The Grand Marquis Across the Highway

Jesse pulled off the two-lane and into the gas station without signaling, which is how I knew he had already made up his mind about something.

He put the truck in park beside the air pump and did not turn off the engine.

“Last time I’m asking, Amber,” he said. He did not raise his voice. Jesse never yells. He just gets quieter and quieter until you have to lean in to hear how bad it is.

“And it’s the last time I’m answering,” I said. “That money is Kaylee’s braces. The appointment is Thursday. They want nineteen hundred down or they don’t put a single bracket on her.”

He looked straight out the windshield at the ice machine. A man in a seed cap came out of the station with a bag of chips and a fountain drink and climbed into his own truck.

The radio was still going, low, some preacher out of Springfield.

“Dusty’s sitting in that jail,” Jesse said. “The bondsman wants nineteen hundred to write it. You’ve got nineteen hundred. I don’t see what’s hard about this.”

“It’s hard because it’s not ours to give,” I said. “It’s hers.”

We had spent the whole of that Saturday at his mother’s place, eighty-some miles west of us and a little south.

Jean had made fried chicken and green beans with bacon and a sheet cake, because it was her birthday, and the whole meal had been about Dusty without anybody saying his name until the dishes were done.

Then Jean said it. She sat at the kitchen table with her coffee and her reading glasses pushed up in her hair and said, “I just can’t stand thinking about him in there, Jesse.” And Jesse looked at me across the kitchen like I was the one holding the key to the cell.

I had kept that refund in savings since March. Every month I had looked at the number and not touched it.

I make a little over seventeen hundred a month cooking at the school cafeteria, and in our house that is not money you set aside easy.

Kaylee is twelve. Her two front teeth came in crossed over each other, and the eyeteeth came in high, and she had started smiling with her mouth closed in every picture.

The orthodontist in town said she was a good candidate and the sooner the better. I had cried in the car after that appointment, out of relief more than anything.

“Get out,” Jesse said.

I thought I had heard him wrong. I turned and looked at him, and he leaned across me, and for a second I thought he was going to touch my face.

Instead he pulled the handle on my door and pushed it open with two fingers.

“Since your money’s so important,” he said, “you can figure out your own way home with it.”

He was not shaking. He was not red in the face.

He was calm in a way I had seen only a few times in fourteen years of marriage, and every one of those times had been about his brother.

I got out. I do not know why, except that I was not going to fight him in a truck at a gas station on a Saturday with strangers walking by.