To look at her, you might have thought Darla was closing in on forty, but she was twenty-eight. She had met her husband, Bobby, at a motorcycle rally in Loudon. Not too many women came to the track at Loudon on their own bike—as opposed to riding on the back of some man’s—but Darla did. A Suzuki 350.
Eleanor didn’t know anything about motorcycles.
“For your information,” Darla said. “A three fifty isn’t the kind of bike a person takes to Loudon. But I was just happy having any bike. Bought with my own damn money.”
“I never won anything in my life,” Darla told her. “But I used to buy a lottery ticket every Friday, and one week they pulled my number. Two thousand dollars. That’s how I ended up with the Suzuki.”
She went to motorcycle school and everything. “I wasn’t going to be like my mother, with a houseful of kids and a drunk husband by the time she was thirty, sweeping the floor at a beauty parlor for three dollars an hour,” Darla said. “I had this plan to ride my bike to California, camping along the way. Not that I knew what I’d do when I got there but it was 1967, you know? Summer of Love.”
Then came Bobby. For a good ten minutes she thought the love might be right there, at the Loudon track. “He was sweet to me that time,” she said. “He had this shirt on that said, ‘If you’re gonna do it, do it on a Harley.’
“First thing he said, when he came up to me at the rally, was ‘You actually ride this thing? Or is it, like, an accessory?’
“That’s Bobby for you. Master of the putdown,” Darla said. But at the time it hadn’t bothered her. That’s how her dad always was, until he ran off with his second cousin. And Bobby was funny. Used to be, anyway.
He told her she didn’t need a bike of her own. She could have a seat on the back of his. He’d take her to California.
“Big talk,” Darla said. “Bobby’s whole family comes from Akersville. Grandparents, stepdad, half sisters, you name it. The guy’s never been farther than Salisbury Beach. He just said those things to get in my pants.”
The biggest mistake of her life was selling the Suzuki, she said. They used the money for a down payment on their trailer. Three months later, what do you know, there’s a baby on the way.
Robert Junior was born with a hole in his heart. (“Took after his father,” Darla said. “Bad joke.”) He lived seven months.
“I could’ve still got out at that point. Nothing keeping me besides the damn mobile home. But you know what happened? After I lost Robert Junior, all I wanted was another baby. That was Kimmie.”
She was four years old now. “Light of my life, I’m telling you,” Darla said. “One thing’s for sure, no way she’s ending up in a double-wide with a guy that stays up all night watching TV.”
They didn’t even ride together anymore, Darla told Eleanor. She could, but there was Kimmie to consider. “If it was just me out on the road, going ninety up Route 89, I’d take my chances. But I’m not going to leave my kid without a mom, you know?
“You’ve got the right idea,” she said to Eleanor, looking out the porch screen at the field below the house, where Eleanor and Walt had planted her vegetable garden. “No man telling you what to do. Nothing holding you down except the dog, and all he’s going to do is lick your hand and wag his tail. Right, Charlie?”
He thumped his tail on the floor.
After that it got to be a regular thing. The two of them would sit in Eleanor’s kitchen while Kimmie played with the Monopoly piecesor colored with Eleanor’s pencils and Darla told Eleanor stories from her life or offered her observations of the world beyond Akersville that she’d never gotten to explore.
“Can you believe that Patty Hearst?” Darla said. She might be the daughter of a millionaire, growing up in San Francisco and all (San Francisco!The place Darla was heading when she met Bobby), but in a funny way, Darla identified with her.
“She had it all,” Darla said. “Then she meets this guy and he takes her away and they start robbing banks. Next thing you know, she’s calling herself Tania and she’s on the front page wearing some damned camo gear, holding an M16.”
According to Darla, this was what love did to a person. You got brainwashed.
She stayed home with her daughter now. She would’ve liked to work, but Bobby wouldn’t let her. He had lots of opinions about how she was supposed to be.
“It could be worse,” she said. “He could be on drugs. He knocks me around sometimes but nothing serious.”
She cleaned houses for summer people. Bobby didn’t know anything about the housecleaning jobs. He wouldn’t like it if he did. The only house Darla was supposed to clean was their own. His house, actually. That’s how he put it.
When she had enough set aside, she was going to use it for a down payment on an apartment for her and Kimmie. Not in this town. Someplace far away. Manchester, maybe, or even Boston.
“I always wanted to go to college,” she said. She knew this probably sounded weird, but she wanted to get certified to be an undertaker.
“Some people might find that kind of work creepy,” she told Eleanor, “but dead people don’t bother me. Plus, you deal with the families. You work with people at the saddest time in their life. If you do a good job, you can make a difference.”
“If I told any of this to Bobby, he’d belt me,” she told Eleanor. “But it’s OK. I’m getting out soon.”
Darla did most of the talking, those afternoons on the porch. Shehad a lot to say, and Eleanor was probably the only one she could say it to. But one afternoon, Eleanor told her what had happened with Matt Hallinan.
“Let’s make an oath,” Darla said. “One of these days, you’re going to stick it to that guy. Same as one of these days I’m leaving Bobby in my dust. We just have to wait for our moment.”
