Maggie Boylan. Michael Henson
“You know what I mean.”
“Now you’re talking crazy.”
“You were thinking with the wrong head. That’s what I was saying.”
He waved the hacksaw at her and clumped and shuffled out the back door.
* * *
TWENTY MINUTES later, a girl stalked in with metal in her lip and a shaky fire in her eye. She looked straight at Sarah and asked, “Has Maggie Boylan been in here?” Her fire died quickly and she lost the track of Sarah’s eye. Then she became just a girl with metal studs in her lips and nose, a nervous young girl who could not look Sarah in the eye. And that was what gave Sarah the clue.
“She stole my clothes and I want to know has she been in here?”
Sarah shot Dennis another glance—this time it was an I-told-you-so glance.
“I know she’s going around trying to sell my stuff, so I want to know has she been in here?” She pulled a bulky, spangled purse off her shoulder and set it on the counter.
Sarah pulled the shoes and the jeans from behind the counter. “These look familiar?”
“They’re familiar enough. How much did she get you for?”
Sarah silenced her husband with another sharp glance. “She didn’t get us too bad,” she said.
“I don’t have anything to pay you with.”
“Then don’t pay nothing.”
“Well, I hate for you to have to take the hit for what she done.” She sucked in her lower lip and chewed on a stud. She reached for the shoes, but Sarah set her hands across them.
“She’ll get hers in the end,” Sarah said.
“I reckon.”
“She’ll do the wrong person and that’ll be the end of Maggie Boylan.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Sarah folded the shoes and the jeans together and put them in the spangled bag. “If she ain’t died of an overdose first,” she said.
“She sure could,” the girl said. She stretched out her hand for the bag, but Sarah held on a moment more. “It’s a shame,” Sarah said. “I knew her when she was a girl and she was as good a girl growing up as there was.”
The girl nodded, but she did not seem to hear. She was eager to get out the door. She put the bag under her arm, nodded briefly, and turned toward the street.
Sarah followed her out the door, then watched from the front step. The girl ran to the corner, got into a car, started it up, and pulled into the street.
And sure enough, there in the shotgun seat, sat Maggie Boylan, smoking a cigarette, and laughing. Laughing like this was the biggest joke in the world.
The bitch.
* * *
FOR THE rest of the afternoon, her man continued to work on the truck. They would need the truck for pickup and delivery and that was the sort of thing Dennis was good for. It was cold to be working out of doors and it was hard work with all the heavy parts and climbing up under the truck, and his mangled leg hurt him. So every half hour or so he stumped and shuffled in for coffee and to warm his hands. She said nothing more about Maggie Boylan and the girl with metal in her mouth. She had said enough. He said nothing at all.
She tried to call her mother back and got no answer. She straightened the children’s bin and handled customers and totaled up the day’s receipts. Finally, near closing time, as the short day darkened, she heard the truck fire up. It hummed with a nice new-muffler hum. She heard his step, stomp and shuffle, stomp and shuffle, into the back office and the clink and clank as he put his tools away.
“Are you done back there?” He did not answer. He stomped and shuffled and clanked as if he had decided to move everything in the room.
“Say,” she said again, “you about done in there?”
She heard him stomp and she heard him shuffle and heard him clink and clank.
He’ll be a minute, she thought. She turned the store lights out and went to the window to flip over the CLOSED sign. A line of Christmas lights ran around the window. She could see other lights up and down the street and she could see the lights of the crèche on the courthouse square and she decided to leave her lights on like the rest.
She took out another cigarette and lit it. He would stretch out his shuffling and clanging as long as he could just so as not to talk to her. He would get over it soon enough, but he might not talk the whole way home.
I reckon she could have done it to get her old man some cigarette money, she thought. She would like that to be true. She knew it was unlikely, but she wished something like that could be true.
But no, she thought. Maggie’s bought herself something to smoke or snort. And when that’s gone she will pass off those shoes and those jeans on some new sucker. And then that girl will come right after with her little lie, and then they’ll go on to the next.
Her man stomped and shuffled in the back office and Sarah Hunter stood in the window and smoked her cigarette. Christmas lights dressed every window up and down the square and around the courthouse and even over the door of the jail where Maggie’s husband sat out his sentence. The bud of a cough had set up in the back of her throat, the bud of a tear in her eye. I should quit these things, she thought. She wished she had quit them long ago. She wished things were different in so many ways. She wished she were able to take care of her mother. She wished Maggie had not become such a wreck of a woman. She heard her man clanging and shuffling in the back and she wished she had not learned to sharpen her tongue.
She wished she could take back this whole damn story.
The Way the World Is
“THAT’S THE way the world is,” the girl said. And she did not seem to like it.
“Honey, you ain’t seen nothing,” Maggie Boylan wanted to say. But the girl did not skip a beat.
“All I did was take her in because she was homeless and I get throwed in jail for what she done.”
A late November wind rattled the windows of the lobby where they sat, side-by-side on a bench. The girl was a heavy girl—a young woman, really, but to Maggie Boylan, just a girl. She was thick in the body, weighted in the shoulders, heavy in the cheeks and around her eyes. She was pierced in several places, pierced in one nostril, pierced with a ring in her brow, pierced by an arc of studs in her ear.
“There I was,” she said, “coming out the door at Walmart. I had a cart full of groceries and diapers and what not. I was fixing to feed her and her kids right along with mine, and all of a sudden, you’d of thought I was Osama Bin Laden. There goes the alarm ringing and here come the security cop and a few minutes later here come the police and there’s my little kids crying and these cops want to know did I think I was smart trying to get away without paying for that purse and I’m, like, what purse?
“And what it was, that penniless bitch I took in off the street had snuck this purse she wanted into my cart after I done checked out so she skips on ahead. She borrowed my car keys, you see, and she says, I’ll go ahead and unlock the door. And she skips out like there ain’t nothing going on.”
“She set you up.”
“She didn’t have the guts to steal it herself and she figured if anybody was gonna get caught it’d be me. And she would of got away with it, except I pointed her out and they ended up taking both of us to jail. And I’m thinking, there’s my little kids off to foster care, and they’re crying their little hearts out. And my parents had to come up from Wilsonville to fetch my kids and bail me out.”
Maggie Boylan had been nodding as the girl spoke, but she perked up her ears at the mention