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he Hardware Man has a counter, not a bar, but he does his share of listening. Men come in to pick up new saw blades and caulking, spackle and sealant, but they get something else at Ace. A daytime medicine like the one they’ll get later at Hobee’s or the Truck Stop. What the Hardware Man offers isn’t that different from what Mama serves up, a friendly face and willing ear and one eye on their money hand.
    When the regulars come in, Sonny, the part-time guy, shrinks back from the counter, the Hardware Man moves forward, and the talk begins. Sometimes the order’s been called ahead but that doesn’t hurry anything and the conversations follow the same direction, starting with the weather. There are only two seasons in the desert so that doesn’t take long. Next is work, and work is always a bitch. Which leads right to the last thing, women. And no women are off-limits except for wives, and then only if the husband is in the room. Everyone else is fair game. When the Hardware Man still had his arm around Timmy’s mama, I heard all about it, but now that that’s over, the customers’ eyes fall on me. “Ain’t that Jo’s daughter?”
    The Hardware Man shrugs, like he doesn’t know and doesn’t care, and says, “Just keeping an eye on her while Carol’s off letting her boyfriend feel her up.” And the men’s replies are always the same. They can’t believe that Mama and the Hardware Man don’t
have something going by now, that she isn’t his secret girlfriend. It’s the only thing I can imagine feeling dirtier than the truth and I want to tell them she wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot extension ladder, but instead I shrink up against the far wall with Sonny, our backs cushioned by silver rolls of duct tape.

pinball
    I ’m not very good at it. I can’t catch the ball inside the flipper, I just send it faster down the hole, another quarter gone, another trip back up to the bar to measure the number of quarters left in our stack, the number of sips left in Mama’s beer. And this is my last quarter no matter how much she’s got left, she already said. I’m praying for the ball to cut me a break when a hand puts three quarters along the edge of the glass, and even though I know it’s one of Mama’s stupid boyfriends giving me more chances at pinball so he can have more chances with her, I turn to say, “Thank you.” But it isn’t one of Mama’s boyfriends, it’s Marc, my neighbor, looking almost as surprised as I am when he says, “No, dummy. That means I’m playing next.”
    Marc is my desk buddy this year. Ms. Hyatt says that even second-grade girls will chitter-chatter if they sit together and our whole classroom, except for Stephanie Harris and Jena-with-one-n, sits at two-person desks in a boy-girl, boy-girl pattern. And she’s right. This is already more than Marc’s said to me ever. Ms. Hyatt already held Marc back one year, and maybe she thought sitting him next to me would help him do better but Marc can’t understand the directions, or doesn’t want to, and I hear his stomach growling all morning and he falls asleep at our desk after lunch. He never remembers his homework or to raise his hand before he shouts out the wrong answer, like he always does, and every day my papers come back with smiley faces, plusses, and stars and he
gets his name on the blackboard for a million things, like picking his nose and rubbing the boogies under our desk. He has to stay after and pound erasers and his papers come back with checkmarks and SEE ME in big red letters, and every day I’m the only one embarrassed because he’s the only boy I like. I try not to like him but it doesn’t work, just like it doesn’t work when I try too late to catch my last ball before it rolls down between the flippers.
    “Too bad,” he says. “You better stick to playing Girl Scouts with your new friend.”
    I look around for Viv, but we’re the only kids here and he laughs. “Oh, she’s not here, huh?” he