1.
She wasn’t a kid anymore. She’d known this fact for years, of course, had believed it true before it was (Stop treating me like a child! she’d screamed at her mother, fifteen and full of hot blood), had registered it more deeply on her thirtieth birthday, though the day itself didn’t upset her, didn’t seem like a milestone excepting the fact that her friends told her, darkly joking, that it was. Her back and feet were strong, even after eight years at the sewing factory. She hardly ever got hangovers. She could throw back beers and rum-and-colas until the bars and dance halls she frequented closed, then sober on the return trip, taking the back roads between Tennessee and Roma too fast, singing along in her raspy but pleasant voice to Mary Chapin Carpenter and Bonnie Raitt and Loretta Lynn and veering when her headlights picked up the flash of a white deer belly. She had the kind of life that people like her sister frowned upon, but it was a good life—she believed this. She was always seeing the sunrise, always dancing and laughing. She could usually find a warm body when she needed one, and she had the confidence to enjoy it when she did, to not give much thought to the pucker of belly fat she’d never successfully worked off or to the cellulite marbling her thighs, which were otherwise muscular from regular step aerobics.
Thirty came and went, meaningless, and then one day she noticed in the mirror that lines etched her mouth even when she wasn’t laughing, and the soft skin on her neck, when she caught her reflection in a certain angle of daylight, had the slightest silky looseness. She could see a faint outline of the little runway she’d traced on her granny’s neck as a very small girl, that plane of flesh from chin to collarbone, the one that had made her jaw seem hinged-on, puppetlike.
Ronnie had never been vain about her looks. She had kept her hair short since her teens, when she started sneaking out to meet friends and boys. She’d not understood the girls she ran around with who had their hair feathered and long, a style that required an hour of daily preparation; Ronnie’s heart was always racing with impatience, her hands not steady enough for curlers and sprays, and she couldn’t stand those moments spent getting ready with friends, the careful application of eyeliner and shadow, the piles of discarded outfits. She and men, she had discovered, wanted the same thing from life: fun. She’d been just as successful at finding it in jeans and sneakers as other girls were in skirts and clumsy wedge sandals, so why bother? Why waste life on anything but living?
But she was not, it seemed, immune to these new changes in herself. She tried not to dwell on it, but she could see how her face had lost its freshness—the alcohol didn’t help there, probably, and the coke in her mid- and late twenties certainly hadn’t—and there had been a moment in Nancy’s not too long ago, when she’d caught the reflection of a good-looking, blond-haired young guy in the mirror behind the bar and smiled flirtatiously, and it wasn’t that he’d rejected her or insulted her; she’d been insulted plenty of times in her life, and the guy who broke her nose five years ago had called her a troll, a dyke troll. It was that this young guy had not seen her. Or rather, he’d seen her, he’d registered the fact of her, but he’d dismissed her. It was instant and impersonal, and Ronnie had realized, with the kind of eerily accurate insight that occasionally dawns upon the drunken, that she seemed old to him. She could have been one of the middle-aged waitresses with tops cut to reveal their papery, overtanned chests and crinkled cleavage. She could have been his mother. She wasn’t old enough to be his mother, not by a long shot, but she’d passed for this guy into the realm of irrelevance, and to him it was all the same.
That was when she had started spraying her hair, putting on eye shadow, glossing her lips, running powder over her face to hide her pores and dull the shine between her eyebrows, where her face, always so full of expression, had worn itself into grooves. But something had changed, not just in her face but in her heart, and her nights at the Tobacco Patch weren’t as fun as they once were, and the only man she’d brought to her bed in the last six months was Sonny, her friend from way back, a forty-year-old career military man who drove in from Fort Campbell every few weekends. She’d met him before he did his first tour to the Middle East with the 101st Airborne Division, written to him throughout his deployment, asked nothing of him, expected nothing. They enjoyed going to bed together, they enjoyed drinking, they enjoyed violent action movies. He wasn’t a talker. They’d never joked about marrying. Ronnie had thought of the subject only to note, with interest, that she hadn’t thought about it. She assumed she’d never be a wife or a mother. And that was OK, too, except for the fact that sometimes she looked at her sister’s kid, Abby, and she could see those elfin Eastman features that were as much Ronnie’s as Susanna’s—the drawn chin; the large, wide-set eyes—and in another universe perhaps Abby would have been hers.
She had begun the evening of October 23 at the Salamander with shamefaced hope; the crowd there was old enough, usually, to make Ronnie feel like the belle of the ball, and she had plenty of friends among the regular set that she could count on for some good-natured flirtation. She was setting herself up for happiness. She arrived just after nine o’clock, when she knew the early drinkers would have settled already into an easy groove of big laughs and steel guitars on the juke. The bar, built in the sixties originally as a hunting cabin, had an old-fashioned tang of wood smoke and mold; lichen grew on the damp stones of the fireplace, which had been sealed since before Ronnie started frequenting the joint. There wasn’t a dance floor; folks looking to dance went down the road. There were only a half dozen tables and a smattering of stools whose vinyl seats had been worn into scabs, unpleasant against the backs of the thighs if you wore a short enough skirt. On the busiest nights there were sometimes fifty people crammed into the building’s one room, burnishing the wood floors with their work boots, their sweat and beer breath and pheromones creating a kind of bar smog, rich enough by the A.M. to get you lightheaded. The Salamander was Ronnie’s kind of place: loose, low-key, intimate. She felt more like herself there than she did at Nancy’s, or at her sister’s, or even in her own rental house, where she could feel not just alone but lonely, the lace curtains on the windows and the few knickknacks on the end tables like the punch line to a joke she’d missed the setup for.
She wore her favorite outfit, the one that featured the jacket Sonny had bought for her on one of their rare evenings out that hadn’t been built around drinking and sex. They’d gone to the Governor’s Square Mall in Clarksville, Tennessee. An odd thing—they must have been really hungover that day, or it was one of those times, infrequent but not wholly rare, when Sonny had told her that he didn’t have the heart for dealing with a crowd. When Sonny felt like that—and it was always he who begged off the Tobacco Patch, never Ronnie—they’d eat out somewhere like Olive Garden, or they’d see a movie, or they’d just drive around the countryside, where Sonny would talk about his teens, the places that had been his regular haunts. And then there was this one time at the mall, so strange for them, especially for Sonny, who was not the kind of man you pictured strolling hand in hand with a woman past the Orange Julius and the J. C. Penney. Not this serious-faced man who wore long-sleeved shirts, even in the middle of summer, to cover the gasoline burns on his forearms and neck that he’d gotten in Kuwait. And yet he’d gone, it had been his idea, and he’d picked out the denim jacket with the brass detailing, told Ronnie to try it on, admired aloud the way the cut of it emphasized her nice breasts and small waist. He’d paid for it, too: sixty-five dollars.
She wasn’t too coy to admit to herself that it was Sonny she most hoped to see that night at the Salamander. She could have called him—she had his number—but that wasn’t how they worked, usually. It wasn’t how she wanted them to work. Part of the pleasure of seeing him was the uncertainty of it, the surprise: the moment when she looked up over the shoulder of some regular like Danny Munford, who’d buy her drinks only if she’d listen to him tell the same story about meeting Elvis that he always told, and saw Sonny, her friend, the person who understood better than anyone else what gave her pleasure. It only occasionally dismayed her that Sonny, this man that she couldn’t even pick up the telephone to call, was that person to her. And the dismay, she told herself, had less to do with him than with herself. She thought sometimes that she’d been built wrong, that a normal woman, like her sister, was supposed to desire stability and commitment. A normal woman would have asked for a ring by now, maybe. But normality had never really meant much to Ronnie. And what had it gotten her sister? A house that she lived in like a guest—Use a coaster, Don’t smoke inside, Maybe you should leave before Dale gets home, you know how he is—a husband who treated her like a child, and a child of unusual solemnity, a little girl who seemed to register the gulf between her parents and had already learned to shoulder that burden as her own. Susanna was the unhappiest person Ronnie knew, and maybe unhappiness was normal, maybe it was what the rest of the world had settled for. Ronnie wanted more.
And what she wanted that Friday was Sonny. She wanted him so badly, she realized, that she could barely concentrate on what Sal Lochman and his wife, Annette, were saying to her. They were complaining about neighbors, some kind of dispute over their dogs crossing the property line—or was it the neighbor’s dogs crossing their line? Ronnie was only halfway tuned in. She liked the Lochmans with amusement and a bit of disdain, the way she liked most everyone at the Salamander, though she wouldn’t quite admit that even to herself.
“Well, I told him if the toe of his boot so much as scrapes our yard I’m coming out with the shotgun.” Sal looked to his wife for approval, which she gave him with an emphatic nod. “I’ve had it with that shit.”
Ronnie, feeling called upon to offer something, nodded, too. “Sounds to me like you handled it the only way the bastard would understand.” She was doing math in her head: the number of weeks since she’d seen Sonny, the average number of times he hit the Tobacco Patch a month, the likelihood that he’d make it down tonight. She’d done this math already, decided that tonight was the night—it’s why she wore the jacket he gave her, why she started the evening at the Salamander instead of going straight to Nancy’s or taking her work buddies up on an offer to barhop on Second Avenue in Nashville. She hadn’t had sex in at least a month. And though there had been a time, a swath of years, when extricating herself from that dry spell would have been easy as pie—if, indeed, she’d ever lapsed accidentally into a dry spell—things now were more complex. She wasn’t confident any longer in her power to bring home the kind of man she wanted, the guy whose belt cinched a slim waist and washboard abs, the guy who could dance well, who had a good laugh and bright, straight teeth. She no longer knew if she could bring that man home, and she no longer knew if she wanted to, if the novelty of strangeness meant as much to her now as the comfort of familiarity. And not just comfort—because who was she to settle for such paltry compensation? Sonny was good in bed. She didn’t have to tell him that her right breast was more sensitive to touch than the left; that she liked starting on the bottom and finishing on top; that she wasn’t into sex talk, which could embarrass her so much that she had to laugh out loud, or the really rough stuff, which some men assumed a woman like her would enjoy. In turn, she knew Sonny’s likes and dislikes: she knew that he liked having sex on his couch because he could watch their reflection in the glass door of his entertainment center, and she knew, too, that he didn’t want her to know that he watched their reflection, that if she watched him watching he would look away or close his eyes. It only endeared him to her more, that primness. That and his desire, usually, to cradle her after, to not see her dress and rush off back to her own place. She knew to rise before him to start coffee; he always made it too weak. She knew that he kept the can of grounds in his freezer and that the filters were on the top shelf of the pantry, and she knew that his favorite mug was a twenty-ouncer with the 101st emblem on the side.
It was then, with the fortuitousness of a dream, that she saw him, spotting him this time over Sal’s shoulder. She lifted her hand in hello, noticing that he had on his favorite green-plaid button-down shirt, that his hair had been recently cut—he always cut it so short, even where his cap would cover it, that he looked vulnerable and pink-scalped, like a little boy. She lifted her hand and grinned, not thinking to check herself, to hold something back, and so it was all the worse when she saw the woman he was pulling in behind him. There was a split second of mutual seeing—Sonny registering her grin and naked pleasure, Ronnie watching his face cloud with sudden memory—and that dawning recognition was the worst, because it meant that he’d brought the woman unthinkingly. He wasn’t trying to make her jealous. He hadn’t taken a chance on Ronnie’s being absent this night. He’d simply, somehow, forgotten her.
“I don’t know what the world’s come to,” Annette said. “I guess we’ll have to teach them to use the can, next.”
Sal barked laughter. “And wipe their asses.”
Ronnie dropped her hand and flushed, the embarrassment so powerful that she felt an electric charge in the roots of her hair. This was déjà vu: her smile, her outsized confidence, the casual dismissal. Did she even exist anymore? Sal and Annette, still chattering, didn’t seem to notice her change in expression—just kept going on and on about their stupid dogs and their stupid sense of entitlement about them, and Ronnie wanted to say, “I wouldn’t want your fucking pit bulls on my property, either,” but would they even hear her? What would it take to make people notice her again?
“Excuse me,” Ronnie said hoarsely. “I need to get something.”
She pushed between Sal and Annette—they’d backed her into a corner, she didn’t have a choice—and took a ragged breath, trying to make a fast plan. Her thinking was already whiskey edged, her heart tapping nervously, and she wasn’t sure what she wanted more: to escape the Salamander without dealing with Sonny or to run up to him and make him see her. She wasn’t being sensible, she knew. They weren’t exclusive, never had been. In the years since she started sleeping with Sonny she’d brought several other men to her bed, some of whom Sonny vaguely knew, and in turn she’d heard rumors about Sonny and a regular thing back in Fort Campbell, an ex with benefits. It had never bothered her. She wasn’t the kind of woman who checked for signs of a lover any more than she was the kind of woman who expected, or wanted, a ring. But the Salamander was their place, she’d thought—it was where they went in search of one another. In a life she had built around superficial friendships and fleeting commitment, it was the one thing that she thought she could depend upon.
The anger surged in her, hot and certain. Her father’s temper—he’d claimed it. “You got that from me,” he had always said, almost proudly, and it was no wonder that she had been more his, Susanna more their mother’s: Ronnie had clipped her hair, but her father had clipped her name, and she was the son he wouldn’t have—strong, decisive, brash, foolhardy.
She crossed the Salamander in a dozen short, fast strides. Her hand never clenched into a fist—she knew that she was too petite to fight a man’s fight, to make weapons of the slim knuckles in her small hands—but it hardened, the fingers lengthening into a plane, flexing back from the hard meat of her palm. She threw her arm back like a pitcher, moving with fluid instinct, and rocketed off the toes of her sneakers, planting her left foot in front of Sonny in time to steady herself before landing the slap, the more-than-slap—it began behind her, arced the hemisphere of her right side, and exploded against his ear with a clap loud enough to silence the bar’s patrons, if not its background music of old country. Sonny sank a little, cupping his ear, and the woman to his side shrieked, and Ronnie vibrated for a second with triumphant adrenaline, her palm tingling, an echo climbing almost to her elbow. She gasped for good air.
“She must’ve been done up on something,” Sal said later to Detective Tony Joyce. “Didn’t seem right all night. She was glassy-eyed when we tried to talk to her, then she just stalked off while I was in the middle of a sentence.”
“Pushed us right out of the way,” Annette added.
“And Sonny didn’t do nothing to her. Walked in, is all.”
“Everybody knew they ran around.” Annette lifted her eyebrows suggestively. “But they weren’t a couple. Never had been. And Ronnie’s took a turn with half the men in the bar.”
“Can you give me some names?” the detective asked.
“You’d have to ask them.” Annette looked at this black cop with his notepad out—how strange that he was in the Salamander, how strange to see her husband speak to him politely and even reverently.
She’d thought for a while that Ronnie was after Sal. This was years ago—before Annette had gotten him to go to the courthouse and make things official with her, before she’d gotten her name on the deed to his property—and she could see with the eyes God gave her that Ronnie flashed her tail feathers whenever he came near, that she hovered and preened and all but sounded a mating call. On a night when everyone had gotten so drunk at the Salamander that Annette had started to urinate on herself in the line to the women’s bathroom, she had stumbled outside to the darkest corner of the gravel parking lot to find Sal and Ronnie pressed together against her own car, the one that she was always giving Sal rides in, and Annette, even in the throes of intoxication, had not made a scene or announced herself. She’d hung back, waited in the shadows. She’d watched as Sal unzipped, took himself in hand, as Ronnie wriggled the skirt she was wearing up around her hips. She waited for them to start moving against one another, for their heavy breaths to stitch a binding line, for the betrayal to complete itself—but Sal kept faltering, cursing. The gold watch on his wrist flickered as he grasped himself, and Ronnie had finally said, “Go back to your old lady, Sal,” and the car had groaned in its springs as she lifted her weight off it. And when Annette had gone to him a few moments later, had silently drawn the zipper to her damp jeans down and leaned in front of him and felt Sal harden against her, she knew that he was hers, that his body would not let him cheat on her. And she’d looked at Ronnie almost kindly after that, because it must be an awful thing to open your legs to another woman’s man in a parking lot, to be the kind of person who’d do a thing like that, and to not even get any satisfaction out of it.
“Did Ronnie and Sonny say anything to each other?” Tony Joyce asked. “Before or after she hit him?”
“Yeah,” Sal said. “It was, ‘You won’t forget me now, will you, asshole?’ Something like that.”
“She called him a son of a bitch,” Annette said. “But Sal’s got the first part right.”
“ ‘You won’t forget me now, you son of a bitch’?” Tony said. “Does that sound right?”
“That’s it,” Annette said, grabbing Sal’s hand, letting him know, without even realizing she was doing it, that her memory of the night superseded his, was more real than his. It was one of those privileges she had gained that night in the parking lot. They never spoke of it, and she had never told him how much she saw, but the near miss with Ronnie had won Annette her husband, half of his property, and a lifetime of veto power. “That’s what we remember,” she said, and in the end that’s what Tony Joyce wrote down.
3.
Ronnie had been at Nancy’s only an hour when she warmed to what was going on with the pack of young men and their older companion. It was enough to break your heart, to make you forget briefly about your own humiliation. This older fellow, old enough to know better but transmitting to as far as Ronnie’s end of the bar an air of innocence and desperate loneliness, was wincing through shots that the guys appeared to be concocting on cruel whim: hot sauce and Jäger, tequila and Kahlúa (“It’s called a Tahlula,” one guy said with straight-faced authority), grape-infused vodka and tomato juice, a few drops of cream. “Tubs, Tubs, Tubs,” they’d chant as he regarded each shot, tweezing it between forefinger and thumb before choking it down all at once, and then they would cheer and start clapping him on the back, hard enough, Ronnie thought, that they must have been trying to trigger his gag reflex. “Add it to the tab,” they all kept saying, for both the disgusting shots and their own beers and highballs, and Ronnie could see from a mile off how this night was going to end for the older man, even if she hadn’t overheard one of the young ones say to another, “One more drink, and then I’ll pull the truck around.”
And still she might have done nothing, if it hadn’t turned out that the young man at their helm was the good-looking blond who’d ignored her smile in the mirror over the bar all those weeks before. She spotted him not long after the older man started singing along to “Wichita Lineman” on the juke, because the blond was the loudest and rowdiest in the group, the kind of person who laughs not just because it’s funny but because he wants to be noticed laughing. “Woo!” he kept yelling, playing patty-cake on his thighs and stomping his feet, once turning the two gestures into a quick little dance that culminated with his slapping the soles of his cowboy boots in a nifty rhythm that ought to have had fiddle music accompanying it. Oh, he was a charmer, she saw, and without a doubt a grade-A asshole, too. She’d known his type. She’d bedded his type. And she’d enjoyed it, because Ronnie had her own capacity for cruelty, her own occasional whim to hurt. It was how she’d gotten her nose broken all those years ago: she’d hooked up with a guy like this one, she’d given him as good as she got from him, and in the end he’d settled the matter with his fists, his only advantage.
She walked over to the group, buzzing on the two rum-and-colas she’d downed at the bar, unable to stop herself. “Hey,” she said. “You can’t just leave him like this. How’s he going to get home?”
“Magic carpet ride,” said the black-haired one, snorting laughter. “Right, Sam?”
Sam—that was the blond one—swallowed the last inch of beer in his glass and slammed it on the bar. The older man didn’t even jerk; he was crooning along with the house band now, slurring and getting most of the words wrong, and two of the other guys in the group were laughing so hard that tears were streaming down their faces. “Mind your own damn business,” Sam said, smiling broadly, but there was something in that smile that chilled Ronnie. The eyes behind it were utterly humorless.
“You fucking assholes,” Ronnie said. Her anger now was mixed up, despairing. She had dulled her humiliation at the Salamander with liquor, but it was nagging at her now, worming its way back into her conscious mind. “You’re a bunch of fucking pricks. Someone ought to call the cops on you.”
Sam grabbed her elbow and shoved her away from the group. Later, when his gang had left the bar and abandoned the older drunk man, she’d find the crescent-shaped imprint of his thumbnail on the soft flesh of her inner arm. “You say another word,” he whispered hotly into her ear, “and you’re going to get a surprise. Do you hear me, you ugly skank?”
Ronnie swallowed against a sob, and he shook her.
“I said, do you hear me?”
She nodded.
He let go and stepped back, grin back on his face. “I’ll be seeing you,” he said. In another few moments, he and his group had slipped out the door. The older man didn’t even seem to notice.
4.
Chris, the manager at the Salamander, had threatened to call the sheriff on her. “Don’t, man,” Sonny had said, hand still covering his ear, the scar on his arm just visible where the cuff of his shirt tugged down. “Don’t, this is all me.”
“You’re damn right it is,” Ronnie said, but she was losing her sense of righteousness, faltering under the stares of the people she’d called friends for the last five years of her life. She could see in their eyes that they’d chosen Sonny, that they would have always chosen Sonny, that maybe none of them had ever even liked her. Annette Lochman was smirking a little, and Ronnie wondered if Sal had told her about them, those four times they’d slept together—five, it would have been, if he’d not been too drunk one night to get it up. Nearby, Danny Munford had his arms crossed, and the lights overhead were glinting off his glasses in a way that turned his eyes into silver coins. He’d given her a copy once of a story he’d written—a novel, he’d called it, though it only seemed about thirty or forty pages long, printed and bound with brass brads, so that you could flip the pages like a book—and Ronnie had unthinkingly tossed it into the backseat of her car. She hadn’t found it again until months later, running the quarter vacuum at Kip’s, and she’d trashed it along with the empty fast food containers and tattered sales bulletins, hardly registering the difference.
“You should let him call them,” the woman with Sonny said. She was pretty in a sullen way, close to Ronnie’s age or a bit older. The regular thing in Fort Campbell, maybe—it suddenly seemed unimportant. “I can’t believe she fucking did that.”
“Maybe I had it coming,” Sonny said, and Ronnie felt the needle of hot tears.
“The hell you did!” the woman said.
“Hush, now,” he said. “She’s on her way out. I’m going to show her ass to the door.”
A few people clapped. It was a short, even halfhearted display, but Ronnie knew she’d be hearing it for a long time.
They were out on the front steps before Ronnie registered the pressure of his hand on her elbow, and she noted dully that it would probably be the last time he ever touched her.
“Goddamn, woman,” Sonny said. “I ain’t never.”
“You got a lot of nerve bringing her here. I thought we had a truce about this place.”
He barked a laugh. “Truce? Is that what you call getting drilled in the parking lot by Sal Lochman?”
“That was years ago. You were in Kuwait.”
“Well, that other guy. The one from your town, that you work with.”
Ronnie had to think a minute. “You weren’t even here that night.”
“I could have been.”
“I knew that was your weekend on base.”
“Thoughtful.”
“At least I thought of you.”
He laughed again and gave her a little push. “Drive home safe, girl. It’s been fun.”
“Fuck you, Sonny.”
“I always liked you in that jacket.” The set of his mouth was soft.
She speared a tear with her knuckle before it could roll down her cheek. “Why did you bring her? Seriously, Sonny. Did I piss you off? Didn’t you want to see me tonight?”
He looked like he was at a loss. “Shit, honey, I just did,” he said. “I didn’t mean nothing by it. She wanted to go out for a drink and here seemed as good as anywhere.” He pulled his hand from his ear and looked at it thoughtfully. “I’m bleeding,” he said. “You made me bleed.”
“Ain’t that a bitch,” Ronnie said.
“No, you are.” He was still smiling, but Ronnie could tell that there was an edge of something else to his voice. “You’re the meanest woman I’ve ever known. Mean as an old bear.”
Ronnie snagged her keys out of her front pocket, started across the lot to the Camaro. She stuck her middle finger up in good-bye as she went.