Heartbroke

by Chelsea Bieker

Genres: General Fiction; Short Stories; Small Town & Rural; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of Godshot and "a pitch-perfect ventriloquist of extraordinary talent and ferocity" (T Kira Madden) comes a defining book of Californian stories where everyone is seeking or sabotaging love.



United by the stark and sprawling landscapes of California's Central Valley, the characters of Heartbroke boil with reckless desire. A woman steals a baby from a shelter in an attempt to recoup her own lost motherhood. A phone-sex operator sees divine opportunity when a lavender-eyed cowboy walks into her life. A mother and a son selling dream catchers along a highway that leads to a toxic beach manifest two young documentary filmmakers into their realm. And two teenage girls play a dangerous online game with destiny.



Heartbroke brims over with each character's attempt to salvage grace where they can find it. Told in bright, snapping prose that reveals a world of loss and love underneath, Chelsea Bieker brilliantly illuminates a golden yet gothic world of longing and abandonment under an unrelenting California sun.

Release date: April 5, 2022

Publisher: Catapult

Print pages: 288

Sample

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Miners

Dedicated to Mary Glim,
whose writing inspired this story

Now I didn’t know a thing about mining when I got into it with Spider Dick one night working at the Barge. I was the only lady bartender on, so you can imagine all the miners, off from their dirty shifts, covered in the soot of the earth, flocking right to me like I was handing out the Lord’s blessing. And who was I attracted to then, my eyes wide as the deer I’d nearly smashed into on my way up from the valley to the mountains where I was employed that summer, but Spider Dick, of course, who introduced himself that way, and I said well, what’s your Christian name? And he laughed and said that was it. Then he really leaned over the bar close to me and I smelled all that whiskey on his breath and thought, I haven’t been giving him whiskey tonight, I’ve been giving him beer, and he said, “Want to come powder your nose?” I burned with shame, thinking my nose was shiny, thinking this man, with dirt in his eyebrows, was noticing my shine. I ran to the bathroom first chance I got, and there he was in the women’s stall waiting for me, lines of white drawn across the back of the toilet seat. He was ready to give me an education, which is to say my nose wasn’t shiny at all.

“Now why they call you Spider Dick?” I asked after I snorted up that white like I’d done it before.

He leaned against the stall door. He smiled this weird way like he could see through my shirt, through to my bra with the safety-pinned strap, through to my heart and right out past me into some long future life where there was a strong likelihood that I would one day be able to describe why he was called Spider Dick with more detail and confidence than even his own self. I would know him and he would know me, so why rush tonight, his look seemed to say. My heart sped up. Colors of the bathroom got brighter. I got brighter.

“What’s your deal?” he said.

I cracked my knuckles like my mam used to hate. “I’m nineteen and enrolled in two courses at the city college,” I said. “Stage Makeup and English Composition 101. Figure I’ll get me a job doing up ladies’ faces at the mall.”

Spider Dick looked at me and nodded. “But I’m gonna need you all the days of the week.”

I could let Stage Makeup go easy enough, I considered. All we did was spread pancake foundation on one another, which then made my face break out in mounds of pimples, and watch silent films of women in modest swimwear while the professor ate potato chips and worked on what he called a screenplay. But the English class. Well. I liked it. After the first day, I’d left feeling different. I’d done something called freewriting and it seemed to unchain the fighting dogs in my chest. But it faded from view there in that bathroom. Looking into Spider Dick’s eyes I could actually see the want in them aimed straight at me. It was like I didn’t have no choice in the matter. If you’ve ever been stared at in that fashion, it’s a powerful drug.

“Well, I’m not that sort,” I said, thinking of how my mother spent her life under a man’s thumb, how it had shoved her right into an early grave. I liked to imagine I could have both a life of my own and the love of a man but I had never seen such a combination turn out. It was one or the other and I wanted my own sports car, a job where I wore a leather miniskirt and read the newspaper some mornings. But goddamn I saw he wasn’t gonna give up on my love and, despite all I knew, a thrill ran through me. There I was in that bathroom imagining myself an old lady telling passersby that I was one of those people who knew right away. Spider Dick would be frail next to me, having endured several strokes but living on still because of my devotion, all the wonderful years we’d spent bringing oxygen to our hearts side by side.

“I’ll turn you,” he said simple.

I kissed him then, just like I knew not to. My mam, had she been alive, would have told me I’d fallen under a fool’s spell.

Spider Dick worked all the time. He was a hydroelectric miner in the mountains near Shaver Lake. A dangerous job. He talked about his work every evening, laying his head across my lap and describing each shift like he had survived a war while I played with his long greasy hair. He’d do all that sad talk and then he’d need me. The first time we was intimate I learned the reason for his nickname. There was a black widow spider tattooed on his thinger and it isn’t special science that the spider got bigger when he saw me. I said, “Why on earth you get something like that?” And he looked hurt and his face darkened in a way I hadn’t seen on him yet, and I thought goddammit, Alma, you’ve gone and ruined your intimacy with this love of your life, but he shrugged it off fast.

“I just woke up with it one day,” he said. “Don’t remember.”

Then I started laughing hysterically and he tackled me and tickled me until I couldn’t breathe. A thought came to me, how my mam once said you never could trust a tickler, but I pushed her aside. What right did she have anyhow, intruding on me at a time like this, a time when finally I was happy. If she wanted to give me advice she should have kept two feet on living soil.

I was in love in love in love. Later that summer I moved in with him and I only went home for Sunday lunch with my daddy and his live-in cousin Rina, who was saving her pennies for a face-lift while actively letting the rest of herself fall right apart, bird bone frail drinking from bags of wine she kept in the bathroom cabinets. Why she thought this was a secret from everyone I’ll never know. I would sit across the table from her while she cut her pork chop into baby bites, moving them all around the plate in a huff before sending the whole mess of it into the garbage, and I would seethe. I had taken up a hatred for her because she seemed to think she was my mam based on nothing but her proximity to my daddy. But my mam hadn’t been alive since I was sixteen years old and she wasn’t going to be replaced by this mumbling half-wit. Rina didn’t notice the awful way I’d stare at her because most the time she was goo-goo eyed looking at my daddy. After we’d eat she’d situate her bones on the couch, right in the middle so he would be forced to sit next to her no matter which cushion he chose, their thighs a press.

“What is this?” I finally asked them. I’d wanted to ask for so long and now I was thinking that if I was special enough for Spider Dick’s love then I could ask my own father a question like this, one that should have been asked when Rina had first shown up like a middle-aged orphan last year.

“What’s what?” my daddy said to me, eyes on the television playing one of Rina’s Lifetimes.

“This,” I said. I stood and thrust my plate so hard into the sink it broke. My daddy didn’t wince but Rina shriveled like a shy princess flower. It was my daddy who liked to throw dishes, right over my mam’s head after he’d had too many beers, and so we had taken to eating off paper plates, but then he started shredding her clothes instead, ripping them from her closet and turning them into a strange confetti that littered their bedroom floor, and so we went back to using real plates so he could get his aggressions out on something she didn’t have to wear. I thought I’d forgiven him for that but seeing him sit there with his dingbat cousin like they were lovers made me realize there was no forgiveness to be found in my heart.

“It ain’t right,” I said. I picked up my purse. I waved my hand at them. “Sick,” I said. “Sick sick. My mam is turning over in her grave.” I looked to Rina. “Before she died my mam always said that you fell from the ugly tree and got beat by every branch on the way down.” My mam had never said that exactly, but instead had thinned her lips when Rina was around and made a point of calling her other names on fake accident: Lina, Mina, Whatser. Oops, she’d say, stone faced, and then flub it again.

Rina put three fingers in her mouth and began chewing. “Everyone thinks I’m your dad’s wife,” she said, eyes on the TV. “Kind of funny, ain’t it?”

“Well, I, on the other hand,” I said to them. “Am in rightful love with someone who ain’t my relation.”

Rina perked up. Leaned forward to me. “Who’s it?” she asked, excited, like she had no memory of the ten seconds prior. “Gonna have a baby? I’d like to give a baby some vanilla icy cream. See how it likes it.”

“Don’t put it in your calendar. You won’t be seeing me much anymore. I got a new life. My beau’s a miner.”

“La ti da,” my daddy said. “A miner.”

Rina shivered into a silent laughter. Slapped my daddy’s knee.

“A miner,” my daddy repeated like it was the single stupidest thing he’d ever heard.

I stopped going to see them after that and I didn’t hear anything until an envelope from my daddy arrived at the Barge weeks later and it was the notice from the city college that if I didn’t show up soon I’d fail my classes and still have to pay tuition. My daddy had opened the envelope himself and read it, no respect for my privacy, and then re-taped it. Don’t ask me for money, cuz I ain’t got it! he’d written on the paper. My face burned because of course I’d been spending my money on Spider Dick’s rent and a number of delicacies he liked to eat—pickled pig nose, mock lobster, canned scorpions, chicken livers—and on several full lingerie suits that were far more expensive than a handful of lace ever should be. I shoved the paper in my purse. I’d been meaning to talk to Spider Dick about my dreams and school. I’d just been waiting for the right time.

But the right time was hard to find. Spider Dick liked to talk about discipline instead when he was on all that white powder, and he’d make up adult games for me. He would leave me notes before he left for work, instructions for my day.

No eating fruit.

Stretch to learn the splits.

Dye your hair blonde like Marilyn Monroe.

My heart flew when I’d read his notes. They were like nothing I’d ever experienced. My whole body trembled. I wanted to check off the lists each day to please him; I wanted to know what would be on the list the next day. Some nights I couldn’t sleep thinking of it, and I’d try to pry the answers from him, but as he said, the ideas came to him in dreams and I’d just have to wait.

I’d wait. I liked that he wanted me a certain, specific way. Lying next to Spider Dick in bed, I knew I’d never be bored again.

Only frozen green beans today.

I tried to tell Dani at the Barge about it. She was as close to a real friend as I had and I was burning to brag.

She looked me up and down, wiped down the counter, and clucked her tongue. “Aren’t you Miss College Girl? What happened to that? Weren’t you on about transferring your credits to a real school? Get a real degree? Believe you said, ‘Dani, I’m gonna get out of this place. I’m gonna go to a school with a two-story library.’ Blah blah blah. Now here you are, with the very one who’s gonna do you the worst.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Please tell me you don’t think you’re the first woman around here to get caught up with a miner. Just you wait. Clock’s ticking on that time bomb.”

That night she flirted hard with Spider Dick to try and prove something to me but she failed. He kept looking over at me, winking, making her all exasperated. She was no match for the greatest love in the universe.

After I completed my tasks Spider Dick would place a happy face sticker in the color of my choosing on a repurposed child’s potty chart that he had named Alma’s Chart of Eternal Happiness. I would clap my hands when he’d place the sticker and feel a real sense of accomplishment.

One day he asked if I had a mother. The question caught me off guard as we didn’t discuss me much, mainly him and his worries and ghosts. His own mother with her nervousness and his father with his COPD. But he asked and when I fell silent he held me to him and said go on, let it out.

It was hard to explain to him but I tried. My mam died a strange way. I didn’t like to think about it too much because I couldn’t make no sense of it. Either something had been quietly the matter in her body for a long time and she chose not to tell me, or nothing was ever the matter and she was taken fast as lightning by no logic of man. Each possibility was a puzzle of its own horrors. A friend I had at the time suggested my daddy had something to do with it. She had seen on Matlock that glass shards in food was quick and quiet, and that maybe he had done her in, right under my nose. The weird thing was, when she said it, it didn’t seem improbable to me.

I didn’t tell Spider Dick about that though. I said she died unexpected and left me without explaining all the things I needed to know about life, and then I mentioned Rina and got started on all that. I was breathing hard about it and Spider Dick looked at me, amused.

“Don’t you ever just want to mess with her?”

“I don’t want none to do with that Rina,” I said. “I don’t want to think about her at all.”

“It’s fun to mess with people,” he said. “It’s fun to make people think you’re one way and then boo! You’re another.”

His pupils were all small when he said that and there was Mam again, right next to me now. I could practically see her, the downturn of her tired eyes, the little hairs escaping her ponytail, saying Honey, don’t you see? Don’t you see?

But I was covered in love and all I could say was See what?

So things were good until the fall. I’d fully shit the bed on my summer classes, and now my transcript had Fs on it. I was surprised at how low this made me feel, like a badness had locked into me. I wanted to erase the Fs. I wanted someone to look at me and at least see Cs. Before my shift at the Barge I went to the small library a few minutes down the road to look at the computer. I could register for new classes. I could start those and talk to a counselor about how to fix my first bad semester. I found the English class I’d have to retake and I entered in a credit card number I had never used before, one I hadn’t shown Spider Dick for a reason I wasn’t sure of, and I paid. I thought of how dumb this would seem to my daddy, paying so much just to take the same class I’d already failed. I thought of Spider Dick at home waiting for me with a new list, how chipped off he’d be if he knew I’d signed up for a class without at least talking to him about it. That’s how we were now. He said we were basically the same person, we were tied together in every way. The thought of him finding out sent a sharp shooting fear into my stomach. I didn’t like the feeling, but it wasn’t new to me, was it? I raced home to him.

But when I got home he wasn’t there. I paced around the cabin until it was time for my shift and when I arrived all the girls were huddled around a phone, hysterical. A tunnel had collapsed at the mine. One of them pulled me aside and told me all about it, how it had crushed Spider Dick’s ribs and cut off his middle finger, killed his best buddy Jimbo instantly. He had been airlifted to the hospital in town. I wondered if the class I had signed up for had caused the accident, cosmically. Oh, I felt guilty. So I went back to focusing on my one true love, whose finger was gone and replaced by a thick bandage. He said they had tried to save Jimbo, but that everything happened fast, a quick black of space and time, the thick air suffocating, and then nothing. He said his last thoughts had been of me, and of the angel version of our child, a blonde little girl. Me and the angel child were calling to him to come back and so he did. Now all he had to live for was me and that child, whoever she was, waiting inside of him to be shot into life.

I threw my body over him and wailed when he said that. I really cried. I felt so much for him. I loved him, so damaged and frail and talking about me like I was a piece of his destiny. What more could I have ever wanted? We were above everything else.

Back at the cabin I fed him creamed corn and washed his hair over the sink. I stayed by his side, but he stopped with the lists. I figured they would return but instead he became angry with me if his soup wasn’t the right feel in his mouth, if I came home a few minutes later than he imagined I should, and he didn’t want me going for drinks or lunches with the girls at the Barge no more. He said all that was energy I was putting elsewhere, into other things, and energy was finite. My energy was for him and for our little girl, whereabouts unknown. The unknown part was my fault, he said, because he put his seed in me every day, carefully of course, because of the ribs, but my body was not doing what it was supposed to do with it. He told me long stories about his ex-girlfriend that made my ears burn, the way he described her as being so beautiful and full of goodness, soooooooo laid back—and how his main regret in life was getting her pregnant and making her get rid of it, how he should not have done that. I sat there listening and petting him but the stories made me feel real weird and even worse when I got up to pee and the toilet water was tinged red.

“I’m on the rag,” I told him when I sat back down. I reached to rub his shoulders but he brushed me off, stood up, and slammed his good fist into the wall behind me and howled.

He looked at the hole and then at me. “Call your daddy to fix that,” he spat.

“My daddy don’t fix nothing.”

“Yeah, don’t think I don’t know you go there all the time, whining to him, poor me poor me, telling him how poor we are. I got your number, little girl.”

He was another person, ...