What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [84]
But the ring also means no more being the center. No more being able to lean toward the women patrons when they come not to try on shoes but to gossip, to let you in on whatever rumor floats around town.
In December, in early January, after the girl was murdered, the clientele had come in droves. Mr. Carson had pursed his lips at the women who arrived in the shop, who hardly even glanced at the merchandise, didn’t even bother to pretend. He stuffed his face with danish to keep himself from speaking out, not wanting to chastise his best customers at the height of the holiday buying season, but he bristled at the same thing you bristled at: the lack of decorum in these ladies, their visible thirst for word about that girl, the way they looked at the heavy curtain leading to the back room of the shop, as if tracing her steps would tell them everything they wanted to know about her. You wanted to point out the inexpensive black flats that the girl liked to wear—These, right here, you wanted to tell them—knowing the ladies in the group would feel a proximity to that girl just by the weight of her shoes, the smallest detail budding into significance.
But what could you have said to them? What did you know? You saw nothing. You weren’t there. You weren’t in her shoes.
“She was such a quiet girl,” you told them. This was true, but you didn’t want to tell them much more than that.
The ladies all knew about Dan Watson. Their feigned expressions of surprise didn’t convince you. They knew his mother from the town café, but his mother wasn’t in his swagger. His good mother wasn’t in the way he stepped out of his truck, cocked his hips as he lit a cigarette, waiting to cross the street. You know they had all looked at him with longing. He was no clean-cut boy like your soon-to-be husband, no straight line across the back of his neck from a dutiful Monday-morning haircut.
Actions like that should surprise no one. All around town, if people had only put their heads together, done the hard work of separating rumor from truth, of confirming what had been seen and not heard, nothing should have surprised anyone.
You didn’t tell these ladies much, no, not in December in the early days of the shock, and not in January, when it felt as if it might be best to toss out an observation, like a coin into a pool of water, just to see the ripples. But then the ring changed everything, and with it came a promise that you would be able to put all such ugliness to rest, never again having to step into Mr. Carson’s store, not one more reminder of that girl, living and breathing as she once was, coming around to haunt you. Marriage was coming for you, and with it would come a startling privacy, you nested in your brand-new home, guarding the things you learned about the family you would be married into: your husband-to-be the middle brother of three boys, the other two living in suspicious bachelorhood.
Marriage was going to save you from having to say anything at all to these ladies. You didn’t tell them about the last time you had been escorted to Las Cuatro Copas, your boyfriend eager to see what all the fuss had been about, those illustrations in the town newspaper and the drive-in shut down for the winter. If the murder hadn’t happened, perhaps you would’ve been able to make small talk about the crudeness of the cantina, the unsavory mixing of whites and Mexicans and how maybe Bakersfield shouldn’t be allowing such a thing. Or maybe you would’ve complimented the cheap but delicious taquitos served up by that girl, who looked only at your boyfriend, not willing to look you in the eye, not willing to acknowledge that she needed another job, that she even knew you. But you wouldn’t tell the women that—you’d tell them only about the cheap food, point to this as perhaps one of the reasons the night was such a weekly success. None of you would admit that