The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  She took a long drag on her cigarette before saying, matter-of-factly: “She says she loves him, and he loves her, and no matter how uncomfortable that might make some people, she has to do what she knows in her heart is right.”

  “So it’s true? They really were, you know—”

  “Having an affair? Apparently so.”

  “She told you that?”

  “We’ve talked about it, yes.”

  Megan took another puff of her cigarette and blew out the smoke, coolly, as if she encountered this kind of thing every day. I’d suspected it myself, ever since the party at their house, but having our mother’s affair with Frank Martello verified, brought out into the daylight and stood up naked in front of us, was still shocking.

  She went on to tell me how after our parents’ big blowup last week, the first thing our mother did was drive to the Conoco station and call Frank from the pay phone. Megan had been with her in the car, so she’d witnessed the whole thing. Frank couldn’t talk just then—he was having dinner with his family—but he promised our mother that when he got back to town after New Year’s, they’d discuss everything like rational adults and find some solution. He only wanted what was best for her, he told her. Our mother was counting the days now until Frank’s return.

  One good thing to come out of all this, Megan said, was that she and our mother were finally getting to know each other better. Since spending more time with her, Megan had come to see what a strong, independent-minded woman our mother really was. Lydia’s only problem, my sister said, was that she’d been trapped for all these years in an unhappy marriage. As our mother described it, she felt like she’d been standing under a dark cloud while everyone else was enjoying the sunshine.

  But Frank had helped her to see that she had as much right to happiness as anyone; he’d been really wonderful for her that way. If she didn’t like a situation, Frank told her, she should change the situation. It was as simple as that. She was an adult, after all; this was her life, and she should be able to do with it what she chose. The only thing that kept her standing under that dark cloud was habit and fear. There was the sunshine; all she had to do was step toward it. “We make our own happiness,” was how Frank put it.

  My sister paused to take another pull on her cigarette. I didn’t see how she could be so calm talking about all this. She seemed to be overlooking the whole sleazy aspect of it—the fact that our mother had actually been sleeping with our neighbor behind our father’s back. But when I thought of this, when I pictured Frank Martello cupping my mother’s head in his hand and whispering to her, We make our own happiness, Lydia, it made my stomach clench.

  “That guy’s a snake,” I said.

  “You don’t think our mother deserves to be happy?”

  “What? No, of course she deserves to be happy. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying I don’t trust Frank Martello. All this ‘sunshine’ and stuff. What’s he up to? How well does she know him, anyway? What does she think’s going to happen? He’s going to leave his wife and family for her? And then what?” I slipped my sister’s cigarette from her fingers and tried to smoke it.

  “You sound like Dad now.”

  “Well, maybe he’s right. This whole thing is crazy. It’s like our mother’s been brainwashed or something.” I coughed on the cigarette smoke. “And what about us? What’re we supposed to do? She can’t just abandon us like this.”

  “See, you’re not even thinking about her. You’re only worried about yourself. You’re worried about who’s going to clean and cook and wash your clothes for you. That’s why you’re feeling so anxious. But we’re all adults here. We can take care of ourselves.” I started to say something but she went on. “We need to be thinking about our mother right now. Lydia’s going through some very challenging times, and she needs all the support we can give her.”

  “What about Dad? You think this is fair to him?”

  “You think he’ll even notice she’s gone? He’s practically ignored her for years. What difference could it make to him now? All he cares about is his precious comet.”

  “Yeah, but …”

  “Honestly, did our parents look like a happy couple to you? Did they? I’m surprised they lasted as long as they did. Lydia probably should’ve done this years ago. I applaud her. I think it’s very brave of her. For the first time in her life, she’s doing what she wants and not what everyone else wants. At last she’ll be free to pursue her own dreams.”

  “You applaud her?”

  My sister must’ve been listening to too much Joan Baez—“We Shall Overcome” and “I Shall Be Released” and all that. She was enjoying this whole separation mess much more than she should have been. In fact, hearing her go on about “free to pursue her dreams” and “doing what she wants,” I got the feeling Megan was speaking more for herself than our mother: it wasn’t our mother’s freedom that my sister was so excited about, it was hers. And since when, by the way, did she start calling our mother by her first name, like they were best friends from school?

  I swallowed a gulp of cigarette smoke and had a fit of coughing. The picnic table creaked beneath us. Megan took her cigarette back from me.

  “Those’ll kill you, you know,” she said.

  “Thank you, Doctor. I’ll be sure to remember that.”

  I felt dizzy, either from the cigarette smoke, or from everything Megan had told me, or from both. This was all happening too fast. One day we were a regular family, maybe not exactly delirious with happiness, but normal enough, and the next, my mother had fallen in love with our neighbor and run away with my sister, who was coming now to deliver food and collect more clothes.

  I looked around our scrappy yard: the trees along the bayou, the rusted chain link fence, the tilting garage shed, my bike resting on the ground over there. Though I’d never held any special affection for it, the place at least had a dependable familiarity. I felt a version of the same sentiment for our household. Our family was like the wobbly picnic table Megan and I were sitting on: four legs supporting some planks, a simple enough structure, nothing remarkable, but it did its job. If you altered it in any way, broke away a leg or pried off the top, it hardly qualified as a table anymore. Then it was just—what?—a pile of scrap wood, something to haul away to the dump, and then only the memory of a table. Maybe soon you were even missing the rotten table.

  I adjusted the blanket around my shoulders. I was beginning to shiver; it was colder outside than I’d thought.

  “How long do you think this is going to last?”

  Megan looked at me curiously. “How long?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hate to tell you, little bro, but I don’t think this is just a temporary situation.” She confessed that she wasn’t sure how our mother’s relationship with Frank would turn out; we’d have to wait until he got back after New Year’s to see how he arranged things with his family. But regardless, Megan didn’t see how our parents could stay together after this.

  She squinted dramatically through her cigarette smoke. “I do believe we are witnessing the end of Mr. and Mrs. Alan Broussard as we knew them.”

  “You mean like … divorce?”

  “Don’t act so shocked. It happens all the time. Why not them?”

  I protested. Maybe it looked bad now, I said, but in a couple of weeks, a couple of months at the most, they’d find a way to get back together. Then things would return to normal. They had to. We couldn’t go on living like this. This was impossible. This was … this was a disaster.

  “Or what other people might call real life. Better get used to it, Junior. You’ve got decades of it ahead of you.”

  She bent over and stubbed out her cigarette on the picnic bench, then tossed the butt toward the bayou. And with that, she got up to go back inside. I stood by while she packed clothes in bags, took her old guitar, and said goodbye to our father through the bedroom door. Then she got in the car and drove back to our grandparents’ house, leaving me to stumble and shiv
er through the ruins of our home, washing dishes, picking up clothes, wondering how we could even begin to build a new life out of this rubble.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  PETER opened the door for me and my father, and a wave of warm, smelly air washed out from inside the house.

  “Come on in!” Mr. Coot called.

  The heat in the living room was turned up so high that it was like wading into a warm pond. And the smell—it was a rank, shut-in odor that made me instinctively close my nose and breathe through my mouth.

  Mr. Coot hobbled around the corner of the couch to greet us. “You made it,” he said, and put his hand out for my father.

  “Merry Christmas, Lou. Thanks for having us.”

  Lou—Mr. Coot—was around my father’s age, with a large belly, a thick neck, and dirty blond hair that he wore slicked back in a flip from his forehead. He walked with a kind of waddle, on account of his hip, and when he wasn’t dressed in his gas station uniform he liked to wear blue jeans with suspenders, as he did now.

  “You didn’t have to get all dressed up,” he said, eyeing my father’s tie.

  My father shrugged and said he wasn’t sure, it being Christmas and all.

  “Oh, hell no. We take it easy here. Casual attire required.”

  We happened to be there because I’d mentioned my parents’ separation to Peter, who told his father, who invited us over for dinner. We all bumped into the small front room behind Mr. Coot, who went on talking loudly, not looking at any of us.

  “Told Pete, you know, it’s a shame, they’re there all by themselves, we’re here by ourselves. I said, Pete, go ask them. We’re neighbors, after all. No need to be strangers. People are people.”

  My father proffered the bottle of whiskey he’d brought. “Sorry, I couldn’t find the wrapping paper. It’s, ah … Well, that’s all we have.”

  “I’m a Wild Turkey man myself, but I like Dickel, too,” said Mr. Coot, taking the bottle and looking at it. “Mix that with a little Coke, you got yourself a nice drink. Take that to the kitchen, will you, Pete?” As Peter carried away the bottle, Mr. Coot called after him, “And get the sodas and stuff out, too. See what all our guests want.”

  Mr. Coot moved a TV tray out of the way and snatched up a half-eaten bag of potato chips from the sofa, moving with a breathy effort. “We meant to clean up here but didn’t get around to it. You know how that is.”

  The Coots’ house was almost identical to ours except that everything was reversed left to right, like in a mirror. There was a kitchen, a small dining room, a living room with a TV against the wall; one bedroom downstairs, two attic bedrooms upstairs—all the same. Also like at our house, the Coots had a Christmas tree in the corner of the front room. Theirs, however, was artificial.

  “Let me show you,” Mr. Coot said, and pulled off one of the wire-and-plastic branches and handed it to my father. “We used to have a real tree but you know what those are like. You’ve got to water them, clean up after them, the needles falling off. Fire hazard. This one, you finish, you pack it up, throw it in the garage. No fuss, no muss. It’s clean, that’s why I like it.”

  He began to look around. “We’ve got the, ah, the scent.” He hollered to Peter, “Where’s that spray? The tree spray?” Peter shouted something back from the kitchen. “Here it is,” Mr. Coot said, finding the can on top of the TV. He read the label aloud for us: “ ‘Real pine scent.’ ” He shook the can vigorously and sprayed the tree. “Smell that? It’s just the same. Better, maybe. It lasts ten, twelve hours. You spray it on one time every day, and that’s all.” He set the can back on the TV.

  My father had turned to look at a narrow table against the side wall. On top was a kind of shrine to Peter’s older brother, who’d been killed in Vietnam. There were framed pictures, a set of medals, a folded American flag.

  “Oh, yeah. That was Tommy. You remember him, don’t you?” Mr. Coot said to my father, coming near. “I don’t guess you’ve been here since then.”

  I paused with them in front of the table. The centerpiece was a framed portrait of Tommy in a dark blue uniform and a white hat, standing beside a flag. In front of the picture sat a bowl of dusty red, white, and blue plastic flowers. On either side were two candles in silver holders. On the wall behind it was a framed poem written in old-fashioned script on antique-looking paper; it began, “Here lies a man once known …”

  “I remember he used to ride his bike …,” my father started to say.

  “Just four years ago,” Mr. Coot said, suddenly reverent. “He would’ve been twenty-four by now.”

  We stared silently at Tommy’s things for a minute. His death seemed to hang over this side of the room like a heavy cloud, the source of the sad, oppressive air that filled the house. Mr. Coot wheezed softly beside me.

  “They say you get over it? That’s a goddamn lie. You never get over it.” Mr. Coot sniffed wetly and then let out a string of obscene curses against the government.

  Peter came in carrying a large tray of beer and soft drinks, and we all backed away from the shrine, quieter and sadder now. “Set it there,” Mr. Coot said, and Peter put the tray on the coffee table in front of the couch. He waved at us. “Sit, sit.”

  Mr. Coot sat painfully in a large blue recliner, lowering first his right hip to the cushions and then allowing the rest of his body to drop. He coughed and gasped. It was the pleurisy, he said. The doctors told him he had to have his fluids drained, but he’d be damned if he was going to let anyone stick a spigot in him, no thank you.

  My father and I sat on the couch, which was covered by a green bed-sheet that kept slipping down. “Just tuck it back up there,” Mr. Coot said. We grabbed handfuls of potato chips while Mr. Coot leaned forward to try to manage the drinks. “Help us out here, Pete.” I took a Shasta cola, and my father and Mr. Coot started with cans of Budweiser.

  “Hell no, it’s not too early,” he said. “This is a public holiday. One of seven days a year the station’s closed. Time I get to celebrate.” He proposed a toast: “The lonely hearts club. Four lonely men, all alone on Christmas. Making the best of it.”

  He lifted up his hip, pulled the remote control out from under him, and turned on the TV. They had a larger, newer TV than we did, and Mr. Coot described its features to my father while he switched through the channels. He found a program—“A Christmas Carol,” he announced—and left the TV tuned to that. Then he abruptly began talking about the challenges of living alone without a woman.

  “You’ve got to get you a routine,” he advised. The hardest thing for him, when Patty left, was coping with the responsibility of taking care of the house. “Me and Pete, we divide up the chores. One day he’ll do the cleaning, the next day I’ll do. That right, Pete?”

  “I remember when I first moved to Terrebonne,” my father said. Holding his beer can on one knee, he started to tell about how he used to live alone in an apartment downtown during his bachelor days, and how when Lydia came over she was appalled—absolutely appalled—by the condition of that place.…

  He trailed off, as though forgetting the point of the story.

  Mr. Coot nodded. “The first days are the worst. You’ll get used to it.… How about cooking? Do you cook?”

  He talked about the best places for takeout in Terrebonne. Ralph’s Restaurant had a good Monday night buffet, he said. All you can eat. You go in there, fill up one of those cardboard boxes—lima beans, baked ham, macaroni and cheese, vanilla pudding, everything. (“Sounds good,” my father said, nodding.) He talked about spaghetti sauce. Ragú. That was something they had discovered as of late. (“Chef Boyardee?” my father asked. “That’s another one,” Mr. Coot said.) He said how, himself, he was happy with hamburger. Him and Pete could eat hamburger eight days a week. Little ground chuck. What you did was—here was a tip—you mixed in instant onion soup powder with the ground meat. No, really. You put that in there, mix it in real good, you got a delicious and satisfying meal.…

  I looked out the front wind
ow to the street, where neighborhood kids were riding their bikes back and forth in the slanting afternoon light, and I wished that I was outside with them.

  “That’s the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

  “What?” my father said.

  Mr. Coot pointed at the TV with the remote. “The first ghost. The Ghost of Christmas Past.”

  “Oh, right.”

  We all turned and stared at the TV for a moment. A cartoon Scrooge was cringing on his knees while a flaming blue ghost rattled his chains and pointed a finger at him. “Mercy! Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?” cried Scrooge.

  “Another thing is, Green Stamps,” Mr. Coot said, going on. “S&H Green Stamps. People laugh at that, but I tell you, you can get a lot of practical things with those. Toast ovens. Coffeemaker. Our station gives them away, and sometimes people don’t even want them. I take them myself—I can do that legally—and save them.…”

  Peter asked if I wanted to see his new gun. I got up to leave with him, relieved to go.

  “You boys run along, have fun,” Mr. Coot said, waving a hand. “Us tired old bachelors’ll be down here discussing things of an important nature.”

  Climbing the stairs to Peter’s room, I gradually allowed myself to breathe again through my nose. On the couch, my father stared dully at the TV and took another swallow of his beer, as though he’d already succumbed to the sad, suffocating air of the place and could barely move his body.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  “CHECK it out,” Peter said, lifting his new rifle down from the rack.

  Except for a long, high window in place of a dormer window, the layout of Peter’s room was exactly like mine. Same size, same low slanted ceiling, even the same furniture—bed, bookcase, desk, chair. His room, though, was dirtier and more cluttered than mine. Clothes and junk covered the brown carpet; cookie and cereal boxes and soda cans lay everywhere. On the nightstand beside his bed sat a bag of cough drops, a jar of Vaseline, and a roll of toilet paper. In an aquarium on his desk, a gerbil ran round and around on a squeaky metal wheel.