Backseat Saints Read Online Free PDF Page A

and
     there was Thom. He was back on the trail. Bent over her. My hands were steady. My eyes were clear. I lifted Pawpy’s gun and
     lined him up, tracking him. My finger tightened. Two bullets left, and I could feel how perfect the shots were, one in the
     spine as he bent over, one in the head.
    Then he scooped up Gretel. My breath caught and my mouth rounded into a surprised O. He was not creeping through the trees,
     seeking out the shooter. He was not turning tail and sprinting away as fast as his strong legs could carry him. He was risking
     himself to rescue my dog. The skin on his back shuddered like a horse’s skin, and I knew he felt my sights creeping across
     him like flies.
    He lifted fifty pounds of dog like she was nothing, adrenaline assisting the hours he’d spent lifting weights and running
     this trail. He started loping away, slow, hampered by my crying dog. He ran serpentine, trying not to be an easy target, but
     Gretel ruined his balance and his speed, so he was. I could have shot him with no effort. I tracked him, but my finger remained
     slack against the trigger. His courage and his weighed-down grace knocked me breathless. I watched him risk his hide for a
     dog he’d never had much use for, saving her because she was mine, because I loved her so. He zigzagged away as fast as he
     could, all the while feeling the black gaze of the gun on his back.
    It was the most romantic thing that I had ever seen.
    I’d stopped the Hail Mary a while back, I realized. Now a rhyme was running in my head, from the Grimm’s fairy-tale book my
     mother used to read me when I was too small to shoot anything but a BB gun.
Oh Snowy-white, Oh Rosy-red, Will you beat your lover dead?
It was a poem from a prince, trapped in bear form. He slept on Snow White’s hearth, and she and her sister, Rose Red, would
     beat the snow out of his fur and roll him back and forth between them with their naked feet. He’d say the rhyme to make those
     rowdy girls be gentle with him.
    The bear’s poem looped around and around, catching and matching the weaving bob of Thom’s head as he ran serpentine away down
     the trail, ungainly but whole.
    My finger stayed lax. Only that morning, I’d lifted my face, open like a posy, for him to lean down and kiss. Only that morning,
     I’d gotten up early to fix his eggs. Then I’d come out here ahead of him to drop the body I had fed, leave it to keep the
     ants company in these green woods. Thom’s blond head set behind the slope. He was gone. I pulled the gun back into two pieces
     and dropped them in the bag.
    I leaned forward in the ditch and put my face into the earth. I felt roots poking me. I’d starting crying again without noticing.
     I was crying for Gretel and for my own spineless love. I wept until my bones went liquid, and then I wept them out. I lay
     against the ditch like a tired piece of rag.
    An idle part of me began to wonder where Thom was. I felt like I’d been lying in the dirt and crying for hours, but when I
     looked at my watch, I saw less than ten minutes had passed. There was a Shell gas not two miles away, and they’d have a pay
     phone. I wanted to call Thom and ask how Gretel was, where he was taking her, if she was still breathing, but I didn’t know
     where to reach him. Thom’s skinflint daddy had yet to join the rest of the world and replace Thom’s pager with a mobile phone.
    He’d take Gretel to the vet, I thought, and then what? Home? The police station? I sat up straight, pulled up in the sudden
     understanding that I didn’t have to track him down. He would be tracking me, and soon. Men who got shot at called their wives,
     the very first minute they could.
    I scrambled up out of the ditch, clutching my bag. I could not have Thom wondering where his wife had been. Not today, of
     all days. When his call came, Ro Grandee had to be at home in a daisy yellow skirt and ballet flats, tenderly hand-washing
     the sticky yolk off Thom’s breakfast