He rolled over to face the wall. “I told you, it wasn’t no heart attack.”
“Whatever it was, it’s not your fault.”
He got quiet again. Then he said, “Tell that to my daddy.”
“He blamed you for your mother dying?”
“No. He never blamed me for it. It’s about the only thing he’s proud of me over.”
“John,” I said, knots forming in my stomach. “What are you talking about?”
A long time passed. I willed him not to go on. Whatever he was trying to tell me, I was afraid to hear it. “Nothing,” he said after a while. “I’m done talking about it.”
I slipped my arms around him. “I’m sorry I brought it up. I didn’t know it would bother you. I just never had anybody to talk about my mother with. Even Granny didn’t talk about her much, and she wouldn’t talk about my father at all. If I asked about the Mayeses, she said, ‘Them people wouldn’t piss on you if you was on fire.’ It’s the closest I ever heard Granny come to cussing.” I paused and there was only the sound of his breathing. I rushed on to fill the silence. “I never tried to see them while I was living at home. Now I figure I can go visit them without Granny knowing about it. They might have pictures I haven’t seen, or stories they can tell me. Granny said the Mayeses owned a pool hall around here.” I stopped again and there was still no response. I began to think he had fallen asleep. I nudged his side. “Do you know where it’s at? The pool hall?”
When he finally answered, his voice was cold. “It’s over on Miller Avenue.”
I hesitated. “Will you take me there?”
“No,” he said, in the same harsh voice. “And you might as well get it out of your head. I ain’t having my wife hanging around no pool hall. I’d be the jackass of the town.”
John was never the same after our talk. The next morning he sat up in the tangled sheets with eyes dead as coal. When I saw the emptiness in his face, I had a flash of Granny and me standing beside the wringer washer. Her story of a black-haired Bible salesman flew over my head like a bird I didn’t allow to nest. I draped my arms over his back and said, “Let’s go for a drive.” He seemed not to hear. “Fix me some coffee,” he mumbled. I tried to hum as he sat with his cup at the kitchen table. I made small talk as I fried the eggs and hovered over him while he ate breakfast. My palms sweated and I kept wiping them on my nightgown. Then John stood up. “Say you want to go for a ride?”
I released the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding and hurried to throw on my clothes. I ran out to the car with him chasing after me, sure I had imagined whatever cold had crept between us in the night. Riding with the windows down on familiar roads, John began to talk as usual. I thought he would tell one of his funny stories, about pranks he had pulled on his brothers or trouble he got into in grade school. But he looked out the windshield, brow clouded over, and asked, “You ever feel out of place around here?”
I looked at him. “No,” I said. “I never thought about it.”
He lit a cigarette on the glowing end of the car lighter. “Sometimes I listen to them hicks that comes in the store and wonder what in the world I’m still doing here.”
I turned my face to the fields passing by, high with goldenrod and purplish heather, cows grazing behind barbwire fences. “I guess I can’t imagine anywhere else.”
“You’re just like the rest of them, then,” he said. “A body can’t amount to nothing here. What’s a man going to do, if he don’t want to work in a factory or shovel shit on a farm, or do like my daddy and scrape together a business that don’t make enough to live on. All there is to do around here is break your back and not have a thing to show for it.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“I ain’t going nowhere,” he said. “I’m stuck in this hole.”
“How come?”
He turned on me with angry eyes. “You think I’d walk away from that store?”
I fidgeted in the car seat, knees drawn up, wind tearing at my dress.
“People think because I’m Frankie Odom’s boy I’m rich, but they don’t know how he is. He works us like mules for next to nothing. When he’s gone, I mean to have my piece of that place. You know, one time this woman came in with her husband and said, ‘Odom’s Hardware is a landmark. Buildings like this are the heart of our town.’ I wanted to say, ‘Why don’t you come in here at the crack of dawn and choke on dust and sell nails and put up with hicks like you all day, then you’d think, heart of our town.’”
I studied his face for traces of the John I had known just the day before. I’d never heard him talk that way. “I’d go anywhere you wanted to,” I said, desperate to fix him.
He smirked. “You think you’d leave here? You couldn’t get along a day without Granny. You ain’t like I thought. You was the prettiest girl I ever seen. Looked like you didn’t belong around here either. It ain’t took me long to figure you out, though.”
I wiped my sweaty palms on my dress again. “We can leave here anytime you want to,” I said, so low I wondered if he even heard me.
“We ain’t going nowhere,” he said. “You got to have money to go anywhere. What do you think we’d live on?”
I looked down at the floorboard, heart in my throat. “We could find work.”
“I done told you, I ain’t put up with my daddy’s shit all these years for nothing. But I don’t belong around here. You can take one look at my face and see that.”
He drew deep from his cigarette, jetting smoke through his nostrils. There was a long, terrible silence. My chest was so tight I couldn’t breathe. We passed a pond with pollen floating on its surface and I wanted nothing more than to get out of the car and stand beside it. “Can we stop here?” I asked. I was relieved when he pulled over to the shoulder of the road and killed the motor. But he sat with his wrists dangling on the steering wheel looking out the windshield and I didn’t know what to do but sit there with him. After a few minutes he got out of the car and leaned against the hood with his cigarette. I got out and sidled close to him but he didn’t move to touch me. I looked at the pond, feeling frightened and alone. After a while another car pulled alongside us. It was an old man in a junker with mismatching doors. He cranked down his window and called out to John. “Hey there, son.” John turned as if waking up from a dream. I saw his eyes darken and his brows draw together. “Having car trouble?” the old man asked.
John stepped away from the hood. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”
The man looked surprised. “Why, I was just trying to be neighborly.”
John bent lightning fast, cigarette clamped between his teeth, and snatched up a rock. Mineral flecks glinted in the mid-morning sun. He stepped toward the junker and the old man’s expression changed from indignation to fear. John charged forward and let the rock fly just as the old man stepped on the gas, spinning a cloud of dust.“Nosy old son of a bitch,” John muttered, breathing hard, smoothing his hair back into place as he stood in the road. I reached out to brace myself on the car hood, spots dancing before my eyes.
Sometimes a week would pass with the John I had first met, sweet and gentle and teasing. Before summer was over he bought an ice cream maker and it took so long to crank that our arms got tired. We stood in the kitchen with the back door open to let in the night air. Our laughter made the tracks and the yard seem not so barren, the smell of homemade ice cream muting the stench of bitter smoke. I still liked making John’s coffee and drinking it with him in the early dark of the mornings. We didn’t say much, just looked at each other over our warm cups. After he left, I sat on the couch waiting for him to come home. Each afternoon when I heard the car door slam, I ran across the scrubby grass and jumped into his arms, locking my legs around his hips. He would groan, pretending I was heavy, and kiss me all the way to the front door.