Dawn.”
I said, “Houston, you got to settle down.”
He said, “That’s why she loved me. I aint scared of womanfire.”
I said, “You sure you don’t want me to take Nicolette?”
He said, “Promise me, Misty Dawn. Promise me you’ll tell her.”
“All right,” I said. “I promise.” Didn’t make no difference to me.
Houston pecked the bill envelope against the back of my hand, said, “Hey.” I looked up into his watering eyes. He face cracked a smile. He said, “That’d be good.”
* * *
JUNE WAITED till she got out of the parking lot before she asked.
“What did he want?”
I said, “Trying to worm back in with Mamaw.”
June crossed the new road that went up Drop Creek and into the old middle of Canard. Coal truck blew his horn at us. A city police leaning on his cruiser stared at us. I give him the stinkeye. Another coal truck downshifted, rolled through the stop sign at the corner.
June said, “I wish she would take him back. She just idles up there.”
Mamaw used to be good to get up in the face of the coal companies, challenging their mining permits, taking up for people who were getting blasted out of their houses, writing letters for people whose water got turned orange and poison, taking people to see the thousands of acres left bare and unstable—and back around the turn of the century, she and some others won a couple fights. But between the pills and the president, coal had knocked down most of the people willing to say something. People seemed tired out on fighting something big as coal, and though they still talked and had their meetings, it was mostly talk. That summer, Mamaw and this statewide treehugger outfit were lining up movie stars and such to come see what was going on. They’d had a dude in one of those boy bands and an actress who’d been about legalizing dope to come on flyovers. Mamaw paid for them flyovers with money she’d inherited from her sister, who made a bunch of money on coal.
I was proud of what Mamaw did. Houston had backed up Mamaw, when people would talk bad about her, soothing it over, so people would still come to their photo studio. So they could have money to live. It couldn’t have been easy. That was what he was talking about at the apartment. Loving Mamaw’s fire. When Mamaw got in a scrap, she was a woman on fire. As for that pumpkin shit, I don’t know what that was about.
I looked at my phone. I had a missed call from Willett.
I said, “Pull over, Aunt June.”
June stopped her car beside the railroad track at the only place for miles my cell phone worked. A bald man sitting on a four-wheeler cried into his cell phone behind us. A woman up ahead hollered into hers about the bad price she got for a bunch of mine batteries.
I called Willett about when we’d be getting to Kingsport. Willett wanted details. His mind don’t work right unless it’s full of stuff he don’t need to know. I told him, “We’ll be there when we get there, Willett. I got to help Momma.”
I must’ve sounded cross, cause Aunt June said, “Dawn.”
“Willett,” I said, “Why don’t you take care of yourself, stop worrying about us?”
Willett was at his mother’s. She was fixing 4th of July food. Willett’s nosiness always got worse when he was at his mother’s.
“Dawn,” Aunt June said.
“Why you got to take on everybody else?” I said. “Everybody else aint your problem.”
Albert said he’d heard people say my mother wore a recorder when she went to buy pills.
“Honey,” Aunt June said.
There was a strip of dirt twenty feet wide between the road and the railroad grade. Somebody’d planted four rows of corn in it. The stalks ran sixty yards down the tracks. The corn was tall as Nicolette. I told myself Nicolette wasn’t why I got married, but I guess she was.
I was getting heavy, couldn’t sit down without fat rolling over my middle, pinching me, making me grouchy. Only people skinny around here are on pills. My mom was skinny as a supermodel, a supermodel needed a good night’s sleep.
I got out of June’s vehicle, walked down the railroad track. I wished Nicolette was with me. She’d find things on the ground I never would. I turned to look at Aunt June. She stood outside the car, her elbows on the roof. Her head rested on her arms looking down the track at me. The wind turned the leaves upside down and the air looked like grape pop. It was fixing to rain.
“Willett,” I said into the phone, “I gotta go. I’m fixing to get hit by lightning. Hunh? Nicolette’s with Houston. At his apartment. In the High-Rise. Yes. We’ll be there before dark, yes.”
The raindrops came in stinging gobs, tiny jellyfish pelting me by the thousand.
I said, “I got to go, Willett.”
I hit the red button on the phone and my husband was gone. Thank you Jesus. A trailer set across the road from the train track cornfield. Car wheels filled up with cement all in a row down the edge of the yard kept people from driving in the grass. Outside toys, red yellow and blue, giant dollhouse, purple pink and white, a brokedown trampoline, a rabbit-wire pop-can silo messed with my seeing till I almost missed the woman on the porch, woman way bigger than me, sitting across a kitchen chair in the gloom, chin tipped up, peering over top of the paint-peeling porch rail. I didn’t wave at her, and she didn’t wave at me.
June came to Canard to try and straighten us all out. She’d been living in Tennessee, but she grew up here.
The woman on the trailer porch stood and turned around, her massive shorts thin and pale yellow, spotted and hanging wide around her knees. She swayed as she made her way to the door, a storm door without no glass in it, just a frame. She went in the house without closing the door, and I could see right through her house out a window on the other side, into the summer light, the rain light, dull and serious, the serious business of rain filling the river behind the trailer. Her house was too close to the river, the corn too close to the train track, her too close to me, everything one bad day away from crashing into everything else, one bad day away from getting washed away and ruined.
I was twenty-two years old. It was all ridiculous. I couldn’t see no point to it. I looked up into the sky, gray like line-dried bedsheets, tiny jellyfish pouring out of it into my eyes. All I did was think. How could I get rid of Willett? How could I get Nicolette somewhere easier? How was I ever going to lose any weight? Why did this woman have to live so close to the river? Why aint they figured out time travel yet? It never stopped.
I didn’t have no more business doing as much thinking as I was doing than a dog did doing the dishes. I had too much to do. But I couldn’t stop thinking cause it seemed the world was a blank, a bottle of pills without no directions for use on it. Somebody was asleep at the switch. Somebody was falling down on the job. I wish I knew who it was. I’d go where they work and beat their ass.
June come to my side like I knew she would.
