“Sounds like a plan. You might give some thought to what we are going to do about this nursery.”
“You ought to get some input from Davy on that. Okay, let me ask you a question and you promise not to get mad.”
“Promise,” I said.
“How do you think Davy is going to react to the baby news?”
“I think that he will be excited. He sees himself as a future Little League all-star coach. Which means, of course, that the little guy will have no interest in baseball.”
“If it is a little guy. It might be a little girl,” Jonathan said.
“True. I guess that I don’t really know how Davy will react to the news. It doesn’t seem that we’ve talked much lately. He has been traveling a lot. He knows that I’ve been thinking about having a baby. He called me from Kentucky while I was at work, but, like I said, I didn’t think that was a good time to tell him.”
“Are you worried that Davy will be gone as much as Dad was when we were growing up?”
“It could happen. I see him becoming more and more like Dad every day. It’s like Davy worships Dad or something. I guess we all do to some extent. Davy has seemed detached lately. I thought that it had something to do with this Kentucky case. I know that Davy sees it as a big deal.”
“I’m not sure that all of Dad’s traits are ones that you would want your husband to emulate.”
“Why whatever do you mean?” I asked rolling my eyes.
Jonathan just shrugged his shoulders. I could tell that he was thinking carefully about how he might answer my question, and we sat there at the counter for a moment eating our entrees in silence. Probably he was thinking about how we both thought that Dad was always running around on Mom, but we didn’t really know anything for certain. Maybe he had information that I didn’t and was considering whether or not he should protect me from the news. Or maybe he knew something about Davy that I didn’t know. He and Davy were good friends. What if he knew something about Davy and was afraid to tell me? I put my fork down a looked at him for a second trying to read his mind. Finally, I interjected, “Do you know something that I don’t know?”
“No,” he said. “I know that Peters & Sullivan has hired a good-looking female contract lawyer that is working on that Kentucky case with Dad and Davy. I guess I assumed that if anybody was going to put the moves on her, it would be Dad. I’m not saying that Davy has done anything wrong. I guess I’m just telling you that I’d be careful is all. I know Davy pretty well. I’m sure that there is nothing to worry about,” Jonathan said trying to sound reassuring. But the seed had been planted, and I was worried.
“How do you know so much about what is going on at Peters & Sullivan?” I asked.
Jonathan didn’t answer.
“Have you talked to Davy?” I asked.
“No,” was all Jonathan replied.
“Did you know that she went with Davy on this trip to Kentucky?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
Suddenly, I was concerned and not just about how Jonathan was getting his information.
6
JONATHAN AND I FINISHED OUR MEAL in relative silence. I ordered a flan for dessert, and he had a cup of coffee. We tried to lighten the conversation by discussing ideas for decorating the baby’s room, but both of us were distracted and didn’t come up with any firm ideas. After dinner, I left him with the check and went to my car. I turned onto West Grey out of the restaurant parking lot and then took Kirby Drive through River Oaks on my way to West University. I had intended to go home, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my conversation with Jonathan, so I decided to drive by my parents’ house. I circled the block where their home was located to see whose cars were parked in the driveway in back of the house. I don’t know if I had hoped or assumed that Mom would be there by herself, but I was pretty sure that Dad’s car was not there.
From the back of the house, I could see over the low finished-stone wall across the courtyard with the giant oak tree to the window of my parents’ bedroom. I parked the car at the curb. It was just beginning to turn dark, and I could see that the reading light was on at the chair beside my parents’ bed. I nervously checked to see that nobody else was on the street, turned off the car, and got out. I stood at the stone wall and could see that Mom was sitting in her reading chair with a book opened in her lap. It didn’t look like Dad was home. I thought about going through the gate to the back door, but instead I just stood there watching my mother read.
In a way, I felt sorry for her. Sure, she was surrounded by luxury—a beautiful home in a wonderful neighborhood. But I knew that she must feel lonely. Enclosed with her antiques and expensive artwork, she sat by herself. Who knew where her husband of thirty-five years was? Probably she didn’t. She may have known where he said he was going to be, but that didn’t mean that she knew where he was. Her kids, to whom she had devoted so much of her life, were gone trying to make their own lives. She had friends and church and charity endeavors, but none of them were here right now. It was just her alone in a big, quiet house with a comfortable chair and a book. Probably it was some book that she had read before but decided to read again rather than trying to concentrate on some trite sitcom on television.
“That could be me,” I thought to myself. I didn’t know if Davy and I would ever be able to afford a house in River Oaks, and I didn’t know if Davy would ever leave me at home by myself to read a book. I felt as if he had left me at home right then. I understood that sometimes work would take you away, but I wondered what Davy was doing and what Jonathan knew and wasn’t saying about him. I had never thought much about my parents as young people. Had they gone through the decisions that we were facing now? Had Mom just decided that it was better to keep quiet about Dad for the sake of her children? Did she regret her decisions that had left her here by herself? At least for twentysomething years, she had her kids’ lives to share. That must have been some comfort. Certainly, it had not been boring, had it? She must have enjoyed that to some extent.
If, when, I have this baby, at least I will have him for the next twenty years I thought. Can anybody plan farther into the future than that? Whatever happens with Davy, I will at least have this baby to raise, and I am looking forward to that. I would much rather do that than review countless interrogatory answers in cases that I don’t care about anyway. Did Mom ever think that she might have wanted some career other than raising children? If so, she had never let on to me that she did. Sure, Mom and I had tangled over the years, but I admired her. If she could put on a bright face and confront the world on behalf of her kids, then I could, too. There wasn’t any hard evidence that Davy had done anything he shouldn’t have, and I was probably making more out of the conversation with Jonathan than it deserved. Still, I wished that I hadn’t been so short with Davy when he left town the other day. What was I thinking? Was I trying to drive him away? No. I had just been upset that he was leaving town again and at a time when I needed him to go with me to an event. I wasn’t trying to drive him away; I was trying to keep him at home.
As it got darker, the lights in the courtyard came on automatically, illuminating the begonias around the giant oak tree. Somewhere down the street a dog barked, and Mom looked up from her reading. I don’t think she saw me standing at the wall, but I eased back to my car and got in. I felt tears running down my cheeks, and I felt alone and scared. When my cell phone rang it took me a moment to locate my purse, and then another second to dig around in it before I found the phone. When I saw on the cell phone screen that Davy was calling, I thought about not taking the call again, but I wanted to hear his voice. I answered before the call went to voicemail, but I didn’t want him to hear that I was upset, and I didn’t want to tell him about the baby over the phone.
Davy sounded like he was a long way away from me on the phone. He said something about having to be in Lexington because he needed to go to the Kentucky law school library there. He also said that he expected to be home the next day. I felt like I
might start crying again, but I didn’t want Davy to worry about what was going on with me. He sounded like something might not be going well on the case. That was what I understood to be the reason why he had gone to Lexington and extended his trip.
I was worried when I got off the phone that I might have been too short with Davy in my effort to end the conversation. I don’t know why I didn’t just let the phone take a message. I don’t know why I didn’t just let myself cry on the phone with him or why I didn’t just tell him about the baby. I’m sure that he could tell that I was upset, but he probably thought it had something to do with his being out of town.
As I hung up the phone and turned onto Kirby Drive to head toward West University, I told myself that I would make everything right when Davy got back to Houston. I’d put on a nice dress. I’d tell him the news, and then we would go to dinner with my parents and Jonathan and tell them the news. I thought that Davy would be excited about the baby, and I knew that my parents would be. After dinner, I’d take him home and make him forget that he had ever been to Kentucky. When I got home, however, the worry swept over me again, and I found myself rifling through his dresser drawers looking for any clue that might suggest Davy had been unfaithful to me. I didn’t find anything like that, but buried beneath his folded T-shirts in his underwear drawer I found an old manuscript of a short story that Davy must have written in college. He had never told me anything about it. I didn’t know if it was hidden away in the drawer so that I wouldn’t find it, but now that I did, I had to read it.
The Traveler
Buses. For reasons I can’t really explain, I don’t like them very much now. The exhaust fumes have a nauseating, weakening effect. The rides to other colleges can be long and boring. There was a time when I was very young that bus rides offered some enjoyment and the excitement of travel. Now, they are only a means of transporting our college debate team and all our files to tournaments. The freshmen load the cargo area with sample cases full of Malthusian crunches, nuclear wars, melting ice caps, and other generic disadvantages.
I remember the first time I rode on a bus. I must have been about five years old. Mom decorated me in a little cowboy hat and boots and gave the bus driver explicit instructions not to let me off until we arrived at Water Valley, Texas. I was thrilled with my new-found independence. The greasy driver and I stuffed ourselves with the cookies Mom had made, and he talked on and on about the importance of highway safety and driver courtesy. In time we detoured from the interstate and stopped at a one-street town that the highway had forgotten. There stood my grandmother, camera held at her waist, eyes squinting into the sunlight, wrinkling the crow’s feet that I have only recently noticed accompanying Dad’s smile. I suppose my younger brother, who has their same eyes, will inherit those wrinkles as well. Mama made the bus driver pose while she snapped photographs.
She and Papa ran a little gas-and-grocery store. The store smelled of oiled-wood floors and old-fashioned unsliced bologna. Antique cakes of cheese and little paper ice cream cups sat deliciously in a porcelain refrigerator. The Coke machine was stocked full of root beers that foamed like root beer ought to foam when you drop salted peanuts into the bottle. But I remember the candy counter best of all . . . soft Tootsie Rolls and peppermints big enough to drink Kool-Aid through. Mama would always hide a couple of Zero bars in the freezer when she knew I was coming. I was much older before I noticed the gnawed holes in the meal sacks or the bare wiring. To me, Mama’s grocery store was a haven of strawberry push-ups and Bama peanut butter.
Mama and Papa lived there with my great-grandmother. Grandma was in her late eighties. She had her own little room behind the kitchen where she collected scraps of cloth for homemade quilts that she was already too blind to piece together. She cherished my Dad. She would sing little ditties to me about sheep and hogs walking in a pasture and tell me how much I looked like my grandfather. She died in her nineties. An uncle once told me she was registered in Oklahoma as part Indian.
I loved Papa with all of my five-year-old heart, but I don’t know if I ever understood him. He was medium height with particularly large shoulders, a weathered tan, a grizzled-gray stubble, and see-through blue eyes. His boots were worn out and his yellowed straw hat was sweat-stained brown around the crown. He would jerk me up in his swarthy hands and rub his knuckles over my flattop while I howled with delight and Mama cringed with overprotectiveness.
In the fall, he would take me out to the ice house to watch him skin a young, whitetail buck. As young as I was, I stood open-mouthed admiring the skill with which Papa would peel away the hide form the fatty carcass with short, quick strokes of his knife. The dripping blood steamed into puddles in the cold wetness of the ice house. When he finished, he would axe the body in half and give the ribs and forelegs to some less fortunate folks that lived down on the river. He usually took the skins and sold them in San Angelo.
I loved him for his oddity. He showed me .30-30 shell casings with bullet holes through the middle and kegs of nails in wax. Someday, he was going to add a room on behind the grocery. And he threw me baseballs endlessly. I would swing my little bat and slap his forkballs skittering down the driveway. With every hit, he would shake with laughter and threaten to fan me with the next three. But the next three would be as slow as the last, and I would send them careening and old Papa would go to fetch them, laughing as he ran bowlegged.
He drank. The trash can behind the house was always full of empty Falstaff beer cans. I remember one hot summer night when I lay in bed and heard him and some others talk drunkenly out on the porch. They talked about rodeos. They all remembered when Papa was trying to hog-tie some calf and his pony got the rope straddled across his belly and was yelling in pain. None of the old cowboys could remember seeing Papa whip out his knife, but before they had realized it, the rope was cut and the calf was free. One of the cronies mentioned that the calf had cost Papa the prize money. It was some time longer before Papa came inside and went to bed. I stayed awake a long time listening to the summer night whistle in through the open window screen.
One summer when I was a few years older, my little brother Charlie went with me to Mama’s. Grandma had died and the new highway went even farther around behind Water Valley on its way from Big Spring to San Angelo. Papa took Charlie and me out to the ballpark over in Grape Creek. I guess because we were out-of-towners, we didn’t get to play until the late innings of a game that was extended by a tie score that neither team could break. Charlie and I found ourselves in the Water Valley outfield and Carlsbad was at bat with the game still tied. Charlie could not have been over six. The Carlsbad pitcher was probably sixteen. He had a big, bushy head of hair that stuck out in all directions from beneath his baseball cap, and the players on both teams referred to him as “the Lion.” Carlsbad and Water Valley were both small towns and anybody without a beard qualified for the kids’ teams.
I don’t remember much about the game itself. I remember some big kid knocking one over my little brother’s head. There was no outfield fence, just an indefinite line beyond which the pasture had not been mowed. Charlie finally got to it, made a stem Christie-like move to pick up the ball, threw it to me as the cut-off man, and I threw the guy out at home. As we jogged in from the last out, some old fellow asked us if we were Gid’s grandkids. We nodded yes and he smiled. If Water Valley could score in the bottom half of the inning, they would win. We got two outs fast. Charlie was next up and then it would be my turn.
Charlie’s little head was swallowed by his batting helmet. If Mom had been there she would never have let him go to the plate against that muscular teenager. And in all truth, Charlie was scared. But Papa came over and whispered something to him, and Charlie went to the plate.
When Charlie crouched down into his stance, everybody realized what Papa had probably whispered. Charlie’s strike zone could not have been over 14 inches. The pitcher threw a couple of balls and then Charlie took one on the arm. I saw tears in his eyes as he jogged to fi
rst base with his bottom lip jutted out. The Water Valley players were all yelling at the Lion, claiming that he had plunked Charlie on purpose. I can’t say whether he had or not, but his pitch had succeeded in making Charlie and me members of the team. As I came to the plate, I looked around for Papa. He was over on the Carlsbad side with his back to me, talking to some guys in lawn chairs.
The first pitch bounced through a hole in the bottom of the backstop. Before anybody could figure out where the ball was, Charlie was on third, sitting on the base. Their shortstop was complaining that Charlie had not bothered going to second, but the umpire had been busy looking for the ball, and anyway, I think he felt sorry for Charlie’s bruised arm.
The shortstop settled down and the game resumed. I heard Mama yell from the pickup. Charlie whined boyhood obscenities at the pitcher from third. But I couldn’t hear Papa. I wanted a hit for Papa. The pitch. I just shut my eyes and swung. The ball got by the surprised first baseman and rolled to some little fellow in right field. Charlie slid into home in spite of the fact that the little right fielder was just standing with the ball. The team mobbed Charlie.
I looked around and saw Papa collecting dollar bills from several of the Carlsbad men sitting in their lawn chairs. He came over and picked Charlie up and put him on his shoulders and tapped the bill of my cap. We all climbed into the pickup and went back to Water Valley with Papa grinning, honking the horn on his truck, and waving at everybody.
That night Mom and Dad came down from Abilene and Dad brought a tape recorder. Several aunts came over and Dad got them to sing for the tape. Papa came home late and everyone pretended not to notice the smell of liquor on his breath. Without much persuasion, Papa started to sing too. Before long, the aunts were just taking turns playing the harmonica and guitar around the Formica kitchen table while Papa sang songs the rest of them had forgotten. His voice was weighty with emotion and reminiscence. He sang cowboy songs—one right after another. I can’t remember all of the songs, honestly to me they all kind of sounded like the same song, but they included one about saying farewell to Old Joe Clark and another one about not being buried on the prairie. The little kitchen was yellow with the light from the uncovered hanging bulb. Outside in the hot night, the crickets chirped incessantly. I did not want to leave the next morning. Papa said that everybody hated to leave Water Valley, but that they all did.
A Minor Fall Page 8