for Shoot the Moon, Tuesday knew. She probably just tore an ad from a fashion magazine and rubbed the scented page against her throat in the car on the way over.
When Hud began tapping out “Chopsticks” on the piano, Tuesday reached over to slam down the lid over the keys. Hud snapped his hands back just in time and jumped at the loud noise of the fallen lid. “Damn, Day,” he said, looking up at her with that baffled, what-the-hell-did-I-ever-do-to-you? look he’d mastered years before. With that look, so carefully maneuvered he must have practiced in a mirror, he always effectively made Tuesday feel like the biggest bitch that’d ever walked upright. In his lovely blue eyes, with that look, were kindness and a boy’s gentle confusion. Gatling had inherited Hud’s counterfeit innocence, had started working that same look way too young.
“One of these days I’ll run away with her myself,” Tuesday said, remembering the peach in her pocket. She pulled it out and pressed at a soft part of the fruit, trying to keep from crying again. “I’ll drop a match on this whole house of sticks as I leave. You’ll lose everything. The piano, your songbooks, all the crap you left behind. And we’ll be nowhere to be found.”
“You were just inches from setting the place on fire last night,” Hud said, whispering just loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear. “You had fallen asleep with a cigarette still smoking, burning a hole in the sofa. Who knows how big a fire you would’ve made if I hadn’t shown up? I, for one, don’t particularly want a little burn victim for a little girl.”
“Cigarettes,” the Widow Bosanko said, sighing, shaking her head. Mr. Bosanko had died of lung cancer.
Tuesday put the peach back in her pocket and left the room. She didn’t feel on the verge of tears anymore. Hud always took an argument just one step too far. He could so easily have her in the palm of his hand, right there along with Rose and the Widow, but then he’d say something too godawful. If he’d just left it at “Who knows how big a fire . . .” But then he had to turn Nina into a burn victim, erasing away all her darling features, her tiny, perfect nose and soft lashes and those lips of pale, pale pink.
In the bathroom she took off her dress and leaned her head over the side of the tub to rinse out her stiff hair. When she turned the water off, she heard that Hud had gone back to performing the rest of his song. Tuesday wrapped her wet head in a towel, stepping into the hallway wearing only the matching silk bra and underwear patterned with blue bunnies that Rose had given her last Christmas.
After pulling on a short tartan skirt and a t-shirt and grabbing her face-painting kit, Tuesday went to Nina’s room. Nina sat on the bed dressing her paper doll in a paper ball gown, and Tuesday sat beside her. She touched the fringe of Nina’s faux-leather vest. “You can wear this today too if you want,” Tuesday said.
“Good,” Nina said.
“Don’t ever leave me in the middle of the night, please,” Tuesday said. “Not even with your father. He’s full of evil schemes. I hate him.”
“No, you don’t,” Nina said, taking the tiny comb from her plastic purse, then running it through Tuesday’s hair.
“Yes, I do. Ouch. My hair’s all snaggy.” She took the comb from Nina and did it herself. “I hate him, and so will you someday. And you’ll hate me too, someday, I suppose.”
“No, I won’t,” Nina whined, scrunching up her nose and chin with offense. “You don’t know.”
Tuesday lifted the torn screen of the window. “Let’s go,” she whispered, and together they crept out onto the lawn as Hud got to an emotional part of the song that involved a kind of pained bellowing. Tuesday lifted Nina into the handlebar basket of her bicycle, hooked the face-painting kit to the back, and rode away, the bike shaky on its wheels. Nina sat high in the basket in her cowgirl suit, the fresh peach cradled in the cup of her two hands.
4.
HIS thumb in a thimble, Ozzie sat on the open tailgate of his pickup. He sewed to distract himself these days, repairing years of tears in old trousers and shirts and moth-eaten sweaters. He had taught himself embroidery from a book, and he stitched a rose into the point of a collar of one of Charlotte’s childhood blouses.
When he had left his house that morning with his few baskets of peaches collected from the tiny orchard in his backyard, Charlotte had yet to come home from the drive-in. Her staying out all night wasn’t all that unusual anymore, but she claimed complete innocence, spoke of all-night prayer meetings and spiritual sweats at midnight and meditation in country ditches. “Junior’s a good boy,” she told him, “not like Gatling.” Charlotte spent most of her late afternoons lying sullen and lanky on the living room sofa, letting Junior kneel beside her and talk in her ear. In a hard whisper, the boy seduced her easily with preaching of biblical catastrophe and plague. She was at an age to be prone to any sort of depravity, Ozzie’s neighbors said. A girl Charlotte’s age, they said from their front porches and window perches, a girl so long without a mother, looks for divine undoing, for the kind of violent, snaky salvation a boy like Junior promises.
Ozzie’s fingers were a bit too big for the delicate embroidery, and he stopped a moment and rested his hands in his lap. Ozzie worked with stained glass, repairing church windows from county to county. His burned and scarred hands, with the grooves in the skin, were lately beginning to resemble his windows of glass shards. He used to be much more careful handling the melted lead for the soldering.
Though the death of Jenny, Charlotte’s mother, three years before, was certainly one of the reasons for Charlotte’s newfound religion and her skanky, psalm-reciting boyfriend, Ozzie recognized his own blame. For years he’d brought Charlotte along to the churches old and new, country and city, to remove the damaged stained-glass windows. As she waited, she stood at the pulpits and pounded her fists, faking blustery sermons, or baptized her rag dolls, dipping their yarn hair into the fonts. Then the windows, for weeks, sat in his studio as he intricately pieced back together a broken glass Jesus or nameless saint. When the sun was at the back windows, the powdery colors filled the room, touching Charlotte’s cheeks and hands as she played on the floor with the cat.
“Charlotte’s on the other side of the square,” said a neighbor as she purchased a sackful of peaches. The neighbor had teenagers of her own and spoke with a conspiratorial hush.
Ozzie poked his needle into the cuff of his shirt and walked through the flea market, scanning the crowd. He found Charlotte, still in her geisha-girl costume and wearing what looked to be pink fangs in her open mouth, lying in the grass and sleeping with her head on Junior’s chest. Junior slept as well, his hand in Charlotte’s hair. Junior was certainly not unlikable. He was as handsome as a drowned-rat kind of a boy could be, with thick black hair greased back. He carried a clarinet around with him, saying that he was teaching himself complicated jazz tunes like “So What” and “Undecided.” Charlotte met him when he worked as an apprentice at an ironworks. Above the garage door of the building was a plaster statue of Christ in an iron cage wrought with curlicues and spikes. Ozzie could just see Charlotte penitent in the doorway watching the boy stand among sparks and blue flame.
Charlotte and Junior slept next to a quilt—for the previous few flea markets, Charlotte had been selling off the stuff of her childhood. All the long-abandoned dolls and books of fairy tales and framed photos of childhood friends had been spread out across the quilt and marked with bottom-barrel prices, and Ozzie had been her best customer—last week he’d bought a tin bird he’d bought for her years before, and some faded candy necklaces. Now, next to the few things she had yet to sell, was a sign that said, “Take whatever you want. It’s all FREE.”
Ozzie
