Honey

by Brenda Brooks

  “And . . . ?”

  “EAT SHIT COP scrawled on the passenger door’s vintage ‘banana parfait yellow’ paint. So it was pretty striking. He must have missed that little detail in the twilight underground parking at the condo. But how smart of her, when you think of it. Better than CHEATING PRICK, or some angry cliché, like a sledgehammer destroying his windshield. Because of course she knew his weaknesses, where the bodies were buried, so to speak, and how the last thing in the world he wanted was a little chat with the police. I slowed down and dropped right back, as you can imagine. No way I wanted in on that whole scene, but at the same time I just had to see what happened. And sure enough, he got pulled over just before the exit to the lake. He looked like such a jerk, standing there trying to explain why someone would screw with his car. But the best part, Nic? The cop was a woman. And she was mighty freaking impressive, I must say, with that haughty posture and the pistol on her hip. I have to admit I was so delighted I almost had to pull over.”

  She put out her cigarette. “Can you remind me why we were drinking tea? Let’s get serious.” She got up and fetched two shot glasses and a bottle of that bourbon she liked. “Down the hatch,” she said.

  “Well? What did you do?” I asked, after I’d tossed it back and caught my breath.

  “What do you think? I drove on to the cottage, lit a fire, and went for a nice, long swim.”

  7.

  Another two weeks passed before we saw each other again, though we stayed in touch. In fact I called her every other day in case there was news about that prick, which was how I thought of him by then too — him and his little gold stud.

  The second week in September we met at the Sugar Bowl on Main for coffee. Wooden barriers blocked the intersections all the way up to Darke Crescent in order to provide safe passage for the Buckthorn charity run. I arrived at the café before Honey, threw my jacket over the bar stool, and watched the racers stretch and warm up in the brisk morning air. The place was jammed with participants and spectators buying hot drinks or a shot of caffeine before the 10 a.m. start.

  Not that it was that hard to fill the Sugar Bowl. The place wasn’t much bigger than a kids’ clubhouse, with four tiny café tables and a short row of stools along the window facing the street, and then the counter with a few pastries on display and the barista behind steaming up the drinks: worn red and cream checkerboard linoleum floor from the days when it used to be an ice-cream shop.

  I saw her wending her way through the barricades. I had to laugh because she wore the same navy toque she’d worn the Christmas Eve we walked back to her place after dinner at the house on Montague Street, a Greyhound Bus logo embroidered on the front, one of her mother’s thrift-store buys. Just like her to hold on to something like that. Her hair crackled as she yanked it off and sat down beside me. The waitress brought me a latte and Honey an Americano. I asked her how the bank was going.

  “I’m appalled to confess that I’ve impressed the hell out of them with my so-called abilities. The clients adore me. One or two wish to marry me, take me away from all this, shack up somewhere nice.”

  “You won’t be hasty though? Don’t take the first shack that comes along.”

  “Only if said shack is a stone cottage next to a deep, blue sea and a field of lavender blowing in the salty breeze. Oh, and I might as well have a pony and a wine cellar and a nice big kitchen. And my knight in shining armor should turn out to be unexpectedly fragile and then quite quickly dead.”

  Her manner was breezy, but she looked awful, at least for her: her eyes a bit fevered, that bruised, vulnerable look she got in childhood whenever Inez and the old man were going at it. Her knee beat a nervous rhythm under the table.

  “I’m going to lend you the money to cover Aurbuck’s loan,” I said and tried not to look as surprised as she did, because I couldn’t recall anything, any conscious thoughts or plans, that led me to such a decision. I mean, did I wish I could lend her the money? You bet. But actually do it? The offer felt so right that even the bothersome details — that I was broke, for instance, or what the required amount might turn out to be — faded into the background.

  She remembered for both of us and politely declined: so sweet of you, can’t thank you enough. But no can do. Don’t be stupid. She told me that she’d managed to pay back $2,500 since she started working at the bank, had taken out an advance on her credit card to do it.

  “Twenty thousand to go,” she said, “and I’ll be free of the jerk.” She said she’d made him promise to return all the stuff he was holding over her head, including personal items, like letters, photographs — every single item that had anything to do with her. “He thinks I can’t come up with the money in what he refers to as ‘a timely manner.’ He’s wrong.” She added that if it turned out he wasn’t wrong, she’d have a big, fat chat with the Eldorado.

  Twenty thousand? Jesus, I thought. Still, I insisted on loaning it to her. I can only explain this by saying that the insurance settlement had recently come through and my mother and I had opened a joint account so that I could continue to pay the bills, shop for groceries, and so on. I avoided thinking about this money for the very reason it existed in the first place. Only at that moment did I acknowledge to myself that we weren’t exactly “broke” the way we used to be. A fair amount of cash sat in our account, and $20,000 was nothing in comparison. Look at the good it would do in its short absence from the bank.

  She resisted, threatened to get up and leave if I kept it up. But who could argue with the wisdom of what I had to say? Because it’s not as if this would interfere with my mother’s life or my own. Honey would pay it back, just in a somewhat less “timely manner” than what Aurbuck desired. I still took care of the banking, after all. And my mother was so absorbed in her work she’d never notice, especially since we weren’t budgeting to the last dollar anymore.

  I pushed on when I saw Honey weaken, urged her to clear the slate with him now, the sooner the better, before he came up with more, or new, terms. That possibility seemed to sober her. I made her promise to call him and nail down a time to make the exchange.

  “So, you’ll call soon?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Soon, like you suggested.”

  “But what does that mean?” Her remark about having to pay him every night lingered in my mind.

  “It’s just that I can’t stand the thought of laying eyes on that asshole again is all.”

  “Well, how about I do it for you?”

  “You’ll pull on your tough girl trench coat and head on over there to strong-arm the guy? Why didn’t I think of that? You’re so imposing — all five-foot-one of you. I can just see your sleeves trailing on the ground.”

  “I’m serious. I can be imposing if I try.”

  “Right. Nothing more imposing than a small woman in a large trench coat.”

  “It’s all in the eyes.”

  “You’ll stare him into submission. Absolutely not. I’ll do it. Because the truth is the guy’s more scared of me than I am of him.”

  “And how does that work?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not talking about holding something over him, like he does with me,” she said. “I’ve never threatened the guy, in words or attitude — except to tell him to go fuck himself — and maybe something fancier, now and then.” She shrugged. “Inez always told me it’s the guys who fear you, those are the iffy ones. Don’t you just hate that our mothers are starting to be so goddamn right about everything?” She looked me in the eye. “Don’t worry. I’ll get it done.”

  I believed her.

  * * *

  Wednesday of the following week she invited me to drop by for a drink.

  “Champagne’s on tap, and I’m talking the good stuff, not that swill,” she said. I went right over, eager to hear the latest installment and certain that I’d never tasted the good stuff.
>
  It turned out she had two bottles of very good stuff, and we had just finished the first and were riding high when she finally came out with it.

  “Here’s to peace of mind,” she said and nodded at a box that had caught my eye when I first arrived. It was sitting on the kitchen counter crammed full, I assumed, of all those compromising materials the ex had threatened her with: documents, notes, personal letters, and photographs. Later she told me the photographs were from his artsy black and white collection of “studies”: porn that he had matted, framed, and hung on the bedroom wall. As for the rest, she said she had watched Aurbuck delete and wipe clean his laptop of everything she’d been involved in, which seemed practically impossible. So he also signed a document exempting her from personal responsibility or any knowledge of wrongdoing that he wasn’t aware of himself when she worked for him. “It’s not like it’s a legal document. It’s bullshit, but at least it’s evidence, if necessary,” she said. My sense was that she knew it was impossible to make anything truly disappear anymore, especially the rotten stuff. If she wanted to be free of him, she had to believe, so I did the same. We toasted again when she showed me the receipt for the money, which wasn’t much more than a canceled IOU. Then her face lit up and she began gathering up the second bottle and our jackets.

  “Come with me,” she said, and down we went in the elevator to her car.

  I knew where we were headed as soon as she made the turn at Elm: up to the abandoned campground on Mt. Vista, where bored teenagers went to drink, get stoned, and torch stuff in the moonlight. Not a word all the way up, just an old pop tune or two on the old cassette deck. And no words either as she threw a few dry sticks together and we built a small campfire on the ghost of an old one next to a stand of pines and junipers so fresh you could smell gin on the wind’s breath, with twist of lemon thrown in.

  She fetched the bottle and box from the car and we sat there getting drunk and, well, torching stuff in the moonlight. When the fire got hot enough she set the box on top and we sat watching it catch and burn while we passed the bottle back and forth; the only sound a series of pops and hisses from the dry wood and the wind stirring the tops of the pines. “Wow, that stuff is as hot as he said it was.” She laughed and kicked a few errant pieces back into the flames.

  She lit a cigarette. She said she’d quit smoking back at the Oblige but when she started to fret about what Aurbuck might do, that got her going again. There were two left in the package, and after that she’d go clean again.

  “But . . . clean again,” she said and shook her head. “At what age do people stop being clean, do you think? Eight? Twelve? Twenty? I guess it’s different for everyone.”

  I asked her what she meant by clean, and she laughed, but softly, and said, “Clean is what you are, Nic; otherwise you wouldn’t have to ask.”

  The remark made me feel like a kid. I was getting sick of her innocent take on me. Looting my mother’s insurance policy might buy me a few creds, no? I was still searching for something that would make her cringe when she grabbed the front of my shirt, pulled me close, and kissed me. Then she let go.

  “There you go. Now you’ve got a little dirt on you,” she said and rubbed soot off my cheek with her thumb. I guess I proved her earlier point, because I didn’t know what to say or do — I just laughed.

  We sat there a little longer as the fire burned low, the moon a big silver dandelion and all the stars gone to seed around it.

  8.

  Tuesday, early evening, a couple of weeks into October. I dropped by the florist to pick up something up for my mother, splash a little color around the house now that the garden had been put to bed. I stared at some roses and considered their symbolism. Red for passion, obviously, and the purity (or despair) of white. I wasn’t sure about pink but felt certain the connotation would be positive, the blush of modesty, maybe. And then the blue with their whiff of self-delusion.

  When the clerk came over I asked her about guilt, the real point behind buying the flowers. She didn’t quite get me and said, “What do you want to know?” Then we got on board and she sold me a dozen (cowardly) yellow roses, which I took home to my mother.

  When I drove up to the old house Al Carney was laboring away in his yard, all dressed up in goggles and ear protectors and blowing leaves into a corner of the fence with that monstrosity my father had claimed Al had knocked together himself using duct tape, a rusty tailpipe, and the motor from an old Frigidaire. As Fate (and the prevailing winds) would have it, our yard received the lion’s share of the waxy horse chestnuts that careened down every fall, while the Carneys were forced to endure two months of leaves the size of dinner plates. He hollered something about them being a bitch to pick up in the rain, and I waved and continued on inside.

  My mother was sitting next to the kitchen window drinking coffee and sorting through some papers.

  “I’ll bet you’re relieved we put the plastic on those windows last week,” I said as I came down the hall. “I guess you can hear Carney out there blasting his way down the drive with the leaf vaporizer.”

  I rifled through the cupboards in search of a vase. From the corner of my eye I caught the white envelope and sheaf of papers on the table in front of her. At first she said nothing; the only sound the fading drone of Carney’s apparatus and, once I was standing in the kitchen, the faint grind of the electric wall clock, which I had never in twenty-four years noticed before. I put the roses in a vase and set them down on the table in front of her. She glanced at them, and me. “Lovely,” she said. A comment like that is fine, on the surface, coming from most people. But my mother’s comments didn’t always match her face. And here was a case in point, because her lips said what they said, but her face suggested that a few other things weren’t lovely at all.

  She was wearing my father’s old bathrobe, blue with white stripes. She’d been soaking in the tub, probably a long while with Carl Jung or some other smart shrink. Her hair was curly from the steam. I could see the tracks where she’d run her fingers through it a few times; she was never one to stare in the mirror and fuss with her ’do.

  I sat down across from her and rearranged the roses, tweaking off a few perfectly healthy leaves, her eyes floating light but firm over my features as if trying to find passage into my thoughts. Her whole demeanor was like someone, chin in hand, scrutinizing a mystifying painting in a gallery with a desire to really get what the painter had in mind, rather than a mother looking at a daughter who had pilfered, as far as she could tell, $20,000 out of a tragic insurance payment.

  We sat there a long time, it seemed to me, although no more than two stretched-out minutes could have passed before she said, “Does this have anything to do with Honey Ramone?” Jesus Christ, yes, I wanted to say through my hard mouth. Yes, yes, yes. Everything has to do with Honey Ramone. Instead I offered a worse insult: I said nothing.

  A pen lay on top of the sheaf of papers and she picked it up, clicked it a few times. I was going to say she kept her poker face, but that’s underestimating her. Her aim wasn’t to conceal feelings, only keep them in check. How lucky for me, I thought, that she didn’t share the sensibilities of Honey’s operatic mother or she might have pulled a gun on me.

  I had just begun thinking it was a standoff when she dropped the pen, took a deep breath, and said, “You know we’re going to have to talk about this, Nicole. So let’s get the hell on with it.”

  So there was a bit of an aria in her after all.

  “Lovely as those roses are,” she said, “I wish you would stop staring them down and tell me what’s going on. I take it from your silence that it is about Honey. Tell me it isn’t also about the two of you spinning the roulette wheel over at that casino of yours.” And really, how sweet of her, I think now, to assume something so adolescent and almost innocent in comparison to the truth. But at the time the point was to avoid, avoid, avoid as long as possible and give myself time to think, wh
ich I was scrambling to do.

  “Of mine? It’s not my fault people are over at the Crescendo throwing their pensions away with both hands. I’m just the pathetic soundtrack to” — here I dragged out one of my father’s old chestnuts, which was unforgivably shitty of me — “the precariat’s misery.”

  We both stared at the roses as if they’d become a painting of roses — abstract or, if such a painting style existed, obtuse. Vase of Roses Caught Between Mother and Thief. I imagined this could go on for a while, the two of us being who we were — tight-lipped, repressed, let’s face it. I foresaw the time-lapse roses wilting as they approached that glorious, frantic, almost dead stage, and the petals curling and dropping to the table — faded shavings fleeing a sneaky, hopeless gesture.

  “Look,” she said, “I don’t care about the money. I think you know me better than that. But I can’t have you going behind my back and doing something like, well . . . this. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice? You could have come to me . . .”