Pie Town - Lynne Hinton [63]
She had been up since five o’clock in the morning, worked breakfast and lunch, helped Fred wash down all the appliances, mop the floors, and take inventory of what was in the walk-in freezer. When she got home she decided to clean her apartment, and finally, by the time the news came on and she had sat down for the first time that day, she was tired.
She lay still for a minute, realizing that she was different after this nap, that she felt unlike herself, and considered how it was that she now was unable to deny that something was vastly changed about her. She thought about how it was that she had managed to hide what was happening, what had happened, for the past several weeks, but that now that ability to hide and keep hidden what was going on no longer existed. She thought about how many weeks she had been this way, counted down the days since she had been in Pie Town and the days since she last had sex with Conroe, and figured she must be almost seven or eight weeks along.
Her period was late by more than a month, and she was usually regular and paid attention to that kind of thing, but up until that evening nap, she had tried to make herself believe that she’d missed a period just because of the leaving she had done, all the walking she did to get to Pie Town, and the stress of hearing the truth from Conroe, the truck driver she met in Amarillo and followed to Tucson.
She thought she loved him when he offered her a ride alongside him in his new rig, hauling cars from Texas to anywhere west. She thought that all of the bad things that seemed to follow her everywhere she went, all the harm and sorrow and smart city boys, had finally done all the damage they could do and she was free now. She thought that because his name was Conroe, the same name as the tiny little town where her mother had once been happy, he was somehow different from the other men she had met since leaving home and that he was honest when he said she was beautiful and that he didn’t want to sleep with her as much as wake up beside her.
She fell for him hard and stayed next to him in that big rig, helping him deliver the fancy cars to car lots and rich people who didn’t want to drive their vehicles across the country and the new vans and wagons to the border patrolmen. She believed him when he told her he hadn’t settled down because he had been waiting all this time for her to walk across his path and that he didn’t have to wear a condom because he knew when to pull out. She believed him when he said he was only twenty-four and that he had a little house in Abilene where she could live when she got tired of the travel. Everything he said she took as gospel, and it wasn’t because she was naive or stupid or hadn’t been played before.
Conroe Jasper was tall and quiet and had hands like her grandfather’s, thick and hard-worked, and she wanted to believe a man could be honorable and interesting. But in the end, he was just like the others, and she had walked all the way from Tucson to the Salt River Canyon before she’d even thought to take a ride with anybody else. She’d never walked so far in her life, but once she found out Conroe was well beyond twenty-four years of age, actually more like thirty-five, married with twin boys, and that the little house in Abilene was really a backroom at his brother-in-law’s place where he already had a wife and a family, she couldn’t stop pressing forward.
She walked in the heat of the day and late into the night. She walked along the highway, avoiding the stares of the children from backseats of buses and the catcalls