Chapter Twelve
Heather

There was an intense resilience that came with every bite of sweet and sour chicken. The food court was too bright, and the sounds were candied, dripping with sugar. People were not people but the carnival versions of themselves. Teenaged girls were barely dressed. Children screamed bright red. Blood vessels were bursting in their cheeks. But the chicken blurred her recognition with each sweet bite.

Flesh in teeth, Heather listened to the soft and welcomed sound of grinding. She remembered the first day she had started truly eating again, breaking her middle school pledge to avoid all food, especially the stuff that caked the pans in her mother’s kitchen. If it hadn’t been for plucking the good parts from Amber and Rachel’s lunches and later inhaling plastic cupped samples from the Manor Market, she probably wouldn’t have survived long enough to create the plan linking her to Wyland forever. 

It was a warm afternoon the summer before her senior year, just a few weeks after the gnome lost its face. She started working at Aurelio’s, the Italian sandwich shop two storefronts down from Turnbull Realty. It was the only place she had applied to, the only place within walking distance of Wyland’s summer job that she knew would automatically hire her. Aurelio had a temper, and none of the kids in the competing high schools wanted anything to do with him, not even for a paycheck. But Heather was willing to sacrifice for even the smallest glimpse of Wyland answering the phone, a pencil distracted with the curls above his ear.

The work was easy enough. Ten o’clock in, six o’clock out. Heather’s father had recently wired her money for a new car, a present wrapped with an imaginary bow as wide and long as his guilt. She took the bus by herself to the lot pretending she knew enough not to get swindled, and when she left, she fit snugly in a powder blue Corolla. Her palm was slick from shaking hands with a salesman named Gabe, who kept eying a blond walking through the maze of cars in her stringy pair of cutoffs.

“Want to trade jobs?” Heather had been wrist deep in pizza dough, kneading a fleshy mound and beating her palms into the subconscious worry that a slanted stack of papers would surely fall onto her mother before six. She looked up and there his face was, his green eyes. The two determined lips she had taken to describing in the journal she stuffed nightly in her underwear drawer.

“Only if your father isn’t hell bent on minimum wage,” Heather said. She regretted the personal taste of it, mentioning Wyland’s father as if she willingly swung from every branch of his family tree. But Wyland just smirked in his blue button-down and green checkered tie, his shirt sleeves rolled up so a fine golden sheen haloed from his forearms. 

“How have you been?” he asked.

The truth was trying to swivel up her spine to find her tongue, but she quickly smiled and said, “Great.  Really great.” The truth never changed clothes. It was always dressed in her mother’s cotton nightgown—in the stink that carpeted their hardwood floors and the late-night trips she took to Manor Market for packs of bras and economy sized boxes of tampons she bought with the money her father sent to support them. Sometimes, the lady would still be working, the one peddling Swedish meatballs or nacho cheese the color of a dying sun. Heather would take a tiny bowl of orange glue from the lady’s gloved hand and furtively scoop it with its accompanying shards of tortilla chips. Her fingers, warm and coated. Her mouth, sticky. It felt like sinning.

She smiled when Wyland smiled. “What can I get you?” 

His order was for the whole office, but when it came to his sandwich, he made sure she knew it was for him. “White please, can’t stand wheat.” She nodded and got to work on the four sandwiches and three salads and tried to still the nervous chill threatening to loosen her bowels. She watched him sit in one of the booths, his back to her so she could play with his hair in her mind. He paid, a check scribbled with his father’s name, and when she said, “Bye” she bit her lip and refrained from obsessing over the fact that he hadn’t called but ordered in person. 

Bologna on white, lettuce, tomato, and pickles. Mustard no mayo. Swiss cheese. She made it for break, putting a handful of grimy cash into the register and ate it in one of the booths as Gina, Aurelio’s wife, complained about the lack of customers. There were several starts and stops in Heather’s chest as the fear of Wyland walking back in to find her eating his favorite sandwich ruined her gut. She couldn’t finish it, tossing the mess of it in the trash and then locked herself in the bathroom. She vomited it up. The taste of bologna plagued her breath into evening.

She made it every day though, after he’d come in, and they’d deepen their conversations.  Favorite TV shows, places they’d visited (Heather had lied through her anxious teeth), colleges they’d apply to in the fall.

“University of Chicago? Me, too,” she said, and his smile was golden, his broad mouth taking on a shade close to that of his curls. A lie, of course. She hadn’t even thought about Chicago, but she liked that it was far away from her mother. And close enough to Wyland.

It seemed like thousands of afternoons of conversations, of half-eaten sandwiches, of toilet bowls filled with her nervous stomach. Then the afternoon came that split Heather like a hair.

“Shut up, I’m not. You are.” The voice was silk, laughing through Aurelio’s opened glass door. The bell tinkled. Heather’s stomach said “Hello,” in her ears.

“Hey Heather, the usual. And what do you want, Vienna?” Wyland said, shoulder-to-shoulder with something that towered beautifully above Heather’s five-two frame. Vienna Oaks.  It was like seeing a celebrity in person. Or the one human being Heather would have liked eradicated from the earth.

“Oh, um. I don’t care. Whatever Wyland’s having.” She didn’t look Heather in the eye. Even the high school version, the full-breasted, small-waisted Vienna was still scared of Heather, hair net and all. Heather nodded and assembled the meats and cheeses like cards in a deck. Her hands processed each order until she forgot they were strictly a part of her and not something gratefully separate from the struggle inside her chest. 

“It’s ready,” she said when the sandwiches were packed cigar tight in white paper and the salads were housed in their boxes. She wanted to say more as Wyland came up and stood at the register, Vienna still invisibly straight-jacketed in a booth. But a line formed behind him. For the first time in weeks, a solid stream of lunch customers.

“Thanks. See you Monday?” he asked, and she nodded. She served straight through until break when the crowd calmed, and no one was left except for Heather and Gina, who complained about “Heartbreak Hotel” drifting through the radio. Heather didn’t pay for one sandwich that lunch break. She paid for three. She couldn’t feel Gina’s eyes burning through her back as she made each one with a determined set of hands. She couldn’t hear the sad leak of music or the cars snorting out in the street when she sat down to eat. All she could taste was bologna and mustard tangled in lettuce and the pleasure of knowing she would be attending college with Wyland in the fall if it were the last thing she did. 

She didn’t vomit any of it.

The sweet and sour chicken was gone. Heather had been staring into space, and now that space was filled with the damaged heads of teenagers. One of them, a boy with a hook in his lip mimicked her, staring like a dead fish until she blinked and gathered her plates. The table erupted in laughter; someone called her an idiot. Nobody stopped, not even as she managed her belly in full view. Her throat was burning. She wanted to release her tears so badly that the thought worked methodically at her muscles. But she kept them in, swallowed the heat. She threw her trash away and hitched her bag up on her shoulder. Heather headed to the women’s department.

She hadn’t been shopping in a large stretch of time. She purchased a few things online, things she prayed would make themselves scarce on their credit card bill before Wyland saw it, but there was no use hoping for that. She was always let down.

“A hundred and fifty dollars. For pants?” Wyland would read off the bills like table reading a script. He’d wait a beat then hit the punch line with inscrutable force. “A pair of pants that will last you a few more months and then what? You planning on starting a handmade tent business?”  Ba-dum-dum.

She’d sit as still as possible during these monthly reports, her bladder reaching into all parts of herself, sneaking into her ears and saying horrid things like, “Just release me, it will feel wonderful. Plus, this is his favorite chair. That’ll show the jerk.” She’d ignore the voice no matter how much sense it made and opted for growing Wyland’s curls in her mind until he became the boy she had known by heart.

“It’s just hard being around Amber and Rachel and not having anything nice...” She’d become those girls she always hated during these conversations. The girls she’d label mousy, spineless, their song fashioned from repetitious squeaks and the overwhelming need to please.

“Nice? I’m working my tail end off for ‘nice’? We have a plan, Heather, a budget. And if we actually stick to it, we’ll have money to—oh I don’t know—retire one day in a place that has a roof and indoor plumbing. If your friends are so concerned with how you dress, then why do you bother with them anyway?” His face was not the boy’s she had known by heart. The boy she had known by heart had bought an ugly recliner on a whim. But the man she lived with had a face that twisted like his father’s did when the holidays came but the sales didn’t. There would be turkey and a side of silence while Owen Turnbull worked reality out in his head. His youngest son functioned the same way, his thoughts hardwired in the nerves of his face.

“I have no one else,” Heather would reply, and the conversation would boil forth, but she’d be stuck in that one moment no matter how high and hard Wyland’s arms would reach to the sky. She had no one else. Yes, that was the truth of it. But the other truth was a stone she set to polishing in the evenings, the mornings, and the chunk of time sitting fat and squat in the middle. It was knowing that her friendship with two people whose husbands made more, did better in life than her own, was to spite Wyland and to make sure he knew what it felt like to be “less than.” She wasn’t sure it was working.

Her eyes adjusted to Macy's, a dull light that lit the path of Heather’s thoughts. She avoided the mirrors knowing they were only good for noticing panty lines and her goiter of a stomach. She pressed her palm there, felt for Dolores’s jumpy limbs. 

Her husband had wanted a boy. So did his father. It was an unsettling string knotted around her ankles knowing other people had wanted to place their bets on her uterus and knowing full well that all they’d get in return was disappointment. That was the sharpest pin that stabbed, that someone could take something so perfect and send their expectations through it like a hairline fracture. 

But Dolores didn’t seem to mind. She was strong, and punching, and reminded Heather that bucking up was the only option on the table. And that’s why Heather couldn’t blame Vienna for trying to break her down, slicing her chest and opening her wide. Vienna’s child wasn’t a real thing inside her yet, a purpose. Vienna had nothing to stop her tongue and straighten her upright. She could only fold cheap, table-like, and pray that the man who had done the damage would free her on his own accord.

Heather felt unnaturally sorry for Vienna Oaks.

“Can I help you?” A saleslady said, “Melinda” engraved on her nametag, sharp sticks poking out of the bun in her hair. Her lips were too red and were the only things Heather could focus on, especially when the lady snarled her nose. She could smell the urine that had dried in the fabric of Heather’s sweats.

“No. Just looking for something for my mom.” Heather shouldered through the racks and touched a set of blue polyester jackets for effect. 

“Let me know if you need anything,” Melinda squawked ten feet away from Heather, the stench pushing her back practically to the purse counter. Heather nodded and kept smacking the hangers with her swollen fingers, the sound crushing the realization that her pregnant brain had driven her to the mall in a pair of urine-stained pants.

“The maternity section is upstairs.” Another voice but this one inches behind her. Heather didn’t want to turn around. She spotted the exit mere yards ahead and weighed her options. Sprinting would probably not be in her best interest. 

“Or are you picking out an apology gift for me?”

Heather turned around, slowly soaking in the dull-colored racks under the dull-colored lights until Amber’s jolt-red hair seized her pupils. 

“My mom needs an outfit for her funeral tomorrow. She’s dead. Remember?” Heather said, turning back to the racks, a circuitous prayer wrapping around her fingers like rosary beads: Please don’t let her smell the pee.

“I haven’t forgotten. In fact, I want to say I’m sorry. I was going to call you later, but now that you’re here... Do you smell that? Geez, this place is really going to pot. The least they could do is clean their carpets.” Heather nodded, a laugh escaping her nostrils. She disguised it with her hand and pretended she had sneezed.

“Are you okay? You don’t look too great.” That makes two of us, Heather thought as Amber forced her way into Heather’s line of sight. Amber’s eyes were lost in the dark heavy flesh settling beneath them. Her teeth were stained with pink lipstick, and where the concealer around her nostrils had faded revealed a pathway of intersecting blood vessels. A button on her top was nestled in the wrong hole, and when she moved, Heather could see her bra peeping through the gap. 

“I know it must be rough because of your mom. Heather, I just don’t think you really understand what you’re doing with Vienna. It’s not healthy.”

“And you know healthy?” Heather bit her lip, but the words still slipped. For a moment she could see it in Amber’s eyes, the empty bottles of wine, the messes her daughters made, paying a mortgage that teetered sky high above a pediatrician’s salary. Waving all of it away with her diamond-ringed fingers. 

Amber swallowed, and Heather waited while her bladder and nerves started to speak up. 

“Listen, I’d like to be there for you tomorrow. I put Sienna and Sierra in that preschool program I was telling you about, so I’ll be free.”

Heather could feel her bladder releasing but she quickly put a stop to it. “What?”

“Got them the best program in Blythesville, seven days a week. Wouldn’t dare put them in at Burling Gates. Gag me,” Amber said, her pointer finger reaching for the back of her throat. Amber reverted to her typical antics, and Heather felt compelled to roll her eyes high in her head but restrained herself. 

“I just need some time to recuperate from the Bonnie thing. That's why I let Rachel drag me to this poor excuse of a mall while she buys that kid another outfit it doesn't need." Amber looped her pointer finger through the delicate chain of her necklace. "I mean, how am I supposed to raise the girls when I can’t even get my head together?” Heather didn’t know how to answer that. Despite Amber looking a tad off her game, she was the one with gold bangles on her wrists and diamonds in her ears, whereas Heather was the one scented in her own bodily fluids. 

“But anyway, I want to be there for you. And I don’t want us to fight.” While Amber studied an unruly cuticle, Heather assessed her situation. She wanted nothing to do with Amber, but she knew Wyland wanted her to have nothing to do with Amber too. Her spite won out.

“Sure. That would be great. I’m sorry too,” she added, the lie dissolving like a bitter lozenge in her throat. At the very least there would be someone in her corner when the casket closed, and her existence boiled down to herself and a being that hadn’t even witnessed life’s globed brutality yet. Even if Amber’s motive was purely guilt alleviating, Heather would take it, if not for her own sake, then to punish Vienna and Wyland for abandoning her. For leaving her powerless.

“Good. I’ll be there in the morning. And call me tonight if you need to talk or anything,” Amber said, bull rushing Heather into a wine-scented hug. The past seeped through their skins, and Heather’s memory kick started, landing into a sleepover at Amber’s years ago. Amber had woken up in the middle of the night catching Heather mid-cry in the bathroom, and the white-cold feel of that moment traveled through the racks in the department store. Moonlight had segmented an orange slice onto the tile floor. Heather’s body silent, a wind shaking through her nerves like loosely tethered leaves. Amber nodding in an oversized Alf t-shirt, an “I’m sorry” quiet on her lips because Heather’s dad was gone. He would never come back. And Amber would never say a word to anyone about it. 

“Thanks.” The word was weak and traveled to Heather’s feet, but Amber smiled at her anyway. 

"Do you guys smell that?" Rachel shuffled in behind Amber with both fists clutching a series of Macy's bags, Viola seemingly duck taped to her front in a wrap carrier.

"Yeah, let’s get out of here before the stench premeditates," Amber said.

"Permeates?" Rachel asked.

"Well, ladies and gentlemen, this year's spelling bee winner has graced us with her presence," Amber said, whipping her arm out and barely missing Viola's head. "See you tomorrow," she said to Heather, who nodded as Rachel hissed, "Sorry about your mother."

They left to enter the cavity of the candy-coated mall, and Heather did the only thing that would make the moment easier to cradle in her hands. She stole.

It wasn’t the nicest outfit. It didn’t even look like her mother. It was the color of a swollen bruise, and the skirt was the type of thing nobody would be comfortable wearing a lifetime in death. But it didn’t have a security tag, and nobody said the thing had to fit. So, Heather shoved it into her bag, a stench-scarred Melinda at the parameter of her vision. She decided to go out the exit to her right and walk around to her car parked near the food court. The air would do her good or at least keep her knees from buckling. 

As she walked scot-free to the set of glass double doors, she glimpsed herself in a trailing mirror. 

She really needed a shower.