Haven Kimmel - The Used World

Peter had been her first in every category, and she had no idea what to do when he vanished. He should have come with an instruction guide, Rebekah thought, or a warning label, turning and heading out to round up customers.

“You’ll lock up?” Hazel asked, jingling her keys.

Rebekah nodded, continuing to stack receipts. The Clancys, in booth #68, seemed to be coming out ahead.

“You’ll lock up if I go ahead and go?”

Rebekah glanced at Hazel, who had her heavy bag over her shoulder and her car keys in her hand. She’d made the bag herself, out of a needlepoint design intended as a couch cushion: a unicorn lying down inside a circle of fence, trees in delicate pink bloom, a black background.

“God knows traffic will be backed up all through Jonah, and my femurs ache like they did in seventy-eight.”

“I already nodded, Hazel, that was me nodding,” Rebekah said. “Claudia nodded, too.”

“I could stand here all night, waiting for you to nod. In seventy-eight, maybe I’ve already told you this, after the snow stopped falling, the people who lived in town went out to check the damage and didn’t realize they were walking on top of the cars. There were drifts eighteen, twenty feet high in some places.”

“I remember,” Claudia said, changing the roll of paper on the adding machine.

“How on earth could you remember?”

“Let’s see, I was…nearly eighteen. That’s about the time we start to remember things, I guess,” Claudia said, without looking up.

Rebekah laughed, put a paper clip on the Clancys’ receipts.

“My cats could starve to death, waiting for an answer from you two,” Hazel said, jingling.

“Have mercy,” Rebekah said, dropping the paperwork and giving Hazel her full attention. Hazel’s purple, puffy coat, fashioned of some shiny microfiber, hung almost to the floor and resembled nothing so much as a giant, slick sleeping bag. The hem had collected a fringe of white cat fur. Beside Rebekah, Claudia was sorting her groups of receipts by vendor. She took the largest stacks from her pile and the largest from Rebekah’s to add up and enter in the ledger book. Rebekah hardly knew Claudia after working with her for more than a year. She knew only this gesture from Claudia, the taking on of the heaviest moving, the staying later if necessary, the silent appropriation of the less appealing task.

“I could wait if you want me to. We could go get some White Castles and then go back to my house,” Hazel said.

“No, thanks,” Rebekah said, thinking of the coming storm, the drive home, how perhaps she’d just drive past Peter’s house, only the once. “I should get straight home if life as we know it is about to end.”

“How’s about you, Claude?” Hazel asked, and continued without waiting for an answer, “Mmmmm, White Castles. Hazel Hunnicutt and a bag of little hamburgers. Many a young buck would have given his eyeteeth for such a treat back in the day.”

“There’s plenty who’d trade their eyeteeth for you now,” Claudia said, running figures through the adding machine.

“If they had teeth. This town is nothing but carcasses, and you are sorely trying my patience and that of my cats by making me wait for your answer, Rebekah. I’m adding an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to sweeten the pot, right here at the end.”

“I can’t, Hazel. If I got stranded at your house Daddy would kill me.”

“Of course,” Hazel said, crossing her arms in front of her chest, her purse hanging from her forearm in a way that made her seem, to Rebekah, old. “Vernon.” She spoke his name with the familiar acid. But in the next moment she turned toward the door, swinging her bag with a jauntiness that wasn’t reminiscent of either 1978 or aching femurs. “All right, children. Remember the words of the Savior: ‘There is no bad weather; there are only the wrong clothes.’”

“You’re wearing tennis shoes,” Claudia said.

“Exactly.” Hazel opened the heavy front door, and a gust of wind blew it closed behind her.

Rebekah took a deep breath, sighed. She was never able to mention her father’s name to Hazel, nor hers to him. She didn’t know, really, would never know what it felt like to be the child of a rancorous divorce, but surely it was something like this: the nervous straddling of two worlds, the feeling that one was an ambassador to two camps, and in both the primary activity was hatred for the other.

Hazel had not dressed warmly enough, and so she draped a lap blanket over her legs. It was red wool with a broad plaid pattern and so scratchy she could feel it through her clothes. Snow had been predicted but there was no chance of it now that the clouds had broken open and the moon was bright against the sky, a circle of bone on a blue china plate.

The car was nearly a year old but still smelled new, which was to say it smelled wholly of itself and not of her or them or of something defeated by its human inhabitants. Hazel leaned against the door, let her head touch the window glass. She was penetrated by the sense of…she had no word for it. There was the cold glass, solid, and there was her head against it. Where they met, a line of warmth from her scalp was leached or stolen. Where they met. Where her hand ended and space began, or where her foot was pressed flat inside her shoe, but her foot was one thing and the shoe another. She breathed deeply, tried not to follow the thought to the place where her vision shimmered and she felt herself falling as if down the well in the backyard. Her body in air; the house in sky; the planet in space and then dark, dark forever.

“Ah,” her mother said, adjusting the radio dial. “A nice version of this song, don’t you think?”

“It is. Better than most of what’s on the radio these days.” Her father drew on his pipe with a slight whistle, and a cloud of cherry tobacco drifted from the front seat to the back, where Hazel continued to lean against the window. She was colder now and stuck staring at the moon. She tried to pull her eyes away but couldn’t.

“True enough.” Caroline Hunnicutt reached up and touched the nape of her neck, checking the French twist that never fell, never strayed. Hazel had seen her mother make this gesture a thousand, a hundred thousand times. Two fingers, a delicate touch just on the hairline; the gesture was a word in another language that had a dozen different meanings. “But it’s a sign that we are old, Albert, when we dislike everything new.” Les Brown and the Ames Brothers sang “Sentimental Journey” and her mother was right, it was a very nice version of the song. Caroline hummed and Hazel hummed. Albert laid his pipe in the hollow of the ashtray, reached across the wide front seat with his free hand, and rubbed his wife’s shoulder, once up toward her neck, once back toward her arm. He returned that hand to the wheel, and Hazel’s hand tingled as if she’d made the motion herself. Her mother’s mink stole was worrisome—the rodent faces and fringe of tails—but so soft it felt like a new kind of liquid. Time was when Hazel used to sneak the stole into her room at naptime, rubbing the little tails between her fingers until she fell asleep. That had been so long ago.

Countin’ every mile of railroad track that takes me back, Caroline sang aloud, the moon sailing along now behind them. Hazel’s head lifted free of the window, and as soon as she was able to think straight, she felt the car—the rolling, private space—fill up and crowd her. There was the baby hidden under her mother’s red, bell-shaped coat, hidden but there and going nowhere until she had decided it was time. There was Uncle Elmer, Caroline’s older brother, a yo-yo master and record holder in free throws for the Jonah Cougars, drowned in the Rhine as the Allies pushed across toward Remagen in 1945. Hazel did not really remember him but she kept his photograph on her dresser anyway, his homemade hickory yo-yo in front of the picture like an offering to a god.