An ocherous afternoon light fell on the subdivision. B. drove past the gate, the colored flags flat in the dead air. The stucco houses looked blanched in the heat, which seemed to radiate up from the ground and in from fields and to bend the new trees along the street to nowhere. She parked the car and walked into the cul-de-sac. Her brain continuing to press against her skull. A toddler on a tricycle in a faded bathing suit stared blankly at her.
B. passed the unfinished houses with giant still-empty rooms and followed the walkway of the first occupied unit. She glanced around. The toddler continued to stare. B. flipped quickly through the letters, slipping anything official-looking into the ostrich-skin purse. She did this at three more houses. As she walked back to her car, the throbbing and swirling and heat and caffeine came together in a steady blaring in her mind.
A man came out of one of the houses. “Are you looking for Patty? Because she’s sick today.” B. walked on without answering, past the little girl, fumbling with the car keys. The man followed her.
“I can have her call you! She’ll hate to have missed—”
B. slammed the door of the Mustang and peeled out.
In a motel room with the drapes closed she opened the envelopes. She did not look at the amounts, just wrote down names and account numbers on a torn-out page of the phone book.
She dialed him. His face coalesced in her mind only in the vaguest form, black and pink dabs on a canvas.
He did not pick up. She lay her head on the bedspread, the heavy receiver at her ear. She dialed again and again. In the clicks and the tumbling she felt the carsickness drumming her down into a dark echoing pit.
When he finally answered, she said: “I’ll tell you the truth this time.”
Her mind focused on the single guiding image of the banks. “It’s some trouble I got into back east. A loan I took out under the table.”
There was silence on the line, the lighting of a cigarette. “Go on,” he said.
She waited for the signal of the image in her mind. “It was an operation. I’ve never told anyone. I was pregnant, by one of the college boys. He proposed. But he hit me.” She told him she’d gotten a backroom abortion but something had gone wrong; she’d had terrible pains. When she finally went to her doctor, he advised a hysterectomy.
It was a true story. She’d heard one of the secretaries tell it about a friend, except instead of having the operation the friend had hung herself by a belt in her closet.
She thought for a moment she’d lost him.
“So you couldn’t tell your mama and papa who sent you to the nice little college to marry a nice little college boy,” he said. But she heard in his voice the beginning of a desire to believe her.
“No.”
“You already lied to me once.”
“I’m not lying.”
She waited to hear cigarette paper crumpling, an exhale. She heard nothing.
Finally, he spoke. “I’m sorry that happened to you. It’s not right something like that should happen to you.”
“Will you help me then?”
She felt his vulnerability beating through the line. “What’s in it for me?” he asked.
“I’ll be your girl, Daughtry.”
She considered briefly how she was deceiving him. But the dark sinking pulled her down and she knew there was only one thing she cared about.