The jukebox was too loud for me to hear what Trace was saying, but in the space between records I thought I heard him say something ridiculous like We can be a family. Then Patsy Cline started wailing and Trace was smashing the receiver against the phone, which answered with cheerful pings. People looked over, then looked away. “At least do it on the beat,” the bartender shouted, like he’d seen it a hundred times. Trace wound up and gave the receiver one more whack, then threw it down and left it to twist and swing. He came back to the table. I assumed she’d hung up on him, so I didn’t ask.
“She wouldn’t listen to me,” he said. His face looked red, but it might have been the lights.
“Was the Yankee there?”
“Pinch-hitting sonofabitch.”
“He’s no star,” I agreed.
“She didn’t believe me about the baby.”
“You could have held it up to the phone.”
“This baby’s pretty quiet,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said. “I wonder if something’s wrong with it.”
Trace picked up the baby, cradled it. He seemed to relax. “You have to support its head, see?” he said to me. “It doesn’t have neck muscles yet.”
We needed more to drink, so Trace left to find Roy. I made him take the baby with him, to show it around. Right after he got up, a woman sitting at the bar turned on her stool and looked at me. I’d seen her in the bar before, and she’d been on the hill at the fireworks show, but I hadn’t talked to her. She was forty, forty-five, thin, a redhead halfway to gray. She wore jeans and a faded black shirt with the top two or three buttons open and the sleeves rolled up. She walked over, pulled up a chair to the end of the booth, and sat down.
“I hear your name is Sundance,” she said.
“It’s Phil,” I said.
She didn’t offer her name, and I didn’t ask. “I hear you’re running from the law,” she said. She had a long, thin nose that twitched when she talked.
“Not really,” I said. “I don’t think they’re chasing us. We just have bench warrants. In Colorado.”
She asked what we had done, so I told her. I told her about Trace’s DUIs and Resisting Arrests and how he missed a court date because we were up all night drinking with two girls from the community college who, it turned out, were both hot for him. And about how I popped the bail bondsman’s guy with a two-by-four when he broke into our apartment a few days later. I didn’t know they were allowed to break in. No one teaches you things like that until it’s too late.
Trace came back to the table, balancing the baby and a full pitcher. A trail of beer wet the floor behind him.
“Whose beautiful baby is this?” the woman asked. She touched its nose, said something like wugga-wugga-woo, and the baby made a noise that might have been a cough or a laugh.
“It’s mine,” Trace said. He sounded almost like he believed it.
“Four months?” she guessed.
“Three,” he said, not missing a beat. “Little Mo’s developing faster than most.”
“Where’s the mother?” she asked.
“New York.”
“That’s far away,” she said.
“The mother,” he said, “is a coldhearted, lying, cheating, mitt-chasing bitch.” Trace looked pretty drunk. I figured if he was, I must be, too.
“Some men think we all are,” she said. I could tell she didn’t like him at all. She looked at the baby like she felt sorry for it.
“I don’t think he means that about you,” I said. “Or about her.”
“Of course I don’t mean that about you,” Trace said. “I don’t know you. Or how you feel about mitts.”
She turned to me. “How about you? Is there a woman in your life?” I watched her nose winking at me.
“There was,” I said. “It didn’t work out.” I had been with Katie a whole year, and then one night, no warning, she told me it was over. You want me to be just like Mo, she said. Well, I’m not Mo. It’s not fair and I’m sick of it. She may have been right. It’s just that Mo was a lot more likable. I told her so, and she threw her shoes at me, and I threw them out the window. One got stuck in a tree. It was still there when Trace and I left town.
The woman leaned back in her chair and undid her ponytail. Her hair fell in loose rings past her shoulders. “How old are you?” she asked. “Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?”
“Twenty-three,” I said. It occurred to me that my life was bleeding out of me even faster than I’d thought.
“I have a kid,” the woman said. “He’s eighteen.” She sipped her drink. “He went to jail this week.”
“What for?” I asked.
“Joyride. Took a car from the lot at the gas station.”
“That’s all?” I said.
“That bastard Duffy pressed charges.”
“That bastard Duffy has our van,” Trace said.
“We broke down,” I explained. “We’re waiting for him to fix it.”
“He’s a bastard,” she said.
It would turn out that she was right. Duffy was a bastard. The next morning he would tell me and Trace our transmission was shot and he wanted sixteen hundred to replace it. We’d say we couldn’t pay that much, so he’d offer us a trade: the van straight up for a ’79 Bonneville with no muffler and bad brakes and power windows that wouldn’t go down. We’d take it so we could get out of town in a hurry.
Behind me I heard a pool ball smack on the floor and roll away. The baby started to cry, but Trace jiggled it and it stopped. Spit bubbled from its mouth. The woman finished her drink. I watched her neck as she swallowed. The skin around it looked a little loose, baggy. I’d never noticed that on anyone before.
“He didn’t even steal anything good,” she said. “Just an old Beetle, all rusted to shit. You’d think the boy would have some taste, at least.”
“He’s lucky to be alive,” Trace said. “The transmission could have exploded.”
She looked down at the floor. “The judge said I was a bad mother,” she said.
“That’s terrible,” I said. “What’d he have to say that for?” He could have been right, for all I knew, but still.
She set her glass down on the table, hard. “I’m a good mother,” she said. “A damn good mother.” Her eyes got wet. It was like she’d been waiting a long time to say this, waiting to find someone who might believe her.
“I’m sure you are,” I said.
“I have to take a leak,” Trace said. “Can you hold my baby?” He held it out to her.
She sat the baby in her lap and bounced it up and down. “Hello, baby,” she said. “What a big baby you are. What a bouncy baby.” She kissed it on the top of its head, then smoothed its thin brown hair. Maybe she was a good mother. The baby looked like it was in heaven, eyes half-closed and dreamy. It drooled a little more, and she wiped its mouth with a cocktail napkin. Her eyes were still wet, but she’d started to smile. She was pretty when she smiled. I told her so.
“You should stop hanging around with that guy,” she said. “He’s holding you back.”
I told her I knew that. It was what she wanted to hear.
The baby grabbed her nose, and she wiggled her head from side to side. “That’s a nose you’ve got there,” she said. “That’s my nose.” The baby let go, but kept moving its hand through the air like it still had a nose in it.
“When are you leaving town?” she asked me.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “I hope.”