Break the Skin by Lee Martin

make his life easy. Do all the little things like ironing shirts and putting good meals on the table. Do all the big things like encouraging him if things got rocky, or standing up for him when he needed that. Partners. If you love someone like that, Laney, they can’t help but love you back .
    Such a different way of thinking than Delilah, who, the first time she saw Tweet, promised she was going to rattle his bones. Delilah, who wanted, wanted, wanted. And yet I loved her because I always knew the orphaned little girl she was deep down inside. A girl like me, who’d lost her father, who was on the outs with her mother. Laney and Delilah—two stray hearts looking for home.
    Finally, she came out on the deck to sit with me, and at first we didn’t say much at all. We sat on the steps and didn’t even look at each other.
    Then she said, “I didn’t mean to get mad at her. She broke my clock.”
    “We’ll fix it.”
    A breeze kicked up and set the wind chimes going. Somewhere across the trailer park, a car door slammed shut.
    “Mama left me on a swing in the park.” Delilah bent at the waist, her hands clasped between her knees. “Right before she went off and gotherself killed. I ever tell you that? She had a note in my pocket that said, ‘Please take care of my little girl.’ ”
    For a few seconds, I couldn’t find my voice, overcome with the thought of Delilah swinging in that park, wondering when her mother would be coming back to get her.
    “I don’t like that story,” I finally said.
    “It’s not a story.” She straightened and looked at me. “It’s my life. It’s everything about who I am.”
    A horn honked, and I looked up and saw the white Ford Econoline van that Tweet used to haul his band and their equipment from gig to gig turning into the trailer park.
    “Didn’t know he was running a taxi service,” Delilah said.
    I took a closer look, and I saw that Rose was riding in the van with him.
    Delilah shoved up from the deck and went down the steps so she was standing on the patch of grass in front of the trailer, hands on her hips, when Tweet and Rose came out of the van.
    Rose was laughing. “That is so true,” she said.
    Tweet clapped his hands together. “I told you, didn’t I?”
    “Told her what?” Delilah threw her arms around Tweet’s waist. She had on a short denim skirt and an orange peasant blouse that dipped off one shoulder. When she hugged Tweet, she came up on her toes, and the muscles tightened in her calves and along the backs of her thighs. “Hey, good-lookin’,” she said.
    She pressed herself into him so hard, he stumbled back a step or two. “Whoa, lady,” he said. “Easy there.”
    I felt a little embarrassed for her, the way she was hanging on to him. It was obvious how desperate she was to impress upon Rose that this was her fella.
    “Tweet do you a favor?” she said to Rose, who was sort of hanging on to the van door like she didn’t want to close it and come back to her regular life.
    “I saw her walking,” he said, “and I gave her a lift.”
    “That was sweet of you, baby.” Delilah kissed him for a long time, so long that he finally pushed back from her.
    “I was just coming by,” he said. “You know, to say hey.”
    Delilah hadn’t forgotten her original question. “So what were you two laughing about?”
    Tweet and Rose glanced at each other and then looked away, and I knew that they were feeling guilty about something.
    “A joke,” Tweet said.
    For the first time, Rose spoke. “That’s right, Dee. Just a funny.”
    I could tell Delilah wasn’t buying it. “You said you told her something,” she said to Tweet.
    “That’s right,” he said. “A joke.”
    “No, you didn’t say it like that’s what you were talking about. You said it like you’d been playing footsies. Getting chummy, are you? Sharing secrets?”
    I could tell this was heading somewhere bad in a hurry. I came down from the deck and I said, “Hey, Rose. Hey,