Mama did that, all day, every day. She probably spent five or six hours doing nothing but entering her name, address, phone number, and submitting. Some of these people got clever. Her fellow sweepstakers (they call themselves sweepers), had a whole culture online where they used robo-filling forms so that it was faster to get your entry in and they had contests to see who could enter the most sweepstakes in an hour. It gave Mama something to do and it filled the trailer.
I knew, now, to wait until she was done with the submission before interrupting her, so I paused, carefully trained to wait out until she got the confirmation page. She turned to me and smiled. “Yes?”
“How’s it goin’?”
“No instant wins today.” An instant win meant that she would submit and get an instant notification that she’d won anything from a free music download to a night’s hotel stay – we never used those because none of the hotels were nearby but she’d often barter them and get on these forums and get a little bit of cash in return.
Over the years, I’d say that Mama had probably averaged about a dollar an hour – she would say more like three. I don’t know, somehow there was always a drinking cup with a logo on it, a hat, and so many t-shirts she started just donating them to the local domestic violence shelter. We had five dollar gift cards to fast food places that were not even close and Mama traded those, but if it was something good or something we could use for a bit of cash then what was the harm? We’d tried lots of foods over the years that we never would have bought, everything from chocolate covered bacon to gluten-free pancake mix that wasn’t half bad.
“Is that boy still here?” she asked, standing and limping over to the coffee pot. She gestured with question – did I want any? What the hell, I nodded and she poured in two scoops of coffee to make two cups.
“Which one?” I was running out of words pretty fast and that wasn’t like me.
“What are you doing, Darla?” she asked, her face screwed up in a look of disgust. “You find some naked hitchhiker by the side of the road and you take him in to a place you won’t even let me see.” Her eyes combed over my body and I got creepy-crawly feeling. We didn’t talk this way anymore—I thought I’d learned to deflect before the conversation got to this point. We didn’t talk much at all about anything other than the lottery and sweepstakes. It felt awkward when she pulled out the concern, like she was asserting the parental role that she’d given up eighteen years ago. But the only part that still fit her was the criticism.
“I’m just having fun. He’s the singer for the band that I like.”
“How would you know him?”
“I listen to his music online and it turns out that it’s him.”
Her eyes narrowed, the flesh above her lip curling in a sneer that I’d never seen on her before. “What a coincidence.”
No kidding, I thought. “Yeah, it is a hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?”
She just shook her head, lips tight, and stared at the gurgling coffee maker as if it were performing alchemy. “What about that fancy car out there? Is that another boy from the band?”
Shit. “Uhh…yeah.”
Her head whipped around. “That was a joke, Darla,” she barked.
“I’m not kiddin’ Mama, it is. He came here to help get Trevor back home safely.”
“So why didn’t they leave?”
“Car’s broke.”
This conversation was rapidly devolving and I didn’t like being on the lower end of the evolutionary scale, or at least in our relationship. A thin thread of anger stirred inside me, wiggling, unraveling something so deep I didn’t have a name for it but if Mama kept talking to me like this I was pretty sure soon I’d have some names for her.
“I’m gonna go take my shower.”
“What about the coffee?”
“I’ll have it when I get out. It’s just a quick one.” I stomped off, knowing I needed to walk away before I said something I’d regret. It wouldn’t be the first time – saying something bad, I mean. As I’d gotten older, I’d gotten better about just getting some space from her when things got like this. However, this was the first time I’d had to deal with a naked hitchhiker and his friend’s broken Beemer – so maybe there wasn’t any rule for how to handle this.
The spray of the shower helped wash away some of my anger and I was quick about it, knowing that I would be late if I dilly-dallied. No one at the gas station cared if I went in with wet hair, so I threw it up in a loose pony tail, grabbed my work shirt, made sure that my jeans were clean and my shoes were something other than sneakers and headed back out.
Mama had already poured me a mug of coffee and dumped in some cream, just the way she knew I liked it. The gesture softened me. I knew she was asking all these questions because she was concerned. “Mama, I threw a tarp over Joe’s car. Can you just keep an eye on it?”
“That’s like asking me to protect the Hope Diamond, Darla.”
We both laughed. “Give it a shot. I don’t think anybody will come over and do anything to it, especially under that ratty old tarp.”
“If they do, I’ll call you,” she said.
Her hand reached out and covered mine as I took a sip from the mug with the other. The gesture startled me. We weren’t the affectionate type – the anything type – when it came to emotions. “Where are they from?” she asked. “Cleveland? Pittsburgh?”
I shook my head. “Boston.”
“Boston!” she shouted. “That far? What on earth are they doing here?”
Oh, Mama, if only you knew, I thought. “They’re just passing through town.” That wasn’t technically a lie so I’d go with it.
“Boston’s where Josie is,” she said, suspiciously. “Isn’t that convenient.”
Yeah, it is, I thought. I gulped down as much of the coffee as I could, the liquid just hot enough to make my throat warm and my belly feel thick and full, but not so hot as to scald me. I said, “Thank you.”
She said, “Just be careful.”
“I’m always careful, Mama,” I joked.
“You’re always somethin’,” she teased back.
I waved as I walked out of the door into the sunlight. A quick peek in the window of my little shed showed a sound asleep Trevor, curled up on my bed, so boyish it made my heart nearly break with some kind of tender emotion that I probably wasn’t supposed to feel for him. I wanted to crawl into that bed with him and just curl up behind him and breathe when he breathed…but I couldn’t.
So, I did what I always did and sucked it up and went to the gas station to hand out cigarettes, and booze, and approve pumps, and spend five hours earning as much money as Joe’s shirt probably cost.
Chapter Eight
Darla
Jane had been my best friend since, well, hell, I don’t remember when, but she definitely became a better best friend when Josie went and graduated high school and wasn’t around much. People used to call us Darla and Jane like it was all one blended word – DarlanJane – and for years we were…inseparable, I mean. You couldn’t separate us, you couldn’t part us, you couldn’t anything us. There were no wedges and no divides until she got pregnant two years ago.
Now, twenty, around here, is actually pretty young for getting pregnant. I didn’t even object to the fact that she got pregnant. Plenty of people do – whether they mean to or not – but it was the guy she got pregnant with. She picked this dumbass named Jared. He was five years older than us and he was somebody’s brother from our class. All I knew is that I’d never liked him, even when we were little kids, and I sure as hell didn’t like he was the father of Jane’s baby. And then, shortly after the birth, it got worse. He became her husband.
Somehow Jane had managed to get pregnant, fall in love with Jared, and find Jesus all at once, although I don’t think the Jesus part came easy. It was driven by Jared, who had become like some sort of truck bed preacher. He’d convinced a bunch of people to go in on renting an old, deserted store front in a little chain of three or four stores attached to a house. The other three stores were an orthopedic specialist, some kind of nutrition and supplement place that I’d never set foot in, and of course, a liquor store. The Renewed Life Fellowship Church was what he’d called it and he was out there for every Sunday, preaching away, into the wind as cars drove by.
Now, I don’t have a problem with anyone finding religion – hell, I’m still searching for mine – but what I do have a problem with is hypocrites. When Jane started showing up to work with little bruises here and there, that’s when I lost my faith – or, at least, my faith in Jared.
I pulled into work and there she was, stocking the pop, putting it all in the cooler one by one, mindless motions so ingrained in us we could probably unload a shipment on our deathbed. We’d been working there since high school. I’d gotten the job first and then, when there was an opening a few months later, helped Jane get hired. We hardly ever got to work the same shift; the owner was cheap and tried to keep only one person on. Only on midnights did he have two working, that way in case there was a robbery at least there was a modicum of safety in place. Today I’d take over for her – we would overlap by an hour – and she didn’t look good. She kept hiding her head and just said, “Hey, Darla.”
I stashed away my purse, straightened my uniform shirt, and waited for her to change cash trays with me so that whatever she’d done on her shift didn’t mingle with what I was about to do on mine. And that’s when I saw it – a new shiner, only this one went all the way from the bridge of her nose over practically to her ear. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath because the last time I’d asked her about it she got mad and didn’t talk to me for almost six months. Six months is a long time not to talk to your best friend. Then again, lately she wasn’t my best friend. The echo of all those years together pinged back and forth in my head, though, leaving me torn.
“Are you OK?” I asked, not certain what I was allowed to say.
“Yeah…oh, this?” she said, touching her face and acting as if I were commenting on her new hairdo or a shirt that she’d bought for a special occasion. “Oh, the baby leaves toys all over the place and he was…” her voice faded out. We both knew she was lying.
I wasn’t gonna call her on it. “You might wanna tell the baby that he really ought not to do that.” We stared at each other in silence. I knew it was lame and she knew it was lame. We were involved in a conspiracy of unspoken truths and unspeakable denials and unfortunately the one person who wasn’t engaged in this battle was the one who was gonna win it. Jared. That motherfucker.
She pulled at the edge of her shirt and my heart sank along with my stomach. The swell of her belly was unmistakable – another baby. Little Lucas was what…seventeen months now? I guess two years or so isn’t too bad between kids but – another one with that motherfucker? He had her really trapped now. She trapped herself, I thought. Somehow the truth was in between those two.
