Break the Skin by Lee Martin Page A

worked at the shop, he helped out by sweeping the floors and emptying the trash. He even got good at answering the phone and writing down appointments. If someone asked something he didn’t know, he put them on hold and came to find me. Sometimes, when everything wasslow, he watched the television I had in the waiting area, and if I could spare the time, I sat with him and he held my hand.
    He seemed satisfied to be there with me as the days got shorter and the darkness came earlier. Soon we were walking home beneath the glow of the streetlights along Oak, and there was enough of a chill that we had to wear jackets.
    Those walks were what I came to love best about the time we spent together. Sometimes we talked about funny little things that had happened at the shop—the man who fainted before the needle even touched his skin, the boy who wanted lips tattooed around his belly button—and other times we didn’t say much at all, and that was all right. We were both just happy to be walking hand in hand down the street in the dark, just a man and a woman going home.
    One night, as we turned left on Scripture, he pulled me to a stop, and he said, “What was it that made you fall in love with me?”
    The question, so sweet for the doubt behind it—as if Donnie couldn’t believe he had anything to offer—nearly brought me to tears. It was like we were teenagers, amazed by the love we felt; a little scared of it, but more than a little thrilled.
    “It was the way you looked at me,” I said, recalling the first time our eyes met. “I could tell you needed me. I wanted to take care of you forever.”
    He nodded. “You take good care of me, Baby.” It all seemed right to him—what I’d said—and for that I was thankful. “I can’t imagine being anywhere but with you,” he told me, and I couldn’t have asked for anything better to hear. I started to believe that I could pull this off, that no one would ever question me, that the people Donnie had left behind would never find him.
    “We’re good together, aren’t we?” I said.
    “Thank you.” I heard the catch in his voice, and I put my arms around his waist and hugged him to me. “Let’s go home,” he said, and that’s what we did.
    Night after night, we lay down to sleep, the way married folks do, and we held each other, and some nights we made love. Oh, I know it was a fool thing to do—I had no idea who this man was or who he’d been with, and these days I know a girl has to be careful—but you have to understand that by this time I was gone. I wasn’t living in the sane, rational world. I was living in the world I was making up as I went along, and in that world this man was Donnie, my husband, the man I trusted and loved.
    He was there in the evening when I closed my eyes to sleep, and he was there in the morning when I woke up. I came to count on the joy of his company.
    Then one day he wasn’t in my bed.
    I rushed out into the living room, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the kitchen or the bathroom. He wasn’t anywhere that I could see. I stood in the middle of my living room and listened to the clocks ticking, and my house was so quiet without our two voices. I sat down on the floor, drew my knees up to my chest, and started to rock back and forth, the way I did when I was a girl and my mami went out for the night and I was afraid she wouldn’t come home. “Loquita!” my abuelita told me, pointing out what a silly girl I was. “She has to come home. This is where she lives.”
    Words to hang on to, whether they were true or not. I believed them because I needed to believe that sooner or later, my mami would come to my bed and lean over to kiss me. Her hair would smell of cigarette smoke, her breath like liquor, her skin like sweat and Heaven Scent perfume. I’d wrap my arms around her neck and cling to her. This was all when I was a little girl, but now that I was a woman, I wondered whether it was true, what my abuelita told me,