by J. S. Bailey
“I think I’ll just stay in the truck while you have fun hanging out with the kinfolk,” she said, staring out the window at the white brick building where Maria and Stephen lay in wait.
Wayne killed the engine. “You’re too old to be acting like that.” He was probably right. “
God grant me the serenity,” she muttered, and climbed out of the truck into the shade of the massive maple trees that swayed in the breeze between the house and the faded pavement.
Wayne led the way up a handicapped ramp onto a white, wooden porch where Esteban Reyes and one of his cousins whose name Jessica couldn’t remember were having a smoke and laughing about something or another that, knowing her uncle, probably wasn’t all that funny.
“Jessica!” the former exclaimed when he saw her. “Long time no see! And who is this?”
Jessica gave her uncle a one-armed hug since she was hanging on to the potato salad with the other. Esteban was her mother’s only sibling, and sometimes she wondered how such vastly different people could have been born from the same womb. “It’s good to see you, too. Haven’t you met Wayne before?”
Uncle Esteban squinted, and Jessica could tell that he was attempting to figure out why Wayne walked with such an unusual gait. “I don’t think so.” His jovial smile returned, and he held out his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, young man. Don’t let any of these Reyes folk pick on you too much.”
Wayne shook his hand. “I’ve known Stephen and Maria for years,” he said. “Nothing can scare me.”
Uncle Esteban and his cousin burst into laughter again. “Better not let my sister hear you!” Esteban said with a twinkle in his eye. “Now, Wayne, this here is Ernesto. His dad and mine were brothers.”
He proceeded to give Wayne the family history, which Jessica had heard about a thousand times over the years. Her grandfather, Andrés Reyes Pizano, came to the United States as a small child along with his parents and five siblings. Instead of giving their children two surnames as per tradition, Andrés and his wife Karen only gave their son and daughter the name from the paternal side of the family since it was the American thing to do. Jessica was glad that the tradition had been dropped, because if it hadn’t, her name would be Jessica Mary Roman-Dell Reyes, and that just sounded terrible.
“—it on the table inside.”
“Sorry, what?” Jessica looked up. Wayne, Uncle Esteban, and Ernesto were all staring at her, no longer smiling.
“That bowl you’re carrying,” her uncle said. “You can set it on the table with all the other food inside.”
“Oh. Okay.” She took a deep breath and walked past them into the big room where numerous round tables had been set up and covered in orange and brown plastic tablecloths as befitting the season. Food covered a long buffet table off to the left. There were deviled eggs, veggie and meat trays, scalloped potatoes, dinner rolls, at least eight giant bags of potato and corn chips, salsa, cheese dip, and homemade churros, to name a few of the items that had already begun to make her mouth water. Two big trays of decorated candy skulls sat at the far end of the table. Wayne was in for a treat.
She set the potato salad between the deviled eggs and a veggie tray. She took off the lid and pulled out the spoon she had stashed inside.
Wayne remained outside talking to the other men, and Rachel and Eric hadn’t shown up yet, so she had nobody else to talk to.
Some older Reyes women whom she didn’t know very well were sitting at a table at the other end of the room talking in rapid voices and showing each other photo albums.
Suddenly a peal of laughter echoed in from the adjoining room. She recognized it as belonging to Marco, the cousin who dressed as a woman and did magic tricks on the weekends.
“Oh, Maria,” she heard him say, “you remember that one time when…”
He and Maria walked into the banquet room, still chatting.
Neither of them looked at her.
Since he wasn’t at work, Marco Reyes—the brother of Ernesto, Jessica was fairly certain—was dressed in a rather ordinary outfit of jeans and a gray turtleneck sweater. Maria wore a dark-gray skirt with a matching blazer, a cream-colored top, and black pumps. Her black hair was piled on top of her head and pinned in place with a silver clip shaped like a flower blossom.
Maria was fifty-two years old and didn’t look a day over forty. Her ability to age gracefully was the only thing Jessica had ever desired to inherit from her.
Though she had intended to be a pacifist today by not engaging in any arguments with her mother, Jessica’s temper began to rise at the sight of her. Maria’s outfit had probably cost more than Jessica’s last rent payment at the apartment complex, and here Jessica was wearing jeans that had a hole in one knee, a hooded sweatshirt with fraying cuffs, and sneakers that had been old three years ago.
Maria must have sensed Jessica’s gaze, for she turned suddenly. “Oh. Hi, Jessica.” She smiled, but the look in her eyes was distant.
Hi, Jessica. No “I’ve missed you.” No warm embrace. No sign that she cared.
“Where’s Dad?” Jessica asked in a weak voice. Her pulse pounded in her ears.
“He went down to the grocery store with David to get napkins.” David was another of her cousins. “They left just a few minutes ago.”
“Does it usually take two people to buy one thing?”
Maria’s eyes narrowed. “Does it matter?”
“I guess not.” If Jessica guessed correctly, the men were picking up cases of beer, too, which was all right since she and Wayne had opted not to bring any drinks after all.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” Marco said. “Esteban might need help with something.” He slipped away, throwing one last glance over his shoulder as he departed.
“Rachel told me you’re living with Wayne,” Maria said. The distant look returned.
“Yeah.” Don’t say anything stupid, she told herself. Please don’t say anything stupid.
“Is that a permanent arrangement?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re not sharing a room, are you?”
Her face heated. “No.”
Maria gave her a knowing look. “He’s thirty years old, Jessica. Don’t assume he’s letting you live there for purely benevolent reasons.”
Jessica’s temper refused to be held at bay. “So what about that?” she blurted. “You’re probably just afraid of me getting pregnant and bringing another child into this cruel world, or something stupid like that. But I’m still a virgin, for your information, so you don’t have anything to worry about for a long time.”
The room grew as quiet as a tomb. The women with the photo albums gaped like beached fish. Maria’s eyes blazed. For some reason, Jessica no longer cared.
“Do you want to humiliate me in front of my relatives?” her mother hissed.
Did she? “I—”
“I think I came in on the wrong end of that conversation,” Wayne said, coming up beside them holding a can of Pepsi. He gave Jessica a warning glance.
The women at the back of the room resumed their conversation but still threw Jessica and her mother snooping looks every few seconds.
Maria’s gaze flicked from Jessica to Wayne. “Hello, Wayne,” she said in a politer tone. “You’ve been well?”
He bowed his head. “Most of the time. I still put up with Charlie five days a week. He says he misses you two. Your replacements are so clueless we don’t know how they managed to pass the CPA exam.”
Maria smiled. “It’s nice to hear we made an impression on him. Tell everyone we said hi.” Then to Jessica, she said, “If you see your sister, could you tell her to come talk to me? I have a present for her.”
“What, is it for the baby you don’t want her to have?”
Her mother opened her mouth as if in shock. “What in the world has gotten into you?”
Jessica felt a tug on her arm.
“Sorry, she’s had a stressful week,” Wayne said, leading her away from Maria. “Don’t take it personally.”<
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They went back out to the porch. Uncle Esteban and Ernesto were talking to some of the new arrivals out in the parking lot.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Wayne whispered.
Tears brimmed in her eyes. The brief encounter with her mother made her feel like curling up into a ball and crying until the sun shined no more. “I don’t know! Every time I look at her I just want to make her hurt like she made me hurt all those years.”
Wayne put his hands on her shoulders. She didn’t bother pushing him away. “You’ve got to put all that behind you! You can’t hate someone forever. Do you think I still make myself sick over what my mother did to me? It took me years, but I finally did learn to get over it—and if I can, you can, too.”
She looked into his coffee-brown eyes, which were giving her the hardest stare she had ever seen Wayne use. “Well, I can’t just quit calling myself Jessica and get over it. That’s why you don’t go by Robert anymore, isn’t it? You couldn’t stand for people to call you what she did.”
He dropped his hands. “Jessica…”
She brushed him off. She had made a mistake in coming here, and not even the promise of a free meal was going to convince her to stay. “Let’s just go home,” she said.
He shook his head. “Nope. You need to start acting like an adult, and in order to do that you have to get along with people you don’t like. Is that so hard to do?”
Yes! Why couldn’t Wayne understand? “She deserves to be hurt. She needs to know what it’s like.”
He gave her a cold look. “Has our friend been giving you ideas? Revenge isn’t the way to solve things.”
“It’s an awfully tempting one.”
The new arrivals, who happened to be Elena the dinner theater actress and her husband and young children, gave them both warm smiles but didn’t say anything as they walked past Jessica and Wayne into the house. They probably didn’t even remember who she was. Not surprising.
Uncle Esteban and Ernesto made their way back up the walk. “Hey, Wayne,” Uncle Esteban said when they reached the porch, “you ever had a candy skull?”
Wayne shook his head. “That would be a negative.”
“You ought to try one and see if it makes you go into a coma. My wife made them.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Cousin Ernesto laughed. “Don’t chip a tooth.”
The two men went inside, leaving her and Wayne alone again on the porch. More cars pulled into the parking lot, including one gray Nissan Altima.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Jessica said to him. She felt as if a carefully built dam inside of her had suddenly sprung a leak, and a vast lake of buried emotions was gushing out through the hole, drowning everything else in its wake. “Never giving me hugs or kisses or a shoulder to cry on…”
“Rachel and Eric are here,” Wayne said, scanning the parking lot. His face was grave. “I suggest you act happy to see them.”
You never responded to the text I sent you earlier,” Rachel said while they ate. She, Eric, Jessica, and Wayne had selected a table close to the rear of the room by the women with the photo albums, because Maria and Stephen were sitting toward the front. The arrangement had given Jessica’s mood a minimal boost.
“I didn’t know you sent one.” Jessica picked up her purse and slid her phone out of its compartment. “Oh, that’s why. My battery’s dead. What did you want?”
“Nothing important.” Rachel stabbed a piece of broccoli onto her fork and dipped it into a glob of ranch dressing. “I’ve been craving jalapeño sauce like crazy today, and I wanted to know if you had any you could bring for me.”
Jessica wrinkled her nose. “That spicy stuff? You’ll burn the kid.”
“No, I’m just toughening him up. Or her. Whatever it is.” She popped the broccoli into her mouth and chewed. “Ranch is still pretty darn good, though.”
Wayne and Eric started telling each other stories about their respective places of employment. While they talked, Jessica’s gaze drifted over to her parents’ table. She had been right about the beer. Stephen and David returned from the store with a package of napkins as well as two cases of Corona and two of Bud Light.
Now her father was sipping a can of the latter, saying something to Marco and emphasizing a point with his free hand like he usually did. Maria sat between them, smiling and looking like a retired runway model in that fancy outfit.
Why did you ever have kids when you clearly have more fun without them? Jessica wondered. There’s lots of ways you could have prevented us from being born.
She returned her attention to their own table. “What did Mom give you?” she asked Rachel. She had seen the two talking by the buffet table shortly after Rachel and Eric arrived.
Maria had passed Rachel a tiny gift bag. A peace offering, Jessica thought. There was no other reason for the woman to give her daughter a gift.
“Oh!” Rachel’s face brightened. She reached into her purse and pulled out a pink-and-blue baby rattle that had a white bow tied around the handle. “She told me she knows it’s probably too early to give me anything like this, but she didn’t know when else she’d be seeing me. And she told me she’s sorry about the way she reacted when I told her about the baby. She said it was the last thing she’d been expecting me to say. Sound familiar?”
“She could be lying.”
“Why would she do that?”
“To make you like her.”
“Well, I do feel a little more warmly toward her now that she doesn’t think I’m an idiot for letting this weirdo knock me up.” She ruffled Eric’s hair, and he swatted at her without pausing in his conversation with Wayne. “Look, he acts like he doesn’t even hear me.”
Jessica didn’t believe that their mother would have changed her mind on the matter in the span of only a few days. Maria was too stubborn for that.
“Are you okay?” Rachel asked.
She looked at their parents’ table again. Maria was spooning a glob of their potato salad into her mouth. “Did Mom ever tell you that she loved you?”
Rachel paused. “I don’t think so. I don’t really remember.”
“Why do you think she doesn’t love us?”
“She does love us. She just doesn’t know how to express it.”
Jessica smirked. Way to go for rationalizing Maria’s shortcomings. “How hard can it be to say I love you?”
“I don’t know, Jess. But can’t we just leave it in the past where it belongs?”
Why did everyone have to keep going on like that? With Wayne it was understandable since he hadn’t grown up in their house, but Rachel had been there. She harbored the same negative feelings that Jessica did, so it was dumb for her to act like Maria’s lack of parenting was excusable. “Today isn’t in the past,” Jessica said.
“Didn’t I tell you to start acting like an adult?” Wayne butted in.
She gave a snort. “Now you’re sounding like somebody’s dad.”
“I’m practicing.”
“I thought that was all in a hypothetical universe.”
“Did I miss something?” Rachel asked.
“Nothing you need to know about,” Jessica said, not quite in the mood to let her sister in on hers and Wayne’s personal jokes.
She wished Wayne hadn’t brought it up.
“Now I’m curious.”
“Don’t be.”
“We were just talking about future things,” Wayne said. “Purely hypothetical, though.”
Rachel laid down her fork. “Like what?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Hover boards. If we’re to believe Back to the Future, kids should be using them about now.”
“Don’t forget the flying cars,” Eric said.
“Those, too.”
“What in the world do hover boards and flying cars have to do with being a father?” Rachel asked him, looking skeptical.
Wayne shrugged. “When you figure it out, be sure to tell me, because I haven’t the slightes
t idea.”
Jessica forced herself to continue eating. Why was everyone acting so cheerful when a witch was sitting only a few tables away from them? She wanted to stand up on her chair and shout, “Look at her! She may have the body of an angel, but inside she’s a monster!” Someone had told her that another person was like that, too. Had it been Wayne? No, he wouldn’t say that kind of thing, because he was too nice for his own good, except for the fact that he’d bludgeoned Mother dearest to death with a fireplace poker. Strangely, that thought amused her. Maria could have used the same treatment. When there’s something deranged in the neighborhood, who you gonna call? Mom Busters!
She swayed a little in her chair. It grew difficult to think clearly. She hadn’t slept well, had she? Her brain felt as though it were lost in a fog bank. Who you gonna call…
All sound in the room grew fainter and eventually ceased. Her mind drifted like an anchorless ship lost at sea. Where was she? Not at home, though home was where the heart was, and her heart was in her chest, and her chest was attached to the rest of her, so she must have been home, because home was anywhere…
Her vision cleared. She saw her mother. Sitting in a recliner, reading a book. Turning the pages, one by one.
“Mommy, read me a story!”
Ignored. Another page turning.
“Please, Mommy?”
A glance. “They’ll teach you to read when you’re in school. Then you can read stories whenever you like.”
“But I want you to read me a story. Mommy, please! The little girl next door says her mommy reads her stories all the time…”
Her mother. Scrubbing a counter in the kitchen.
“Mommy! I cut my finger!” Blood. Pain.
A pause. “What did you cut your finger on?”
“There—there was a piece of glass in the yard, and I picked it up and—and—”
Leading her into the bathroom. Washing the cut, wrapping it in a bandage.
No kisses. No more blood, but pain…
Her mother. Doing paperwork by the window in the living room.
“Mom, do you care if I go hang out at Sidney’s?”
A distracted glance. “Hmm?”
“Sidney’s house. Do you care if I go over there?”