Once in a Blue Moon

by Vicki Covington

  At church, the women always arrived looking serious, but by the time the music started they were sweating, swaying, and waving their hands, their faces all big, open smiles and closed eyes.

  The first time Sam took Tanya to church, she came to life in a way he had never seen. Generally reserved and prim, she dove right into the music, reaching for the ceiling as if to make way for the sky, the sun, the universe. When he witnessed the desire and passion she had inside, he couldn’t help wondering if he was good enough for her. Even though his family was big and respected in Greene County, it didn’t have the city money that Tanya’s family had. And he certainly wasn’t making what Tanya was making. He knew she didn’t like his dealing, but she hadn’t left him over it.

  Tonight, he walked to Landon and Abi’s house alone. Landon greeted him at the door. He followed her to the kitchen and accepted the beer she handed him. Abi, Jet, and Lenny were laughing, and he guessed maybe they’d had a few already.

  “Lenny, this is Sam. Sam, Lenny.”

  They shook hands.

  “This is important,” Jet said to Sam. “The Iowa Caucus is always important.”

  He sat beside Jet on the couch. Lenny was in the lounge chair. Abi was in the wingback wicker and Landon on the ottoman. Jet looked relaxed, if a little stiff around the middle. It looked to him like she might have a back brace on, and he wondered if that’s why she always wore her weird clothes—to distract. When she leaned against his shoulder, Sam didn’t shrug away.

  The exit poll results were coming in, and it looked good for Obama. The commentators kept mentioning the youth vote.

  “Those TV anchors are really pulling for him, aren’t they?” Sam asked no one in particular.

  Jet was popping her knuckles. Sam stared at her hands, so fragile and tiny—like a child’s hands. He put his hand over hers.

  “It’s all gonna be good,” he assured her.

  If Obama didn’t take Iowa, Sam had his own concession speech for his white friends. He was going to be like Poppy, strong and conciliatory. He still didn’t believe Obama would pull this off, but he was starting to notice the excitement around him.

  The pizza man arrived, and Landon paid him. But nobody was hungry for food yet; they were hungry for a sign in the form of a victory. Sam offered to pack a bowl, but no one wanted to smoke until the results were in.

  He looked around at the strange group. Lenny, who Sam sensed might have been apolitical—or at least not starry-eyed—until this moment. Abi, mindlessly petting Alejandro as he lay curled in her lap while she stared intently at the screen. He watched Landon put the pizza boxes on the table and arrange the napkins and plates she had set out, always keeping her eye on the TV.

  At the commercial break, everyone was quiet. In that moment, Sam allowed himself to, as Poppy would say, “‘be still and know that I am God.’”

  “We are ready to call for Iowa,” the anchor announced, cutting off the end of a commercial for an ED medication.

  And there he was. Obama’s black face appeared, a light turning on, and suddenly Sam believed. The others jumped up like their asses were on fire and started screaming and hugging each other. They cheered with beer bottles, passed around Sam’s pipe, broke into the pizza. To Sam, everything was a blur. He felt the stirrings of something brand new—the idea that he was a part of this.

  When Obama started speaking, the apartment grew silent once again.

  “They said it couldn’t be done,” he began. Sam felt like Obama was talking directly to him. His words made sense. And when he got to the part about hope, Sam welled up inside. “Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire. What led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation.” He was talking about Poppy. “What led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause.” He was talking about Sam’s mother, all his relatives who had marched. “Hope is what led me here today. With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.” He was talking to Sam now. “We are not a collection of red states and blue states. We are the United States of America. And in this moment, in this election, we are ready to believe again.”

  “This is a moment, isn’t it?” Sam asked the room as Obama concluded his remarks.

  Everyone had their cell phones out. Landon was trying to call her daughters. Lenny and Jet were quietly, furiously texting.

  Abi was screaming into her phone. “Daddy! Are you watching?” she said, pulling the metal cross out of her pocket.

  Sam thought of calling Poppy, but it was late, and whatever he needed to say could wait until morning. Still, this reminded him of the altar calls after the sermon, when people surrendered their fear and pride and knelt near Poppy’s feet as he quoted his favorite scripture: “‘And now being surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside all the weight that doth beset us and run with patience the race that is set before us.’”

  JASON

  Jason Kasir got the phone call at dawn. He thought before he answered that it must be Granddad wanting him to help out with a tenant dilemma—moving a piece of heavy furniture or sawing a dead limb from a tree.

  But it wasn’t his granddad. It was his father.

  “Jason,” he said. “I got bad news, buddy. I’m bummed.”

  Jason sat up straight. Anxiety ran like fire ants in his chest and down his arms. He hated what he already knew, what his father was going to tell him.

  “I’m in the county jail.”

  It wasn’t the first time. And yet every time, instead of calling one of Jason’s older sisters, his father called him. Jason wondered if it was because he was closer to his father’s parents, who wouldn’t answer calls from Abe Jr. anymore.

  Jason threw on some jeans and a sweater. He looked out the window and saw a light snow falling. Ordinarily, this would be a great day, since it so rarely snowed in Alabama. He got online and checked out the forecast. Little accumulation was expected. Still, it would have been—without his father’s phone call—an exciting day. Jason would have called his girlfriend, Carly, whom he’d met at Alateen, and gone over to her place to watch the snow from under her comforter. The two were now twenty-one, but they had bonded quickly at meetings when they were teenagers over shared experiences with messed-up parents.

  But instead of a day of keeping warm with Carly, Jason would be forced to bail out his father. Again.

  Jason drove downtown to the Northside. He parked in the deck and took the crossover to the jail. The sheriff’s deputy at the front desk looked as bad as the guys in the tank—eyes swollen, face red, as if he were nursing his own hangover. Jason showed him his ID.

  “I’m here for Abe Kasir Jr.”

  The deputy looked at him. “That an Iraqi name or what?”

  “We’re Lebanese,” Jason replied.

  “Oh, really? Sounds Muslim to me.”

  Jason felt a kind of anger rise but tried to keep cool. “We’re Christians,” he said.

  The deputy stood and got a file from the cabinet, sat back down, thumbed through it, and said, “This is your daddy we’re holding?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Looks to me like this isn’t his first time around. He’s got a thick chart here. Not his first time around, is it?”

  “Could I see him, please?” Jason didn’t know if he wanted to cry or yell.

  The deputy directed Jason to the visitation room, where he’d wait until his father emerged, handcuffed. Jason had been through this before.

  After nearly thirty minutes, Abe Jr. appeared through a blue metal door. He had bruises on his face and a cut over his right eyebrow. He looked old, as old as Granddad. He was dressed in what l
ooked like brown operating-room scrubs. He sat down at the table across from his son, smiling weakly.

  Jason checked his father’s arms to see if they showed any track marks or collapsed veins. He didn’t see any. This meant his dad was taking Oxycontin right now, rather than shooting heroin.

  Jason resented the knowledge he carried about classifications of drugs, painkillers in particular. He wanted to be normal. Carly’s mother was an alcoholic. Though he knew addiction was addiction, opiates seemed so much more shameful than booze.

  “I need to get out of here,” his father said.

  “What’s the charge?”

  “Possession with intent to sell.”

  Jason felt the despair creeping up on him. Then he closed his eyes, silently recalling the Serenity Prayer, which he had learned in Alateen: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can change, and the wisdom to know the difference.

  “Jason, man? Hello?”

  Jason opened his eyes and stared at his father. He was grateful that he had learned his father’s disease wasn’t his. “Don’t ask, don’t talk, don’t feel,” they’d say in Alateen, reciting the old rules of their messed-up homes.

  “I said I need to get out of here,” his father repeated.

  “How much?” Jason asked calmly.

  “You need to ask the deputy,” his father told him.

  Jason knew that his father wasn’t going to rehab again. He had no intention of long-term recovery. Why should he if he knew that Granddad, once Jason told him what had happened, would pay to get him out?

  And sure enough, his next words were, “Go tell Pops I need him to come down here and get me out.”

  “I don’t want to bother him with this,” Jason said.

  His father slammed his hand on the tabletop that separated them. “Goddammit, son!” he yelled. “I’m not getting no bondsman, if that’s what you’re thinking. We’re family, damn it.”

  The deputy appeared at the door and motioned for Jason to rise. “Time’s up,” he said. He gestured for Jason to leave, nodding toward the door. Then—with no small effort—he took Abe Jr. by the arm and led him back behind the bars.

  Jason sat in the parking lot, gripping the wheel tightly, trying to breathe. He wanted to call Carly, but it was too early.

  He drove back home, made some coffee, and sat on the couch, leaving his coat on. He was shivering even though it was warm inside. He looked around his apartment, at the posters on his wall, his laptop, the framed maps his grandmom had given him, the things he’d carried with him into adulthood—his old baseball cards, a globe, Harry Potter books, a Swiss Army knife.

  His place was one that his granddad owned, so he didn’t have to pay rent. He knew that in many ways, he was lucky. But not in other ways.

  Jason knew he would have to tell his grandparents. They wouldn’t like his keeping it from them. But it wasn’t even seven o’clock.

  He pondered the idea of not telling them. After all, his father had used his one phone call on Jason, and the information was Jason’s to share. If he didn’t tell his grandparents, then maybe he could break the chain of enabling. If he kept his father’s incarceration to himself—telling only Carly and his group at Alateen—then maybe he would be doing the healthy thing.

  Jason thought about his father sweating out the withdrawal on his cell floor. The county wouldn’t intervene. Then maybe his father would finally hit rock bottom, feel that pain, get some humility, have nobody to turn to but himself, or maybe a higher power.

  But what if he died in there?

  The conversation Jason was having with himself wasn’t new. The pattern was always the same: his father was thrown in jail; he called Jason, who went to see him; then Jason delivered the message to Granddad, who—despite his grandmom’s interventions—inevitably rushed to get up the bail money. Grandmom had been to Al-Anon, so she wanted no part of Abe Jr.’s cycle.

  Jason knew he wasn’t free from the sickness. He felt compelled to tell his grandparents because he knew it would hurt Granddad not to help, to learn only later that his son was locked up.

  Jason decided he’d wait awhile before going over to his grandparents’. At least his father would have to suffer through some suspense.

  He went to the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. He was nothing like Abe Jr., with one exception. Jason had inherited his father’s eyes. Dark as the Warrior River, where they used to go fishing together.

  Jason had borne the brunt of his father’s addiction. His sisters married young and got the hell away from Abe Jr. His mother’s career was taking care of her addicted husband. Jason got lost in the shuffle. When he turned twelve, he went to live with his grandparents. Now, he was in college on a music scholarship and doing well. Jason didn’t play an instrument. His voice was his instrument. He sang in the choir at the Kasirs’ church, often soloing, and had on occasion even made some money singing at weddings and funerals.

  Jason sent Carly a text: “Call me.”

  Back in his bedroom, he lay in bed with his phone in his hand. Finally, it rang.

  “Hey, babe, what’s up?”

  Jason told Carly that his dad was in jail. She asked if he wanted to come over. He told her he had to go see his grandparents first.

  “Just talk to me for a while,” he said.

  She understood that need, and told him a red cardinal was perched on the ledge of her porch, so beautiful against the tiny flakes that were falling.

  He closed his eyes and listened to her voice, feeling calmer with her every word.

  “Just keep talking,” he said.

  MR. KASIR

  When Mr. Kasir’s phone rang, he was in the kitchen, sipping coffee and watching Mrs. Kasir. The breakfast dishes were washed. She was taking off her apron. He answered. It would be one of his tenants, he knew.

  “Hi, Mr. Kasir. It’s Landon Cooper.”

  “Hello, Landon.” Mr. Kasir put his free hand to his chest. “How are you doing? You’ve been on my mind.”

  This was an understatement; he so wanted to tell her more about Carissa. Mrs. Kasir patted his shoulder and left the room.

  “So, I’ve been nominated to call you and ask if some of us can put up Obama signs in our yards.”

  “It’s fine by me,” he replied. “The yards are yours.”

  He stood and walked to his window, peeking out at his lawn. A few flakes of snow were blowing, but they disappeared before they hit the grass. Although real snow had been forecast, nobody in Birmingham wanted to get their hopes up.

  “Is it snowing there?” he asked her.

  “Let me check,” she said.

  He pictured her walking over to the window and pulling the sheer curtains back.

  “Yes, it is! It is!”

  “I know you and Abi must agree on the signs, but are Jet and Sam in agreement? And there is Roy Manley across the street from you, and Nicole, who lives upstairs from him. And Jesse, in the bungalow. And Tina. Sid. Frankly, I’ve never been in this position. I wonder if you should ask them.”

  “Of course,” Landon said.

  Mr. Kasir reconsidered. “No,” he decided. “It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.”

  He offered to help plant the stakes. Landon tried to dissuade him, but he insisted.

  “This snow won’t stick,” Mr. Kasir said. “And even if it does, the truck has four-wheel drive.”

  “I do have something to give you,” Landon said.

  “I’ll be over soon.”

  He took a deep breath and walked past Mrs. Kasir, who sat by the fireplace knitting. Good, he thought. She hadn’t looked out the window yet at the light snowfall. She would have put her foot down about his going anywhere.

  Once outside, he saw that the children on his street were starting to appear, toting sleds as if there was something actually to slide on. He turned the heater on and headed over the mountain.

  When he got to Landon’s house, he saw the s
igns on her porch. Before he could knock, she was there at the door, a warm smile on her face.

  “Come in, Mr. Kasir,” she said.

  “Don’t you want to get to it?”

  “We don’t have to put those signs up right now. You need to warm up first, and the coffee is already made.”

  Just as it had during his previous visits, Landon’s apartment felt like a holy place. She brought him the coffee in the same good china and sat down. Then, bless her, she got up, went to the secretary, and retrieved a copy of the photograph of her and her brother.

  “Here,” she said. “I made a copy for you, so you can look at it whenever you want to.”

  It was as if she knew how important this was to him.

  Landon’s home was alive with plants, light, and hope. What if she had not rented from him? Now that she was in his life, he hardly recalled what it had been like without her, when he had nobody to hear him out, to say her name to—Carissa. It wasn’t a secret now.

  “You have to remember,” Mr. Kasir said, “that we had spent months training for the invasion—fastening splints, winding bandages, making tourniquets. It wasn’t fear so much as anticipation. We knew we wouldn’t have sterile dressing rooms like we did in our rehearsals; we’d be working in the sand on a beach. We had seen drawings on blackboards of what the invasion was to be like. We were all wondering, would we drown? Would we be able to save anyone? We were expecting—and we found—gaping shrapnel wounds, loss of limbs, men blinded and knocked unconscious. When we were in the throes of it, everything was so loud and fast, you couldn’t focus on any one thing. There were ships, tanks, men—and women, too—doctors, nurses, drivers. It was so big, so big a fight. After a few hours, I started to think I was dreaming, like I was seeing myself outside of myself.”

  “Depersonalization,” Landon said, setting her coffee cup down gently.