Sugarland

by Joni Rodgers

  Aching between empathy and a heartbreaking, targetless anger, Kit bundled the letters together and foraged deeper into the tin.

  Frank Dupuis’s carefully clipped obituary typed out his simple life in no more than a couple of column inches: born in San Antonio, Shankow-Turner foreman, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, dead. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a gentle-humored expression, softened further by the grainy beige of the aged newsprint.

  Next, Kit excavated a curled photograph of three women on the loading dock at old S-T. You could tell it was the late forties because of the way they all had their bangs rolled up in sausages above their foreheads. The other two had their hair pulled back with those big bows that remain tunelessly in style, but Neeva stood in the center, dark hair draped over her shoulders like a velvet curtain. Her head was thrown back laughing,

  those big ol’ breasts of hers riding all the higher and prouder for the tight-cinched waist of her coveralls. At the edge of the great corrugated steel door, there was the blurred image of a man, features distorted by motion just a heartbeat ahead of what the camera could capture. But even as he turned, it seemed that he was laughing, too.

  Kit turned on the shower and slowly undressed, thinking of Neeva embalmed in clothes she’d never have worn. “Wouldn’t be caught dead in,” Neeva might have said. Kit drew the plastic curtain and imagined what it would be to lie closed in with the dark and the flowers and all the coming decades of glued-shut silence. Hidden in the hot water, she cried, mourning all things unheard, unhad, unwritten, and unread. The steam on the window reminded her of cigarette smoke over sky. The slippery soap made her think of stroking and saying and the sort of dissolving that could wrack your entire being.

  No wonder Neeva couldn’t sleep nights.

  This Kit understood, because lately, after Mel went off to the hangar, she’d find herself pacing, obsessively cleaning things or sitting at the table staring. Her bed was too empty to retire to. Her inner landscape was changing with the slow, sure swelling of her belly, and her middle finger could no longer access that one specific place or capture that precise circular motion that used to release her enough to sleep. There was no little nova for her anymore. Not with the repugnant mental residue of Wayne crawling over her skin and the guilt-ridden images of Ander crowding out her familiar store of romance novel fantasies and pleasant memories of Mel in his worn jeans and Semper Fi T-shirt. On his nights off, Mel made slow, quiet love to her, cherishing her breasts full of milk and her belly full of life, and Kit tried to deliver herself to his gentleness. She trusted his willingness to go slow. But so much hung so heavily between her and her self now. There was just no joy in it anymore.

  “Do you want coffee, Mel?” she called from the kitchen, but Mel’s head was under the car. He couldn’t hear her. “Mel? I made coffee.”

  She poured a cup for him and a cup of tea for herself and set them on saucers with Oreos.

  “Mel?” She backed out the kitchen door, balancing the cups in her hands.

  “I told you not to come out here!”

  The wheeled platform squealed out from under the jacked-up body of the vehicle, and Mel conked his head on the bottom of the door.

  “Ouch! Dang it! Shit!” he gritted, and then pointed a socket wrench at her, placing the blame for his throbbing head and his mother’s death and everything else that was broken in his life. “I told you I don’t want anybody out here!”

  “Mel, why don’t you come on in now? You’ve had such a long day.” He rubbed his head sullenly.

  “What do you want?”

  The easing and the entering, she longed to tell him. I want you to be my sweetest, most coveted love.

  “I made coffee,” she told him instead.

  “Thank you.” He took it from her and blew on it, taking a drink and then looking at her as if she was supposed to be satisfied and go.

  “Mel, fixing that car couldn’t bring him back,” Kit said carefully. “And it’s not gonna bring her back, either.”

  “That’s not what this is about.”

  “Then what is it about, Mel?”

  “It’s about the restoration of a classic automobile—”

  “—that just happens to be exactly like the automobile your dead mother restored for your dead brother? C’mon, Mel!”

  “It’s a car. Spare me the deep-seated psychological bullshit.”

  “Your mother didn’t care about the car, Mel. She just wanted someone to acknowledge her. To ask her. To hear her.”

  “Well, maybe there are a few things you don’t know about my mother.”

  “And maybe,” Kit countered, “there are a few things you don’t know about her.”

  “Like what?”

  “Nothing.” Kit backed off and picked up a wrench from the tool bench.

  “Like Frank Dupuis?”

  “You knew about that?”

  “How could I not know about it, Kit?” Mel took the wrench out of her hands and laid it back on the bench. “I was ten years old. I wasn’t stupid. I heard people talking.”

  “But you never mentioned it.”

  “It didn’t exactly come up in conversation. ‘Oh, by the way, my mother spent eight years getting porked by her boss.’ I didn’t think it would really improve your relationship with her,” he said, adding, “That’s the kind of thing you’d never understand.”

  He sat on the steps, twisting together a cable that would connect something automotive to something vehicular.

  “One Friday morning, when I was about Cooper’s age, she left. Like she was going to work. Like usual. Only she didn’t come home that afternoon, and when my dad called, they said she’d called in sick. And so had Frank.”

  “What happened?”

  “They found him parked by the side of the road up north of Nacogdoches, hammered as a two-penny nail. He was supposed to meet her in Texarkana, but... I don’t know. He didn’t. Lost his nerve, I guess. Maybe because he and Pop were friends. Or maybe he decided to go back to his wife or something.”

  “Then what happened?” Kit knelt down in front of him, ashamed that she was more transfixed by curiosity than concerned for his pain.

  “He gave Pop the number of this hotel where she was at. Where he was supposed to meet her. Pop called the pastor of their church, and the pastor called her.”

  “And what did she do?”

  “She did the right thing,” he shrugged. “She came home.”

  “No,” Kit shook her head. “It wasn’t right. Not for her. And I’m not even sure it was the right thing for you, Mel. I mean, what did she really give to you after that?”

  “You can’t blame that on Frank Dupuis. She was never willing to give anybody anything.”

  “Yes, she was! She was willing to give everything! She would have given it to your father if he wasn’t such a—a lamppost, and she’d have given it to Frank if he’d had the guts to take it. But maybe when he left her like that, she couldn’t risk it again. Maybe she wasn’t willing to risk taking anything or giving anything ever again. That part is her own fault. That was her choice. But Mel, that guy was an idiot to let her go. And with or without him, she should have never looked back.”

  “How can you say that? She had a husband and kids. You don’t just abandon your family!”

  “No, you don’t.” Tears were stinging Kit’s eyes and nose. “You just abandon yourself. You just do what they tell you because they say that’s what God wants you to do, and you don’t know who God is anymore. You just accept whatever half-assed effort someone’s willing to put out because you think you don’t deserve anything better. And you think, well, it’s better than nothing.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You just keep all your thoughts to yourself because nobody can hear you anyway. You just kiss your own hand and pretend you believe it’s wrong to want anyone to touch you. You just turn your back on the one person who could have given you some happiness—and I don’t mean your husband or some lov
er—I mean yourself! And then you just get old and angry and bitter until it consumes you like a cancer, and then you just die!”

  Mel stared at her for a moment and then laughed nervously.

  “Okay.” He turned back toward the toolbox. “I think somebody’s mommy hormones are running a little rampant tonight.”

  “Don’t you dare dismiss me like that!” she shrilled at him, startling them both.

  “I’m sorry!” Mel got up and started chucking his tools in the squeaky red drawers of the top box. “Geez, can we please get off this subject?”

  “Fine. Don’t think about it. That’ll make it go away.”

  “No, Kit,” he wheeled on her, “she’s dead! That makes it go away. So can we please let it go away now? Please?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’m sorry. I just don’t want to talk about it. Okay?”

  “I said fine, didn’t I?”

  She took a sip of her tea, but it was cold and oversweet now.

  “Why did you even come out here in the first place?” he grumbled.

  “I was just trying to help.”

  “Yeah, thanks, honey. You’ve been helping me become a better person in so many ways lately.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she defensed.

  “Kit, you’ve been on my back for some reason or other every damn minute since we got back from Orlando. If it’s not my weight, it’s money or my laundry or razor stubble in the sink or newspaper on the floor or the way I put syrup on the kids’ pancakes, for God’s sake!”

  “Every dirty sock under the bed, every syrup dribble on the floor, it takes away from me that much, Mel,” she measured a minute quantity with her thumb and index finger. “Just that much. What you don’t understand is that all of it together adds up to my life! But that doesn’t mean anything to you. You never had a concept of what I did at the shop all day, and you don’t have a concept of what I do around this house. You don’t know. You don’t want to know. You don’t care!”

  “And what do you know about what I do, Kit? You have no concept of what goes on at the goddamn airport all night. Have you ever even thought about it?”

  She thought about it now, while he finished putting his tools away and straightened the blue tarp.

  “Mel, this is not about housework, it’s—”

  “No, look...” He rubbed his hands over his face, leaving a black mark that made him look even more weary. “I’m sorry, okay? Let’s not fight.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I have been on your case, but I—”

  “You’ve been great.” He sat next to her on the steps, pulled her head over to his chest, and whispered into her hair, “I’m the one who’s sorry.”

  “Mel,” she pulled away, “you have nothing to be sorry about.”

  “I know what’s bothering you, and I don’t blame you for being mad at me about this baby thing. I know it’s my fault.”

  “Your fault? How is it your fault?”

  “Well, I knew I was supposed to go back and have another sperm count done every year, but geez... The whole process is so—geez!” He wrinkled his large nose in childlike beets-and-broccoli distaste. “I just didn’t want to. It was easier to assume that Poplin was right, you know? She goes around acting like she’s always right, and she seemed pretty sure that nothing could ever happen, so to—to use something or get a vasectomy or whatever, it seemed like there wasn’t any point.” Mel got up and moved away, embarrassed by both the concept and the conversation. “But now, it’s too late. And I know you’re not thrilled about the timing, and I’m sorry, Kit.”

  “Would you please stop saying that?” she begged him, because the anvil on her chest was starting to feel more like a branding iron.

  “I’m gonna make it up to you, Kit. I swear, I’m gonna be more help to you than I was with Cooper and Mitzi, and I’m gonna work every bit of overtime I can, so we can afford for you to stay home—”

  “Do I ever get to be the one who makes the mistake or causes the problem or takes responsibility for anything? Is it ever my fault? Is it even necessary for me to be here? Because, obviously, if you’ve caused all these problems, then you’re the one with the ability to fix everything, aren’t you?”

  “Kit,” Mel coaxed. “C’mon, honey. Stop this.”

  “No, Mel, you stop it! Just—stop it stop it stop it!”

  She pushed against his chest, but he was immovable as the foundation under her feet. That branding iron finally penetrated the thick, dry shell in which she’d encased her heart and lungs, searing into the last part of her that was left.

  “I can’t do this anymore! I can’t stand it! How can you be such a big, stupid ox? How can you keep acting like everything’s fine? It’s not! Get with reality, Mel! Dr. Poplin is always right! Hasn’t it occurred to you, hasn’t it once crossed your mind that maybe this is not your baby?”

  “No,” Mel said mildly. He even laughed a little. “No, of course not!”

  And Kit knew that it hadn’t and couldn’t and wouldn’t, even now. She went away from him, and facing into the corner like a little girl, covered her face with her hands and started sobbing.

  “Honey, what is it?” Mel was immediately at her side. “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, God, Mel! I’m so sorry. I’m so ... so very sorry.”

  “Why?” Mel sounded hollowed out and scared.

  “I didn’t mean for it to happen. Any of it.”

  “Kit, please ... don’t do this.”

  “It was all—it was a terrible, horrible mistake.”

  “No!” He stumbled away from her. “I won’t hear this!”

  “Oh God, oh God!” she wept, “I wish I were dead.” And she could almost hear the coffin slamming shut, denying her the work of her hands and the praise of the gates and everything she had ever wanted, worked for, and loved. “I wish I’d never been born.”

  “Kit, I don’t understand what... what... I mean, if—if it’s not... whose baby is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? How could you not know?” She could feel the air around him escalating like a thunderhead. “What the hell is going on?”

  “It’s not going on,” she tried to tell him, “it just ... happened.”

  “Happened? How does that just happen? Happened with who?”

  “Oh God, oh God!” She covered her head with her arms as if the debris crashing all around her were something tangible.

  “Ander. It was that goddamn Ander, wasn’t it? Was it him? Or... What? Are we talking about—about neighbors? Delivery men? Strangers?”

  Kit shook her head, grieving, sobbing, seeing herself as he was seeing her now, sleazy sound track, stilettos, and all, as she opened the front door for the pizza man. Come in and bring that big, luscious pepperoni with you. My husband won’t be home till morning.

  “Kit, why?” Mel held out his hands to her, begging her for something. “Why would you do this to us?”

  “Why would I?” Kit’s jaw clenched hard enough to hurt. “You better ask yourself that question, Mel Prizer, because you did this to us as much as I did!”

  “I have never fucked around on you, and you know it!”

  “There’s more than one way to betray somebody, Mel. You left me drifting. You couldn’t find fifteen seconds for me! You couldn’t take care of your own body half the way you do this damn car! You just let go, and you lost me!” The shame and remorse that had been eating a hole in her stomach for the last four months were suddenly eclipsed by plain white rage. Kit was snow-blind with it. “You lost me!”

  The closest thing at hand was Cooper’s Louisville Slugger, and she brought it down on the blue plastic tarp with all her might, knowing full well she couldn’t have hurt Mel any worse if she’d kneecapped him with it.

  “You—lost—me!”

  With more force than she knew she had, Kit swung, flailed, flogged on the car. The side window and then the windshield gave way, sucking the tarp toward the in
terior.

  “You lost me, you lazy bastard! You lost me!”

  The hood groaned, a headlight exploded, the chrome side mirror clangeranged on the floor along with the hood ornament and one side of the bumper.

  “You lost me... you lost me...” Kit sank down on the red picnic cooler, sweating, breathing hard. “So just you go ask yourself why, Melvin Thadeus Prizer. Why’d you have to go and lose me?”

  She rested her hands and forehead on the baseball bat and cried like the newly born.

  Mel stood in the corner, not speaking. Just standing still. After a time, he knelt down and picked up the hood ornament. He weighed it in his hand, then hurled it through the window, shattering one pane, spidering the other. He brought both fists down on the hood of the car, dragged the tarp aside, and flung it against the wall.

  “Surprise,” he said bitterly.

  Kit stared in disbelief at what was left of the taxicab yellow Mustang.

  “Oh—” She felt like her whole soul was caught in her throat. It was her old ‘69. It had black vinyl seats. Kit could almost hear the Gulf of Mexico reflected in the windows. “Mel—”

  His eyes were red-rimmed and full, his mouth twitching slightly. After a little while, he began gathering wrenches and sockets in his airport toolbox.

  “Mel, please. Don’t leave.”

  He just shook his head.

  “Please, Mel!”

  He had to blink and swallow hard and even then, he could only speak the words one at a time.

  “Fuck ... you.”

  He stepped over her legs to the door and closed it quietly behind him.

  A little time later, there was the gun and roar of his truck starting outside in the driveway. Kit listened until the engine gave way to crickets, and then she listened to the crickets until the night chirring gave way to the long predawn silence, gray dawn birds, early-morning traffic, and then she got up and went into the kitchen.

  “Oh, yeah.” Neeva’s lighter flashed in front of her face. “I’d say the honeymoon’s definitely over.”