What Else Could He Do

The walls are thin and she can see sunlight around the windows. When the wind gets up, the howling keeps her awake and creates small dunes of red sand along the west walls. During the day she wedges cotton into the cracks around the windows with a case knife. It helps, a little, but they still have to sleep with a wet wash cloth over their faces in order to breathe. 

She didn’t ask for this life, had once imagined joining her sister on the assembly lines at the plant in Dallas. But that dream was overcome by a handsome airman who undid her bra with one hand on their first date. She made him fasten it back and take her home straightaway but his big gold-toothed smile and an embarrassed apology made her give him a second chance.

A month later he asked her to marry and she said yes. She knew he had a child and wasn’t quite divorced yet, but he promised to fix that soon. After the wedding at city hall, they rented a house in River Oaks near her sister so she could babysit her niece and nephew. 

After he was discharged from the service, he took a job driving long-haul trucks. He was gone a lot but home long enough for her to get pregnant. In the summer, he brought home ears of fresh corn and tomatoes and green beans from the roadsides where he stopped to sleep. And then one night he showed up with a scrawny kid with long braids and his hazel eyes, carrying a grocery sack of faded dresses and raggedy underwear. “What else could I do?” his eyes begged.