The Girl Who Slept with God: A Novel (6 page)

“How much money is in there? Never mind.” He grabbed the purse, unzipped it, and started making a pile of bills next to the bra. “Over thirty bucks. So what’d you need to steal earrings for if you got thirty bucks?” He leaned back in the swivel chair and twisted the cap on his pen back and forth expectantly.

“What? What do you mean? I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t take them. I tried some on sort of, but I didn’t take them.” She thought she was starting to
cry, but instead felt herself give a strange little laugh. “I’ve never taken anything in my life.” In desperation, she tried to force him to meet her eyes. “I swear. I haven’t.”

“Where are they, down your shirt?”

“Okay, Al.” The small man in the blue shirt turned around from the desk and his writing. “We’ll have to get one of the gals from up front in here for that.”

“What? Oh, yeah. Well, get Janet or Velma or whoever.”

The blue-shirted man pushed himself out of his metal desk chair and disappeared out the door.

Jory stared at a poster, right over the tie man’s head, of a man throwing a Frisbee to a dog. Underneath the dog it read
:
A HEALTHY EMPLOYEE IS A HAPPY EMPLO
YEE
. A time clock thwacked loudly at the minute change. She could feel her heart beating in her throat like the time the dentist gave her too much Novocain.

“Why not hand them over? They’re worth what—three, four bucks? So your parents will ground you and you won’t be welcome here anymore. Big deal.” He sat slowly forward in the squeaky leather chair and began digging a hole in the desktop with a pushpin. He paused in his digging and fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. “You smoke?”

“I don’t have them,” Jory whispered.
“Please.”
Her chest was pumping now like she’d just crested the hill to their house on her bike. “You’re completely wrong.” She said it louder.

“I got one of these ear staples, see? This doctor my wife sent me to was some kind of thera-hypnotist or whatever. Said every time I get the urge to smoke I’m supposed to twist this little deely bobber here and think pleasant thoughts.” He lit up and inhaled deeply. “I’m still twisting.”

The door opened and a fuzzy blond woman in an orange work smock stood suspiciously in the doorway. She glared at the tie man. “My till ain’t counted.”

“Ed’ll stay at your register.”

“I’m on break in ten.”

“Alma
,
all you have to do is . . . you know, whatever.” The tie man shrugged helplessly and then coughed once and eased out of his chair. He pulled on the end of his tie and then punched Jory lightly on the shoulder
on his way out the door. “You kids behave yourselves. Alma, you write up the report when you’re done. I’ve got markups.”

The blond woman seemed slightly blurred, like someone had taken an eraser to her outer edges. She wore a silver ring on every finger, even her thumbs. “Honey.” She breathed audibly and crossed her arms. “I don’t want to do this, but you’re gonna have to take off all your things.”

“No.
NO
. I didn’t do anything.” Jory could feel something flattening and then spinning in the back of her head, flattening and spinning. She was back in grade school on the crowded rushing playground listening to the other kids’ voices sounding sharp like the side of a penny and then flat like the face. “I mean, I’ve, I’ve got this skin disease. Like some kind of ringworm thing and”—her eyes darted wildly around the little room—“it’s getting worse. It’s completely contagious.”

“I’m sorry, hon.” The woman lowered her faint cloud of hair and shook it back and forth slowly. “They told me I have to check everywhere. So if you just stand there, I’ll take a quick look-see. Okay?” She turned her smudgy eyes back up to meet Jory’s and reached a silvered hand toward the front of Jory’s blouse. Jory shrank back against the tie man’s desk. The blond woman frowned. “I know how you feel, doll, but it’s either me or some policeman.”

Jory couldn’t seem to think; she kept watching the woman’s coral-colored lips puckering and pinching. Her lipstick seemed to have nothing to do with her lips. It was a separate thing altogether.
So you just hold still and I’ll do all the work,
it was saying. Jory stared down and saw the woman’s shiny fingers undoing the buttons on her sailor blouse. The shirt was open now and Jory could feel the woman running her sharp little hands up both sides of her ribs, up and down her back, and then around in front and over her cold-tightened breasts. “No earrings here,” she could hear the woman saying. “Don’t you wear a bra, hon? You’re almost grown enough. Now turn around and hold your arms out to the side, okay?” The woman turned Jory around to face the desk, sliding her hands underneath the waistband of Jory’s shorts, unsnapping and unzipping. Jory shut her eyes and kept them shut. Her cutoffs were down around her feet. “We’ll leave these underthings on.” The woman spoke quietly, as if to reassure herself. “I can just feel around and see enough this way, I think.” Her hands were
quick and darting like some kind of firm little fish nosing out food from every hidden bit of coral. Jory’s eyes suddenly opened all on their own. The wall was beige, she told herself, a mushroom beige or a sort of light taupe or maybe golden brown, and something had once been tacked to the wall in four places, a bulletin board maybe, or a large picture, and now there were faint lines left, a lighter spot and four holes, one in each corner. They weren’t big enough to be nail holes, they must have used thumb tacks or pushpins, or needles, or . . . she didn’t know—
she didn’t
know
. “I used to have these,” the fish lady was saying, her words coming out all strangled and mixed up with her breathing. “Day-of-the-week panties—that’s right, I had them too. I remember now. And Tuesday was always blue.”

Out in the parking lot, Jory ran toward the bike stand and pulled the ten-speed up and out of its slot with one huge jerk of her arms. She jumped on and pedaled toward the curb, nearly hitting the small white ice cream truck that was pulling in. The man in the driver’s seat yelled, “Hey, wait!” and slammed on his brakes, but she didn’t stop and once she was on the street and riding like mad she forgot to think about the man and his red-haired fingers, his tiny blue tattoos. The bike’s wheels made an incredible whizzing sound as she pumped and pushed the pedals around and around. Her tendons in her knees burned and the bushes and trees flew by and the houses’ colors melted together like old crayons left in the sun. She could feel the wind pulling her hair back tight against her head; the rubber band had worked free long ago. She kept her lips pressed close together, her teeth fitted firmly, one against the other. She breathed carefully through her nose, counting only the number of times she blinked, the number of blocks left to go, the number of houses until hers.

No one was at the dinner table even though the places were still set with milk in the glasses and a cold square of lentil loaf on each plate. Jory walked quickly through the house, running her hand along the corners and edges of each thing she passed. Table. Chair. Kitchen counter. Oven. Toaster. Light switch. Wallpaper with the green roosters on it. Her father was always home from teaching by now. “Dad?” she called. “Dad?” She
found them down in the bomb shelter. Her father had his headset on and was listening to a shortwave message from Pastor Ron in Guanajuato. Grace hadn’t been feeling well and the elders thought it best if maybe she left Mexico a few days early, although Grace herself had made it clear that she didn’t want to go. No, they didn’t think it was anything serious, only some intestinal disturbance—the water perhaps, or the aftereffects from her typhoid shot maybe. Jory watched her father nodding his head as he wrote this information down on the back of one of his QSL cards.
Typhoid?
he had written in his clear, firm printing, and underneath that,
Cholera?
Hepatitis?
He drew circles around each one as he listened. Jory’s mother made a little noise and left the room, brushing past Jory without even looking at her. Frances was sitting underneath her father’s homemade desk sorting some shiny round metal slugs into piles. “Look, Jory.” She held up a handful for inspection. “We’re rich!”

Jory knocked a small knock on her mother’s bedroom door, and then pushed the door open as quietly as she could. Her mother was lying on the bed with her apron still on and a wet washcloth over her eyes. Jory leaned against the door’s edge and watched her mother breathing.

“They’re going to fly Grace home tomorrow,” Jory said. It felt very strange to be looking at her mother while her mother couldn’t see her. Her mother could always see her. Always. Even with her eyes closed, her mother could see her. “Grace is going to be okay. She is. Dad says so.” Jory didn’t know why she was whispering. She moved over to the bed and sat on its corner. She smoothed the yellow rose design on the quilt over and over with the palm of her hand. “Mom?” she said.
“Mom?”

Her mother lay perfectly still on the bed, giving no sign of having heard anything at all.

Later, Jory lay in her own bed and listened to her father pounding around the backyard. He had already done his twenty times; she had counted. She got out of bed and kneeled next to the window. Even though it was dark, she could see his outline moving slowly past the fence and beyond. After twenty-five times, she gave up counting. Her eyes had adjusted now and she could see a tiny bit of light glinting off the silver pen he still had
in his shirt pocket. She pressed her hand against the window screen so she could see even better, and peered upward. The moon was nearly full and she was sure that if it weren’t so very bright she could see the stars that were bound to be up there. What did the stars look like to someone in Mexico? What did they look like to someone in jail for supposedly shoplifting? She wanted to ask her father when he came jogging past, but as he finally pounded right next to her window, she saw the expression on his face lit up by the moon and she let him go by. As he moved farther from her, the noise of his running melted away, and she heard something like carnival music in the distance, a tinkling kind of gypsy music as faint as a blue tattoo, growing slowly closer and closer to where she knelt waiting in her window.