by Lisa Tucker
I know that isn’t true but I don’t say it. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, watching him. He’s moving towards me and I know he will touch me if I don’t stop him.
Mama used to say that Rick and I were nothing but a physical attraction—this was whenever she was sober enough to remember who he was. She was wrong, but the physical attraction was undeniable. Even after three years of living together, we still fell on each other pretty much every time we were alone.
He’s kneeling in front of me; his hands are resting on my hair. He’s mumbling, “You look so good,” and he’s leaning forward, but I’m telling myself I’ll stop him before it goes much further. But I don’t stop him as he puts his lips on my neck and down to my shoulders and then down lower, giving soft kisses through my shirt to my breasts. After a while his hands are moving on my thighs; he whispers, “This is my dream,” and I realize I’m losing the will to stop him. Then I hear Willie’s laughter and I go rigid. He and Irene are at the door.
“Shit,” I mutter, and jump up. My hands are straightening out my shirt and shorts; Rick is standing too.
“Well, hey, it took you long enough,” Irene says, when I throw open the door. “It sure is gloomy in here,” she adds, walking to the blinds and pulling them open with a screech. She spins around and sees him but he doesn’t look at her. He’s too busy watching Willie, who has run over and is hanging on my leg.
I pick him up and he feels heavy, sleepy. I ask Irene if he had a nap and she shakes her head. “I drove him all over town, but he never conked.”
“Mama,” he says, and buries his face in my shoulder as he points his little finger at Rick. They have the same eyes, eyes so big and brown and soft they seem to absorb you when you look at them.
After a minute, I snap on the TV and set him in front of it. When I introduce Rick to Irene, she walks over and sticks out her hand. “So you’re Willie’s father,” she blurts out, and I want to kick her, but Willie doesn’t notice.
Rick nods and shakes her hand but he doesn’t say anything. He stands with his arms crossed while Irene smiles and talks and tries to figure him out.
“Well, I guess I better go wake up Harry,” Irene finally says. Harry is her boyfriend, our bass player. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon; as usual, the guys in the band stayed up all night jamming. Irene calls herself a day person and she likes me because I am too—now that I have Willie.
When we get to the door, I thank her for taking care of Willie, but she grabs my arm and pulls me outside. “Wow, Patty,” she says. “He’s really something.”
While she’s telling me how cute Rick is, I’m looking through the door, trying to see what he’s doing with Willie. I don’t feel annoyed with Irene though. She’s a good friend; six nights a week, she sits in my room and watches Willie while the band plays. She tells me she doesn’t want to come to the club anyway, she’s sick of music. She also says she’s tired of being on the road with Harry, that she’s going back to Kansas City soon and get herself a nice place, settle down, find a real job rather than making jewelry for peanuts like she does now. I listen but I know she isn’t serious. Irene adores Harry. She says he’s the only man who can make her laugh even when she’s furious.
“I guess this is a lot for you to deal with, honey.” She’s squinting now, worried. She knows Rick was in jail but she doesn’t know why. At some point, she thinks to ask if I need her to send Harry over to throw him out. Harry is six-three and weighs at least 250 pounds. Irene calls him her gangster boy because he’s black and he’s from New York.
“You know Harry won’t really hit him,” she whispers, “but he can look the part.”
I tell her no, I don’t need that, and she pats my arm. She says to give a yell if I need anything at all.
Before she walks across the parking lot, she turns back and gives me another worried look. I shrug like this is no big deal. I can handle it. I can handle anything.
When I get back into the room, Willie is lying flat on his back, sound asleep. The TV is off and the air conditioner has shut down; it’s so quiet I can hear Willie breathing. Rick is sitting next to him, lightly stroking Willie’s fine blond hair. Blond hair is the only thing Willie got from me, and Mama says it’s bound to darken before he’s much older. Willie’s eyebrows are dark already, like Rick’s.
“He’s so little,” Rick whispers, and smiles. “It’s hard to believe he’s two.”
I tell Rick his birthday was back in February, but I don’t talk about what it was like that day: miserable and raining and nothing like what I’d hoped for him. We had to make five hundred miles by six o’clock in order to have time to set up for the gig; Willie had to eat his birthday cake in the van. I told Willie we’d go to McDonald’s for dinner as soon as we got into town but then there wasn’t a McDonald’s, at least not on the main drag. Harry tried to cheer him up, told him Burger King was better.
“This is no ordinary hamburger shack, Willie,” Harry said. “It’s a palace. We’re in the presence of the Supreme Lord. The Burger Duke? No. The Burger Prince? No. The Burger Master himself. The Burger Emperor. The most holy, Burger King.”
Willie looked confused but he laughed because Harry was grinning and wearing a cardboard Burger King crown. When he opened his toy though, he started crying again. It wasn’t a Hot Wheels like they had at McDonald’s, it wasn’t even a toy to his way of thinking, it was just a coloring book.
Poor guy, I thought, as I pulled him on my lap. The only things he wanted for his birthday were a Happy Meal from McDonald’s and a tricycle. He got the tricycle, but he hadn’t been able to ride it yet; it was packed in the back of the van between Dennis’s drums.
Later that night after the gig, I sat in our hotel room, drinking a beer, making a list of my accomplishments on the back of a napkin. I was desperate to convince myself that I was doing all right. That I was making a life for Willie and me, even if it wasn’t perfect. Even if it wasn’t close to perfect.
One: I hadn’t touched any drugs, not even weed, since the day I found out I was pregnant. Two: I’d worked hard and completed my GED before Willie was born, so he’d never have to feel like his mother wasn’t good enough. Three: I’d been there for him day in, day out for two years. Four: I’d supported the two of us.
I wrote down the number five but I was stuck; no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t think of anything else. I was near tears; I’d planned on a list of at least ten accomplishments. As I drank another beer, I stared at number four—supporting the two of us—wondering if it was the reason I was drawing a blank, if it was messing up my list the same way it had messed up Willie’s birthday.
Rick is still running his fingers through Willie’s hair. “You like all this traveling?” he says, looking around the room and then at me. “You always said you wanted to stay in one place. A home.”
I did say that, Rick is right. I didn’t even want to leave our first apartment, rundown though it was. He made me move to the new complex outside of Lewisville, so we could have a dishwasher and air-conditioning. I cried when his friends came to load up the furniture.
Of course he remembers that, but now I tell him the traveling isn’t that bad. Then I shrug. “I don’t have a choice.”
It feels true. No question, it was worse the first year of Willie’s life. Even though Mama had stayed sober and turned into a surprisingly good granny, it was still hard. I worked nights as a dishwasher while Mama stayed with Willie. My feet ached all the time, my breasts leaked milk, and my take-home pay wasn’t even a hundred and twenty a week. But then I saw Fred’s ad in the Kansas City Star, and I got up my nerve and went to the audition. By the time I told him about Willie, we’d been rehearsing for two months and were ready to hit the road. He frowned and shook his head but he didn’t complain. I decided not to tell him that I wouldn’t turn twenty-one for another month. According to the press release he sends out to the clubs, I’ve been singing professionally for five years, I studied vocals at the University of Missouri,
and I won a singing contest in Kansas City while I was still a teenager.
Only the last thing is true. I did win that contest. Rick drove me to the auditorium and he sat in the front row. I’d been nervous all morning, but as soon as the piano started, I forgot everything but the music they’d given me to sing. It was a wonderful Gershwin song, “I Loves You Porgy”; I just wanted to do it justice, get it right. And I did get it right, I knew that when I hit the last note perfectly and the applause started, loud and furious, like a thunderstorm waking me from a dream. I was smiling, bowing. I felt alive.
All the contestants were supposed to wait in the hall while the committee decided the winner. I was standing down a little bit from everybody else when Rick came up. He hugged me and said how proud he was, but then he took my hand and pulled me around the corner and down another hall.
“I have to go back.” There was no one around but still I whispered. “Rick—”
“Watching you… I can’t wait.” He pushed my hand on the crotch of his jeans. “Feel that?”
Before I could object, he pulled me inside a janitor’s closet and shut the door. I was still sweating but I shivered when I felt the cold steel bucket with the dirty mop against my leg.
I could hear the loud laughter of one of the other contestants, an older girl named Elizabeth. They all seemed to know each other—most of them were friends, taking music classes at the college. When one of the guys had asked where I studied, I told him the name of my old high school. Then he asked me the name of the music teacher, and I found myself stammering like an idiot. I’d dropped out in the middle of freshman year, before I could try out for chorus.
“I don’t belong here anyway,” I said softly, more to myself than to Rick. He was kissing my neck. His response was a groan.
By the time I heard them announce my name over the loudspeaker, I’d forgotten that I cared. Rick heard it too and put his hand over my mouth. “Keep it down,” he said, and laughed. “What will they think if they hear their little contest winner doing this?”
Afterwards, Rick went with me to pick up the certificate and the five hundred dollars I won. I was leaning against him when one of the judges asked what I was going to do with the money, if I would use it to further my singing career.
“She’ll probably buy crap for the apartment,” Rick said. He was smiling. “That’s what she does with the money I give her.”
I didn’t say anything. I felt ridiculous, but it was true. Whenever I got any money, I ended up spending it on our place. It seemed like there was always something else we needed: spaghetti strainer, soap dish, laundry basket, welcome mat. Always one more thing and then our place would be a regular home.
It was less than a week after the concert when Rick and his friends were arrested during a heroin deal. And then, at the end of the month, my period didn’t come. For a long time, I winced whenever I thought about the possibility that Willie had been conceived in a janitor’s closet. Later I felt like maybe that Gershwin tune had something to do with it. Like one of my eggs came down, ready and happy, because it heard that gorgeous music.
“I can’t believe he’s real,” Rick is saying, touching Willie’s pink, dimpled knee. “Our kid.”
Rick leans down and lightly kisses his forehead. After a minute, he sits up straighter, reaches for my hand, brings it to his lips. Whispers that he loves me. That he has to have me with him again. Me and Willie too.
I stand up and motion for him to follow me into the bathroom. When I shut the door behind us, I tell him it’s time to leave now. He starts to reach for me but I back up against the wall. As he comes closer, I tell him I can’t be with him anymore. I’ve changed. And when he grabs me anyway, pressing his body against mine, licking my ear, I pull away and tell him a lie. I say there’s somebody else now, I’m sorry. Then I whisper that if he doesn’t leave, I’ll have to call the cops.
He drops his arms; the anger passes across his face so quickly that most people wouldn’t see it. Then he slumps down on the toilet and puts his face in his hands. He stays there for a while, and I’m trying not to look at him, trying not to notice the slight movement of his shoulders that means he’s crying.
Finally, he stands up and leaves without saying a word. I lock the door and collapse in the chair by the window, barely able to breathe. It isn’t until later that I realize he took it with him. The picture of me and Willie.
two
Rick & Patty Forever. When he spray painted that on an abandoned barn, he was twenty-three; I had just turned sixteen. He wanted it to be a surprise; he wouldn’t tell me where we were going as he drove up Highway 29, towards St. Joseph, all he said was to keep my eyes open. It would have been hard to miss. The letters were ten feet tall, two feet wide, black on dusty white, and the barn was on top of a hill, right next to a billboard advertising a Howard Johnson’s.
He parked his car on the shoulder of the highway and we took off running straight up the hill, him pulling me to go faster, faster, like he thought if we got enough speed, we would leave the earth, go right to the clouds. He was panting and out of breath as he grabbed me in his arms in the doorway of the musty barn. “If I could, I’d write it everywhere. On the sky, on the leaves, on the side of Mount Everest.”
I’ve heard that every couple believes they’re the first to discover love. Irene says it’s part of the magic, the feeling that you two have something no other lovers have ever experienced. I know what she means, but I don’t think it applies to Rick and me. Rick didn’t think we discovered love. Words like discovered and thinking had nothing to do with it. The two of us were like waves slapping against a beach or death from a gunshot wound to the head: inevitable, unchangeable, just so. “We have to be together,” he would insist if we fought, and especially if I hinted at leaving him. “We need each other like normal people need air.”
No matter how angry I was, I always found this strangely comforting. This was what a family was supposed to be, I thought. People you were stuck with. People who couldn’t get rid of you because you left a bowl in the sink or forgot to do the ironing or “gave an ugly look” or “dressed like a stupid little slut.”
Mama had thrown me out for the last time back in March. Rick wanted me to move in with him and there was no reason not to. I was over at his place all the time anyway. And she didn’t really care. I was a fool to keep calling her and telling her I was fine.
We’d been living together for eight months when we got “married” that day in the barn. We’d been drinking all morning; when he first told me he’d decided it was time for us to exchange vows, I laughed and said, “To have and to hold, for richer, for poorer, something, something, the end.”
“No. Do it right.”
“Okay,” I said, still giggling. “From the beginning. I, Patty, do take you, Rick, to be my not-really-wedded husband.”
He grabbed my wrist. “You think this is a joke?” We were sitting on the ground; he brought his face close to mine. “You think I’m kidding?”
“No. I didn’t mean—”
“Because to me, there is nothing funny here. This is deadly serious. You understand?”
I sat up straighter and told him yes, I understood. After he let go of my wrist, I rubbed it against my jeans, but casually, as though I had an itch. It felt raw and sore, bruised already, but I didn’t want him to know. Whenever Rick hurt me, even if it was only an accident, he insisted on hurting himself too, only worse. Often he would punch his chest and thighs, over and over, hard enough to leave marks the next day, as I pulled on his arms and pleaded with him to quit. Finally he would, but only when we were both shaking and sniffing, licking salty tears from our lips, ready to collapse into each other and take comfort for what had just happened to us.
It seems strange now that it always felt like something that happened to us—like a car accident or a tornado or any other act of fate—rather than something he caused.
Rick meant it when he said he was serious. He wanted the traditional vows f
rom start to finish. The only change he made was ending with “forever” rather than “till death do us part.”
“Death will never come between us,” he said, tracing the outline of my face with his fingertips. “If one of us dies, the other will too.”
He knew how important this was to me. I’d told him many times how worried I was that he would die and leave me alone, the same way Daddy did.
After we said everything, he reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a beautiful diamond ring. I was choking back tears as he slipped it on my finger because I finally understood that he’d planned all this: the ring, the wedding in the barn with the last word of the vow, the most important word to us both, spray-painted on the outside wall.
“I’ll never stop loving you,” I whispered. “Forever.”
“Forever,” he repeated, as he lifted my hair and eased me backwards to the floor. It was filthy and uncomfortable but I didn’t complain. His hands were pulling off my clothes, beginning to explore my body, which he knew so well. Better than I did.
After a while he closed his eyes, but I didn’t. I wanted to see him; I wanted to burn this into my memory. It wasn’t a real wedding; still, I thought it was the high point of my life, that I would never be happier.
Highway 29 is the quickest way to Omaha, where we’re booked for the next three weeks. Today we’ll have to drive past that barn and I’m nervous, though I know it’s silly. It’s been weeks since I saw Rick in Kentucky, and he certainly won’t be at the barn. Even the graffiti is probably painted over, or at least faded in the weather and wind.
The club is a prime location, Fred says. Much better than the little supper clubs we’ve been doing for the last few months. It’s a new room for Fred, and he picked us over all his other bands because he has so much faith we won’t screw up. That’s what he told me; he told Jonathan we better not screw up if we planned to keep eating.
We left Quincy, Illinois, this morning. We’ve been on the road for hours, but when I ask Jonathan if we can pull in at the next exit, he frowns. It’s only three o’clock, not time for dinner, but Willie is hot and cranky; I know he won’t nap unless he eats something. He only took two bites of the grilled cheese sandwich I ordered him for lunch. He wrinkled up his nose and said, “Yuck,” and then he got distracted by Irene and Harry, who were laughing and pointing at their food as if they agreed.