Unsightly Bulges

by Kim Hunt Harris

  I might have let my frustration at that show a bit more than I should have, because his eyes grew a little wide, too, and he motioned toward another guy about his age, wearing the same black pants, white shirt and black bow tie. “Zach was here, I think.”

  It turned out Zach had not only been there, but he had witnessed some of the drama that was reported on later.

  I wanted to do a fist-pump but held back.

  “I’m with the Discreet Investigations Agency. I’m sorry but I left my business cards in my handbag.” I wasn’t that sorry. “We’re investigating the death of CJ Hardin and I’d like to talk to you about that night if you have a few minutes.”

  He looked skeptical. “Who are you working for?”

  Not that again. “I’m not at liberty to divulge that. It’s a party who is very concerned that justice be served for CJ Hardin.”

  He frowned and looked around. “I’m kind of busy right now.” He started moving toward the kitchen.

  I followed him. “You don’t have to go on record or anything,” I assured him. “We’re not working for the police. We just want to hear what happened last week. Establish a timeline of CJ’s last days.”

  He shrugged. “Not a lot to tell, and I’ve already told it all to the cops anyway. He and that other guy were talking.” He nodded toward a door that exited the kitchen. It looked like it led to the alley behind the building. “He seemed agitated. The guy with the spikey hair said, ‘Just stay strong a little bit longer. You know it’ll be worth it.’ Something like that. Then they went out to the alley. I had to dump the trash so that’s why I was out there. You could tell they were arguing out there, just watching them.”

  “Could you make out any words?”

  He shook his head. “Not really.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “The short guy said something, and the tall guy calmed down a little, then they kissed each other. That’s when I came in.”

  “You didn’t take the picture?”

  “No, man, I had work to do. I have work to do now,” he said with a crooked grin. He grabbed two plates and stood like he was waiting for me to get the hint.

  I nodded, remembering the picture from the paper. They hadn’t been kissing then, but were clearly in a moment of high emotion. Marky had his hands on CJ’s head, resting his own forehead to CJ’s. They looked...close.

  “Stay strong a little longer?” I asked. “That’s what he said? It’ll be worth it?”

  “Something like that.” He shuffled from one foot to the other.

  I thanked him, more frustrated than anything else. What did that mean? Why did CJ need to stay strong just a little longer? The next day, he’d come out at the 5K race. I wondered what he’d been thinking the night before. Had he already decided, or was he still at that point planning to stay in the closet?

  If he had planned to come out, it seemed more likely that he would be girding up for an extended battle. That didn’t seem like the occasion for a “just a little longer and then it’ll be over and worth it” kind of pep talk.

  And if he planned to stay in the closet...I’d only met Marky once, but he didn’t seem like the type to encourage someone to stay in the closet. “In your face,” that’s how Desiree Shaw had described him. I couldn’t see him encouraging CJ to get through this week so he could go back to his closeted life and it would all be worth it.

  I made my way back to our table and sat beside Tony. The Smaxx were seriously cutting into my ribs and I was beginning to feel cranky.

  “Everything okay?” Tony leaned over and whispered.

  I realized how it must look to him. I’d excused myself to use the bathroom, been gone quite a while, and came back scowling. He could tell something was wrong but was probably too delicate to be specific.

  I forced a smile. “No problems. It’s just...” I motioned toward my feet. “I’m not used to these uncomfortable shoes,” I said. It was true. My feet did hurt, just not as bad as my ribs did. I crossed my arms on the table and tried to surreptitiously tug at the elastic band under my armpit. It didn’t help much.

  He smiled and leaned over. “Take them off,” he whispered. “It won’t be time to go for a while yet.”

  I slipped off my shoes and forced another smile. It was almost all I could do not to stand up and rip the Smaxx off and toss them in the general direction of the waste basket.

  The emcee stood up and tapped the microphone. “Now that everyone’s gotten some food into them, it’s time to get to the reason why we’re here. To honor these very deserving members of our community.”

  The first up was a retired first grade teacher who taught adults how to read at the library. She had started out by volunteering twice a month, now she was up to three times a week, four hours each time. It was like a part-time job for her, except she didn’t get paid. One of the first people she had taught stood up and read from a speech he had written. By the end, he was crying, she was crying, and I was crying, and probably some other people, too.

  Dale stared at me like he’d never seen anyone cry before. I narrowed my eyes at him, but he didn’t seem affected in the least.

  The next up was a husband and wife team who had fostered twenty-seven kids over the past ten years. A dozen or so of the kids had shown up to support them, and talk about what a loving, stable home had meant to them. The parents cried, the kids cried, I cried.

  Dale stared some more. I stuck my tongue out at him. He grinned.

  Les’s award was up next. A guy got up that I’d seen at Exodus, a prison ministry where Les spent a good bit of his time. I’d never met the guy before. He wore starched jeans, a white button down shirt with pearl snap buttons, and a dark brown leather vest. He had a cowboy hat tan; the bottom half of his head was tanned, the top half was pale, with thin brown hair combed over a bald spot. He looked supremely uncomfortable.

  He gripped the edge of the podium and looked out over the crowd, the white part of his face growing redder, the longer the uncomfortable silence stretched out. He looked painfully at Les, who winked at him and nodded.

  “I’ve just realized,” he said, “that the speech I’ve written is going to come out all wrong. On the walk up here, I realized that. Good timing, huh?” He laughed uncomfortably, and the crowd sympathetically joined in. “It’s going to sound like I think the first two recipients up here don’t deserve this award, and that’s not true. They deserve it. They deserve this and a lot more. It’s the kind of people like this who make this world a tolerable place to live. But if we’re talking about what people deserve...those kids you just saw up here with the Millers? They deserved what they got, too. Every kid deserves to have a home where they’re safe, and provided for, and loved. Every kid deserves a good education, deserves to have someone care about whether or not they can read and write, who cares if they got a good breakfast or who will help them make a science fair project. These kids deserved someone who cared about them, and these –” He gestured toward the honoree table – “These good people stepped in and did that. They didn’t have to. They could have looked away, but they have huge hearts and they want to see kids get what they need and deserve.”

  He stopped and bowed his head for a second, clearing his throat. “You would be hard-pressed to find anyone on the face of this earth who deserved the help of Les Nolan less than I did. I was a hateful, bitter, hurtful drunk. I had hurt everyone who knew me. My wife, my kids.” He paused again. “My second wife. Her kids.” He paused with the crowd gave an uncomfortable laugh. “I was so full of pain and anger, all I wanted to do was drink and spread that anger around. So I did. I put all my energy into making sure everyone around me was as miserable as I was. I was good at it, too.”

  He stopped again, shook his head slowly as if remembering. “My kids were sweet and young like you were when you met the Millers,” he said to the girl who’d shown her second grade picture. “When my daughter was the age you were in that picture, I took her to a bar. I parked outside and gave her a col
oring book and a package of Saltine crackers, and told her I’d be right back. When I came back out it was dark, and there was a man outside the car –“ His voice broke off then, and he shook his head again. “My daughter wasn’t hurt that night, but it wasn’t because I was concerned for her safety. It was because I happened to run out of money at the same time she needed me most. It was a lucky coincidence that I walked out the door just then.” He smiled crookedly at Les. “Les would say it was divine intervention. Who knows? What I do know is, I put my baby in harm’s way, and when I was faced with what I’d done, instead of facing the responsibility and conviction of it, I did what I always did. I turned it to anger. I blamed her. I blamed her for being the kind of person that trouble always follows. I blamed her for being born, for putting me – by her very existence – in the position of having to watch out for her when I had other things to do. Things like crawling into a bottle.”

  The crowd was deathly silent now. I swallowed the lump in my throat. I didn’t have kids – possibly another example of divine intervention there – but I knew all too well the kind of havoc this guy was talking about wreaking on his loved ones. I’d been there. I’d had amends to make. It was awful. There was no other word for it.

  “See, kids deserve a parent who protects them from bad guys. I wasn’t her protector. In fact, I was the bad guy. I was the one my kids needed protection from.” He looked at the crowd, then at the honoree table. “Jesus said that anyone can love their brother, but he says to love our enemies. You, you’ve loved your brother, and you’ve done it at great personal sacrifice, and you’ve given these kids lives they would not have had. You’re a superhero for that, make no mistake. But Les...Les loved his enemy. I was the enemy to all that was good in the world, and he loved me. He loved me back to myself, he loved me to God, he loved me back to my family. That little girl? She’s almost thirty now, and we’re having lunch next week. She’s letting me meet my granddaughter for the first time. She’s hesitant, you know. She has every right to be. She might never truly forgive me, and I can’t blame her. But because Les picked me up out of that gutter and loved me to sobriety, I can work on forgiving myself, and knowing God has already forgiven me.”

  He nodded toward Les, and held up the plaque. Les rose and the two men shook hands, then embraced. This time I didn’t particularly care if Dale saw me cry.

  That man’s story was my story. I wondered how many people just like him, just like me, had had their lives turned around because Les refused to give up on them. When the rest of their world had written them off as a lost cause, that’s when Les stepped in. I looked around the room and from the expressions I saw, I knew I was in good company.

  Almost every day, for some reason or another, I had occasion to think of heaven, to picture it in my mind, with its fluffy white clouds and gold harps and endless blue sky. I knew on a logical level that that’s not really what heaven looks like, but in the absence of any real visual, I worked with what I had. Heaven was some far off place, where we’ll all float around someday, kind of bored but still happy.

  But looking around that room, I realized with a sudden and deep sense of surety that this...this was heaven. This was what heaven really was, all of us loving each other, accepting each other, lifting each other up. All of us, without our hurts and the walls we build between us, broken open and vulnerable, and messy, accepting each other and loving each other. This was the real heaven.

  I wanted to congratulate Les one more time and give him a hug before we left. That would put off the inevitable end-of-the-evening moment for a little bit longer. I’d only given him a quick hug, however, when I was jostled by a young redheaded woman in a stylish purple suit and tapped Les on the shoulder.

  “Mr. Nolan, I’m Hailey Forrest from Channel 11 News. We’d like to talk to you about tonight’s event, if you have time.”

  “Let me just say goodnight to my friend here,” he said.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, stepping back. “Take your fifteen minutes of fame. You deserve it.”

  When Tony and I left, Les was busy talking to the reporter, who was nodding thoughtfully at every word.

  Stump, bless her high-maintenance heart, heard us on the deck and immediately slammed against the door and set up a howl.

  Tony looked at me in alarm.

  “Don’t worry,” I said as I opened the screen and put my key in the lock. “That’s her normal welcome home routine.”

  She flopped over on her back when she saw me, then started to whine and attempt, insanely enough, to scootch toward Tony on her back.

  “I think she likes you more than she does me,” I said.

  Frank was asleep in the recliner, as I fully expected him to be. I reached over and turned volume on the TV down.

  “Should we, uh, wake him up or something?”

  “No need,” I said. “He’ll wake up sometime during the night and let himself out. He always does.”

  Tony nodded, but he didn’t seem totally at ease with the idea.

  “Don’t worry,” I said hastily. “Frank and I aren’t...I mean, he’s not remotely interested in me. Except for my food and my recliner.” I stopped as I realized I’d just walked smack into the subject I’d been trying to avoid all evening. “I mean, not that I thought you were worried, or jealous or anything like that. Not that you have any reason to be, or any reason to not be, or...” I stopped again, and decided I should just shut up a little bit.

  Tony smiled at me, white teeth against tan skin, and again my head went into that very confused state.

  “It’s a little weird, isn’t it?” he said.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Right! I mean, so weird, huh? I’ve been freaking out all week, wondering what to expect and how to act and what to say and whether you were...” I ran out of steam again. I threw a look at Frank, not sure if I wanted desperately for him to wake up and put the screeching brakes on this situation – as was his particular skill – or wanted desperately for him to stay asleep. I swallowed.

  “Me, too,” he said. “I wonder how many guys can say they’re honestly nervous about dating their own wife.” He laughed lightly. He wanted Frank to stay asleep, I realized, and my heart beat a little faster.

  “I guess it would depend on the wife.”

  He laughed again, but I wished the words back as soon as I said them. I had been the kind of wife that would make a man nervous about leaving the house.

  He grew quiet again. That was one of the things that had driven me crazy about Tony – his quietness. I was one roiling, noisy ball of anger and fear, and I could handle just about anything except dead air. I would do anything to fill that silence.

  Now, I thought, it was okay. I could relax a little in it. It wasn’t nearly as threatening as it had once seemed.

  Tony looked around, scratched Stump’s belly some more, then looked at me.

  “How about this?” he said. “How about if, just for a while, we don’t expect anything? And we both just act like ourselves.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “You sure?”

  He nodded. “Absolutely.”

  I pretended to breathe a sigh of relief. “Good, because I only know how to act like myself. If I knew any other way to act, believe me, I would have done it long ago.”

  “You’re fine just the way you are,” he said, and I kind of loved him a little bit for saying it, even as I didn’t believe it was true.

  “So,” he said. “Your friend Viv tells me you guys are hot on another case.”

  “She did, huh?” I wasn’t sure what to say to that. If the day’s events had been any indication, I needed to stick with dog grooming.

  “She said you guys were investigating the CJ Hardin murder.”

  I nodded as noncommittally as I could. “When she said ‘we,’ did she say who she meant, exactly?”

  “She didn’t say, but that guy with her talked like he was on board.”

  “Yeah. He’s on board.”

  “So, you are working with th
em?”

  I nodded again, then noticed a look very like dismay come into his eye. “I mean, I’m not really working with them, per se. It’s just...well, you know Viv. She gets bored easily. And she likes a good reason to nose into other people’s business. Dale, he just...well, the body was in his truck, so he kind of acts like his business, too.”

  “And you? You’re involved because...?”

  Well, crap. That was the million dollar question, wasn’t it? At this point, I could give him any one of the lame, childish reasons that had me going all over town getting shot at and asking intrusive questions:

  I hate Dale, but Viv seems to like him and I don’t want them to become besties without me because I’m basically still in seventh grade.

  I’m freaked out about the fact that you’re still my husband, and I can’t drink and I’m not supposed to eat, so I need something else to distract me.

  I’m afraid that if I stay home with nobody but Frank and Stump for company I’ll either dive into a bottle and lose all the work I’ve done or dive into a family-size bag of Doritos and then Tri-Patrice will get even skinnier than me. I can’t let that happen because, again, I’m basically still in seventh grade.

  I looked him in the eye and decided that, if nothing else, he deserved the truth.

  “Look,” I said, standing. “I’m wearing Smaxx. You’ve heard of it, right? Supposed to make you look slim and svelte? Right now I think they might be severing my torso. Plus they’re a little twisted around the top of my right thigh. I would like to answer your question intelligently, but all I can think about right now is how much pain I’m in. So I’m going to go slip into something more comfortable. I don’t mean that in any kind of come-hither-y way. I mean I’m going to leave the room and come back in a few minutes in very baggy, unattractive sweat pants and a t-shirt that probably won’t do a single thing to flatter my figure. If you want to stick around for that, I’ll be happy to discuss my motivations then.”

  Tony blinked.

  “You did say we should be ourselves,” I reminded him.