Time Trials

by Lee, Terry

  Without raising his head, the manager of the news desk flipped forward a piece of paper between his fingers like pulling a trick card from his sleeve. She reached for the paper. “What’s this?”

  “A human interest bit. And if you make it good….” Roger dropped his pen, sat back in his chair, and pushed black framed glasses up on his forehead.

  “Yes?” Her body tensed, her free hand balled into a fist. Too much enthusiasm was never good. And as suave and debonair as she tried to portray, she had yet to perfect the nonchalant posture which could possibly have earned her more than a few Brownie points over the years. Instead, she looked about as relaxed as a starving puppy waiting for a doggy biscuit.

  “I won’t fire you.” Roger rolled a wad of gum around in his mouth and rested his arms casually on the sides of his chair.

  “Oh, Roger.” She flapped the paper back at him in what she hoped to be flirtatious. “You know you can’t live without me.”

  The gum chomping from the other side of the news desk continued. Used to his games and hoping this was just another tease, she winked and turned on her heel. Leaving the manager’s desk, she skimmed the assignment she’d just been given. Something about military dog tags, a couple of names…one of which sounded vaguely familiar, and…an address. She stopped in the middle of the hallway and stared at the piece of paper.

  “Is there a problem?”

  Flipping around, she noticed Roger had done away with his gum and balanced his chin on his desk with his hand.

  “This address….”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  Deciding not to test the waters as to how serious he may or may not be about his threat to fire her, Regina smiled and threw an attempted casual wave to her boss. “Nothing, Rog,” she said. “I’ve got it.”

  Back at her desk, she read through the news piece. Twice.

  Dog tags from the Vietnam war had been recovered

  and were to be returned to the mother of a soldier

  twenty-two years after his death.

  She was to interview the woman. Her lip curled. She stroked her throat, grimacing at what appeared to be a golf ball she had swallowed. The story itself could bring her a lot of attention, but that wasn’t what caused her toes to curl. Now she recognized the name. The address had been shock enough, because that’s where she lived. Rent checks for the Fountain Oaks Apartments were made out to F.O.A.M.–some management company. But the manager. If ever there was a she-devil, Viola Middleton was it. And she knew this because she’d had her fair share of run-ins with this…this….

  Her hands felt clammy. Few people intimidated her. She usually cornered that market with her passive-aggressive charm or sarcasm. However, she couldn’t hold a candle to this bitchy, downright hateful dragon woman. Holy shit.

  Chapter 16

  Allison - 1992

  Such a simple request. Such a simple answer. At least, that’s how it should have been. Sitting at her kitchen table, she scratched her forehead with her index finger and ran through scenarios about how to convince Suzanne that driving down to North Padre with Regina would be a good thing. It shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but she knew it would be. At least for Suzanne, aka Ms. Henny Penny/Chicken Little. Personally, she could deal with Regina and her high-handed self-centered ways, but knew her fearful friend, who smelled disaster with each inhale, would not feel the same. Maybe she should take a firmer approach with Suzanne and just tell her to “suck it up.”

  Making an executive decision, and taking the path of least resistance, Allison decided to wait until the last minute to tell Suzanne. She pushed the issue aside, knowing she had a small window of time to get a few things done before her mother woke from her nap.

  So much had happened in the last twenty years Allison sometimes had difficulty putting dates to events. Kevin, she had heard, completed his law degree at Harvard and married someone from Connecticut. She still thought about him, but that was something in the past. Sad story, but she refused to spend the rest of her life living with a woe-is-me attitude.

  After graduating with her degree in criminal justice, she’d agreed to marry Ben, who graduated with the same degree at the same time. Lucky for her, Ben was a wonderful guy, and she never wanted him to feel he had come in second. She loved Ben dearly, just not in the same way she had Kevin. After the wedding they moved to Houston, where Ben had joined the HPD. Not crazy about her husband being a policeman, once again, she knew she couldn’t and wouldn’t hold someone she loved back from something they really wanted in life.

  She took a job with Harris County Juvenile Probation, but had to take a leave of absence due to her getting pregnant right out of the shoot. Cara had been born almost nine months to the day after their wedding. After a short stint at home with her newborn, she was able to return to her position at Juvenile Probation, which lasted two years until another surprise pregnancy brought them Shelby, a little sister for Cara. Again, returning to her job after the standard six weeks maternity leave, Fertile Myrtle, as she referred to herself, and Ben had taken birth control a bit more seriously.

  Her parents had been in their mid-thirties when she was born. Long story short, they tried for years to have a baby. Then, what her mother thought was the beginning of early menopause turned out to be a pregnancy. And voila, Allison had been born. Obviously getting the hang of this impregnation thing, her parents had two more children, her younger sisters. All was well except for the fact that her parents were in their fifties by the time she graduated from high school.

  “Letting go” seemed to be a theme in her life. After Kevin, she faced the hardest “letting go” lesson when her dad died. He had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer in January of last year. After undergoing a short round of chemo merely to minimize the pain, he said “no more” and Hospice had been called in. With fifteen years of service with Juvenile Probation under her belt, the department had no problem granting her time off. She headed back down to Corpus Christi to spend the remaining two weeks of her dad’s life by his side. He had been her hero. Her main go-to-person on the planet. She’d even told him about Kevin back when she thought her heart couldn’t stand the pain.

  “Sometimes you’ve just got to let go,” her dad had told her. “We’ve got no guarantees here. We’re just passing through.” Words her dad had to reiterate to her only a day before he passed away, or “passed through” on to his next adventure, as he put it.

  Her mother, on the other hand, had started showing signs of dementia. Allison had been able to manage the situation by moving her to Houston into a house just down the street. The decision to actually move her in with them came after she found her mother had not only befriended a helpful person at Sam’s Club, but brought the stranger home. Her mother’s ability to continue to drive had been close to the top of issues to tackle. However, after dropping in that shocking afternoon to find a strange woman making her mother a cup of tea, she had pushed not only the driving issue, but also the living alone debacle to the top of the list.

  “What’s your problem?” her mother had said after Allison thanked the stranger for seeing her mother home and ushered her to the door, at the same time making a mental note to have the locks changed. “You’re always saying I need to be nicer to people.”

  Moving her mother in had not been an easy decision. Allison had called a family meeting, and luckily Ben and the girls had agreed. Cara, then fifteen, and Shelby, thirteen, were immersed in their hormonal dramatic and moody teenage years and couldn’t see how having their grandma around twenty-four/seven would impact them in the least. Both her sisters lived on the outskirts of town. Not far, but enough to have to plan ahead for any sort of help from them. She knew she’d have her hands full, but she felt she had no other alternative.

  That was a year ago, and another hard decision was now on the horizon. As expected, her mother’s dementia had progressed and the diagnosis had moved into early Alzheimer’s. Before long her mother would have to be placed in an assisted
living facility. Just a couple of Saturdays ago she’d found her mother in the driver’s seat of Allison’s car, motor running and garage door closed. Thankfully, she’d discovered the situation before it was too late due to the continuous honking of the horn.

  “Mother! What are you doing?” Allison had yanked the keys out of the ignition and opened the garage door for fresh air.

  “I’m waiting for the carhop.” Her mother had seemed more agitated than usual. “I want my tater tots.”

  “You could have killed yourself!” It was then the ding-ding-ding sounded in Allison’s head. The time had come…her mother could no longer be left alone.

  “So could you, jumping in my car like that,” her mother had said. “Want a milkshake? Prince’s makes the best chocolate milkshakes.”

  Her first impulse was to point out that her mother was sitting in the garage with the motor running, and only minutes away from carbon monoxide asphyxiation, but knew that would only result in more of an argument.

  “Thanks, Mom. I just had lunch,” had been her reply instead. “C’mon, I’ll have them bring your tater tots inside.”

  Since that time, she’d taken yet another leave of absence from her job, hidden her keys, and put childproof locks on all the doors leading to the outside. She’d also stashed away all kitchen knives, the potato peeler, ice pick, and any other potentially harmful objects, warning the girls to keep their eyes open for…whatever.

  Making arrangements to leave town for a much-needed extended weekend with the BAGs took an enormous amount of planning. Her sister, Shelley, would stay during the day, since Ben’s day shift extended through the weekend. The girls would be there with their dad at night. Although Ben was a great help and adored by his mother-in-law, it was clear some female needed to be present to keep her mother calm.

  During the night not long ago, her mother had wandered into the kitchen for who knows what and found Ben drinking a glass of orange juice. Having a moment when she forgot who he was, she frantically dialed 911 to report an intruder. When Ben had tried to pry the phone from her, she started screaming. The scratchy fingers-on-chalkboard sound had brought Allison up out of a dead sleep, and she spent the next hour trying to calm her mother down, leaving Ben to explain to a couple of his police buddies this was not a home invasion.

  In her attempt to plan an assortment of meals for Ben and the family while she would be away, she’d somehow forgotten about tonight’s dinner, which always meant one thing…baked potatoes. Pulling a portion of one of Ben’s smoked briskets from the freezer, she removed the foil, slipped the meat into the microwave to thaw, and scrubbed up some russet potatoes she always kept on hand for just such occasions.

  The decision for her and Suzanne to ride to the bay house with Regina seemed less and less of a good idea. She hadn’t seen Regina in a number of years, but the short conversation they’d had about the commute to North Padre gave Allison absolutely no indication Regina was any less difficult to tolerate. Her ex-roommate had always hosted an egotistical, non-stop bravado party for one. Apparently, the party raged on. Regina had few friends.

  “And she wonders why.”

  Allison retrieved one of her sharp knives from her super-secret-hiding-spot and chopped the now manageable brisket. She stopped and turned, raised knife in hand, at the sound of feet shuffling across the hardwood floor. There her mother stood with an overnight case in one hand and an umbrella in the other. She wore a raincoat over her nightgown. Realizing she had a butcher knife aimed at her mother, Allison nonchalantly lowered it to the counter and covered the potential weapon with a kitchen towel.

  “When did you put your nightgown back on?” Dismissing the overnight case and umbrella, she went straight for the nightgown she’d wrestled for over an hour to get her mother changed out of earlier in the day.

  “Call me a cab. I need to go to Nashville.”

  The hunched over, gray-haired stature of her mother reminded Allison more and more of The Golden Girls Estelle Getty, although she found Sophia to be more amusing.

  “Okay, but while we’re waiting, can I fix you a snack?”

  This sort of conversation played out over and over during the day. Allison wondered what it was like to be trapped in a body once the mind had taken a hike. She realized they weren’t far from the dreaded full-blown Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

  Cara had come to her not too long ago with concerns after reading about the heredity factor of the ill-fated disease. “Mom, what if you get it?” Clearly Cara did not want to step into the shoes of being a caregiver, nor having to watch her mom in that state.

  “Sweetie, none of us are getting out of this alive.” She found the words useful when people expressed their fear about dying, which she always thought strange. Allison and her dad held a similar philosophy about the end of life.

  “I hate it when you talk like that.”

  Allison pictured Cara back when she was about three. She’d stick out her lower lip, duck her head, and fold her arms. “I hate it when….” Cara would storm out of the room, fussing about whatever she “hated” at the moment. Allison figured three year olds weren’t capable of hating…at least she hoped not.

  “Well, it’s true. Life’s a conveyor belt, honey. We’re all going to get to the end of it one day.” Approaching forty, Allison knew this little bit of trivia to be a fact. Several people from her high school class had died, and now Denise, who she’d spoken those exact words to only a week or so ago.

  Allison turned her attention back to the brisket simmering in the barbeque sauce and her mother, still wearing her raincoat, downing half of a PB&J sandwich and a glass of milk. She picked up the phone to give Suzanne a heads-up on their travel arrangements for tomorrow, but changed her mind. Knowing Suzanne, she’d probably work herself into some rare, near-fatal four hour illness, just to get out of the drive.

  She and Suzanne had stayed in contact, sort of. Every six months or so Allison would give Suzanne a call just to touch base. However, almost every phone call revolved around some crisis in Suzanne’s life. The constant fretting reminded Allison of why she only called occasionally. It got old. Quick. The wife of a doctor, and mother to two highly intelligent, but spoiled-rotten daughters, Suzanne spent half of her time putting out domestic fires. The other half of her frazzled existence involved agonizing over some social function she had volunteered to organize, each in its own way highly disturbing her hospital-corners life. Comparing Suzanne to a ticking time bomb would be a major understatement. Hence the hesitancy of making the call about tomorrow’s drive.

  ~~~

  Shelley wouldn’t arrive until after lunch, due to some real estate conference call she hadn’t been able to avoid. To Cara’s delight, Allison had allowed her to skip school so someone would be with her mother. Suzanne arrived mid-morning, just as the home healthcare worker had finished giving Allison’s mother a bath.

  Cara emerged from her room and sat next to her grandma just as Suzanne walked in. “Hi Granny,” Cara said. “You look really nice today.”

  The old woman had her eyes locked on Bob Barker, hosting The Price Is Right. “Who are you?”

  Cara pulled back, staring at her grandmother. “Granny, I’m Cara.”

  “I know who you are. I mean the other one.”

  “Mother, that’s Suzanne, my friend from college. Remember?”

  Suzanne leaned toward the old woman and offered a timid smile. “Hello, Mrs. Jennings.”

  Allison’s mother turned to Suzanne and narrowed her eyes. “You here to fix the television?”

  Her mother was having one of “those” days. Just as Allison shot Suzanne and Cara a “yikes” expression and the hand signal across the throat to cut the conversation, a horn blared from outside. “That’s our ride. C’mon, Suzanne.”

  “What do you mean ‘our ride’?” Worry immediately lined Suzanne’s forehead. “I thought you were driving.”

  Knowing what was shortly to ensue, Allison grabbed Suzanne’s arm. “Slight change of
plans. We’re riding with Regina.”

  “We’re what? Riding with…oh, oh no, not Regina!” Suzanne freed her arm and started backing up. “I’m not getting in that car.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Ridiculous would be getting in that car. I can’t.”

  “Yes. You can.”

  “No. Oh God, I’m getting a hive.”

  “I’ll give you a hive. Now move it.” Allison hated taking that tone with Suzanne, but after dealing with her mother for so long, her fuse was rather short lately.

  Suzanne stood frozen in the middle of the family room, her eyes searching for an escape route.

  “If you don’t move through that door in the next ten seconds, I will make you ride shotgun.” Allison folded her arms across her chest, ready to do battle with her fickle friend.

  After Suzanne made her exit through the front door, Allison shook her head ever so slightly and gave her mother and Cara a loaded smile. “Works every time.”

  “Don’t pay her,” her mother said. “She didn’t fix the television.”

  Chapter 17

  Janie – 1992

  Wives are always the last to know. Wasn’t that the saying? Yet Janie had known Matt had been screwing around for quite a while. She clamped down harder on the steering wheel and glanced at her watch. An hour since her oversized drive-thru order at McDonald’s. Keeping her eyes on the road, she reached over and emptied a bag containing salted peanuts, a box of Hot Tamales, and a Snickers. She opted for the chocolate fix.

  Thinking about Matt and his infidelities always made her hungry. Hungrier, actually, since she spent most of her life in a nonstop yo-yo hunger frenzy. Now was not the time to think about her busted marriage. Maybe in a year or two she’d get her act together.

  “Then I’ll leave his rotten ass. He’ll be sorry.” Either that or realize he really did love her. In that case, she’d have to “think” about it.