What Else

Sandra Martz
The walls are thin and you can see sunlight around the windows. When the wind gets up, the howling keeps you awake and creates small dunes of red sand along the west walls. The mother takes cotton and wedges it 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 to 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. 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 enough for her to get pregnant. When he did come home, he brought ears of fresh corn and tomatoes and green beans from the roadsides where he stopped to sleep.

And then one night he came home with a scrawny little girl carrying a grocery sack of ragged dresses and underwear. “What else could I do?” his eyes begged.