dig into a pink suitcase of makeup samples that just arrived in the mail.
“Emerald Noir, fancy!” Christy says, opening a plastic eye shadow tray. “I can’t believe you signed up.”
“Wrote a check, so it won’t cost anybody anything,” says Justine.
“An’it,” Christy says, and they laugh like bouncing a check is the funniest thing in the world. Reney doesn’t laugh.
“Just kidding,” Justine says, tossing a cotton ball at her. “Besides, if I get good at this, we’ll be in our own place before you know it. We’ll probably get a pink Cadillac and drive to Dallas and dine with Mary Kay herself.”
“I’m definitely skipping school for that,” Christy says, bumping Reney with her butt. “I’ve never seen a vampire.”
Reney and Justine rent the two upstairs bedrooms of this big, old rickety house from Christy’s mom, who Justine worked with on the line before switching to days. Reney likes it here okay. Christy lets her come into her room and listen to albums sometimes. She lets her watch television with her and her friends after school. Justine isn’t quiet like she was at Granny and Lula’s, isn’t so mad.
Justine makes a V with her fingers. She puts them over Christy’s cheeks and tells her to hold still and quit grinning. She colors in dark rouge, first on Christy’s cheekbones and then her own, just the way the lady had shown her. She pulls out a deep maroon lipstick to match the rouge and turns to Reney.
“Sure you don’t want to get dolled up, Bean?”
Reney shakes her head. The lipstick is so dark it looks almost black in the fluorescent light of the bathroom mirror.
“Doesn’t matter. You’re the prettiest little Indian I ever did see.” Justine rolls her lips together, smoothing the lipstick, and then kisses a piece of toilet paper and hands it to Reney.
Makeup, Justine had said, was just one reason they couldn’t live with Granny and Lula, who quoted Timothy so much that Reney could mouth the entire Scripture along with her: “In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety . . .” and so on. Reney could count on Justine to follow with a crack about Timothy’s next verse: women staying in silence and subjugation. Then there would be stretches of hard quiet, and they were just better off here, so said Justine.
Reney takes the toilet paper and presses her own lips to it, rolls them into the color. She stands on her tiptoes in front of Justine and looks in the mirror, then wipes her lips with the back of her arm.
A good-time crew from the factory drifts in and out of the house. Cigarette butts transform ashtrays into morning-after volcanoes. Reney turns the ash-dusted tabletops into canvases, tracing hearts in her path when she creeps to the kitchen in the morning quiet. Men, some with union money to spare, bring occasional gifts (a bone-handled jackknife, a book of knots, the licks of a bobtailed dog). They fill the house with noise and a sweet-smelling smoke that Reney has come to know. They leave behind safety glasses, a stray sock here or there. One leaves the Waylon and Willie record that Reney keeps stashed beneath her bed.
“If being with my ex taught me anything,” Justine says, “it’s take not one ounce of shit from a man.” Justine, who won’t call Kenny by name anymore, holds her eyeliner to the flame of a match to soften it before touching it to her eyelid.
Reney leans in the doorway, waiting for the familiar sermon.
“You can’t trust a man to take care of you. Remember that, Reney. You can’t trust them at all for that matter. They’ll lie to get what they want. And they always want something.”
Justine steps over Reney and disappears into the kitchen. She is going to work tonight at the second job she’s picked up, waiting tables at a cowboy bar. Justine walks back in with a shot glass of tequila.
“I wish you wouldn’t go to that job,” Reney says. The low-cut blouse Justine has to wear makes Reney feel equal parts angry and embarrassed.
“I wish Granny and Lula didn’t have to walk to the laundromat. Wishing won’t get that washing machine out of layaway.” Justine does a little shake with her hips, holds up her tequila, and winks at Reney.
Reney digs through Justine’s purse and finds the lemonshaped squeeze bottle and disposable saltshaker. She passes the salt and squeezes a bit of lemon into her own mouth before handing it up to Justine, who has already licked the back of her hand.
“I go and prepare a place for you,” Justine says before giving the salt a shake and drinking the tequila down. She cackles, then gets mock serious—maybe, Reney is not sure—and says, “Father, forgive me.”
Kenny seemed good-natured enough until he didn’t. After him, men ran together in Reney’s mind. There could have been one or ten. There was the one who traveled around sharpening barbers’ razors and scissors and prided himself on keeping the kitchen knives sharp. There was a rodeo clown with the sweet dog and his own bag of makeup. Then there was the one whose friend owned the bar where Justine worked. This one wore a .38 Special in a holster he clipped to the inside of his cowboy boot. He had a long red ponytail and plenty of money but no job. After Justine ended it the first time, he stood at the bottom of her bedroom window crying and strumming a guitar. The second time, he snuck into her locker at the plant and filled her purse with poison ivy.
Reney doesn’t know what her mom is looking for in the men or nonstop working. She doesn’t know what makes her squeeze Reney so hard and so long sometimes that it seems like all the air might leave Reney’s chest for good, what makes her sit up all night watching Reney sleep some nights and stay up making noise with the good-time gang others. Reney doesn’t understand what makes it so hard for her mom to keep still. As far as Reney can tell, they don’t need much at all, and between the one job and Granny and Lula, they have all they might ever need in the world.
Like a cowboy from Waylon and Willie come to life, in saunters the jockey from Texas. A towhead with blue eyes and skin like orange leather, Pitch stands a whole head shorter than Justine. Despite his size, he fills the house with bellowing laughter and a Texas jangle, tight as a new barbed wire fence. He doesn’t drink much. When he’s around, whatever it is that keeps Justine wound so tight seems to ease up. He buys Reney a Zebco reel one visit, then shows back up to take her and Granny fishing. He lets her braid racehorse mane and stand in winner’s circle pictures. Reney beams when he remembers to leave her eggs runny and fry her bologna black on the edges.
One Friday morning before school, Justine’s flurry of getting-to-work-on-time chaos comes to a stop in the kitchen doorway. She stands there, tying her hair up in a bun, watching as Pitch flips a pancake shaped more or less like Texas. It grazes the ceiling, and Reney doubles over giggling as Pitch stretches himself as far as he can to catch the pancake before it slaps the floor. When Reney straightens, she notices Justine’s eyes are not on Pitch, but on the sink piled with dishes.
“Go comb your hair, Bean,” Justine says. She sticks her safety glasses in her shirt pocket. “I have to go, and you don’t have time to be playing.”
“But we made God’s country for breakfast,” Pitch says, offering her a plate.
“You better be out there when the bus comes, Reney,” Justine says.
Pitch and Reney listen to her bang down the hallway. When the front door closes, Pitch makes a scary face that gets Reney laughing all over again, but as she lies in bed that night, worry washes over her. She
