of good news was something she grabbed and stuffed in her mouth. Now, it’s like everything he says comes to her on a lone rider across a flat stretch of desert, hard to understand, and all she sees is clouds of dust, and all she feels is as nothing as the dust when it settles.
“Okay.” She sits at the table and works the inside of her cheek between her molars, enjoying the slippery, meaty sensation of her trapped skin with the tip of her tongue.
“So you want me to run out and get you some coffee? Egg McMuffin?”
Dusty-dust-dust. What does it matter? The baby. She wants to ask him when, when can they go, but not yet, not in front of the Flaky.
Across the room, Brandi hangs up the phone, goes back to where she dropped the remote on the floor. When she bends over, her skinny jeans slip and you can see the olive dimples at the top of her ass, the hint of her crack, and the pink butt-floss elastic of her panties. Jesus, that girl. Doesn’t she know what dressing like that gets you? Penny knows. If she liked Brandi at all, she’d tell her.
But she feels Jason watching the girl’s every move, sees his eyes go to the panty T at the top of her jeans, and she swears the bitch gives it a little wiggle before she stands up, grabbing at her pants. Penny digs her blunt, fleshy fingertips into her own thighs. Back in Drain, back when she was working, she had long acrylics, dragon-lady red. They made a nice clickety-clack when she pushed buttons on the register. Men buying ground sirloin and TV dinners looked at her hands, looked at her face, looked at her wavy brown hair.
“What, are my panties showing?” Brandi turns to Jason. “I need a fucking belt. We’re starving to death here, till Lisle gets back from Bend with some fucking money. The fridge is like ol’ Mother-fuckin’ Hubbard.”
“I said I’d go out and get you girls some breakfast!” Jason’s neck vein is out. “Nobody’s talking to me around here! What? What do you want?”
“Okay. I want a deluxe breakfast and some extra sausage. And a chocolate milk shake. Large.”
Penny can do the math for that in her head. More than six dollars for one breakfast, what does she think Jason is, an ATM machine? The girl’s got a job, minimum wage, but a job. Where does she think Jason’s cash comes from? Every nickel they spend on greasy food is money they can’t use for the things he promised, for Mexico, for the bus fare to see Buddy.
“I’m fine,” Penny says.
“You don’t want nothing?” Too loud, too close, big dust clouds billowing up around her, and Penny has to shout through them to get to him.
“You know what I want!”
By the time the dust has settled, he’s gone. Brandi looks over the back of the couch at her, whistles through her teeth, and goes back to Judge Judy.
Penny fills a glass of water at the sink. It tastes like rust. Her fingers find the scar at the top of her underpants, her real cover-your-whole-ass underpants, trace its length. Where and when? she thinks.
When Jason comes back, he throws a bag of food at Brandi—“No milk shakes!”—and sits at the table with his. Penny wants to start again. Tries to sit on his lap. He doesn’t shove her off, doesn’t squeeze her to him either. She sips from his coffee, scalding hot. It is black, tastes like metal too. Jason eats his dollar McMuffin in three bites.
“I just—,” she begins, and he gives her a look that normally would have stopped her cold. Before. Now, she keeps going in a whisper. “You shouldn’t have told me if you didn’t plan to take me there.”
“You let me handle it.” She can feel the rumble of his voice box against the back of her shoulder.
“Like you handled it—” She begins low, but squabbling on the television court show drowns her out. Underneath her, Jason’s leg starts to twitch, an electric tremor.
She just wants to look. If she trusted Chloe Pinter an ounce, she would call her up and ask how it was going with John and Francie. Once, on Oprah or some show, there was a couple that adopted a retard from Europe, and he was like a demon spawn, and they beat on him with wooden spoons until he died. She just wants to know it’s going okay.
“I hate this