Pie Town - Lynne Hinton [102]
He shook his head again.
“Is there something wrong with you? I mean, why don’t you talk?”
Father George glanced away. “Just enjoying listening to you,” he replied.
“Oh well, that’s different. Most everybody tells me I talk too much. Randy . . .” She paused. “That was my boyfriend,” she explained. “He said I was like a damn leaky faucet, drip drip, drip . . . he’d say.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just like to talk.” She turned to George. “Are you in college?”
He shook his head.
“You been to college?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“You come home?” she asked.
George studied the girl. “What do you mean?”
“Did you come home to Gallup?”
He shook his head. “No, I’ve been working and now I’m going to California to rest.”
“That’s home then? California?”
George shook his head again. “No, that is also not my home.”
She nodded. “I understand. I don’t really have a home either,” she said. “My dad was in the navy, we moved a lot. And then my mom left him and we moved back to Albuquerque and then when I turned sixteen she told me I had to get out of the house.” The girl yawned and then covered her mouth. “Randy and I lived in a motel downtown for about six months, but before that I don’t think I had the same address for more than a couple of weeks.” She laughed. “Funny, isn’t it?”
George waited. “What?” he asked.
“Just funny that neither of us has a place to call home and now we’re getting on a bus, going somewhere else that isn’t home.”
There was a pause.
“Randy always promised me he’d make me a home. Must have said it a hundred times.” She shook her head like she was trying to rid herself of unwanted thoughts. “But you should never trust a man who has to make a promise.” She turned to George. “Naomi, at the shelter, told me that. This was her third time in there. She kept going back to her husband even though she knew he would kill her. She said he always promises he won’t do it again.” She shuddered. “Well, at least I wouldn’t believe that promise!”
George thought about what the girl had said. He thought about her comment about home and he wondered when the last time was he had felt at home. Moving around so often as a child, going away to seminary. The truth was that the only time he really did feel at home was when he was at church, but even that had been a long time ago. And then he thought about what she said about promises, and suddenly remembered the conversation he had with Trina the night of the fire, something he had said.
She had just explained that she was pregnant, and after she said it she held out her hand and he had taken it. He couldn’t remember before that night the last time he had held a woman’s hand. And it startled him to feel how small it was, how easily and simply it fit in his.
“If I have this baby,” she had said, “I need to have a home. I need this baby to have a home.”
He had made a pot of tea and after telling her about the girl from seminary, the one he had gotten pregnant, the one who had an abortion, he reached out for her hand and he told her that he would help her make a home. No, he didn’t just tell her, he promised her. “I promise that I will help you and your baby have a home here in Pie Town.” That’s what he said, the exact words.
George rubbed his eyes. That conversation, that vow, felt like it happened so long ago. He knew he had meant it when he said it, believed it when he promised her, but then after the fire, after the accusations and the realization that everybody thought Trina had done it, after the first interview with Roger and the fire chief and the questions that were never asked, the ease with which his silence fell, he just couldn’t go back, just couldn’t tell the truth. He could not keep his promise.
“You okay?” The girl had been watching him. “You sort of look like you saw a ghost or something.”
George faced the road ahead of them. A bus was coming in their direction. “I think this is the one to San Francisco,” he said. “The one to Oklahoma City comes in about an hour.” And as he stood up to leave, he bent down to pick up his