Rexanne Becnel - Old Boyfriends

Cat ruffled her hair. “So. Where’s a good place to eat around here?”

Bitsey was the only one who didn’t touch her, and Margaret kept her distance, too.

We found a Shoney’s. Once we were all settled with our buffet lunches Bitsey asked, “Do you like my hair?” forcing Margaret to look at her.

Margaret stared at her through the dark glasses for a long moment before the difference seemed to register. “You cut it. It looks good. It makes your face look thinner.”

“Her face is thinner,” Cat said.

“You look thinner, too,” Bitsey said to her daughter.

Margaret shoved her mixed greens around with a fork. “I’ve been working a lot.”

“How’s school going?” I asked.

Her fork clattered down onto her plate. “Look. I don’t want to be grilled, so let’s just get it over with. Here’s the deal. I dropped out of school and I’m not going back.” She glared at her mother. “So if you want to cut off the money, fine. I’m doing just great at Tavernous.”

“Yeah,” Cat said. “And you’re living in the lap of luxury, too.”

“Fuck you!” She stood up but Bitsey grabbed her arm before she could storm off.

“Margaret Anne Albertson! What kind of way is that to speak to someone who loves you? We all love you and we’re all worried about you.”

“I don’t need you to worry about me. Okay?”

The people at the next table were trying not to notice us, but without much success. I don’t like scenes and I know Bitsey hates them, but Cat is a different story. Once you rile her up, it wouldn’t matter if the pope himself was watching. Without warning she stood and snatched the sunglasses off Margaret’s nose.

The girl froze. So did Bitsey. The bruise around Margaret’s left eye was faint and probably old, but there was no mistaking what it was.

“I thought so,” Cat said as she sat down, picked up her fork, and began calmly to eat. “She has that same belligerent attitude I used to have in my first marriage. I couldn’t stand up to him, but I sure as hell stood up to everybody else.”

“Fuck you,” Margaret repeated, only it came out a shaky, little-girl whisper. Not very sincere.

Bitsey caught her by the hand. “Margaret, honey. Sit down. Are you all right? Let me see—”

“Mom, no!” Margaret shrugged her off. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to talk about it. It was just once and I’m okay. I can handle it. I did handle it. He said he was sorry, and I know he is. So just…just eat your breakfast and…and have a good trip.”

She scooped her glasses off the table and put them on.

“Wait,” Bitsey pleaded.

“No, Mom. I have to go. Tell Grandpy hello when you see him.” Then she walked away and left us, three women sitting in a Shoney’s booth with a brand-new trouble on the table to worry about.

She walked across the parking lot and headed down the street. She was so thin, but it wasn’t that strong willowy thinness. She looked skinny and brittle, ready to break. Though it was only eight or ten blocks to her house, the choice she’d made, to leave the security of our love and reenter the danger zone of that apartment, made the distance seem enormous, a chasm impossible for us to cross.

Only when she turned a corner past a dry cleaner’s shop did any of us speak. “We can’t let her go back,” Cat said. She’d acted so blasé before, but now her jaw was clenched and it jutted forward like a bulldog’s. Belligerent and determined. Tenacious.

We both looked at Bitsey. Her face was almost as pale as Margaret’s, but she wasn’t crying. She looked at each of us. “You’re right. We have to get her out of there, even if at first she refuses to come. If she won’t protect herself, then we have to protect her. I have to protect her,” she said.

I leaned forward on the table. “Maybe we should call Jack.”

Bitsey shook her head. “Jack doesn’t need to know how his little girl is living, or with whom. First of all, it would kill him. And second of all, we can handle this.” She grabbed each of our hands. “We can. We have to.”

We. My first instinct was to save Margaret. My second was to avoid any kind of ugly scene with her or the creep she was living with. But Bitsey’s quiet conviction and Cat’s unmistakable fury gave me courage.

“So, how are we supposed to do this?” I asked. “I mean, it sounds like you want to kidnap her or something.”

“If I have to, I will,” Bitsey responded.

“You can’t be serious.”

“She was right about stripping your house of all the valuables, wasn’t she?” Cat pointed out.

“Well, yes. But her first suggestion was to burn it down. And don’t forget, she wanted to drown the Jag.”

But Cat didn’t back down. “This is different. Those were things. This is Margaret. Little Magpie.”

So we made a plan. First we staked out her place. Cat and I took turns strolling by, disguised by big straw hats and white plastic sunglasses. It was about quarter after two when some lanky, shaved-head guy with sideburns and a goatee sauntered out of Margaret’s place. He stood on the front steps scratching his belly and lit a cigarette. Then he crossed to a beat-up blue van, climbed in, and with a smoky roar, drove off.

We called Bitsey. “He’s skinny, almost six feet tall. No hair, blue jeans and a black T-shirt. With a hole in it.”

“You just described every other musician on MTV. So he’s gone and she’s inside?”

“It seems that way.”

“I’ll be right there with the car.”

The three of us knocked and knocked, but there was no answer. “Maybe she’s pulling an M.J.,” Cat said.

“Excuse me,” I said. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s been juice, tea and water for me for over a week.”

“Ignore her,” Bitsey told me. “Cat is just being her smart-alecky self.”

“What? Me, smart-alecky?”

“Y’all! Focus!” Bitsey ordered. “What do we do now?”

Cat and I shared a look. “She’s probably loaded. That’s why she won’t wake up,” Cat said. “I say we break in, get her in the car and go.”

So we did. I was scared to death, so my job was to back the car into the driveway, move everything off the backseat and keep a lookout for the creep in the blue van.

Displaying a talent she had up to now kept hidden from us, Cat pried open a screen, lifted herself up and shimmied through the bathroom window, then came around and opened the door for Bitsey.

When a woman peered out at us through a window in the house next door, my adrenaline, which was already pumping, started speeding. But she must not have called the cops, because it took nearly fifteen minutes to get Margaret out, and no police cars ever showed up to investigate. I watched fearfully as they walked Margaret out the side door, hefting her between them like a limp doll. “Good grief. What’s she on?”

“Probably Vicodin,” Cat said. “We found a half-empty bottle.”

Bitsey looked as if she’d aged fifteen years in the last fifteen minutes. But she had this superhuman strength, because she maneuvered Margaret as if she were still a little kid, heaving her into the backseat and folding her legs carefully inside.

“Get the bags,” she told Cat, who was already on her way back into the apartment.

Just then a van slowed in front of the house. That van with that man. Seeing his parking spot taken, he passed the house.

“Get in. Get in!” I yelled to Bitsey. “Cat! He’s back. Hurry up!”

The woman next door was watching us again, but I didn’t care. I was scared and I wanted us out of there. Bitsey pushed me into the driver’s seat. Not that I needed much pushing. “Drive!” she ordered, climbing in beside Margaret.

“What about Cat?”