“I don’t see you being taken away from here in handcuffs any time soon, sweetie.”
“I guess.” His breathing slowed a little, hitched, then slowed a bit more.
“You can hide out until things have calmed down, as long as that takes, and then you can ride my bike to Statesboro and catch a bus.” I washed between his legs, taking my time. I did it slowly.
Over and over. I used a lot of soap. His little guy hardened in my fist. Like a turtle’s head with a long, pink neck.
“Yeah,” he said, but not like he believed it. He looked down at my hand and then back up at me. “It might be better for me to go tomorrow morning before they really get serious about looking for me.”
“Nah, that’s crazy. It’s way too late for that. If you tried to bike or walk there now, especially during the day, they’d catch you for sure. Statesboro’s the closest Greyhound station and it’s still a fair hike. They’ll give up looking for you around here after a few more days. Don’t forget, you’ve still got a pile of Green Gable books to get through.”
I lifted his heavy, wrinkled sack of skin. In the bright light, it looked like something deformed. It occurred to me then that a boy’s equipment had its uses, but it really wasn’t much to look at once you got over the thrill of seeing it out in the open.
“I guess,” he said.
I put the washcloth back in the water and looked at him. I smiled.
“What are you smiling about?” he asked.
“You clean up nice,” I said.
But It’s Really More Like a Dozen
The first thing Mom said to me Thursday night after work, as she came in through the kitchen door with a brown paper sack in each hand and a carton of Virginia Slims Menthol 100s tucked under her arm, was, “I saw Mr. Jenkins today.”
There, under the bright twitch of the fluorescent lights, I got a good look at Mom’s face and I didn’t much like what I saw. She had about twenty pounds of frown dragging down each corner of her mouth and her eyes had sunk into deep, dark caves beneath her eyebrows. Still, those eyes of hers flashed at me as she set down the bags and told me what Mr. Jenkins said.
And since these were the first words to come out of her mouth—never mind a Hey or a How you doing?—my first fast thought was I must of brought this on myself by lying to Logan. I’d had this happen to me before. Tell someone a hard lie, and in return, someone else might tell you a hard truth. A string stretched between these things. Mr. Jenkins told her about what you’d expect. “And now,” she said, “they’re looking all over for him. Some people have it in their heads he might even be hiding here.”
“In our house?” I fairly screeched this out. My God, look what my lie has done.
Mom, God bless her, just laughed at this.
“No,” she said, “nobody thinks you’re a tramp, honey. Just a foolish child who maybe made the very bad decision to ride around in a strange man’s car.”
I couldn’t keep the blood from rushing to my face. It went there without my permission. And my cheeks flushed hot and guilty. I had to cut Mom off at the pass before she tripped me up or caught me in a lie. Frantic thoughts bounced around my skull like flies trapped in a bottle. The lies had gotten so thick and tangled, I near about had to write them down to keep track.
“Something bad happened,” I said, after a too-long moment.
My mom’s eyes widened and I could see she thought the very worst. “God, Lynn. Did he do something? Did he touch—?”
“No, no, Mom.” I shooed that idea away with my hand. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Then what?” she said, putting her hands on her hips. When I didn’t speak up right away, she stepped across the kitchen to fetch her quilted cigarette bag from the counter. The motor in the fridge chug-chugged and stopped. The room went dead still. The metal clasp on her bag sounded like a Black Cat firecracker when she snapped it shut again. Mom knew something was up, so I decided I’d best walk on tiptoe from here on out. She blew a thin blue jet of smoke at my chest and stared me down with her shiny black eyes. There was nowhere for my own to slip away to. When I glanced off to the safety of the tablecloth, she snatched up my chin and made me look at her. Mom hadn’t done this to me since I was ten years old and she thought I’d messed with one of her boat bottles. “Don’t you look away from me, Lynn Marie. I know something’s happened. You’ve gone red as a beet. What? Please don’t tell me you’re pregnant because I don’t want to hear it. Not now, anyway. Not tomorrow either.” She turned my face to one side. “And what in God’s name happened to your cheek?”
“It’s two things, really.” I took a breath.
“Jesus,” she said, pacing back across the room and throwing her cigarette bag onto the counter. Cigarettes spilled everywhere. She put one hand against her forehead and the other on her hip. Then she pushed out her lower lip and blew at the bangs hanging over her eyebrows until they fluttered. “Tell me. What is it?”
“Rhonda said for you to call in is one.”
Her eyes flashed at me. “That’s not what—”
“No, I think it’s important. Really important. She seemed pissed.” Slow down, I thought. She knows I babble when I’m spinning stories. “She said Dr. Drose wants to talk to you. Right away.”
“Oh.” She dropped her hand from her head and hugged herself. “What’s two?”
Then I took the mashed and sweat-limp business card out of my pocket and held it out to her like a pet that’d died. When I opened my mouth to steer this conversation toward safer shores, suddenly, without me meaning to or even expecting it, the tears came popping out one after another and dribbling from eye to nose and nose to chin. Touching the card again was all it took for the fear to squirt out of that fresh crack behind my left cheek and go juddering down my spine. I thought I was over it, but I guess the bad feelings were only hiding out and waiting to ambush me when I least suspected it.
“What, baby? What happened?” When she came across the kitchen to hug me, I handed her the card. This brought her to a full stop. Her eyes turned to slits as she read.
I told her what Marty’d told me to say about the deadline and the money and all the rest. And then I told her what he’d done. I lifted my shirt and showed her the mess he’d made of me. I was surprised myself at how ugly the marks looked. I could see the reflection of it in the microwave door. My shoulder was seriously puffed up by then and an ugly blue-red color. The prints left by his sausage-link fingers couldn’t have been clearer had he drawn them on with a marker.
“Oh, baby, I’m sorry.” She sucked in a breath and winced. “He did that to you?”
“Yeah,” I said, quietly, “he did.” Then I told her about what he’d done to the house.
She ducked her head under the cabinet and looked across the breakfast bar at the living room.
“God-damn-it,” she said. Each syllable came out of her mouth with a hiss, like water dripped in a hot skillet.
Mom kicked off her shoes and slid back and forth across the linoleum in her stockings. She gnawed at her lower lip. She did it in small, hard shuffles, like she was cleaning grime off the floor with her feet. This odd sort of pacing was usually her standard operating procedure for thinking over a serious financial jam. Half a dozen expressions made the muscles in her face jump and twitch.
I sat at the table and tried to stay still, following her around the room with my eyes. After a couple or three minutes of this slide pacing, she made as if to pick up the phone and then decided against it.
“Damn it,” she said finally. “This has got way out of hand.”
Mom stopped to look at her scattered smokes in the sink. After three long sighs, she snatched up one of the unbroken ones, put it in her mouth, and lit it with the big pink lighter from her cigarette bag. Then she went to the phone and picked it up again.
The sky outside the kitchen window slowly turned dark orange. An ambulance screamed through the parking lot on its way to the emergency room. The entire room filled with red light for a mom
ent and then went dim again. After the ambulance turned the corner, it seemed a whole lot darker in the kitchen than it had before.
“Hey, Rhonda. Yeah. No, I didn’t. What’d he say?” She took a drag off her cigarette. “When was all that? No. Yeah?”
Rhonda’s voice scritched and scratched in the receiver like an angry cricket.
“If that’s what he thinks, why’d he have you do it then? Damn, I should of known Carla would say that. Uh-huh, I’ve been thinking that for years now.” She laughed an angry laugh. “Like hell she will. She’d sooner get that man to look at her then fly. Thanks. Yeah, page Dr. Drose.” She stabbed out her cigarette, gave me a curious appraising look, and shook her head. “This is the last time I—” Suddenly her voice dropped a pitch and became softer. She gripped the phone with both hands. “No, Dr. Drose, I wasn’t talking to you. I’m sorry. No, of course.” She paused for a long spell. “I don’t believe I know.” She closed her eyes and bit down hard on her lower lip. I recognized it as something I did when I tried hard not to cry. “Is that what you think of me, Dr. Drose? Alright, well is that what they think of me?” She blinked her eyes twice, hard, and grimaced at the ceiling. “No, absolutely not. I’ve never even considered doing such a thing. That’s right, I have to get the drug-cabinet card key from Carla and sign everything out. She’s always right there when I’m doing it, and believe you me, she never so much as blinks her eyes.”
Dr. Drose’s voice was a yellow jacket trapped in a Coke can.
“Oh, so that’s what this is.” She rolled her eyes and clenched her jaw even tighter. “I’d be happy to take a urine test, but when it comes out negative, which it will, I think I’ll deserve an apology. No, I’m not blaming you. That’s right. That’s exactly right. I’m glad you can see that too. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
Mom disappeared around the corner of the breakfast bar and didn’t speak for some time. I thought she’d hung up, so I got up off the couch and went into the living room to find out what this was all about. When I came around the corner, I found her squatting on the floor with her eyes shut tight and her back against the wall. I wished right away I hadn’t seen it. It wasn’t meant for me to see. I can still picture her like that now if I shut my eyes. Something was bad wrong at work. Something was terrible wrong at home. These troubles pinned Mom to the wall like a wriggling bug. It wormed its way out of the phone and then down through her body in unhappy ways. Her face went from clenched and angry to utterly blank and then mercifully softened into something vague but hopeful as she listened to the buzzing voice on the phone.
“An hour from now?” Then she actually smiled, which surprised me more than any of the expressions that came before. A nice smile. “No, Raymond, I haven’t forgotten your invitation.”
Raymond? I wondered. Is she talking with someone different now? Who in the hell is Raymond?
In the next pause, her eyes lit up. “Let’s wait until I clear my good name, how about?” She giggled a downright girlish giggle. Under the circumstances, I took some offense over that. Here she is flirting while Metter burns. Or at least our place in it. I stood in the dark and glared at her, but she only had ears for this Raymond character. I don’t even think she knew I was there beside her. “Yes, that’s right, a steak the size of my head and an extra-large strawberry daiquiri.”
She hung up the phone and immediately her mouth shrank down to normal size and her eyes took up a worried look again. I’ll admit to feeling some satisfaction about this. After all, this was an emergency we were dealing with. Shoulder-squeezing thugs and dog butchers coming by the house on a daily basis should be given priority over steak dinners with Raymond.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Oh, shit,” she said, taking my hands and pulling herself up. We went and sat on the couch. Spilt silverware clinked as the cushions moved.
“What, Mom?” I put my arm around her and laid my head on her shoulder.
In the dark, I heard her sniffle.
“You’d think I’d know better at this age than to think I could go and fix somebody.”
“And now it ain’t only Hayes, they’re picking on me too. Isn’t there something we can do to get out of this? Call the police, maybe.”
Mom started. “Oh, God, no, honey. He’s in way too deep for that. Before his accident, Hayes was playing tricks with peoples’ fighting dogs. I’m not sure what exactly, some kind of half-assed cheating. The sorry man couldn’t even cheat right. He lost everything and then some. To pay them back, he had to drive his truck down to Florida and pick something up.”
“Drugs?”
She shrugged and looked away. “I didn’t ask.”
“Then drugs.”
“Later, I overheard him talking with somebody at the hospital, after the crash. I guess there are people that go around to crooked doctors and get pain pills. There’s a bunch of these doctors down in Florida. Somebody has to pick up the pills. It was only supposed to be the one time.” She glanced at me and away.
I nodded.
Hayes told her he thought somebody was following him on the way back. A blue dump truck. Maybe one of the pill people down in Florida. He decided to make sure, so he got off on a two-lane highway just over the Georgia border. About ten miles down the road, way out in the country, the dump truck edged up and passed him. He went up over a small hill and saw rubble spilled across the blacktop. When his truck hit it, Hayes lost control. The truck went sideways and rolled three times. Four days of intensive care in Jacksonville and they transferred him back to the hospital in Metter. The cops told him they didn’t find any rubble. And when they looked in his truck, it was empty. The cops thought he was lying about something, but he swore it was all true.
Dr. Peeples, one of the older doctors at the hospital, put Hayes on some serious strong pain pills. And that was fine at first because he needed them. His leg was all torn up and he’d broken four ribs. But then Hayes kept on complaining of pain. My mom didn’t doubt he still hurt, but after a few weeks, you got to downgrade the medication.
“So Hayes got hooked?”
“Yeah,” my mom said, putting a cigarette between her lips but not lighting it. “Hayes sadly ain’t one of those men who knows when to say he’s beat and stop.”
“It seems to happen that way with Hayes a lot, don’t it? One sorry trick leads to the next. But I don’t get what this has to do with now. With us.”
“Those pills were worth a lot of money.” She closed her eyes. “Thousands and thousands and thousands.”
One day, Mom told me, when Hayes was just about to be released from the hospital, she heard him talking to a man in his room. The man told him he’d cut his throat and leave him in a hog pen if Hayes didn’t find a way to make up for the lost pills. Then he whispered something else Hayes didn’t like. “I don’t care if you don’t like it, son,” the man told him, “you’re going to do it.” Hayes didn’t tell her what it was, but he said he was done for if he didn’t find a way to pay them back, so sucker that she is for a pretty face, and Hayes, nasty as he was in almost every other way, did have a pretty face, so my mom got him a job at a pharmacy.
“That lasted about a week,” I said. “Stupid Hayes.”
And the threats kept coming. They got worse. Hayes begged her to help him.
“So this has been going on for almost a year now? Jesus, Mom. What did he ask you to do?”
But I knew. I knew and it made my teeth hurt.
Mom shrugged again and blew smoke toward the TV. “Now there ain’t nothing for me to do but step back and let him fall down and hope he can pick himself back up. I don’t intend to have—”
The phone rang and we both turned our heads, but neither of us got up to answer it.
“But you ain’t going to help him get more pills, right?”
The phone rang again. And again.
“Mom? Are you?”
The answering machine picked up. “None of the Sugrues are here to answer just now. Say something n
ice,” my mom’s recorded voice said nicely, “or we won’t call back.” Beep.
“Hush, sweetie.” She held up a hand and cocked her head to one side to better listen to what might come out of the machine’s speaker next.
“Darla, are you there? This is Raymond.”
Mom fairly threw me to the floor to get to the phone.
“I’m here. I was out back of the house.”
It always amazed me to hear my mom talk with men. No matter the man, she underwent a change—even for the teenage boys working the drive-through window at McDonald’s. I’d seen it all my life and it never failed to fascinate me. That night, it struck me that something between her and Dr. Drose had changed. Because I heard now that this Raymond character was indeed Dr. Drose. I’d known him near about my entire life and I’d never heard his Christian name until that night. I knew he and his wife had separated around Christmastime, but I’d no idea he’d started looking for Mrs. Drose number two so quickly. But this discovery also provided some relief. It meant the Hayes days were now coming to an end.
“Uh-huh, well, I’m on my way. Then we’ll see who it is that’s turned junkie. Just promise me this, if I got to pee in a cup, then so does Carla.” She hung up and stomped back into the living room. “Sweetie, I got to go back to the hospital and clear up a few things.”
“What’s going on? I don’t want to stay here all by myself. What if that Marty guy comes back?”
She covered her mouth with the back of her hand and choked back what sounded frighteningly like a sob. Just the way her mouth looked alone, crumpled and slack like a damp dishrag, made me want to cry. Feeling my own throat tighten up, I stepped across the linoleum to help her pick up the rest of the loose cigarettes.
“This time, Lynn, lock all the doors. Don’t even turn on the lights. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She yanked open the back door and slammed it behind her, but it didn’t catch. A breeze made it swing back and forth against the jamb. Smack, smack, smack. I doubt there’s a lonelier sound in the world than a screen door banging back and forth like that. I went over and pulled it shut, but she’d broken the latch when she slammed it and it wouldn’t stay closed. I had to stick it shut with Scotch tape.
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