Suicide's Girlfriend (2 page)

“Say, darling, you watching for your boyfriend?”

This came from a trucker across the way. Sweet-voiced. That sliver of face I allowed in my sight not entirely bad. In self-defense, I began to pray, “Lead us not into temptation . . . ,” but found I could not hold on, both prayer and temptation spun on the same globe, their edges blurred like the borders between countries.

“Psst! You in the nightgown!”

“That man wants you, Marie!” the children cried. “Marie! Marie, look!”

“Marie!” said the trucker. “Look!”

I looked. A dinner plate held up, and on its chopped steak, the words “I love you” unwound in bright red catsup.

“Hey!” protested the trucker as an enormous man in a blue windbreaker came between me and my view of the trucker's plate.

“Chuck Rappenhoe's the name,” said the man in the windbreaker.

At my mom's funeral, I met my granddad. I suppose Mr. Rappenhoe was about his age, with the same kind of gray hair—it looked like it'd been chipped at with a chisel. Mr. Rappenhoe wore glasses. He had a gap-toothed smile, like a jack-o'-lantern; but he frowned at my trucker, who just laughed and started eating the chopped steak.

“Don't pay any mind to that joker,” Mr. Rappenhoe said, then asked if he could sit with us a while.

I regretted the loss of the trucker, but maybe Mr. Rappenhoe was my reluctant prayer made flesh. Maybe he'd pick up our tab.

“That's a beautiful baby,” said Mr. Rappenhoe. “Is that your baby, young lady?”

The children had seen me go around big as a house, but they giggled as if his question were something silly. I glared them down. They knew from Social Service calls not to correct me when I looked that way. “Yeah, she's mine,” I said.

Mr. Rappenhoe put one of his big fingers in Krystal's hand. Bang,
she leaned over and bit him, hard, with those sharp little teeth of hers.

“Yikes,” Mr. Rappenhoe said, but then just grinned. He acted as if he didn't even notice that, under our coats, both Theresa and me wore nightgowns or that Erin's eye was turning black and there was jam in his hair.

“I came here to study radio electronics,” he said. “Me and my wife farm, but, on the side, I've always been good at fixing things.”

Of course, it crosses any person's mind that such a man might be a mass murderer/child rapist in disguise, but Krystal liked him, all the children liked him. While Sammy combed, this way and that, Mr. Rappenhoe's old gray hair, Mr. Rappenhoe smiled and explained that just that morning he had finished his final exam, so he'd come over here to celebrate with a piece of pie.

I didn't hear all of what he said because over by the cash register, my trucker was giving me a sign: “Tonight.” Pointed his finger at me like we were a regular thing. “You be here.” It gave me shivers. Was he handsome? Ugly? I watched him cross the lot and swing himself into a big blue truck, but I couldn't tell a thing. Everything needed further investigation.

Mr. Rappenhoe frowned while he worked to untangle a snarl in Theresa's hair, but he sounded happy: “Tomorrow, bright and early,
adieu
to the Three Bells Motel! I load the car and head on home to Arkansas!” He stuck his comb in his back pocket and smiled. He creased his napkin with his thumbnail, made a shy boy's face. “I missed the wife so a couple times I drove home in the middle of the night just to eat breakfast with her!”

He showed us her photograph. “She seems nice all right,” I said. I knew they couldn't be Amish since he'd mentioned a car and electronics. Still . . . farmers, and one of them knew how to fix things!

“How many kids you got?” Mickey asked.

Mr. Rappenhoe shook his head. “We kept trying, but just weren't blessed. Turns out now we're too old to adopt.” He patted Krystal's cheek. She had taken charge of his glasses by then. She
worked the hinges back and forth like she meant to snap the bows right off. “Look at that,” Mr. Rappenhoe said, “she's a smart one, isn't she?”

Who could answer? Here sat the best dad I ever met, without even one child to be dad to! It just showed, again, the rightness of my theory, and so I said.

Mr. Rappenhoe listened, but then
he
said, as if he put away my theory entirely, “Christ came to ask us to be better. Maybe we're home free in the end, Marie, but he still asked us to be better.”

The waitress stopped by the table, rag squashed in her hand, face all red. “These kids have sat here over four hours and I take it you aren't the dad?” she said to Mr. Rappenhoe.

I blushed. All the children old enough to know beans blushed. “He'll be here,” I said. After she left, I told Mr. Rappenhoe, “I try to do everything Jesus told the Rich Young Ruler, but even Jesus didn't honor His parents. Jesus said He didn't even have a family! If my father had been better to my mother . . .” I didn't want to tell Mr. Rappenhoe what Mom did, so I backed up a little. “If he were nice to her, she'd be happier.”

Mr. Rappenhoe nodded. He looked serious, but not mad, like the counselor they had me talk to when I got pregnant.

A few minutes after he had left, the waitress came over. “Old pumpkin head paid for you,” she had said. Sniff. And turned on her fat white heel.

After Dad finally got down off the median, and all of us were in the car, he gave me one of his biggest, booziest smiles. I knew this meant he was headed for tears, about Mom, and every bad deal he ever met, and how we didn't appreciate him. He sort of sloshed the car off the road, barely missed the sandwich board in the truck-stop yard: $1.13 Reg. It was my hand on the wheel that got us back on the road just as the station manager ran out.

Dad says to me: “Anndean didn't mean nothing this morning, Marie. Why, you kids are all we got!”

I thought about that. Was that true? “Still,” I said, “Tommy was all I got. Had.” I wiped the wet off the windshield. Put the bunch of us together in a car and it dripped like a covered pot. I said, “Thou shalt not steal, Dad.”

“Oh, hell.” Dad rested his chin on the steering wheel. He squinted at the winter afternoon as if it were a terrible storm and he were the sea captain. “First one to spot a church gets a quarter,” he said, “and no more lip from you, Marie.”

The secretary lady at St. John's Episcopal saw Dad drop us off. She seemed embarrassed for us, but she must have had similar cases in the past since she knew what to do. Right away she got a box of graham crackers from a Sunday school classroom, and, by five thirty, the kids and I were eating lasagna and something called green beans amandine at the home of a church family named Zenor. Dry pants for the little ones. A whole case of Krystal's favorite formula on the kitchen counter.

“Quiet down!” I told the kids. The Zenor house knocked them out: toys in the basement, more in the bedrooms, a place just for finger painting and clay and puzzles, a clothes chute to holler down, the boy's bed topped by a frame so it looked like an outdoors tent. Everybody kept jumping out of their chairs to go see this or that. Nuts—even Mickey, who should've remembered other times that weren't so different—as if we might live in that nice house with candles on the table forever.

I knew better. Dad might not come tomorrow, but he'd be back the day after tomorrow for sure. You couldn't understand why, but he would. “Trouble with the oldest,” he'd tell Social Service. “You know she's trouble.”

While I dished myself seconds of the lasagna, I tried on the idea of me running off with all the kids in the back of that trucker's trailer.
Then I tried just Krystal, me, and the trucker. I kept it simple, but it didn't look good, either way.

“Mrs. Zenor,” I said, when Mr. Zenor got up to get us more milk—Mrs. Zenor was pretty and nice like some schoolteachers I'd had—“what's a person have to do to be a nun?”

“We're not Catholics!” cried her son and daughter. Them, I didn't like. Them, I gave a look. Not that they noticed. They kept on eating, chewing up their little mouthfuls of food like they had all the time in the world.

“I'm not Catholic either,” I told Mrs. Zenor, “I just wondered.”

Mrs. Zenor nodded. She tilted her head to one side: “Let's see if I can get all your names right!” she said.

Chuck Rappenhoe couldn't
believe
himself so lucky as to set Theresa or Krystal on his knee, while Mrs. Zenor couldn't believe anybody would ask her to return the children she fancied. She and Mr. Zenor looked across their shiny table at each other with a crazy kind of happiness. Later on, while the bigger kids ran around the house and I watched TV with the little ones, I heard her on the telephone:

“This Krystal's a darling, Kim! And I can just imagine your Glenn with a little brother . . .”

Mrs. Zenor was a good woman, but misguided. She thought taking one or two of the children would be like picking out a pair of hamsters, easy, she'd tuck them into a spare corner, and their gratitude would shape them into something better than what she already had. By about nine-thirty, however, she began to see the error of her ways. She came downstairs in her bathrobe. Without makeup she looked older, tired. I felt old and tired myself. I propped Krystal with her bottle and the three of us watched the end of a show called
The Exterminator.

Now and then Mrs. Zenor looked up at the ceiling. “Do you usually just let them run down?” she asked me. Thud, went children jumping off beds. “I kissed them good night at about nine, but in five minutes, they all were up again.”

Probably, they started arguing about who she kissed first and why and if she liked one of them more than the others. What if she
thought she had to kiss me, too? Except for the children, and the person who was Tommy's dad, nobody had kissed me since Mom died.

I told her, “You may blame me that they're not better mannered, but we've been subject to bad influences.”

Mrs. Zenor smiled. “I doubt you're all that bad, honey. What are you . . . fourteen?”

I switched the channel with the remote. I stopped at a couple dancing in the rain and drinking 7Up. They made me want to cry. Was it fair for envy to be a sin? If you had everything, you could put envy out of your mind, but if you didn't, on top of everything else, you had to worry about wishing you had something!

I imagined Mr. Rappenhoe would have a quick reply to that, and it would sound nice, but not fit me at all.

“That's a cute ad, isn't it?” said Mrs. Zenor.

I looked at her, sitting on her couch, smiling. “Didn't you think God was wrong when He asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?” I asked.

She smoothed her hands over the lap of her puffy robe. Finally, with a little laugh, she said, “Well, He wasn't a father yet, Marie.”

At first I liked her answer, but then I remembered: “He was God, Mrs. Zenor!”

“Yes.”

“He was supposed to be
our
father, wasn't He?”

Mr. Zenor had been doing something in the basement. He came up the stairs just then, like on cue. “Girl talk?” he asked.

Mrs. Zenor patted my knee. “Let's discuss this in the morning, sweetie. Let's get some rest now,” she said.

By ten-fifteen, except for the TV, the whole house was quiet. You would not have believed the quiet, like Krystal and I swam under the sea and all the others rode in a boat above. The weather lady said tomorrow would be the same as today, cold and clear. She acted as if she liked the prospect.

For cover, I left the TV on when I went in the kitchen. I put as many cans of formula as I could into a paper bag, along with half the Pampers, a jar of peanut butter, and a box of Triscuits.

I laid Krystal on the counter to change her. “You know you're going somewhere, don't you?” I said. She bounced her heels against me and laughed.

Have you ever noticed how babies cry and cry but don't understand
you
crying? Then somewhere along the line, maybe about the time they start
causing
pain, they get sad when you're sad.