The clerk behind the counter was watching intently. She was maybe sixty, with frizzy gray hair, a stained polo shirt, nails bitten down to raw red circles. She glanced from Johnny to Lavender to the phone, useless on its cord. She lifted a finger and pointed past the bathroom, where the door to a supply closet was propped open.
Lavender nodded her gratitude. She ran through it.
There was no light in the supply closet. Cleaning supplies were stacked onto towering shelves, looming in the inch-long strip of yellow that came in under the door. Lavender leaned up against the metal, breathless with the shock of what she’d done—the woman on the other side propped something up against the lock, trapping her in. The fear raced, urgent. The fear had lived inside her so long, it had distilled into a new force entirely. It jumped, acidic, fresh and electrifying.
Lavender pressed the back of her head to the door, listening. It was too thick. She could hear nothing. She let her hands slow their shaking and tried to recall the voice on the phone.
The dispatcher had sounded so controlled. So confident. Lavender imagined people in suits swarming into the farmhouse, speaking in professional, adult voices. They would find Ansel and the baby, wrap them both in big warm blankets. They would feed them something other than canned beans. She pictured a woman in a police uniform and a tight bun picking up the baby, so much stronger and more capable than Lavender had ever been.
In the pounding, waiting dark, Lavender breathed in bleach and dust and vinegar. In a box on a low shelf, she found dozens of individually wrapped chocolate cakes, the kind of neat, processed squares she had not seen since her childhood. Despite it all, her stomach gurgled. Lavender began to sob as she unwrapped one little cake, then another, shoving them whole into her mouth—the dough globbed, perfect in her throat, as she choked them systematically down. Surrounded by crinkling plastic wrappers, her fingers sticky with excess, Lavender wondered if she’d made the greatest mistake of her life. Maybe. But through her doubt, there was something else, a glimmer of solidity she could hold on to. She had always heard that there was nothing more powerful than a mother’s love. For the first time since she became a mother, Lavender believed it.
*
The woman at the gas station unlocked Lavender’s supply closet, and blinding light flooded in. Her name was Minnie, she said, as she helped Lavender off the floor. Lavender squinted into the bright rows of candy, gum, cigarettes.
“I told him you called the cops,” Minnie said, handing Lavender a cup of coffee. She did not comment on the cake wrappers, the smear of chocolate across Lavender’s cheek. It was night now, moths swarming the lights around the empty gas pumps. “I never even let him inside. He spent a long time storming around the pumps, yelling and such. Kicked the hell out of his own car. But he left eventually.”
“Which way did he drive?” Lavender asked. Her head throbbed, but the first sip of coffee was brilliant, bitter on her tongue.
Minnie pointed south. Downstate, away from home.
Later, Lavender would track down the number for social services. She would call and call and call, begging for information, until finally the receptionist took pity on her and confirmed: The boys were in the foster system. Their father had not come searching.
*
That night, Lavender slept sitting up in the storage room, an iron paper towel rod clutched in her hand like a gun.
She found it when she reached for her sweater—a cold lump in the breast pocket. It was the locket she’d given to Ansel, curled up regretful. She’d unclasped it from his neck the last time she’d given him a bath and pocketed it thoughtlessly. This will keep you safe, she had told him. It seemed unbearably cruel, that she could bestow such a promise then accidentally steal it away. The truth felt swollen in the dark of the closet. No little trinket—and no amount of love—could keep anyone safe.
*
In the morning, Minnie gave Lavender a steaming egg sandwich, a twenty-dollar bill, and a ride to the bus stop.
“You go, honey,” Minnie said, as Lavender slid from the car. “You get as far away as you can.”
Huddled on the bench, Lavender wondered where Ansel was then. She hoped that someone had given him real clothes—he’d spent his entire life waddling around in men’s underwear, pinned at the hips. She pictured him in a clean set of pajamas, a plate of juicy meat heaped before him. She’d forgotten to tell the police about the little bag she’d packed, with the corn and the knife and the winter coat. But now she was glad for it. How pathetic, the tiny things on which she’d placed so much hope.