Chapter Six
Storytime
PART I.
We’re standing at the threshold of his door when he clears his throat and says, “The truth of it is that you’re gonna have to fake it, Joe. Half of parenting is faking it.” Tate glances at my pickup, parked outside this suburban hellhole, and keeps his eyes trained on his daughter, who is duly buckled up inside. “Fake being interested in her paintings, in her chitter-chatter, in her dancing. At night, when you’re tired, you’re going to fake your desire for story time. It’s tiring. Do it anyway. Some of parenting is faking it. The love part is real.”
If it comes. I think it but don’t say it, although I do find myself snorting and hawking snot into a rosebush with a few dying flowers hanging on. No doubt my sister planted the bush before she died. She loved roses whereas my life always lacked dignity. “You’ll get better.”
“Joe.” He says it like he’s disappointed and then he waves his arms toward his own body. There are tears blurring in his eyes. My own eyes stay on him and it’s true he looks like hell. He’s had his head shaved and his teeth pulled after the chemo made half of them fall out anyway. He’s lost maybe fifty pounds, and he’s not the strapping Nebraska boy my sister married. Still, he is more human than me because he says, “I don’t have long now. Blood, it’s in my blood.” His eyes shift to me. Green and steady. “I wish there was someone else too, you know. You are not ideal. And I wish you were married, or had a girlfriend or something, because it would make it easier. For you. So I’m sorry, man. I’m sorry. But here it is. We’re down to this.”
“I do, Tate. I do have a girlfriend. Finally.”
“Well, good. Maybe she’ll like kids.”
I keep my mouth shut on that one. No, she doesn’t. Never wanted any. Said it sounds exhausting, and that her own childhood was shit, and the idea of kids puts her in that same mode she’s spent a lifetime escaping. Asked me four times if my vasectomy was tested and secure. And here’s the problem: Her presence in my life has caused some strange joy to be flip-flopping around in my body and that is a by-god miracle. The whole fall has been a miracle. “Her name is Gretchen.”
“That’s great. I’m happy for you,” he says. “Joe, this is just a test-run weekend, but I want you to do certain things eventually. I want you to get Honey a rock tumbler, she’s always wanted one. She’s a tyrant. She will strut around the house and howl for what she wants. Sometimes she can be a snot. All seven-year-olds are snots sometimes, because all people are snots sometimes. She has opinions about everything, and they will rarely coincide with yours. I want you to be patient about all this. She hates shoes and socks and clothes that touch her too much. She’s not being picky, it’s how she experiences the world. In certain ways, she’s precocious. In others, she’s way behind. Probably because of me. Having to live through this. She still wears Pull-Ups at night, for example. Read her Goodnight Moon. She still likes it and it’s a tradition. She’ll expect a bedtime story. Stories help. With teaching us all how to be human. Take her to the ocean someday.”
Yesterday Gretchen was naked on her back below a spruce tree on the mountainside, the sleeping bag below her and the bursts of pine needles above us and her beautiful body lifted to mine, and it keeps on surprising me, this ferocious fight for the full experience before we suffer our own version of what Tate is facing. I should have told her about Honey but I could not form the words, and now I cannot get rid of the image of naked Gretchen and form the right words for this situation. My brain is so often one situation behind.
Tate is shifting his weight and wiping his eyes. My whole life, I have been too distracted. I find myself saying, “Shit, Tate. Well, I guess it’s only for the weekend, right? This time, I mean. I can’t fuck up too bad. I’ll quit cussing, too, you know, I can do that. I’m pretty sure I can. I realize that’s the least of it. It’s just a little weird for me. I realize it’s weirder for you. You know?”
He does know. On top of that, he knows I’m a coward. Which is worse: having to adopt your niece, or die of cancer? He’d trade places with me anytime. But some things, you try not to say.
We just stand there, staring at each other, and I know for damn sure we’re both thinking of my sister, Cara, who is still supposed to be alive, Cara who wasn’t supposed to die in one of the most mundane and stupid ways possible, car crash, and Cara, who is needed here, and most of all, how this sort of thing isn’t actually supposed to happen. It’s supposed to happen in stories, maybe, but not in reality. I’m a horseshoer in the mountains of Colorado with a new girlfriend and I live in an off-grid house with no flushing toilet and I eat venison and this sort of thing doesn’t happen to guys like that. It happens in stories but not to me.
And Honey. A mother dead and a father dying and grand-parents who are too old and ailing and who don’t want to be dying out from under a kid who has suffered too much. That’s supposed to happen in fairy tales but certainly not in real life. No. I’ll tell you why. Because fictional people always have crap happen to them, the tumor is always cancer, the crash is always bad, because that’s what is most interesting for the story, and furthermore, stupid mistakes are more interesting than wise conduct, and so, it would be stupid, for instance, to have your mother die, your father get cancer, and be forced to have your incompetent Uncle Joe care for you. That is a fiction. That cannot possibly be real life.
Tate puts his hand on my shoulder. It feels like a claw, and I have to work not to flinch. “Whatever you do, Joe, do not let Honey feel your resentment. She doesn’t deserve that. If you do that, I’ll come back from the grave and kill you. You see? That’s what parents do. They give their life, their time. And the good ones, they don’t make the kid feel the resentment about all they’ve offered. Can you do that?”
I say, “Probably not.”
PART II.
Honey wakes before I do and I hear her feet patter from the couch into my bedroom right as I sit up. She climbs on top of my body, stares into my just-opened eyes for a long time, and then says: “Meow.” She says it many times, in fact, a long series of meows that seem to be telling an entire drama. She’s wearing a diaper pull-up thing I was instructed to put on her at night, and it’s puffy and stinks with pee. “I’m a cat,” she says, after she’s done with the meows, and she climbs on me and plops the squishy diaper on my chest. I have just enough time to get my hand around my privates, in part for protection, and in part because I woke up with a half-hard-on. I was dreaming of Gretchen. “Actually, I’m a kitten,” Honey says in a tiny, high voice. “You’re my owner. You found me, lost and abandoned. My paw got cut! I need warmed-up milk in a dish.” She actually licks my whiskers, then backs up, regards me, moves her freckled nose back and forth. I forgot a million things about being a kid, one of which is that your teeth fall out—how weird is that?—and one of her lower side teeth moves back and forth, getting sucked in and out as she breathes.
I hold her away from me. “Morning, sweetie. Let’s take off your diaper.”
“It’s not a diaper, Uncle Joe. It’s a Pull-Up. Diapers are for babies.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not a baby. I just can’t hold my pee. I can’t sense it yet, the doctor says.”
“Okay, I know that.” I guess I should have taken out her barrettes before she fell asleep. Now they’re way down on her hair, barely holding on for dear life, two red patches in a mess of straw.
“I’m a kitten. Kittens don’t wear diapers, either.”
She pulls the not-diaper off and throws it on my floor. Her vagina, or vulva, or whatever it’s officially called—and I suppose I should know, why don’t I know?—is so hairless. A hairless V. Tate had said to me, “Joe, it might be weird for you to see her naked, but it’s just her body, you know, and she’s not ashamed of it. And don’t you act like she should be, either.” I looked him right in the eye and said, “No, Tate, that would never happen, I give you my word.” I said that because if I were a father, I guess I�
�d need to hear that too, which is exactly what he said, “Thanks, man, I needed to hear that. Let her love her body, and don’t look away when you see her naked. She’s seven. She’s not going to feel weird about being naked. Don’t you ever make her feel bad about her body, do you understand? I’ll come back from the grave and kill you. There’s enough women in this world feeling bad about their bodies, and my Honey is not going to be one of them. You love her the way she is, man. You got that?”
Honey follows me to the kitchen by walking on her hands and knees, a thin little body with ribs and juts, except a round butt sticking up in the air, like one of Gretchen’s yoga moves, and it’s just that I never considered what a female looks like without that hair. I pour some milk into a cup.
“Meow?” she says. “Meow?” like a confused, forlorn thing. I pour it into a bowl and put it on the floor. She crinkles her nose at it and I have to rack my sleepy brain to see what requirements I’m missing. Fuck, she wants it warm. I don’t have a microwave. It’s going to take ten minutes to get out a pan and warm it up. I tell her that, and she gets teary, and laps up the milk, cold. This is why Tate wants me to move to Denver. She’d be in familiar surroundings; she’d have her own room and grandparents nearby and microwaves.
It could be said that I’m hoping Honey warms to this place; that it’s a compromise, since living in Denver would kill me. You could say that. But that would be a lie. It’s more like I’m buying time, because surely some other option is going to present itself. Because this just cannot happen; I am quite clear on the fact that I do not want to raise Honey. I should have told Gretchen about all this. But that would be like shoeing a horse and then shooting it in the chest.
I go to Honey’s suitcase and find some underwear. I find several pairs, rolled up, each one covered in pictures of princesses.
“So you like princesses, huh?”
She says in her high cat-voice, “I used to be a princess’s kitty, but she got captured by an evil warlord, and that’s how I got abandoned, and you are the human that found me. Some cereal please,” she says in a tiny, high voice. “This kitty likes cereal.”
“In that bowl? On the floor? Do you want a spoon?”
But she only purrs and mews until I put the Cheerios that Tate had packed for me in the bowl, and then milk, and then she eats it with her face, until it gets down low, and then she sits up and drinks the rest. Then rolls over on her back, her four paws pointed into the air, while I slip on her underwear and, at her command, scratch her tummy.
She demands I tell her a story. She demands I tell her that I am really a knight in disguise and that we’ll find her mommy hidden up here in the woods. And she wants a story about my girlfriend, and she wants to know when she gets to meet her.
“Later,” I say. “Next time. I’m no good at stories.”
She regards me, disappointed, and she starts up a long stream of words, a barrage against the silence. “My mommy died in a car and my daddy is sick and that’s why I’m here with you and are you going to teach me to shoot a gun,” to which I say, “No, but how about a bow and arrow?” and she says, “Sure, all right, Robin Hood is okay I guess. Do you have that movie? No, you don’t, do you, because you don’t have a TV, which means you don’t have an Xbox or a Wii, and my daddy said you were different, not different bad, but just different, which is okay, because everybody’s different. But maybe you’re more different than most people because you live in the mountains and don’t have anything that normal people have.” She crinkles her nose at me and regards me without blinking. She says, “Well, but you do have pinecones, and spray paint in the garage, I saw it, and that’s what we’re going to do. Ready, Uncle Joe? Ready to have some fun? Do you have gold? Do you have sprinkles? Glitter, I mean. My daddy says one of the best things about me is that I remind him how just to be and to have fun. Which is what love is. He told me to tell you the funny names I make up for things. Like you know that part of your bum where the crack starts? I’ve always called that a butt-sprout. Because it looks like your butt is sprouting.” She points to her own, stabbing the concave indention below her underwear elastic, which, as she intended, makes me laugh, but holy shit, I am not the right man for this job.
Outside, the sun is blazing. It’s too warm for October and I stand there, in the gravel driveway, annoyed by it. I need to go hunting; to put away some meat for the winter. But a straw-haired child is stabbing my leg with a stick, so, at her direction, we spray-paint pinecones every color I have on the ground outside the garage. She wants glitter, but I don’t have any, so we glue on red berries and pine needles, and then tie on orange bailing twine, and we end up with some crazy-looking ornaments. The truth is this, though: I could be at Moon’s having pancakes, or I could be horseshoeing Violet and Ollie Vreeland’s old mare, or better yet, I could be with Gretchen.
Instead I’m watching Honey write her alphabet in the dirt of the garage with a stick. I guess she’s got it down already, though her Ks and Js are backward. ILoV EMyDaD, she writes in the dirt. Then she wants to know how to spell my name. ILoV EJOE.
“Thank you, Honey. I love you too.”
“Just because I love you doesn’t mean I don’t love my Dad, too. Even when he’s dead, I will love him the most.” Her look makes me so fucking sad that I want to crush the pinecone in my hands. It seems so easy, for a kid. Love is so interchangeable, so fluid.
“I would like to give one of these pinecones to Lillie. I think she’s kinda lonely.”
“Who is Lillie?”
“One of my neighbors.”
“You don’t have any neighbors, Uncle Joe.” She looks around the mountain, as if to show me the evidence.
“Well, I do. We’re all just farther apart. She lives down the mountain. Everyone lives down from me. We’re highest up. Top of a kingdom. There’s a couple named Sy and Anya, and they have two kids you could meet sometime. And there’s a man named Ruben, who is sort of like a veterinarian, and he has a girlfriend named Jess. And Violet, she runs the grocery store, and her husband’s name is Ollie, and a daughter named Korina, who is a teenager and maybe a babysitter for you someday. There’s a guy named Sergio who works with wildlife, and he also likes wood. His sister, Gris, lives with him. They’re both really nice. We’re all like a family.”
“And Gretchen, your girlfriend.”
“And Gretchen, yes.” Last night, I faked being interested in Honey’s drawings, I faked my compliments. I made excuses to Gretchen for why I couldn’t visit. I was tired. But one thing is serious and genuine and I-want-to-know: When do we get the crazy notion that our life has a predictable trajectory? That it’s not just one crazy winding story? I’d like the answer to that one. I’d like to hear a story about how, at some point in our lives, our stories get blended up. Then I’d like to hear how this particular one sifts out.
PART III.
First it was Tate doing most of the talking, then it was Honey doing most of the talking, and now it’s my turn, I suppose, because I guess it’s true that eventually we have to clear our throats and string together a long sequence of words, so that we are simply not responding to the others of the world, but articulating our own likes and dislikes, our own wishes and sorrows. If I’m honest I will tell you that I prefer listening and responding, not coming up with the words myself. I am not much of a talker.
“I wish I could have been with you. The day of the bear.” I say this to her as I stand on the stoop of her trailer house, not coming in, as she’s indicating I do. “I wish I would have experienced that with you. Also, there is something I wanted to tell you that day. But you’d just chased away a bear, and were full of the energy of that.”
She steps outside, barefoot into the snow, which although has been shoveled away since the storm, has refused to melt. She kisses me full on the mouth, and she pulls me inside her door and sinks down first, pulling me with her, and then I find myself on the floor, objecting, but she shhshs me and somehow my lips end up between the
legs, in the V of a woman who was once a girl, a place of the body I have no good word for because they’re all wrong and I want to call it moooon because it changes like a moon but the only thing I can do is hold her thighs and push my tongue in further and hum.
I can’t help myself. I simply can’t. But when we are done, I say what I came to say: “Listen. Please listen to me. There was something I wanted to tell you that day, Gretchen. When I came home early from Denver, because of the storm. But you were so full of energy from the bear, it wasn’t the right time. And then. Well. Sy. We wake up to Anya’s calling, we wake up to a blizzard, we wake up to the mess these last weeks have been. So what I am telling you next, I should have told you weeks ago, and I know it. But I ask that you forgive me, considering the timing of it all.”
She stares at me, expectantly. We are still on the floor of her trailer, on a blanket she has put there. “If only Sy could have seen the sun like this. So bright. Maybe if it hadn’t snowed early, he wouldn’t have taken his life. Maybe he wouldn’t have taken my gun from my truck, maybe now I wouldn’t be thinking of his frozen body. Maybe this could be a normal winter with a normal trajectory.”
“Oh, Joe,” she says. “Joe. That’s why I brought you in, to love you, to help you through.” She is gazing at me with love-drugged eyes, and outside her trailer, I hear the thw-ump of snow falling from trees. “We got through the shock of it. We got through the ceremony. We all got shot-through, didn’t we? And now we’re all starting to catch our breath. I can feel it. Not that we’re not still suffering. We are. Anya is a mess. We got gut-punched, and we’re just gasping for air. That’s good. The snow is starting to melt. It’s going to be okay.”
I open my mouth to speak. Odd, how long it takes the words to come. Odd, that I find myself saying them at all. “I simply do not know how this story will go,” I say. “But I’d like to write a story, about real humans who do indeed exist, and I would probably call it ‘On the Mountain’ or ‘Blue Moon Mountain,’ and it would be about the real people up here, and their real hearts, and it would be about how we all have secrets, and how we all have awful decisions to make, and how we hurt others in our love, and mine would start with describing our shadow against the wall—see there?—and how there we look like we are one big creature, bizarre and beautiful. But first, first, listen now. Listen, Gretchen. There is a story I need to tell you right now, and a question I need to ask.”
The Blue Hour Page 8