Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

by Deb Caletti

  I barely got a hello from Mom either. “Good book, huh?” I asked. It was the same one I had seen in her room a few days before—Life Times Two, by Charles Whitney, thick enough to have her engrossed and to cause her fingers to splay like duck feet with the effort of holding it open.

  “Mmm hmm.” She stopped stirring the sauce, moved to the counter where she’d begun making the salad. Poe trotted after her, his eyes still never leaving her hands and their amazing possibilities. My mother took some torn lettuce leaves from the salad spinner and dropped them into the salad bowl, still reading. Her aim gradually wavered until she was missing the bowl completely and a little pyramid of lettuce greens was rising on the kitchen counter. This was better than TV.

  “Mom,” Chip Jr. said.

  She looked up. “What? Oh, shit.” She grabbed the leaves and shoved them in the bowl with irritation, as if they had willfully misbehaved. One fell on the floor, to Poe’s great delight; he jumped up and trotted over to sniff it. Then he sat back down and looked up again in wait. The lettuce leaf looked limp and rejected. It should have. That dog would eat underwear, for God’s sake.

  “Let me help you,” I said to Mom. I could see the spaghetti sauce rising slowly to the edge of the pan, bubbling all lavalike. I caught its handle just in time. It was one of my mother’s biggest problems, the way she immersed herself in something to the exclusion of everything else. She could move from world to world, and it was tough trying to find the secret door to wherever she was.

  “Time to put this down,” she said, stating the obvious. It was too bad in a way. I was looking forward to actually eating and seeing how she was going to manage reading while spaghetti slapped all over her chin. “You,” she said to me, as if she only now noticed I was there. “I need to talk to you.” She put the cover flap inside the book and set it down, away from the possible splatterings from the stove. My stomach flipped. Oh, God. Nerves tightened my throat.

  “Oh, jeez, Poe,” Chip Jr. said. He waved his hand back and forth, fanning the air. Poe continued to stare up at Mom as if nothing had happened.

  “Dog, you were not named for the poet and short story writer and forefather of the modern mystery,” my mother said down to him. “You were actually named for Sir Potent Fart, king of the exiled canines.”

  It was the first joke I’d heard her make since my father’s last visit. Jokes, a regular dinner, reading—my mother was returning to us again.

  She strained the spaghetti, steam rising in a sudden gust, and slid some onto our plates. She ladled the sauce on, dropped the heel of bread pretend-accidentally to Poe, who brought his prize to the living room, where he could spread the crumbs all over the carpet. I waited. I was making brave efforts to remind the sick feeling that there were lots of things she could want to talk to me about. Maybe I’d forgotten to do something she asked. Water the garden? Get gas in the car? Not break into someone’s house in the middle of the night while Travis Becker took their jewelry?

  Mom ate for a while, looking down at her plate. As the silence grew, I was sure she would not be struggling with words if I had left the gas tank empty or didn’t water the garden. Outside, someone was mowing their lawn. Chip Jr. was doing an apparent pasta science experiment. On the first mouthful, he rolled up the spaghetti as high as he could around the fork and up the handle. On his second bite, he took a single strand between his lips and inhaled, until the end of it finally whipped past his lips like the back car of the Tornado Train Roller Coaster at the Gold Nugget Amusement Park.

  “Ruby,” my mother said finally. “About the other night.”

  “Uh oh,” Chip Jr. said.

  “What night?” I said. I was giving her every opportunity to let this be about something else. Even I could tell that my voice was too cheery.

  The lawn mower sound stopped right then. The room was suddenly too quiet. I studied my tangle of spaghetti. Poe was back. He sat by my chair and panted, Heh heh heh. I didn’t know what he thought was so funny.

  “The night you went to the movies with Sydney.”

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  “She called over here after you left, saying they ordered a pizza. They asked if you wanted to come over.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just kept looking at that spaghetti, hoping it might do something to save the day. It was one of those times where you just don’t understand yourself and how you got into such a mess. I was having a lot of those moments lately. The real me had gone off on vacation somewhere and I was being house-sat by someone who had wild parties and smoked in bed.

  “Is this about a boy?” my mother said. I guess she thought that most troubles had love at the heart of them. She was probably right.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I knew it,” Chip Jr. said.

  “Oh, Ruby,” my mother sighed. “You know when you start to lie about something that you are in territory where someone is going to get hurt. If you need that lie, you’ve stepped over the line onto dangerous ground.”

  “I know,” I said. I did know, too.

  “Who is he?”

  “That rich guy that lives in the castle,” Chip Jr. said.

  “One of the Becker boys?” my mother said.

  “How do you know?” I glared at Chip Jr.

  “Oscar’s brother saw you throw him in Marcy Lake.”

  “Spy,” I said. Did everyone have to know your business?

  “Yeah, right,” Chip Jr. said. “This is actually a hidden camera.” He held up his bread roll.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “And this is a miniature microphone.” He held up a cherry tomato from the salad. He spoke into it. “Yep, she’s here,” he said.

  I shoved back my chair. I shoved a little too hard; it fell over with a crack and Poe did a little sideways scurry from the fright. I don’t know why I was so angry. I went to my room. I slammed the door. I could hear the framed pictures on the other side of the wall—overly large school photos of Chip Jr. and me, caught at our height of ugliness, with teeth that looked too big for our faces and glazed expressions of goofiness—slide off-kilter. I sat with my back to the door. My mother knocked a second later, as I knew she would. All of this was familiar from those Disney movies where a Teenager Makes a Scene. I guess that’s where I learned what to do.

  Mom rattled the doorknob. Then she gave up. I could hear her slide her back down the door, and I knew she was there, sitting on the other side of it. She was quiet for a long time, and then her muffled voice came through the door, right at my own ear level.

  “Is he a nice boy?” she asked.

  “No,” I answered truthfully.

  “So I guess you’re trying not to see him anymore,” she said. “At least I hope.”

  “Right,” I said.

  She didn’t talk for a long time after that, so long that I thought maybe she’d gotten up and left. I stayed where I was. My thoughts had to catch up to the rest of me. I was almost getting sleepy when I heard the soft flip flip flip of playing cards being snapped down.

  “Hit me,” I heard Chip Jr. say.

  I got up and looked into the hall. My mother and Chip Jr. were both outside my door, holding a fan of cards. My mother lay on her side, her head propped up with one hand and her legs stretched out, and Chip Jr. sat cross-legged. Poe was lying sphinxlike, chewing someone’s sock.

  “He can see your cards from there,” I warned Mom.

  “Cannot. Wanna play?” Chip Jr. asked.

  I sat down in their circle. They reshuffled for me and started again. This was not supposed to be how the Teenager Makes a Scene was supposed to go. Then again, my mother never watched much television.

  “Man, this hand stinks,” she said.

  “I’ve been doing some thinking,” my mother said in the car as she drove me to work. Since she asked me about Travis Becker, she’d been treating me like a sick child, studying my face as if looking for signs of fever and hovering in my orbit as if her presence was the one thing that was keeping me w
ell.

  “If it’s about Travis Becker, I don’t really want to talk about it,” I said.

  She sneaked a quick look at me; as I’ve said, you’ve got to keep your eyes on Cummings Road when you’re driving it. Her look was easy to read—she couldn’t understand, we’d always been able to talk, she was hurt. Mothers can give all of that to you in one brief look. There wasn’t much to understand, really. I didn’t want to talk because I had things to hide. Secrets are the ultimate hiding place.

  We passed the open corner where different merchants brought their products. That day, it was fresh-picked cherries, set out in baskets on a card table. A woman in a sun hat and a tank top and shorts sat on a folding chair. She read a book, head down, as those cherries baked in the already warm sun. Her white, jiggly arms would turn bright red by noon if she wasn’t careful. When we passed the Becker estate, I forced myself not to look.

  “Listen,” Mom said. “I know these things are hard. If you really don’t want to see this boy anymore, then it’s best to keep busy, is all I was going to say. When you get time on your hands, that’s when your mind takes advantage. Give it an inch, it takes a mile. Then the phone’s in your hands and you don’t know how it got there.” Mom was in top mother form, driving the Car of Life. “Take it from me, I’ve been there a thousand times. It’s this weird, powerful battle.”

  “It’s been a week,” I said. She was right, too. It was a weird, powerful battle. My thoughts were drawn to Travis in a way I didn’t even seem to have control of, like an overfed mouth to chocolate, a drunk to another drink. It was a compulsion. I was in love with him, I thought. I didn’t even like him. I hated what he had done, and wanted to see his hair, made golden by the sun, again. It was as if he had taken up residence in my body, an unwelcome visitor bringing longing and intrigue and dread.

  “If you can get through the worst, you won’t even count anymore. Tonight we’ll have Sydney and Lizbeth for a sleepover—how’s that? Saturday you can come with me to the Casserole Queens.”

  “No, Mom. Please. I don’t want to hear about hip operations.”

  “It’s not like that. What were you, fourteen, when you went last?”

  “I don’t know,” I moaned. Thirteen or fourteen, and all I could remember was that when we got out of there my cheeks hurt from smiling and from using my Old People Voice.

  “I want you to come. And what about Libby? Can she give you extra hours?”

  “This sounds like strategic military planning,” I said.

  “It has to be,” she said. “It has to be,” she said again, as if she hadn’t really heard herself the first time. “Listen. I personally have had enough of being pathetic in the name of love. Your father had a baby. A baby! Enough is enough.”

  “I could have told you that a long time ago.”

  “Watch it, girl. I’m digging up roots twenty years deep. You think it’s easy? You’ve got a couple of months’ worth, and it’s no picnic. Give me my bag,” she said. She wiggled her fingers in the direction of the floor where her Nine Mile Falls Library canvas tote, sold at last year’s book fair, sat. I heaved it up onto the seat beside her. It was always full of books and magazines and mail and maybe a bowling ball, by the weight of it. I swear it was a hundred pounds.

  She fished around inside with one hand, taking quick looks down and swerving the car unnervingly.

  “Let me do it,” I said. “What are you looking for?”

  “A postcard. In that stack of mail near the front. A beach.”

  I flipped through and found the postcard, in between her bank statement and the garbage bill. A beach during sunset, with a palm tree in the corner. “This it?” -

  “Give it to me. Don’t look.”

  I handed it over, but not before I saw the writing on the back, my father’s writing. Missing you, it said.

  She rolled down her window and tossed it outside. It fluttered in the speeding air; in the side mirror, I could see it land on one of its corners and travel end to end in a spry fashion, like those funny birds in the nature shows that appear to run on water. Finally it lost its burst of enthusiasm and landed flat. The tire of a pickup truck behind us rolled over it and made it shudder. I couldn’t see it any more. I imagined it lying there, beach side up, giving some animal a last, tempting view of life on earth before becoming roadkill.

  My mother rolled up her window. “This is war,” she said.

  My mother had apparently already gotten to Libby before I’d even arrived at work that day. I was in the stockroom at Johnson’s Nursery, tying my apron behind my back, when Libby came in. She was wearing her big batik dress and had a handkerchief tied around her head, and her eyes were even bluer than usual, set against her face, which was getting more tan by the day. She took a swig from a water bottle, then held the bottle against her forehead.

  “All year we complain about the rain, but then it gets nice and we can’t take it,” she said. “If it gets as hot as yesterday, I’m turning on all the sprinklers and standing underneath. Damn the customers.”

  “I second that,” I said.

  “Ruby, I meant to ask you,” she said. “I know it’s summer and all, but I could really use you a little longer for the next few weeks. Say, until five thirty? These longer summer hours and all these shipments, I just can’t get caught up.” Libby spun the water in her bottle in a slow circle.

  “There’s no particular other reason you’re asking this?” I said. Five thirty was when Mom got off work.

  “Well, like I said . . .” Libby shook her head and laughed. “Damn, Ruby, I’m a terrible liar.”

  “Your voice gets too high,” I agreed.

  She looked at me for the first time since coming in the stockroom. “I know it. I’ve been that way since I was a kid. The lie just gets stuck in my throat, and the other words can’t squeeze through.”

  “My mom called you.”

  She took hold of my shoulder and shook it. “It’s just because she loves you, right?”

  “I know it.”

  “I really do need you, though. I’ve got perennials up the kazoo.”

  “I’ve seen them.”

  “Rich and Allen can bench-press six bags of beauty bark but they can’t make change to save their lives. If you tell them that, I’ll kill you.” She took another swig of water. “If you want to stay late tonight, I’ll take us all out for Coke and onion rings after. Does Smelly’s have onion rings? I saw some onion rings on a commercial and can’t stop thinking about them.”

  “I think so. But I’m going to have to pass. Mom’s got the evening shift covered. We’re having a sleepover.”

  “Oh, jeez. I can just see her inviting those old ladies she does the book club for, in their sleeping bags and curlers.”

  “The old people are tomorrow,” I said.

  Libby started to laugh. “Man. When I hear the helicopters, I’ll know she called the National Guard. SWAT team on your roof with machine guns.”

  “Ha,” I said.

  “Guys in jackets with big letters, FBI, on the back.”

  “You’re hilarious.”

  “Oh, Ruby,” she said. She tried to look serious, but her smile was still peeking out the sides of her mouth. She plunked a kiss on my forehead and ruffled my hair before she left. It was the same thing she used to do when I was three. It was one of those moments when you get that snug, solid feeling. When you realize there are people in the world that really care about you.

  I took that feeling around with me for the rest of the day as I rang up orders of dahlia tubers and hanging fuschia baskets, sweet alyssum and tomato plants, weed killer and bone meal and wheel barrows of peach trees and chinaberry. I hardly thought of Travis Becker. After lunch I went outside and unloaded flats of perennials and deadheaded the geraniums, helped load magnolias and beeches and bags of manure into the sagging trunks of cars, and transplanted a few cramped root-bound rose trees.

  Libby was right—it was too hot, and when it came time to have a break I went o
ut near the sample waterfalls and garden sculptures, to the plot of land where we keep the larger trees in the ground, and where they need to be watered with thick hoses as the sprinklers don’t reach out that far. There’s a pond out there too, where we keep several koi, and it is shady and pleasant there, the burbling of the waterfalls giving you the very sound of coolness. No one else was around, and I turned on one of the hoses and let it run into the roots of the beech and Purple Robe locusts, waiting for the cold water to come before I took a long, sweet drink. I wanted to pour it right over my head—I was tempted by that delicious possibility—but instead tossed a handful of water on the back of my neck, and another on my face and breathed it in.

  “There you are,” Travis Becker said, as if he’d been looking for me from the moment I drove away from him in the Yellow Submarine parking lot. He startled me; I hadn’t seen him come around the shady bend toward the tree plot, and hadn’t heard his soft steps over the sound of hose water spilling to the ground. I jolted at his voice, jerking the hose, causing it to make an embarrassing splash across the front of my shorts.

  “You scared me,” I said.

  “Uh oh,” he said, and pointed to my shorts. “Accident.”

  I blushed, though with my face already red from heat, he might not have noticed. It was just great that he found me right then, with my tank top stained with sweat and my apron dirty and my bangs now pointy-wet.

  He didn’t seem to mind. He leaned in and kissed me, just like that. His mouth was warm against my cold one.

  “Mmmm,” he said. “Just like taking a drink. I’ve missed you.”

  He wore a beret, dark shorts, and a dark shirt. You’d think this would look ridiculous. It didn’t. You pictured him walking the Pont Neuf in Paris, smoking a Gauloise, one of the crowd from A Moveable Feast. As I said, he had that kind of face—timeless. It was the surroundings that looked wrong, not him. That face was more welcome to my eyes than it should have been. He looked good to me.