She waited some more, but still nothing happened.
Her ears filled with that sizzling static.
He cain’t come back. He’s dead.
She waited on the dirt until her thoughts had gone to ash.
She got up and threw the crowbar in the ditch. She limped to the car and opened the glove box, finding what she wanted, a matchbook. She struck one match, pushing too hard, breaking it. She struck another but couldn’t make it light, scratching it over and over before tossing it. Then one smoked and lit right up, but by the time she held it out in front of her it burned her fingers, and she flung it away. Next one she got a little light from. Finally she struck one that shone onto the key, lying against the front tire.
She got back into the driver’s seat and started the ignition, without Daddy’s voice in her ear, and turned the car around, toward home.
When she got to camp, the tent was gone, Momma and Uno too. Even Daddy’s banjo. Just trash, empty cans, a broken plate, spilled nails.
You paid your debt, said the voice.
“That ain’t it. That ain’t what I’m gonna do.”
She kicked the dirt, looking for any small thing that belonged to her—a book, a bag of marbles, a comb—but found none of it. Near where Daddy hit Uno, she found seven pennies and a hand-printed card—“Sweetie, 3528 Clay Street, San Francisco.”
She felt a knot of pain in her forehead and fingered an almond-sized lump there, which worried her. She knew deadly wounds were often bullet small.
But she wasn’t dead yet.
She put the pennies and the card in her pocket, got back in Uno’s Ford, her hope chest filling half the back seat, and started the car, heading west.
CHAPTER TWO
CLAY
Let me in,” Jane said to a sliver of face visible through the chain-locked door.
Sweetie’s left blue eye traveled the length of Jane, over her bloody overalls, her cut-up forehead, her bare left foot—she’d removed her shoe as her foot swelled over the five hours it took her to find her way to this Clay Street doorstep. She’d rolled down her window a dozen times on the drive, desperate enough to talk to all manner of people who were not like her, asking Orientals, Coloreds, Italians, Irish, prostitutes, police, and swells how to get to this porch of the only person she knew who lived in San Francisco—Sweetie Jeffers, daughter of Uno.
“Janie? What happened?”
“A fight.”
“Here?”
“Home.”
“How’d you get here?”
“Let me in, Sweetie, please.”
“Why are you here?”
“You said I could come if I ever needed anything.”
“When did I? I . . . I couldn’t have. I left without . . .” Her voice quavered.
In fact, Sweetie hadn’t said it to Jane but had said something like it to a crying, jilted, eighth-grade girl, years before. Jane had been so touched by Sweetie’s salve-like tone in that overheard conversation that she’d filed the moment in her memory, retrieving it for practical use tonight. She hadn’t seen Sweetie since she’d disappeared from Tumbleweed right after Jane and Daddy and Momma first moved in, but Jane thought Sweetie would be on her side, having already escaped Uno herself.
“Please,” Jane said. “I need your help.”
Sweetie’s one visible eye grew bigger, softening what Jane could see of her face. “Help” looked like the magic word.
“I can’t have you stay here. It’s not my place.”
“You’re the only one I can go to,” Jane said.
Sweetie closed the door, unchained the lock, and opened it all the way. “Come in,” she said. “But be quiet.”
She led Jane, limping, upstairs into a front parlor, settling her on a brown velvet sofa facing a piano the size of a truck bed, sheet music papering its top.
Looking down at Jane’s foot, she said, “Looks like a ham hock,” which it did.
Sweetie’s nose crinkled up at that. She had a sprinkle of freckles across its ridge and the rise of her cheeks. Jane had never known a redhead with so few freckles. Uno never put her in the field with the other kids, Jane recalled, keeping her inside their Tumbleweed cabin instead, cleaning up, cooking, sewing, ever since her mother had died of tuberculosis. She’d always looked like a little lady, no matter how patchy her wardrobe.
Now, grown up, she had the same small peach mouth over a pointy chin. Her pearl earrings matched the buttons of her navy shirtdress, tailored to her curves, belted at her waist just so. She was still in her day clothes, not her sleep clothes, at two in the morning. Her navy leather heels were waxed over scuffs. She’d always been so pretty in a clever way, the kind of girl who knew how to make herself look good, even if she hadn’t looked good by nature. Jane remembered watching her sew a cheerleader outfit and spot-bleach it at night by the fire all season, captivating the younger camp girls. The way she let them into that intimate work by the fire showed a real generosity, a willingness to share her success, to say they were worthy of it, to let them—who were so low—connect with her—so far above. That was the memory that had risen up when Jane found her address left behind like a charm in the dirt.
“Do your momma and daddy know you’re here?”
Jane leaned back on the velvet and waited, mute, for a steep hill of pain to flatten. Then she said, “No.” She’d told Daddy about San Francisco, but he was dead now.
The phonograph breathed a moaning kind of music from an instrument Jane didn’t know, sounding like it was coming through the room’s thin plaster skin, from its lungs.
Sweetie blew a puff of air that raised the fringe of hair on her forehead. “Don’t go anywhere.” She headed out the door, down the hall, leaving Jane alone.
Jane took in her surroundings. Bookshelves anchored the lower two-thirds of the parlor walls. Three books were stacked next to her on the sofa, scraps of paper sticking out the sides, strange words on the books’ spines: Tchaikovsky’s Impossible Concerto, Great Thinkers on Ligeti’s Etudes and Hearing the Macabre: Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. Double doors on the nearest wall were pulled closed.
Pencil drawings of people with tall white hair and hats like ships, canes of vining flowers and swords of fire, were strung all around with twine. Over the fireplace hung a gold-framed painting of a John Deere tractor up close, its grill huge, parked on black soil under an orange sky with pink clouds, signed “SJ” in the corner. The room smelled toasty, acidic, lingering proof of cigarettes, all of it chaotically impossible to decipher.
Though the music stopped, the record kept spinning, scratching.
She heard a conversation down the hall.
“She is not my problem. I do not need another project.”
“I won’t ask anything of you. It’ll just be a short time.”
“Right. You won’t ask anything. Nothing at all.”
“What, do you want me to call the cops or something? Silly, Rivka, think about it.”
This was a mistake, better to sleep in the car, near the hobos, by the water. Jane pushed off the sofa, stepped once— unh!—and dropped back again.
Settle down. There was no static around the voice this time. It was coming in clearer.