LATER THAT MORNING, Jem—driving with a wary eye out for Lebanese construction workers—was on her way back from the grocery store. She stopped for gas at Lil’ Lulu’s Garage down the street from their house. Lil’ Lulu’s owner, Fred Beevle, didn’t believe in self-service gas. He used to say about it: “Everyone gets cheated, you, me, everyone.” So his attendants, the same three for over twenty years, Jesse, Owen, and Fergyl, jumped up for every car. Their skin had turned gray from oil, and they perpetually had some car hoisted on their pneumatic lift. Sometimes when Jem drove up, she could see Fred himself, fat as a buddha, enthroned behind the glass walls of the office, leaning back against the cigarette machine and winding dollar bills around his fingers.
Fred was not anywhere in sight that day, and the rock music rushed from the garage. When Jem looked up, she saw that the hand on the pump was not the hand of Jesse, Owen, or Fergyl. It was a new hand, long fingered and well shaped. Her eyes climbed that limb, arm and shoulder, collar and hair. The attendant’s head was lowered to the task, but the posture was familiar; she’d seen that stoop somewhere before.
Then the curtain of hair—black, dirt-straight—lifted, parted with a shake and there were those eyes again, looking at her. After more than ten years, it was Ricky Ellis, one-time disturber of her dreams, hoisting a gas-pump hose. She could see the oil in the seams of his hands as he handed her the credit-card slip, and her own hands were just slightly trembling. Then she could have sworn she heard him say, “Jemorah.” His gaze was still and she looked back at him through what seemed like a dark mantle of years. He drew her into his gaze, and in that instant she was asking, “Do you remember me?”
Ricky left the garage door open, the pump on, the rock music blasting into the underbelly of a Ford, went around to the car door and got in next to Jem. He left the bells chiming unanswered, and when Fred called to check up on things, the pay phone went on ringing.
JEM PULLED OUT onto Route 31 and they drove past fields, still silver-blue in places, and velveteen cows. In winter, the snow had etched lines of frost into the trees, the creeks stood white and still, the long grass sparkled with ice. Now everything seemed to be dissolving and in movement. She stared straight out the window, balancing her breath high in her lungs, trying not to think about the strange man in her car. They passed shacks with folding, rain-broken walls, tar-paper roofs, old trailers with sides the color of rain. Dolores Otts’s trailer was set back from the road in a clump of weeds, trash, and toys, dropped there like a lost key. Rags of curtains billowed out the small windows and the trailer looked still and ghostly.
Ricky was quiet. He seemed uncomfortable in the passenger’s seat and spent a lot of time twisting the radio dial until he settled on a country-western station. A man was singing like the words were coming straight from a vise around his heart, a pure, Western tenor.
“Guess he’s got his jeans on too tight,” Ricky said, sliding down in his seat.
“Guess I owe you one,” he added, a moment later. “Or your dad, I guess.”
“Why, what do you mean?” she asked, her voice oddly high.
He shrugged. “Way lard-ass Fred tells it, Fergyl, Jesse, and Owen have got this ‘damn fool idea’ into their heads to be musicians, and it all has to do with this ‘damn, fool, foreign A-rab’ that lives next door. These days they’re calling in sick a lot, playing around with the damn, fool, foreign A-rabs, so old Butt-Face has to break down and hire local scum like me to do the job ten times better than his regulars at one-tenth the pay. So tell your dad thanks.”
Jem didn’t know quite how to answer that. She just stared ahead and said, “Okay.” Some moments passed, then she said, “I haven’t seen you for a while.”
“Yeah, well…” he shook his hair back. “Spent a couple years in juvenile detention. Not exactly sure why. That was fun. Got this tattoo. Tried working out on the rail yards. Got kicked out. Seems like people just don’t ever like my looks.”
She glanced at Ricky once, quickly. There was a tattoo on the back of his wrist; she caught a greenish blur of it, heard the soft hum of his breath in the silence between them. What kind of man is he? she wondered, her breath slowing. Those are the clothes he wears. She had a flash of jeans, a flannel shirt, on a floor somewhere, soft and stale from him. Frightened, not thinking, she lifted one hand and touched his hair.
Ricky turned away. “This wasn’t the greatest idea; I ought to get back,” he said. “I left the whole shop open. Fred will shit.”
Jem went hot with embarrassment, made a U-turn in the center of a wide, empty highway and started back. She decided to let Aunt Fatima pick out the men from now on. The sad singer stayed on the radio, singing about desolation and longing, his voice hammered to steel. Ricky put all his concentration into tuning the station. The countryside rushed at them, acres of overgrown fields beaded with moisture. Then Ricky flipped off the radio, sat up, and said, “What did they tell you about my father?”
Jem turned to look at him. She eased her foot off the gas, and they coasted in neutral. It was the first time she had dared to look at him straight on. With the windows open, his hair flew back and revealed his features, the straight nose, the blue disks of his irises. Outside, the long-stemmed wildflowers were blowing. Then a man on a shaking piece of farm machinery appeared before them, whirring and crawling and taking up the whole lane so they were forced to slow behind him.
“They told me that he blew himself up working on a car, I guess,” Jem said at last.
Ricky looked at her sharply, then he nodded. “Well, that’s wrong,” he said and looked back out the window.
Jem tightened her grip on the wheel, listening.
Ricky kept silent, chewing on a fingernail. Then he grinned and said, “Well, maybe I never had a father.”
“What do you mean?”
His eyes were polished river rocks behind the locks of hair. He looked at her and said, “Just what I said. I might never, ever have had no father to begin with. I might’ve got born all by myself, just the same way I’m gonna die. I just wanted to make sure you got your story straight.”