“No, I have not,” I answered. “I was almost fourteen, and Frank promised that I could have a fake ID on my birthday so I could play cards. You saw my picture at that age. I matured really early. Anyway, we were at one of those backroom games that drew in the kinds of guys you might expect. Frank was on a losing streak and had thrown his last chips into the pot. He lost again and was ready to leave the table. That’s when a man who had been watching me with ...” I paused andtried to find the right words. “He didn’t look like Buddy, but he had those same creepy eyes. Anyway, he said that Frank had something he wanted, and he would give him five thousand dollars in chips for one night with me.”
Rosie gasped. “You poor child.”
“Of course, Frank said no, and we left the game, but he hesitated and looked over his shoulder at me before he turned the guy down. There were other offers like that, but by that time I had my ID, and I made the decisions, not Frank.”
“I’m so sorry that you had to live through that,” Rosie said.
I shrugged. “Life is not all rainbows and unicorn farts. I read on a T-shirt once that experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. Do you still want to talk about tonight?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “We both need to get that taste out of our mouths.”
I took a long drink, and it did help take away the memory. “You are already up past your bedtime.”
She patted the place beside her on the sofa. “If you ain’t done telling me all about it by midnight, we will stop and finish up tomorrow morning.”
“It started out really well,” I said, and went on to tell her about the kiss on the side of the road, and the restaurant. “That place was so romantic, Rosie, with crystal chandeliers and fancy leather chairs. And then his parents showed up.”
“You are joking, right? Did he know they were coming? I’ll strangle him if he sprung this on you out of the clear blue sky.”
“I’m serious as a heart attack, and he was as surprised as I was.” I told her about Julia and as near as I could remember what had been said.
She scowled and shook her finger at me. “Don’t ever let anyone, and I mean no one—not Julia Armstrong, or Jackson, or whichever Armstrong—make you feel inferior. No matter how much you love a person, they are not worth giving up your peace to stay around them.You handled that situation well, and I couldn’t be prouder of you if I was really your mama.”
I didn’t even try to keep the tears from flowing down my cheeks. “You don’t know how much that means to me, Rosie.”
She handed me a box of tissues from a tiny end table. “Dry your eyes. I’m speaking the truth.”
Black mascara mixed with my tears and left long streaks on the tissue. “How did you get so wise?”
“Like you said, ‘Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted,’” she answered.
I pondered over what she said for several seconds. “Amen to that. I wanted to go to Vegas, but I got the Tumbleweed instead.”
“I wanted to have a happy ever after marriage, but I got the Tumbleweed instead, so we are enough alike to be kinfolk even if we don’t share a drop of that DNA stuff everyone seems to be taken with,” she said in a wistful tone.
I gave the tissue box back to her. “I would gladly claim you for my mama.”
“Thank you for that, and I meant what I said about not letting anyone control you. I thought if I found a good man in the church, one who had the same values that I had, then I could spend my life with him. Raise a bunch of kids and die with a big family gathered around me, singing hymns when I made that transition from a physical body to a spiritual one.”
“I take it that didn’t happen, since you wound up at the Tumbleweed, too.”
She barely nodded and took a deep breath before she went on. “What I’m about to tell you goes no further than the walls of this trailer. Do you understand?”
I felt a yawn coming on, but I stifled it. No way in the universe would I ever stop her from telling me her story. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I will be forty-eight years old in July. Thirty years ago, about the time you were born, I gave birth to a stillborn little girl. She was full term and perfect, but she never took a breath. I was eighteen and hadbeen married for ten months. Her birth broke me. Not spiritually or mentally, but physically. I could never have another child.” She stopped talking.
“I’m so sorry.” I couldn’t help crying more tears.
“I was a smart student and graduated a year early, and I’d grown up with the man I was in love with, so we got married on my eighteenth birthday. We went to church every time the doors were open, volunteered for fundraisers, and even taught the four- to five-year-old Sunday school class.”
“Catholics have Sunday school?” I asked.
“No,theyhave catechism, but in those days, I wasn’t in the faith that I am now. Fred and I worshipped in a nondenominational place that was very radical in their beliefs. My parents had gone there my whole life, and they abided by the ‘rules.’” She air-quoted the last word. “It’s what Fred and I both knew, so I was prepared to be a submissive wife.”
“You?” I almost choked on the idea.
“Yes, and I did a fairly good job of it, until we got a new preacher who was very charismatic and began to make new rules. The first one was that to keep men’s minds pure during services, the women would sit on one side and the men on the other side of the center aisle.”
