by Marsha Moyer
Then the music stopped. I'd come upon him sitting in some shadowy corner, his face a mask, eyes dead, a glass in his hand, and no amount of threatening or coaxing on my part could talk him out of it. I once took Jude and left for a weeklong visit to Mooney, hoping to shake Ash out of his funk, but when we got back to Tennessee, he was still sitting in the same chair wearing the same shirt he'd had on when we left, looking for all the world like he hadn't moved a muscle in six days.
Still, your mind can tell you one thing and your heart something else completely, and in those days I was still listening to my heart. I loved Ash—not the same way I'd loved him when I met him, all his big talk and razzle-dazzle, but in ways that were deep and tangled, roots below the surface. More than anything, I loved the man I'd first seen onstage in our old hometown, the one he'd been on the verge of showing the world, but that somehow, for the past couple of years, seemed to be running through his grasp like water, like music, like love, something you felt but couldn't hold.
All this went through my mind as I sat at my kitchen table and watched Ash stare out the window, his shoulder blades rigid under his T-shirt, a muscle jumping in his unshaved jaw. He was still a handsome man, with his fine-carved cheekbones and swept-back silver hair, but he was starting to look blurry around the edges. I wondered if that was how he felt, too, like a cartoon character half-erased, beginning to fade away.
"After Tony hung up, I just stood there with the phone in my hand," he said. "There were these two people having a fight down the hall in the day room, something about which game show to watch, and a counselor came along and broke it up. One of the aides walked by, pushing a cart loaded with lunch trays. She looked at me and smiled and said hi. And I was thinking, How can everybody be acting so normal? My whole net is gone—my job, my wife, my kid, the whole nine yards—and these assholes are bickering over TV and chicken a la king."
"So you left."
"Nothing much they could do about it. I'd checked myself in, so they couldn't hold me. Not that they didn't try. I'm stuffing shit in my duffel bag, and this poor little girl with a B.A. in psychology is standing there the whole time wringing her hands and giving me the twelve-step creed like her life depended on it. You never heard so much cockamamie bullshit in your life, about one day at a time and working your program.
"I hiked out to the highway and stuck out my thumb and got a ride back to Nashville with a guy in a work truck. I got him to drop me by the Chevy dealership, that big one on the south end of town. I figured I'd better make a deal quick, before the word got around that I was Mr. Has-Been."
"What about your Jeep? Wasn't it still back at the house?"
"I didn't want to go back to the house."
"You mean you bought a brand-new, forty-thousand-dollar truck just because you didn't want to go home?"
He smiled. "Want to know what one of the little psychology girls at the rehab told me? She said I have a problem with impulse control."
"And you decided to play right along. Jesus, Ash!" I stood, slamming down my coffee cup so hard the syrup bottle in the middle of the table tipped over.
"No yelling!" Jude yelled from the living room.
I sat down again, placing my hands flat on the table, and stared at them until I felt steady again. I wanted to yank off my wedding ring and bury it, or make Ash swallow it. That'd teach him a thing or two about pain and suffering.
"You know, this might come as a surprise to you, but plenty of folks manage to make it in the music business without flaming out or cracking up."
"Little late for that. I'm already out of the music business, apparently."
"You know why Tony let you go," I said. "It isn't because you don't have the talent. It's because you seem hell-bent on living out this, this Hank Williams fantasy."
"I've already outlived Hank by a dozen years. Anyway, plenty of folks drink. Hell, look at George Jones—he drank for fifty years."
"Till he drove off a bridge and just about died! Is that what you're going for? The longest-drinking-man-in-show-business award? You trying to trounce George Jones? Or are you waiting for something big enough to stop you? Because if losing your job and your wife and your kid aren't enough to do it, then maybe a bridge is the only way."
"I'm telling you, Lucy," he said in a taut voice, "I can handle it."
"Well, I can't."
He pushed himself away from the counter and started to cross the room.
"Wait," I said. "I'm not finished."
"What's left to say? You've made yourself pretty goddamned clear."
"Sit back down," I said. "Just for a minute."
He looked skeptical, but he pulled out a chair and sat, hooking one ankle over the other, and folded his arms across his chest. I could just see him sitting this same way in group therapy, limbs stiff, jaw twitching, mouth set in a smirk. How could you get through to somebody who'd already made up his mind? If Jesus Himself had walked in wearing a gold halo and offered Ash His hand, it wouldn't have convinced him to give up his shield.
"Look, I know you must feel—"
"You don't know how I feel."
"Okay. But I think you feel like you've been hung out on the line and left there, twisting in the wind. And I'm trying to say it's not true."
"Is this the speech about letting go and giving over everything I have to a Higher Power? Because if it is, I've heard it already, so you can spare me."
"No. This is the speech about how I want to try to make things right with you again. But I can't do it unless you meet me partway."
He held up his hands, palms open. "I'm here, aren't I? Isn't that partway?"
"But it took you eight months to get here! Have you got an explanation for that that you can make me understand? Because I'm having a hard time coming up with anything that doesn't involve Miller High Life and Jack Daniel's."
Ash sighed, uncrossed and recrossed his ankles.
"You know, I've been thinking a lot, Ash, over the last few months. And for the longest time I tried to excuse you. I mean, I can only imagine how it must be, having people throw things at you right and left—money, power, drugs, themselves, whatever. It would go to your head, right? To anybody's head. But at some point it stops being fun and games and it turns into a habit. And when it gets to be a habit, it starts to be, I don't know, dehumanizing. Didn't you respect yourself more than that? Why would you sell off everything, all your talent and your career and your family, just so you could snort coke out of some bimbo's cleavage? I mean, every now and then, weekends and holidays, I can understand. But every chance you got for five years? I'm not talking about what you did to me; I didn't even feel like it was about me. What I want to know is, why did you start hating yourself so much?"
He pushed back his chair. "Are you done?"
"Not quite. You keep telling me you can make me see how things got the way they did, even though I haven't seen any proof so far that you can. I want to give you a chance. But all this, this slamming in and out and pointless arguments about stuff we've been over time and again—this is why I left Nashville. I can't live this way, and I won't have Jude in the middle of it, either. I haven't given up on you, even if you think I have. But whether you admit it or not, your drinking is behind everything that's happened to you. I'm not the only one who feels that way—ask Tony, ask Vern, anybody. Till you get a grip on it, I can't live with you."
"You can't keep a man out of his own home. It's not legal."
"I can call the sheriff and get a restraining order. Is that the way you want to play it?"
"What the hell am I supposed to do?" His face was tight, furious.
"I don't know. Check into a motel, sleep in the truck, go back to Nashville, whatever. But if you want to stay with me and Jude, you have to start sober."
He turned back toward the door. "Is that all?"
"Forget about you and me for a second. Don't you remember what it was like, being a little boy with no daddy? Do you think it's right to keep doing what you do to Jude, duckin
g in and out of his life like a criminal?"
Ash looked away, rubbing one eye with the heel or his hand.
"I hope you'll come to his baseball practice this afternoon," I said. "It would really mean the world to him." I got up and set my cup in the sink. "One o'clock, at Old Settlers Field."
I turned to rinse out the coffeepot, listening to Ash go into the living room, his and Jude's voices mingling with the Transformers. Footsteps retreated up the front hall. The screen door squealed and slammed. The truck roared to life and pulled out. I thought about Lucy Grubbs, the woman who'd died in her kitchen of a broken heart, of how smart she was to get it over with all at once like that, instead of an inch at a time, in bits and pieces.
chapter seven
"A't first I felt really good, for saying what I should've said a long time ago," I told Geneva. "But then I started feeling awful. I mean, you should've seen his face. It was like kicking a dog that's already down."
We pushed our carts side-by-side up the frozen-food aisle at the Super Wal-Mart. Try doing this at the Food Ring back home and you'd have needed the Jaws of Life to separate you, but here you could go two and three wide with the ease of a big-city freeway.
Ash had shown up for Little League practice, right on time, but he'd headed straight out onto the field to join my brothers, and he was still there when Gen and I left on our weekly grocery run. Bailey and Kit had offered to take the Hatch Brothers team for pizza after practice, so Geneva and I were enjoying a kid-free shopping experience, which meant the luxury of one-hundred-percent adult conversation as well as the possibility of reaching the checkout with at least a halfway decent ratio of fruits and vegetables to cookies and chips and sugar-coated cereals.
"Tell you what," Geneva said, reaching into the freezer case for a bag of broccoli. "Bailey showed up in our front yard for the first time in eight months without an excuse, I'd be tearing him a new you-know-what. And when I say 'excuse,' I mean watertight— like unconscious and tied to a tree in Bora-Bora. With video and signed depositions to prove it."
"Well, Ash had the unconscious part down, at least. He might have been tied up, too, for all I know. He probably would've liked that." We piled bags of frozen french fries into our carts, although the way our kids ate them, we should probably have just had truckloads delivered to our front doors wholesale. "You don't think I was too hard on him?" I said.
"Ha! What was that business about his self-respect, how it's not about you? Hell, yes, it's about you! He may not have been sitting around thinking, 'How can I hurt Lucy?' But he was just doing whatever he wanted, whatever made him feel good. He wasn't thinking about you, not for a minute. If that's not disrespecting you, I don't know what is."
"So you're saying my marriage is a sham and a lost cause."
"No, I'm not saying that. Y'all still love each other, for one thing. Any fool can see that." I sighed, slumping over my cart. "I just think you need to keep laying down the law. Either Ash is gonna toe in, or he's gonna keep on heading downhill until he finally hits something." I thought about George Jones and that bridge. "You just have to remember, it's his call. You know what Dove always says." Geneva stopped to check out a sale on Lean Cuisines, three for seven dollars. "I wonder if Bailey would eat pork lo mein."
"Dove says she wonders if Bailey would eat pork lo mein?"
Geneva put the package back and closed the freezer door. "Dove says all you can do is make sure you're standing where they can see you, holding out your hand."
We left to take our groceries home after agreeing to meet at Pizza Rita's to join our families. I got there first and found Bailey sitting among the ruins of several pizzas, sipping a beer and looking cheerfully exhausted. Jude and Lily were in an adjoining room playing video games, but Kit and everybody else had gone home. There was no sign of Ash.
"How did he seem to you?" I asked Bailey, reaching for a wedge of cheesy crust and biting off a hunk. Nothing like an hour's worth of shopping for healthful food items to work up a craving for greasy junk.
He shrugged. "Same old Ash. Maybe a little lower-key than usual. Did y'all have a big blow-out or something? He wanted to know if he could spend a couple nights at our place."
I set down my pizza crust. "What did you tell him?"
"I told him that if there was something going on between y'all that had him looking for a place to sleep, then I felt like it was probably in my best interest not to put myself in the middle of it. He just kind of stared at me and said, 'I guess that's a no.' Then he walked over and said something to Jude, and got in his truck and left."
I sat back, watching my son in his red-and-white Hatch Brothers shirt and matching cap, firing an imaginary Uzi at a screen full of bad guys while his mercenary little cousin egged him on. Ordinarily I tried to steer Jude away from the more violent games, the ones with bleeding bodies and blazing weapons, but some biological imperative seemed to keep pulling him in, and today I was too beat-down to put up a fight. Sometimes everything you did as a parent felt like a losing battle, that the whole point of having kids was to let them wear away at your principles until you gave in and let them turn into the natural-born psychopaths they really were.
Just then Geneva arrived, and I watched my brother's face light up at the sight of her, watched him set his beer bottle on the table and get up and fold her in his arms like they'd been apart for months and not hours, like he'd just gotten back from some long and tortuous journey to Bora-Bora. Any time I started to doubt the basic decency of humankind, especially the male half, all I had to do was look at my brothers. They'd never come home from a long weekend in Vegas with bite marks on their necks and their wallets missing. They'd never walk out of rehab and spend $40,000 on a pickup; they'd never be in rehab in the first place, because, while they liked a good time as well as the next guy, they also understood the meaning of moderation.
"What did Daddy say to you earlier, at the ball field?" I asked Jude as we were driving home. He'd pitched a fit about not being allowed to go back to Lily's, like he usually did on Saturdays, but I wanted him to have a bath and an early supper and bedtime tonight. We'd promised to go to Easter sunrise service with my mama, which meant getting up at five the next morning.
"He said to keep my head down."
"What?"
"He said that's why I can't throw the ball where I'm looking. 'Cause I don't keep my head down."
"I meant later on. When he was getting ready to leave. Did he say 'See you later,' or anything like that?"
"He said for me to be good and the Easter Bunny would bring me a surprise."
Visions of extravagant foolishness raced through my mind: a child-sized Easter basket brimming with stomach upset and tooth decay; thirty-foot inflatable plastic rabbits or, God forbid, a cage full of regular-sized live ones.
"Mama?"
"What, baby?"
"Jason Marchman said there's no such thing as the Easter Bunny. He said it's just your mama and daddy hiding things in the night."
"Well, what do you think?"
"I think Jason Marchman smells funny. Like when Aunt Dove cooks cauliflower."
I smiled, and Jude started to laugh, a big, openmouthed, machine-gun laugh. He loved to crack himself up; nothing made him so happy as being the life of the party.
"It's like Granny says," Jude said, serious again. "Just because we can't see Jesus doesn't mean He's not there. Same with the Easter Bunny, right?"
I thought about trying to explain the difference, but the more I thought about it, I wondered what the difference was, especially if you were six years old. What was faith, anyway, but belief in a thing for which there was no proof?
"Mama?"
"Yes, Jude."
"How come the Easter Bunny brings us presents, but Jesus doesn't?"
"Well… Jesus gave us the gift of Eternal Life." I shuddered at how much I sounded like my mama.
"What's that?"
"It means you go to heaven when you die."
Jude made a face in the re
arview. "I'd rather have candy."
I suppressed a smile, flipping on my signal for the turn onto Little Hope Road. "Better not let your granny hear you say that."
"I bet Daddy will bring me some," Jude said excitedly. "I bet the Easter Bunny will give lots and lots of candy to Daddy for me. I bet he's waiting at my house right now!"
He wasn't, though—not the Easter Bunny or Ash, either one. He didn't come for supper, or for Jude's bath or prayers or his bedtime story. It was all I could do to persuade Jude to let me turn out the light at eight-thirty. He kept insisting Ash would be there any minute, that we just needed to read one more page, to stay up a few minutes longer.
He'd had a big day, though, and the pull of sleep was too much for him. I sat beside him for a few minutes in the dark, my hand resting lightly on the blanket, listening to his breathing deepen and slow. Once I was sure he'd drifted off, I went and straightened up the kitchen, made myself a cup of tea and drank it. I laid out my dress for the next morning. Just before turning in for the night, I went out and stuck a new bulb in the porch light—a hundred and fifty watts, bright enough for any lost soul to see, should one happen by in search of shelter. All night long it shone in my bedroom window, until I rose at five the next morning and shut it off. It was still dark out, but I knew by then nobody was coming.
I woke jude and we put on our best dress-up clothes and went to sunrise service at First Baptist with Mama. We weren't regulars, like she was, but it was Easter, and Jude liked it if nothing else for the sheer spectacle of the thing, the pews jammed with folks in suits and rustly dresses and fancy hats, the rousing organ music, Reverend Honeywell in his white-and-gold stole, his yellow hair like a crown, holding up his hands and exhorting us to go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.
Afterwards we crowded into the fellowship hall for cookies and punch with our fellow worshipers. "Lucy, dear, how are you?" I must've heard it a hundred times, all those church guild ladies sidling up to grip my hand moistly between theirs and peer into my eyes. Like I didn't know what they were really up to: trying to see if they could tell by looking at me whether Ash and I were truly together again, in the biblical sense.