by Lisa Tucker
“The way you want me to be?”
“You know what I’m saying.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Everything about us seemed different, but I told myself it was only appearances. I told myself that deep down inside, we were the same. That you might be my true soul mate.”
“I thought that too,” I whisper.
“Then it seems we were both equally deluded.”
“You don’t mean that,” I stammer, even though I know he does. His lack of response is the proof. That and the distance between the couch and the wall he’s leaning against. It’s only ten feet but it seems enormous suddenly, unbridgeable.
But it can’t be true. Yes, we’re having a terrible fight, but we can work it out. I can change this back. Make it like it was only a few minutes ago, when I was in his arms on the blanket, amazed at how wonderful it felt, how lucky I was.
If only I knew what to do. I’m so nervous; my mind can’t come up with anything except I’m sorry. And I’m not sorry, that’s the problem. I respect the way he sees this. It’s part of what I love about him, that he has high standards, that he believes in what he does so much. I also understand why he wants me to see it the same way, but I just can’t. Do it, be it, live it, yes—as long as it doesn’t hurt my baby. Music is wonderful, but Willie is my heart. Music makes me feel alive, but he is the reason my life makes sense at all.
When I finally force myself to stand up, part of me is still sure he’ll try to stop me. And after I tell him I’m leaving now, it feels like my whole body is straining to hear his no.
But it doesn’t come. He looks every bit as sad as I feel, but he doesn’t move. Doesn’t even say goodbye.
I miss the exit to Evans, and it’s after ten—and way after Willie’s bedtime—when I finally make it to Mama’s house. When I pull into the driveway though, every light in the house is on. And Willie’s still awake. I can see his shadow against the curtains, running back and forth like it’s a party.
I feel like throwing something. Mama used to let me stay up all night when I was a kid, but with Willie, she’s always treated bedtime like this huge deal. I’ve even lied to her about what time he goes to bed on the road, just to avoid hearing another lecture on the importance of kids keeping regular schedules.
Maybe Irene is right, maybe she is going crazy. Irene isn’t the only person who’s noticed how weird she’s been acting. Two of the neighbor women just asked me yesterday if she’s okay. Mama used to come to their morning coffees but now she won’t even wave at them. They thought maybe she was sick. I told them no, she’s fine. She’s just tired, I said. She has a lot on her mind, I said. I told Joan, her AA sponsor, the same thing, when she called and asked why Mama missed the weekly meeting.
“You know why,” she said, when I asked her why she didn’t go. I pretended to ignore the rant that followed about my letting Rick see Willie, have spaghetti with him. “You opened that door,” she’s said, several times. The door to the past, she means. My response has been to roll my eyes or tell her to back off or something, anything, other than really think about what she was saying.
I’m getting out of the car—cursing this day, wishing so badly I didn’t have to deal with her now, when what happened with Jonathan is still too fresh and painful to think about— when a sickening possibility crosses my mind. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. But it’s not true. It can’t be. Anything but that.
I run up the driveway and onto the front steps, but I’m still telling myself it’s not possible. I’m already looking forward to how stupid I’m going to feel, running like this, when I see that everything is fine. Mama is mad at me, but that’s it. Nothing worse.
And then I walk into the living room and see her. She’s standing by the television, and there’s no way to deny what’s going on. She has the bottle in her hand. It’s Jim Beam, her favorite, and it’s half empty. There’s another one almost empty on the coffee table, only a few feet from where Willie is chasing his ball.
I feel like I’ve just stepped off a cliff. Of course she’s drinking—it explains everything. All the anger and how tired she looks and even that she’s fallen asleep three times this week “forgetting” to change Willie’s diaper. But how could she be drinking? How could she, when she knows it will destroy our lives?
“Baby,” I whisper, leaning down to pick up Willie. He seems fine, but my breath is coming in short gasps as I think about all the things that could have happened. What if she’d passed out? What if she’d dropped one of her stupid cigarettes and burned the house down?
He’s in the same blue-and-yellow-striped T-shirt he had on when I left, even though it’s stiff with dried grape juice.
No wonder he’s napped so well all week. He’s completely exhausted. As soon as I have him in my arms, his head falls on my shoulder and his legs go limp as he lets out a deep breath like he can relax now, he’s finally where he belongs.
“I want you to know it’s happened.” She’s shaking the bottle at me. “You think I’m so damned funny! Well, the joke’s on you, missy.”
“I don’t want to hear it.” I turn away from her. My voice is as disgusted as I can manage, even though I’m swallowing back a sob.
“He came to see Willie, just like I said.”
“What?”
“That’s right! Your two-bit movie star.” Mama is yelling so loud, I’m sure the neighbors can hear. She kicks at a green truck on the floor and it rolls under the coffee table. “He wanted to give him this stupid thing.”
“Truck,” Willie says softly.
My first response is relief. If Rick was here, then maybe it’s not her fault. Maybe he made her do this somehow. I imagine him holding her down, pouring the bottle down her throat. She’s begging him not to. Saying she’d rather die than endanger her grandson.
But I know it’s just my imagination. I know before I ask her why she let him in.
“I didn’t. I’m not stupid! I told him he can go to hell in a rowboat without a paddle. I told him if he put one foot in my house, I’d call the cops and have him put away for life.” She smiles at Willie, but it’s a syrupy, cloying smile. “He saw the truck, so I had to let Malone give it to him. But I slammed the door in his face.”
“So you were already drunk?” I know she’s been at it for a while. She has that glassy-eyed look I recognize so well.
“I ain’t drunk now,” she says, putting the bottle down with a start, like she didn’t realize it was in her hand.
Tomorrow, I’ll know what to do about this. Tomorrow. “Let’s go to bed, buddy,” I whisper.
“I can put him to bed.” She drops her hand on his arm. “Give me my baby. My sweet little Willie.”
He’s still awake, and he’s snuggling into me, hard. It occurs to me that he’s afraid of her. My teeth are clenching to keep from yelling. “Stop it,” I hiss, and move towards my room.
She gets there first though, and blocks the door. She keeps telling me to give him to her. “I’m taking care of him, not you,” she says. When I finally tell her we’ll have to leave then, we’ll spend the night at Irene’s, she says, “No you won’t.” Her voice is a triumphant squeal. “You think you can drive any time you want, but it’s not true. It’s my car. If you take it, I’ll call the cops on you.”
“Granny is just joking,” I tell Willie. I’m rocking back and forth on my heels, praying he’ll be asleep any minute. He’s slept through rehearsals before. If only he could sleep through this.
She comes so close I can smell the whiskey on her breath. “I don’t care if you get arrested, Patty Ann. Everything is about you. You, you, you, always the little princess. I’m sick of it!”
“Please, Mama, shut up. You need to shut up.” I already can’t imagine ever trusting her with Willie again. If she goes much further, we’ll lose it all. “You don’t mean any of this.”
“You don’t know what I mean.” She points a finger at me, but her voice turns halting, a little teary. I’ve hear
d this shift a thousand times. Back and forth: anger, self-pity. This is the past. I can’t believe we’re here again.
Even what she wants to talk about is the same.
“I want to tell you something about when I met your daddy,” she says, after a moment. Her finger is still in the air. I couldn’t care less about this right now. I shake my head.
“He was in love with that Evelyn.”
I look at her. “What?”
“Yeah, he wanted to marry that slut instead of me. Isn’t that the funniest thing you ever heard?” Her eyes are darting around the room; her voice is shrill. “He only changed his mind ’cause I got pregnant. He wouldn’t even sleep in my bed, ’cause he thought I tricked him.”
She’s crying now, sudden, angry tears.
“No matter what I did, he wouldn’t give me a chance. He’d come home and walk right by me, looking for you. He didn’t even want me outside with him when he was doing his chores. He’d take his little princess anywhere, but not me.”
I think of all the times she wailed for him to come back. All the times she told me how happy they were.
I’m surprised, but I also feel like everything makes more sense now. All those memories I had, sitting with Rick in the cemetery that night, of Daddy and me. The fact that I’ve never remembered a single time when he and Mama touched each other. Even the pictures are all of him by himself or him with me, never the two of them.
Maybe I would feel sorry for her if she hadn’t kept this from me for so long—and if she wasn’t screaming that she’d never had anything because she sacrificed her life for such an ungrateful little brat.
I’m finally able to get past her, but my whole body is shaking as I go into my room and push the door shut. I turn the lock in the knob, and she screams for me to open this door. She’s pounding on it, yelling to let her in.
Willie has his hands over his ears. I put my hand on the door, willing her to stop. Stop. Stop.
My bedroom door at the old house was cracked. She cracked the wood, doing exactly what’s she doing now. I used to wonder what the people who bought the house thought when they saw that door. Maybe they thought we were crazy. I didn’t care though. That was the past.
When I turn around and see him sitting on my bed, I’m not even that surprised. Of course Rick’s here. This isn’t now anymore. Now ended when I walked in the door and found my mother stinking drunk.
His arms are crossed; his eyes are looking straight down, staring at the mess of Willie’s crayons on the rug. He’s wearing the same black shoes, maybe even the same jeans he had on in Omaha, but there’s one difference. He has a deep gash running along his hairline to his left temple, not open but not a scar yet either. The only sign of his accident.
He’s standing up. Apologizing for startling me. Explaining why he crawled in my open back window—easy to do, I remember, since I took down Mama’s dinner plate.
“I got here, Sylvia was like this.” His voice is quiet, urgent. He nods at Willie. “I thought I should stay until you got home. Make sure he was okay if she passed out.”
Sylvia. He had a lot of ugly names for her, but he always called her by her real name when she was drunk. Even the way he’s acting is exactly the way he used to: shy, almost afraid, as if her being like this reduced him to being a kid again with his own drunken mom.
I’m so confused, but I manage to whisper, “I want you to leave now.”
He nods again. Before he can move though, Mama is messing with the lock. She has a master key, I forgot about that. It’s her house. Even this room is hers, she tells me, as she pushes open the door and then lets out a hysterical laugh when she sees Rick standing there.
Her face is white as bone, but her voice is dripping with sarcasm. “Well, well, well. If it ain’t the killer. I should’ve known you’d be here, waiting for your little slut.” She turns to him and laughs. “Guess what? You can have her for all I care.”
“Mama, stop.”
“Everybody loves the little princess.” She leans against the door frame. “Go on, take her.” She turns to me. “I don’t want you in my house no more.”
She always threw me out—that’s how our fights ended. It was as if getting rid of me was the solution to some problem she couldn’t name. The problem of her inability to love me, it seems now. The problem of having a child you can’t stand to look at, much less care for.
I’ve been trying not to look at Rick, but when I turn away from her, he catches my eye. I look in his big brown eyes, just for a moment, but it’s enough. This is what he knows about me that no one else does. This is the thing we’ve always had in common—the ugliness at the root of our families, the lack of love, the hopelessness.
“But you don’t get to have my grandbaby, too. You got everything, you always have, but you don’t get him!” She moves right next to me. Her arms are thrust out. “Give me my boy.”
I keep blinking, wishing so badly to see her standing up straight and saying she doesn’t mean it. She doesn’t just care about my father or my son; she cares about me, her daughter.
The other reason I’m blinking is so I won’t be blinded by tears.
“Daddy,” Willie mutters, half asleep, pointing his chubby finger at Rick. He’s just showing me he remembers, but it feels like fate.
I know it’s a mistake even as I grab the diaper bag and Willie’s beagle. It’s a mistake, but that doesn’t mean there are any other options.
Jonathan was wrong, that’s all there is to it. It isn’t a script and it never was. It’s my life.
fourteen
The first thing I feel is his fingers on my ear lobes. He’s flipping them back and forth. His voice is higher than usual, excited. “Waked up, Mama. I gots to show you.”
“What?” I say, and yawn. My chest hurts, but then I realize why: he’s sitting on it, bouncing up and down.
“Toys,” he shouts.
“Hold on,” I say, but he’s crawling off me, dangling his legs over the side, scrambling off the bed. “Come back here, buddy,” I yell. No response. “I mean it. I want you where I can see you.”
The room is light even though the curtains are pulled closed. It’s so tiny I feel like I could reach both walls if I stretched my arms out. At the end of the double bed, there’s a green plastic lawn chair with a pair of jeans and a faded gray T-shirt hanging off the back. The closet door is half open. I can see a pile of Rick’s clothes stacked on the floor.
Willie peeks through the doorway and grins. “I in here, Mama. The toy room!”
I manage to sit up and then stand, but I feel like a limp rag. I must have slept all of an hour last night. But I make my way into the next room, and I can’t help smiling. He’s sitting in the lap of a gigantic white stuffed bear. It has a large red bow around its neck; Willie’s head doesn’t even come up to the bottom of the bow. On his left side, there’s an expensive-looking wood train set, a racetrack, and at least fifty little cars. On his right, two more bears and a stuffed elephant, a Fisher Price garage set, a blue ball as big as he is, and a bunch of action figures.
The toy room is what it is, all right. There’s a twin mattress in the opposite corner but no other furniture, not even a chair.
“I wike this motel!” he shouts, as he jumps up and grabs a truck from the pile of cars.
“We need to change your diaper, buddy. Let’s see if we can find some.” The diaper bag had only one diaper. Mama must have taken the rest out, God knows why.
Willie ignores me, but that’s okay. I need to use the bathroom, get a drink.
The bathroom is off the bedroom I came from. It looks clean, but there’s only one towel and no paper cups. I run the faucet until it’s cold, scoop up handfuls of water to drink. I’m splashing my eyes and cheeks when I hear Willie screaming.
He stepped on the wooden caboose; he has it clutched in his hand and he tells me he hates it now. He’s not wearing shoes or socks. The bottom of his foot is angry red but not bleeding. After I get him calmed down, I conv
ince him to come with me, explore this place. What if there are other toy rooms?
He takes my hand and puts on a goofy, mysterious grin. “Spies,” he says, and I nod.
It doesn’t take long. The house has a kitchen, but there’s nothing in it but cabinets, an old stove, and an even older refrigerator. The living room seems much bigger than Mama’s, but maybe it’s only because it’s empty, too, except for what looks like a brand-new TV sitting on the floor, next to the radiator. There’s another bedroom with nothing in it but a few empty U-Haul boxes.
What Willie really wants to explore is the outside, but I tell him we can’t until I find his shoes. From the front door, the outside seems as big as the house is small. The yard, as Willie calls it, is an immense woods. I can hear a creek, but I don’t hear any cars. If I didn’t see tire tracks in the dirt path, I wouldn’t believe Rick had driven us here.
It’s Rick’s new place, the one Boyd told me about. To get here, we had to go through Kansas City, then Lewisville, then maybe ten miles north on roads I didn’t know. Rick promised he would just drop us off and leave, and he kept his word. He opened the door, pointed us back to the bedroom, and then disappeared, after saying he’d see us in the morning.
I didn’t expect it to be so beautiful. The air feels cold and still, and the smell is clean, woodsy. Most of the trees are still green, but one of the oaks has a solid orange band of leaves at the top, like a hat; another has tiny splotches of red on each leaf, as though it rained paint last night instead of water. If it wasn’t so cold, I’d leave the door open. I do push back the curtains in all the rooms, hold Willie up to the window in the bedroom so he can watch the squirrels scrambling up the branches. His diaper feels like it’s soaked up a swimming pool. When Rick gets back, I’ll have to ask him to get some. All our exploring turned up nothing in the way of diapers or clothes.
But he thought of it already. He also got breakfast. A few minutes later, he comes in holding a grocery sack in one hand, a McDonald’s bag in the other. The food smells wonderful, but I don’t say anything as I take the sack from his hand, get out a diaper from the pack of toddler Pampers.