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Show Blue Run/71 with Monarch boats in Pine Bluff, hauling these glittery cabin cruisers out West. Joey got taken with him once, so I pictured the two of them flying along the desert highway with three sparkling boats stacked piggy-back. Jimmy was in speech therapy and first grade then. One perfect autumn day I watched him walk the length of gravel driveway up to the mailbox with its silly little red flag up, where the school bus stopped A light frost had fallen. He stood out there with the light breath rising. I was looking out the window and could see the sun in his face, how he stood there with his little Snoopy lunchbox, waiting to go where teacher would try so hard to unlock the words from his mouth-and what then? What would come out when the words were unlocked? Would his words remember the forgetfulness of their former lives, the way birds remember routes flown by ancestors? He turned and saw me in the window, this big crooked grin and breath rising and the new sun in autumn that I was pregnant for the third time. He held up sign language for I love you, stood there grinning with his fingers splayed: Oh where are you going, my blue-eyed son? What words would he remember? Then the bus came and he stepped up and disappeared into the huge curve that cars were always missing, so they'd end up out in the pasture by the little red barn where the swaybacked Palomino chewed grass to the root. I've got this picture of myself when I first considered adultery. My job was at the Maybelline Factory down 1-40 between Sardis and Galloway Exit. I worked day shift on the lipstick line, shoulder to shoulder with three-hundred other women and a few men, all of us stuffing electric pink or cool peach or Aristotle red lipsticks into plastic molds. Mornings, I'd wake sleepy-head Jimbo, and Joey'd make daddy-long legs toast while I drove Trace to Feed My Sheep, the daycare |