke inside the house; she didn’t rise to crack the window. The teenage couple was kissing on the screen, and Margarita tried to focus on memorizing their movements, one lip sliding under another, a mouth opening wide, a flicker of a tongue.

Jenkins wobbled into the room, and Diane patted the couch, called for him to jump up. The old dog couldn’t manage it, so she scooped him up between them. The girls watched one of the rebuffed lovers—he’d caught his girlfriend and his best friend kissing—row across a creek.