Heart with Joy

by Steve Cushman

  “Will you help your mom with the motel?” Tia asked.

  “I guess so.” I knew we would cook together and hang out, go to the beach, but I wasn’t sure if she would want, or need, my help.

  Parents and young children walked by, most of them saying hi to Tia and giving me the hairy eyeball like I was some pervert trying to take advantage of her. I reached over and held her hand. She didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything. That, I suppose, is the way these things happen, without the need for words.

  There was so much I could tell her—how I felt about her, how I wished I wasn’t leaving for Mom’s right now—but I didn’t want to ruin this evening. Instead, I held her hand and breathed in the fresh air, listened to the occasional snippet of music drifting out of the houses we passed.

  When we made it back to her house, Dad was sitting in his truck in her driveway. “Hey, guys,” he said.

  “Sorry to be late,” I said.

  He waved my comment away.

  I walked Tia to her front door. She opened her arms and we hugged again. She cried a little and I squeezed her tighter “See you soon,” I said.

  “Call me.”

  “I will.” I walked away, out to my father’s old truck.

  As we drove away, he patted my knee. “You okay?”

  “Fine, Dad.”

  “What did you have for dinner?”

  “Fajitas,” I said.

  “Were they good?”

  I laughed. “Damn good.”

  “Watch your mouth,” he said, but I knew he was only joking.

  “You sure you’re going to be okay?” I asked. We’d stopped at a red light.

  “I’ll be alright.”

  “What about Lucky and the birdfeeders out back?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll feed the cat and change the feeders. It’s not like you’re going to be gone forever. It’s only a couple months.”

  “I know.” Then the light turned green and we drove on home.

  45

  Even though I talked to my mother a couple times a week and thought about her everyday I was still nervous about seeing her. When I walked off the plane, into the airport terminal, I spotted her right away. She’d cut four or five inches of her hair off and had gained some weight, but she looked great. I wondered if I looked any different to her.

  We hugged and she smelled like I remembered: her odd mix of bananas and cigarettes.

  On the drive back to the motel, I stared out the open window at the palm trees lining the highway, trying to figure out if I could live in a place like this.

  She asked how Dad was doing, if he was still running. “Yep, he’s doing good. He’s up to seven miles on the weekends.”

  “Damn,” she said. “Who would’ve thought?”

  “Not me.”

  The motel was pink with nine rooms in a loose U-shape. The parking area was crushed pink and white stones. I thought of Mrs. Peters and her driveway and that day my leg was magically buried in her stones.

  The unit right in front of the pool had MANAGER stenciled in white letters above the peephole. “Home, sweet home,” she said.

  I carried my suitcase inside. The first room was the office, a little box of a room with a table, two chairs and a phone. I assumed this was where the guests came to check in or out. Beyond that was another door, which led to her actual apartment. The kitchen was small, but there was a breakfast nook and living room with an old ugly green love seat.

  Mom had three different books on the coffee table in front of the couch, each book was open face down to mark the spot. On a TV stand, next to the door, was a small stereo. She had told me in one of our conversations that she didn’t have a TV. She said the TV in one of the rooms broke the week after she got here and she’d put hers in there and didn’t miss it at all.

  In the living room, one of the walls was covered with about twenty of those postcards my father and I had been sending her.

  I smiled and walked over to the wall, read a few, most of them I remembered either coming up with myself or Dad running by me. I read one I didn’t recognize: I miss pulling your hair from the bathroom drain. It was gross but I got his point.

  “You wouldn’t know anything about those, would you?” she asked, walking up behind me.

  I shrugged.

  “Funny, your father doesn’t either.”

  “Where are they from?”

  “Greensboro, North Carolina.”

  “Home sweet home,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  I couldn’t wait to tell Dad about this wall and how all those silly lines had added up to this, some sort of epic poem.

  Mom said she had to do some work for a couple hours and then we would go and do something together. “Why don’t you go check out the beach?”

  I hadn’t come here to go to the beach without Mom, so I told her

  I would help.

  She asked me to skim the leaves out of the pool. I watched her walk away. She was wearing cut-off jean shorts and a bathing suit top. The Florida sun had given her a dark tan and the work had made her arms and legs more muscular. She actually looked healthier now that she’d gained some weight. I’d always thought she was too skinny.

  As if she could sense I was watching her walk away, Mom turned back and smiled at me, waved. She moved from room to room, knocking on each door. She would disappear inside for a couple minutes and then come out carrying a pile of sheets and towels, which she loaded onto a laundry cart. I took my time with the pool, partly because it was lulling work, and so damn hot in Florida even at the beginning of June, but also because I wasn’t sure what else she needed me to do.

  When she finished changing the linens in each room, I walked over. “Anything else I can do?”

  “Do you mind vacuuming?”

  Of course, I didn’t mind vacuuming. I was used to it since I did most of the cleaning at our house anyway. By the time I finished the fifth room, I realized they were all decorated the same. The walls were an ocean-blue color, the carpet light pink. The furniture, a couch and reclining chair in the living room, were white, and the coffee and end tables were some sort of wicker material. The bed sheets all had the same cheesy sea shell design on them.

  It took a little over two hours to vacuum and clean all the rooms. Then we went for a walk, holding hands, the three blocks to downtown Venice. We passed shops that sold tourist stuff—Tshirts and cups and coffee mugs with pictures of Florida on them, lots of shark’s teeth too. There were antique shops and an English Tea room. We walked past a candy store and the post office and newspaper stand and stopped at an ice cream shop.

  It was a hole in the wall, literally, located on the side of a hardware store. They opened a little window and took your order. Mom and I sat on a bench and watched cars drive by as we shared a banana split. Most of the people here were older, retirees probably, but the ice cream was good and cold. I’d wanted to be with my mother for the last four months and now that I was sitting beside her I wished Dad was with us. I wondered how she’d respond if I said that.

  Then I heard something I couldn’t quite place. It was a steady, rhythmic sound, and when I looked down the street I spotted a man in jeans and a white tank top riding a huge white horse on the side of the road. Cars, mostly Cadillacs, passed him. There were a lot of silver and gold Cadillacs in Venice, Florida.

  Mom talked about how people come from all over the world to find shark’s teeth here. She said it was so easy to find them, like sea shells on a North Carolina beach.

  After the horse and rider disappeared around the corner, Mom said, “That’s Tommy. He trains horses for the circus.”

  “Circus?”

  “The Ringling Brothers Circus is in Sarasota. He trains the horses until they’re ready and then they go into the circus. Maybe we can go and see him if you want to ride a horse.”

  “Maybe.”

  I heard an unfamiliar bird. It’s song was rhythmic, rising and falling, da-duh-da, da-duh-da. In the median, a
t the base of a palm tree, there was a cardinal-sized bird, mostly black with red and yellow on its wings. I’d never seen that type of bird before. I’d have to check the bird book when we made it back to the motel.

  I asked Mom how old the motel was. “About fifty years,” she said. “It was practically destroyed by a hurricane, but grandpa bought it and fixed it up.”

  “Why did you move to North Carolina?” I couldn’t remember ever hearing that story.

  “When my parents split up, Mom and I moved up to Charlotte, her sister lived up there. I was only five or six at the time. And then a few years later Dad moved up there to be with us and hired someone to run the motel.”

  “Did you miss your Dad when you were apart?”

  “I’m sure I did. But I don’t really remember. We miss people all the time. I have missed you and your father. It doesn’t mean I sit around and stare at pictures of you and cry all day. Missing someone doesn’t have to be a big, dramatic thing.”

  I was relieved to hear her say there were more ways to miss someone than to sit around moping. I’d felt guilty for not missing her more in the last few weeks, and then for not missing Mrs. Peters as much as I thought I should once I began cooking and spending time with Tia.

  As we walked back to the motel, Mom said, “I can’t wait to try some of your cooking. Your father says you’ve turned into a little gourmet chef.”

  “He’s just saying that.”

  I told her I’d like to cook for her tonight, make what I’d come to think of as my specialty: salmon and spinach with butter sauce.

  “Sounds good,” she said.

  We drove to the grocery store to buy supplies for the meal. Instinctively, I looked over at the registers, but Tia wasn’t there. There was an old woman with a smile on her face. I wondered what Tia was doing and figured she was probably cooking.

  Back in Mom’s kitchen, I explained how the salmon should be just slightly pink, how I liked to cook the spinach slowly with lemon sauce, maybe add a few walnuts.

  She let me do most of the cooking. When I looked back to her, she was drinking her wine and bobbing her head to Van Morrison singing about being real, real gone. “What?” she asked.

  I laughed. In some ways, it was like she’d never left and we were together again in our kitchen. But this wasn’t our kitchen. This wasn’t our home and in some ways, besides the obvious physical ones, she seemed like a different person.

  “You don’t need me at all,” she said. “Your father tells me you take care of the house, take care of everything, cooking and laundry, cleaning the house.”

  “We miss you,” I said.

  “I know.” She stepped up and hugged me.

  Because there was no proper table, we sat on the love seat and ate. When the CD stopped, I looked over at Mom. She was sleeping, her head resting back on the couch, her feet on the coffee table. The empty plate on her lap. The glass of wine between her fingers. I stared at her. Her strawberry-blond hair, her skin perfect except for a small scar by her right eye. There was another scar by her right knee, about two inches long and vertical. Her little toe on each foot was curved in a little. These were all things I’d seen before but had never really noticed, had never considered asking about.

  I took the wineglass and plate from her and brought them to the kitchen sink, then found a sheet in the hall closet and covered her, turned the lights off and drifted off to sleep beside her on the couch, my mind abuzz with questions I’d ask her: where did she get those scars on her face and knee, why had she really left us and was she coming back?

  46

  The next couple days in Florida took on a sort of rhythm. Mom and I would wake early and go for walks on the beach. We collected shark’s teeth, sandwich bags full. All you had to do was scoop up some of the wet sand and sift through it—you’d get a couple teeth every time. I planned to send some to Tia.

  After breakfast and the guests started checking out, we would clean the rooms. I skimmed the pool every morning and used a blower to clean off the sidewalks and vacuumed whatever rooms Mom hadn’t made it to.

  I couldn’t help but notice she seemed happier than I ever remembered her being at home. She didn’t walk around with a big silly smile on her face, humming a happy song under her breath, but she was calm and never got upset and moved around the motel like she was at ease, kind of like Mrs. Peters in her garden. While I would have liked to think it was because I was here with her, I knew this wasn’t the case.

  It wasn’t that I remembered Mom as being miserable at home, but she was definitely less stressed here. She seemed to like sitting behind the desk, working over her numbers with a calculator, and all the other daily chores that went along with running a motel. In a strange way it seemed as if this was where she belonged, as if this was the life she was supposed to lead, not one complicated with all the trivial duties of running a household for a husband and son.

  We’d finish most of the work by one and then eat fish tacos or chicken paninis for lunch and head downtown so she could drop off her daily bank deposit. We’d stop for ice cream and take our time walking back in the mid-day sun, the sidewalks so hot it felt like your skin was being burned right off the bottom of your feet. She joked that you could fry an egg on the sidewalks here.

  Back at the motel, we’d take a swim to cool off, then Mom would close all the blinds, put a sign on the door that said out of office until 5, and write from two to five every afternoon. I tried to stay away, to keep busy while she worked.

  While she wrote, I’d sit by the pool and look through the bird book Mrs. Peters had given me or read one of the cookbooks I’d brought, planning what we would have for dinner that night. Or I would take a sandwich bag full of birdseed and walk around the block, dropping seed for the blue jays and mockingbirds I saw in the middle of the day. And sometimes I just lay there in the shade of a palm tree, trying to imagine what it would be like to live here. A couple months seemed possible, but it didn’t feel like home to me.

  When I saw the curtains open, I knew she was done writing for the day. She’d walk out, stretch and ask what I had in mind for dinner. It was like she was in a daze from the writing, the slow transition from the world of her fiction to the real world around us. I’d seen that look on her face many times. I’d come home from school and she’d look up glassy-eyed from her typewriter, staring for a second, as if she didn’t even recognize me.

  As we cooked dinner, she let me do most of the work. She said it was obvious who had the talent. Whenever I waved away these comments and compliments or told her how I’d learned it all from her, she’d say, “No, Julian. I didn’t teach you this.”

  After dinner, we would go for another long walk on the beach. We talked about different things. Of course, we talked about her novel and about Dad, about his running, and I told her I’d spent the day with him at work and how being a nurse didn’t seem like such a bad job at all. And I told her about Mrs. Peters’ son cleaning out her house to sell it and about the Price is Right video.

  I told her about dropping birdseed on the sidewalk. And I told her about Tia and the cooking we’d done together and how her mother offered me a job. She nodded, not pressing me, letting me reveal whatever I wanted and keeping to myself whatever I didn’t want to share. I couldn’t remember what I’d told her on the phone. If I had told her any of this, she never mentioned it, only listened as if what I had to say was the most important thing in the world.

  One night we made it back around eleven. The lights were off in all the other rooms. The No Vacancy sign flashed on and off. She changed the sign each night when we went for our walks, said that way people wouldn’t come looking for the manager. I knew this wasn’t very good for business, but it seemed like something she would do.

  As we sat beside each other on the couch, I asked her how she got the scar by her eye. “I’ve had it for years,” she said.

  “I’d never noticed it.”

  “There’s a lot around us that we don’t notice, Julian. Ev
eryday, here especially, I’m learning new things, seeing things for the first time.”

  “But the scar,” I said, knowing I had to keep her focused. If not, she would go off on some tangent we might never recover from.

  “I was little, maybe four or five. We were still living down here, in Sarasota. Walking home from school one day, I turned a corner and a German Shepherd was standing in the middle of the sidewalk. It was as tall as me and before I could do or say anything it jumped up and bit me. I ran home screaming. My father, your grandfather, took me to the hospital where they stitched it up. Looking back, it probably bit me because I scared it.

  “I’m sure you don’t remember it but I’ve told you that story before. You were two, maybe three. You were sitting on my lap one day, running your fingers across the scar, and you said, ‘Mommy, why boo-boo?’”

  Another night, after one of our walks, I asked her, “Are you happy here, Mom? You seem happy.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It feels right to me to be here. I like the hours. I like the fact that I can write whatever I want. If I want to stay up until three in the morning I can. Of course, I miss you. You know that.”

  “Why did you really leave, Mom?”

  “The motel,” she said, looking away, out into the darkness of night, as if the real answer might be there.

  “I’m not stupid.”

  “I know you’re not, Julian. What did your father tell you?”

  “Just that you needed time to figure some things out.”

  She turned to me and smiled. “Your father and me sort of drifted apart. It didn’t happen overnight. It happens to a lot of couples. One day, I woke up and realized he wasn’t the same man I married. He’d become this zombie, working all the time at a job he didn’t like. The man I’d met was young and alive. He was going to do something with his life, be an artist, make magic with his fingers. I always wanted him to go back to his pottery. He was so damn good at it.