Free Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman Page B

both her ears worked perfectly, soon after that, the Hardware Man found himself eighty-sixed. That was the official word, but I’d heard rumors of the truth and I started to put them together.
    The word molestation and the phrase sexually abused are heard once a year around here, in a short presentation given by Mr. Lombroso as he hands out the pamphlets with the hotline number we’re supposed to call should anyone touch us inappropriately , and for the entire eight minutes of his speech none of us looks each other in the eye. But no one has trouble with phrases like son of a bitch and touched my kid , and I imagine Mama had no trouble looking the Hardware Man in the eye when he got back and she said them. Our authorities may deal with trespasses in their own way, but the
line the Hardware Man crossed is drawn as hard on the Calle as anywhere else. The words carried all the weight of a judge’s gavel, especially coming from my mama, and some of that weight was put behind Calle fists. When the Hardware Man was one fist short of requiring an ambulance, the punches stopped, but the hits kept coming. He soon found he’d lost his regular barstool at the Truck Stop, walked into the bar to find silence, his seat taken, his tab run dry, and not just on Mama’s shift either, because bad news rolls like tumbleweed through the Calle, silent but sticky. Soon enough none of the bartenders, at the Truck Stop or Hobee’s, had what the Hardware Man ordered, if they could remember that he’d ordered at all. The tumbleweed rolled along, and pretty soon after that, the folks down at Ace figured that Sonny could handle the counter by himself. When the Calle took its final turn on him, the man, who was just a man then, with no uniform to hide behind, no counter to look over, no drill bits to catalog, that man used the last speck of sense he had, packed up his home and his daughter, and went to lose himself somewhere else.
    It took a long time to sink in. That the Hardware Man’s trailer was empty as a keg at closing time, that the sounds that woke me at night were really only the hands of the clock ticking the hours through, that the shapes the shadows took outside my window were really only Mama’s gladiolas growing up to meet the desert sun. When I finally understood all that, I took a long, deep breath and stopped hiding my mouth from fear of spilling a secret that was already out.

mirror image
    O n the night I discovered mirrors, I was at Grandma’s in the bedroom of her single-wide Regal, a bedroom I’d shared with one graveyard-shift-abandoned child after another. Mama had been working worried evenings at the Truck Stop, worried because of the quiet that still had such a hold on me, because I should have been getting old enough to watch myself but still seemed to forget how. Because I forgot to walk myself home, or walked myself to the wrong house, to the Hardware Man’s empty trailer, pressed my forehead against the windows, and whispered apologies to Carol’s shadow, sure as I was that she was getting all the punishment I deserved for not keeping my mouth shut, for not keeping the secret about her bad daddy in the safe, silent dark. Because I’d sit on the porch waiting until Mama found me there and, without saying a word, took me home or to Grandma’s. Because Grandma, despite her own record of forgetful tendencies when her gambling hand itched, was once again the best bet for childcare on the Calle, so there I was in her back bedroom, her mirror in my hand, and Timmy was there too, playing with his favorite toy truck on the floor.
    The mirror was a red-handled plastic affair, and I watched my face in the square glass, blue eyes, near-white hair, and a closed mouth, no wide red hole, a mouth very closed against the redness that still traced around it from the scabs I had made keeping myself quiet. I was running my tongue over the few scabs left, seeing
which were loosening, and then, suddenly, over my shoulder, little