It was at the Laundromat a couple of weeks later that Roxanne told me her secret. We were washing towels and other stuff, and she said, “Jesse, you know I’ve been married before.”

“Yeah, to Robert, right?”

“He was my second husband. I was married once before him.”

I must have looked surprised, which I was, since she’d never mentioned another husband before. She looked at me real hard for a moment and then turned away.

“We got married when we were still in high school,” Roxanne said, sorting out colors in piles on the floor. “I was barely sixteen years old. We didn’t even have to. We were so much in love, Jesse. I’ve never been in love like that since then.”

“Couldn’t you be in love without getting married?” Barely sixteen wasn’t that much older than me. I couldn’t picture it.

“I lived in a little town, smaller than Ida. Johnny, that was his name, lived way out on a farm in the country. We couldn’t see each other much without being married, so we ran off and did it.”

Roxanne poured in the detergent, and for the first time I noticed a thin silver-and-turquoise ring on her right hand.

“We lived with his grandparents. They’re the ones who raised him. I packed up all my stuffed animals and moved right into his bedroom.”

I backed up against the washing machine so that I could feel it vibrate. “Wasn’t that kind of strange sleeping in a bedroom right there in the same house with his grandparents?” Roxanne understood exactly what I was thinking.

“We slept outside a lot,” she said, hoisting herself up to sit on the machine. “We made love on an old mattress Johnny dragged way out by the cornfield. Have you ever been in the country at night, Jesse? Have you ever been in total darkness?”

“Once,” I said, “when we went to Carlsbad Caverns. They turned out the lights, and we couldn’t even see our own hands.” That was the summer after William III died, and when it got dark, I felt Mama next to me. She was shaking all over and she cried out, “Please turn on the lights, please!” When they did, she had her face in her hands and she was sobbing.

“Being in the dark with Johnny was like living inside a dream,” Roxanne said. “A dream where you don’t remember the pictures, but the feeling you never forget. You know, Jesse, sometimes I can’t even see Johnny’s face or hear his voice, but I feel what it was like lying next to him in the dark.”

I knew exactly what she meant. William Ill’s face wasn’t real clear to me anymore, either. But I can’t forget how soft he was or that powdery smell after his bath.

“What about your parents? They let you stay married? Mine would throw a fit.”

“I was one of eleven kids,” Roxanne said. “Not the oldest or the youngest, just somewhere in the middle. My daddy could barely put a pot of beans on the table. Mama always had morning sickness. Does that answer your question?”

I tried to picture Roxanne being part of a big family. It was hard.

“Anyway, about Johnny,” Roxanne said. “He was beautiful. Tight brown body. Hard, muscular—and smooth. A highway in the desert, Jesse. You hear women say they want a hairy man? They never had Johnny.”

I looked around to see if anyone else had come into the Laundromat, and I was glad they hadn’t. “So what was the problem?” I asked.

She propped her elbows on her knees and thought. “Johnny’s grandparents had high hopes for him before I came along. They wanted him to go to college, be a doctor.”

“What happened?”

Roxanne sighed and slid down off the washer.

“It just wasn’t right, Jesse. He should’ve died in a war. Or fallen off a mountain or a wild horse. There’s so many better ways it could’ve happened. He shouldn’t have fallen from an old windmill that didn’t even work anymore.”

“Were you with him?” I asked.

She shook her head. “That’s the bad part. We’d had this big argument about something real silly. I can’t even remember what it was about. But I got mad, threw ail my stuffed animals in a pillowcase and headed out the door.”

“And it happened while you were gone?”

Roxanne nodded. “He went out late that night and climbed to the top of the windmill. It was real cloudy, which made it extra dark He must’ve stepped on some wood that was rotted and slipped They found his body on the ground when the sun came up.”

“That’s terrible,” I said.

“The idea of losing what could have been, of losing all our dreams for the future, that’s the worst thing. And then there was something else.” Roxanne hesitated She lifted the lid on the washer and watched the clothes spin around and around to a stop.

“I was pregnant.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking that was even worse than being married so young.

“I wanted to take care of the baby and be a good mother, but I knew I couldn’t. I figured I had a chance to do the best thing I could ever do in my whole life” She said the words like she’d said them to herself a thousand times: they were worn smooth as rocks in a river.

“It was the hardest thing in the world. I gave my baby away.”

“Couldn’t his grandparents have helped you?”

“They never knew, Johnny didn’t even know yet. Besides, they didn’t like me, and they were old, way too old for a little bitty baby. So I left. Right after we buried Johnny.”

I helped Roxanne put all the wet stuff in a dryer and she finished her story.

“I didn’t have anything to wear to a funeral. I’d never been to one. And the preacher asked me what songs I wanted. I only knew one funeral song.” Roxanne started singing. “Swing Low—Sweet Chariot—Comin’s for to carry me home—Sw-i-i-i-ng low—Sweet Char-i-o-ot, Comin’s for to carry me home….” Roxanne’s song floated around the Laundromat as soft and fluttery as cotton.

“Lord, Jesse. You should have seen me at that funeral. I had some black patent spike heels Johnny loved, so I wore them and this square-dance dress that my best friend loaned me. It was bright turquoise with silver rick-rack all over. You had to wear this big net cancan underneath to make the skirt stand out. Like this.”

Roxanne held her arms out at her sides and twirled around, almost falling over the detergent box.

“Be careful,” I warned her.

Ignoring me, she kept on. “I thought it was the most gorgeous dress I’d ever seen.”

Roxanne finally stopped twirling, and I stretched out on four of the plastic chairs next to the dryers.

“Johnny’s grandmother told me I shouldn’t dress like that for a funeral. But I said I wanted to look real pretty for my husband.”

She paused, twisting her ring. “It rained at the cemetery. The ground was already wet because it’d been raining all week, and by the time the last prayer was over it really started pouring down. Everybody was running to their cars, and I did too, but those heels of mine stuck into the mud like tent stakes and I fell forward on the grass, right on my face. That cancan and skirt flipped up to my head like the trunk lid on a car. Johnny’s grandmother was mortified.”

“I would’ve died,” I said. And I meant it.

Roxanne laughed. “That’s when I decided that what you wear underneath is more important than what you wear on the outside.”

“How can you laugh about something so horrible?” I asked her.

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I figure there’s enough to cry about in the here and now without crying over the then, too.”

“So after the funeral, did you go back to your parents’?”

“No. I moved off to another town, got a job. The doctor there knew a couple who wanted a baby more than anything in the world, and the wife couldn’t ever have one herself. They were educated, had plenty of money, a stable life. I never met them, but they promised to love my baby. They also promised to let my child know something about its heritage, which is Cherokee on my mother’s side of the family.”

“Do you think if you hadn’t gotten mad, Johnny would still be alive?”

Roxanne bent down to pick up the laundry basket. She walked closer to the dryer and stood there watching the load of towels slow to a stop.

“I don’t know. Life is crazy,” she said.

I wanted her to say more than that. To explain how things didn’t work that way. But she didn’t.

The towels were almost too hot to touch, but Roxanne hugged an armful up next to her chest. She buried her nose in them.

“Ummmm,” she said. “Don’t you love how towels smell when they come out of the dryer?”

I couldn’t get my mind off Johnny. I had to know it wasn’t Roxanne’s fault. “It was dumb for him to climb on a windmill in the middle of the night,” I said.

Roxanne folded the last towel and looked at me. “He’d done it before. We both used to climb up there and look at the stars at night, and sometimes in the day we’d climb up there so we could see the whole world. But his grandparents thought it was my fault.”

I shook my head.

“I only have one thing left of Johnny. His hand. You’ve seen that plaster hand in my bedroom?”

I said I’d noticed it before, but I was thinking about the baby.

“What was it? A boy or a girl?”

“It was one of the two,” Roxanne teased. Then she got real serious. “I never touched my baby. I was afraid to. I thought if I held it, I might not ever let go, and I had to.”

“You did the right thing,” I said. “Now, which was it, a son or a daughter?”

Roxanne turned her face away from me. “I don’t want to say, Jesse. Not yet, anyway.”

I walked around and faced her to see if she was kidding. But she wasn’t.

“If I could hug my baby, just once, it’d last me the rest of my life,” she whispered.

“Do you know where it is?”

“The records were sealed, but I know. Don’t ask how. I just know.”

“Do you want it back? That wouldn’t be possible, would it?”

“No, that wouldn’t be best for anyone. Just a hug, that’s all I want.”

“You could go there, Roxanne.” It wasn’t like William III. She still had a chance.

“Jesse?” Roxanne was barely breathing. “Why do you think I moved to Ida?”