The Wilson Mooney Box Set

by Gretchen de La O

  “Yeah, J is here. As a matter of fact, she drove the whole way up and we literally just got here about 10 minutes ago. It’s really foggy, damp, and cold. Joanie’s trying to make a fire in the stove, and well, the fence looks like it’s falling down,” she rambled on.

  “Wilson? Did you find the paperwork the lawyers are asking for?” I said, redirecting her focus.

  “Well, no, but we haven’t looked yet,” she answered.

  “What’s really going on?” I could tell by the way she was rambling off random things that something was on her mind.

  “It’s just…I think I got a letter in the mail from Candi,” she sighed.

  “You think?” I repeated.

  “I haven’t opened it yet. I don’t know if I want to. I don’t think I want to know why she’s trying to contact me now,” she spat. I could hear it in her voice that she was getting all worked up.

  “Alright, babe, listen, you don’t have to open it. What did Joanie tell you to do with the letter?”

  “She said to burn it.”

  “Okay…well, we don’t even know if it’s technically from Candi. I’ll tell you what; just put the letter in a drawer. I’m trying to button up a few more things, and after tomorrow I should have a pretty good idea of when I can leave and come out there to be with you. Sound good?”

  “I’m meeting with the lawyers tomorrow at 2:30. I really wish you were here with me, and I didn’t even think about it being New Year’s Eve. Maybe I should look for the deed tonight,” she yawned. I could hear her open and close a couple of drawers. “I just wish I wasn’t so tired,” she complained.

  “Well, Wilson, you’ve had a pretty stressful day. Did you guys eat dinner already?”

  “No,” she answered quickly.

  “Well, maybe the deed can wait until tomorrow morning. Go get something to eat and then just go to bed early. What is Joanie doing?” I asked.

  “She’s talking on the phone with—” she stopped speaking abruptly.

  I knew who she was about to mention, and I respected her for not saying his name. Truthfully, I didn’t understand what Joanie was doing with him anyway. That whole relationship was…well, it wasn’t any of my business. I just wanted to get to Wilson as soon as possible.

  “Listen, sweetheart, I think you should get something to eat, relax, and then look for the deed in the morning.” I knew she was getting tired because she didn’t argue with me.

  “God, I just left this morning and I miss you already,” she moaned.

  “Hah, I miss you too babe; but it won’t be long. Promise,” I answered.

  “I love you,” she said clearly.

  “I love you too,” I whispered back before I clicked the button on my earpiece and we were disconnected.

  I could feel the frustration gurgle in my stomach as a sharp pressure thundered against my ribcage. I lowered the window and let the bitter Aspen wind scratch and claw through my nostrils, skim across the back of my tongue, and eventually drown my lungs with a burning cold sting.

  One more day and I will be with Wilson. My mind swirled off into memories of how she’d bite her bottom lip when she’d tease me, how she dragged her fingers across my arms when she wanted my attention, and how she’d sink back against me when I’d sneak up behind her. God, I craved pushing my nose against her hair and inhaling the aroma of her coconut shampoo. Pressing my lips between her shoulder blades, skating the tip of my tongue along her spine, floating to the bend of her neck, letting the taste of her sweet skin drift deliciously against my mouth to the curve of her bottom lip.

  I rolled into my driveway, my body reacting to every vision I had of Wilson—my pants were that much tighter. Great, Max, you’re gonna walk into your house with a raging hard-on.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket. I recognized the ringtone, and it was one I’d been wanting to ignore for the last couple of days. Well, there goes my hard-on.

  “Hi, Gary.”

  “Hi, Max, I wanted to catch you before you made any plans,” he said.

  “Oh, really, what’s up?” I asked, knowing by the tone of his voice it wasn’t going to be anything I wanted to hear.

  “Well, I just got a call from a couple of companies that are talking about leaving. Saying that your father is what kept them coming back. I’m going to need you to meet with them.”

  Wouldn’t you know it? “What are we talking about, Gary?” I huffed.

  “Well, Holtz’s Oil will meet you tomorrow, but the big account that’s ready to pull out wants to meet you Saturday mid-morning.”

  “Well, don’t they know that Saturday is New Year’s Day? Who is it?”

  “Yeah, it’s Glück Petroleum. I’m really sorry, Max, but if we lose—”

  “I know, alright, I’ll deal with it. Thanks, Gary,” I said as I hung up the phone. I knew there was no way I was going to be able to go to California. Not until I took care of business.

  ~ Wilson ~

  I did what Max told me to do. I went over to my grandma’s china cabinet, pulled open the middle drawer, and tossed the letter inside. It was the same drawer where she kept all of her spit-shined silver serving spoons and spatulas. The same one I always used to hide anything I didn’t want anyone to read or find. See, the thing about my grams, she wasn’t one who would entertain people at the house. Most of the time the fine china and polished silver were valued more as a form of art than anything else. I’m not saying my grams couldn’t cook, she could; all I’m saying is that as she got older, she chose to keep those dishes right where they were. To her, the work wasn’t worth the hassle.

  “So you aren’t going to open it?” Joanie said as she shut the door of the stove. She’d been able to get the fire raging, and the room was starting to warm.

  “Well, not right now,” I answered.

  “I think you should. It’s time to find out what the hell that woman wants; if not for you…open it for me. I’ve spent my whole life hearing about her, and finally something shows up that just might tell us why she did the things she did, and you are willing to shove it in a drawer with useless silver and God knows what else.”

  “J, this isn’t about that! It’s about the fact that I’ve spent my entire life, running from the pain she inflicted on me since the day she left me and every day after,” I said, feeling the anger for Candi burn through my body.

  Joanie walked over pulled open the drawer. Every movement she made seemed to go in slow motion—her fingers pulling the envelope from the drawer, the sound of the paper dragging against the wooden edge—I watched Joanie’s eyes narrow and her lips curl as words began to pour from her mouth.

  “Wilson, it’s time you stop running. Don’t you think it’s time to close that book? At least turn the page of the story you’ve been stuck rereading every day of your life since she abandoned you on that porch. Face those fears, doubts, and pain, sweetheart. You’ll never know what could happen if you don’t ever turn the page,” Joanie whispered as she held the letter out in front of me.

  I’m not going to lie, a big part of me, feared being rejected all over again by her. The other part of me looked at it from an aspect of respect for my grandparents and what they sacrificed for me. They didn’t run; they didn’t choose drugs over me. They stuck by me, giving up the freedoms older people probably took for granted. I knew what they did for me, and if I read her letter I was afraid it would nullify everything they forfeited to make my life something better than their shitty daughter’s existence.

  “I’m sorry, J, I can’t,” I answered as I turned and walked away, dropping it on the table.

  I glanced back long enough to see her shoulders round as she walked over to the table, picked up the goldenrod envelope and slid it back into the silverware drawer of the china cabinet.

  Neither of us said anything more about it the rest of the evening. Dinner was quiet, to say the least. I didn’t eat much, just a bowl of minestrone soup. I think the fact that my stomach was still riddled with knots and indigestion had a lot
to do with it. All I wanted to do was sleep. I wanted to feel Max hold me, hear him tell me everything was going to be alright. I ached to feel his voice tickle at my ear as he made me feel safe. I pulled my phone from my pocket and was about to call him when I saw that he’d texted me.

  Hey Babe. Wanted 2 tell U 2 sleep tight 2nite. I’m beat. I’ll call U 2morrow LUV U XOXO.

  I wanted to text him back but saw that it was 9:00 p.m., which means 10:00 p.m. in Aspen. Suck it up, Wilson. Call him in the morning. I pushed my phone back in my pocket and noticed Joanie watching me.

  “I’m sorry if I upset you or hurt your feelings,” Joanie sighed as she came over and grabbed me around the neck to hug me…tight. “You know I love your guts.”

  “I know you do. I love your guts too,” I answered. We stood there a moment in an awkward span of a couple of seconds.

  “I’m gonna crash in my grandparents’ bed,” I said.

  “Do they have a TV?” Joanie asked quickly.

  “Yeah, and satellite too,” I teased her.

  “Well, then I’m with you! Besides, I’m not sleeping by myself,” Joanie whined.

  Joanie and I pulled our suitcases upstairs and into my grandparents’ room. Yeah, I know they are gone, not coming back, but it just didn’t feel right to call it anything else. It wasn’t long before we had our teeth brushed, PJ’s on, and hopped into the soft, queen-sized bed, heavy with a stack of wool blankets topped with a hand-stitched quilted comforter. The same comforter I would fall asleep under staring at the different patterns of swirling floral prints and landscapes of places I wanted to visit in my dreams.

  I pushed my feet between the cold sheets, noticing as always they weren’t the softest I’d ever felt, but they comforted me with their familiar aroma of Borax and Woolite, my grandma’s detergents of choice.

  The weight of the wool blankets created a safe space for me to slip into; exhausted, I felt my skin surrender and mingle with the temperature of the cool sheets. J hopped onto the bed and wiggled her way in next to me.

  “Slumber party,” she sang as she tossed and turned, adjusting her body to face me. Smiling, she pushed her brown hair back and tucked her hands between the side of her face and pillow. Her eyes danced back and forth, gleaming as she bit her bottom lip. I knew she wanted to talk about everything that had happened throughout the day, especially the conversations she had with Nick. That’s one thing Joanie always loved to do…talk about the guys she’d fallen for.

  I mirrored her position. Dragging my hands over the side of my head, I pulled my tangled hair back from my face and tucked it behind my ear. Once I adjusted myself to be comfortable enough, I slipped my hands between my cheek and pillow.

  Behind Joanie was the only covered wall. Plastered from floor to ceiling, mauve wallpaper hung with cream-colored flowers and paisley lace interspersed with chunky, ornate white flowers with pale pink centers, dark green leaves, and wispy brown stems. I remember when I was a kid, I used to take summer naps and I would lay here trying to untangle the stems from the dark green leaves.

  “I love this room,” I said as my eyes danced behind Joanie.

  “Me too. Remember the time when your grandparents went out and we heard scratching outside the dining room window?”

  “We were so scared. We ran up here and hid under the covers,” I added.

  “I was scared shitless. That was the night your grandpa came home and told us that story of the long-lost sailor who’d come looking for children home alone, scratching and knocking on the houses near the ocean,” Joanie sighed as she adjusted her pillow under her head.

  “Oh my God, I’ll never forget how mad Grams was at him for scaring us. I think it was the first time you’d been here. He spent a couple of nights on the couch for that one,” I laughed. Of course I could laugh now, but in the moment…it wasn’t funny.

  “Wasn’t it a tree branch rubbing on the house?” Joanie asked.

  “Yeah, Grams made him prune it back the next day. She stood out there and made sure he cut back every branch that touched the house,” I answered.

  We both laughed. It was refreshing to talk about old times spent with my grandparents. In some ways, it made me feel like they were still here.

  “What about the time we huffed it all the way to Highway 1 to sell lemonade?” Joanie said as she laid back and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Yeah, Gramps wasn’t too happy when the cops brought us home…without the wagon and the card table,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Dang, that was a lot of work to get all that stuff up to the highway. He was fuming when he took us back up there and everything was gone,” Joanie said, trying to hold back a laugh.

  “Except for that crappy sign…it was the only thing—” I said, trying to swallow the giggle that was creeping up through my chest. I laid there trying to mimic my grandfather frantically tearing up the sign.

  Joanie’s face lit up at the memory of the lemonade incident. She started laughing, the type of laugh that was contagious. I felt my face tense and a smile broke wide as an uncontrollable laugh began to take over my entire body. My eyes narrowed and my nostrils flared as tears rolled down my cheeks. I physically couldn’t say the last word to finish my sentence as my body surrendered to a hysterical laugh. I tried to look away from J, hoping I could stop laughing, but every time I tried, the vision of my grandpa chasing down the crawling sign along the highway as cars sped by and kicked up the wind flooded my mind. He looked so crazy running, trying to catch it as the two of us cheered him on from the back seat of his car. And the look on his face once he finally caught it; he was so pissed.

  I was laughing so hard that the only sound that came out of my mouth was from the gasps I had to take to breathe. I pulled the front collar of my pajamas into my eyes, trying to soak up the lake of tears that spilled into the corners of my eyes. Finally I took a huge, refreshing breath, trying to return the oxygen that my laughing stole from my lungs as Joanie mirrored my actions and we both sighed. Suddenly, we were those nine-year-old girls in the back of my grandpa’s car, comfortably in love with the collection of memories that scared the shit out of us back then.

  “Oh, J, I sure do miss them.” I felt a pressure build in my chest.

  “I know,” she said as she rolled over and we faced each other.

  “I just can’t stop thinking…I don’t have the security of them being here for me anymore,” I said as the energy in the room became solemn.

  Joanie listened as words began to flow from my mouth. “I don’t have the ability to call Gramps and ask him stupid questions about random things. And I miss hearing Grams’s voice in the background telling him to ask me if I’d been eating right. I’ll never have that simple comfort, ever again,” I sighed.

  “Not that anyone can ever take your grandparents’ place, but…you have…Max. He loves you, and his mom seems really nice,” Joanie said, delicately dancing on each word.

  “Nancy is amazing. I really do love her. She is the epitome of the perfect mom. You look up mother in the dictionary, you’ll find Nancy’s picture there.” I felt warmth flood my chest.

  “Yeah, she seemed really put together, even through the death of her husband,” Joanie whispered.

  The words put together hung in my mind. I felt the blood drain from my face as my heart hammered against my sternum. That’s what I wanted my whole life, I wanted a mom put together, not the broken fucked-up druggie I got saddled with. I couldn’t help seeing the visions of where I’d find Candi’s picture in the dictionary. Maybe I’d look under the words Fucked-up Druggie, Ninth-Grade Egg Donor. Yeah, well guess what, Wilson? That’s not an actual word. The profane words to epitomize the woman who birthed me, well, they’d probably incite massive book-burning rallies. But of course as thoughts of Candi filled my head, so did the idea that there was a letter I refused to open downstairs from her in my hideaway drawer in the china cabinet.

  “Wilson? Hellllloooo?” Joanie sang as she waved her hands in fron
t of my eyes. I didn’t realize I’d spaced out.

  “Yeah, well, Candi has nothing on Nancy. She couldn’t even hold a match in the same vicinity as Nancy,” I spat.

  “What? When did we start talking about her?”

  “We didn’t,” I answered.

  Joanie lay there, silently studying my face, her eyes grazing every line, every curve, every blink I forced my eyes to make and every twitch I tried to stop my lips from making. She read me like a book.

  “It’s that letter, isn’t it?” Joanie asked.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t lie there any longer and pretend that I wasn’t pained by not knowing what she wrote.

  “Maybe it’s time to move away from being so angry to discovering some type of closure,” Joanie said in a very delicate manner.

  I knew she was right. It was time to grow up and face the one obstacle in my life. She was like a thorn in my foot. How was I going to move forward in my life while dragging all the crap from my past? Even though I wanted to keep it in the drawer, suddenly I needed the closure more than the anger I held for Candi. I looked over at the clock—9:45 p.m.

  “Maybe it’s time,” I mumbled as I flung back the covers and stretched out of bed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’ll going to get the letter.”

  “Do you want me to go with you?” Joanie pulled the covers back.

  “No, I’ll be right back,” I said as I shuffled out across the cold oak floors. The creaking floorboards whispered, trying to convince me to go back to bed.

  The room was dark, but the familiarity of spending my summers here and the glow of the moon helped to spare my toes the pain of the dining room table and matching chairs. I made my way to the china cabinet, pulled open the drawer, and saw the letter shift across the silver. My heart thrashed and my skin broadcasted every fear I had from the moment I discovered I’d never see my mother again.

  I pulled the letter out quickly, as if there was someone waiting to catch my hand and pull me into the drawer. Every movement seemed deliberate, and yet at the same time, I felt like my soul had unintentionally floated outside my body. What was it going to take to pull me back into my existence? My fucked-up memories of Candi, or the physical act of walking away? With the first step I took toward the stairs, my body secured my mind and my out-of-body experience collided with the edges of my reality. I could feel my skin, muscles, and bones regain their purpose. I ran upstairs, feeling vulnerable and unprotected, as if my soul may decide to stay downstairs if I didn’t hurry.