Break the Skin (10 page)

The officer left, and Carolyn said to me, “Married? My, my, when did this happen?”

I grabbed a date, my
mami
’s birthday. “We’d been seeing each other ever since June, just after Pablo left town. Then, August seventh, we decided to take the jump.”

Donnie still had his arm around my shoulders. “Lucky number seven.” He gave me a squeeze. “Right, Baby?”

“Count my lucky stars,” I said.

He winked at me, and I got the feeling, not totally unwelcome, that he and I were weaving this story, this lie, together.

OF COURSE, CAROLYN
was doubtful. I knew that right away. I let her sleep in my spare bedroom—Pablo’s old room—and the next morning, when Donnie and I came out of our room, she was in the kitchen, drinking a cup of instant coffee.

“Donnie?” she said. “You think you could be a hon and fetch me a little sugar for this coffee?”

I understood it was a test. She was suspicious that we weren’t really married. My husband would surely know where I kept the sugar, right? Otherwise, what would Carolyn think? That I’d brought a man home for a one-night stand. Surely not the truth: that I’d stolen him away from wherever he was headed, that I was trying to make him into someone who would believe we were in love.

“Sugar?” Donnie said, glancing at me.

“Yes, dear,” I said, trying to make a joke.

Carolyn put her hands on her hips and studied Donnie. “You know where the sugar is, don’t you?”

He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a pink paper
packet. He held it up and looked at me with a big smile on his face as if he couldn’t believe his luck. “We don’t have sugar,” he said, handing the packet to Carolyn. “We’ve got Sweet’N Low instead.”

She studied that Sweet’N Low packet a good long while, and I held my breath. “It’ll do,” she finally said, “but, Baby, I seem to remember you always take sugar in your coffee.”

“I gave it up,” I told her. “I’m slimming down.”

We didn’t have much to say after that, or else we had the world to say, but we didn’t know how to say it. Carolyn drank her coffee, and she kept her eyes on Donnie and me, looking for a sign, I’m sure, that we weren’t married at all.

“Baby,” she finally said, “where’s y’all’s wedding rings?”

She had me there. Our fingers were bare, and I didn’t expect that Donnie would pull any rings out of his pockets. “We’re going to pick them out real soon,” I said. “We have to put some money aside first. You know how love can be.” I snapped my fingers. “When it happens, it happens fast. We couldn’t wait to get married.”

“Oh, I’m sure.” She set her coffee cup down on the counter. “Mercy, yes. Fast. I imagine your head is still spinning.” She clicked the point of her fingernail against her front teeth. Then she said, “I hope you get those rings real soon ’cause I’d sure like to see them. Yessiree, Baby, I surely would.”

“NOW, WHO WAS THAT?”
Donnie asked me after Carolyn had gone, and I told him about Pablo and how Carolyn was his ex. I even told him about the cattle-rustling scheme and how in the middle of the summer it all came apart and left Slam Dent pissed off and on the hunt. That’s all I told him about Slam. I didn’t say that he’d been the last man in my bed. I didn’t tell Donnie how he’d treated me like I was nothing but his whore. I wanted to get as far away from those days as I could, and Donnie, though he didn’t know it, was helping me do that.

“He’s trying to get to Pablo by putting the fear into Carolyn,” I said, and then I told Donnie why she’d come to the house, afraid, and why I’d called the police. “There, that should just about have you up to date.”

It was going to be another scorcher. I could tell that. The sun was bright through the kitchen window, spreading across the linoleum floor, falling on our legs where we sat at the table, Donnie across from me. I could hear a yard sprinkler buzzing next door at Emma’s, jetting water onto her St. Augustine grass, and I imagined she’d be over soon to drink coffee and shoot the breeze with me until I had to get to work, the way she usually did when she wasn’t off on a trip somewhere to visit family. She had kids and grandkids all over the South.

Babyheart’s Tats opened at noon, so the mornings were always leisurely, plenty of time for Emma. I told Donnie about her. “Our neighbor,” I said. “Miss Emma Hart.”

He got up and went to the window and stood there, looking over the top of the privacy fence that separated my backyard from Emma’s. A mockingbird was perched on the fence, singing away. “How come it is I don’t know any of this?” His voice was halting, slow with the hard work of trying to understand, tinged with just enough misery to break my heart.

So I told him the first thing I could think of that might explain his predicament.

“Amnesia,” I told him. “You got hit on the head just a few days after we got married. You were in a coma up until a few days ago, and since you’ve been home from the hospital, you’ve had some trouble remembering things.”

“Who hit me?”

“A man.” I was flying by the seat of my pants now, saying whatever came to me. “We were in Deep Ellum—we’d just left The Bone—and there was this man in an alley, and he asked you for money. You told him no, and that’s when he hit you with his fist. You went down and hit your head hard on the pavement. He went through your wallet. Took your
cash, your credit cards, your driver’s license. Then he threw the wallet on the ground and he ran.”

Donnie touched his fingers to the top of his head, feeling for any sign—a knot, or a scabbed-over gash—that what I was telling him was true.

Emma’s knock on my front door was a loud
rap rap rap
. She called out, “Yoo-hoo. Miss Baby? It’s Emma.”

Donnie took his hand down from his head. “Emma Hart,” he said, recalling what I’d told him. I’d never seen a smile like the one he gave me, such a grin of pure bliss. “I remembered, didn’t I?”

“That’s right, cutie.” I laid my hand on his cheek. “You called it up just fine.”

I would have stood there forever like that if I could have, but Emma was knocking and yoo-hooing again, and so I left him in the kitchen and went into the living room to let her in.

“Did I see the police over here last night?” She brushed past me, her head swiveling around, looking for any sign of what might have transpired when the police came to my house. She was good-hearted and nosy. Lord love her. “Miss Baby, are you in trouble?”

She swung back to look at me, and it was all I could do, I swear, to keep from laughing. It was clear she’d put on her face in a hurry, eager to get over to my place to see what was going on. She’d drawn on her eyebrows with a sharp peak in each center rather than the half-moon arc she usually used. Her lipstick strayed at the corners, as if someone had jostled her arm, and she hadn’t got her hair all the way brushed out after taking it out of the curlers. She was a woman who looked startled.

“No,” I told her. “No trouble.” I didn’t see a need to go into the story of Carolyn and Slam Dent and ruin the pleasure Emma took from hating Carolyn. “They just had more questions about Pablo and that cattle rustling.”

“Did you tell them what they wanted to know?”

“I don’t know anything, Emma.”

“Does Carolyn? Is that why she was here last night?”

I pretended to be peeved at her. “Emma, were you snooping out your windows?”

She twisted up her mouth in disgust. “I was
not
. I saw that woman leave this morning when I was setting up my sprinklers.” Emma crossed her arms over her chest and gave me a haughty look. “A body has a right to take note of a few things, doesn’t she, Miss Baby Ruiz?”

“She needed a place to stay.”

“And you let her?”

I tapped my chest with my fist. “What can I say? Soft heart.”

“Soft head is more like it. Oh, Miss Baby. What on earth were you thinking? Lord-a-mighty. After the way that woman’s treated you?”

“Things are looking up, Emma. That’s all I’ll say.” I took her by her scrawny arm, pulled her close, and whispered in her ear, “I got married.”

She tipped her head back and squinted at me. “While I was in Mississippi?”

“Justice of the peace,” I said. “A courthouse wedding.”

“That Donnie fella? I didn’t even know you were keeping time with him.”

“Well, Emma, you just don’t know everything.” I winked at her. “Even though you want to.”

“Are you saying I’m nosy?”

“Come on in here.” I took her hand and led her toward the kitchen. “I want you to meet my sweetie.”

Donnie was standing just where I’d left him, as if he couldn’t unstick himself from that spot.

Emma walked right up to him. “You’re Donnie,” she said. “Donnie True.”

“True enough,” he said.

She got tickled. “True enough.” She cackled and swatted my arm. “Did you hear that?” she asked me. “Donnie True is true enough.”

He took her hand and raised it to his lips, and that was enough to
stop her from having the hysterics. She put her other hand to her mouth, amazed. I saw a little blush creep into her cheeks the way it must have when she was a girl and a boy paid attention to her. Donnie kissed the back of her hand where the veins were roped up and the knuckles were all knobby. He kissed her hand like an old-time Southern gentleman, and I knew he’d won her over.

“Charmed,” Donnie said.

“Why, Mr. True,” said Emma. “What a sweetie pie you are, and cute as a Kewpie. Believe me, sir, the pleasure is all mine.”

WHAT CAN I SAY?
We got on, my Donnie and me. Our first whole day together, after Emma had gone home, we walked back to where we’d started—the corner of Fry and Oak—and I opened up Babyheart’s Tats.

“So this is our shop,” I told Donnie.

He leafed through a binder full of sample tats. “I’m a tattoo artist?”

What was I to tell him? Yes? No? I wasn’t sure which way to go, afraid I might scare him off.

“You’ve done it before,” I finally said.

He slapped the binder shut. “I don’t think I could do it now. I wouldn’t remember how it all went.”

“That’s all right,” I told him. “You don’t have to remember everything at once. We’ll take it slow.”

And we did. All through the rest of September, we fell into a gentle rhythm—the easy tempo of our own fairy tale, as I came to think of it. Pablo, when he’d finally run, had left things in my house—jeans and shirts and underwear and socks and toiletry items. He and Donnie had the same build, so it was easy to convince Donnie that everything was his. While I worked at the shop, he helped out by sweeping the floors and emptying the trash. He even got good at answering the phone and writing down appointments. If someone asked something he didn’t know, he put them on hold and came to find me. Sometimes, when everything was
slow, he watched the television I had in the waiting area, and if I could spare the time, I sat with him and he held my hand.

He seemed satisfied to be there with me as the days got shorter and the darkness came earlier. Soon we were walking home beneath the glow of the streetlights along Oak, and there was enough of a chill that we had to wear jackets.

Those walks were what I came to love best about the time we spent together. Sometimes we talked about funny little things that had happened at the shop—the man who fainted before the needle even touched his skin, the boy who wanted lips tattooed around his belly button—and other times we didn’t say much at all, and that was all right. We were both just happy to be walking hand in hand down the street in the dark, just a man and a woman going home.

One night, as we turned left on Scripture, he pulled me to a stop, and he said, “What was it that made you fall in love with me?”

The question, so sweet for the doubt behind it—as if Donnie couldn’t believe he had anything to offer—nearly brought me to tears. It was like we were teenagers, amazed by the love we felt; a little scared of it, but more than a little thrilled.

“It was the way you looked at me,” I said, recalling the first time our eyes met. “I could tell you needed me. I wanted to take care of you forever.”

He nodded. “You take good care of me, Baby.” It all seemed right to him—what I’d said—and for that I was thankful. “I can’t imagine being anywhere but with you,” he told me, and I couldn’t have asked for anything better to hear. I started to believe that I could pull this off, that no one would ever question me, that the people Donnie had left behind would never find him.

“We’re good together, aren’t we?” I said.

“Thank you.” I heard the catch in his voice, and I put my arms around his waist and hugged him to me. “Let’s go home,” he said, and that’s what we did.

Night after night, we lay down to sleep, the way married folks do, and we held each other, and some nights we made love. Oh, I know it was a fool thing to do—I had no idea who this man was or who he’d been with, and these days I know a girl has to be careful—but you have to understand that by this time I was gone. I wasn’t living in the sane, rational world. I was living in the world I was making up as I went along, and in that world this man was Donnie, my husband, the man I trusted and loved.

He was there in the evening when I closed my eyes to sleep, and he was there in the morning when I woke up. I came to count on the joy of his company.

Then one day he wasn’t in my bed.

I rushed out into the living room, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the kitchen or the bathroom. He wasn’t anywhere that I could see. I stood in the middle of my living room and listened to the clocks ticking, and my house was so quiet without our two voices. I sat down on the floor, drew my knees up to my chest, and started to rock back and forth, the way I did when I was a girl and my
mami
went out for the night and I was afraid she wouldn’t come home.
“Loquita!”
my
abuelita
told me, pointing out what a silly girl I was. “She has to come home. This is where she lives.”

Words to hang on to, whether they were true or not. I believed them because I needed to believe that sooner or later, my
mami
would come to my bed and lean over to kiss me. Her hair would smell of cigarette smoke, her breath like liquor, her skin like sweat and Heaven Scent perfume. I’d wrap my arms around her neck and cling to her. This was all when I was a little girl, but now that I was a woman, I wondered whether it was true, what my
abuelita
told me, that the restless spirit always longed for home.