Nicola Griffith - Stay

She got out and the children scrambled after her. “You go change your clothes and play in back,” she told them, and went into the house. But the boy seemed unable to tear himself away from the truck. He patted the paintwork, then squatted down to look at something. Luz hung back, not wanting to get too close to me, unwilling to leave Button alone.

I got out and stretched. The boy was unscrewing the dust caps from my tires.

“I’m Button,” he said in a shiny voice, looking up at me. “What are these for?”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Button.” His teeth looked huge, adult teeth in a child-sized mouth. Just like any seven-year-old. “They’re to stop dust from getting in the air valve and clogging it up. I’ll need them back.” But he wasn’t listening; his eyes were wandering again, gaze alighting on this, flitting to that. “Button—”

“That’s not his real name.” I turned to the girl with the quiet, precise voice. “His real name is Burton, only he can’t say it right, so now we call him Button. He’s eight. Nearly nine,” she said carefully, waiting to see how I’d react: a nine-year-old should be able to say Burton.

“I’m surprised,” I said. She turned her head slightly, to examine me out of each eye, as though each saw a different world but only one could be trusted. Her straight, shoulder-length hair was a dense, matte chocolate brown, and would have looked better without the amateur cut. Delicate bones contrasted with the stance; she stood the way a Theban might at Thermopylae. Nine years old. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance also,” I told her, “though I don’t know your name.”

“I’m Luz. It’s Spanish. It’s not short for Lucy.”

“My name is Aud, rhymes with loud. It’s Norwegian. It’s not short for Audrey.”

“Aud,” she said, trying it out. I blinked at the perfect Norwegian pronunciation. “Aud.”

“You say it very well.”

She accepted the praise as her due, and opened her mouth to say something, but shut it when the front door opened.

Adeline had wiped away her lipstick and swapped her pumps for tennis shoes. An apron covered the dress. Judging by her hair—blond going gray, and pulled back in a short but thick tail—and the smile lines around mouth and eyes, other lines in neck and forehead, she was in her early fifties. Her eyes were not strange, but she was recognizably Button’s mother. Or grandmother. “Button, in the house.” Button wasn’t listening. “Luz, take Button in and get yourselves changed.”

“Yes, Aba.”

We both watched them go inside. “Now,” she said, turning to me. I got the impression she had spent some time thinking about what to say. “My husband is getting out of his Sunday clothes and will be back down directly. It’s his way to be a bit wary of strangers, but he would be most obliged for a ride to a gas station. I can’t tell you how thankful we are for your kindness. The name’s Carpenter. Adeline and Jud.” She held out her hand. Plain, thin wedding ring; straight-edged nails with no polish. Hardworking hands, but not overworked.

“Aud,” I said, giving it a deliberate American pronunciation: sounds like god. I took off my gloves. “Aud Thomas.” We shook hands. I put the gloves in my pocket.

“Now, Aud Thomas, although men make fun of us women and the time it takes to change, I think my husband might be a minute or two.” She patted the pocket of her apron nervously. “Is there something I can bring out for you meanwhile?”

Being parked on the doorstep was not what I had planned.

“If I’m to wait a minute or two, I’d like to borrow the use of your facilities if I may.”

Natural suspicion warred with Christian charity. She patted her pocket again. A weapon? It would have to be a small one. I shivered a little. That and the morning’s sermon turned the tide. She stood to one side and motioned me across the threshold. “Upstairs, first on your right.” Then, in a rush of overcompensation, “When you’re done I’m in the kitchen. In back.”

The bathroom was what I think of as southern feminine: clean, decorated in pastels, and with a shower curtain depicting sunrise over a perfect valley, complete with Bambi look-alike and rabbits. I used the toilet, washed my hands, and ran my fingers through my hair. What did someone like Adeline Carpenter see when she looked at me? No way to know, just as I didn’t know why I had used my real name with Luz.

I turned away, then back again, and opened the bathroom cabinet. On the top shelf lay the explanation for the lack of pets: asthma medication. Pills, and two kinds of inhaler. Adeline’s.

I used a towel to wipe down everything I’d touched.

“Poured you some coffee,” Adeline said as I went into the kitchen. The same red mug, steaming now, stood at one end of the Formica table. At the other end, Luz and Button, now in identical worn corduroy pants, ate from already half-empty bowls of beef and vegetable stew. Adeline patted at her apron, utterly unconscious of the gesture. Asthma medication.

I sipped. “Tastes good.” Luz looked up and studied me for a moment, then turned her attention back to her lunch.

“That’s a big truck you’ve got there,” Adeline Carpenter said.

“Only thing big enough to pull my trailer, a fifth-wheel. I’d planned to vacation up around Petit Jean, or maybe Lake Maumelle.”

“Awful late for a vacation.” Suspicion seemed to be winning again.

I touched my throat, just enough to show the healing gash, and then my waistband, which hung more loosely than it had. “I’ve… I spent some time this summer in the hospital.” Poor pitiful Aud Thomas, probably has the cancer, yet she still takes time to play Good Samaritan to those in need.

The children finished their stew. Button wiggled in his chair, but Luz, although she looked down at a chip in the Formica as though it fascinated her, was listening to our conversation.

“Luz, take Button out back.”

“Yes, Aba.”

Aba. Some weird fundamentalist title? “Great kids,” I said.

“Jud and I had Button late in life. He’s… he’s not quite right, but he’s a blessing from the Lord.”

“His sister, too.”

Adeline Carpenter smiled. “She’s as good as gold with that boy.” She sounded proud, as if she really cared. If I hadn’t known how she was being paid to train this girl, I might have believed her. Her smile disappeared suddenly as she remembered she was talking to a stranger. She drummed her fingers on the table, blushed when she caught me watching. Maybe that was something good Christian ladies weren’t supposed to do. “Well, Miz Thomas, I don’t know what’s keeping my husband, but if you want to take your coffee outside and sit in the sun, I’ll go see if I can find him.”

I left by the front door, but walked around to the back. It must have been nearly sixty degrees outside, and the sunshine was a little bolder. The cabin in the clearing would be lit by sun, too, but probably fifteen or twenty degrees cooler. Be present. Pay attention. I breathed deeply, exhaled, breathed in: Arkansas soil; the thin, crumbly smell of mold formed on hay stalks that have been sodden but are now dry; and, faint in the still air, the pine scent of the woods. Luz and Button were nowhere in sight.

The barn was big and old and the right-hand side was cluttered with farm machinery: half modern, half the broken, rusting remains of seventy years of automated progress. Sunlight streamed in through the open door and through chinks in the eaves. A child’s steady voice, and another, interrupting, came from behind a truck of forties vintage. I moved closer. The truck had no wheels, and was filthy with rust and dirt and rodent droppings, but its headlights were intact, round and clean and shining. Luz spoke in Spanish.