“I hope this isn’t about your commission.”
“Christ, no. What do you think I am?”
“Tom?” my boss said, more gently. “Tom?”
“Yes?” I said.
“What are you thinking of?” He came round his desk and stood in front of me. “What is going on in your head?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t see how it could hurt her.”
That’s when he first asked me about early retirement. “It’s just an option. But maybe you should think about it.”
Someone had to go round and pick up the books from Mrs. Kidner’s house, of course. I didn’t have to, but I asked if it could be me. My boss looked at me hard.
“I’d like to,” I said.
“No monkey business, all right?”
“Come on,” I said. “Give me some credit.”
Before I rang the bell, I looked at myself in the mirror in the car. I blew my nose and looked again and then I went in to her. “Remember me?” I said when she opened the door.
She had the books all set up on built-in shelves in the little girl’s room, and she watched me sullenly as I took them down one by one. I could only carry five volumes at a time, so it took a while. Afterward there was a strange blank space on the wall: just the empty bookcase, like a dark wooden box.
She didn’t offer me a cup of tea this time, but at the door I said, “Look, I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do about it.” She just looked through me. I wanted to tell her that I’d tried to let her keep them, that I’d got into hot water for her. I said, “My boy—what I told you about him—I lied. He won’t even talk to me anymore.”
She looked at me properly then. I wanted her to believe me so much.
“More fool you,” she spat, and shut the door.
When I was rearranging the books in the boot of the car, I opened the first volume. The inscribed page was still there. I read it over to myself, and then I ripped it out and stuffed it in my pocket. I thought of Kevin and me, one night when he was just starting school, hunched over the kitchen table reading all about prisms and the refraction of light and how that made the sky blue. And then he asked me what happened when you died. I looked at Beth and she smiled crookedly, and I told him gently I didn’t know, while the pages fluttered out from under my thumb.
I might have fought the retirement—I gave them my best years, after all—but the boss told me he had to let somebody go. His hands were tied. Volume was down. The job was changing. “The only people going door-to-door nowadays are Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they’re giving the business a bad name,” he said. If it wasn’t me, it would be one of the younger lads. I was the wrong side of fifty-five, so it wouldn’t affect me like some of them in their forties, with no chance of getting another job in this town, and some of them still with young kids.
And when he put it like that, I had to admit it made a sort of sense.
Everything You Can Remember in Thirty Seconds Is Yours to Keep
THE COURT HAD GIVEN ME six months to prove I was a responsible adult and a fit mother. “But how am I supposed to do that?” I wanted to know. “How am I supposed to prove I’m any kind of mother if they take Luke away?” “Catch-22,” Billy said, like that explained it. Billy was no help. Luke was two months old and we were twentywhat-ever, but his eyes when they took him away seemed older than anything.
When we got home, Bill said he was sad. He said he was going out to score, did I want to come? But I just sat there on the sofa and shook my head. Luke was supposed to be a new start for us. I’d cleaned myself up when he was inside me, but when I came home Bill wanted to do some celebrating. “Yes!” He held Luke overhead like the Stanley Cup. “I’m a dad!” He rolled himself a joint as fat as a cigar and when he passed it to me he called me Mamacita and when I slid it back I called him Daddy-o. I’d been high on Luke when I was pregnant, but coming home all sore to our apartment in the converted motel on Ferry was a downer. I needed a little pick-me-up. I’d been clean as snow for nine months, but after all the Demerol and ephedrine they’d pumped into me during labor, I figured a few tokes wouldn’t much matter. I crashed pretty quick, but then I woke up to Luke’s crying. Billy told me to lie back down: “Papa-san’s got it covered.” He was so proud, he was grinning like a cartoon of himself. I heard Luke yelling and Bill walking up and down with him, talking softly, telling him in a deep voice, “Luke, I am your father,” and laughing to himself until he set the baby off again. I must have zoned out again. Sometime after that’s when Billy got the idea to blow smoke in Luke’s face to mellow him out. It worked fine, and Bill was smug as fuck in the morning. “It’s the crying cure,” he said. But Luke was still sleeping at lunchtime, and when I put my head close his breathing was bad, whistly like a slow flat, and I screamed at Bill until he took us to the hospital. Luke was okay then, but the nurse called social services on us.
Luke’s toys were everywhere still, but I couldn’t put them away yet. I hugged one of our old cushions to my stomach, stroked it. Ever since I was a kid I’ve had a habit of squeezing feather pillows until one of the little quills pokes through the fabric and I can tease it out. There are always little wisps of feathers on our rug. I was working on another one in the pillow now, pressing the sharp point against my finger until it punctured the cover, strumming it back and forth, finally plucking it out. This pillow used to be plump and soft; now it’s skinny and no good for sitting. One corner was crusty from where Luke had sucked on it. You could still smell his diapers, even though the social worker had taken him away a week before. It made me think of the times I pressed my face to his belly when I changed him. He smelled so good. Like a fresh can of coffee or a new T-shirt, the kind of smell you can’t get enough of in one breath. Sometimes I’d just run my nose all over him, sniffing him up while he giggled and squirmed. I wondered who’d look after him now. A foster mother, they told us. “A methadone mom,” Bill said when the lawyer explained it, and that started me crying because it made me the stuff Luke was coming off. I tried to imagine her, this replacement mom, but all I could picture was my own mother. She was a fit mom. She was a responsible adult. And look how I ended up. Moms was all alone down there in Arizona living in one of those retirement communities where they do your cleaning and buy your groceries for you. I hadn’t seen her since I ran off in ’86, but I kept a P.O. box because she sent checks sometimes. I still had the letter she wrote me when Dad died and another when she moved from Texas four years ago. And then it struck me. Maybe she could come up here to Eugene and help us get our shit together. If she lived with us, maybe the court would change its mind.
Having Luke was so much pain, I thought I was being torn in two. I wasn’t going to give him up now.
I thought of calling Moms up, but I hadn’t done that for a long time, and if I did it now, with this news, it might not be so good. The shock might kill her, I thought. The shame, most likely. We should go see her, drive down there. Sure, I thought. Drive down there and get her.
I told Bill when he got back and he looked at me like, “Your mom?!”
“I do have one.”
Jeez.
He didn’t want to, but I told him we had to. He knew that look. He’d seen it before, when I was strung out. My gotta-score look. Besides, he loved road trips, popping speed. They made him feel like Hunter Thompson, even in our two-tone ’87 Voyager.
It took us eighteen hours, and when we got there my back was aching but he was still wired. “Howdy,” he said (he’d been talking like that since Flagstaff), giving Moms a big hug. “Howdy, ma’am.” But then he couldn’t sit still. He had to stretch his legs, he said, walking about bowlegged as if he’d gotten off a horse. That made her laugh. He was like a big kid. At least he broke the ice. But I couldn’t watch him the whole time, and every so often he’d whistle and call out, “You’ve got some right purty stuff here. My, my.” He was taking shit! I knew it. I wouldn’t have minded, but that old family stuff was Luke’s too now. “Whatever happened
to that silver ashtray, Moms?” I asked her when I saw him come back with his pockets bulging. “And that nice table lighter?” But she couldn’t remember. Then Bill said he had to go out, “get me some smokes.” I followed him to the door and saw him throw another pill back, slapping his hand over his mouth with a little pop and dry swallowing, but when he saw me looking he made like an Indian brave, patting his hand over his mouth, making that woo-woo noise they make, and doing a rain dance down the hall. I told Moms he was shy, but she said he was sweet. I watched her carry the teacup she’d set for Bill to the kitchen, and it shook in its saucer as if she’d seen a ghost.
“Jesus, Moms,” I said, “when d’you get so old?”
I guess she had me when she was thirty-eight or -nine already. For a long time they didn’t think they could have kids, my folks, and then there I was. Now Moms’s hair was white and thin and she walked with her head down, watching her feet. But she was pleased to see me, although it took her a minute to figure out who I was. It’d only been nine years, for Christ’s sake.
So we sat around and chatted. We had some laughs. People dropped by. Friends of Moms’s. She called them all up to tell them she had a visitor. “My daughter,” she said proudly. She told them all I was in town on business and I thought she’d got it wrong, but then she winked at me and I said I was in . . . “Computers.” She was still sharp, Moms, I thought, and she could help me out with the court, I was sure of it. She looked like the perfect grandma, even if she didn’t know she was one yet. It wasn’t until later, after the friends had gone and we were alone, that I told her, and then she just sat there very still and I had to tell her again. “A little boy,” I said. “Called Walt.” Walter was my dad’s name. I’d thought of this in the van on the way down. I’d been saving it up. And then I saw the tears gleaming in her eyes and we held each other for a long time. And then I told her that I’d wanted to bring the baby to see her, but that I was in a fix, that I needed her help, and she nodded and said, Yes, yes, yes, anything, of course. The thing is, she didn’t remember what had gone on before—all the shit I pulled before. Just didn’t remember it one bit. “Forgive and forget,” she said. “That’s my motto.” I was so relieved. So long as she remembered who I was and that she was supposed to love me.
Bill called that night. He wasn’t doing John Wayne anymore. The cops had picked him up. “Buying?” I said. “But you had a big stash.” I’d seen him going into the trunk at rest stops every time I went to the bathroom. I thought he’d just packed for the trip. “Selling,” he told me. I knew Billy dealt back in Eugene, but not out of the apartment, not around me since I kicked. If we’d been stopped carrying that kind of weight across state lines, we’d never have seen Luke again. Billy wanted me to bail him, so I said sure and hung up. “Who was that?” Moms wanted to know. I took a deep breath. “Just some sales guy,” I said.
The thing about Bill is that I did love him, but then Luke came along and I really loved him. When Moms asked me what happened to my friend, “the cowboy,” I told her he’d had to ride off into the sunset.
The next morning I got up early, took her coffee and told her to get packed. I went down to the condo office and told them she’d be staying with me for a while. The lady at the desk looked surprised. She asked me if I thought that was a good idea, and I said I thought it was a great idea.
On the road Moms was quiet the whole way. Kept looking at me and then out the window and then back at me, as if she thought I might turn into someone else. The radio was busted, so I tried to talk to her about the old days, the house, Dad, but she didn’t say anything. I just started talking about whatever came into my head, like this old game show we used to watch. My dad was with Exxon then, and they wanted him in Scotland on account of the North Sea oil, so we were living in Aberdeen for a year. It was called The Generation Game—just a dumb show, with cheesy sets and bad toupées, really—and the gimmick was that the teams were dads and daughters, uncles and nieces, grandmas and grandsons. Happy families. There was a bit at the end, a memory test, where the contestants sat in front of a conveyor belt and watched all these prizes slide by, one by one. Then they got to sit in a spotlight and the host would tell them that everything they could remember in thirty seconds was theirs to keep. “Toaster,” they’d go. “Blender, golf shoes, cuddly toy.” There was always a cuddly toy. But then they’d start to forget things and the audience would go nuts, calling out, “TV, tennis rackets, mixer.” And the host would be shouting, “You’ve got that already. What else, what else?” By the end of it some of the contestants could barely remember their own names. The prizes weren’t much and it was real corny, but we loved it, yelling at the TV, screaming at them what they forgot.
“That’ll be us,” I told Moms. “You and me, playing the Generation Game.”
We were close that year, two Americans in Scotland. We went to all the castles together. I couldn’t understand the accents of anyone at school and all they knew about Texas and oil was Dallas. For the first time, Moms and I had more in common than anyone else we knew. But that was also the year I started getting high. On gas fumes first—a fuck you to my dad the workaholic oil man—then later sniffing glue, doing whip-its behind the cafeteria. It felt so dumb passing around a tube of glue; it was just a game. But then when we moved back to Houston, I got serious. Dope, coke, crack, smack. Moms was playing her own games back then: moving the cocktail hour up from five to four to three to two, the vodka greasy, straight from the freezer; watching the soaps all afternoon. But finally she sobered up long enough to tell me I had to choose: my home or my habit; her or the heroin. It was no choice at sixteen. Not even close. I kept in touch with Dad for a few years after I left. He would meet me for coffee, take me for a big dinner, or if I was too fucked buy me sacks of groceries (always frozen dinners: chicken cordon bleu, Salisbury steak, stuffed peppers—like I was too busy to make my own). He gave me money too, though he always made me promise not to spend it on shit. He told me that after I left, she just stayed in her room for weeks, hugging herself. She never went out, didn’t eat, just lay there in the dimness with the drapes closed. And she was drinking, working her way through years of accumulated duty-free—Cuervo Gold, Curaçao, Kahlua.
“She won’t even answer the phone,” he said, meaning in case it was me.
“I’m not as strong as her,” he said, meaning he still had to see me, behind her back.
He was still hooked, I told him, but she was going cold turkey. Meaning from me. In her first letter to me, when she told me he was gone—heart attack in the yard—she said he’d made her promise to do what she could for me. I took the money she sent, but I knew enough not to get in touch. She didn’t need me back in her life. Not after she’d kicked me. And yet here I was again.
Outside, the road was rough; it sounded like static under the tires until we hit one of those patches of fresh tarmac, when everything went quiet for a moment. It was like trying to tune a radio, except all I could hear in the good spots was Moms breathing.
We stayed at a Snooz Inn just outside Salt Lake (I put it on Moms’s Visa), shared a room for the first time in twenty years. When she came out of the bathroom to go to sleep, she had her head caught in her nightgown and I had to get up and help her set it straight, but then when her head appeared she was all flustered. “I can manage,” she said, and then I felt embarrassed in just my bra and panties, stretch marks and tracks still showing.
It was raining when we got to Eugene, which saved me from giving Moms the tour. I wouldn’t have known what to say anyway. Billy always liked to call it “the town where the sixties never died.” He liked to say he came to college here on account of Ken Kesey—that and the fact they filmed Animal House down the block—and stayed because Springfield was the crystal-meth capital of the West.
When we got to our apartment it was dark, which I thought would help, because the building looks better at night, although sometimes the johns from Seventh like to cruise you. She just took one look and said “W
ell!” and rolled her sleeves up and went right at it. She found all that crap under the sink—Windex, Mr. Clean—from the last tenants, and I cut up an old maternity dress for a rag, but when I tried to help she just waved me away, so I left her to it, fetched her stuff from the van, and made up a bed for myself on the Goodwill sofa. She was happy, I thought. Humming! Happy to be doing, to be needed, I guess. But just when she was going great I heard her give a little cry. She was in the kitchen, and when I went in, it seemed so beautiful. It shone. She was mopping, there was water on the floor, but then I saw she was wet. “An accident,” she said in a strangled voice, and I could tell she wanted to run to the bathroom, she kept lifting her feet, but she couldn’t because she didn’t want to get pee everywhere, and she was whimpering with the frustration. Well, I helped her out, of course. The mess wasn’t much compared to shooting galleries I’ve seen, though I didn’t tell her that. Got her changed—turns out there was a pack of diapers, big ones, in her case, but she’d forgotten to put one on—threw her dress in the sink, and cleaned up. “You cleaned up after me,” I told her through the bathroom door. “What goes around comes around.”
And that’s how we went at it those first few weeks. Me looking after her, and her cooking and cleaning and looking after me. I had a lot of trouble with the breast pump. It hurt and I didn’t like to use it, but then my breasts would leak all over. The smell of my milk always made me cry for Luke. But Moms helped me with the pump, boiling up the plastic pieces in a saucepan on the stove before I used it. She wiped my breasts, caught a drop on the end of her finger and tasted it. “That’s good stuff,” she said, and she held out her finger to me and I licked it. She made me get little bottles to sterilize and store the milk in, and we kept a stash of them in the fridge to supply the social worker when I saw her each week. Luke didn’t like formula, she told me, and it made me glad to think of him still jonesing for me.
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