The membership card for the employee recreation center. After all this time. My husband. An employee. I stacked the papers and my heart hammered like somebody beating on the wall when you’re making too much noise in your motel room. I put the papers in the blue folder, took them out and held them to the light again. I closed the folder and moved to the chair facing Willett. He lay on his side with his eyes open.
“Permanent,” Willett said.
I said, “That’s good, right?”
“Right,” Willett said.
I said, “Come to the bedroom,” and went and checked on Nicolette. Then I got in bed. Time I fell to sleep, I was still alone.
* * *
TUESDAY MORNING, I lay in the bed staring into a pile of clothes and a pencil drawing I did right after high school of six lady astronauts. Light filtered through the pink sheet covering the window. Willett’s arm draped across my stomach. I took his hand in mine. He snored like a little baby cow.
I moved out from under Willett and sat up on the side of the bed and began to fold clothes. Willett’s band T-shirts. His boxer shorts. A wet pair of my jeans. I got two wire hangers out of the closet, hung the jeans on them, and hung the hangers on the new shower rod. Willett stirred as I come back in the bedroom.
He said he loved me and I said I loved him. I went to Nicolette’s room and closed one eye, held the drawing of the lady astronauts up to a blank wall, wondered would Nicolette like me to paint her a mural of the lady astronauts.
I got my navy-blue pants out of the laundry bag, dressed standing in the kitchen. I pulled a powder-blue button down shirt out of the bag, smoothed it out best as I could. I worked at a copy shop. Had been for a while. It might be that when Willett’s pay from the plant started piling up I’d be able to quit.
I opened one of my schoolbooks for nursing. Two hundred dollars for a book. Now Willett had a job like the ones his father and his grandfather and uncles and some of his aunts and a lot of his cousins had kept their whole working lives. I’d seen the pins on their lapels, on their blouses, in the pictures in the halls of their brick houses. Twenty-year pins. Thirty-year pins. Forty-year pins. He could be there forever. I could be whatever. I could be new. I could be not a nurse.
Willett rose and stretched. When he did, he knocked the lamp beside the bed off into a pile of towels on the floor.
“Goddamn, Willett,” I said, but I couldn’t be mad at him. I set the lamp back up, got the towels and shirts and stuff, and put them in a basket.
Willett moved the lamp aside looking for his work pants, which lay hanging over an aquarium had three pitiful guppies left floating around in it. Willett whistled and bobbed his head in his own little going-to-work world.
* * *
WORK THAT day at the copy shop was church bus slow. They sold office supplies at that copy place, so I went and opened a thing of scissors and got a bunch of magazines and cut pictures out of them. I cut out a movie star pushing a baby stroller, acting like she didn’t want nobody to know it was her, when obviously she did, or she wouldn’t have on the hiding-out-movie-star costume. Black sunglasses and a tight, showing-off-fake-boobs T-shirt and a hundred-dollar baseball hat like you see rich women wearing when they run out on the bypass, ponytails bouncing, trying to act like they’re in Lexington. Then I found a big old picture of a pit bull, its mouth full open, looking like a shotgun wound with teeth, its head filling up both pages of a magazine spread. I cut that out and lay it next to fake hiding movie star, and it looked just like that dog was going eat both her and her baby clean up. That made me feel better, and I was fixing to go get a glue stick and glue them to a big piece of paper and then draw some stuff around it for Nicolette, leaving her space to make up a story about them or whatever, when this bunch of women with helmets of hair, all in yellow and pink and flowerdy print dresses with sunglasses big as Big Mac boxes, their bare arms like those long skinny loaves of bread French guys carry around on the back of their bicycles, their teeth white as mall toilets.
They was fixing to have a church bazaar which I don’t even know what that is and they wanted a flyer to hand out to their friends and they wanted to know what kind of paper I thought they ought to put their church bazaar flyer on and so I got out fifty million different paper samples for them, and one of them said, “That lime’s too hot,” and another one said, “That pink looks tacky,” and they finally said, “Honey, what do you think?” like they were doing me some big favor to ask and I said I didn’t have no idea, and then I wondered to myself how many chomps it would take a pit bull to bite one of their heads off and I thought if you took their hair off first, a dog might could do it one chomp, and I was thinking such not because I cared one way or the other, but because they kept debating and debating about their paper color, and wouldn’t never stop, and so I thought, you know, their heads are actually pretty small if you take the hair out of consideration, and so I was looking at my pit bull picture and then back at the small-headedest one of them, when the biggest one said they’d decided. I took out my order pad and she fished out a piece of paper from the fifty million samples all over the counter and she said, “We’ll take this one. What do you call this one?”
And I said,
Which was like the most boring, obvious thing they could have possibly chosen. I didn’t say nothing. Or maybe I did, but if I did it wasn’t anything real bad, just like “I’ll be damned” or something like that, and probably said it under my breath, but they give me a funny look and said, “If you don’t want our business, you can tell your manager we took our business elsewhere,” and I said, “I am the manager,” because the stupid boy who was the manager was with his stupid friends staring out the front window of the shop, not paying a speck of attention to what was going on, and so them women left and I just said, “Bow-wow-wow-yippy-yo-yippy-yay” to the back of their helmets of hair, and went back to thinking about Willett’s blue folder and all his employee-ness and how the world was my goddam oyster.
* * *
WHEN THEM women left, it got quiet and everything was fine till I had to change the toner on one of the big main copiers. I spilled that toner everywhere—on the carpet, down in the copier, all over the job I was copying, all over myself. The manager and the two other boys working my shift blew snot laughing. They all went to the state university in town. They made fun of me, how I talked, the way I drug out my words.
“Fuuuuuck,” I said, when the toner got on my face and hair.
They had a time laughing at my dustyass face, but after a minute they went back to wishing for cars they seen in the parking lot. I went back to cleaning up after myself and wishing them dead. The lights in that place were gray as the carpet on the floor and the paint on the walls, and didn’t none of it ever change, morning noon or night. The boys laughed and talked about vomiting in public, and the fat funny-looking country kids in their classes. I got out the big vacuum cleaner that place had—it was big and gray too—and went to sucking up that toner powder. They were laughing louder than the vacuum. Laugh it up, boys, I thought. Cause it wouldn’t be much longer. In a minute here, I’d be working for extra money, not bill money. And maybe I wouldn’t be working at all.
When I finally got that mess cleaned up and the clunky-ass vacuum cleaner put up, I went back to copying. I was copying some book I knew was copyright violation but the boys had give me ten of the forty the guy needed it copied give to them. So I had the copier going top up. The light went straight to the back of my eyes, and hurt.
The copier was going ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk. The bell on the door rang. The toner had got up my nose. That toner powder was like coal dust. But it wasn’t. It was clean. Even though it messed everything up, it was clean, an indoor mess. It made me miss everything home, home like it was before Daddy died. Made me miss a genuine mess. Made me miss Momma making Daddy change clothes at work, making him shower at work, when his mines had a shower, so he didn’t come home covered in mine mud and dust. He’d have his work clothes in garbage bags. I’d see how dirty that work was when she’d do the wash. But he