Dirty Love (40 page)

Authors: Andre Dubus III

BOOK: Dirty Love

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She sits at the small desk she’s never sat at before. She turns on the lamp. She pulls out her iEverything and sees it’s 2:47 in the morning. The sun will be up soon. She opens the notebook and writes:

Dear Uncle Francis,

If I could change the

She crosses this out. She slowly rips out the page and balls it up and flicks it at the wall.
Dirty Devon
. Bobby and Luke made that website, but what if tonight only her father logged onto it? What if Francis never saw it? He still knows. Her mean, shit-faced father, how could he not tell him about his tramp? She’d come to live with Francis to start clean. But how can anyone ever be clean with family? Blood is too dirty, dirty with love that can so easily turn to hate.

She writes:

Dear Uncle Francis,

Thank you for being so good to me. I don’t deserve it. Maybe I never did.

LOVE,
Devy

She reads it, then stands and leaves the notebook open to that page and drops the wadded paper into the trash basket. She carries the iron and ironing board back to the closet, and she folds the ironing board as quietly as she can and leans it under the closet shelf, pushing the iron up there and pulling her duffel bag down. It’s the one she used for track meets so long ago, and as she stuffs her underwear and an armful of bras and T-shirts into it, she sees herself running again, running under a hot sun.

She picks her underwear and shorts up off the floor and empties the bureau drawers of her clothes, pushing them all into her bag on the bed. She cleans the bathroom and zips all she needs into a cosmetics case her mother loaned her. It’s from Lord & Taylor, and Devon feels like she’s stealing it. She shoves it on top of her clothes beside her laptop and cord, and she zips her duffel and carries it to the doorway. Then she makes her bed, pulling the spread as tightly as if she were at The Whaler. Outside her window the sky is still dark, but she knows it won’t be for long.

She has almost six thousand dollars in the bank. She’ll have to be there as soon as they open. She’ll go to the one on River Street because they have a big parking lot down in the back near the floodwall. It’ll be a safe place to leave Aunt Beth’s car. Then it’s a short walk to the train station in Railroad Square, and she’ll text her mother to call Francis and tell him where it is. She’ll text her not to worry either.

But you should paint yurself, D.
Sick. She’ll text him, too. But first she’ll sit back in her train seat and put on her Dr. Dre’s and pick music that makes her feel free, the car rocking over the bridge rails and the swirling dirty water below, heading south to places she’s seen on her screen but only from the insides of rooms in houses on streets in cities she used to think were all the same, but how can they be if Hollis Waters is from one of them?

She pulls the duffel bag over her shoulder. She glances down at her open note to Francis, then she’s tiptoeing down his dark hallway and into his kitchen past the door to his bedroom where he sleeps alone. A hollowness opens up in her chest. She promises herself to come back and visit him before it’s too late.

It’s hard to see. There are only the shadows of things. She feels along the fridge to the wall and the phone, touching first her uncle’s keys, then her dead aunt’s, a woman Devon can feel judging her from the grave even though she’s only borrowing something, not stealing it. She has never stolen anything in her life, and she never will. She steps into the cool, still air of the closed garage and she sees Sick’s face. The way he looked at her as she let him in, the only one. His hair hung down and his lips were parted and as he moved inside her his eyes seemed to shine with a sweet sadness, the kind that only comes when you know something good can never, ever last. But you keep going anyway. All you can do is keep going and never quit.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank Kourosh Zomorodian for his expertise on the work of a project manager. I’d also like to thank my mother-in-law, Mary Dollas, for her help with bank telling details. And I’m particularly grateful to my daughter, Ariadne, for her help with Facebook and cyberspace, in general.

And here’s to my agent Philip Spitzer (and steadfast Lukas and Luc), and to my truly gifted and essential editor, Alane Salierno Mason.

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FIRST EDITION

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