Richard Ford - A Piece of My Heart

“Where is it you live?” he said, snuffing his cigarette.

“Rag-land.” She pointed off into the desert, where he could see the gauzy pancake hills in the south.

“How far you drive every day?”

“Seventy there, sixty back,” she said. “I mix it up.”

He started figuring miles and looked at her and added it up again, and looked forlornly down the highway. She took a last long gulp of beer and let the can drop between her legs, pinching her mouth in a hard little pucker, as if she had just decided something.

“That’s a hell of a ways,” he said. “I’d let them switch their ass if it was me.”

“You worry about you,” she said. “I own the Buick. If I want to drive it to the moon, I will.”

She turned away and stared at the desert. He figured he’d just get out of it while he had the chance and make a supreme effort to keep his mouth shut.

“I just don’t want to lose him,” she said slowly, speaking so softly he had to look at her to see if she was talking to him. “I’ve had about as much trouble as I can stand,” she said. “I’d just like to have things easier, you know?”

“Yeah,” he said.

She pulled another beer out of the package and peeled off the top. “We ain’t been married but four months,” she said, taking a tiny sip and rotating the rim against her lip. “I had a husband to die on me seven months ago. TB of the brain.” She looked at him appraisingly. “We knew he had it, but didn’t figure it would kill him quick as it did.” She smacked her lips, looked at him again, and wrinkled her nose. “Flesh started falling, and I had him in the ground in a month.”

She gradually seemed to be taking on appeals she hadn’t had, and he decided just to let it go.

“In Salt Lake, see?” She was getting engrossed and tapping her beer against the window post. “We was in the LDS, you know?”

He nodded.

“I was the picture, you know, the whole time we was married.” Her face got stony. “And after he died they all came around and brought me food and cakes and fruit and first one thing, you know. But when I tried to get a little loan to buy me a car so I could go to work, they all started acting like somebody was callin them to supper. And I had been the picture of what you’re supposed to be. I let ’em have their meetings right in my house.” She drew her mouth up tight. “Raymond was born one — see? But I was raised on a horse farm outside of Logan.”

She took another sip of beer and held it in front of her teeth and stared at the desert. It was past midday. The sun had turned the desert pasty all the way to where the mountains stuck up. He watched her while she looked away, watched her breasts rise and fall, and maneuvered so as to see the white luff of fabric between her blouse and her shoulder showing the curve of her breast, and it made him feel a little shabby and a little bad and he disliked himself.

The woman let her breath out slowly. “I had a friend that had that Buick, just sitting in his garage.” She kept looking at the desert. “I told him if he’d let me pay it off a little bit every month, I’d buy it. I always wanted a Buick, and it never seemed like I’d get one. It’s queer to have to get down before all your dreams start coming true.” She looked at him and her nostrils got wide. “Anyway, I quit the LDS right there,” she said, “and got the hell out of that Salt Lake City. Let me just tell you, don’t be fooled by them. They’re cheap-ass, I swear to God.”

He looked at her blouse again to see in the little space, but she had swiveled sideways of him and the space was gone, and he let his eyes wander on back to the road.

She tapped the can against her teeth. “I think I’m better now,” she said. “Less quick to judge. It ain’t easy to have a window on yourself.” She slid back in the seat with her arms folded across her stomach as if she felt better. “Where you going?”

“Arkansas,” he said.

“Where’s your wife at? Did you leave her home to take care of your babies?”

“I didn’t say I was married,” he said, feeling itchy.

“I know it.” She sighed. “You ain’t hid nothin , have you? You’re right up on top with everything.” She smiled.

“I guess not,” he said.

“I ain’t getting after you,” she said.

“Ain’t nothing to get after,” he said. “How come you to get married again so quick?”

“Bad luck,” she said, and laughed and made her shoulders jerk. “Why don’t you drink a beer? I’d feel better if you drank one.”

He took a look in the mirror and saw nothing but the markers flashing back. “I’m fine,” he said.

She pushed a ring top out the ventilator. “Let me slide over — don’t nobody know me at Curvo anyway.”

She shoved across the seat and socked her head against his shoulder and put her heels on the dashboard. She let the can of beer, a soft tuft of foam pushing up through the tap, rest on her stomach, and arced her fingers around his thigh. And all he could think was that he wasn’t going to do anything to stop it.

She held the half-warm beer can up to his face and rolled it back and forth. “Larry likes that,” she said, smiling. “It makes him relax.”

He looked at her hiding up under his shoulder, her green eyes with the tiny black centers peeping at him, and reached around her so that her face was drawn up against his chest.

“Do I look thirty-two?” she said, her eyes mounting with tears.

“God, no,” he said. “You think I look thirty-four?”

“You’re married,” she said.

“So are you.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Let’s don’t talk about that now.” One of the tears broke and wobbled onto her lip.

“I want to know how you got married again,” he said, holding the truck to the road.

She hugged him so the tear got wiped off, and got her arms around his stomach. “Oh, I went to Albuquerque with my car and moved out to Alameda. You know where that is?”

“I ain’t been there but twice,” he said, feeling warm inside.

“It ain’t far,” she said. “I took a little house by myself and drove to work every night at Howard’s. I call it Howard’s.” She drew one fingernail up his leg and made the back of his neck cold. “So I was driving my car one night along this road where there wasn’t any light, drinking Ezra Brooks. And got off the pavement somehow and hit this guy straight on and killed him, just mowed him like a weed. He never even knew what hit him. He just went down boom .” She flopped her hand upside down on his thigh. “Just like that. I didn’t even have time to honk. I stopped and went back and seen he wasn’t moving, and felt of his heart, and it wasn’t even fluttering, and I figured it didn’t take a nurse to know he was dead. But there wasn’t a drop of blood on him nowhere. He was clean as when he’d put that suit on. So I walked off down the road to the Amoco to get one of them boys to call the police. And thank God I had thrown my Ezra in the ditch, cause when I was walking up the road some drunk slowed down and tried to pull up behind me, and instead of getting beside me, the bastard hit me, and knocked me in the ditch and broke my leg. Son-of-a-bitch just kept going, with me all broke to pieces. It wasn’t until the police came along and found my car and the guy I hit that they saw me in the ditch up the road bawling my head off.”

She looked up at him hopefully.

“So how’d you end up married?” he said.

She drummed her fingers on his leg. “Cause they cramped us up in St. Dominic’s Hospital on account of a flash flood in the mountains.” She puckered her lips and didn’t say anything for a time. “Put all them people in the hospital, and I had to share a room with a man. And that turned out to be Larry. He had his hernia operated on from carrying bricks. And quick as he got out, he started bringing flowers, and we started going one place and another when I got out, and we just sorta caught on. Ain’t that romantic?” She smiled.