to never want anything cause you don’t have a way to keep it safe.
Or stole. Or lost. Every chair in pieces. Every rug pissed on. Every glass and plate and toy and pretty little thing on every shelf shattered. You don’t put your hand down in the cushion of your burnhole sofa cause you’ll come back with your finger cut on bottle glass or a needle or tin can lid. Blood beading like a superball cause can’t nobody give a shit.
But our house hadn’t been like that. It wadn’t perfect like Willett’s mother’s, but it was ours and it was nice cause none of my family knew where I lived.
Fu Manchu went back to the kitchen, lay that curtain rod on the counter. He took out his hog-sticker lock blade. He cut summer sausage into little pieces and he raked them off the counter into his hand. He threw them in his mouth like they were my baby’s teeth. He stared at me.
I said, “GET OUT.”
Fu Manchu said, “I heard you before.” He was bigger than the refrigerator. I felt like one sweep of his arm might knock my house down.
Groundhog crashed to the floor, set with his back against the sofa. Willett come back down the hall, Nicolette hanging on his leg. She went to Groundhog and put her hand on his face. She said, “Momma said leave, Slobberface.”
Groundhog raked his arm and caught Nicolette in the side of the knee, knocked her down, which was enough for Willett and he set into kicking Groundhog, saying “Don’t you ever, EVER touch her.” Which we all stood and watched till Momma come out of the bathroom, bolting down the hall like a wiener dog shot out of a cannon, and Evie said, “This is stupid” and grabbed the Jeep keys off the counter and left out.
The rest, Momma included, filed out after Evie. Nicolette dragged a chair to the sink and filled up a squirt gun I’d been using to train the cat to stay off the counter and out of my spider plants. I didn’t make a move to stop her, nor did I when she went running out the door straight as a string, pointing the squirt gun dead ahead of her. Willett grabbed the squirt gun as she turned sideways and slipped past, and I finally did stand up.
“Here, girl,” Momma called from the front seat of the Jeep.
Nicolette ran to her grandmother. Willett stood there, pointing Nicolette’s squirt gun at Momma, his finger on the trigger. Momma hugged Nicolette and the Jeep started moving before she set her down. But she did get her set down before they took off, and then Momma was gone in a cloud of gravel dust.
* * *
I WOKE up that night alone in bed. Willett’s snoring came through the closed bedroom door. I got up and went down the hall. Willett’s legs curled on the sofa. The streetlight on the corner lit up the room. On the table next to him was the blue folder holding his new hire papers.
I sat down on the edge of the couch and opened the folder and held the direct deposit form to the light, did the same with the medical plan papers. The credit union papers. The paper explaining how Willett gets time and a half for all hours over eight worked in a shift, double time for all hours over twelve. The employee newspaper. The sign-up form for the employee softball league. The menu from the employee cafeteria. The membership card for the employee recreation center. After all this time. My husband. An employee. I stacked the papers and my heart hammered like somebody beating on the wall when you’re making too much noise in your motel room. I put the papers in the blue folder, took them out and held them to the light again. I closed the folder and moved to the chair facing Willett. He lay on his side with his eyes open.
“Permanent,” Willett said.
I said, “That’s good, right?”
“Right,” Willett said.
I said, “Come to the bedroom,” and went and checked on Nicolette. Then I got in bed. Time I fell to sleep, I was still alone.
* * *
TUESDAY MORNING, I lay in the bed staring into a pile of clothes and a pencil drawing I did right after high school of six lady astronauts. Light filtered through the pink sheet covering the window. Willett’s arm draped across my stomach. I took his hand in mine. He snored like a little baby cow.
I moved out from under Willett and sat up on the side of the bed and began to fold clothes. Willett’s band T-shirts. His boxer shorts. A wet pair of my jeans. I got two wire hangers out of the closet, hung the jeans on them, and hung the hangers on the new shower rod. Willett stirred as I come back in the bedroom.
He said he loved me and I said I loved him. I went to Nicolette’s room and closed one eye, held the drawing of the lady astronauts up to a blank wall, wondered would Nicolette like me to paint her a mural of the lady astronauts.
I got my navy-blue pants out of the laundry bag, dressed standing in the kitchen. I pulled a powder-blue button down shirt out of the bag, smoothed it out best as I could. I worked at a copy shop. Had been for a while. It might be that when Willett’s pay from the plant started piling up I’d be able to quit.
I opened one of my schoolbooks for nursing. Two hundred dollars for a book. Now Willett had a job like the ones his father and his grandfather and uncles and some of his aunts and a lot of his cousins had kept their whole working lives. I’d seen the pins on their lapels, on their blouses, in the pictures in the halls of their brick houses. Twenty-year pins. Thirty-year pins. Forty-year pins. He could be there forever. I could be whatever. I could be new. I could be not a nurse.
Willett rose and stretched. When he did, he knocked the lamp beside the bed off into a pile of towels on the floor.
“Goddamn, Willett,” I said, but I couldn’t be mad at him. I set the lamp back up, got the towels and shirts and stuff, and put them in a basket.
Willett moved the lamp aside looking for his work pants, which lay hanging over an aquarium had three pitiful guppies left floating around in it. Willett whistled and bobbed his head in his own little going-to-work world.
* * *
WORK THAT day at the copy shop was church bus slow. They sold office supplies at that copy place, so I went and opened a thing of scissors and got a bunch of magazines and cut pictures out of them. I cut out a movie star pushing a baby stroller, acting like she didn’t want nobody to know it was her, when obviously she did, or she wouldn’t have on the hiding-out-movie-star costume. Black sunglasses and a tight, showing-off-fake-boobs T-shirt and a hundred-dollar baseball hat like you see rich women wearing when they run out on the bypass, ponytails bouncing, trying to act like they’re in Lexington. Then I found a big old picture of a pit bull, its mouth full open, looking like a shotgun wound with teeth, its head filling up both pages of a magazine spread. I cut that out and lay it next to fake hiding movie star, and it looked just like that dog was going eat both her and her baby clean up. That made me feel better, and I was fixing to go get a glue stick and glue them to a big piece of paper and then draw some stuff around it for Nicolette, leaving her space to make up a story about them or whatever, when this bunch of women with helmets of hair, all in yellow and pink and flowerdy print dresses with sunglasses big as Big Mac boxes, their bare arms like those long skinny loaves of bread French guys carry around on the back of their bicycles, their teeth white as mall toilets.
They was fixing to have a church bazaar which I don’t even know what that is and they wanted a flyer to hand out to their friends and they wanted to know what kind of paper I thought they ought to put their church bazaar flyer on and so I got out fifty million different paper
