isn’t true. In health class, Miss Yant showed us a videotape of people dying of AIDS in hospitals, too sick to eat, shaking under their blankets. Little babies have it now too, and they haven’t even lived long enough to sow anything. So maybe Eileen is wrong. Maybe nobody is getting AIDS for a lesson. Maybe people are just getting it, and it’s sad.
It won’t really be like a wedding, Travis told me. It’ll be more like an appointment, fifteen minutes from start to finish, four o’clock to four-fifteen. Just at the courthouse, not at a church. But I think Mrs. Rowley got a new dress for it—blue with white flowers, with a sash in the back that she has left untied. She uses her hand to fan herself as she walks down the stairs to the parking lot.
Deena gets out of the car and waves up at Travis, turning in a little half circle to show him her dress. It’s the dress she got for the prom. I remember when she bought it last year, on sale, seventy-two dollars with the shoes. She just happened to get a white one. Or maybe she knew, even then. Her stomach is still flat under the satin bodice. Spaghetti straps, tight against her tan shoulders, hold it up.
I duck below my window when she looks.
Travis is wearing a navy blue jacket, a gray shirt, a white tie, and dark gray pants that look like they have maybe been hemmed with safety pins. Deena’s grandmother stays in the car, the engine running, but Mrs. Rowley has a small camera, and she motions for Travis and Deena to stand together. Travis puts his arm around Deena, and she leans her head on his shoulder.
I know that this moment, what I am seeing before me, will become a picture in a photo album. Their child, the one on its way, will look at this picture years from now, showing friends, and say, This is a picture of my parents the day they got married, touching Travis’s and Deena’s stilled faces with his or her fingers, seeing only how beautiful they both look, Deena’s dress lifting in the breeze. They will think the picture is more important than it really is; they will think he or she exists because of the picture, instead of the other way around.
eighteen
WHEN SUMMER COMES, TRAVIS AND Deena get approved for a Section 8, a two bedroom in Kerrville, just across the street from the garage where Travis works. It shouldn’t be any different when they finally move—Deena and I don’t talk, and Travis just works all the time anyway. But when they are actually gone, when I can no longer see them going on their long walks in the evening, I feel it. It’s just me now.
But at least I’m finally old enough to work this summer, and that takes up some of the time. I turned in my application to the McDonald’s in early June, but the manager, Franklin DuPaul, wouldn’t even interview me at first. I had to bug him about it, by phone and in person, every day for a week before he dug my application up and waved me over behind the counter.
DuPaul is in his early fifties, tall and lean, the only black man I’ve ever seen in Kerrville, with a close-cropped beard that he rubs when he is thinking something over. When he interviewed me, he looked down at my application and not at my face while I explained that I needed to start saving money for college, and that I was a hard worker. He would not be sorry, I promised. Not sorry at all.
“Okay,” he said, rubbing his beard. “We’ll start you out, see how it goes.”
He put me on fries, so this is what I do now, over and over for four-hour stretches at a time: I open a bag of frozen fries, pour them into the wire basket, lower the basket into the grease, and set the timer. While the fries are cooking, I sweep the floor, or I spray and wipe the stainless-steel counter behind me. When the timer for the fries rings, I lift the basket up out of the oil and dump the fries onto the warmer, add salt, and then shuffle them into different containers: small, medium, and large.
It is usually just boring, being at work, but sometimes it’s hard. There are decisions to make. The fries go bad after about fifteen minutes, turning limp and