The Devil You Know (3 page)

Sam ground the gears as she pulled out of the parking lot, glancing back at the silver Acura in the rearview mirror. Michael and his receptionist-wife were probably standing together and watching her drive away, his small hands a perfect fit around her small shoulders.

There had been a long pause as she looked at her feet before Michael asked if she should perhaps come another day when she was feeling better. She had laughed again, but it sounded ridiculous, like a donkey. He told her what day her mother's remains would be interred and she remembered saying that she wouldn't be attending and that there would be no service. His expression had telegraphed pity, and she had stood up, noticed the slim gold band on his finger for the first time, and retreated from the office to her car.

The ride home passed in the blur of familiar houses, with the same sad, dry brown grass all around. Sam pulled into the driveway without checking the mailbox, turned off the car, and hurried into the house. She flipped on the radio tuned to an insipid oldies station and lit the remains of the previous night's joint. When it was gone, she walked into the bathroom and rummaged through her makeup bag. She removed her haircutting scissors and grabbed her ponytail with her free hand. She started by snipping away at the ends, but gradually worked her way up, where the scissors began to resist the thick hank of hair. She squeezed the hair flat and kept cutting. The cuttings fell around her feet, landing on her sandals and toes. Sam slid the elastic off the ponytail's stump and shook her hair out. It was uneven, but it could still be fixed if she stopped. A chin-length bob. She kept cutting. She held out random sections and cut each down nearly to the scalp until there was almost nothing left. Haphazard longer pieces stood on end and contrasted with her darker roots, giving the impression of a broken doll or a sickly orphan. Sam set the scissors on the counter and ran her hands over her patchy head. The woman in the mirror looked naked, skull-like. Sam saw her grandmother's cheekbones, her mother's baleful eye. She saw her own emptiness, her heart so open, so capable of love, and not a soul in the world to give it to. This was her house now. This was her life now. And, somewhere, a hole in the earth waited for her.

Solitaire

T
HE VAN CRESTED THE LAST OF THE BIG HILLS, AND ALTHOUGH
Ginny couldn't yet see the cabin, she knew by the look of relief on her mother's face that they were nearly there. Forests lined the road, and the sun shone between the spruce trees in bright stripes that reminded Ginny of the pictures in her book of Bible stories. Although they had only been driving for a day, their early morning departure seemed to have been ages ago: the loading of their bags in the still-dark, and Ginny slipping her boots and her jacket on over her pajamas. They had made it across the state line into Pennsylvania, through Erie, then Warren, and then up and up into the Allegheny Mountains.

“Pass my smokes, baby,” said Debby, her mother. Debby had wedged her lighter into a split in the sun-scorched plastic of the console, but the Virginia Slims pack still slid across the dash with every turn. Ginny pulled her bum forward in her seat and grasped the cigarettes from her side of the van. She loved the Virginia Slims packs and had been collecting them for a few months. Every time her mother was finished one, Ginny neatly cut out the package's floral border and kept them in her one of her father's old cigar boxes. She hadn't yet figured out what to do with them all, but sometimes she used one as a bookmark.

“Mama?”

“Yes, you can have that one too.”

“No, Mama. I want to know—will Grandma and Grandpa be there?”

“I already told you, baby. It's Thanksgiving. They always go to the cabin at Thanksgiving.”

Ginny knew Mama couldn't call them to tell them the surprise news that they were coming, because there wasn't a phone at the cabin. Be- sides, her mother had thrown her cell phone out the window hours ago, right off the bridge into the Roanoke River.

The cabin was still there on the right, in a row of weather-beaten holiday cottages and mobile homes. Everything looked exactly as it had when Ginny visited three years before. Debby backed the van into the strip of weedy brown grass beside the cabin, and Ginny jumped out and stood in the yard, smelling wood smoke and crunchy spruce needles. Mama took Ginny's hand as they climbed the porch steps.

The kitchen was filled with steam. Ginny's grandmother looked up from stirring a big silver pot on the stove.

“Grandma!” Ginny yelled.

“Oh, my sweetie,” said Grandma, and opened her arms wide, as though no time had gone by at all.

“Debby,” Grandma said as she squeezed Ginny with her soft fat arms. “Why didn't you tell us you were coming?”

“Hi Mama. Thought we'd come up and have Thanksgiving with y'all, if you don't mind. Ginny missed you something awful.”

“Is that so?” said Grandma. She held her Ginny out in front of her. “Did you miss your Grandma?”

“I did miss you, Grandma, and Grandpa too.”

Grandpa's voice boomed from the doorway between the kitchen and living room. “Is that my baby girl or am I gone crackers?”

“Grandpa!” Ginny flung herself at his huge belly and let him mess up her hair, while the two women talked behind them in quiet voices. She knew they were talking about Dwayne, where he was and why he wasn't with them. She hoped Mama wasn't getting in trouble.

“Mama and me left this morning before Dwayne even woke up,” Ginny whispered to her grandfather.

“Let's you and me go sit outside for a while then.”

She heard her grandmother say, “I could have told you that years ago, saved you the trouble,” but didn't hear her mother's reply as the screen door swung shut.

Ginny and Grandpa Joe sat at the picnic table on the back porch. Ginny could sometimes hardly remember what her father's face looked like before he got sick, or the sound of his voice, but the back porch brought back her memory. The smell of stale cigar smoke, the soft flapping sound of the plastic enclosing the porch, the vinyl tablecloth marked with stains and burns. She could remember her father here, before the hospital, sitting and drinking and talking with Grandpa in his white undershirt. She remembered Daddy's plaid shirt tucked into his green work pants, and the package of White Owl cigars peeking out of his shirt pocket. Sometimes men from the other cabins came over, or aunts and uncles drove up in their RVs, and the men would play cards and drink beers from the blue Coleman cooler while the women made Thanksgiving dinner. When there weren't enough men for a game, Daddy and Grandpa taught Ginny how to play Go Fish and Crazy Eights and Solitaire. Grandpa had even given Ginny her own deck of cards to practise with. And she took the cards home with her and played Solitaire all the time, especially when her father got too sick to play with her. She'd lay the cards out on his wheelie hospital tray while her mother sat beside him and touched his face. When Ginny got bored of playing Solitaire, she'd lay the face cards out and decide which ones were her favourites. She liked the Queen of Clubs, because her hair was the longest, and because she had a little smile. She wished the Queen of Hearts was the prettiest one, but she looked sideways with scared eyes and a sad mouth.

On the day Daddy died, Ginny put a hair elastic around her cards and placed them in the bottom drawer with the too-small nightgowns and the wooly winter socks. Mama kept her home from school. Ginny followed her mother around the house whenever she got out of bed, putting out all the cigarettes she left burning in ashtrays, just like Grandma had told her to do. Then Grandma said it was time to go back to school, and she came over every day at breakfast and made waffles and porridge and packed Ginny's lunch with bologna sandwiches and made macaroni and cheese for dinner and gave her a Coca-Cola if she was a good girl. Debby drifted from her bed to the kitchen table to the bed again, like a ghost in a pink bathrobe.

After they had brought the bags in from the van and eaten dinner, Grandpa asked Ginny if she wanted to go looking for deer. Grandpa was too old and tired and fat to go out deer hunting anymore, so now he just liked to go for a drive at night and look at them. Grandpa's pickup truck was so high off the ground Ginny had to be lifted into the cab. Grandpa eased the truck down the road while she held the giant flashlight, its face a glowing moon that lit a path deep into the woods, making eerie nighttime shadows in the trees. After a few minutes they spotted a doe and her fawn, caged in them esmerizing beam. Their eyes glittered green, and they were so close Ginny could see the flesh and fur twitching along the tops of their flanks. As the truck inched forward, they leapt into the air, white tails flashing, and vanished into the trees as the light passed over them.

“There's a buck,” whispered Grandpa, pointing ahead on his side of the truck. As if he knew what they had come for, the buck strode onto the road and into the headlights. His neck was long and muscular and swollen from the rut, his antlers wide and rubbed nearly clean of their velvet. He sauntered across the road, seemingly aware of his own beauty, and down into the ditch on the other side.

Ginny counted twenty-three deer. It never occurred to her that she might have counted some of the same ones twice. She believed she could tell them all apart. All that night she dreamt of chasing them, their delicate hooves and flashing tails always just beyond her reach.

The next morning, Grandma made blueberry pancakes for breakfast and Ginny ate five with syrup and sausages.

“Keep eating like that and you'll be as big as me one day,” said Grandpa, patting his round belly.

“Leave her alone, Dad.”

“He's just making a joke, Debby. Don't be so keyed up. Anyways, we can all see she's just a tiny thing, aren't you, dear?”

“She's got a bony butt, that's for sure,” said her mother.

Grandma cleared the table and handed Debby a list. “You and your father have to go to the store for supplies if I'm going to make a decent Thanksgiving dinner. I was only planning for the two of us. I think I've got a big enough turkey, but I need more corn and potatoes and yams…well, you've got the list.”

“Oh, Mom…” Debby sounded like one of Ginny's fourth-grade classmates. “Can't we go later?”

“No, you cannot. I want you in that store before they sell every Brussels sprout and can of cranberry sauce in the place. Ginny can stay and help me a get a start on things.”

After Grandma had shooed Debby and Joe out of the house, she put the kettle on for hot chocolate and sat down at the kitchen table with Ginny.

“Sweetie, do you remember how your mama met Dwayne?”

Ginny remembered. It was a few months after Daddy died, when Mama got a job as a checkout girl at the Piggly Wiggly. “He asked her out when she was ringing up his groceries,” said Ginny.

“I never wanted you to go away, Ginny. I want you to understand that,” she said, taking her hand and looking intently at her. “Your grandpa and I were so sad when you left and we wondered if we'd ever get to see you again.”

When Dwayne and Mama had been dating for a while, and Dwayne had been staying over a lot, Debby sat Ginny down at the kitchen table for a talk that seemed grownup and serious, like this one did. She told her that when Daddy died, their house wasn't finished being paid for, and she couldn't afford to pay the rest on her own. Debby told Ginny that Dwayne wanted to go back to Virginia, where he could get a good job, and that he wanted Mama and Ginny to go with him. All Ginny knew about Virginia was that it was for lovers.

The new house in Virginia wasn't as nice as the old house in Pennsylvania, but Mama told Ginny not to complain, especially to Dwayne. It was small and a little bit falling apart in places, but Ginny had her own room and the family across the road had a tire swing in their front yard with a big pile of hay you could jump into. Dwayne started his new job driving truck, and was mostly gone just for a day at a time. Sometimes he did a longer trip, and then he'd come back with a chocolate bar or a T-shirt for Ginny and a carton of cigarettes for Mama. Dwayne told funny stories, getting up from the kitchen table to act out the different parts and making Ginny laugh even if she didn't want to. Mama told her they were very lucky to have found a good man like Dwayne. Ginny still missed her Daddy though. Even though Dwayne was funny and nice, Daddy had seemed to make her mother more calm, more sure of what she was doing. Without him, she sometimes seemed to drift away, not finishing her sentences or just staring at nothing for a while with a scared look in her eyes, like she might bolt if you made any sudden movements.

They had been living in Virginia for about a year when Dwayne got in his accident. He got some money from his work, but he couldn't sit behind the wheel all day or lift heavy things anymore. He stayed home and watched television because the pain medicine he took made him tired and cranky, then he started drinking to cheer himself up. Dwayne turned into a different person when he drank, but not like when a normal person turns into a superhero. Instead of saving people from fires and bad guys, Dwayne turned into a person who threw dishes and stood yelling in the front yard in his underpants. Sometimes it would seem funny to Ginny, almost like he was telling one of his stories, but other times it was scary. Ginny worried about Mama, who would sometimes yell back at him and sometimes cry and hide in the bathroom and other times would pull Ginny by the arm to the van and drive away. They usually went to McDonald's for a couple of hours and Mama drank coffee and Ginny could play in the ball room for as long as she wanted.

Once a week Mama would call Grandma and Grandpa, and Ginny would get to talk to them, but only after she'd promised not to say anything about Dwayne.

Sometimes Ginny would get out her old deck of cards and lay them out on her bed and make up stories. She would be the Queen of Clubs, who was so smart and brave that she used all of her clubs to rescue the sad Queen of Hearts from the Jack of Spades. Then the two Queens went to a witch, who sent them back in time to live happily ever after in a castle with the King of Hearts, who had been away for a long time but hadn't died after all.