Break the Skin (20 page)

I sang that song with all the love in my heart, and when I came down from the stage, people were clapping and cheering, and my mother
was there to wrap me up in her arms. “Thank you,” she said. “Oh, Laney, thank you so much.”

Then on the drive home we made fun of the other people we’d seen try to sing that night, and we giggled like kids until finally my mother said, “We’re bad, Laney,” and I told her, nah, we were just honest, and that started her giggling again.

She’d been so lonely since Daddy died. She reached over and took my hand. “You have a wonderful talent,” she said. “Why can’t you claim it? Don’t you want to?”

“I’m hoping I can someday,” I told her. “It just seems strange to me now. That’s all.”

“Strange?”

“Like I don’t deserve it,” I said. “Like it was meant for someone else.”

We rode along in silence for a while. “I just want you to be happy,” she finally said, and I told her not to worry, I would be.

That’s what I felt when I was with Rose and Tweet—happy. I liked to listen to the sweet things they said to each other. Rose called him her Tweety Bird; he called her his Cutie Patootie. He had a clarinet and a saxophone, and sometimes he’d pick one up and play something jazzy that would get Rose and me dancing. Other times, he’d get bluesy and we’d sit there listening, bobbing our heads, letting the time tick by and with no concern at all about anything.

One night, Tweet got me to sing. “C’mon, Laney-Girl,” he said. “Just like you did that night at the South End.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know what song to do.”

Since that night of karaoke at the Executive Inn, I’d been thinking about what singing meant to me. Those nights onstage in
The Music Man
, I’d let the songs lift me away from my real life. It was the same thing now. Whenever I sang, I got inside the notes and let them carry me away like they were bubbles. When that last note faded away, and the music stopped, and I had to come back to who I really was, I could barely
stand it. I suppose the tragedy of my life was the fact that I was afraid of how much I needed to be someone else.

But that night at Rose and Tweet’s, I felt so cozy. So when Rose said I should sing whatever was in my head—“You know, those earworms,” she said—I just started in with a song that, for whatever reason, I’d been hearing all day.

It was an old song from a CD Mother had played the night before—the Whitney Houston version of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.” A song that let my voice get big and then tender in all the right places.

Tweet picked up his sax and did a few licks, but for the most part it was just me, my voice soaring and then coming back. I closed my eyes, and then, finally, it happened. I went away from myself. I was all breath and voice. I was a shiver up your spine, a lump in your throat, a reminder of everything, no matter how scruffed up your life might be, that you could still feel.

When the last note faded away, I kept my eyes closed, trying to hold on to who I was inside that song as long as I could. I heard my voice, the last tones of it, still ringing in the air, growing fainter and fainter until finally it was gone, and I had no choice but to open my eyes and come back to the here and now.

Rose’s eyes were all soft and wet, and there was a blush on her cheeks. She was looking at me like I’d just handed her life back to her, like I’d given her something she’d never know how to thank me for.

“Oh, Laney,” she said.

Tweet gave a low, admiring whistle. “Jesus, girl,” he said. “That voice. You should come sing with Helmets on the Short Bus.”

I shook my head. “I couldn’t. Really, thank you, but no.”

“Laney, don’t be shy.” He was grinning. “You should be going places.”

But in truth, I wasn’t. I wasn’t going anywhere at all. I was stuck in New Hope.

SOME MORNINGS
, when I came home from work, Tweet would be up, messing around with his clarinet or saxophone. I’d hear the music as I drove by. On Fridays, after I had some breakfast, I went over to Mr. Hambrick’s. He’d started paying me a little money to clean his house once a week.

One morning, he was sitting on his front porch. The air was still, and we could hear the clarinet music coming from Rose and Tweet’s.

“That’s ‘Jumpin’ at the Woodside,’ ” Mr. Hambrick said. “Count Basie. I saw him play the Lakeview once.”

As hard as it was to believe, there’d been a resort hotel west of town before the state bought up the land and turned it into a nature preserve and park. People came from Chicago and St. Louis and Indianapolis and Memphis, even farther south, riding up on the train,
The City of New Orleans
, to spend a week or more relaxing at the hotel. Mr. Hambrick had photographs inside his house, framed and hanging on the wall. I dusted them each Friday and stood awhile admiring the grand hotel with its sprawling verandas and the manicured lawns stretching down to the lake. I studied photos of guests navigating that lake on paddleboats and photos of folks dressed to the nines for dinner in the ballroom and then dancing later to the likes of Count Basie and his orchestra, who, as Mr. Hambrick pointed out, had traveled to the heart of the country to play the Lakeview.

Some evenings before work, I went riding with Lester. He came to Mother’s house, and we sat around awhile with her, and she told us stories about how she first took notice of Daddy at a basketball game in Mt. Gilead. The regional finals back in 1987. “We couldn’t take our eyes off each other,” she said. “I thought I’d die if he didn’t ask me out.”

All my life, whenever I’d risked my heart, I’d had it stomped. Once in high school, I worked up my nerve and wrote a boy a love letter. “I love you,” I said. “I dream about you at night.” The boy tacked it on a bulletin
board in the hallway for everyone to read. The rest of the time I was in school, my phone would ring, and when I answered it, a voice would say, “Oh, Laney, I dream about you at night.” Or someone would call it out when I was at my locker or in the cafeteria. Just minding my own business, but I couldn’t escape that joke, the one I’d made for myself because I’d been so starry-eyed I’d actually told a boy how much he meant to me.

Anyway, Mother would recollect those tales of love and finally I’d say to Lester, “Come on. Let’s go for a ride.”

We’d jump in his truck and head out into the country, just riding along, enjoying the night air, and more often than not, we’d end up out at Lakeview, where he’d park at the end of Veterans’ Point. We’d watch the ducks on the water, and after dark there’d sometimes be night fishermen on johnboats, the lights of their lanterns passing by, and we’d hear faint voices for a time, and then they’d be gone. It was nice being together. I wasn’t yet thinking about loving him. Not until what happened that night.

Across the road at the campgrounds, people were laughing and a radio was playing. Then we heard a woman crying, not a wailing cry, just a low boo-hooing that kept going on and on as if that woman would never get to the bottom of her broken heart. After a while, it seemed like that noise didn’t belong to a person at all, but was the sound of a grief that stretched beyond the grave.

“That gives me the spooks,” I said.

“Let’s walk down to the lake,” said Lester. “Maybe we won’t be able to hear her down there.”

We walked together to the end of the point and then down a path through the pine trees to the water’s edge. We stood in the dark, and though the woman’s crying was more distant now, we could still hear it. Lester said, “I wish she’d stop. I don’t like hearing anyone cry like that.”

I wondered if he was thinking about that wedding party in Iraq and what happened to the spirits of the dead. I wondered if he heard them sometimes, if he dreamed about them, if they haunted him in the night.

Just then, a johnboat passed close to the shore, and the glow of its lantern fell across our feet. Something sparkled on the ground. Then the boat was gone, and we were in the dark.

“Did you see that?” Lester asked, and I told him I did. “Something shiny,” he said, and then he crouched down. I heard him running his hand over the grass. “Got it,” he said. “Laney, it’s a ring. It’s a woman’s gold wedding band.”

We went back to the truck, and there, with the dome light on, he showed me the ring. “You said I’d have luck.” He pointed out the window at the moon over the lake. “Remember, Laney? When the moon was full? You cast that spell.”

I laughed. “If you were really lucky, you’d have found a pile of cash.”

“Laney, I’m already lucky. I’m here with you.”

It was a sweet thing to say. I told him to turn out that dome light in case anyone was watching us. Then I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

“You’re a good man, Lester.”

That was enough to break him, and I thought later how it must have been the thing he wanted to hear someone say most of all. He’d done what he’d done in Iraq, and he’d come back, and someone like me could still think well of him.

“Laney, if I’m really lucky—if
we’re
really lucky—well, just give me your hand.”

The ring slid onto my finger, a perfect fit. Just like that, the woman stopped crying, and the night settled in around us with the sounds of the water lapping at the shore, and crickets singing, and I said to Lester, “We should take out an ad in the paper so whoever lost this ring can have it back.”

“Maybe someone threw it there,” he said. “Maybe that woman who was crying.”

“Should we try to find her?”

“No, if she threw it away, she had a reason, and besides, she’s quiet now.”

“Maybe it wasn’t even hers.”

“If you ask me, we found it for a reason.” We were making stories, the ones we wanted to believe. “Keep it, Laney. Finders, keepers.”

“You know the rest of it. Losers, weepers.”

“She’s not crying anymore. Everything’s fine.”

I couldn’t keep that ring and have a clear conscience, so I put an ad in the
Daily Mail
’s “Lost and Found” and even called it into the
Swap Shop
program on the radio where folks had things for sale, or things they wanted to buy, or things they’d misplaced or come across, and it wasn’t long before I had a call. Libby Raymond, Jess Raymond’s wife, the one Poke said was keeping time with Bernard Goad.

“Lands, I thought I’d seen the last of that ring,” she told me when she came to claim it. She was a slight woman with nervous hands that were always skittering through the air as she talked, or touching her face, or pushing up her glasses, or combing through her hair. “Jess and I were fishing off the point, and I took it off so I wouldn’t get it slimed up with bait, and, well, Laney, I’ve just been out of my head ever since.”

I couldn’t help but wonder whether she’d tossed it down some night when she’d been in Bernard Goad’s arms, and now she’d had a change of heart.

That’s what I told Lester when I gave him the news.

“I hope you’re not mad that I gave it back to her.”

“No, Laney. It did what it was meant to do. It got us to say what we think of each other. It was the lucky gift you conjured up for me.”

ONE NIGHT, WHEN
we didn’t have to work, Lester and I went into the South End to have a drink.

Delilah was there. She sat by herself at a table in the corner. She
wouldn’t even look my way. She finished her drink, got up, and headed toward the door, wobbling a little. She bumped into a chair and almost fell. I couldn’t stand to see that. No matter the trouble between us, I still cared about her and didn’t want to see her hurting. I went over and put my arm around her waist.

I asked her if she was okay. “You need any help?”

“Honey, I’m fine,” she said in a little voice that held just a smidge of embarrassment. “I really am,” she said, and then she walked on to the door.

I thought about going after her, but I didn’t.

That night, I couldn’t get her out of my head, wondering, as I was, what life was like for her now that I wasn’t there to be a part of it, now that I was starting to make a life of my own. I wondered how she was getting on with her rent now that it was only her there to pay it. I still saw her at work, but we never had much to say, and it started to feel like we’d never really been close as sisters, never told each other the most secret things in our hearts. I told myself she was just a woman I worked with, just someone who didn’t matter to me at all.

Then one morning in October, I saw her leave the store and get into a black Camaro. A man was behind the wheel. He pulled her close and kissed her. Then he turned toward the store, ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair, and I could see it was Bobby May. I hadn’t known he was back in town, and I got a sick feeling in my stomach to think that Delilah had picked back up with him. He’d been no good for her the first time, and now there they were, and I couldn’t get comfortable with that fact.

Lester came up beside me. “Watching anything interesting?”

“Delilah,” I said. “I think she’s headed for trouble.”

ROSE SAID IT WASN’T
any of her concern what Delilah did with Bobby May, and she didn’t see why it should be any of mine. “She turned you out, Laney. If you ask me, she can make her own road.”