*

In February, when Alma and Glory were fighting every day about homework and money. When Glory said, I want to quit school and go to work, I want some money of my own, and Alma shook her head fiercely. It was her job to work, her daughter’s job to learn. When boys sometimes pulled into the alley behind their apartment and tapped the horn until Glory grabbed her rabbit’s fur jacket and dashed out the door, but not before Mr. Navarro beat on the front door and hollered at Glory and Alma to stop shouting at each other. On Valentine’s night, when her mother cursed Glory in Spanish while they waited for the van that would pick up Alma and drive her to work, and Glory walked into the bedroom and stood over to her mother’s bed for a few seconds and then casually, as if she were standing over a flowerpot, tamped her cigarette out on the new bedspread. I can’t understand you, Alma. You won’t let me learn it and neither will the school, so speak English, goddamn you. And when, two hours later, Glory took a long, last look around the Sonic parking lot and decided she had nothing to lose. When she climbed into Dale Strickland’s pickup truck and pulled the heavy door closed. When the morning is still as a corpse. When tumbleweeds newly torn from their roots are flung across the land. When the wind picks up, when it says stand up. And she stands up. When a mesquite branch snaps beneath the weight of her bare foot and she hears her uncle’s voice in the slight echo that follows. Walk quiet, Glory. When she thinks she will miss this blue sky stretched tight above the earth’s seam because she can’t stay, not after this. When the wind is always pushing and pulling, losing and gaining, lifting and holding and dropping, when all the voices and stories begin and end the same way. Listen, this is a war story. Or maybe, this is yours.

Suzanne

On the first and third Friday mornings of every month, Suzanne Ledbetter and her daughter drive over to the credit union to deposit Jon’s paycheck along with her cash and checks from selling Avon and Tupperware. To avoid the crowds of men who work at the plant across the highway and come on their lunch breaks, they arrive a few minutes before nine. While Lauralee waits in the car or stands in the parking lot twirling her baton, Suzanne fills out deposit slips for checking, savings, retirement, vacation, Lauralee’s college and wedding, and one account that she records in her notebook as charity. It is an account she has had since she worked full-time selling life insurance and nobody, not even Jon, knows about it. It is her safety net. If things go south in a hurry, she will have options.

When Suzanne hands the slips and checks and cash to the teller, the woman marvels aloud, as she does every two weeks, at Suzanne’s neat handwriting and tidy piles. I believe you are the most organized woman I have ever seen, the woman says, and Suzanne replies, Well, aren’t you sweet, Mrs. Ordó?ez, and she digs through her purse for a business card and a perfume sample. Because she prefers to sell products that make women feel pretty, she does not mention the new food storage system she has in the trunk of her car. Instead, she tucks a catalog under the woman’s windshield wiper on her way out.

It is late June and the sun is murderous. Suzanne’s heels sink into the black tar and gravel as she walks back to the car where Lauralee waits with the windows up and the engine running, her hair hanging in thin strands around her face. She has her mother’s red hair, just as Suzanne has her mother’s.

How much did we earn this week? Lauralee asks after Suzanne has slammed the door and pulled a tissue from her purse to dab her forehead and armpits.

Forty-five dollars. We’ll have to step up our game at this afternoon’s practice.

You can do it, Lauralee says. Her baton rolls off the seat and she leans over to pick it up, groaning as the seat belt cuts into her belly, kicking her mother’s seat as she stretches her arms toward the baton. You’re the best saleslady in Odessa.

That’s because nothing feels as good as earning your own money, Suzanne says. Her deliveries are in small white bags on the passenger seat, and she keeps the vents pointed directly at them. She pulls a small spiral notebook from her purse and makes a record of her account balances. She is five dollars short of her biweekly goal. Two weeks ago, she was short by ten. Suzanne pats her armpits one last time with the tissue and then puts on her sunglasses and freshens her lipstick. Time to channel Arlene, she thinks, setting aside her notebook and taking up the legal pad where she has written her to-do list: Take Lauralee to piano lessons, drop off casserole for Mary Rose, pick up Lauralee, hang needlepoint art in L’s bedroom, deliver gift bags to the ladies at the practice field, call Dr. Bauman, go to Credit union. Check.

They are running late, so she shifts the car into first gear and pulls out of the parking lot with her tires squealing and the transmission humming tightly. They are going nearly sixty miles an hour when they drive through the green light at Dixie and South Petroleum Street, but they catch the train anyway. Suzanne pulls to a quick stop and taps one fingernail against the steering wheel while they watch the Burlington Northern cars rattle past. When the train slows to a crawl and then stops completely, she chews her cuticle for a moment, then shifts into reverse and takes a different route. Never depend on a man to take care of you, Lauralee, she says. Not even one as good as your daddy.

I won’t. Her daughter is buckled up tight, a stack of piano books on the seat next to her. Her tap and ballet shoes are in the trunk, along with her swim bag and a large plastic tub filled with Tupperware.

I got lucky because your daddy is the best man in Odessa, Suzanne says, but many don’t. You are going to get everything you want in life—she tries to catch her daughter’s eye in the rearview mirror—but you can’t take your eye off the ball, not even for a minute. People who take their eye off the ball get hit in the face.

Suzanne is a firm believer in sunlight and bleach, and not hiding behind little white lies. The sooner Lauralee has a complete picture of their situation, the better, so she tells her: Trash, that’s what people say when they talk about my family. Trash when they were tenant farmers in England, and crofters in Scotland, trash when they were sharecroppers, first in Kentucky, then in Alabama, and trash here in Texas, where the men became horse thieves and bison hunters, Klansmen and vigilantes, and the women became liars and confederates. And that, she says, is why there are only three of us at Thanksgiving dinner every year. That’s why nobody will be coming to town for the Bicentennial celebration. I wouldn’t have those people at my table if somebody held a gun to my head—which they might.

When her daughter is a little older, Suzanne will tell her that less than a hundred years ago, they were still living in dugouts, hiding out from debt collectors and Texas Rangers, waiting for the Comanche to come and fill them with arrows. Suzanne’s people were too stupid, or isolated, to know that the Red River War had been over for five years, and what was left of the Comanche people, mostly women and children and old men, were confined to Fort Sill. Until the day he died, Suzanne’s great-great granddaddy carried a tobacco pouch made from the scrotum of a Mescalero Apache he murdered on the Llano Estacado. Suzanne’s cousin, Alton Lee, still keeps it in an old cedar chest covered with cigarette burns and bumper stickers of the Stars and Bars.

I don’t feel like going to piano, Lauralee says. It’s boring.

Suzanne grits her teeth and chews the inside of her cheek. Little girl, you think you’ve got it bad? When I was your age, I saw a boy get eaten by an alligator. All they found of him was his little Dallas Cowboys T-shirt, and one sneaker.

Why did he get eaten? Lauralee has heard this story a dozen times and she knows what question to ask next.

Well, he wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. When people don’t look where they’re going, alligators get them. Anyhow, the boy’s mother—her name was Mrs. Goodrow and her family had been in East Texas since they were run out of Louisiana—she hung in there. She had eight other kids and no time to dwell on it, but his daddy wasn’t ever the same. Or at least that’s what your grandma Arlene told all of us kids. Your grandma could sell a glass of iced water to a polar bear. She could talk the sweet out of a sugar cube. And she was pretty as a field of bluebonnets, too. Five years running, she was the Harrison County rodeo queen.

I wish she was here, Lauralee says.