He went to the mall on Saturday and bought new jeans. A pair of stonewashed blue Levi’s his mother hemmed quietly that evening in the front room by lamplight. He scrubbed his Reebok tennis shoes, then applied white paint from a tube to cover the scuffs that couldn’t be rubbed away with hot water.
In the thin light of dusk, Samuel hosed down his father’s pickup and cleaned the inside with a handheld vacuum that plugged into the cigarette lighter. Later, in bed, he lay awake going over in his mind the things they had said to one another that night in the diner. The way Heather had held the glass carafe of coffee with a slight tilt in her wrist; how she had hit him with the rag when he made a joke.
When Sunday came, Samuel ate his breakfast in silence, changing the subject when his mother asked questions about the girl he’d met at the restaurant on Halloween night. His father kept joking that she was a witch who would cast a spell on Samuel’s paycheck, making it disappear every week.
When it came time to leave, Alfredia and Uncle Rusty followed Samuel to the driveway and watched him go.
Alfredia shook her head. I hope she doesn’t break his heart.
I know, said Rusty. I prob’ly should have gone with’um. But that’s life.
It was the first time Samuel had been out on a date since starting work at the auto plant. Although he had met women in bars and gone to hotel rooms for sex, he’d never felt good about it afterwards, dressing quietly in the dull, drowsy light of a Sunday morning, not knowing what to say as it came time for them to part.
There were others on the road that afternoon—mostly folks on their way to diners for meals after Sunday service. He passed church buses driven by old men with Stetson hats and dress shirts buttoned all the way. Small faces stared at him pensively through thick window glass, as though they were not children at all but statues of children.
After an hour of driving, he went left at the flashing red light as she’d told him to on the napkin below her phone number. He followed the road for seven miles with his window down, breathing in the deep scent of fall trees and a skunk, which lay smudged at the side of the road.
After crossing Leachman’s Creek, he saw the rusted mailbox with her surname in stick-on letters. The driveway was a long, twisted dirt road with potholes, overhanging tree branches, and dust that would dull the gleam of the truck’s metal.
At the end of the track was a wooden farmhouse in desperate need of repair. The gutters had separated, allowing rain to cascade down the side of the house, where the siding now peeled to reveal rot. A screen door in the front was attached by a single bottom hinge. There was a small gray pickup in the driveway that Samuel assumed belonged to Heather’s mother and her silver Ford Probe. He remembered how she’d told him about her father running away when she was a child and her grandfather dying only months before. Samuel guessed that he must have been sick awhile to have let the place fall to such ruin. As he parked and got out of the truck, the form of a woman appeared behind the mesh of the crooked screen door. She pushed through and was wearing a white tee shirt, rolled up blue jeans, and white canvas shoes with no socks. She stopped at the top of the porch steps and called out to him.
You made it then!
Her red hair had been teased out and it blazed in the afternoon sun. Samuel was struck by how a woman like that could emerge from such a place of physical decay, as though any beauty left in the old house had chosen her as its sole refuge.
Do I look okay? she asked, doing a twirl?
You look beautiful.
I do?
Like a movie star.
What kind of movie? Romance?
How about action?
Heather laughed and fluttered down the steps to meet him halfway across the front yard.
When they were close, she seemed nervous.
Is it okay if Momma meets you, Samuel? She can’t come out ’cause of her oxygen tank.
Where is she at?
Inside. It’s okay if you don’t want to.
The living room was heavily furnished with chairs and couches, each piled with quilts and pillows for sleeping downstairs in the glow of a large television. The window blinds were all pulled down and an old air conditioner rattled as though there were small rocks being tossed around inside.
Momma likes it cold, Heather said nervously. Like ten below!
Her mother was a small, hunched woman whose body had been ravaged by ill health. She extended a claw-like hand at Samuel’s approach. Her eyes were slow and watery.
Be nice to her, she croaked. Please, Samuel. She’s all I got left.
Momma . . . quit it now.
The woman acknowledged her daughter’s complaint by turning back to the television.
Y’all take care, and don’t come back too late.
Okay, Momma.
I’ll take care of her, ma’am. We’ll be back before dark.
That’s all I’m asking, said the woman. For my little girl to come back safe. I lost my daddy a few months back and I’m having a hard time with it, so forgive me if I seem overprotective.
No, ma’am. I understand. She’s your daughter and she’s precious.
Thank you, Samuel, y’all can go.
As they crossed the yard toward the truck, Samuel noticed the rear side–window of Heather’s car was webbed with cracks.
What happened there? he asked, going over to it.
Oh, a rock must’ve bounced up. ’Bout scared me half to death.
One push, Samuel told her, and that glass is gonna fall in.
I know it, Heather said, turning her body toward the truck. I’ll do something with it soon.
Samuel remembered that his father’s toolbox was in the bed of the Ford. Want me to fix it?
Heather laughed. C’mon, let’s go bowling. Isn’t that what you said we were gonna do this afternoon?
We can still bowl. But I’m gonna take care of this for you, so it don’t fall in when you’re drivin’ to work. I’m sure there’s somethin’ roun’ here I can use to cover the hole.
But I ain’t got no spare glass.
Samuel looked at the broken window. We’re gonna have to order it . . . or go to a junkyard. But I don’t want you cuttin’ your fingers on the broken pieces.
With a rag wrapped around his hand, Samuel opened the door—but as he reached in, the window collapsed and glass fell inwards, covering half of the back seat.
Murphy’s Law, he sighed, is what that is . . .
I wonder who Murphy was? Heather said. If there really was someone who had all that bad luck.
I know a guy like that, but his name ain’t Murphy.
What is it?
Eddie Walker.
Samuel worked quickly, picking molars of glass off the seat and dropping them into a plastic bag. Then, on the carpet half under the driver’s seat, Samuel glimpsed the foot of a Barbie doll. He didn’t think anything of it at first. He was too busy being careful.
When all the pieces had been collected, Samuel used a pair of bullnose pliers to pull glass squares from the doorframe.
Heather watched. They’re kind of beautiful don’t you think?
We should keep one, Samuel said. A souvenir of our first date.
One each?
No, just one, Samuel said. This is a romance movie after all.
Heather grinned. You want soda pop or something?
That’d be nice.
When Heather was in the house fixing him a drink, Samuel went in the glove box to get the serial number of her vehicle. He was going to order the glass from the auto-parts store as a surprise. But the glove box was packed with gum wrappers and receipts for gas. When he opened the trunk, hoping to find the owner’s manual, it was a mess of cans for recycling, balled-up jeans, a hairbrush, and, bundled under a blanket, a gray car seat. Samuel suddenly remembered the Barbie he had seen on the floor, and went to check that it was really there.
For a moment, he stood, holding the doll, frozen to the spot by a feeling of humiliation he could not articulate. He should have heeded the caution in his father’s voice when he joked that morning over breakfast about his paycheck disappearing. It made sense to him now why such a beautiful woman had encouraged him to take her out.
Samuel peered at the bag of broken glass in his hand and felt ashamed of his new jeans, the way he had scrubbed his sneakers, washed the truck, and lain awake in bed, going over the things he might say and wondering if she would let him kiss her on the bench seat of the truck after an afternoon of bowling.
When the screen door whined, he could not bring himself to look over. But on hearing the crunch of her white shoes on the loose dirt, the sudden spite Samuel had felt, like a rope around his heart, came undone and fell slack. He felt himself hatching through the shell of an old self.
Heather had not told him about the child because she was afraid. She had been with someone in high school when she was a child herself, and the boy, like her own father, had run off.
She must have felt alone then, he thought, and seen herself as a person too miniscule for any man to cherish for more than a few moments. And now there was some little person with toys, a bed, colored socks, tubs of crayons, favorite things to eat, books with cardboard pages, and the woman that child loved most carried shame everywhere she went for those few, long minutes in the back of a car when she felt what she believed was love.
But that wasn’t love, Samuel realized.
When Heather reached out to give him the soda, all he could do was stare at it in her hand.
She was no longer the girl whose fickle affections he hoped to win over. This was a woman standing before him, whose disappointment, sacrifice, and pain had been far greater than his own. He let his gaze fall upon her red hair, and he imagined it tied back as she went into labor—as though he were there in the delivery room—a ghost from the future instead of the past.
Samuel held up the doll he had taken from under the seat.
How old is your little girl?
Heather cocked her head to one side as she tried to make sense of what was happening.
It is a little girl right?
Heather tightened her lips and nodded. She did not speak or blink her eyes.
She inside?
Heather turned to look at their dilapidated home. From the second floor a curtain twitched.
What’s her name?
Heather wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. Linda.
Samuel stared at the grinning doll in his hands. Its hair was made from strands of orange plastic. Its eyes were happy and untroubled.
Well does she know how to bowl?
When he got home that evening, Samuel’s parents were up watching Wheel of Fortune. Uncle Rusty was down in his apartment with the door open and his sign turned to open. He was looking through his collection of Coca-Cola trucks and humming the soundtrack to the game show playing upstairs. Each vehicle had its own stand. Both the model and year it went into production were written in silver script. Sometimes Rusty would open the hood and look at the engine parts, sticking his tongue out in concentration or saying aloud words that fell randomly into his mouth.
Samuel looked in on his uncle, then went upstairs and dropped into an armchair beneath a pastel drawing of John Wayne.
His mother stopped her sewing. She was tucked snugly under her favorite quilt—one Grandma Carol had made from Alfredia’s old feed-sack dresses.
So how’d the date go, sweetheart?
His father lowered the volume on the TV. She a nice girl, son?
Alfredia moved her sewing to the side table. I can tell by the look on his face he’s fallen in love with her.
Samuel’s father scowled. On the first date? That ain’t good.
But Randy . . . that’s exactly what happened to us.
Samuel’s father reached for his cigarettes. That’s true I guess.
I guess? said Alfredia. Our wedding picture was the first thing you hung up in the new house.
That’s true too. And the second thing was a buck with glass eyes.
Alfredia threw a cushion. But then their attention turned back to Samuel.
I may as well tell you now, he said, that it’s serious.
Serious like you’re gonna get married to her? Can a mother ask that anymore?
Randy exhaled a long train of blue smoke. I’m not sure he’s ready for being married. He needs to save some money first. Maybe make supervisor on the line.
Samuel picked up the remote and turned the television off.
The question Mom, isn’t—am I ready to get married—the question is, are you ready to be grandparents?