Honey

by Brenda Brooks

  She frowned and took another swig from the flask. “It’s not as if that was the first time something bad happened. He’d never broken anything before, that’s all. Because I was quick and not usually trapped in a fucking cave with him. And why I never told you is because of the look on your face right now.”

  “But . . . what do you mean, exactly, by ‘goes caveman’?”

  She stared at the information sign on the kiosk. Enough time went by that she might have read the entire thing — Who’s Who in the Hinterland and all the species of fish, and the details about the purple loosestrife invasion over at Hermit’s Bog, bullfrogs the size of kittens devouring ducklings in the county ponds.

  “A lot of things have changed, but some things haven’t,” she said finally.

  “Which means?”

  “It’s only that, well — you’ve kept your innocence nicely intact.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “No,” she said and touched my hand. I noticed some of her fingernails were broken and torn, her knuckles raw, and I realized she must have been camping out and making bonfires; that’s why her hair smelled of smoke. “I like your innocence, or whatever you want to call it. I think you should hang on to it as long as possible.” She withdrew her hand and pulled down her sleeve.

  “Afterwards I walked out to the main road where some guy I vaguely remembered from one of those summer incarcerations at McDonald’s picked me up and drove me to the hospital. Which he may have regretted because I woofed twice on the way. They set my arm, and I called Inez with some bullshit story about what happened and she drove out and fetched me. When we got home the old man wasn’t there. He didn’t come home that night, or the next. Two weeks went by, and still no sign of the asshole. I figured Inez thought he’d gone off on another binge, because she didn’t seem that surprised. But then one morning, about a month later — she was slinging breakfast dishes in the sink and didn’t even look at me — she said, ‘By the way, he won’t be back.’ You can imagine my joy. It was like she’d finally found the balls to see through all the lies and do something about what the hell was going on in the fucking house.”

  She took a deep breath. “But then — three years go by, up to that dinner at your folks’, and my mother’s reading out the Christmas cards. And there’s one of those Hallmark things with a big stone two-story house with gables and all bathed in amber and sparkly snow on the lawn. A mailbox stuffed with bullshit gifts, and a house crammed with happy shiny people. It’s from him. And his note says something about having a revelation and he wants to come back and everything’s going to be peachy. Same old shit as the old days. And I’m sitting there listening to Inez read out this crap, and I think, Here we go again. And I just can’t take it. My mother can fall for this shit if she wants, but I can’t do it anymore. I’d only been staying to bring in some extra dough, so making that kind of decision screwed me up. I know you didn’t know this, but between her depression and headaches, and what she might have called ‘a touch of drug addiction,’ I doubted she’d ever work again. She got some social assistance, but not enough to cover everything. And plus, I didn’t want to leave her with Daddy the Fuck-Up.” She took another swig from the flask. “And get this. He signs off his sentimental bullshit card with It’s all going to be uphill from here. He never could get that direction right. So Inez slips the card back into the envelope with that old pushover look on her face. I’d already started planning my exit, going over the map in my head when she stood up, grabbed that old gun down off the Corn Flakes shelf, and told me to start packing. We ate the last real dinner we’d have in weeks at your place, and then we split early in the morning on Christmas Day.”

  We sat there quiet for a while, listening to the waves wash up and ease out again.

  “But why didn’t you tell me? You told me every other goddamn detail of your life. Why the hell didn’t you come to me with this too? And what’s with just disappearing? I mean, six years? I thought we were best friends, that we were . . . something.”

  “That’s why I couldn’t say anything. Because I would have had to tell you the whole story. And if your mother found out she might have felt it was her duty as a therapist to report it. And maybe it would have been. And then the police would get involved, and the courts. And you know how Inez thought they were bullshit and wouldn’t do a thing. She just wanted to start over, and who could blame her? I think she would have killed him if she’d laid eyes on him again. I really do. I planned on getting in touch with you after we figured out what to do. I guess we just never figured it out, and time slips away. I wanted to come back to you with good news, not a shit sob story, like now.” She reached over and rattled around in the glove compartment. “I’m going to have to smoke one of these,” she said and fished a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and rolled the window halfway down.

  “And honestly? We may not have returned at all if it hadn’t been for a certain morning outside some gas bar in the Midwest. We’d stopped for a bite: a couple of stale muffins and some gas for the Caddy. Inez was taking her sweet time in the ladies can while I waited for her in the foyer. And I see this eighteen-wheeler and the driver checking the load. I knew it was him right away because I’d done nothing but study his every move since I was eight, after all, trying to stay three steps ahead. At first I recoiled behind the rack of sunglasses by the doorway, but then as he came around to hoist himself into the cab I stepped outside. And I swear to god it was almost like my mind forced him to turn and look at me. I walked up to him. We stood there staring at each other. I said, ‘Speaking of drivers . . . you left your golf clubs at home.’ He cracked an uncertain smile. I smiled too, big and faux-sincere. And then I said, ‘If you come back, I’ll wait until you’re asleep and cave your head in with that club the size of a cantaloupe.’ He gave me a long look, stepped up into the cab, and headed back onto the highway. I knew we wouldn’t see him again.”

  “Geez-uz,” I whispered.

  “It was lucky that Inez had fucked around in the ladies so long because I’m pretty sure she would have gone Corn Flakes, if you get my gist.”

  She unscrewed the cap on the flask and offered it to me, out of habit, confident I wouldn’t accept. I took a gulp that set my throat on fire and then spread and glowed in my chest. A story like that? I could almost see how a girl might develop a taste for the hard stuff.

  * * *

  On the way back to Buckthorn she told me about a few of the places they’d ended up before eventually heading east. Money was tight and Inez’s health went downhill dealing with life on the road. They bought a tent and Coleman stove and headed south where at least some of the traveling could be done on the cheap. She admitted to having ripped off more than one grocery store. “Out of desperation, of course.” Sometimes she foraged for fruit and vegetables at the farms and orchards along the highway, all the while pretending the whole thing was a lark for Inez’s sake. She tried to keep her mother in the dark about the urgency of things because over the miles she saw her become more and more subdued and started to worry about her state of mind.

  “Miles and mind-numbing miles went by without her saying a thing. She just stared out at the prairie, the sagebrush, the prairie, the tumbleweeds, the prairie, the sagebrush — as we drifted by under a big, shiny blue sky. I wasn’t sure if it was the monotony of the landscape or if she, if we, were doing a mother/daughter losing our minds thing, bound for matching straightjackets or something. And to say we were broke is an understatement all rolled up in a thousand miles of bullshit, as Inez put it. Now and then I pulled a fast one on certain amenable guys — to buy cigarettes and renew the migraine meds. And, yes, a bottle of bourbon or two. Why start lying now? And, if I leave any of the tawdry details out it’s only because they got sucked out the window somewhere along that unrelenting highway.”

  “But why didn’t you at least email or call? Together we would have thought of something. Didn’t we always? I
would have gladly kept my mother in the dark as long as you wanted. That’s all I did in those days, after all, aside from wander up and down the piano — kept a few pathetic secrets from my mother.”

  “Do tell,” she said. I sat looking at her as if I didn’t know what she meant, which was more or less true.

  “Nothing to report?” she said. “After such excruciating sincerity from me? That hardly seems fair.”

  “Oh, it isn’t. But I’m afraid it’s the sad truth. If I recall anything, or something unfolds down the road, you’ll be the first to know. So back to you.”

  She stared at me a bit longer, sort of tongue-in-cheek, and then moved on. “All I can add is that sometimes things don’t have the right ending. Life doesn’t run along like a movie — that’s one thing I found out. If it did, I’d just rewind and do a whole bunch of stuff over again with a more satisfying conclusion.”

  By the time we got back to Buckthorn it was 4. She still had the 200-mile drive to Torrent and a room she’d booked. “I’ll finally be able to unpack” she said with a smile. She drove me back to my car and we sat for a few seconds staring at the clock. 2:03.

  “Well, what are you going to do?” I asked. “Are you staying in Torrent or heading off somewhere else?” I thought about inviting her to crash at my place, at least overnight. I think she may have seen the thought cross my mind, because she started right in assuring me she’d be fine and needed time alone to think. “It’s probably time to stop screwing around on the highway and look for a job,” she said, and then laughed. “Did I say that out loud?”

  Then out of nowhere she apologized for sticking us with the dog. “Dude’s dead, I presume?” she said, followed by that droll look we often exchanged before a fantastic bout of maniacal laughter — but we let it go this time.

  “Well, yes, Dude’s gone,” I said. “It’s not as if he wasn’t a century old when you — when he came to us. You can imagine how much my mother misses him to this day.” And then we did allow ourselves a sort of trial laugh after all.

  We hugged. “This is so rough — what you’ve got on your plate. Are you going to be okay?” she asked when she let me go. “Are we going to be okay? Can we get together next time I’m in town? I’ll want to keep tabs on you.”

  “So, you’re saying I’m actually going to see you again?”

  She crossed her heart. “I promise I’ll make it hard for you not to see me. And I want you to promise me something in return — and this is important, even though I know it’s not top of your list right now. Swear you and your mom will get yourselves a real asshole of a lawyer to handle the accident insurance thing, because from what I heard you deserve a payout — big time. Those fucking insurance guys would rather cut their own throats than cough up dough. Believe me, I’ve known one or two.”

  After I started the car and pulled away I realized I’d forgotten to ask about Inez, and she hadn’t given me her cell number. But when I turned back she and the Eldorado were gone. On the way home I remembered her remark about the dog and had to smile.

  “Dude’s dead, I presume?” Only Honey could have made me see the kooky humor in something like that.

  3.

  My mother woke up four days later with me sitting beside her hospital bed, the bearer of bad tidings I could hardly bear myself.

  In the moment, she was stoic as always, more grim than sad, and I half-wondered if somewhere in the depths of dreamland she somehow sensed my father hadn’t made it even before I told her — not that I’d ever suggest such a thing because I knew she hated anything that hinted at mystical woo-woo, and so did I.

  The first thing she did when we got home was ask me to settle her into the wing chair with a tumbler of my father’s single malt and give her an hour to think. So I went away, but only far enough that I could hear and see her through the side window — her face in her hands and a whole unknown side of her wrenching itself into view. Only a grief-stricken woman with Scottish personality disorder could have packed an entire Irish wake into sixty minutes. I stood there thinking I should go back in and play something for her, Debussy’s “Reverie” maybe and not rush it for a change. But did I? An hour later I waltzed back into the house as if I was none the wiser, and in the days to come we got down to the brass tacks of what it would mean to go on without him.

  She had always seen clients in an upstairs room accessed by a set of outside stairs, but that would be a stretch for the time being, so we turned the old TV room on the main floor into her new office. The insurance payout looked to be guaranteed, just as Honey thought, what with the car accident being so blatantly vehicular manslaughter. I suggested that in a few months she might retire and we could reconfigure things further: turn the new office into a library, or dancehall. (It was gratifying to see her crack a smile.) But she seemed determined to carry on until her clients became accustomed to the idea of her retiring — sometime down the road. I pretended not to know that “sometime down the road” meant she had no intention of ever giving up her work. Her clients relied on her too much, and it wasn’t as if there would be a shortage of people losing their shit in the next decade the way things were going in the world. On top of that she wanted to keep busy and, I suppose, try to fill the absence my father left behind.

  Ours was the last house at the end of a quiet crescent, a brick Victorian ruin on a large lot that my parents had owned since they got married, a monster with gables and windows all over the place, a huge dining area, and four bedrooms upstairs. Mine was in the back overlooking a yard divided into a wildflower garden on the right and vegetable enclosure on the left, and then a patch of grass to pitch a summer tent and, farther on, a few yards of rickety interlocking brick for the barbecue to sit on. There were two century-old maples in the back and a group of three birches whose leaves became a haze of silver in the wind and sounded delicate as the breeze blowing past a guitar somebody left on the porch.

  All of this sounds opulent, and it probably had been when the doctor who built the house lived there. But that had been over a century ago and a lot had happened since. The owners before my parents had covered the original siding with cedar paneling that had weathered into gray and begun splintering off here and there, revealing the pink brick and crumbling mortar underneath, like blood and viscera. My parents hadn’t been able to afford many improvements themselves. A music teacher and self-employed therapist only had so much extra money for renovations, and none to spare if things went sideways. They had considered selling and even met with a real estate agent, who told them the value was in the double lot and the house was a teardown. They could sell and have money to burn if they moved to a condo in Torrent. My father left the decision to my mother, who said she’d rather go on planting vegetables for another season or two and enjoying a glass of Chardonnay while my father burned something on the grill. She hated the wood siding on the house but always said, “Better that than seeing it turned into dining tables for sale at Pottery Barn.”

  Two weeks later I threw a few things into a suitcase and moved from my flat over Vesuvius Pizza back to the house, just until she regained her strength, although I could see she was well on her way. And so mother and daughter became roommates, but of course that’s laughable in a repressed and dour sort of way. A mother and daughter, no matter what they become, will always be mother and daughter, especially with a river of Scottish blood running through their veins.

  Example: in some people’s kitchens the breakfast problems begin when somebody burns the toast, and then you have two choices: scrape off the char, or pop another piece in the toaster and get on with your short, precious life. Not in my mother’s kitchen though, and I’d forgotten how true this was in the years since I moved out. She liked her toast burned to carbon around the edges and left sitting in the toaster for twenty minutes before starting the egg, which should be poached until the yoke’s center was semi-soft while the white itself was ultra-firm. And only when the egg had lingered
awhile on the plate should the incinerated toast be buttered (the sound of someone wiping their shoes on a coarse mat) all over the surface, not just in the middle, like some lazy daughters tried to get away with. I’d like to skip right over the part about the tea, but I can’t because it’s vital: the hot pot, the milk in the cup first, the one-quarter teaspoon of sugar, and so on. By the end of the second week she made her own breakfast, but at lunch I burned the grilled cheese — all the breakfast rules reversed.

  At dinner we each took to having a glass of wine, though I’d seldom done so back in my own apartment. A beer on a hot summer day was usually my limit. But I came to require this glass of wine (I began looking forward to it while doing the breakfast dishes) and so did she, whether she knew it or not. Two glasses was pushing it in her view though, so I found myself forgetting things in the kitchen so I could quaff a booster without her knowing. But of course she did know, because she was my mother, it’s just that she couldn’t prove it — and proof is everything.

  After dinner she insisted we play Scrabble, which I had always hated but learned to hate more. Honey and I had often played, years before, up at the cabin my parents rented on Serpentine River for two weeks in the summer. Honey would start things off, on a rainy day, by saying, “Oh F-U-K. It looks like we’ll have to play Scarble after all.” So we changed the rules to spice things up: Hillbilly Scrabble for instance, with words like yarnt and yawnder and overthar. But then Honey had always mangled spelling on purpose and had been suspended from school once for insisting on spelling god without a capital G, unless it was spelled Gawd. Later we played Dirty Scrabble in our bedroom. She always won, because I was reluctant to spell that kind of thing out, so to speak; she couldn’t wait to use every single four-letter word she could think of, which were many, and she happily sacrificed points in order to shock me with just one. So I’d give up and sweep the tiles back into the box. Who really cares who wins at Scarble?