“I have to protect her,” my mother said. “At all costs.”
After, she never left my mother’s side. She lived her life on my mother’s hip, or in my mother’s lap, and she was a big, fat sass of a baby with a wicked laugh and hair like copper springs.
I loved her.
But every day, my mother and I seemed to just check on each other, to see if the other was still there. I left school and I started working, and I’d drive my mother’s truck out to Walmart to buy diapers with cash. Where no one knew to ask me who I needed them for.
* * *
Baby Jane never asked me anything. He just let me talk, so much that sometimes I felt like I was unraveling.
I asked him everything. What his real name was. Where he was from. Where he had worked. If he’d been married.
“That is my real name,” he said. I didn’t believe him.
He was from Georgia.
He worked on cars.
He’d never been married.
I went to the car that first time, then waited a few days to go back. And then the days got closer together until I met him almost every day. I knew it was weird. But some days, having somewhere else to be between work and home felt like a balm.
I told him all the books I’d read and loved and why. I liked the sound of his voice. It was deep and reedy, and there was something old-fashioned about the way he said certain words. I couldn’t tell if he had an accent. I liked the smell of his clothes, his cigarettes, the way his hands moved and his mouth when he talked. He was smart like no one else I’d ever known, and something underneath the surface said to me that he was deeply broken, in ways I couldn’t imagine.
He told me he’d retired early. If I saw him in town, he’d nod in recognition, but he never stopped to talk to me.
Summer is a brief hot second up north. After Labor Day, the nights got cold. Not long after, the grass was dusted with frost in the morning.
My mother let me drive her truck only if it was raining. Otherwise, I took my bike. She didn’t want to be detectable at all, and having the truck parked at the diner was predictable and traceable. I’d throw a flannel shirt on over my work shirt, ride my bike down Mill Street to the shortcut, and duck in, my wheels hitting the trail with a puff of dirt.
I’d sat in the car by myself that first night, and some nights after. But mostly, he knew when to expect me, or he saw me go by his kitchen window. He seemed to like to give me time to smoke a cigarette and have a drink before he walked out through the backyard and into the woods after me.
* * *
I leaned on a pine tree on my way into the car, and my hand was sticky with sap. I sat rubbing it, smoking, waiting. I felt too restless to read, and it was dim in the forest.
When he came, Baby Jane saw me rubbing my hand, and reached for it.
“You need alcohol,” he said. “That’s the only thing that’ll get it out.” That was the night I asked him his real name.
He raised his eyes and gave me a look that said I’d never know. I thought he looked different each time I saw him, and I blamed the failing light of fall, the heavy tree shadow, the early dark.
“Baby Jane is my real name,” he said, and smiled. I thought his eyes were a blue I’d never seen.
I tried to touch his cheekbone, and he flinched.
I thought I would break the seats inside that old car if I could just put my hands on the sides of his face and look at him.
“Can we go inside?” I asked him.
“No,” he said.
“Do you live with someone?” I asked.
“No.”
I felt small.
But then he asked, “Do you?”
I hesitated. No one ever asked me. My mouth went dry. “Just my mom,” I said, and he nodded.
“I have to go,” he said after that, his eyes flat. But he waited. He sat there waiting for me to say the last thing. I didn’t want him to go. I didn’t want it to be over yet.
“How did you know who I was?” I asked.
“I pay attention.”
He got out. He disappeared between the pine trees, and his shoes didn’t make a sound. I could have followed him, but I sat still, breathing hard, my heart knocking in my chest, thinking I’d ruined something, that I’d broken the spell. And then I didn’t see him again for three days.
* * *
At home, I woke up to a stranger in the yard. My mother and the baby slept hard, in her closed room with the red curtains drawn. They might have been up half the night. I never knew. My mother had never been an early riser.
I heard the truck, and I heard hammering, and I saw him on the TV surveillance, a big guy, putting a sign in the yard. Sometimes men came through for maintenance, to take care of a downed tree or clear other storm damage on the trails. But this was right in our yard.
I went to the porch, barefoot, cold, and lit a cigarette. “Can I help you?” I called to him.
He was over fifty, with a moustache. His truck had a logo on the side I couldn’t quite read from there. He stepped forward and handed me a flyer .
Tax Auctions.
The sign in the yard read PUBLIC AUCTION, NOVEMBER 29, 9AM.
“What the fuck is this?” I barked at him.
“Tax auctions,” he said, and shrugged. “You must owe something.”
I looked at the flyer. Ours wasn’t the only address listed.
“What am I supposed to do?” I yelped.
“I don’t know, son,” he said. “Call the number. I’m just putting up the signs.”
When he pulled out, I took the ugly black-and-yellow sign from the dirt and tucked it behind the house.
My mother had heard me, and she was up inside, making coffee, and Birdie all at once had like eleven Barbie dolls out on the floor, in various states of undress. She had one Ken doll that she called the angel. She would sometimes fly him around the room.
“Who was here?” my mother asked.
“The county?” I said.
She paled so hard she looked green. She clicked the stove on and set the percolator to boil.
I hated conversations about money. I just wanted to make enough to cover everything and never have to talk about it.
“Do we owe money?” I said.
“Oh fuck,” she said, and pinched the bridge of her nose.
I stepped past Birdie into the kitchen so she wouldn’t hear. My mother rooted around in drawers, in the cupboard, looking for old mail. I paid the bills usually. But everything I paid was utilities. There was no mortgage. My grandparents had owned the house outright.
“Fuck,” she said again, digging into the junk drawer that overflowed with matchbooks and balls of string, markers, marbles, seashells and rocks. “Here,” she said, pulling out a rat-edged white paper that had the sides ripped off. Behind it were similar notices that hadn’t even been opened, letters from the county, letters from real estate companies, hand-addressed to Mrs. Pearl Jenkins.
The notice listed our address, my mother’s name, and the auction date, and stated fifty-seven thousand dollars in back taxes.
I didn’t know anyone who made fifty-seven thousand dollars a year, let alone owed it all at once.
I watched my mother reach in the side cupboard for a pill and take it without water.
“Have you ever paid the taxes?” I asked.