The Right Thing (18 page)

“Sit down, Annie.” Bette pats my shoulder as she guides me to the dinette. Like an obedient dog, I sit in a stunned heap. She leans out through the Airstream's door, into the foggy night. “You can c'mon in, Ted,” she hollers. “I'll pour us all a cup of coffee.”

My hands are knotted together on top of the table when Ted ducks his head to walk in the trailer. He pauses and looks around, seems nonplussed by all the swans, and then slides in across from me on the dinette's other bench. I can't look at him.

I can't look at anyone.

“Bette,” I say, my voice low and dangerous. “Tell me where Starr is this minute. Tell me she didn't just take off in my car.”

Bette's back is turned to me as she pours out the coffee I don't want. Her wide shoulders slump. With a sigh, she pushes up the velour sleeves of her sweat suit like she's got a tough job ahead of her and turns around to face me.

“Well, she did, Annie. Starr took your car and went back to Jackson. You were gone for so long, over an hour, and we didn't even know where you'd gone.” Bette folds her tattooed arms across her bosom, her face worried. “I'm so sorry. She said to tell you she couldn't wait.”

My mouth falls open again, and nobody says anything. “What?” I falter, finally.
Jackson?
Starr left me here, in New Orleans, in the middle of the night without a way to get home? “What?” I say again, still unable to believe this is really happening to me.

Like a dancing bear in teal velour, Bette trundles over to the dinette with two steaming cups, putting one in front of Ted, the other in front of me. “Here you go, honey.” She squeezes in next to Ted and pats my clenched hands. “Oh, Annie—I got another call, and it wasn't an asshole trainer with a sore horse this time, it wasn't for me. That call was for Starr.”

I jerk my hands away, clutching Ted's jacket to my bare shoulders.
“So?”
I demand, panic turning to dread.

Bette's naked little eyes are guarded. She looks down at the table. “So after that call she had to leave. Right away. She wouldn't wait.”

“I heard that part already. What was so goddamned important that she'd strand me in New Orleans,” I say, my voice rising to an almost-shout, “when she knows how much trouble I'm going to be in
when I can't get home tonight?
”

And with that outburst I'm exhausted, collapsing against the leatherette back of the bench seat, dully appraising the disaster Starr's landed me in. Across the table, Ted takes a sip of his coffee, his eyes watching me with what looks like compassion. I'm numb inside, but my thoughts are racing: even if I could get a rental car on the night before Thanksgiving, my driver's license, my credit cards, and the money in the pocket of my parka—they're all in the BMW. I'm broke and alone in New Orleans in the middle of the night. How could Starr do this to me? My eyes fill with tears.

“Didn't she know?” My whisper sounds broken. “Didn't she know what's going to happen to me now?”

Bette sighs. “Oh, honey,” she says gently. With a grunt, she gets up to get me a Kleenex from the swan-shaped dispenser on top of the television. “Starr knew it was going to be a problem, but she had to do it. She said to tell you it was Mr. Right who called.”

Remember Mr. Right? The man my momma told me was going to carry me off, love me forever, and get me whatever my heart desired?

Bette goes on. “It was her chance to get together with her baby's father, to go get married and get shut of the world of hurt she's been in, but she was afraid he might have second thoughts. She didn't dare waste any time.”

“But
tonight?
” This horror is making less sense by the minute. Starr? Going back to Bobby? “Why tonight?”

“I don't know, sugar,” Bette says, shaking her head.

“Eight hours ago she had to be in New Orleans tonight!” I want to put my head down on the table and sob, but I can't summon the energy even for that. “She's going back to Jackson to marry Bobby? After all he put her through, Starr's going back to Bobby Shapley? Has she lost her mind, thinking he can marry her just like that? Last I heard, he wasn't even divorced! He's still with Julie.”

I can't seem to take this in, my mind shrieking
no
. Please, please tell me I'm not going to be ruined because Bobby Shapley changed his fucking mind.

Bette sits down again, and the bench groans under her weight. Her husky contralto is loaded with a galling commiseration when she says, “I know it's a shock, sugar.”

“No, it's not.” Ted says.

I turn from Bette's heavy-jowled face to meet his steady, brown-eyed gaze. “What do you mean, it's not a shock?” I ask. “What the hell are you saying?”

Ted's eyes don't waver. “You've known her—how long?”

Without thinking I say, “Since I was seven years old. What about it?”

Ted shrugs. “Then how can you be shocked when Starr Dukes runs off with your car?”

This hits like a baseball bat to the gut. I stare at him, hoping I heard wrong.

“So you do know her,” I say. “In fact, you seem to know Starr better than I do.” Could Ted be one of the men in her past? Starr, sitting on that god-awful ugly bed, clasping her hands in her lap and looking dreamy.
Poppa said that the wages of sin is death. I've made me some mistakes, but I can't say I'd do anything different.
Not knowing why I should care, I swallow hard and have to ask, “So . . . how well do you know her?”

Ted doesn't say anything right away. He takes a sip of coffee and puts the cup down before he says, “It's not what you think, Annie. Starr's like a lot of people—comes from nothing, wants a lot. I'd say that if taking your car and leaving you behind was the one way for her to get over, she'd drive off with your BMW in a heartbeat and never look back.” He idly turns his cup in its saucer. “Starr and I were friends once, sort of. That's all.” His tone tells me to take his word for it.

Bette runs her fingers through her tight brown curls, working them into a loopy, corkscrew halo. She looks tired, too. “And that's the way it is with me and Starr,” she says, sounding subdued. “She only tells me what she thinks I need to know, so I can't answer all your questions, Annie. She hadn't even told me about being pregnant, and wasn't that a surprise when she walked in the door! But I'll tell you what, once Starr's made up her mind, she's like a round from a thirty-aught shotgun—whatever she's aiming at, she's gonna take it
out
.”

Eyes cast down at her wide lap, Bette gulps, obviously steeling herself for what she says next. “And Annie”—she lowers her voice—“this isn't the first time Starr's been pregnant, but she swears it's going to be the last, said that phone call meant she wasn't going to have to fight anymore, she'd never be broke again. Starr's going to be set for life.”

I'm reeling with humiliation. I want to crawl into a hole and die. I want to wake up in my bed at home to find that this has been a wicked, wicked dream. Ted's face is carefully without expression, but the terrible sympathy in Bette's eyes tells me I've been a fool. What have I done to myself now?

Finally, I locate my voice. “I still have to find a way home,” I say, defeated and thin as tap water. “All my money, my driver's license, everything's in the car. I have the clothes I'm standing up in. And a dog.”

“Well, the dress looks fabulous on you.” Bette narrows her eyes and gives me the once-over. “I'd lose the boots, though. You need a killer pair of Ferragamo sling-backs.”

“And he's a good dog,” Ted offers.

“Where is he?” I ask. In the midst of all this sickening revelation, have I lost Troy Smoot, too?

“He's in my truck,” Ted says. “There's a pile of clean horse blankets in the back seat, fresh from the Laundromat. He's warm and comfortable.”

“Why'd you do that?” I rub my eyes, put my face in my hands.

Ted reaches across the table and gently pushes a thick sheaf of hair off my face. I look at him through my fingers. “I'm going to drive you both home,” he says. “You ready to leave?”

This offer is as surreal as everything else. “Why are you being so nice to me?” I ask.

“You liked my horses, and I don't have another date for tonight.” His voice is easy, but his eyes tell me that he means it. “I can get you home and be back here before my first horse runs tomorrow.”

Looking relieved, Bette nods her approval. “Ted's one of the good guys, honey,” she says. “Go on home, Annie. Things will look better in the morning.”

It's already morning.

 

Ted's truck is humongous, an older black four-door Ford diesel with an extra pair of tires on the rear axle. Ted calls it a dually. There's a welter of fast-food bags, gas station receipts, road maps, a couple of shiny aluminum horseshoes, a tattered paperback copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird,
and a claw hammer underneath my feet on the passenger's side. I'm shivering on the frigid bench seat that's as cold under my bare thighs as only vinyl can be, waiting for the big engine block finally to warm up so we can have some heat.

“Somebody stole the radio back in Virginia,” Ted says. “I could sing, if you want. My ex-wife used to say I sound okay for a guy whose only musical experience is hymns from when I was an altar boy. Sometimes I sing Van Halen in the truck, just because it feels good.”

“I'm not really in the mood for music, thanks.”

It's a quarter of two o'clock in the morning, black as the underside of a crow's wing except for the brief pools of efflorescence surrounding the deserted interstate's lamps. Just as the truck begins to lose its chill, we pass the last exit and leave New Orleans, plunging into the darkness of the spillway, going back the way I came, across the marsh and up the I-55. Slipping off my boots, I curl my feet underneath me and lean my head against the window, looking through the bug-splattered windshield at indistinct stands of cypress trees, the hummocks of switch grass and reeds spread under the scattered stars. Troy Smoot snores softly in the back seat, ensconced in his pile of horse blankets.

I glance over at Ted. He drives like a guy accustomed to the thousand-mile distances between racetracks, forearm resting on top of the wheel, one long leg bent, the other stretched to the pedal. His profile in the greenish light of the instrument panel is cut from the cloth of the night.

“You hungry yet?” he asks.

“No.” I can't imagine eating anything. Hell, I don't even want a cigarette—which is unusual, although just as well because the pack's in my purse in the BMW. I wish I hadn't thought of that.
Damn
her. “I'm not hungry.”

“You're going to be. Bette packed up some cookies for later, for when you want them.” He pauses. “I told her about the brownie while you were in the bathroom.”

Cookies. If I hadn't eaten those Chessmen, I probably wouldn't be in the mess I'm in. If I hadn't eaten the damned brownie, Starr, Troy, and I would be almost to Jackson by now. The truck hums along the elevated miles of the spillway, its diesel engine a constant drone, and the silence, so alive before, is thick and lifeless between Ted and me. What can I possibly say? I don't deserve his kindness—a silly, vacuous woman who deceived her husband, ran off to New Orleans, and got stranded there.

Finally, I clear my throat. “I'm sorry,” I say. “I'm sorry you have to drive me two hundred miles back to Jackson.”

“I'm not,” Ted says. “Sorry, I mean. It's a good excuse for spending more time with you. I'd like to know you when you're sober, Annie.” He turns and glances at me briefly before he puts his eyes back on the road again. “Besides, driving's half of what my job's about. I'm good at it—better than singing anyway.”

“Still,” I persist, “you shouldn't have to—”

Ted interrupts. “Why don't you just say thank you and let it go?”

I swallow my apologies. “Thank you,” I whisper. But letting it go is going to be a lot harder.

 

Still, after that the mood in the truck lifts. As if by mutual agreement, Ted and I don't talk about Starr. I can't even think of her without crying, and he seems to know this.

Instead, we head directly to all those places you're never supposed to go with an acquaintance: politics (he's a nonvoting Republican, I'm a blue-dog Democrat), religion (he's a Christmas Catholic, I'm a lapsed Episcopalian), and money (both of us agree that while it doesn't buy happiness, it sure makes miserable a lot easier to take). I find myself laughing at Ted's absurd stories of the backstretch, especially the ones about Bette and her temper, something of a small miracle since I was sure it would be years before I laughed again. Even so, from time to time there's a sense of black ships on my horizon, the foreknowledge of what might be waiting for me at home. It's a disturbing disconnect with a whiplash effect. I'll be laughing, talking, and then out of the blue I'm besieged by sharp-edged, wince-worthy memories of a tribe of Barbies in sock-dresses, a broken majolica umbrella stand, a burning tractor, a four-and-a-half-inch heel and an empty pint bottle left under a gardenia bush. Disapproving faces around the dining table. My mother's perpetual disappointment with me. Du's wary eyes watching me maneuver myself into yet another corner at a law firm cocktail party.

He
trusts
you
. It's an ambush. The rosebush voice has been lying in wait for this opportunity.
Look what you've gone and done to Du. He
trusts
you.

Trusts me to screw everything up, you mean. The realization presents itself like an old diary, my private thoughts misplaced and found in a box in the attic many years after the fact.