The bitch.
* * *
FOR THE rest of the afternoon, her man continued to work on the truck. They would need the truck for pickup and delivery and that was the sort of thing Dennis was good for. It was cold to be working out of doors and it was hard work with all the heavy parts and climbing up under the truck, and his mangled leg hurt him. So every half hour or so he stumped and shuffled in for coffee and to warm his hands. She said nothing more about Maggie Boylan and the girl with metal in her mouth. She had said enough. He said nothing at all.
She tried to call her mother back and got no answer. She straightened the children’s bin and handled customers and totaled up the day’s receipts. Finally, near closing time, as the short day darkened, she heard the truck fire up. It hummed with a nice new-muffler hum. She heard his step, stomp and shuffle, stomp and shuffle, into the back office and the clink and clank as he put his tools away.
“Are you done back there?” He did not answer. He stomped and shuffled and clanked as if he had decided to move everything in the room.
“Say,” she said again, “you about done in there?”
She heard him stomp and she heard him shuffle and heard him clink and clank.
He’ll be a minute, she thought. She turned the store lights out and went to the window to flip over the CLOSED sign. A line of Christmas lights ran around the window. She could see other lights up and down the street and she could see the lights of the crèche on the courthouse square and she decided to leave her lights on like the rest.
She took out another cigarette and lit it. He would stretch out his shuffling and clanging as long as he could just so as not to talk to her. He would get over it soon enough, but he might not talk the whole way home.
I reckon she could have done it to get her old man some cigarette money, she thought. She would like that to be true. She knew it was unlikely, but she wished something like that could be true.
But no, she thought. Maggie’s bought herself something to smoke or snort. And when that’s gone she will pass off those shoes and those jeans on some new sucker. And then that girl will come right after with her little lie, and then they’ll go on to the next.
Her man stomped and shuffled in the back office and Sarah Hunter stood in the window and smoked her cigarette. Christmas lights dressed every window up and down the square and around the courthouse and even over the door of the jail where Maggie’s husband sat out his sentence. The bud of a cough had set up in the back of her throat, the bud of a tear in her eye. I should quit these things, she thought. She wished she had quit them long ago. She wished things were different in so many ways. She wished she were able to take care of her mother. She wished Maggie had not become such a wreck of a woman. She heard her man clanging and shuffling in the back and she wished she had not learned to sharpen her tongue.
She wished she could take back this whole damn story.
The Way the World Is
“THAT’S THE way the world is,” the girl said. And she did not seem to like it.
“Honey, you ain’t seen nothing,” Maggie Boylan wanted to say. But the girl did not skip a beat.
“All I did was take her in because she was homeless and I get throwed in jail for what she done.”
A late November wind rattled the windows of the lobby where they sat, side-by-side on a bench. The girl was a heavy girl—a young woman, really, but to Maggie Boylan, just a girl. She was thick in the body, weighted in the shoulders, heavy in the cheeks and around her eyes. She was pierced in several places, pierced in one nostril, pierced with a ring in her brow, pierced by an arc of studs in her ear.
“There I was,” she said, “coming out the door at Walmart. I had a cart full of groceries and diapers and what not. I was fixing to feed her and her kids right along with mine, and all of a sudden, you’d of thought I was Osama Bin Laden. There goes the alarm ringing and here come the security cop and a few minutes later here come the police and there’s my little kids crying and these cops want to know did I think I was smart trying to get away without paying for that purse and I’m, like, what purse?
“And what it was, that penniless bitch I took in off the street had snuck this purse she wanted into my cart after I done checked out so she skips on ahead. She borrowed my car keys, you see, and she says, I’ll go ahead and unlock the door. And she skips out like there ain’t nothing going on.”
“She set you up.”
“She didn’t have the guts to steal it herself and she figured if anybody was gonna get caught it’d be me. And she would of got away with it, except I pointed her out and they ended up taking both of us to jail. And I’m thinking, there’s my little kids off to foster care, and they’re crying their little hearts out. And my parents had to come up from Wilsonville to fetch my kids and bail me out.”
Maggie Boylan had been nodding as the girl spoke, but she perked up her ears at the mention of the children almost gone to foster care. She was small as the girl was large, small-boned and spare of flesh with the quick, fierce eyes and sharp features of a fox. She watched the girl more closely now.
“But that’s the way the world is,” the girl said again. “You try to help somebody and you get stiffed.”
A deputy passed through the lobby. He was a heavy man with a heavy tread and he called out, “What d’you know, Maggie?”
“I know I want to visit my old man,” she called. But the deputy slung himself through the door without another word.
The girl had lit a cigarette; she blew out smoke and nodded. “That’s just how they treat you,” she said.
“They won’t let you smoke in the building.” Maggie pointed to a sign above the counter.
The girl raised a skeptical brow. “They can’t do no more to me than what they done already.” But she drew on her cigarette one more time, stubbed it out carefully on the rim of a trashcan, then slid it back into the pack.
“They can slap you with a fine,” Maggie said. “They can write you a ticket in a heartbeat.”
“Right now, I don’t hardly care. They could throw me right back in that cell and I wouldn’t care.”
“Honey, you don’t know what you’re saying.”
“They couldn’t do me no worse than what they done already. What could they do worse than what they already done?”
Maggie held her peace.
“This is the worst that’s ever happened to me,” the girl said. She folded her arms, unfolded them, then placed her hands on her knees “I ain’t never been inside a jail before. Never did expect to be. But there I was. And all because I wanted to help some girl that wouldn’t help herself.”
She looked toward the door where the deputy had gone and folded her arms again.
“Like I say,” she continued. “If it hadn’t been for my parents coming up to make my bail, I probably would of lost my kids to foster care. And God only knows what would of happened to them.”
“How many
