“He really was cute.” Gillian stubs out her cigarette and starts to cry. “Oh, boy,” she says.
Sally can’t believe it, but she actually wants to see him. She wants to see what such a man looks like. She wants to know if a woman as rational as herself could ever be attracted to him, if only for a second.
Gillian follows Sally over to the car and they lean forward to get a good look at Jimmy through the windshield. Tall, dark, handsome, and dead.
“You’re right,” Sally says. “He was cute.”
He is, by far, the best-looking guy Sally has ever seen, dead or alive. She can tell, by the arch of his eyebrows and the smirk that’s still on his lips, that he sure as hell knew it. Sally puts her face up to the glass. Jimmy’s arm is thrown over the seat and Sally can see the ring on the fourth finger of his left hand—it’s a big chunk of silver with three panels: a saguaro cactus is etched into one side panel, a coiled rattlesnake on the other, and in the center there’s a cowboy on horseback. Even Sally understands that you wouldn’t want to get hit if a man had that ring on; the silver would split your lip right open, it would cut quite deep.
Jimmy cared about the way he looked, that much is clear. Even after hours slumped over in the car, his blue jeans are so crisp it appears that somebody tried hard to iron them just right. His boots are snakeskin and they obviously cost a fortune. They’ve been very well cared for; if somebody spilled a beer on those boots by accident, or kicked up too much dust, there’d be trouble, you can tell that by looking at the polished leather. You can tell just by looking at Jimmy’s face. Dead or alive, he is who he is: somebody you don’t want to mess with. Sally steps away from the car. She’d be afraid to be alone with him. She’d be afraid one wrong word would set him off, and then she wouldn’t know what to do.
“He looks kind of mean.”
“Oh, god, yeah,” Gillian says. “But only when he was drinking. The rest of the time he was great. He was good enough to eat, and I’m not kidding. So I got the idea of a way to keep him from being mean—I started giving him a little bit of nightshade in his food every night. It made him go to sleep before he could start drinking. He was perfectly fine all this time, but it must have been building up in his bloodstream, and then he just conked out. We were sitting there in the rest area and he was looking through the glove compartment for his lighter, which I bought for him at the flea market in Sedona last month, and he got bent over and couldn’t seem to straighten back up. Then he stopped breathing.”
In someone’s backyard a dog is barking; it’s a hoarse and frantic sound that has already begun to filter into people’s dreams.
“You should have phoned the aunts and asked about the correct dosage,” Sally says.
“The aunts hate me.” Gillian runs her hand through her hair, to give it some fullness, but with this humidity it stays pretty limp. “I’ve disappointed them in every way.”
“So have I,” Sally says.
Sally believed the aunts judged her as far too ordinary to be of any real interest. Gillian felt sure they considered her common. Because of this, the girls always felt temporary. They had the sense that they’d better be careful about what they said and what they revealed. Certainly they never shared their fear of storms with the aunts, as if after nightmares and stomach viruses, fevers and food allergies, that phobia might be the last straw for the aunts, who had never particularly wanted children in the first place. One more complaint might send the aunts running to collect the sisters’ suitcases, which were stored in the attic, covered with cobwebs and dust, but made of Italian leather and still decent enough to be put to good use. Instead of turning to the aunts, Sally and Gillian turned to each other. They whispered that nothing bad would happen as long as they could count to a hundred in thirty seconds. Nothing could happen if they stayed under the covers, if they did not breathe whenever the thunder crashed above them.
“I don’t want to go to jail.” Gillian takes out another Lucky Strike and lights it. Because of her family history, she has a real abandonment anxiety, which is why she’s always the first to leave. She knows this, she’s spent enough time in therapy and paid enough bucks to discuss it in depth, but that doesn’t mean anything’s changed. There is not one man who’s gotten the jump and broken up with her first. That’s her claim to fame. Frankly, Jimmy comes the closest. He’s gone, and here she still is, thinking about him and paying the price for doing so.
“If they send me to jail, I’ll go nuts. I haven’t even lived yet. Not really. I want to get a job and have a normal life. I want to go to barbecues. I want to have a baby.”