The Next Time You See Me (7 page)

That was her sister. But there was also the Ronnie from that day so many years ago, the Ronnie who’d tried to coax Susanna, browbeat her, into that van with those men. She’d looked then much like she looked now: dark blond hair worn cropped, almost like a man’s; shorts and T-shirt cinched tight around her narrow middle and her large chest, the legs emerging from her cutoffs muscled but thick, almost stocky. She hadn’t been much on makeup in those days: just mascara, and perhaps too much of it, making her appear elfin, with that short hair and the short legs and those wide, startled eyes. Childlike. She’d always smelled of cigarettes and Red perfume, her splurge, that and her French-manicured press-on nails her only shows of uninhibited femininity. It was ironic, that question she’d posed:
Are you a dyke?
The way she’d taunted Susanna, the hoarse laugh, the way the men had echoed her laughter. Looking back, Susanna knew that Ronnie had needed her, or thought she did; and Susanna knew, too, what would have happened to her—what Ronnie would have let happen—if she’d gone along on that ride.
Are you a dyke?
Ronnie had asked, looking herself like Peter Pan hitchhiking with the Lost Boys, and Susanna had backed away and turned tail and run home hard as she could, betrayed and betrayer, choosing herself just as Ronnie would have.

“I’ll go get that photograph,” Susanna said finally. She couldn’t meet Pendleton’s gaze.

“All right then.” He was almost kind. “I’ll be here till five.”

She reached down for Abby, the both of them grunting as she pulled to a stand—Susanna with the effort, Abby at the indignity of Susanna’s hard fingers in her armpits—and they were most of the way to the car when Susanna realized that her daughter was still clutching Pendleton’s toy cruiser. “Keep it,” she muttered, fumbling one-handed in her purse for her keys.

Chapter Four

1.

Wyatt Powell’s morning routine had been more or less the same for thirty-two years, since the day when he took a promotion—he guessed you could call it that, though there hadn’t been an accompanying bump in pay—and moved from seconds at the factory to first shift:

Awaken at five
A.M
. He’d needed an alarm the first several months, especially while he was still retraining his body for the new schedule, but never again since then; he couldn’t sleep past five
A.M
. now even if he wanted to, even if he went to bed after midnight.

Coffee. Back then his mother had used an old aluminum kettle, brewing it stovetop, but now he owned a Mr. Coffee automatic drip with a digital clock and a timer: he needed only to scoop out his Folgers before bed and pour in a pot of water, and the coffee would be brewed and steaming at 5:10, which was always just enough time for Wyatt to rise, urinate, and let Boss out back for his own pee. Of course there’d been no Boss in those early days, but there’d always been some dog to tend to, though not always an inside dog. Wyatt hadn’t started sharing his house with an animal until it had become clear, sometime in his forties, that he was never going to find the right woman for the job.

Breakfast. For himself and for the dog. Today, as on most Mondays, Wyatt opened a new package of sausage from the groceries he’d purchased yesterday, peeling back the plastic sleeve and slicing off three thick pieces smelling of cold fat and sage. These he plopped into his cast-iron skillet, which was still sitting out, wiped but unwashed, from yesterday’s use. As the sausages were cooking, the air redolent with smoke and the tang of red pepper, Wyatt spread margarine on two slices of white bread, popped them into the toaster, and poured his first cup of coffee. Here, too, his habit was many years fixed: one spoon of sugar and one spoon of powdered creamer, the sugar and creamer stored in little containers made of amber carnival glass, each with a divot between the lip and the lid where the stem of a spoon could extend. The set had been his mother’s. It had been on the kitchen table all through his growing up.

He crumbled a sausage into Boss’s food bowl, stirred in a cup of Ol’ Roy kibble, and poured off the rendered fat from his cast-iron skillet. Boss, old enough now that he sometimes couldn’t even bring himself to eat standing up—he’d sit and lean into the bowl, only getting his hind legs into the motion when he needed to stretch for some last bits in the back—was already grinding away before Wyatt could seat himself. They were a couple of old boys, old bachelors, and Wyatt had examined his face in the bathroom mirror enough times to reach the conclusion that there was more than a little bloodhound in his own features these days: the rheumy, sagging eyes and loose jowls; his hair graying just as quickly as the fur on Boss’s muzzle was going to white. Boss paused, as he often did, and looked over his shoulder at Wyatt. “Go on, boy,” Wyatt said, tucking into his own breakfast, smearing blackberry jam on one of the pieces of toast and folding the other one around the first sausage. He sipped coffee between bites, wiped crumbs off the paunch of his stomach before they could grease-stain his undershirt. All of these acts were familiar and comforting.

He dressed after breakfast, buttoning the collar on his work shirt to hide a scratch on his neck and examining his reflection carefully in the harsh fluorescent light framing his bathroom mirror. Then he
slipped into his quilted flannel jacket and called for Boss, accompanying the dog outside this time for round two. He had to watch, confirm, or else Boss would get indoors and have an accident while Wyatt was at work. Sometimes it happened anyway. The dog wandered around the yard, sniffing well-known landmarks like the picnic table and an ancient garden gnome, probably picking up on the scent of the neighbor’s cat. At last his steps became shorter and faster, and then he was walking his back legs forward and hiking up his bottom end, watching Wyatt over his shoulder again suspiciously—the look had always struck Wyatt as suspicious, anyway, and made him laugh, but not lately, not since last week—and then the dog was finished, coming back to the house without being called and giving Wyatt a wide berth as he entered.

The dog was balled up on the couch, chin resting on a pillow, when Wyatt came through the living room with his travel mug of coffee and sweet roll, fuel for the ten-minute drive. This was when he’d usually sit and rest a moment, catch a few minutes of the Channel 5 news out of Nashville, give Boss a good scratch behind the ears, a good belly rub to hold him over until nighttime. But Boss wasn’t having it: not sleeping at the foot of Wyatt’s bed, not greeting Wyatt at the door with his tail wagging, not taking treats directly from his master’s hand. If Wyatt were to sit at his usual place on the couch now, Boss would hop down heavily, cross to the opposite side of the room, and lie with his back against the wall, chin on his forepaws.

“Don’t move on my account,” Wyatt said to the dog. He sipped his coffee, checked the clock: 6:20, too early to be heading out unless he felt like sitting for half an hour in the break room, waiting to punch in. He didn’t know what would be worse: biding time in his own home under Boss’s wary eye or trying to hide from the young guys at the plant, the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who called him Tubs and then tried to play it off like they were joking, laughing with him instead of at him.
Aw, Tubs, stop pouting. You know we love you, man. When’re you gonna come out for a beer with us? When you gonna let us get you drunk?

He rubbed a tight spot in his chest, the place where his breakfast crumbs always landed, where the hollow between his pecs surged out into the hard, round curve of his stomach. He carried his fat high and close to his heart.

“I’ll see you, then,” he said to Boss.

The dog stared at him with his tired, milky eyes, and Wyatt went on and left.

He took the long way to the plant, cutting through town instead of using the bypass, even circling the square so that he could drive by Citizens Deposit and see the temperature. Fifty degrees. It was supposed to be warm again after the weekend’s cold snap, maybe even up to the seventies, and Wyatt was of two minds about it. At fifty-five he felt the cold a lot more than he had at eighteen, when he first started at Price Electric, and so the short, halfhearted winters of recent years were in some respects a blessing. Saved him on electricity bills, too. But it didn’t seem right that you could walk around outdoors in almost-November in nothing but your shirtsleeves. A lot of things didn’t seem right about the world today, a lot had changed without Wyatt’s say-so, but what could a guy like him do about it? Price had been talking for years now about shutting down the Kentucky factory and moving to Mexico. They’d already closed a plant in St. Louis, and these had been some strange years lately, foreigners coming in and local guys, folks Wyatt had worked with since his mother was still alive, getting laid off or retiring early, tired of switching from one job to the next and fighting tooth and nail for the sections of the plant with the better pay grades.

Wyatt held on, took whatever the higher-ups were willing to give him. He’d gone from the winding room to the die cast to the repair shop, and now they had him out in packaging, one of the lowest pay grades a man of his seniority could get, working alongside Bosnians with dark circles under their eyes and knobs of muscle under their T-shirts, guys who could load and seal a crate of motors before Wyatt could get the packing materials printed. And that was part of the problem right there: all these computers you had to use now,
computers controlling the machines and computers to replace what had always been done with triplicate forms and an ink pen just years before, a system that had seemed fast and fine to Wyatt. Lord’s sake, who couldn’t operate a damn ink pen? Who in the hell had decided that wasn’t good enough anymore?

He was ten minutes early at the plant and decided to go in, get on with it. The usual bunch of guys was stationed beside the Coke machines, smoking and sipping sodas. The cafeteria had been shut down two years ago, after the corporate office started making cutbacks. No coffee these days unless you brought your own. You got a frozen turkey at Thanksgiving, a ham loaf for Christmas, and there was a company picnic once a year with a free meal, rides for the kids, and a prize drawing. That was the extent of the freebies. Wyatt had won, in various years, an eighteen-inch color television—that had been the best luck of his life, and he still marveled at it—an off-brand clock radio, and something called a Whopper Chopper that he’d immediately traded in at Wal-Mart for store credit.

“Hey,” Sam Austen said, tipping his Mr. Pibb can toward Wyatt. He was a good-looking kid, tall and blue-eyed with longish sandy-colored hair and a brand-new Dodge Ram that his pop had gotten him as a graduation present. He’d started at Price in May, right after school let out, telling everybody who’d listen that he was just earning gas-and-girl money through the summer until he went to WKU in the fall. Here he was, though, still at Price, working as a temp but hoping to get on full-time as soon as there was an opening. He grinned, swigged from his soda, and put the can high in the air as if he were making a toast. “Tubs! There you are, you silly bastard. So you heard from that woman you hooked up with yet? Man, she was a dog.”

He was talking about the woman from the dance hall. Wyatt had been getting grief about her—about the shots he’d drunk in front of the guys, the fact that three alone had been all it had taken to get him to sing along with “Wichita Lineman” on the jukebox—all last week.

“I didn’t do anything with that woman,” Wyatt said, knowing it was
stupid to get drawn into this but feeling trembly and flushed, mouth running on before his better instincts could check him.

“There’s no shame in it,” Gene Lawson said. “She wasn’t that fat. She had a decent face.”

Wyatt was red now, he knew, scarlet probably, and everybody was going to start laughing soon, egging him on, saying
Way to go, Tubs
and
No shame in Tubs’s game
and
More cushion for the pushin’
. He hadn’t taken the fat woman from the dance hall home. He hadn’t.

“Leave him alone,” Morris Houchens said. Wyatt hadn’t seen him. He’d been in the back of the room, sitting and reading a section from a
Courier-Journal,
and the other men had blocked him from view. “Don’t know why y’all care so much about another man’s love life anyhow.”

“Love life,” Sam snorted. “We’re just having him on a little, man. It’s all in fun.”

“I know your brand of fun,” Morris said. They stared at each other for a moment, silent, and then the shift bell sounded. The men lined up at the time clock.

Wyatt hung back intentionally, waiting to go through after Morris. “Thank you,” he said, embarrassed. He was too old to be bullied. Too old to need a rescuer.

Morris, hands plunged in his pockets, shrugged in an exaggerated way. He wasn’t quite Wyatt’s age—Wyatt had ten years on him, probably—but he wasn’t one of the young turks, either, and he’d been around long enough that they had one of those pleasant but limited acquaintanceships, the kind that had weathered nothing more serious than an argument about who should take the last Nip Chee bag from the vending machine. “That son of a bitch Sam gave my boy trouble the whole time they were in school together,” Morris said. “Him and a pack of his buddies came and set fire to a Halloween dummy we had in our yard, probably would’ve caught the whole house on fire if I hadn’t seen it in time. I knew it was him, but I couldn’t prove it. Nobody did a thing to him.”

“That’s how it goes around here,” Wyatt said.

Morris punched his card. “You got that right.” He paused before crossing into the factory. “No offense, but you’re asking for this kind of thing, going out with those guys. They’re not your friends. They’re not good people.”

Wyatt remembered Glen Campbell on the loudspeakers and his own earnest, drunken crooning, the guys all laughing so hard they had tears in their eyes, wiping them away and patting their knees and saying, “Woo! Shit!” before erupting all over again. “
I am a lineman for the county . . .”

“I know,” he said. “I made a mistake. I thought it would be better if I gave in and went along one time.” His hand was shaking so badly that it took him two tries to punch his own card.