In a way, she hated her father, period.
Zelda was talking about the past again—the really long-ago past, when she had made the choice to leave her home and her ten-year-old brother behind. Their mother was dead, their father remarried. “I had a chance to go on the road with a symphony. I had to take it,” she said—not for the first time.
“I know you did,” Luna reassured her, as she had the other times.
“I didn’t know my stepmother was so cruel, that she would treat Lenny that way.”
“How could you?” Who could believe that wicked stepmothers really existed—that little Lenny would be sent to the garage to sleep like a dog. That his father would allow such a thing.
“By the time I realized something was wrong… it was too late.” Zelda lamented.
“It’s not your fault.”
Left to his own devices, Lenny had looked for friends. The ones he found showed him a way to forget his troubles: Shooting up heroin.
“Do you think the drug use played a part in his stroke?” Zelda asked.
“I don’t think it helped,” Luna said.
They sat in silence for a while, holding hands. And Luna thought back to the day when she learned the awful truth about her dad.
Twenty-seven years earlier
They were on the barge’s roof, painting it rustoleum red. It was kind of cool, giving the ugly metal a makeover. But Luna was too distracted to really give in and enjoy the process. She was tired of the big mystery surrounding her father’s employment. Loreena just sighed and walked away every time Luna asked. Zelda tended to divert the question, or say “Ask your mother.” But Luna wasn’t giving up.
With every roll of her paint, she recited a different classmate’s name, followed by their father’s profession. “Jeremy Fitzhenry’s dad is a defense attorney.”
Roll.
“Stuart Weinstein’s dad is an orthodontist.”
Roll.
“Arlene Schumacher’s dad works on Wall Street.”
Eight rolls later, she got to her point. “What is my dad?”
Aunt Zelda dropped her roller and fisted her hands toward the sky. “He’s a drug addict!” she proclaimed in her scratchy voice. At this high decibel, it sounded like a car screeching into a pole. Luna felt like she was the pole. “He’s addicted to heroin and he supports his habit by selling it!”
Stunned by both the revelation and Zelda’s tone, Luna fled the roof. Boom, boom! Steel thundered under her quick movement. She descended the steep metal ladder so fast that she lost her footing. She didn’t fall—her tight grip on the cold rail saved her—but her stomach plummeted in a rush of panic, like on a roller coaster ride. She forced herself to slow down.
Finally at the bottom, Luna bolted inside the barge’s dark chamber, flopped across the ratty couch Zelda slept on and tried to cry. She couldn’t—she was too shocked. And anyway, it was a relief to know, even if the truth was horrible.
She lay there with her eyes closed. Soon the metal barge door creaked open again. Then footsteps. Then Aunt Zelda’s cracky voice. “Child, I’m sorry… I never meant to tell you… but you kept asking…”
Zelda’s warm hand pressed Luna’s shoulder. “Forgive me, dear heart. The truth is, I’ve felt guilty for not being there when your father fell in with that bad crowd… But I had my music career, I was on the road…”
Luna pulled herself up and pushed into Zelda’s arms. Wrapped in that hug, Luna absorbed Aunt Zelda’s love—like a plant’s roots soaking in nutrients from the soil. Maybe that was why Aunt Zelda loved gardening. She could see that her hands had the power to make what she loved bloom.
After a moment Aunt Zelda let go. She looked Luna in the eye. “Come on, child,” she said. Luna had a stray strand of hair hanging in her face. Aunt Zelda tucked it behind her ear. “Let’s get back to work.”
Aunt Zelda released Luna’s hand and gave it a little pat. “Go home to your children, dear heart. I’ll be all right, now that I’ve absorbed some of your strength.”
Luna’s strength? Now that was funny. “Are you sure?”
Zelda nodded, and stood. “I buried two husbands. At least my brother’s still alive.”
“Well, that’s true.” Luna said. She got up and headed to the elevator once more without bothering to mention a few things: How her father was the poster child for a life wasted. How his new physical condition was a metaphor for the metaphysical nothing he’d been for so long. How it was so devastating that he might very well wind up some kind of paralyzed vegetable with no hope of connecting and resolving his issues with Luna in one of those Oprah moments she’d always believed they’d have. No, these things she couldn’t lay on her poor Aunt Zelda, who clearly had enough of her own shit to process.
And besides, Luna had to go and deal with her shit of a husband. She had to stop shitting up her own life. And, she had to make sure her kids didn’t get hit with a bunch of shit.
The shit stops here, Luna thought. The elevator door opened. She waved goodbye to her aunt and stepped inside. Part of her waited for Aunt Zelda’s usual “Tootle-loo, old chum!”—Luna would’ve given anything for some kind of normal—but the only sound was the slight rumbling of the door sliding closed.
FIVE
Luna pulled up in front of Sunny’s white, aluminum-sided house. A small one-story, it looked flat and incomplete. But Sunny didn’t care about appearances. It had a roof and heat. Praise Baby Jesus! For a while, after Sunny’s husband Sal decided to try crack at age 33 and subsequently wiped out all their savings chasing his high, Sunny hadn’t been sure if she would be able to afford housing at all. Even now, years later, there were months when she barely pulled the rent together.
Luna grabbed her purple parka, got out of her Windstar and chirped the locks. She slipped the coat on as she walked, without breaking her stride. Luna wasn’t a born multi-tasker, but motherhood had instilled efficiency.
Flower and Spunky, Sunny’s two female “mixed breed” dogs, were in the process of doing their business on the lawn. Someone had once asked her what kind of dogs they were, and Sunny had answered, “The smelly kind.”
Flower was brown, mid-sized and plump. Spunky was black and white, larger, with a tight, muscular physique. They were attached to the fence bordering the house on long chains that clanked when the dogs got riled up—which was whenever a man passed by. They would bark and strain to get at anyone of the male persuasion, but women didn’t faze them.
“Hello, girls,” Luna greeted them as she headed up the cement walkway. Flower and Spunky wagged their tails briefly, then went back to sniffing out spots to poop in.
Luna stepped onto the decaying brick stoop and read the newly hung wooden Christmas sign on Sunny’s door: “Santa, I’ve been as good as I can be, what else do you want from me?” Yesterday in this spot, there’d been a turkey sporting a t-shirt that said, “Eat ham.” Like at the hospital, Sunny wasted no time swapping out holidays. Luna knocked, and the door opened. “Oh, chickie,” Sunny exclaimed. “How are you?”
“I’m okay, I guess.”
Luna stepped inside and Sunny hugged her. This was a rare thing, because Sunny was not a touchy person. The situation had to be really dire.
But Sunny showed her love in other ways. The best was that she would always listen. Another, not as easy to swallow, was that she never failed to give her opinion on a situation—in a very snarky manner. She didn’t mean any harm by it – that was just Sunny’s “truth hurts” approach. Luna believed her best friend could make a bundle as a stand-up comic, but Sunny had permanent stage-fright.
Here are some other things (both funny and not-so-much) about Sunny:
STATS ON SUNNY
Name: Sandra Jacqueson (Miss Jacqueson if you’re nasty.) Sunny hated her real first name because people always shortened it to “Sandy” no matter how many times she told them not to. This made her think of Olivia Newton John’s sugary character in Grease, which subsequently made her want to hurl.
&n
bsp; Age: 37
Ethnic background: Haitian. Black on USA census forms, but light-skinned enough to be routinely claimed by natives of any and all Hispanic nations as one of their own.
Marital status: Divorced from a crack-head.
Children: An eleven-year-old son (Layne, named after Alice in Chain’s lead singer, whom she adored) and a ten-year-old daughter (Phoebe, a name Sunny just liked.)
Body: A few pounds over, but placed in strategically appealing areas. The term they used in on-line dating was “voluptuous.” The term Sunny used was “fatty-fat.”
Hair: Straight when she flat-ironed it. Most often she wore it pulled up in back, making her look really young.
Occupation: Cataloguing books for the county library system, working nights at a local library and doing laundry, house cleaning and child feeding when not occupied by the first two jobs. She was a single parent with the emphasis on single—her ex bounced in and out of town, jobs and jail, providing sporadic financial aid when he wasn’t on a crack binge or serving time for funding it.
Favorite physical activities: None. Sunny didn’t like to sweat.
Likes: Reading—she read voraciously. Movies, especially cheesy ones. She also loved Star Wars. Drinking—she enjoyed partaking in the spirits while doing that reading and movie watching. Snarking—she enjoyed ridiculing those who deserved it, and so many deserved it. Alternative music—as an alternative to talking to the people she’d later ridicule. Also, the TV shows I Love Lucy and The Year Without A Santa Claus.
Dislikes: Most people, clutter, chaos, mildew.
Religion: None to speak of. She’d had a brief bout with some sort of Protestantism, but it had passed. She was spiritual; she just disliked the group effort thing and preferred going solo.
Favorite writer: Stephen King.
Favorite dessert: Hostess cupcakes.
Favorite expression: She had a comment for every occasion, especially treasuring her many visual descriptions of Christ (i.e., “Christ in pajamas!”) and her nifty all-purpose wrap-up phrase, “’Nuff said.”
Luna had inadvertently nicknamed Sandra ‘Sunny’ the first time they’d met, fourteen years prior, at a summer barbecue. Sunny had been dressed in a black Alice in Chains t-shirt, black jeans, black open-toed platform shoes and black nail polish on her toes.
Looking her up and down, Luna had asked, “Why so sunny?”
Sunny appreciated the irony, and adopted the name on the spot.
Luna and Sunny’s boyfriends, Nicky and Sal Marone—whom they’d later marry—were cousins. The barbecue was a Marone family get-together: big and boisterous. The two young women bonded immediately in that neither fit in with the drama du jour. The volatile Marone family didn’t need the Grucci’s to make fireworks—alcohol sufficed. After a few hours and more than a few Budweisers, the truth burst forth about who hated who, and exactly why. All this anger would be re-buried as soon as the sun peeked, but it was uncomfortable and unnerving to witness its exposure, however temporary.
As voices, tempers and blood alcohol levels rose, Luna and Sunny dragged their plastic lawn chairs across the gritty brick and cement patio, through air thick with smoke and malevolence, to the outskirts of the yard—planting themselves next to a bushy rhododendron. Strangers in a strange land, they learned that night that it was way easier to laugh at the craziness of the world when you had company.
They’d been providing each other company ever since.
Sunny smelled like cigarettes and cocoa butter. She released Luna and they went inside. “The kids are in the middle of a Star Wars movie marathon. They’re up to the Revenge of the Jedi. Those ewoks are mad annoying, but apparently children enjoy them.”
They stepped into Sunny’s always-immaculate kitchen. Sunny couldn’t afford much, but what she had, she kept tidy and clean. The white counters gleamed, the matching appliances shined, the paper towels and napkins were neatly stowed in coordinating seasonal dispensers, with Rudolph perched forlornly on each one (Sunny identified with outsiders.) Wooden chairs were tucked under a matching table, and when Luna put her coat on the back of one she took care to keep it aligned.
The refrigerator stood out, because it was covered with Sunny’s extensive magnet collection. Magnets were the only things Sunny allowed to collect in her home, which was funny because Sunny was herself a magnet: for crazies. When she hit the street, the crazies approached. She was safe at her day job, because the county library system was closed to the public, but at night she worked in a public library that might have been a sanitarium. Crazies practically leapt across the counter to get at her. And it was worse when she wasn’t working. Crazies found her everywhere. Gas station attendants, grocery clerks, oil delivery men: all were not only attracted to her, but felt no obligation to obey social boundaries. (This could’ve been because they were crazy.) Everywhere Sunny went, she was like that poor black-and-white cat accosted by Pepe Le Pew. It might not have been so bad if only she could summon men higher up the chain, but inevitably: if a guy was missing teeth, grooming skills and good sense, he’d be all over Sunny.
Luna had never thought about the correlation between Sunny’s magnets and the fact that she was a magnet. She was about to mention this when five-year-old Dylan raced in from the living-room, where the sounds of a space battle were playing. Luna was glad to skip the Star Wars saga today—she had enough to battle through here on Earth.
“Mommy!” Dylan exclaimed with exuberance. It was nice to be exalted. She gathered him up in her arms and squeezed.
“Hey, Mom.” Ten-year-old Ben said, joining them a moment later. She added him into the fold. The three embraced for several heartbeats before separating.
“Where’s Daddy?” Dylan asked. He had blonde hair, a cherubic face and a vivacious spirit. Always, he smiled. With his looks and temperament, Luna had been tempted to take him for head shots and parade him among talent agents in Manhattan. Every mom wants to show her child off to the world! But she was afraid of becoming a stage mom and even more scared Dylan would become a child star. They rarely fared well as adults.
“Um… Daddy had some errands to take care of,” Luna said. Dylan’s left overalls strap was undone. Soon he’ll be too old for overalls, she thought, as she refastened it. She wanted to freeze his boyhood, stick it in a bottle like time in that Jim Croce song. And yet she craved the independence that arrived when children became more self-sufficient, like Ben.
Dylan said, “I’m gonna go back to Star Wars. Phoebe and Layne are way ahead of me.”
“You do that,” Luna told him.
“May the force be with you, Mommy.”
“You too, baby. Tell Layne and Phoebe I said ‘hi.’”
“Okay, Mommy.”
Dylan zipped back to the living room. “My Mommy says hi,” he said to his cousins. For how long, Luna wondered, will he be so obedient?
“Hi Aunt Luna!” Layne and Phoebe shouted. She pictured the three kids together on the couch, the light of the screen playing over their faces.
Ben took a step toward the living room, paused and turned back. His complexion was darker than his brother’s, but nothing near his dad’s. People were always saying that Ben looked like Nick, but Luna didn’t see it. Nick’s hair was black, while Ben’s was brown—and Ben had none of those Italian spots on his face. She had to admit, the shapes of their faces were similar—but was that what made you resemble someone? There were only so many shapes a face could be. One thing was for certain, Ben had Luna’s hazel eyes and kind heart. “Is everything all right, Mom? You seem sad.”
Luna hesitated. So much had happened today! It seemed wrong to burden him with reality, but equally erroneous to spin a fantasy that everything was fine. “I’ve got a lot going on, honey. But don’t worry—no one died.” There was no point in telling Ben about his grandfather. He’d only met him a few times, anyway. It wasn’t like Ben was going to be asking for Lenny, so why deliver painful news? But what would she say about Nick?
“Is Dad r
eally running errands?”
Ben’s eyes were so deep and expressive, Luna felt as if she could find the truths of the universe if she could only dive inside. But she had the same eyes as her son and she had no answers, only questions.
“Why do you ask?”
“Well… I was just wondering if maybe you were mad at him.”
“Mad?”
Ben furrowed his eyebrows, causing the worry-lines on his forehead (another thing he had in common with Luna) to look extra prominent. “Cause of… the stuff on the computer.”
“What stuff?”
“The… pictures.”
“What pictures, honey?”
“The wieners.”
“What wieners?” Luna prayed he was talking about hot dogs, but knew that he wasn’t.
Ben looked down at Sunny’s black and white checkered linoleum. It was rare for him to break eye contact. “I was trying to go on the Disney Channel website on Dad’s computer, and all these pictures of guys with their wieners showing popped up… they were pretty gross.”
Luna wanted to say something reassuring, but all she could think of were vicious things about Nick. She took a deep breath and let it out. Then she did it again. Finally she said, “I didn’t know about the wieners, sweetie. I’ll make sure you never have to see them again. And as for Daddy…” She paused again. Oh, there was a lot she wanted to say about Nick. But she remembered how horrible it had been to listen to her mother rant about her dad, and she wasn’t about to scar her son like that. She took yet another breath in and let it out. “Daddy’s got a bunch of things to take care of right now, that’s all.” Like packing. There was no way Nick was spending one more night under the same roof as Luna. Period.
Ben still seemed unsure. “Is Daddy moving out?” He really was intuitive. He’d probably heard the fighting. Luna and Nick had been doing that a lot. She’d never done it in front of the boys, but kids always heard.
Luna Rising Page 4