Free Break the Skin by Lee Martin

visit?” I asked.
    “Humidity near melted me. I felt like I was nothing but water.”
    I didn’t want to be rude, but I needed to get Donnie inside and out of sight. “It’s been dry here.” I pulled him gently up the walk toward my front door, but he paused to take a look over at Emma. “Hot and dry,” I called to her.
    She was an itty bit of a thing, her back all humped up from years of leaning forward as she walked through the world, and though I couldn’t see her plain as she gripped the porch railing with her bony hands, I knew she’d have her face made up, the way she did every day and night until she cleaned it off and made ready for bed. She’d have those thin, arched eyebrows painted on, and those two little spots of rouge on her cheeks, and cherry-red lipstick on her mouth.
    “Miss Baby, she was here looking for you tonight.” Emma was trying to keep her voice low now. “That Carolyn. I told her, ‘Scat. Go on now. Miss Baby don’t suffer your kind.’ ”
    “You hadn’t ought to take a chance on making trouble for yourself, Emma.” I took Donnie’s hand and kept leading him up the walk, eager to get inside before she took a notion to ask who it was I had with me. I was standing between her and him, and I was hoping in the gathering dark, given her old eyes, she might not even spot him. “Carolyn’s mad as can be. There’s no telling what she might do.”
    Just then, a flock of grackles came swooping down to settle in the trees. The glass bottles in the mimosa clinked together, and the birds screeched.
    “She’s trash,” Emma said. “Don’t worry about me. I know her kind.”
    “You can stand up for yourself. I know that for sure.” Donnie and Iwere at the front door now, and I had the key in the lock. “Good night, Emma.”
    I unlocked the door and swung it open. A few ticks more and we’d be inside.
    Then Emma said, “Who’s that with you, Miss Baby? Is that Pablo? Has he come back?”
    I gave Donnie a nudge, and he stepped into my house, out of sight. I felt the burden of having to decide what to do next—to call the police and say, I found this man; or to say to Donnie, Cutie, let’s have some supper; to lie down beside him in the dark and put my lips to his, to his neck, his chest, and say, Remember this … and this … and this .
    “No, it’s Donnie.” What else could I do but say the story I was inventing? “I don’t know where Pablo is. He’s still in trouble.”
    “Those cows. Him and that old boyfriend of yours.”
    “It’s late, Emma. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
    “Donnie,” she said. She was used to people coming to my house, looking for Pablo or else, drunk, wanting me to open up my shop, fire up my iron, and pound some skin because, Miss Baby, there’s this tat I just got to have tonight . I could tell Emma was searching her memory to see whether she could recall someone named Donnie. “Little fella?” she said, and I felt it was a sign, the fact that she’d gotten this right. “Fair-skinned?”
    “That’s right,” I said. “Donnie True.”
    Just like that I gave him a last name, said it before I even knew it was on my tongue, spoke that wish for how I wanted everything to turn out.
    WHEN THE TROUBLE first started for Pablo and Carolyn and they filed for a no-fault divorce, I told him he could stay with me. This was just after the New Year—Happy 2009!—and on April 1, the divorce was final. “April Fools’ Day,” Pablo said. “Baby, I hope I haven’t made a mistake.”
    The story was simple, as old as Moses—a man with a woman no amount of money or love could ever satisfy. A gringa to boot. Little, blond priss of a thing who thought a Mexican boy would be to her taste. Carolyn. A name as white as that.
    She wanted too much. I can’t say she’s any different than the rest of us in this regard, just more insistent, more apt to pitch a fit when Pablo didn’t come across with the goods. He was working an honest job then, hauling freight