which was spraypainted a lime green. Albert could waste money like nobody’s business.
He said, “Where’s your queerbait husband?” His head filled the truck’s opposite window. Albert backed up and grinned.
I walked back towards the copy shop.
“What’s the matter? Aint you gonna hug me?”
I said, “You got a woman. Go hug her.”
Albert laughed with his arms wide open.
My dark face in the glass of the copy shop door could have told me. There is no way to make your family disappear. Nor was I ever going to know peace with mine. Hubert’s face filled the glass next to my face.
Hubert said, “Where’s your momma?”
I said, “Yall get out of here. This is my work.”
“Your mother needs to call me,” Hubert said.
I didn’t even have the urge to say how pissed off I was, to tell Hubert to leave her alone, leave me alone, leave Tennessee alone. Hubert got me by the arm and jerked me around. I said, “Get your fucking hands off me, Hubert.”
He said, “I need your help, Dawn.” Hubert’s eyes was like the front end of bullets. “She’s gonna get herself killed.”
I said, “What am I supposed to do? Blink three times and make her appear?”
I could feel them asshole drips watching me from inside. Sweat was running in Hubert’s eyes. He looked like a bottle of orange pop just come out of a cooler in some old store.
“Just hold her,” Hubert said. “If you see her, hold her.”
I met Hubert’s bullet eyes with my own.
Albert put a Canard County Bugle, our newspaper, in my hand. As usual, there was a big drug bust on the front page. And there in big color pictures above the fold was Groundhog and Fu Manchu, cuffed and not even trying to hide their faces. Hubert and Albert got back in the truck.
I said, “Hey,” and Albert started the truck. I ran up to Hubert’s window. He rolled it down. I said, “Did Momma rat on them two?” and pointed at the paper.
Hubert said, “I don’t know. Why don’t you blink three times and ask her?”
Then they were gone. I went back in the copy shop. The boys were behind a row of shelves, but I heard them.
“Her boyfriend,” one of them said.
“I thought it was her brother,” another said.
“Probably both,” said the third, and then come the laughing.
I run as hard as I could, put my shoulder into them shelves. There was twelve foot of them hooked together. They went over easy and I caught all three of them dicks under it. They were rocking the shelves trying to get out, but I stood up on the flipped shelves, like a surfer, them hollering, hurt, while the desk calendars and candy bars went flying. I stomped till one of them cried and then I walked out of the store.
4
DRY IT UP
DAWN
I didn’t answer the phone when work called Wednesday morning. I was done copying.
“Well,” Aunt June said when I told her, “why don’t you come take my summer class?”
I was sitting up in bed when she asked me. I put the phone in my lap. Cause I don’t want to, I didn’t say. I also didn’t say this:
Aunt June was wanting to make a difference teaching them classes at the community college, and I’m sorry, Aunt June, but I’m afraid what you’re doing don’t. There were photographs by the thousands mounted on the walls in the building where Aunt June taught—photos she and her students put there the summer before, photos taken with throwaway cameras by kids and church people, by everybody in Canard County, pictures of endless mamaws standing at stoves stirring skillet bottoms skimmed with gravy, people standing out front of trucks with their fighting chickens balanced on their arm, feathers pluming down, grandfathers and grandchildren with guns, endless trailer underpinning backdrops, endless four-wheelers, photos of baptism hot tubs, children holding hot dogs and plastic tigers, plastic cups, plastic motorcycles, little plastic men with flowing plastic hair wearing plastic wrestling tights, pictures of people in the dollar store, children sitting in tires, children looking bored in school, looking bored behind cyclone fences in the yards of coal camp houses, children wallering in piles on brokedown trampolines, old men on couches with their eyes closed and their forearms resting on the top of their heads, a hillbilly parade, and it did give you something—I won’t deny it gave you something—but I don’t know. I don’t know, Aunt June.
So I sat in Kingsport Wednesday. Sat in Kingsport and wondered had my mother scored. Had she found her pills? Had she really snitched like June said Belinda Coates said she had? Was she really about to get killed like Hubert said? Momma might deserve killing. She might. I don’t know. So I sat at the trailer.
The only thing cheered me up was the thought of Willett tooling around the factory floor in a forklift hauling plastic pellets to and fro. Corporal of industry. My plastic man. That blue folder full of employment papers sparked up my why-I-like-Willett. I was feeling good and warm, about that anyway, when Willett showed up in the back doorway, sawed off at the waist where we didn’t have no back steps.
I said, “What are you doing home?”
He said, “I have to train before I can work. The trainer got sick. They sent me home. Go back Friday, they said.”
I asked if they were still paying him.
“Yeah,” Willett said, climbing into the house. “Can you believe it?”
A pretty song came on the radio. A woman sang high and content in a voice had a cup of tea waiting when the song was over. I took the cap off a Pepsi. Willett opened a packet of instant oatmeal lying on the counter. He sang along with the cup-of-tea woman.
I said, “You’re in a good mood.”
Willett said, “I am,” and stuck his head in the refrigerator. He come out with the milk. “The baby still at Mom’s?” he said.
I said she was.
Willett said, “Maybe she could stay over there tonight.”
I said, “She could.”
Willett said, “Maybe after while we can get out the baby pool.”
I took the cap off my Pepsi, said, “Maybe so.”
A car raced by, loud. Somebody doesn’t have a job, I thought. Not like us. Not like Willett. Willett put his oatmeal in the microwave, went to the bedroom and changed into his favorite shorts, came back, and
