Holding on to Nothing

by Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne

  When he got to his driveway ten minutes later, he realized he couldn’t remember the drive home from the store. There was his father’s old Chevy, still sitting on the blocks the old man hefted it up on so he could spend his Saturdays ignoring his kids and working on a car that Jeptha knew would never run. Suddenly, the car was right in front of him. Jeptha stood on the brakes. His Camaro bumped the rusted body before it stopped. Jeptha hit his head on the steering wheel. All was quiet.

  He rubbed at the goose egg that was already coming up on his forehead. The car looked like it was still on the blocks, but it had shifted a few inches off center, seemed like. Jeptha squinted to figure out how bad it was and gave up when he saw two and sometimes three cars in front of him. Besides, what did it matter? His dad was dead and gone, good riddance. In fact, Jeptha was tempted to back up and finish the job. That would show his dad. But he didn’t want to risk denting up his own car, since it was about the only nice thing he owned. He reversed a few inches and shifted to park.

  He peered up at his trailer. It was dark. Good, he thought. Lucy was probably already asleep, oblivious to Crystal Gayle’s death. He’d have to tell her tomorrow, but when he was sober. He couldn’t do it like this.

  Jeptha saw a flash of white off to the right of the trailer. For a minute, he thought it was Crystal Gayle toting Lucy’s shoe, but it was a rabbit running off into the woods. If Crystal Gayle was still alive, she’d be standing outside his door, waiting for him to get out of the car, probably giving him that disappointed look. That’d be all right, Jeptha thought. To be disappointed in someone, you had to expect better in the first place. Crystal Gayle always had.

  He could almost feel her chin rubbing on his leg, feel the soft yet wiry hair between her ears, hear the soft harrumphs of her breath through her deep black nose. He wanted to remember her like this, not that broken heap she had been a few hours before. Even though he knew he’d done the right thing, he couldn’t rid himself of that look in Crystal Gayle’s eyes right before he pulled the trigger—having begged him to deliver her death, she seemed to rebuke him there at the last second for having come to terms with the decision so quickly, as if her last thought was dismay that she should be so easy to dismiss. Even in his drunken haze, Jeptha knew he was exaggerating, probably giving the damn dog feelings she’d never had a day in her life, but still. Her eyes haunted him.

  He grabbed another beer, trying to force them from his mind.

  “If you were here, girl, it’d be like old times. Just you. And me. And the mandolin,” Jeptha said aloud to Crystal Gayle. He straightened up, thinking of his mandolin. That’s what he needed. He’d play a dirge for Crystal Gayle, say good-bye to her the old way.

  “I’ma get it,” Jeptha said, talking to her, like that would bring her back. “Play us some music.”

  He moved his feet and tried to rise out of the seat. The ground tilted underneath him and he fell back hard, popping a rib on the steering wheel and his wrist on the gearshift.

  “Aw, fuck. CG, I’m drunk,” he said, and nearly fell out laughing with sheer joy at the feeling. He lay his head against the headrest and pulled his legs back into the car. “I’m gonna get us that mandolin. Just gonna finish this beer here and rest my eyes for a minute.”

  Jeptha could almost feel Crystal Gayle nuzzling her nose under his hand. He tried to get his fingers to move enough to pat her nose, but he wasn’t sure if they were obeying his brain. He mumbled something about resting his eyes again and then surrendered to sleep and dreams where his dog sat beside him, ears alert, full of love, fully alive.

  “JEPTHA? HEY, JEPTHA! Are you okay?”

  Jeptha’s eyes opened, and he immediately closed them against the sunshine. Where was he? Who was talking to him? He opened his eyes slightly again and saw an image of Lucy, fuzzy against the morning sun. His head echoed with her voice, the pain shooting off his skull like a bullet off a tree. He groaned.

  “Good. You aren’t dead then,” Lucy said. “In that case, I’m going to work.”

  “Wait,” Jeptha said, his voice barely loud enough for him to hear it. He coughed and straightened up in the seat. “Wait.” He opened his eyes wide enough to see Lucy stalking toward her car as fast as her belly would allow her to go. He lurched to standing. A wave of nausea hit him so fiercely that his knees buckled, and he gripped the doorframe to keep from falling. He swallowed, thinking he’d beat it down, but no. Over the sound of his vomiting, he heard Lucy slam her door. He straightened up as much as he could and ran crookedly, still bent in half, over to her car. She started the engine and looked between the seats to back out.

  “Lucy! I’m sorry. Wait.”

  She shook her head at him. Jeptha saw tears in her eyes before he jumped out of the way of her front bumper. “Lucy, please. I’m sorry.”

  The car bumped down the incline for twenty feet, and then stopped. Jeptha ran to her door. “I’m so sorry. I fell asleep in the car.”

  “Yeah. Fell asleep. That’s what we’re calling it.”

  Jeptha didn’t know what to say. His head hurt like never before. He couldn’t think. And there was something weighing on him, something he needed to tell Lucy. Crystal Gayle. He suddenly remembered. He stumbled back from her car.

  Lucy shook her head, her voice quiet. “What happened, Jeptha? You were doing so good. We were good.”

  “Crystal Gayle …” he whispered, leaning his head on his arm at the top of the car. He wasn’t strong enough to look Lucy in the eye.

  “Yeah, where is she? I called for her last night for ten minutes and nothing,” Lucy said.

  “She’s … she’s gone,” Jeptha mumbled into the fabric of his shirt.

  “Gone?”

  “She got hit by a car last night. She was dying. I had to …” Jeptha stopped. He gave into the sobs. “I had t-to sh-shoot her.”

  “Oh, Jeptha,” Lucy said. The car door eased open, and he moved out of the way. She slipped her arms around him, and he leaned fully into her until they both fell against the car.

  “I’m sorry,” she said into his chest. “I’m so sorry.”

  They stayed like that for two minutes until finally Jeptha pulled away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, hesitating. “For this. For me. For drinking. I didn’t know what else to do.” He could see now that there was nothing steady, boring, routine, or stable about falling into a case of beer and getting so drunk he passed out in his car. That was something Old Jeptha would do.

  “You need to call Cody and tell him you can’t come to work today. You’re already late. And you can’t go. Not like this.”

  Jeptha shook his head and looked up at the sky. Clouds flitted overhead, and a hawk flew by in search of an unsuspecting mouse. He watched the hawk for a moment more, envious of the freedom flying above his head: freedom from his blinding headache, from his dead dog, from his disappointed wife, from having proved once more the kind of fuck-up he could be. The bird flew out of sight.

  He looked back down at Lucy. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.”

  “It’s okay. I’m sorry about Crystal Gayle. I loved her too.” She waited for a moment and then checked her phone. “I’m going to be late if I don’t get going. You okay today?”

  “I’ll be all right. You go on,” he said. Jeptha’s stomach curdled as he watched Lucy pull out onto the road. He clamped his arms around it, trying to stem the involuntary lurch that he knew was coming. Then he let his hands drop to his sides—he’d lost his dog and screwed up, disappointing both himself and his wife. He deserved to be throwing up in a bush.

  After, Jeptha walked heavily up the stairs to the trailer, his phone in his hand. His brain and his legs weren’t communicating well, and he walked like a baby, re-creating the process with each step.

  He saw his charger snaking across the kitchen counter and plugged in his phone. While he waited for it to come back to life, he grabbed a carton of orange juice out of the fridge. After a quick, guilty look out the window, he slurped direc
tly from the cardboard, groaning with joy as the cold juice sizzled against his parched throat, sluicing through the taste of old beer and vomit that coated his tongue. He longed for the numbness of the prior night when he’d been able to forget what he’d lost.

  He put the orange juice back in the refrigerator. Behind the milk, he spied a sole longneck Coors, and his body ached for it. The hair of the dog; it had been a while since he’d been forced to endure it, but now he remembered it like it was something he’d been missing. He closed the door so he wouldn’t have to see the bottle. He should call Cody. He checked his phone. Still dead.

  He opened the fridge again, this time for food, but there was nothing that looked good. He dug through the furthest kitchen drawer for Tylenol. He had to open the fridge again for more juice. The bottle of beer was bathed in light, the condensation on its sides illuminated like in a commercial. He shut the door. His phone pinged, back from the dead.

  He had five messages, all from Lucy, her concern growing stronger and angrier with each progressive message. He deleted them all after he heard the first few words. Jeptha looked at the time. He was due at work two hours ago. He owed Cody a phone call, but, as he dialed the numbers, Jeptha prayed his friend wouldn’t hear his phone on the plant floor.

  “What?” Cody answered.

  “Hey. It’s me. Um, Jeptha.”

  “I got caller ID. I know who it is.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there today, man.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I am. Really.”

  “Whatever. It’s one day. You just can’t do it again. Tom don’t give many chances.”

  “I know,” Jeptha said. “It won’t happen again. It was Crystal Gayle. She got hit last night. I had to put her down.”

  “Oh, man. I’m sorry. She was a good dog.”

  “She was.”

  “You should have called me …”

  “Phone was dead. And I was too busy drinking myself to death.”

  “Jeptha …”

  “I know. Can’t believe I did it either.”

  “Be careful, man.”

  “I will. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  His throat felt tight and his eyes stung. For want of anything better to do, he opened the fridge, staring at the contents like a death-row inmate at a woman. His eyes rested on the beer. He’d promised Cody and Lucy that last night was a mistake. He wanted it to be. He wanted to go back to that moment on the porch before Crystal Gayle died. He’d been content, he now realized. That’s what that feeling was. He didn’t want to be a drunk for his wife, for his kid. He looked down at his jeans, hay snaking up the legs and flecks of vomit splashed up around his ankles. He didn’t want to be this man, not anymore. Jeptha pawed the tears off his face. He pulled his hand away and watched the fingers jitter across the air, his body aching for another drink. Just beyond his hand, the beer sweated. He didn’t want to be like this, but all he could see were Crystal Gayle’s eyes, haunting him. A tear dropped to his dusty shoes. He made to straighten up, to shut the refrigerator door. But his hand closed around the neck of the beer, the glass clinking against a jar of pickles as his hand shook. He sat down on the couch and opened the beer. He didn’t want to be this kind of man anymore. But he didn’t know how to be any other kind.

  16

  “YOU GOING IN TODAY?” Lucy asked at breakfast.

  This was about the extent of the conversation she and Jeptha had exchanged in the two weeks since Crystal Gayle died. Jeptha had been so sorry about getting drunk the night she died that Lucy had assumed it was a one-time thing, a mistake he could make up for. She was wrong. He’d been drunk nearly every night and for several of the days.

  Jeptha nodded slowly.

  “You better hurry,” Lucy said. He’d already missed four days of work and been late another three. Lucy tried to quiet her rising sense of panic. She’d banked her life on sober Jeptha, and for months, she thought she’d been right to do so. He smiled weakly at her. He was still in there, the Jeptha she’d come to love. Or, at least she hoped he was.

  “Please God,” she prayed silently. “Let this be temporary. Let him get back on the path he was on before Crystal Gayle died.”

  Lucy scooted herself out from the table, groaning as she did. Even with her belly sucked in as much as she could, she still snagged a spoon on liftoff and would have taken the whole cereal bowl down with her if Jeptha hadn’t reached out and grabbed it. In the mirror this morning, even her nose looked pregnant. Since she’d woken up, an emptiness had yawned in her stomach, now located near her boobs—it was Tuesday, her due date. She looked around. Everything was done. Diapers, crib, formula, bottles, clothes. It was all ready. Except one thing: Lucy knew it was crucial but could not, for the life of her, remember what it was. She almost asked Jeptha but knew he wouldn’t remember. He hadn’t remembered it was her due date, after all.

  “I got to go,” she said. “You heading out?”

  Jeptha nodded again but stayed seated.

  She crouched down by him. “You need to go, Jeptha. You’re going to be late. We need that job.”

  “I’m going,” Jeptha said, a note of anger in his voice.

  “Okay,” Lucy said, standing up so quickly she got dizzy for a second. She put her hand out on the table and closed her eyes until the spinning stopped. “I’ll see you later.”

  As she walked out onto the porch and down the stairs, Lucy still couldn’t help but look around for Crystal Gayle to come bounding up. She had loved that dog from the very minute she met her. Lucy was pretty sure the feeling had been mutual, but Crystal Gayle’s love for Lucy was no match for her love for Jeptha—that was a foolhardy devotion, the kind only a mother might show. Lucy imagined that Crystal Gayle loved her because she saw Lucy as another caretaker for her beloved Jeptha. Right now, Lucy knew that Crystal Gayle would be barking at Jeptha steadily—a special bark that sounded like nothing so much as nagging—until he finally got up and out the door to work. Lucy wished that Crystal Gayle was there to do it—she doubted very much that her own nagging along those lines was going to work.

  WHEN LUCY GOT to work, the store was quiet except for the sparrows nesting in the beams above. One kept flying over to a nest and chattering away to what Lucy assumed was another bird inside. He was frantic with concern. She wondered if he’d remembered his wife’s due date.

  Lucy threw her stuff in a locker and pulled on her blue vest. She was on checkout today, thank God, and had somehow convinced Teresa to let her drag a stool from the break room out so she could sit for at least part of her day. Lucy walked to her checkout lane, Number 37, nearly at the end of the row. If one could be said to have a favorite checkout lane in a sea of identical ones, this was it. It was at the end of the line and always busy. Busy was exactly the way she usually liked it, but today, for the first time, she winced every time she looked up and saw someone in her line.

  Four hours later, Lucy finally got her break. She shut off her light, put the closed sign on the end of the conveyer belt, and ripped the vest off her shoulders, desperate for her twenty minutes. Her head rang with the beep of the purchases, and her arm periodically swept phantom products across the scanner, the muscle memory still working. She stopped to collect her thoughts outside the break room, trying to remember the last thing they needed for the baby, but failed. She gave up on sitting down for her break and went to the baby section, hoping it would jog her memory.

  Finally, in the fifth aisle, Lucy remembered: a car seat. She examined the row of car seats on display, taking careful notice of an infant bucket seat in taupe that went with everything and was beautiful to no one. It had the look of the cheapest one, but she saw that it was still almost a hundred dollars. She didn’t have that in her bank account and doubted Jeptha had it in his. He’d only gotten one paycheck so far and, given how much work he’d missed, it didn’t seem like he’d get much in the next one. Maybe there was still some left from the tobacco money? She closed her eyes and sighed. If not, they’d
have to ask Deanna or Bobby. She knew what Jeptha would make of that suggestion—his lips would pucker up and his forehead would draw forward in a sea of wrinkles. He hated being the poorest one in a poor family and would occasionally go off on a rant about how they were cheating him out of what he was owed. He hated asking them for anything. Not having to do so was one of the big benefits of having a steady job, he’d told her after a few days at the plant.

  A steady job, Lucy thought. Steady until you’re too drunk to keep it. She’d have to come back for the car seat, she decided, as she rummaged in her pocket for her ringing phone.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Lucy.” Jeptha’s voice slurred. It was only 1:00 p.m., but he sounded hammered.

  “What, Jeptha?”

  “They fired me. Damn assholes fired me.”

  Lucy was rooted to her spot in front of the car seats. All she could hear was her heartbeat pounding through her body as a wave of nausea washed over her. He’d lost his job. She wasn’t sure why she was so surprised. He’d been late, drunk, or absent for most of the last two weeks. It was her fault for thinking the last five months had meant something different.

  “Jeptha …” she said, and then stopped. There wasn’t anything else to say.

  “I’ma find something else. Don’t worry. I know. I’ma be something steady, something good.”

  “I gotta go, Jeptha.” Her voice was flat.

  “I love you, Lucy,” Jeptha said, pleadingly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Bye.”

  She hung up, hoping that maybe if she didn’t move, didn’t react, this wouldn’t be happening. Just then, a dull cramp bloomed in Lucy’s belly and snaked its way around to her back and up to the top of her rib cage. She held onto the shelf in front of her and bit her lip until it passed.

  “Lucy!” a voice called out from down the aisle. It was LouEllen. Lucy gripped the shelf again to keep from running into her arms. She didn’t want to tell anyone about Jeptha losing his job, least of all LouEllen. Lucy could see LouEllen’s observant, beady brown eyes searching her face. She prayed that LouEllen had lost some of her skills at reading Lucy’s mind.