Break the Skin by Lee Martin Page B

and then that night on our way to Walmart in the Malibu, she told me how wonderful the day had been. They hummed right along in that Mustang and had it swapped out all before noon. Their ride coming back was an Explorer. “Seats seven,” she’d pointed out to Tweet. “Mom and Dad and five kids.” She told him she wanted more kids than that. He didn’t say anything, just reached over and took her hand. It was nice, she said, just ridingalong, imagining one day they’d be husband and wife with a fine ride like that, and a house somewhere nice.
    “You don’t even like kids,” I said to her. We were driving past the city park, and through the dark I could see the gaslights along the walk-ways. “You’ve said as much a hundred times.”
    She gave a little wave of her hand like she was shooing off a fly. “I was just telling him what I thought he wanted to hear. Something wrong with that? We were just playing pretend, anyway.”
    “Don’t you believe in telling the truth?”
    “Only if I have to.”
    Much later, I’d remember this moment and I’d wonder whether she’d invented other things to tell me, lies to get what she wanted, but at the time it didn’t matter to me. At least that’s what I thought.
    “Go on and play make-believe all you want,” I told her. I couldn’t get the picture out of my head of the little girl she was that day in the park when she swung back and forth and waited for her mother to come back for her. I guess she deserved a little make-believe now. “Go on,” I said again. “Dream a little dream. Really, Delilah. What harm can it do?”

MISS BABY
    September 2009
DENTON, TEXAS

 
    T his is the truth. Lordy Magordy. Listen. He was just there. He was standing on the corner of Fry and Oak, looking at the drum circle, a group of North Texas students who had gathered, as they usually did that time of evening, on the grass outside the Language Building across the street. It was mid-September, near dusk, and the grackles were flocking to the live oaks, screeching as they settled on the branches. Soon a campus maintenance crew would set up shop on the roof and put the propane cannons to work. Their blasts—a boom boom boom I always felt in my chest—was a humane way to disturb the grackles and send them off in search of somewhere else to roost.
    But in the last moments before the noise came, it wasn’t bad at all. It was all right. Dusk coming on, and the drum circle setting a rhythm that went through my legs. A breeze rattled the leaves on the live oaks, a little cool air at the end of the day, a blessing after that blazing North Texas sun. The sky was all different shades of purple-blue with a haze of orange down low on the horizon, and I was just a woman, almost forty, pretending I was in love with my life, pretending I didn’t have a brother, Pablo Omar Maximillian Ruiz, who was in trouble and needed cash, who would eventually say to me at a time when I didn’t want to think what it would cost me to help him—when I was so close to having the life I’d always wanted—“Betts, do me this favor. I’m a dead man if I don’t get the money.”
    That’s me, Betty Ruiz, but most folks know me as Miss Baby, owner of Babyheart’s Tats, a parlor right here on Fry. You want barbed wire on your bicep? A rose on your ankle? A heart with an arrow through it on your forearm? I’m your gal. I’ll even drill as much of the Lord’s Prayer as you want across your back: And lead us not into temptation . But don’t come asking for the nasty. No tats on your ta-tas. No rat-a-tat-tat anywhere near your bird or your back door. Go on down the street if that’s your kick. Miss Baby runs a classy place.
    “Betts,” Pablo would finally say when he didn’t know what else to do, “you know I need the cash.”
    Oh, but so much would happen before we got to that point. That night on the street, I had no idea what I was headed toward. I just knew it was an evening like all the other evenings