Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 823 & 824, March/April 2010

Rearview Mirror by Art Taylor

An assistant professor of English at George Mason University, Art Taylor also has his fingers in a number of related literary pies. He’s a fiction writer, an editor for Metro Magazine, a reviewer for Washington Post Book World, and a contributor to nonfiction fan magazines such as Mystery Scene. He’s a native of North Carolina and often sets his stories in the South; this tale was inspired by a trip he took to New Mexico and is in a somewhat lighter vein than most of his work.

I hadn’t been thinking about killing Delwood. Not really. But you know how people sometimes have just had enough. That’s what I’d meant when I said it to him: “I could just kill you,” the two of us sitting in his old Nova in front of a cheap motel on Route 66 — meaning it just figurative, even if that might seem at odds with me sliding his pistol into my purse right after I said it.

And even though I was indeed thinking hard about taking my half of the money and maybe a little more — literal now, literally taking it — I would not call it a double-cross. Just kind of a divorce and a divorce settlement, I guess. Even though we weren’t married. But that’s not the point.

Sometimes people are just too far apart in their wants — that’s what my mama told me. Sometimes things just don’t work out.

That was the point.

“Why don’t we take the day off,” I’d asked him earlier that morning up in Taos, a Saturday, the sun creeping up but everything still mostly quiet in the trailer park where we’d been renting on the biweekly. “We could go buy you a suit, and I could get a new dress. And then maybe we’d go out to dinner. To Joseph’s Table, maybe. Celebrate a little.”

He snorted. “Louise,” he said, the way he does. “What’s it gonna look like, the two of us, staying out here, paycheck to paycheck, economical to say the least” — he put a little emphasis on economical, always liking the sound of anything above three syllables — “and then suddenly going out all spiffed up to the nicest restaurant in town?” He looked at me for a while, and then shook his head.

“We don’t have to go to the nicest restaurant,” I said, trying to compromise, which is the mark of a good relationship. “We could just go down to the bar at the Taos Inn and splurge on some high-dollar bourbon and a couple of nice steaks.” I knew he liked steaks, and I could picture him smiling over it, chewing, both of us fat and happy. So to speak, I mean, the fat part being figurative again, of course.

“We told Hal we’d vacate the premises by this morning. We agreed.”

Hal was the man who ran the trailer park. A week or so before, Del had told him he’d finally gotten his degree and then this whole other story about how we’d be moving out to California, where Del’s sister lived, and how we were gonna buy a house over there.

“Sister?” I had wanted to say when I overheard it. “House?” But then I realized he was just laying the groundwork, planning ahead so our leaving wouldn’t look sudden or suspicious. Concocting a story — I imagine that’s the way he would have explained it, except he didn’t explain it to me, he just did it.

That’s the way he was sometimes: a planner, not a communicator. Taciturn, he called it. Somewhere in there, in his not explaining and my not asking, he had us agreeing. And now he had us leaving.

“Okay,” I told Del. “We’ll just go then. But how ’bout we rent a fancy car? A convertible, maybe. A nice blue one.” And I could see it — us cruising through the Sangre de Cristos on a sunny afternoon, the top slid back and me sliding across the seat too, leaning over toward him, maybe kicking my heels up and out the window. My head would be laid on his shoulder and the wind would slip through my toes. Now that would be nice.

“No need to blow this windfall on some extravagance,” he said. “No need to call attention to ourselves unnecessarily. Our car works fine.”

He headed for it then — an old Nova. Little spots of rust ran underneath the doors and up inside the wheel well. A bad spring in the seat always bit into my behind. Lately, the rearview mirror had started to hang just a little loose — not so that Delwood couldn’t see in it, but enough that it rattled against the windshield whenever the road got rough.

I stood on the steps with my hip cocked and my arms crossed, so that when he turned and looked at me in that rearview mirror, he’d know I was serious. But he just climbed in the car, and sat there staring ahead. Nothing to look back at, I guess. He’d already packed the car while I slept. The trailer behind us was empty of the few things we owned.

“A new day for us,” he’d whispered an hour before when he woke me up, but already it seemed like same old, same old to me.

When I climbed in beside him, I slammed the passenger-side door extra hard and heard a bolt come loose somewhere inside it.

“It figures,” I said, listening to it rattle down. The spring had immediately dug extra hard into my left rump.

Del didn’t answer. Just put the car in gear and drove ahead.

When I first met Del, he was robbing the 7-Eleven over in Eagle Nest, where I worked at that time. This was about a year ago. I’d just been sitting behind the counter, reading one of the Cosmos off the shelf, when in comes this fellow in jeans and a white T-shirt and a ski mask, pointing a pistol.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said. “I’m not a bad man. I just need a little boost in my income.”

I laid the Cosmo facedown on the counter so that I wouldn’t lose my place. “You’re robbing me?” I said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

I bit my lip and shook my head — no no no — just slightly.

“I’m only twenty-four,” I said.

He looked over toward the Doritos display — not looking at it, but just pointing his head in that direction the way some people look into space whenever they’re thinking. He had a moustache and a beard. I could see the stray hairs poking out around the bottom of the ski mask and near the hole where his mouth was.

“Excuse me?” he said finally, turning back to face me. His eyes were green.

“I’m not a ma’am.”

He held up his free hand, the one without the pistol, and made to run it through his hair — another sign of thinking — but with the ski mask, it just slid across the wool. “Either way, could you hurry it up a little. I’m on a schedule.”

Many reasons for him to be frustrated, I knew. Not the least of which was having to wear wool in New Mexico in the summer.

He glanced outside. The gas pumps were empty. Nothing but darkness on the other side of the road. This time of night, we didn’t get much traffic. I shrugged, opened the cash register.

“You know,” I said, as I bent down for a bag to put his money in. “You have picked the one solitary hour that I’m alone in the store, between the time that Pete has to head home for his mom’s curfew and the time that our night manager strolls in for his midnight to six.”

“I know. I’ve been watching you.” Then there was a little nervous catch in his voice. “Not in a bad way, I mean. Not voyeuristically,” he said, enunciating the word, and then the next one too. “Just surveillance, you know. I’m not a pervert.”

I kept loading the register into the bag. “You don’t think I’m worth watching?”

Again, with the ski mask, I can’t be sure, but he seemed to blush.

“No. I mean, yes,” he said. “You’re very pretty,” he said.

I nodded. “There’s not much money here we have access to, you know? A lot of it goes straight to the safe. That’s procedure.”

“I’m a fairly frugal man,” he said. “Sometimes I just need a little extra for... tuition.”

“Tuition?”

“And other academic expenses.”

“Academic expenses,” I repeated, not a question this time. I thought that he had a nice voice, and then I told him so. “You have a nice voice,” I said. “And pretty eyes.” I gave him my phone number, not writing it down because the security camera would have picked that up, but just told him to call, repeating the number twice so he would remember it. “And my name is Louise.”

“Thanks,” he said, “Louise.”

“Good luck with your education,” I called after him, but the door had already swung closed. I watched him run out toward the pumps and beyond, admired the way his body moved, the curve of his jeans, for as long as I could make him out against the darkness. I gave him a head start before I dialed 911.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I was some bored, bubble-gum-popping, Cosmo-reading girl, just out of her teens, disillusioned with the real world and tired already of being a grownup and then along comes this bad boy and, more than that, literally a criminal and... well, sure, there’s some truth there. But here again, you’d be missing the point.

It wasn’t exciting that he robbed convenience stores.

It was exciting that he was brave enough to call me afterwards, especially in this age of Caller ID when I had his phone number and name immediately — Grayson, Delwood — and could have sent the police after him in a minute.

That Cosmo article? The one I was reading when he showed up in the ski mask? “Romantic Gestures Gone Good: Strange but True Stories of How He Wooed and Won Me.”

Not a one of those stories held a candle to hearing Del’s voice on the other end of the phone: “Hello, Louise? I, um... robbed your 7-Eleven the other night, and I’ve been percolating on our conversation ever since. Are you free to talk?”

That takes a real man, I thought. And — don’t forget those academic expenses — a man who might just be going somewhere.

But it had been a long time since I believed we were going anywhere fast. Or anywhere at all.

We took the High Road down from Taos. That figured too: two lanes, 45 miles per hour.

“Afraid they’ll get you for speeding?” I asked.

“Who knows,” he said. “One thing might lead to another.”

As we drove, he kept looking up into the rearview mirror, nervously, as if any second a patrol car really was gonna come tearing around the bend, sirens wailing, guns blasting. He had put his own pistol in the glove compartment. I saw it when I went for a Kleenex.

“If we get pulled over, are you gonna use it?”

He didn’t answer, just glanced up again at the mirror, which rattled against the windshield with every bump and curve.

I was doing a little rearview looking as well, I guess.

Here’s the thing. Even if I had become a little disillusioned with Del, I don’t believe I had become disappointed in him — not yet.

I mean, like I said, he was a planner. I’d seen my mama date men who couldn’t think beyond which channel they were gonna turn to next, unless there was a big game coming up, and then their idea of planning was to ask her to pick up an extra bag of chips and dip for their friends. I’d dated men who would pick me up and give me a kiss and then ask, “So, what do you want to do tonight?” having had no idea what we might do except that we might end up in the backseat or even back at their apartment. I’m sorry to admit it with some of those men, but most times we did.

On the other hand, take Del. When he picked me up for our first date, I asked him straight out, “So where does the desperate criminal take the sole witness to his crime on their first date?” I was admiring how he looked out from under that ski mask — his beard not straggly like I’d been afraid, but groomed nice and tight, and chiseled features, I guess you’d call them, underneath that. Those green eyes looked even better set in such a handsome face. He’d dressed up a little, too: a button-down shirt, a nice pair of khakis. He was older than I’d expected, older than me. Thirties, maybe. Maybe even late thirties. A little grey in his beard. But I kind of liked all that, too.

“A surprise,” said Del, and didn’t elaborate, just drove out of Eagle Nest and out along 64, and all of a sudden I thought, Oh, wait, desperate criminal, sole witness. My heart started racing and not in a good way. But then he pulled into Angel Fire and we went to Our Place for dinner. (Our Place! That’s really the name.) And then my heart started racing in a better way.

And then there’s the fact that he did indeed finish his degree at the community college, which shows discipline and dedication. And then coming up with that story about his sister and why we were moving, laying out a cover story in advance, always thinking ahead. And then planning for the heist itself — the “big one,” he said, “the last one,” though I knew better. Over the last year, whenever tuition came due, he’d hit another 7-Eleven or a gas station or a DVD store — “shaking up the modus operandi,” he said, which seemed smart to me, but maybe he just got that from the movies he watched on our DVD player. He’d stolen that too.

That was how we spent most of our nights together, watching movies. I’d quit the 7-Eleven job at that point — it was too dangerous, Del said — ironically, he said — and got a job at one of the gift stores in town, so I was home nights more. Home meaning Del’s trailer, that is, because it wasn’t long before I’d moved in with him.

We’d make dinner — something out of a box because I’m not much of a cook, I’ll admit — and I’d watch Court TV, which I love, while he did some of his homework for the business classes he was taking over at the college, balancing work and school and me. And then we’d watch a movie, usually something with a crime element like Ocean’s Eleven or Mission: Impossible or some old movie like The Sting or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or all those Godfather movies like every man I’ve ever been with. I suggested Bonnie & Clyde a couple of times, for obvious reasons, but he said it would be disadvantageous for us to see it and so we always watched something else.

“Is that all you do, sit around and watch movies?” Mama asked on the phone, more than once.

“We go out some, too,” I told her.

“Out out?” she asked, and I didn’t know quite what she meant and I told her that.

“He surprises me sometimes,” I said. “Taking me out for dinner.”

(Which was true. “Let’s go out for a surprise dinner,” he’d say sometimes, even though the surprise was always the same, that we were just going to Our Place. But that was still good because it really was our place — both literally and figuratively — and there’s romance in that.)

“He loves me,” I’d tell Mama. “He holds me close at night and tells me how much he loves me, how much he can’t live without me.”

Mama grunted. She was in South Carolina. Two hours time difference and almost a full country away, but still you could feel her disappointment like she was standing right there in the same room.

“That’s how it starts,” Mama would tell me, “ ‘I can’t live without you,’ ” mimicking the voice. “Then pretty soon, ‘I can’t live without you’ starts to turn stifling and sour and...”

Her voice trailed off. And violent, I knew she’d wanted to say.

And I knew where she was coming from, knew how her last boyfriend had treated her. I’d seen it myself, one of the reasons I finally just moved away, anywhere but there.

“I thought you were going to start a new life,” she said, a different kind of disappointment in her voice then. “You could watch the tube and drink beer anywhere. You could date a loser here if that’s all you’re doing.”

I twirled the phone cord in my hand, wanting just to be done with the conversation, but not daring to hang up yet. Not yet.

“Frugal,” Mama said, making me regret again some of the things I’d told her about him. “Frugal’s just a big word for cheap.”

“Are things gonna be different someday?” I’d asked Del one night, the two of us laying in bed, him with his back to me. I ran my fingers across his shoulder when I asked it.

“Different?” he asked.

“Different from this,” I said.

He didn’t answer at first, and so I just kept rubbing his shoulder and then let my hand sneak over and rub the top of his chest, caressing it real light, because I knew he liked that. The window was slid open and a breeze rustled the edge of those thin little curtains. Just outside stood a short streetlight, one that the trailer park had put up, and sometimes it kept me awake, shining all night, like it was aiming right for my face.

After a while, I realized Del wasn’t gonna answer at all, and I stopped rubbing his chest and turned over.

That night when I couldn’t sleep, I knew it wasn’t the streetlight at all.

For this big one, this last last one, Del roamed those art galleries in downtown Taos after work at the garage. He watched the ads for gallery openings, finding a place that stressed cash only, real snooty because you know a lot of people would have to buy that artwork on time and not pay straight out for it all at once, but those weren’t the type of people they were after. He’d looked up the address of the gallery owner, the home address, and we’d driven past that too.

I liked watching his mind work: the way he’d suddenly nod just slightly when we were walking across the plaza or down the walkway between the John Dunn Shops, like he’d seen something important. Or the way his eyes narrowed and darted as we rode throughout the neighborhood where the gallery owner lived, keeping a steady speed, not turning his head, not looking as if he was looking.

We had a nice time at the gallery opening itself, too. At least at the beginning. Delwood looked smart in his blue blazer, even though it was old enough that it had gotten a little shine. And you could see how happy he was each time he saw a red dot on one of the labels — just more money added to the take — even if he first had to ask what each of those red dots meant. I hated the gallery owner’s tone when he answered that one, as if he didn’t want Del or me there drinking those plastic cups of wine or eating the cheese. But then I thought, He’ll get his, if you know what I mean. And, of course, he did.

“I like this one,” I said in front of one of the pictures. It was a simple picture — this painting stuck in the back corner. A big stretch of blue sky and then the different colored blue of the ocean, and a mistiness to it, like the waves were kicking up spray. Two people sat on the beach, a man and a woman. They sort-of leaned into one another, watching the water, and I thought about me and Del and began to feel nostalgic for something that we’d never had. The painting didn’t have a red dot on it.

“With the money,” I whispered to Delwood. “We could come back here and buy one of them, huh? Wouldn’t that be ballsy? Wouldn’t that be ironic?”

“Louise,” he said, that tone again, telling me everything.

“I’m just saying,” I said. “Can’t you picture the two of us at the ocean like that? Maybe with the money, we could take a big trip, huh?”

“Can’t you just enjoy your wine?” he whispered, and moved on to the next picture, not looking at it really, just at the label.

“Fine,” I said after him, deciding I’d just stay there and let him finish casing out the joint, but then a couple came up behind me.

“Let’s try s on this one,” the woman whispered.

“S,” said the man. “Okay. S.” They looked at the couple on the beach, and I looked with them, wondering what they meant by “trying s.” The man wrinkled his brow, squinted his eye, scratched his chin — like Del when he’s thinking, but this man seemed to be only playing at thinking. “Sappy,” he said finally.

“Sentimental,” said the woman, quick as she could.

“Um... sugary.”

“Saccharine.”

“Okay. No fair,” said the man. “You’re just playing off my words.”

The woman smirked at him. She had a pretty face, I thought. Bright blue eyes and high cheekbones and little freckles across them. She had on a gauzy top, some sort of linen, and even though it was just a little swath of fabric, you could tell from the texture of it and the way she wore it and from her herself that it was something fine. I knew, just knew suddenly, that it had probably cost more than the money Del had stolen from the 7-Eleven the night I first met him. And I knew too that I wanted a top just like it.

“Fine,” she said, pretending to pout. “Here’s another one. Schmaltzy.”

“Better! Um... sad.”

“No, this is sad,” she said, holding up her own plastic wineglass.

“Agreed,” he laughed.

“Swill,” she whispered, dragging out the s sound, just touching his hand with her fingers, and they both giggled as they moved on to the next picture. And the next letter too, it turned out. T was for tarnished, for trashy, for tragic.

Del had made the full circuit. Even from across the room, I could see the elbows shining on his blazer. Then he turned and saw me and made a little side-nod with his head, motioning toward the door. Time to head back home. Back to the trailer.

I looked once more at the painting of the couple on the beach. I’d thought it was pretty. Still did.

I’d thought the wine had tasted pretty good, too.

But suddenly it all left a bad taste in my mouth.

A bad taste still as we drove south now.

The steep turns and drop-offs that had taken us out of Taos had given way to little villages, small homes on shaded roads, people up and about, going about their lives. I saw a couple of signs pointed toward the Santuario de Chimayo, which I’d visited when I first moved out this way, picking Northern New Mexico just because it seemed different, in every way, from where I’d grown up. I’d found out about the church in Chimayo from a guidebook I’d ordered off the Internet, learned about the holy earth there and how it healed the sick. When I’d visited it myself, I gathered up some of the earth and then mailed it off to Mama — not that she was sick, but just unhappy. I don’t know what I’d imagined she’d do with it, rub it on her heart or something. “Thanks for the dirt,” she told me when she got it.

“Do you think they’ve found him yet?” I asked Del.

“They?”

“I don’t know, Del. The police. Or the cleaning lady or a customer.”

We were nearing another curve and Del eased the Nova around it slowly, carefully.

“Probably somebody will have found him by now. Like I told you last night, I tied him up pretty good, so I don’t think he’d have gotten loose on his own. But by now...”

He sped up a little bit. I don’t think he did it consciously, but I noticed.

A little while later, I asked, “Are we gonna do anything fun with the money?”

“What kind of fun?”

“I don’t know. Clothes, jewelry... a big-screen TV, a vacation. Something fun.”

He scratched his beard. “That’s just extravagance.”

“Are you gonna make all the decisions?”

“All the good ones,” he said. He gave a tense little chuckle. “Don’t you ever consider the future?”

But again, he missed what I was saying. The future is exactly what I was thinking about.

We bypassed Santa Fe proper, and then Del had us two-laning it again on a long road toward Albuquerque: miles and miles of dirt hills and scrubby little bushes, some homes that looked like people still lived there and others that were just crumbling down to nothing. The Ortiz Mountains standing way out in the distance. We got stuck for a while behind a dusty old pickup going even slower than we were, but Del was still afraid to pass. We just poked along behind the truck until it decided to turn down some even dustier old road, and every mile we spent behind it, my blood began to boil up a little more.

I know Del was picturing roadblocks out on the interstate, and helicopters swooping low, waiting for some rattling old Nova like ours to do something out of the ordinary, tip our hand — even more so after I asked about that gallery owner getting loose. But after a while, I just wanted to scream, “Go! Go! Go!” or else reach over and grab the wheel myself, stretch my leg over and press down on the gas, hurl us ahead somehow and out of all this. And then there was all the money in the trunk and all the things I thought we could have done with it but clearly weren’t going to do. Once or twice, I even thought about pulling out that pistol myself and pointing it at him. “I don’t want anybody to get hurt,” I might say, just like he would. “Just do like I ask, okay?” That was the first time I thought about it, and that wasn’t even serious.

Still, it was all I could do to hide all that impatience, all that restlessness and nervous energy. None of it helped by that tap tap tap tap tap of the mirror against the windshield. I felt like my skin was turning inside out.

“I need to pee,” I said, finally.

“Next place I see,” said Del, a little glance at me, one more glance in the rearview. I looked in the side mirror. Nothing behind us but road. I looked ahead of us. Nothing but road. I looked around the car. Just me and him and that damn mirror tapping seconds into minutes and hours and more.

We stopped in Madrid, which isn’t pronounced like the city in Spain but with the emphasis on the first syllable: MAD-rid. It used to be a mining town back in the Gold Rush days, but then dried up and became a ghost town. Now it’s a big artist’s community. I didn’t know all that when we pulled in, but there was a brochure.

We pulled up by one of the rest stops at one end of the town — outhouse, more like it. Del waited in the car, but after I was done, I tapped on his window. “I’m gonna stretch my legs,” I said, and strolled off down the street before he could answer. I didn’t care whether he followed, but pretty soon I heard the scuff scuff of his feet on the gravel behind me. I really did need a break, just a few minutes out of the car, and it did help some, even with him following. We walked on like that, him silent behind me except for his footsteps as I picked up that brochure and looked in the store windows at antiques and pottery and vintage cowboy boots. Fine arts, too. “Wanna make one last last job?” I wanted to joke. Half joke. “Get something for me this time?”

I walked in one store. Del followed. I just browsed the shelves. The sign outside had advertised “Local artisans and craftspeople,” and the store had quirky little things the way those kinds of places do: big sculptures of comical-looking cowboys made out of recycled bike parts, closeup photographs of rusted gas pumps and bramble bush, hand-dipped soy candles, gauzy-looking scarves that reminded me about the woman at the gallery the night before. I browsed through it all, taking my time, knowing that Del was right up on me, almost feeling his breath on my back.

One shelf had a bowl full of sock-monkey keychains. A little cardboard sign in front of the bowl said, “Handcrafted. $30.”

“Excuse me,” I called over to the man behind the counter. He’d been polishing something and held a red rag in his hand. “Is this the price of the bowl or of the monkeys?”

“Oh,” he said, surprised, as if he’d never imagined someone might misunderstand that. “The monkeys,” he said, then corrected himself: “Each monkey,” he said. “The bowl’s not for sale at all.”

I turned to Del.

“Why don’t you get me one of these?” I asked him, holding up a little monkey.

I tried to say it casual-like, but it was a challenge. I felt like both of us could hear it in my voice. Even the man behind the register heard it, I imagine, even though he’d made a show of going back to his polishing.

“What would you want with a thing like that?” Del said.

“Sometimes a girl likes a present. It makes her feel special.” I dangled the sock monkey on my finger in front of him, and Del watched it sway, like he was mesmerized or suspicious. “Or is the romance gone here?”

“It’s kind of pricey for a keychain.”

I leaned in close for just a second. “Why don’t you just slip it in your pocket, then?” I whispered.

Del cut his eyes toward the man behind the counter, and then turned back to me. His look said hush. “I told you last night was the last time,” he said, a low growl.

I just swayed that monkey a little more.

A woman in a green dress jingled through the door then and went up to the counter. “You were holding something for me,” she said, and the man put down his polish rag, and they started talking.

You could tell that Delwood was relieved not to have a witness anymore. “C’mon, Louise,” he said. “Be serious.”

But me? For better or worse, I just upped the ante.

“Suppose I said to you that this monkey” — I jerked my finger so that his little monkey body bounced a little — “this monkey represents love to me.”

“Love?” he said.

“The potential for love,” I clarified. “The possibility of it.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, suppose I told you that my daddy, the last time I saw him, me only six years old, he comes into my bedroom to tuck me in and he gives me a little sock-puppet monkey, bigger than this one, but looking pretty much the same” (because the truth is they all do) “and he says to me, ‘Hon, Daddy’s going away for a while, but while I’m gone, this little monkey is gonna take care of you, and any time you find yourself thinking of me or wondering about me, I want you to hug this monkey close to you, and I’ll be there with you. Wherever I am, I’ll be here with you.’ And he touched his heart.”

I wasn’t talking loud, but the man behind the counter and the customer had grown quiet, listening to me now even as they pretended not to. Del wasn’t sweating, not really, but with all the attention — two witnesses to our argument now — he looked like he was or was just about to break out into one.

“And my mom was behind him, leaned against the door watching us,” I said. “Anyone probably could have seen from her face that he wasn’t coming back and that it was her fault and she felt guilty, but I was too young to know that then. And I dragged that monkey around with me every day and slept with it every night and hugged it close. And finally my mom threw it away, which told me the truth. ‘Men let you down,’ she told me when I cried about it, because she’d just broken up with her latest boyfriend and had her own heart broken, I guess. ‘Men let you down,’ she told me. ‘Don’t you ever fool yourself into forgetting that.’ And I stopped crying. But still, whatever my mama told me and whether my daddy came back or not, I believed — I knew — that there had been love there, there in that moment, in that memory, you know?”

Del looked over at the wall, away from the shopkeeper and his customer, and stared at this sculpture of a cowboy on a bucking bronco — an iron silhouette. The tilt of his head and the nervous look in his eyes reminded me of the first night we’d met, at the 7-Eleven, when he’d called me “ma’am” and I’d told him my age. Seemed like here was another conversation where he was playing catch-up, but this time he seemed fearful for different reasons.

“And maybe,” I said, helping him along, “just maybe if you bought this for me, I’d know you really loved me, for always and truly. Now,” I said, “would that get it through your thick skull?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an embarrassed look on the storekeeper’s face — embarrassed for Del and maybe a little embarrassed for me, too. His customer, the woman in green, cleared her throat, and the shopkeeper said, “Yes, ma’am, I’ll get that for you.”

Del shifted his lower jaw to the side — another indication, I’d learned, that his mind was working on something, weighing things. He really was sweating now, and still staring at that bucking-bronco sculpture like he felt some kinship with the cowboy on top, like staring at it might give him an answer somehow.

“What was your monkey’s name?” he asked me.

I gave out a long sigh, with an extra dose of irritation in it. He was missing the whole point, just like always. “I don’t know,” I told him. I sighed again. “Murphy,” I said.

His look changed then, just a little crease of the forehead, a little raise of the eyebrow. “Murphy the monkey?” he said. He wasn’t looking at the sculpture now, wasn’t looking afraid anymore but something else entirely. “Well, Louise,” he began. “I don’t really think that this monkey represents the love we share, and the truth is that thirty dollars seems like quite a bit for—”

But I didn’t hear the rest of it. I just turned and walked off, out the door, slamming it behind me the way I’d slammed the Nova’s door that morning and stomping off fast back toward the car.

I can’t say whether I wanted him to call for me to come back or rush out after me, something dramatic like that, but if I did, I was indeed fooling myself, just like Mama had warned. That wasn’t Delwood. When I got in the car, I saw him through the window, slowly coming back — those sad little footsteps behind me, scuff scuff scuff. No hurry at all, like he knew I’d be waiting.

We rode on in silence after that — a heavy silence, you know what I mean. More ghost towns where people used to have hopes and dreams and now there was nothing but a little bit of rubble and a long stretch of empty land. I wasn’t even angry now, just deflated, disappointed.

“Men will do that to you,” my mama told me another time. “After a while you feel like it’s not even worth trying.” I’d known what she meant, theoretically. Now I knew in a different way.

Soon the two-lane widened, and the strip malls started up and fast-food restaurants — civilization. I saw a Wendy’s and asked if it was okay to stop.

“I’ll pick from the dollar menu,” I said, sarcastic-like.

Del didn’t say anything, just pulled through the drive-thru and ordered what I wanted. He didn’t get anything for himself. I think it was just out of spite.

Toward evening, we stopped at a motel in Kingman, Arizona, one of those cheap ones that have been there since Route 66 was an interesting road and not just a tourist novelty — the ones that now looked like they’d be rented for the hour by people who didn’t much care what the accommodations were like.

Del checked us in, pulled the Nova around to the stairwell closest to our room.

“Get your kicks,” I said.

“Kicks?” he said, baffled.

“Route 66,” I said, pointing to a sign. “Guess we couldn’t afford the Holiday Inn either, huh?”

He stared straight ahead, drummed his fingers light against the steering wheel. He curled up his bottom lip a little and chewed on his beard.

“You know those court shows you watch on TV?” Del said finally. “And how you tell me some of those people are so stupid? You listen to their stories and you laugh and you tell me, ‘That’s where they went wrong,’ or ‘They should’ve known better than that.’ ”

“Do you mean,” I said, “something like a man who robs a convenience store and then calls up the clerk he’s held at gunpoint and asks her out for a date?” I felt bad about it as soon as I said it. Part of why I fell in love with him and now I was complaining about it.

“There were extenuating circumstances in that instance,” he said, and this warning sound had crept into his tone, one that I hadn’t heard before. “I’m just saying that we need to be fairly circumspect now about whatever we do. Any misstep might put us in front of a real judge, and it won’t be a laughing matter, I can assure you.” He turned to face me. “Louise,” he said, again that way he does. “I love you, Louise, but sometimes... Well, little girl, sometimes you just don’t seem to be thinking ahead.”

It was the little girl that got me, or maybe the extenuating or the circumspect, or maybe just him implying that I was being stupid, or maybe all of it, the whole day.

“Del,” I said through clenched teeth, putting a little emphasis on his name, too. “I’ve always said that I love you. But sometimes, Del, sometimes, I could just kill you.”

He nodded. “Well,” he said, slow and even as always, but still with that edge of warning to it, “I guess you’d go to jail for that too.” He handed the room key across to where I sat. “You go on in. I got a couple of things to rearrange in the trunk.”

“Fine,” I said, toughening the word up so he could hear how I felt. He stared at me for a second, then went back to get our bags. In the rearview, I watched the lid of the trunk lift up, but still I just sat there.

I don’t know how to describe what I was feeling. Anger? Sadness? I don’t know what was running through my head, either. What to do next, I guess. Whether to go up to the room and carry on like we’d planned, like he seemed to expect I’d do, or to step out of all this, literally just step out of the car and start walking in another direction.

But then I knew if I really did leave, he’d come after me. Not dramatic, not begging, but I knew he wouldn’t let me go. Can’t live without you, that’s what he’d said, and like Mama said, sometimes that kind of love could turn ugly fast. I’d seen it before.

“You just gonna sit there?” Del called out, just a voice behind the trunk lid. Still rearranging, I guess.

“No. I’m going up,” I called back, calling to the reflection of the trunk lid, I realized. Then, just before I stepped out of the car, I opened up the glove compartment and slipped the gun into my purse.

In the motel room, I locked the door to the bathroom, set down my purse, and then turned the water on real hot before climbing in. I stood there in the steam and rubbed that little-bitty bar of soap over me, washing like I had layers of dust from those two-lane roads and that truck we’d followed for so long.

I thought about what would happen after I got out. “Sometimes people are just too far apart in their wants,” I could say. “I do love you, Del, but sometimes people just need to move on.” It was just a matter of saying it. It would be easy to do, I knew. With or without the gun. But the gun showed I was serious. The gun was protection. “I’m not taking all the money, Del,” I might say. “That’s not what’s going on here. That’s not the point.” As if he had ever got the point.

I took both towels when I got out of the shower. The steam swirled around me while I stood there toweling myself off — one towel wrapped around me and one towel for my hair, leaving him none.

Would he try to talk me out of it? Would he try to take the gun away? Would I have to tie him up and leave him there the way he’d left that gallery owner back in Taos? Just thinking about it left me sad.

He was sitting there when I came out of the bathroom, sitting on the one chair in the room, staring at the blank television. I hadn’t taken the gun out, just held my purse in my hand, feeling the weight of it in there. Thinking that I might have to use it, I suddenly wished I’d gotten dressed first. I mean, picture it: me wrapped in two towels and holding a gun? Hardly a smooth getaway.

Del’s face was... well, pensive was the word that came to mind. He taught me that word, I thought, even then. I wouldn’t have known it without him. And that kept me from saying immediately what I needed to say. So I just stood there, feeling little bits of water still dripping out of my hair and onto my shoulders and then down my back.

“You never talked much about your daddy,” he said, breaking the silence. “He really leave you when you were six?”

“Yes,” I said, and I realized then that I felt like I was owed something for that.

Del nodded, stared at the blank television. I looked there too, at the gray curve of the screen. I could see his face there, reflected toward me, kind of distorted, distant.

“He really give you a sock monkey when he left?”

I thought about that, too, but I was thinking now about what I owed Del.

“No,” I told him, and I could hear the steel in my own voice. “But what my mama said, she did say that.”

I stared hard at the dusty TV screen, at his reflection there. I saw then that his fists were clenched, and that he clenched them a little tighter at my answer, and I could feel myself tighten too. I knew then that he knew the pistol was gone. I didn’t take my eyes off that reflection as I pulled up the strap of my pocketbook, just in case he stood up quick and rushed me. But he dropped his head down a little, and then I saw his profile in the reflection, which meant he’d turned to see me straight on.

“So you lied to me, then?” He was clenching his hand hard, so much that if I’d been closer, I might have backed away. But there was a bed between us. And the pocketbook was open in my hand.

“If that’s what you want to take from it.”

His eyes watched me hard. Those green eyes. First thing I’d really noticed about him up close.

“Do you believe your mama was right?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

Those eyes narrowed. Thinking again. And it struck me that I could just about list every little thing he did when he was pondering over something: how he sometimes stared hard at something or other times stared off into space with this faraway gaze, running his fingers through his hair or through the tip of his beard, shifting his jaw one way or the other. Usually left, I corrected myself. Always to the left. And sure enough, just as I thought it, he shifted his jaw just that way, setting it in place.

I almost laughed despite myself. Men always let you down, Mama had said, but Del had come through with his little jaw jut exactly like expected. At least you could count on him for that. And all of a sudden, I felt embarrassed for having taken that gun from the glove compartment, just wanted to run out in my towel and put it back.

“Do you want a surprise?” he asked, and I almost laughed again.

“It’s a long drive back to Our Place.”

“A new surprise.”

“Sure,” I said.

“The story we told back at the trailer park, about me having a sister out in Victorville,” he said then. “I really do. Haven’t talked to her in a while. We were estranged.” He stretched out the word. “But I told her I wanted to go straight — was going straight. She’s in real estate. Got us a deal she worked out on a foreclosure. A little house. Said she’d let me do some work for her, at her company, now that I have a degree. It’s all worked out. I just needed to get the down-payment on it, so I figured, well, one more job. One big one and that’d be it.” He tapped his hand on the side of the chair, like you would tap your fingers, but his whole hand because it was still clenched. I think it was the most words he’d ever said in one breath. “That’s my surprise.”

Part of me wanted to go over to him, but I didn’t. Don’t you ever fool yourself into forgetting, I heard Mama saying. I stood right in the doorway, dripping all over the floor, all over myself.

“I stole that painting you wanted, too,” he said, as if he was embarrassed to admit it. “We can’t hang it in the house, at least not the living room, not where anyone might see, but you can take it out and look at it sometimes, maybe, if you want. It’s out in the trunk now if you want me to get it.” He gave a big sigh, the kind he might give late at night when he was done talking, as if he might just pretend to be asleep. But something else in his face this time, some kind of struggle, like he wanted to go quiet, but wanted to say something too. “But I was serious about that being the last one,” he said finally. “This is a new day and I want to do it right. So I paid for this.”

He opened his fist then. The little sock monkey was in it. Crushed a little in his grip, but there it was.

“I knew that story wasn’t true, about your daddy,” he said. “I knew it while you were telling it. But it being true or not, that wasn’t the point, was it?”

I smiled and shook my head. No no no, that wasn’t the point. And yes yes yes, too, of course.

Needless to say, I didn’t kill him. And I didn’t take my half and hit the highway.

When we got in the car the next day, I almost didn’t see the rust along the wheel well, and I closed the door so soft that I almost didn’t hear that loose metal rolling around inside. While Delwood packed the trunk, I slipped that pistol into the glove compartment, just like it had been in the first place. I didn’t touch it again.

As Delwood drove us along 66 and out of town, I rolled down the window and kicked up my heels a little, leaned over against him.

You might imagine that I was stuck on that $5000 painting in the trunk and that house ahead, and partly I was, but again you’d be missing the point. It was the sock monkey that meant the most to me. Light as a trinket but with a different kind of weight to it. When I hung it from the rearview mirror, the rattle there died down almost to a whisper, and it all seemed like a smoother ride ahead for a while.