the one who messed up.”
“It’ll be okay, Derek. You’ll see.”
“The problem with Tess is that you were always taking care of her and she let you. She used you.”
“No she didn’t.”
“She did so.”
“Drop it, Derek. And anyway, it’ll be okay because this morning I helped Kay and Baxter, they were working calves. Amber slept in her car seat the whole time. Babies can adapt to anything. It’ll work out.”
Derek snorts. At first I think it’s at me, but I look up and see Ed Mongers’ old orange VW bus pulling in the parking lot. There’s two kind of folks around here, as Derek likes to say, the ranching kind and the escape-people-hippie kind, and Ed Mongers is this second kind and Derek’s not mean about it, he just finds those sorts amusing. He nods and says, “Howdy,” when Ed walks by us, but sort of like he’s being ornery, and Ed says, “Hello there,” back with a smile on his face, and he surprises me by winking at me, like he knows we’re all teasing each other just a bit. He’s got on jeans and a T-shirt and so if you didn’t know Ed you’d think he was just like everyone else, but everybody around here knows that he lives in a house that’s U-shaped and made of tires with slanted windows on one side and extra tires piled all around. There’s a crummy-looking greenhouse behind it, and a bunch of white boxes that I guess are for his bees. He sells honey at the store, and I hope that’s not his only income, because there’s just not that many people out here that eat a lot of honey.
“I ought to go back in.”
Derek nods and looks sideways at me. “Want me to take a look at your car sometime?”
“It’s not making that noise anymore.”
“Tell me if it does.”
“All right.”
He hangs his head and rubs his thumb and finger across his eyes. I can tell how tired he is because he winces, like he doesn’t have the energy to keep his eyes open.
I say, “You should look for a different job. Or make them promote you to driller.” He shrugs his shoulders at that, though, so I add, “You going to go home and sleep?”
“Maybe rent a movie.”
I run my hand down his back. “Sneak by later if you can.”
“Amber sleeping in your room?”
“Well, yeah. But I can move her over to Tess’s space.”
“Well.”
“Derek, she’s what, a week old? That’s not old enough to know what’s going on. Believe me.”
“What if she wakes up crying?”
“You’re just inventing something to be mad about.”
“No I’m not.”
“Because you think she’s going to ruin our lives.”
“No, I think maybe it will be hard to have sex with a baby hollering.”
“Just give her a chance.”
“I’m giving it a chance.” He touches my nose, and then kisses me on the lips, a soft kiss, and then his lips are on my neck. He’s smiling as he kisses because he knows I don’t like it when he kisses me that much outside the store but that I do like it, of course, because one thing Derek knows about me is that his kisses drive me crazy, they really do, they send me spiraling in a new direction every time, and he likes to kiss me just to see me change the way a person changes when they go from existing in life to being caught somewhere magical instead.
Finally he stops and hugs me, and then he pushes himself to his feet and walks to his truck. He’s wearing Rustler jeans, since they’re the cheapest kind and they get tore up so much at work. Usually I wish he’d get a better brand so he’d look nicer, but this time the sight of those skinny legs in those cheap jeans just makes me feel sorry. Sorry that he probably won’t ever have any better. Sorry that his life isn’t a little easier, a little more fun. Sorry that he’s feeling bad about us, about something that wasn’t his fault. Sorry that we’re together but that we both suspect it’s not love. Sorry that we were just kissing and now we have an ache that we can’t do nothing about. I feel so sorry that it’s not until he’s out of sight for a good long while that I can turn and head back into the store.
Here’s a smart thing I learned from Tess: If you want someone to keep a promise, you tell the whole world about that promise.
Telling the town about our deal was Tess’s way of making sure I wouldn’t back out. That was smart, because maybe I did want to change my mind a time or two. Then I realized I couldn’t. Not unless I wanted to leave town. Not unless I didn’t care if I ever faced these people again.
“All I asked her to do,” Tess would say at the start of every conversation, “was drive me to Denver for the abortion.”
And I’d say, “Tess, that’s enough now.”
And she’d say, “Libby, I can tell the story if I want to.” She’d rub her white T-shirt, stretched tight over her big belly, and say, “But no, my big sister wouldn’t do that for me. No, Libby had another alternative. She wanted me to carry the baby. If I carried the baby, she’d raise it. Sounds noble, don’t it? But she don’t know what she’s in for.” Then she shot me a look that meant, Now that everyone knows they’ll hold you to it.
My favorite response to this conversation came from Frank. What he said to her was, “Tess, your sister is a noble gal. She’ll be a good mom. Noble.” He kept saying that word over and over, like maybe he hadn’t used it before and wanted to test it out. Later that week, he gave me a raise. That’s pretty much how it went—once Tess was really showing and Kay had been informed, everyone in town found out and after that they were generous with me. They weren’t with Tess, which is maybe why she made plans to hightail it out of here after the baby came. But for me, doors got opened and people patted me on the back. When I mopped the floors, people’d stop to ask how I was doing, had I decorated a room yet, was I pretty excited? They said things like, “Aw, you’re a good kid, Libby,” or, “You got the makings to be a fine mama.”
All that made me believe I could do it. It was nice, you know, making people proud because I’d done the right thing, but also having them sympathize a bit, because the thing I promised wasn’t so easy.
Stupid me. I thought Derek would feel that way too. I should have realized long ago that he wouldn’t, and that anyway, all that attention would never be enough.
THREE
It shouldn’t be this hot. Something is wrong. I feel like the old-timers and their croaky In all my days here, it ain’t never been like this, but it’s true. It’s never been like this. Even I remember how on summer afternoons the clouds would boil up and send down rain. Now the heat feels dangerous, like it’s pressing down to suck away the life of this earth—and even worse, it’s doing it quietly, like an evil thing waiting for us to not notice so it can pounce.
Kay’s note says, “Amber was up most of the evening, so probably she’ll sleep good tonight. Hot, isn’t it?”
The hot part is true, but the other part is turning out not to be the case.
Amber is screaming her head off, maybe because the heat makes it feel like her lungs won’t work. I’ve got her at the edge of the tub, about to give her a bath—her first bath, in fact, even though I haven’t scrubbed out the tub with Borax yet. Which is something I meant to do, but later , because her first bath would be in the kitchen sink, but the kitchen sink is full of dirty dishes be in the kitchen sink, but the kitchen sink is full of dirty dishes because the dishwasher suddenly broke and I can’t hold a crying baby and do dishes