Heteroflexibility (13 page)

A dozen or so light-green lipstick tubes rolled together as I yanked it open. All the same brand. I picked one up, recognizing the case.

Cade’s mystery woman was Fern.

I slammed the drawer closed again, torn between leaving some vicious message scrawled in red on her mirror and leaving without letting her know I knew.

I stumbled backwards out of the bathroom, ramming the back of my knees against her bed and sitting abruptly. This was completely and utterly fucked up.

I had to get out of there.

***

The boxes were heavy and awkward, stacked against my face. I waddled down the hall, determined to take the steps and avoid the elevator troll. I tried to reach for the doorknob to the stairwell, but I couldn’t grasp it. Damn, damn, damn.

I wanted to make it in one trip. I couldn’t bear to come back up and run into Fern. God, she’d been having an affair with my husband. My clutzy, balding, unromantic
husband
. Of all the men in the world—and she had so many of them—she wanted mine too.

The boxes heaved perilously as I tried to open the door. No way would I make it. I stumbled back down the hallway and pushed the button for the elevator. Elevator Boy would just be one more awful thing in a horrid night.

The light on the floor numbers immediately began zipping upward. I glanced at my watch. Almost midnight.

The doors opened, revealing the same Elevator Boy, who leaned against the mirrored walls, arms crossed. “You rang?”

I ignored him, bending down to lift the stack again. Bloody heavy things.

“Here, it’s my job to help.” He took the top two. “I can get you a dolly or a cart if you have more.”

“This is it. I came light. Leaving light.”

“Didn’t work out?”

I shook my head.

He set the boxes in the corner and pressed the button to close the door. “You got somewhere else to go?”

He had to ask that. “Of course. Loads of friends. This was always temporary.”

He nodded. We began the descent. “Your car in the garage?”

Oh, crap. “Actually, it’s several blocks down.”

“You want me to watch these while you get it?”

The elevator opened. I glanced at the boxes. My livelihood was in them—cameras, sample albums, as well as a few clothes and the mattress. “I guess I don’t have a choice.”

He smiled, looking far more friendly than he had a half hour before. “You know what, it’s time for my break anyway. Let’s drive these down. That way you don’t have to worry.”

The elevator began closing, but he stepped forward to block it. “What do you say?”

“Okay. Great. Thank you.” So Elevator Boy wasn’t a complete jerk.

He waved at the security guard as we passed. “I’ll be back in a few.”

“You only got fifteen minutes, boy.” The voice was gruff but his face was smirking. “Not that you’ll need it.”

I glared at the man. “You’d think they’d hire someone a bit more professional.”

Elevator Boy pushed open the front doors and waited as I passed. “You don’t get the pick of the litter for the night shift. But Bud’s all right. He entertains me.”

He led us to a beat-up truck parked on the street. “They don’t let you in the garage?” I asked.

“Nah. That costs money. And most of what I make goes to child support.”

What? He couldn’t be much older than twenty. And a father? Elevator Boy? Who wanted the hottie-hookup? “You have a kid?”

“Yeah. The ex, though, she didn’t want anything to do with me. I get to see Madison every other weekend.”

He shoved his boxes in the back and lifted mine over the side. “Your chariot, oh roommate of the harlot.”

“Ex-roommate.”

We climbed into the cab. “I didn’t think you’d last long. Too many houseguests.”

“You were right. I’m done. The garage is off Second Street, in the Warehouse District.”

“I know the one.”

We pulled up to a red light. The roads were quiet and dark, the street lamps leaving dim pools of light at measured intervals. I could see the photograph, the leading lines taking you out into the distance. All it needed to complete its despondency was a lone figure, head down, walking away.

Elevator Boy drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “You okay? You really got somewhere you can go at midnight on a Wednesday?”

The truck chugged through the intersection. I glanced at him and noticed a picture clipped to his sun visor. A curly haired girl, about two. This wasn’t a guy I had to bullshit. “No. I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“I got a place, you know. I don’t get off until two-thirty, but you seem kinda lost. We could hang out. Bud wouldn’t say nothin’.”

Two men inside an hour offering me a place to stay. This day could not get any stranger. “That’s real kind of you. But I do have some money. I’ll get a hotel.” Actually, I didn’t have much money. Harry Histrionic’s check had mostly gone to gas.

“You got some family?”

Of course. Dad. “I do.”

“They’ll take you for a spell?”

A neon sign lit him from behind, his nose sharp in silhouette, hair flopping on his forehead beneath a ridiculous flat-top, bell-boy style cap. “Actually, they will, yes.” I had enough gas to get to Fort Worth.

I realized suddenly that if Elevator Boy was so observant, he might have seen Cade going in and out of Fern’s place.

“Hey.”

He didn’t turn. “Yeah?”

“You seen a guy coming around to Fern’s a lot, tallish, pug-faced, without a lot of hair?”

He shrugged. “Nobody came around a whole lot. Not on my shift anyway. Always somebody different.” He stole a quick glance at me. “Did she go for yours?”

“Oh no, no. Just someone we both knew.” I could only handle so much humiliation in a day.

The truck lurched forward. “Well, I’m glad you got family. I’m going to leave Ol’ Faithful here illegally for a sec, and we’ll get these boxes to your car.” He drove half up on the sidewalk and shoved the gearshift into park.

He started to get out, but I put my hand on his arm to stop him. “Thank you. Really. I’m sorry I don’t even know your name. In my head you were just…asshat.”

He chuckled. “It’s Carlos. And most people aren’t asshats, once you get to know them. Except for a few, who become even bigger asshats.” He opened his door. “We’ll don’t sit here wasting my break time. I could be banging somebody. Let’s hit it.”

Chapter 16: Thirsty Birds and Nodding Donkeys

I arrived in my old neighborhood outside Fort Worth at four a.m.

Dad had waited up despite the hour, sitting in his bathrobe on the swing at the end of the porch. He looked more grizzled than last time I’d seen him, on Father’s Day, tall and gaunt, with a little lean to his posture. He’d had a rough life, decades of off-shore drill work, and it showed.

I climbed the weathered concrete steps, the corners broken off. He stood and pulled me into his embrace, his hand on the back of my head, and cleared his throat. I had to bite hard on my lips to keep from losing the control I’d held all the way from Austin. I would not cry. Not over those hideous people I thought I knew, my husband, my friend.

“I’m sorry, Peaches. I’m glad you called. And I’m glad you’re here.”

He led me into the house. Dad never changed much of anything. The sofas were still orange and brown plaid, the TV encased in its own fake-wood console. A dozen dusty pictures littered the top. They pretty much stopped when I turned fifteen, when Mom died, other than a wedding picture. All this time I’d been a photographer, and I hadn’t gotten a shot of me with my dad. I’d fix that. Tomorrow.

I stumbled into my old bedroom, still decorated from my teens. We didn’t talk any more, and I collapsed onto my tattered quilt and fell asleep.

***

Dad shook me awake. I peered at the ancient digital alarm clock on my old bedside table, still covered in N Sync stickers. My misspent youth. It was 6 a.m.

“Wake up if you’re coming on the rounds. I got breakfast ready.”

I mumbled something even I couldn’t parse.

He straightened. “I’m fine if you don’t. You need your rest.”

I pushed the blankets away. “No, I want to come.”

“All righty then. Make sure you dress proper for the wind and dust. Haven’t had much rain.” He set a pair of broken-in cowboy boots on the floor by the bed. “I seem to recall you and your mom wore the same size.”

He sauntered out the door, his stride hitching a bit. The muted light from the hallway eased into the room, resting on the boots. I leaned over the edge of the bed to touch them. Mom had worn them when she worked in her garden. I hadn’t seen them in over a decade.

She’d always seemed to put more time and attention into her beets and radishes than she did her family. Her little rectangle of vegetables was her refuge. “You can bury a lot of troubles by digging in the dirt,” she’d say.

She planted only oddities. Sweet onions, ginger root, cilantro, squash, habanero pepper. Never the good stuff, like watermelons or corn. Then she’d foist them on me at dinner, mumbling tripe about “salt of the earth and working my fingers to the bone.”

With Dad gone so much, we often sat opposite each other in the fading light of the kitchen, too cheap to turn on the overhead, a showdown over the Formica table. Oh, how I hated her those nights, beets bleeding across my plate, a slab of chicken smothered with peppers and onion. Not teenager food.

We didn’t talk as I stealthily transferred my meal to a paper napkin, waiting for moments when she stared into space, seeming to forget I was even there. She had my hair but a withered face, eventually lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke into the silence.

If we broke the quiet and got into an argument, usually over what I’d do with my life and how to get out of this god-forsaken suburb and into a real town, she’d abruptly go back outside to dig and weed. Texas was good that way, allowing her to keep something planted year-round.

No matter how she went out, she’d come back in happier, with muddy knees, humming some little tune—the only indication any of us ever got that she might be in a good mood.

Dad approved of her gardening. When I’d be put out that she wouldn’t drive me to a friend’s house, he stop me from insulting her by saying “When you throw dirt, you lose ground.”

Coming from a man who married a woman who tossed more sod than a bull in heat.

But I never shot back with the truth, that I would know all about throwing dirt. I turned out just like her.

I sat up and straightened my wool socks. The cold front was chillier up here than in Austin. One foot slid down into the boot, gliding comfortably past the bend, and a quick tap on the floor brought my heel firmly down.

Dad was right. They were a perfect fit.

***

The two-lane highway stretched out long and flat as we rumbled out of town in Dad’s Ford pickup. I felt a little queasy from eating fried eggs before sunup. The lack of sleep didn’t help, but I did not want to spend the day alone.

The fields alternated in brown, yellow, and green with long skinny pipes of pivot irrigation systems sprawling like praying mantis. Sagging barns and small ranch houses dotted the landscape, flat and unbroken other than the occasional mesquite tree.

“So, you hired a lawyer yet?” Dad kept his eyes on the road, hands relaxed on the steering wheel. A pair of cows watched us ride by from behind a barbed-wire fence.

“Not yet.”

“I reckon he’ll get some big shot.”

“I don’t think so. It’s just a friend from college. I don’t expect it to get ugly. We don’t really have anything to split.”

“You going to take the house?”

I sunk down in the cracked vinyl seat. The light was shifting from gray to blue as we drove into the sunrise. “I don’t think so. It’s too expensive. Besides, he wants it, for the baby.”

Dad hit the brakes suddenly, and I shifted forward against the shoulder belt. He pulled over onto the gravel shoulder. “The what?”

Suddenly I remembered something. The woman was Fern. “Oh my God. I mean, yes, he wants the house for the baby.” I pictured her downing the Oban at the bar. “But I think he got lied to. I don’t think the girl was pregnant.” The sticks from college. The joke we’d played. She’d done it again. But why this time? Why did she want to break us up?

Dad pulled back onto the road. “The boy never did have it all together upstairs. I’ve seen one-eyed geese with more sense.”

“Oh, Dad. He has a master’s degree.”

“Paperwork doesn’t make a man smart.”

A truck hauling a trailer full of hay rolls approached in the opposite lane. Dad lifted his hand. The other driver waved back. I’d forgotten about that, such a simple gesture. The only hand signals on freeways in cities were quite the opposite of friendly.

He cleared his throat. “You okay for money?”

“Not especially.”

“I’ll loan you some. You’ll need a lawyer.”

I hated this. Each moment got more humiliating than the last. This had to be rock bottom, surely. Living with my dad and asking for money.

Dad turned off the main road onto a strip of white gravel. We bumped and jostled a few hundred yards and pulled up before a black pumpjack, its iron head slowly rising and falling in a steady rhythm.

He rolled down his window. The pump moved almost silently, the quiet of the hay field broken only by the truck’s idling motor.

He listened a moment. “Sounds like she’s fine,” he said, backing up again. “Most of ‘em only need a listen. I can tell if something’s wrong with them.”

“Do you fix them if there is?”

“Depends on the problem. Some things are easy.” He glanced over at me, his mouth in a tight frown. “Most things are hard.”

We drove back onto the road, only to pull off again a couple miles down. We had a dozen pumpjacks on today’s rounds, spread out all over North Texas. The truck lurched along a dirt road a ways before coming up on another, older pump, brown and rusting but still moving steadily against the cloudless sky.

“This one’s scheduled for shut down,” Dad said, killing the engine.

“Why?”

“It’s an old model. Runs on a motor fueled by its own oil.” He opened his door, filling the cabin with the pop pop CRACK sound of the pumpjack.