Becoming Bonnie Read online

  He kisses me back, his hands framing my face. A tingle courses up my spine and I press harder into him. I smile, leaning back to gaze into his safe eyes.

  “What was that for?” he asks, his thumb rubbing circles on my cheek.

  “Just a hello.” Just validation.

  “Well, hello. And hey, how’s Buster?”

  “Drugged up.”

  Roy runs his hands down my arms, intertwines our fingers. “Before, when I said I could help you out, ya know, financially, I was serious.”

  “Thanks, Roy.” I gesture toward our future house. “But I think you got your hands full here. She needs lots of work.” And I can handle my family on my own.

  He studies my face, finally saying, “Well, I’m not afraid of a little work if you ain’t.”

  “Not one bit.” But that’s a white lie, the okay kind to tell. Really, the house needs more than a fresh coat of paint. Termites have attacked nearly every inch of her, causing the porch to slump. The windows are cracked, the shingles—and the roof itself—are missing in spots, and huge chunks of brick are gone, leaving holes in the chimney. It’s no wonder Roy’s so quick to get his hands on her.

  I sigh, turning it into a yawn when Roy notices. “Shall we get to work?”

  Roy takes my hand and we do just that: get to work, heading to the hardware store for supplies. I walk the aisles aimlessly, randomly picking up thingamajigs and gadgets. I tap a wrench, or maybe it’s a screwdriver, against my palm while Roy adorably purses and twists and bites his lips while deliberating on what we’ll need. His face becomes grimmer, and sadly less adorable, each time he checks a price tag.

  “Should’ve saved a few more pennies,” he says. “Maybe we can try our luck in the stock market.”

  I rest my head against his shoulder. “Well, I don’t know a thing ’bout that, but I do know Mr. Miller has some of these tools down on his farm, and I bet ya we can borrow ’em.”

  Roy’s chest rises slowly, giving away his concern, but he offers me a reassuring smile. “I bet you’re right.”

  “You going to know what to do with these tools, once you got ’em?”

  He gives me a pointed look.

  “What?” I hold up my palms, smirk. “Remember that time you tried to make a birdhouse and—”

  “The birds were fine.”

  But he laughs right along with me.

  We end up getting a few inexpensive items—a scraper thingy, sandpaper, and paintbrushes—for repainting the porch, an easy enough project to start with.

  Roy heads home after that to get some sleep before he’s due back at the plant. I hurry home to change before hightailing it to the diner.

  I’m off my bike before the brakes stop it fully, and toss it against the diner’s wall. Out of breath, and a few minutes late, I skid into the kitchen and snatch an apron.

  “Bonnelyn,” Mr. Banks says from behind me.

  I close my eyes, willing him to go easy on me for my tardiness.

  “Bonnelyn, come and have a chat with me.”

  I plaster an optimistic expression on my face. The way Mr. Banks arches a brow from the doorway of his office, I reckon my big smile and wide eyes look more crazy than positive. “Yes, sir,” I say, and he disappears inside.

  I shake my head at myself as I follow him into the office and tentatively lower myself onto a simple wooden chair.

  “Bonnelyn—”

  “I’m sorry I’m late, sir.” In my lap, I bunch my skirt. “I swear, it won’t happen again.”

  He runs a palm over his bald head. “We’re not sitting here ’cause of that. In the two years you’ve worked for me, I can count the number of times you’ve been late on one hand. The thing is, we’re slow. We’ve been slow. People are more interested in buying stocks than steaks.”

  I nod, and that bowling ball in my gut seems like it’s doubled in size.

  “Look, Bonnelyn, I cut your hours, but it ain’t helping my bottom line like it should, so”—he stops, starts—“it makes the most sense to let you go.”

  It takes a moment for his cheek-slapping words to register. “Okay,” I finally say, even though it’s not. It’s not okay.

  “Go on out and finish your shift. I won’t rob you of that.”

  I stand, an instinct from being excused, and my legs shake underneath me.

  Mr. Banks gives me a sorry look. “I always liked ya, kid. If things pick back up, I’ll track ya down.”

  I offer him my thanks and stumble out into the kitchen, then the dining room. It’s exactly as Mr. Banks said: slow. Only a few regulars sit at the counter, and a single table is occupied by the windows.

  My shift drags on ’til I’m clearing my last table and counting the few coins I made in tips. When I hang up my apron for the last time, my hand lingers, but not ’cause I’ll miss it here. It’s ’cause, plain and simple, this is necessary income, and there’s not enough time in the summer to find a new job. Plus, Mr. Banks always let me keep working a few hours here and there, even after the school year had begun. It’s harder to get that leniency in the nicer parts of Dallas.

  The air in the diner seems too thin. I rush for the door.

  But, on the way home, my mind keeps trying to steer me in scary directions: my family and I not even affording canned beans; Billie getting picked on for wearing rags my ma’s sewn countless times; Buster’s hand keeping him out of work all month. Losing the house. I tighten my grip on the handlebars.

  Exhaustion hovers over me stronger than the August sun by the time I cross the tracks back into my measly town. It’s like God is taunting me with each run-down house I pass.

  I get it, I want to yell. We’re poor. We’ll always be poor.

  I round the corner, and Roy’s and my run-down house comes into view. Looking at it, all I see are dollar signs. I turn away, but a pop of yellow on the grayed porch pulls my gaze back.

  Flowers, I realize when I’m close. I should be happy. But I ain’t. Roy’s heart is too big. He must’ve recognized the sadness I hid in my eyes earlier and picked me flowers, like when we were seven. I grab the note, expecting the soft loops of his cursive.

  Nope. I’d recognize Blanche’s chicken-scratch handwriting anywhere.

  I messed up, it says.

  Ain’t that the truth.

  Getting herself skunked, painting some boy red with lipstick, passing out and leaving me alone with him, then having the nerve to tell me I’m high and mighty.

  What I am is levelheaded, a girl with a plan. I drop my hand to my side, taking Blanche’s note with it.

  A plan that’s on its way to hell, with all that’s going on.

  What am I supposed to do now? Find a real, low-paying, low-skilled, forty-hour-a-week job and not go back to school? I can say good-bye to my teaching dreams. It’ll be the beginning of the end, everything unraveling from there, ’til I’m not thriving or surviving.

  Could Blanche really be the one thriving, making more money in a single night than I made in a month at the diner?

  I start to turn away from my disheveled one-day home. My eye catches on the public phone outside the library. I stop in my tracks, lick my lips. Could a month be all I need ’til Buster is all healed up?

  I stare at the phone and finger the coins in my pocket. Doing nothin’, letting my future go to hell, maybe that’s more dangerous than going to the speakeasy with Blanche tonight, just this once. One night of recklessness to make a month’s worth of dough to keep us afloat.

  Before the smart side of my brain taps me on the shoulder and screams how I’m acting a fool, I slip two pennies into the phone.

  A nasally woman connects me to Blanche’s house.

  “Hello,” I hear, in her singsong voice.

  I wipe my sweaty palm against my skirt and reposition the phone against my ear. Seconds pass.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Oh.” More seconds pass. “I messed up,” Blanche says, again.

  “It’s okay.”
/>   “Really?” Her voice is low and soft.

  “Yes, really.”

  “The fact you never hold grudges is one of your best qualities.”

  “Yeah, well, sorry for judging you. That’s one of my bad ones.”

  “Yes, Bonnelyn, not the Christian thing to do.”

  I bite my lip, knowing if I don’t do this now, I never will, but the telephone’s slick in my grasp as I think of the simple words I need to speak aloud. A big breath helps. “I’m going with you tonight to the ‘physician’s office.’”

  Seconds pass.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “This is Bonnelyn Parker, right?” Blanche laughs before I can respond … or change my mind. “Well, attagirl. You won’t regret it. I’ll pick you up.”

  The line goes dead.

  I simply stand here, listening to the silence, ’til the realization that I’m going to a speakeasy tonight—for real—swoops in and knocks me upside my noggin.

  I rattle the phone into its holder. This thought and that thought bump into each other, colliding, fighting, ’til a single thought remains: Forgive me, Father, for I’m ’bout to sin.

  5

  I wipe down the icebox with boiling water. The furniture is in need of dusting. And the porch, sweeping. At supper, I chew my chicken thirty times, the proper amount for optimal digestion, and then I help Ma wash and dry the silverware to prevent stains.

  I don’t allow myself to think, just do, happy to help Ma, who might as well be sleepwalking after working all day.

  “Seeing Blanche again?” she asks.

  I nod, not looking her in the eye, and escape to my bedroom to get dressed. My hand is shaky as I paint my lips red and slip from my housedress into an equally modest skirt and blouse.

  The blouse caught Roy’s fancy one time when we were down by the river. He said the blue brought out my eyes.

  The sound of an engine starts slow, then grows, ’til it rumbles outside my front door. I nearly trip over Billie and Duke Dog to get out of the house. Buster narrows his eyes like he knows I’m up to no good.

  As soon as my butt lands in Big Bertha, I want to claw my way out, ’cause I am up to no good. Buster’s right. But Blanche ain’t; she was surely mistaken when she said I wouldn’t regret this here decision. I reach for the door handle.

  “Oh no you don’t.” Blanche puts the car into gear. “This’ll be good for you.”

  “How on earth is going to an illegal establishment good for me?”

  “You’re a blotter,” Blanche says matter-of-factly.

  “A what?” My fingers slip from the handle and find the safety of my other hand in my lap.

  “A blotter.”

  “Blanche,” I say between my teeth.

  She laughs, so easy and carefree. “I’m not trying to hurt your feelings by sayin’ this, but you only ever go surface deep. Dab, dab, dab. That’s how you approach life.”

  Dab, dab, dab.

  “But sometimes,” she says, “life needs some elbow grease, a good scrub to get the dirt out.” She shrugs. “Yet you’re a blotter. Tonight is the first step to recovery, Miss Parker.”

  I stare at my best friend blankly. With all the dabbing and scrubbing, I have no clue what this girl is sayin’, but, still, I insist, “I ain’t a blotter.”

  She shrugs again.

  “Well, what do you reckon you are?” I ask her.

  Blanche pauses, her one eye squinting. Finally, she says, “Blanche is a misbehaver.”

  “Anything beginning with mis ain’t good.”

  “Come now, how ’bout misunderstood?”

  I open my mouth, close it, pondering that word. It ain’t necessarily good to be misunderstood. It’s only good if you’re finally understood—but then only if it’s a good understanding. I rub my forehead, confusing myself, and silence falls between us.

  Blanche continues to drive, looking mighty satisfied with herself. She even hums. At least understanding the way Blanche acts is easy. Maybe it’s myself I’m failing to understand. A blotter? She says I stop at the surface, but that can’t be true—can’t.

  I love and dream and believe.

  I’m sitting in this here car, putting myself, and my relationship with Roy, at risk so I can keep loving, dreaming, believing.

  “So why’d you agree to come?” Blanche asks, as if she’s creeping ’round in my head.

  I wring my hands, nerves spiking from head to toe. “I’m doing what I need to do to survive.”

  She smiles. “I’ve an idea. Why don’t you really let your hair down tonight?”

  Keeping one eye on the road, Blanche plucks pins off my head. I paw at my hair. Even with it heavy on my shoulders and running down my back, I feel exposed.

  “And,” she adds, pulling up outside the physician’s office and setting the parking brake, “you could be a bit more hotsy-totsy.”

  “What?”

  “Here.” Blanche opens Big Bertha’s glove compartment. “A few embellishments, so you ain’t any old Jane.”

  She slides a glistening thing with rhinestones onto my head and a bangle onto my wrist—the one she’d worn last night. Sucking air through her teeth, she wiggles her fingers midair, deliberating. The pit in my stomach grows, taking on a life of its own, crying out, This is a mistake.

  Like a snake attack, her hand lurches toward me.

  I don’t even know what she’s done ’til I look down. My chest’s in plain view for the world to see, peeking out from a tear in my blouse. My mouth drops open. No words come out. I reckon this is what having a stroke is like. I lean away before she can somehow tear a few inches off my long skirt.

  “Ready?” Blanche says with a sly smile.

  Blanche climbs from the car in a short black dress with silk stockings rolled just below her knees.

  I suck in a Texas-size gulp of air, my rear end glued to the seat.

  “Bonn,” Blanche calls, “did I just hear your electric being switched off?”

  I groan. Blanche trots toward the physician’s office. Reluctantly, I follow, feeling like Alice going down the rabbit hole. ’Cept, I know how that story goes. Alice is a foolish, foolish girl. And here I am, acting just like her. All I need is my own Cheshire cat.

  Blanche grins at me, teeth and all, and I peer frantically over my shoulder, through the wide storefront window, at Big Bertha. The car practically opens its doors for me to hide inside. I could sit there, all night, like before. Again, a book would’ve been a good thing to bring.

  “Not going to happen. Come on,” Blanche says, and grabs my hand, pulling, prohibiting my dreams of escape.

  “What?”

  “Oh, don’t play coy.” She pauses, looking ’round the quiet room. “This way.”

  The corners of the waiting room are dark, the area behind the reception desk even darker. It feels criminal to creep ’cross the empty floor after hours. With the doctor living upstairs, as they normally do, I reckon he gets sick visitors at odd times. But it doesn’t stop this scratchy rawness in my throat ’bout how I should proclaim this as wrong and how the police may be lurking behind this chair, that desk, or in the closet by the window. Officers could come bursting through the panes and restrain me any second.

  Sad, they’d say. So much promise and potential going right down the drain.

  “Buck!” Blanche’s voice is an octave too high, and I shrink at the noise, going so far as to shield my head with my arms.

  He’s sitting on a stool at the end of a poorly lit hall. Everything ’bout Buck—his posture, his clothing, his confident smile—screams gangster.

  My muscles tense, my jawline taking the brunt of it. Blanche drags me down the hallway, passing doors to rooms where a doctor would visit with patients.

  We stop in front of Buck, and I hold my breath, as if removing the rise and fall of my chest will make me less noticeable.

  With scruff hiding his otherwise baby face, it strikes me again how Buck looks older than us, even though it’s only by a few years.
Yet here I am, with the drooping neckline, pretending to be someone I’m not … for the money.

  I slowly release the last little bit of air in my lungs.

  Buck greets us each with a quick kiss—Blanche on her red lips and me on my cheek. I tense again, biting my own red lip and not knowing how to act, not wanting him to touch me.

  “It’s hopping tonight,” he says, and grabs the handle of a door, revealing a staircase. He starts down it. Blanche pushes me forward, leaving me no choice but to do the same. I swallow, hard.

  She stays on my heels, forcing me from one step to the next, yet time slows to a crawl. Above us, a row of lights hangs from the slanted ceiling. On the walls on either side of the staircase, posters and clippings in an array of sizes date back nearly ten years.

  JANUARY 16, 1919, A MOMENTOUS DAY IN WORLD’S HISTORY: U.S. IS VOTED DRY.

  My hand slides down the railing to steady myself.

  ALCOHOLISM MEANS DEATH TO THE NATION. PROTECT OUR COUNTRY.

  My eyes jump from one print to the next.

  EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE, ALL ’ROUND THE BLOCK, THE BOOTLEGGERS BE RUSHING BIZNESS AT ALL HOURS OF THE CLOCK.

  KEEP OUR MEN PURE. VOTE AGAINST THE SALE OF LIQUOR.

  The fact that both Prohibition and anti-Prohibition posters paper the walls makes me dizzy, as if the drinking regulation is one big joke. But I ain’t laughing. I’m struggling to hold on, agonizing over what awaits me below.

  “Are these stairs the only way out?” I manage to ask.

  Buck’s deep voice echoes up the stairs, “Yup.”

  Behind me, Blanche squeezes my shoulder before I have a chance to retreat. The squeeze turns into a nudge and I steady myself with an awkward and noisy step. That’s when the quietness of this stairwell, the physician’s office, dawns on me.

  Most would find glamour in its secrecy and exclusivity. Not me. It only makes coming to the speakeasy feel more reckless and dangerous.

  Buck faces us, but his focus is on me. “Ready?”

  No. But I nod, slow.

  “Just do as Mary says and you’ll be fine. She’s the big cheese ’round here.”

  “Mary,” I repeat. My knees wobble at the idea of there already being somebody to impress.