Eight
The months went on and things did not change. October rolled on through November, the December gray finally blocking out the sun. As the year wore on, Arlene took notice some days of how the morning looked through the plate-glass windows. How did Bakersfield ever get through the summer heat, the intolerably white sunlight? The only thing changing was the season, but who paid attention to that? Not the girls chattering along and unfocused while the customers waited for coffee. Not Dan, still seeing the young Mexican girl from the shoe store, sometimes even daring to come into the café with her, her little shoulders sporting a new winter jacket. What could Arlene do? Did she want things to change? The farmers noted the change, though you couldn’t tell from Vernon, who still came in during the late morning, or Cal, who joined him at the counter not fifteen minutes later. They bantered with her, and the exchanges were mechanical yet soothing to Arlene, like listening to a clock. No, not much was changing except the weather, the seasons, Arlene ending her café shifts at five with the streets nearly gone dark. Her Ford was a serviceable’52, but the engine doubted itself more and more as the chill of evening settled deep all around her. She made the nervous drive home with a certainty that her headlights would fail, but they, too, held on. It was a change she wouldn’t have wanted—the need for a new car when winter was making money scarce all around the city.
More and more, once she got back to the motel, she would find the parking lot empty and Dan nowhere to be seen. He’d taken up with that girl enough to sometimes close the front office too early in the evening, the motel mostly empty. Who knew how many customers had driven away when no one answered the knock at the front office? Tonight, the parking lot was empty for a weekend, and she knew even before she pulled up close to the front office that Dan had already left.
Every once in a while, back at the café, Cal would read the latest news about the new highway, and she would keep up her nonchalance, acting as if she wasn’t already alarmed at the current downturn in business. What was it? The lack of paint? The two new motels nearby that had come up that summer? Was her rate in line with the rest of the city? She thought about how much worse it would get if the highway diverted the traffic away, as Cal kept insisting it would.
Things change, she thought to herself, though this was a slow, creeping change, like water seeping underneath a door.
This evening was going to be like every other evening. Dan had purchased a TV for her from Stewart’s Appliances, a hefty color set to appease her for his absence, but it was a complete waste in her mind, since half the programming was in black and white. These days, she’d come home from the café so exhausted that, with Dan not around to cook for, she had started buying those new frozen dinners. Turkey with gravy, corn, cranberry sauce, and rice that didn’t taste half-bad. She sat in front of the set and found a teleplay about to start, a story set in New York City about a young couple struggling for money and living in a cramped apartment, the husband a drunk who staggered around. His voice blared out of the speakers so loudly that Arlene had been tempted to get up and turn down the sound. Something was strange about the story, these city people struggling like small-town folk, when everything she’d seen about the big city dazzled with easy luxury. Arlene watched with mild interest, turning every once in a while to the parking lot, which remained empty of customers, until she realized that the characters were never going to leave their shoddy apartment, were never going to step out into the glamour she’d seen in magazine spreads. She turned the set off, wrapped a sweater over her shoulders, and walked out to sit on the porch.
Those were the days, she thought, when she could feel change coming. Sitting on the porch as a little girl, her mother trying to retell a story, but all along they had been waiting for her brother. She rubbed her arms against the chill, but it wasn’t just the cold—it was the knowing, the thought of her young self anticipating her mother’s anxiety, wanting to live with it somehow. How had she known such a thing, at her age, going out to the porch at one in the morning because she knew that, come dawn, her brother would be standing at the edge of the dirt road that passed in front of their farmhouse, the Sierra Nevada bright gold in the east, and her mother running to him, crying and smoothing his hair just like she had done to Arlene, and no one in the family saying anything about where he had been?
What would her brother have made of how big Bakersfield had become? He had gone off to Los Angeles after his release from prison, but he had never returned. Just like her husband, Frederick. Her brother had left so long ago that hardly anyone remembered that she had a sibling. She thought of this, how she hid the fact under her tongue, how she rarely told anyone that her own blood had once been in prison. She remembered how everyone from the nearby farms had gathered in the early afternoon to welcome her brother home, his long bus trip from up past Sacramento to Bakersfield. They had led him to the backyard, and the men sat squat-style in a circle, drinking beer, her brother the beginning and the end of the loop, the one who balanced on his haunches the longest without having to get up to stretch. “Prison will harden you to stand anything,” he had bragged, the men laughing, but his voice carried over to her and settled inside like the smoke from his cigarettes, one after the other. He lit one up as a signal to the rest of the men that he didn’t feel like talking, that he’d rather listen to the stories of their years, all that time he’d been locked away.
How much time, Arlene thought as she stared out at the empty parking lot, had he actually been gone?
Those men had spent the entire afternoon like that, the sun coming down and the men still talking, the cigarettes glowing in the dusk. There had been a lot of ground to cover. There had been a lot of ways to say how unfair her brother had had it.
Come along, her mother had said, her hand on Arlene’s head. It’s getting late. Night had come. The ashes in the pit had died down, the food long ago eaten. All the men stayed, dark shadows with dark orange glows.
Arlene had heard them as she lay on the floor in the living room, her eyes once again looking out past the open front door of their old farmhouse, past the porch, and fixing on the dark road outside. The men’s faint talking filled her with a vague comfort, knowing that the dark was not so lonely.
When she had opened her eyes, it was dawn. The front yard was quiet. Her mother was not yet awake. Arlene rose and walked to the kitchen, the open back door. A light dew on the grass, beer bottles strewn everywhere, and the men long gone home. She had never even heard them leave.
Down the hallway, the door to her brother’s room was wide open. Arlene stood in the quiet of the house, looking down the hallway, a chill that she found soothing in the morning air, how it had seeped inside, the doors open for the cross breeze. She stood long enough to listen to the house settle, a creak in the wood somewhere in the roof. She stood and looked down the hallway at the open door to her brother’s bedroom, wondering if he was actually in there or if he’d gone off with the men for more drinking. The answer was right there, just a quiet tiptoe down the hall, the door already open. But instead, Arlene kept standing there, taking in the unfamiliar and delicious chill to the morning air. She was understanding that it did not matter if her brother was in that room right then. Her mother loved him. All that mattered was that he had returned and that life was going to change in their house.
Things change. Everything’s gotta change, Arlene thought, rubbing her arms, and she stepped back into the house.
But how some things stayed. That feeling, standing in the hallway. She could remember it even now.
It was early yet and Arlene was tempted to turn the TV set back on. She was in no mood, though, for another unhappy teleplay, and instead she prepared for bed, turning off the lights in the house one by one and taking one last look out at the parking lot. With some guilt and some defeat, she turned off the motel’s road sign, a little angry that Dan wasn’t around to man the office in the evening hours like he had agreed. But no one was coming. She lay in bed and tried to get her mind to stop racing, to stop thinking of the motel’s demise, and in her frustration she put her hand out to the empty side of the bed.
Sleep came in a strange wave of images: Cal at the counter turning the pages of the newspaper; Vernon drinking from his coffee cup; the young waitresses wiggling their bottoms for the farmers. Sleep brought the Actress, too, enough to wake Arlene a bit to near alertness, wondering what had become of her, Cal never having seen anything in the newspaper headlines announcing a film shoot. She floated back into sleep, her mind flitting from image to image and refusing the clean slate of dreams, a sound thumping and thumping until Arlene opened her eyes, groggy, and realized the sound was real. She sat up, alert, and listened carefully as the faint thump came again, from Dan’s room, and she recoiled for a moment at the possibility that Dan would dare bring that girl into the house when the motel rooms sat empty and secretive.
She listened for voices but heard nothing except Dan’s footsteps and drawers being opened and shut. Her nightstand clock glowed a surprising five minutes past eleven.
“Dan?” she called from her open room. A light shone from underneath the door to his room. “Danny?”
The noise in his room stopped for a moment, and Arlene stood at the threshold of her bedroom, waiting to hear an answer, wondering why Dan was taking so long to respond when he had clearly heard her voice.
“Dan?”
He opened the door and stuck his head out, the same brown hair as Frederick’s, the same hard line of a nose. The same long jut of clavicle and the coarse ring of hair around the nipple. She caught a glimpse of his white underwear. She remembered Frederick’s coarse laughter when she had told him about her brother, about having no idea where her brother had gone during his first night home.
“What’s going on?”
“Sorry, Mama,” he said nervously, his body half-hidden behind the door. “Go on back to sleep.”
“If you have a girl in there …” Arlene teetered between stepping forward and stepping back. She braced herself for the embarrassment of confronting a naked girl sitting on the edge of Dan’s bed. She steeled herself as she had when Frederick shushed her, Dan’s little-boy footsteps in the hallway, tiny and fearful.
Through the sliver of open door, her view partially blocked by Dan’s body, she saw the edge of the bed. It was bare.
“What’s going on?” she asked again.
“Mama … ,” he protested, but the absence of the girl allowed her to approach the door insistently. It was her house. Then she saw the suitcase.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going, Dan?” She put her hand on his door and he pushed back. She was surprised at her strength, but knowing she couldn’t hold her ground, she slid her hand on the jamb, fingers in full view, daring Dan to close the door and bruise her.
“Mama!” he yelled. “Leave me alone!”
“You better not be running off!” she yelled back. “The two of you are too young to be doing that!”
She pushed harder against the door—hard enough to surprise him, a peek of his face coming through the sliver of doorframe—and she gasped at the similarity of his face to Frederick’s. But then she spotted the cuts.
“What’s that on your cheek?” she demanded. “Dan, answer me!” She put her hand on the jamb, fingers laid out as fragile as eggs. She felt him stop pushing on the door, a silent truce.
“Mama,” Dan said quietly, “give me a minute to put on some clothes. Okay?” His voice was jittery, now that she heard him speak a complete sentence. “Okay?”
“All right,” she agreed, but she kept her fingers on the jamb. She heard the rough slip of Dan getting into a pair of dungarees, the slide of a drawer as he searched for a shirt. Then he slowly opened the door.
Dan’s suitcase sat open on the bed, a story she didn’t yet know. Next to it was the black bank deposit bag from their front office. He stood with his hand on the doorknob.
“What’s that on your cheek?” she asked, but now she didn’t want to know the answer. A black eye or a crust of blood under the nostril or a swollen lip would have made it easy to imagine too many beers at the Bluebird, the inability of men to keep their mouths shut against bravado. Dan’s cheek was something more dreadful in its simplicity: four little half-moons, caked in purple. A small hand doing that to his face.
“Something happened, Mama …”
“Oh, dear God … ,” she said, and took her eyes away from the scratches on his cheek and saw the mess, the spilled contents of his bureau and, on top of it, his white shirt with dark stains, the deep, ugly sheen. She couldn’t help but touch it, her fingers electric against the damp, and she flinched. “Oh, dear God …”
He was a blur of motion, hurrying over to the suitcase, gathering the black bank bag and shoving it inside, snapping the thing shut. She followed him out helplessly, incredulously, as he made his way to the kitchen, pulling the cabinets open and yanking down bread, boxed crackers, a jar of peanut butter, a tin of canned meat. In a flash, he spied the keys to her sedan hanging by a hook near the door and grabbed them before she could stop him.
“Dan … what on earth happened?”
“Listen, Mama,” he said, stuffing the keys into his pocket. He became calm once again, the tone in his voice suggesting he was not going to repeat himself. “You listen to me, now. I’m not telling you where I’m going. And I’m not going to tell you what I did.” His voice quivered and broke. “You know what I did.”
She thought of her brother, after all that time in a prison up-state, and the way he took a cigarette in his mouth and blew out the smoke.
“What did you do, Dan?”
“Listen to me! The police are going to come around here soon enough. So I’m not telling you anything. You don’t know anything, so they can’t call you a liar.” He patted his pocket, as if to assure himself the keys were there, then reached under the sink for a paper bag and gathered the food.
“Dan, you can’t do this …”
“Mama … ,” he said sternly. “I took the cash from the office and I’m sorry about that. But you get rid of that truck. Okay? Take it up into the mountains and burn it or push it into the river. Just get rid of it.”
“I won’t do any such thing,” she said, with a firm voice, a glimmer of defiance, the same tone she had used when speaking to Frederick those years ago in this very kitchen, when he threatened to leave her if she didn’t stop pestering him about his late hours. Frederick had looked at her with a stare as thin and deadly as a razor.
“You do what you want,” Dan said. He gathered the food and the suitcase and butted his way to the front door, unstoppable, and she wanted to reach out to him, remembering how her mother had reached out to her brother to embrace him when he came back.
To her surprise, Dan put his things down and hugged her. He held her hard and she allowed him to. She closed her eyes against the half-moons on his cheek, their ugly certainties, and willed everything to stop, to stay as it was.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said. “I am.” He gathered the suitcase and the paper bag of food and bounded out to the parking lot. She ran out to the porch, almost following him down in her bare feet. She watched his dark form fumble with the keys, heard the click of the door as he unlocked the sedan. The night was still, no cars on the highway, no sound at all, the entire city asleep, and her car roared to life, startling her. The inevitability startled her, the coming change. The motor gunned and the lights, weak willed and scant, dimmed as Dan put the car into reverse and wheeled right out of the parking lot. Just like that. Just like Frederick, whom she had not witnessed leaving, only finding an envelope on the kitchen table announcing his departure. The envelope held the deeds to the motel and the house and a bit of cash, but otherwise no indication about where he had gone. But the dark silhouette in the sedan tonight was not Frederick—it was Dan, making a hurried right turn onto the highway, heading south, the red taillights disappearing, the rumble of the engine receding, and Arlene on the front porch alone and looking at the dark.
Dan’s black Ford pickup stared at her, parked lengthwise, its one visible headlight a wary eye. It sat there like a still but breathing animal. The truck spooked her, a dark hulk in the empty space of their parking lot, and Arlene had to step away from the door, a foolish fear of the truck somehow turning on and idling there. It reminded her of falling asleep in front of the television set and waking up to static that unnerved her, filled her with a shaky dread as she rose from the armchair and moved toward the set, deeper toward the source of her irrational fear, just to turn the thing off.
Sooner or later an officer would indeed come and park his patrol car in front of her house, stepping out with questions. The truck sat out there with the inevitable answers. She wondered what was in it, why Dan wanted her to dispose of it. She pictured herself driving it east of Bakersfield, on any of the roads that headed out on big, easy asphalt, then meandered into swerving, near-single-lane passages that hardly anybody traveled. Not this time of year, with fog and sometimes even snow in those hills if a cold front came in hard. Those were summer roads, roads for fishing spots along the creek, bass and trout making their way down the Sierra, picked off all along the way until only the lowly catfish survived. The hills blazed with dry grass but by winter went green again and even muddy, the tree trunks rich with moss. Hardly anybody went up there, just the locals who knew the roads. No guardrails to stop a vehicle from plummeting down into the ravines that grew deeper and deeper as the hills gradually turned into mountain.
She could see herself doing it.
She could see herself driving the truck up there, the hairpin turns of those roads. Far up there. Ten miles, maybe, of that kind of driving, then pulling over and turning off the engine. And then what? A box of matches and a jug of gasoline? Would the truck explode? She could see it, the truck blooming in flame, consumed. Would anybody hear it, the echo of the blast, somebody looking east and seeing an odd orange glow over there in the mountains way before dawn? The orange tip of her brother’s cigarette glowed when he puffed, its blaze a signal that he didn’t want to talk anymore, just listen. Would the truck burn itself out, or would the flames leap over to the grass, the damp winter containing it? What then, with a ten-mile walk back to town? How long would that take, especially in this cold, her hands huddled around her elbows, her feet against the asphalt in thin shoes? The little girl in her childhood picture book walked all that way. But how impossible! Five miles, then? Three? Just far enough away from the eastern edge of Bakersfield, at the beginning of the hill slopes, far enough away to slip the truck into neutral and steer it over the side of a ravine, out of sight of the road.
For what? It was nothing she had done. She had no lies to conceal. She knew where Dan was headed. Only south. And that was logical. Over to Los Angeles to hide in that enormous city. Over to San Diego. To Tijuana and everything she’d heard about its teeming, ugly life.
She didn’t even know what he’d done, really.
The truck stared back at her, and she stood on the porch for a long moment, the way she had stood in the early morning hallway of her house when her brother had returned. She had been waiting for answers back then. Right in front of her, the truck held them. She went back into the house to wrap herself tight in a housecoat, and she slipped on a pair of Keds. She walked down the porch stairs, the truck beckoning like a faithful star. Her eyes fixed on the cab, its interior too dark for her to see inside. What was she expecting, the body of the dead girl? Arlene chided herself for being so afraid, never having been so, after all these years near the highway, so far away from town, having grown up in the countryside. Darkness was just not being able to see. Nothing came out of it. She had stared at darkness throughout her childhood summers as she’d gone to sleep, the strange noises outside nothing but small animals foraging for food. Yet here she was, approaching the truck with so much timidity that she felt foolish.
She opened the truck door, the dome light dim, and ran her eyes over the interior. What had she expected? A torn and bloodied bench seat? Red handprints on the steering wheel? Nothing seemed unusual, nothing that demanded the truck be destroyed as Dan had adamantly suggested. Maybe, Arlene thought, it was simply that the police would be searching for the vehicle, that someone had spotted it making a getaway from whatever horrible scene still waited to be discovered. She needed the truck now, Dan having taken her car.
But then she spotted something. The dome light was too dim for her to see clearly, so Arlene leaned in. Along the curve of the steering wheel, along the ridges made for the fingers to grip, she could see a vague discoloration, a darkness. Her stomach gripped in panic, the fear coming again, and she stepped back as if shocked by an electric wire.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Arlene muttered, anger overtaking her fear, wishing Dan had driven away in the truck instead of her sedan. Now what was she to do? She looked at the steering wheel more closely, her eyes following the curve and spotting the rest of the marks, streaky, as if he’d already tried to wipe them away. Fearless now, Arlene put her finger on the wheel, expecting to feel something slick or dried, but nothing was discernible, just the cold, smooth surface chilled by the December night, and the keys still in the ignition.
“Stupid, stupid … ,” she muttered again. She eased onto the bench seat, the door still open so the weak dome light could give a measure of guidance. She spit on the steering wheel and, with the inside hem of her housecoat, began to wipe away. She spit into her hand and ran it along another spot, working the hem along the steering wheel as if she were fastidiously wiping down the café counters, the task of cleaning always something she could put muscle into. Arlene turned the hem of the housecoat and inspected it, the fabric now tinted with a deep color. She wriggled out of it, impervious to the chill of the vinyl seat, and spit a few more times on the steering wheel, on the dashboard, swiping her housecoat along the surface with a confused vigor. Why was she doing this? What, exactly, was she trying to hide? It wasn’t her story to manipulate, not her words that she needed to consider carefully when the police came looking. She stopped wiping for a moment, considering. She looked at the inside hem of her coat, the newly dark smears on the cloth, but then turned the hem down, the coat back to how it looked every day, and decided then and there that Dan was on his own.
You know where he went that night, right? Frederick had asked her when she told him years later about her brother, about wondering where he’d gone that first night after getting home. They’d been lying in bed, very young, when being in bed was still thrilling and exhausting, and Arlene had her hand on Frederick’s chest. She could feel in her palm the deep, guttural cackle he let out when he asked the question, a pulse so disconcerting she had to take her hand away.
He was out getting pussy, Frederick had said, laughing, both of them in the dark, and she was grateful now, sitting in the truck, that she had not seen the look on his face when he had said that. If your brother was in prison for three years, believe me, that was the first thing he went out to get. Her brother, who had shown up at her wedding at City Hall all cleaned up, a poorly fitting suit picked out from the secondhand shop on Union Avenue, but cleaned up nonetheless. Sober, clean shaven, his hair combed, freshly cut in the kitchen the day before. Hardworking, too, stacking fruit crates on the farms up north by Exeter and Porterville, picking strawberries and almonds, driving trucks. All the love shown to him by their mother, only to find that he’d left all the hard work and gone off to Los Angeles, never to return.
That was one unlucky woman, Frederick had said. Whoever she was.
Dan, she thought, her own son, was ripped through with that same ugliness, the same disregard, as her own brother, whatever was contained in the pulse rooted in her palm, holding her hand against Frederick’s chest as if she could keep his ugliness at bay.
The parking lot sat silent, greeting her revelation. The night sat silent. Nothing moved. Not even a cold breeze to disturb the trees. Nothing from the highway. Not the truck still settling with metallic pings. Not even her own breathing. The windows of the house beckoned to her, but not warmly, not the yellow picture windows of her childhood storybook. They stared back at her with a cold, white gleam, and inside, Arlene knew, were years of empty rooms.
From the road came the sound of a distant motor. A truck: she could tell by its downshifting gears, the way the engine sounded as it approached and slowed. Arlene looked in the rearview mirror, but then came the distinct sound of brakes that needed a tending to, and the soft arc of headlights sweeping left as if preparing to make a turn into the parking lot. Hadn’t she turned off the lights to the motel’s road sign? She quickly closed the door to the truck to shut off the dome light, one eye on the rearview mirror.
Sure enough, a diesel truck turned a slow roll into the parking lot. Its headlights swept over the cab and glistened on the chrome and glass, refracting, and Arlene edged herself against the door. She held her breath as if doing so would send the truck away, but it eased over to the edge of the parking lot, near one of the motel wings. The truck sat chugging for a moment, and Arlene listened, not able to hear anything over the noise of the truck’s idling engine, and unable to see much in the rearview mirror. Maybe the driver was studying the darkened motel office or looking at the still-lit windows of the house, judging whether it was worth it to disturb anyone at this time of night.
The engine idled interminably and then suddenly stopped. The parking lot was plunged back into silence—she could even make out the diesel truck’s engine ticking away as it cooled. It was too late, she realized, to step out of the truck, even if the driver might make nothing of it. But later, when the police came and maybe questioned him, it would seem suspicious, her getting out of a truck, housecoat over a nightgown. She craned her neck to get a better look in the rearview mirror but could see nothing in the darkness, and then the door to the diesel truck opened.
The sounds carried. The weight of his body as he jumped down to the ground. A gob of spit as he hacked to clear his throat. His boots stepping across the gravel. Another door opening and then the rough whisper of his voice saying something in the dark—were there two of them? She listened for an exchange, but it was only the driver’s voice. He was talking to himself as she heard him step onto the wooden porch in front of the motel office, then rap on the door. Arlene heard him knock again before he let out a whistle and an admonishment that she couldn’t make out: that was when she made out the soft footfalls alarmingly near the truck and realized the driver had let out a dog. She could spot its dark form in the side-view mirror, lifting its leg to whiz on the truck’s rear tire. She stayed absolutely still, even as the dog sniffed its way along the side of the truck, as if it sensed her inside. The dog paused for a moment, its attention held stone-tight at her window, and it let out a short, anticipatory growl.
“Buddy!” she heard the truck driver call out in a hoarse whisper, then a quick, sharp whistle of a command. The dog obeyed, but she could see the dark form of its head still fixed on her as it trotted back toward its owner. One more time, the driver let out a short whistle of admonishment, as if the dog had stopped to rethink its retreat, and then the parking lot went silent again.
In the mirror, for the briefest moment, she saw a tip of light, as if a firefly had flown into view. She wanted to rub her eyes to see if she’d imagined it, but it came again and this time she caught its orange color, the tip of light she remembered from her childhood, watching her brother. He was smoking. She shifted a bit and turned to take a sidelong glance out the back window. The tip of his cigarette bloomed a few more times. He was too far away for her to see his silhouette in the darkness, to know whether he was facing the road or staring up at the cold light of the house, deciding once and for all whether he would make the effort to knock up there.
Two glows later, the orange tip darted to the side and went out as the driver flicked the butt to the gravel. She heard him whistle softly again, but the dog seemed near its owner, the whistle calm and reassuring. The driver’s boots shifted across the gravel, heading back to the diesel truck, but then he paused yet again, this time urinating—a heavy, long stream hitting the ground before the boots resumed walking. Arlene could see the light in the truck’s cab turn on again as the driver opened the door, his voice saying something to encourage the dog to get inside, and then he lifted himself back into the cab.
Arlene sighed, relieved, and ducked back a little, anticipating that the headlights of the truck would sweep over her again. She crouched down, waiting, but as the moments slipped by, the truck didn’t move. She kept anticipating the engine turning over and the truck getting back on the highway to search for another motel. But nothing. “Sweet Jesus,” she muttered when she realized the driver was bedding down for the night, the silence growing deeper and deeper. She braved another sidelong glance through the rear window, still fearful that the driver might suddenly turn on the engine, the headlights catching her like a fox in the road. The truck remained still. Nothing passed on the highway.
The tension in her body hardened further in the December cold. Arlene could feel it in her fingers. She wouldn’t last much longer, dressed as she was in her nightgown. She draped the housecoat over herself and sat up a little straighter, craning for a better look at the truck. In the other direction, the front door of her house seemed impossibly far away. She racked her brain trying to recall if she’d locked the kitchen door on her way to bed earlier that evening—maybe sneaking around to the side of the house wouldn’t rouse the driver or the dog. But now everything she did, Arlene knew, would carry a sound, just like the driver’s boots, the dog’s prowl of her premises, the driver relieving himself on the ground. The dome light of her truck would turn on, but maybe the driver wouldn’t see it, now that he was bedded down for the night. She would have to slip out of the truck quietly and click its door shut, then scurry up the steps to the house.
He could be exhausted and already asleep. He could’ve drunk a beer or two on the road just before he made the turn-off, the alcohol making him drowsy. But how many nights had she herself been awakened by movement in the parking lot, one of the drivers who’d checked in going right back out to the Bakersfield bars?
Her feet numbed at the toes. She could not wait much longer.
Arlene took a deep breath. She grabbed the door handle, absolute ice to the touch, and held it for a long moment. Maybe it would be best to put the coat on first. She slipped it back on, arranging herself, and was surprised at how much noise she made by doing so. She shot a last look back at the diesel truck, but nothing, so she took the door handle once again and this time pulled.
The dome light blazed like an accusation, and she scrambled as quietly as she could out of the cab. The truck door groaned. Her feet thudded onto the gravel. Alarmed by the noise she was making, she shut the door as softly as she could, the dome light extinguishing, but she couldn’t hook the latch. She pushed the door a little, finally hearing it click shut, but she could see, even in the dark, how the door wasn’t flush with the frame. From the diesel truck came the faint but perceptible growl of the driver’s dog, alert to her movement. Arlene crouched down, listening for the growl again. She imagined the dog sitting up in the seat, paws resting on the door, studying her malevolently through the window of the cab. Her body ached from crouching, the slumped posture, the cold. Just that pathway to the house, just those steps, just the screen door, just the twist of the knob. The dog remained silent, as did the road, so Arlene bolted, trying her best to half run, half tiptoe to the house, the cold gleam of the windows taunting her with their proximity, but by the time she hit the steps, she was so overcome by the fear of being caught, by the anticipation of the driver calling out Hey! into the night, that she disregarded the creak of the screen door and how it always slapped against the frame, and rushed in, shutting the door behind her hard enough for the window to shudder.
Yet even after she made it inside, she kept looking out, with the same foolish impulse that forced her to run back into the house on some mornings to check the electric coffeepot, its unplugged cord coiled safely away. The trucker had remained asleep, the dog not barking, and she turned out the living room light, one window going dark, signifying motion to anyone who might be looking. But no one was looking. She knew this now. It was well past midnight and anyone still awake would be only half so, nodded off in front of the buzz and static of a television set, the local stations not able to fill insomnia’s empty hours. There was no need to be nervous, but she remained so as she walked into the kitchen, filling a teakettle with water and setting it to boil so she could ward off the chill of having been outside, wondering if her silhouette appeared in the windows, a ghostly form to an onlooker from the road. The ugly feeling was unshakable, that sense of being watched. Arlene reached over and turned out the kitchen light, one more light extinguished in the house, leaving her alone with only the blue flame of the stove, startlingly bright. So bright, she was surprised how easily she could manage a teacup from the cabinet, a spoon from the drawer. At the first sign of a coming whistle from the kettle, Arlene removed it from the stove, carefully pouring hot water by the glow of the blue flame, something to keep her eye on as she sat in the kitchen.
What’s a mother to do? Arlene thought. She saw her mother in the Bakersfield courthouse, her dedicated mornings of dressing up in her best outfit to sit through proceedings she could not possibly have understood completely, then coming home in the afternoon to air out the dress and make it ready for the next day. What’s a good mother to do? Willful and stubborn, sitting in silence while she heard exactly what her own son had been accused of. What’s a good mother? Arlene considered the chasm she had to cross to be like her mother, to be confronted with the irrefutable, yet still acknowledge her own flesh and blood. A son no matter what. Here is a knife. Here is a gun. Here is a bloody set of clothes. Here are your son’s hands. Deep down, she knew she could never be like her mother, long dead now. Upstairs, she remembered, was Dan’s bloody shirt on the dresser, but now she did not feel the sense of panic. There would be more to dig out of by trying to hide the shirt than by allowing its discovery. She would show the police officers, lead them right to it, her arms crossed over the flaps of her housecoat, and they would never think to inspect her garment and trace it back to an earlier moment of desperation.
Arlene sat at the table, warming her numb fingers against the teacup. There were hard days coming. Tomorrow, would she go to work? Would she be able to simply carry on with the business of the day, serving coffee, swiping change off the tables and dipping the coins into the pocket of her apron, making it clear through her silence that she would not be entertaining anyone’s nosy questions? How fast would the talk start swirling? With the patrol officers coming into the café at 6 a.m. on the dot for scrambled eggs and hash browns? Wouldn’t her face grow more severe by the hour? Wouldn’t her hair, pulled back in a bun, look even more like a gesture of resignation to her coming old age? Let your hair down, one of the young waitresses had told her, about six months after Frederick had left her, when it was clear to everyone that the male regulars had gotten wind of her situation. She had felt ashamed about it: feeling abandoned on the one hand, desired on the other. Not good enough for her own husband, yet not damaged at all in the eyes of the lonelier bachelor farmers.
But this was different. How much time would pass before people began to ask her questions directly? How thick would the silence be when she walked over to a table of customers and everyone politely gave their orders? Would it be better or worse if Dan were caught, arrested, and dragged back to Bakersfield? How would it look if he disappeared, Arlene still walking around free? The young waitresses would cross paths with one another in the back kitchen. The whole town would be talking about her. What kind of mother raises a son like that?
Sitting in the dark of her kitchen, Arlene wasn’t sure if the clarity was real, but she understood her mother now. With her hands on the teacup, she felt for the warmth, its measure, its certainty, the way she had felt the laugh rumble from Frederick’s chest, a discovery. She searched her own mind now in the same way, her own heart. What it took to sit in a courtroom when the entire world was against your son. What it took to sit there and know the silent judgment being cast upon you, the way you had to raise your head and walk in and out of the courtroom with conviction. Nothing you could do would bring back the victim everyone was grieving over. Nothing could be done in terms of real justice. Mercy wasn’t anywhere in the law. Neither was forgiveness. Or clemency. If it was, someone would have called out and said there were two mothers in the courtroom—why should they both suffer?
Could Arlene do that at least? Walk in and out of the café and face the day with her chin held high? Mrs. Watson. That woman. Her son. Long years awaited, whether or not she rose from the kitchen table, went back to bed, or remained sitting until dawn. Ahead were long years of being Mrs. Watson, with no one remembering Frederick, no one remembering she had a first name, even though it was on the red badge she pinned to her uniform every day. A waitress, but no one’s ex-wife. No one’s daughter, her family long gone. But everyone remembering she was the mother of that young man who had done that terrible thing.
She resolved to stay at the kitchen table until dawn. She resolved to stay until the police officer came with his inevitable questions. She resolved to point to the room at the back of the house and tell him what was in there. She resolved to tell him about what Dan had wanted her to do with the truck, how she had refused to do so because she was a mother. Arlene looked outside at the dark shape of the diesel truck and felt for the man inside. She had forced him to remain in the cold, huddled uncomfortably with his dog to pass the night, all because she hadn’t had the wherewithal to act like a woman first and not a mother, a person who cared about someone else’s well-being, not just her son’s.
Arlene thought about walking back out there and rapping on the door of the truck, showing the driver to one of the rooms and telling him with great apology that the fee would be waived. She decided against it, only because she was going to be facing life very soon—questions, suspicions, accusations—and these would be the last quiet hours she was going to have.
She thought back to that morning years before, when she had stood in the hallway of their old farmhouse, her brother maybe or maybe not in that back bedroom, and she had listened for some kind of noise to tell her that he was in there. Instead, her own mother rose and disturbed the quiet of the house. Arlene, honey, her mother had said. What are you doing up so early, my love? And then her mother began making an enormous breakfast in the kitchen.
The hours passed in the dark, Arlene transfixed by herself, by the silent truck in the parking lot, by the huge well of her coming life. The tea went cold. The blue flame burned. When the sky started to change over in the east, she finally rose from the table. She turned on the light. She took out eggs and sausages from the refrigerator, pancake mix from the cabinet. She set coffee to boil. She worked with resolve, remembering how her brother had walked into the kitchen to the smell of their mother’s cooking, his hair matted, and he made a playful grab for her and brought her to his lap as a cup of coffee was presented to him. The pans sizzled hot on the stove. Thank you, love, Frederick used to tell her, after their big Sunday dinners. Arlene made hearty portions and set everything on a breakfast tray—the coffee in a carafe, the eggs and sausages and toast and pancakes covered with a larger, upside-down plate to keep everything warm as she made her way outside and over to the truck.
The sky readied itself for day in the east. Arlene cleared the steps carefully, making her way to the diesel truck. The December morning clipped her with a sharp chill, her breath in the air. The dog sensed her even before she had taken a few steps, but she kept her resolve. She would move forward. There was only forward.
From the road came the familiar sound of tires, of a car slowing down. As she looked to the road, the police car rolled into view, and she stopped. The dog barked madly and she heard the driver call out, “Buddy!” in a tired voice, then again when the dog raised its paws to the window. The police car slowed down and she could see in the coming clarity that there were two officers inside. They parked the car and she felt her hands go numb. “Buddy!” the driver yelled, and she could hear him rising up in the cab. She wanted to keep going, but the distance was too great, too long, the simple path into the storybook forest too dark, too dark. She felt her hands give up and drop the tray as the officers opened the doors to the patrol car, the food spilling all over the gravel, the plates shattering, the coffee carafe tumbling. Arlene looked at the truck driver’s breakfast and then at the two officers approaching and she collapsed to her knees, weeping. She wept hard. She held her face in her hands and the morning was cold and she wanted to go back inside to the safety of her little house with the warm yellow windows.
“Mrs. Watson?” said one of the officers, approaching her. He came in to the café every day, just past the lunch hour, and ordered a grilled cheese, home fries, and a cola. “Mrs. Watson?” he called one more time, his boots on the gravel. He came closer, closer. Then he put his hands on her shoulders and bent down to her. “Arlene?”