by Diana Estill
I could relate to that part. “Oh, I know all about that. Strangers used to say to me, ‘You can’t be pregnant! Why, you’re still a child yourself.’”
Pearly clapped her hands together and belted out a laugh. “I know tha’s right!”
We were an unlikely pair, Pearly and me. The one thing we both had in common was our struggle to accept a fate we’d failed to accurately predict.
Nothing could have dampened my mood that day. I’d taken the first few steps in a thousand-mile journey, and I felt invigorated. I didn’t get mad at Kenny later that afternoon, not even when he told me that, when he hadn’t been looking, which didn’t narrow things down too much, Sean had broken my Seals and Crofts album. The Hummingbird one.
SEVENTEEN
While I’d been only dreaming of flying away, Daddy had actually done it. Now I knew whose defective genes I’d inherited. I’d been afraid of what he’d think of me if I left Kenny, worried about his appraisal of me as his daughter, too embarrassed ever to admit the truth of my situation. Come to find out, all that time, my morals had been higher than his.
As soon as I heard the news from Ricky, I rushed over to Momma’s house. I found her sitting in a dining chair looking like somebody had let all the air out of her body. Kneeling before her, I waited for her to bring her gaze level. She didn’t tell me the whole story, but Ricky had already clued me in on the worst of it.
“How could he do this?” She blew her nose on one of Daddy’s embroidered hankies.
“Are you sure?” I shook my head. “I mean, did you call Brother Sontag? Did you ask him if he was missing anything...like, maybe his wife?”
That must have been the wrong response because Momma let out a bawl.
I patted her on one knee, doing my best to take back my remark. “Okay. Okay,” I said, uncertain which of us I wanted most to reassure.
Momma’s eyes appeared focused on something far ahead, way off in the distance. “What am I going to do? They were already in California when he called.” She let out a wail. “California! How is that possible?” She gave me a dumbfounded look. “I never even knew he liked avocados!”
I tried to ignore the twisted logic behind her statement. “Apparently, there’s a lot more you didn’t know. Nobody would think Daddy would do such a thing. It’s crazy. It’s selfish.” I searched for more descriptive words. “It’s plain...wrong.”
Momma folded and refolded her handkerchief. “I’m nobody’s wife, now. And if I’m nobody’s wife, then who am I?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Nobody.”
That was too much for me to hear. I leapt to my feet. She’d just identified the crux of the problem. If she’d regarded herself more highly, maybe Daddy would have, too. I wasn’t sure how, but it seemed to me that Momma’s attitude had maligned more than her marriage. “Don’t say that. You’re my mother, and you’re...you.”
Momma shook her head. “Without Jesse, I’m nothing, Renee.” She sat up straighter. “I’m not like you.”
I hadn’t come here to pick a fight, but it sure felt like one was brewing. “What do you mean by that?”
Momma refused eye contact. “You’ve always been so...” She appeared to search for the perfect word. “Independent.” The way she said it, it sounded like a curse word. But I accepted it as a compliment.
~
“I don’t freakin’ believe it,” I said to Pearly. “He left Momma just like that, after twenty-five years of marriage, and after she’d lived damn near her whole life treating him like he ruled the roost.”
Pearly peered at me over her safety lenses. “See there. That’s why you don’t let ‘em rule the roost.” She wagged one index finger in the air. “’Cause you can’t count on ‘em to be there the next mornin’ when it’s time to crow.”
But Momma had depended on Daddy. She’d expected him to do what she’d always done—make do with what was on hand. She simply hadn’t identified that what was available included the minister’s wife.
It crushed me to think my daddy would do something like this, that he could so easily abandon his family for another one. I guessed he’d have the daughter he’d always admired, the one he liked to describe as a natural beauty. If he couldn’t produce one himself, he’d steal somebody else’s. But I wasn’t about to give Janice Sontag a free pass. She’d been equally at fault. Her prayers had conjured up more than the Holy Ghost in Daddy’s heart.
“He went testifying on Wednesday evenings,” Momma had said, trying to recreate the crime scene in her head. “I knew Janice went with him. But as far as I know, that’s the only time they could have been together, alone.” Momma was looking for the road signs she’d missed, the ones that had been marked, Adultery Straight Ahead.
“All I can say is, Daddy must have been witnessing more to his own needs than to others’.”
Momma burst into tears.
In hindsight, I realized I didn’t possess the most sympathetic ears Momma could have bent. Our thoughts were traveling in different directions. She was dying over the idea of losing her marriage, and I was living for the day I could break free of mine. Mostly, I was mad at Daddy for pretending to be somebody he wasn’t and angry at Momma for forgetting who she was.
~
Neta Sue and her big mouth had plenty to say about Daddy’s disappearance. Even on holidays, she couldn’t restrain herself enough to be civil. “You know, some folks got more sex hormones than’s good for ‘em,” she spouted. “I hear you can inherit that. Maybe you got it from your daddy.”
I wanted to run over and snatch that fake copper hairpiece of hers right off the top of her half-bald head. How dare she link Daddy’s extramarital affair to my teen pregnancy? I’d been sixteen when I made my mistake. And I hadn’t done it with someone else’s spouse.
“I doubt hormones had much to do with it,” I fired back. “Daddy’s forty-six years old.”
“Like that means anything.” Neta Sue waved off my comment and wandered into her seldom-used kitchen. “Kenny’s father ain’t found his way home yet from wherever he’s laid up. And he’s fifty-two,” she continued from the next room.
Anson Murphy had been missing for years. Or so Neta Sue claimed. She said he’d gone off one day on one of his many three-day drunks, and simply failed to return. And even now, at Christmastime, she rarely made mention of him.
But I knew Momma was sitting home thinking plenty about Daddy and about everything she’d lost. She’d had to sell the farm because she couldn’t afford to keep it. Now she and Ricky lived in an apartment in the city. Christmas for her would never again be the same. Family traditions that had once brought comfort now summoned her grief. Even the standard tree ornaments seemed out of place hanging from a four-foot, tabletop tree inside Momma’s sparsely decorated apartment. Thank goodness Momma had Ricky to be with her on Christmas Eve. I’d see her tomorrow.
I pulled a chair away from Neta Sue’s dining table. Before I could get my caboose in the seat, she barked, “Don’t sit there. That’s where I set Kenny’s plate. You can sit over there.” She indicated another chair. “Next to Sean.”
Kenny’s painted dishes from childhood never failed to make their way back to Neta Sue’s dining table whenever we visited. It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever seen—a grown man eating his food and drinking his tea from his toddler plate and tumbler. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her set out his baby fork, too.
After we’d all filled our plates, Neta Sue said, “Mm, mm. I cooked that turkey right good, if I do say so myself.” She’d dived right in before we had even said prayer. “Pays to work for somebody who ‘preciates you.” She pointed with her fork to the free bird she’d received from Jumpin’ Janitors, where she worked. “I even got a canister of popcorn someone left ‘side their desk. Had a sign on it that said, ‘For the cleaning staff.’” She puffed up like an inner-tube making contact with an air compressor. “People ‘members those whose work’s important.”
I’d received a free calculator and
an extra half-hour lunch break on my last day of work before the holiday. And Kenny had been given a brick of cheese and a ten-pound ham. Unlike Neta Sue, I didn’t feel the need to brag on it.
Sean stood up in his chair and leaned across the table. I tugged at his corduroy britches, pulling him up short of his goal. I didn’t want him to get burned on Neta Sue’s candle centerpiece. The outer globe displayed a glass-beaded likeness of the Virgin Mary. “I wanna blow it out,” Sean whined. Earlier, I’d told him today was Jesus’ birthday. So I could see how he’d connected those dots.
“No, honey. You can’t have Grandma’s prayer candle,” Neta Sue scolded. She moved one fat forefinger like a pendulum, flashing her fake nails the way she always did when she was trying to show them off. “I’m burnin’ that so God’ll help me win next week’s twenty-five-hundred-dollar bingo pot.”
Kenny burst out laughing. “You ain’t gonna win no twenty-five hundred dollars playin’ bin-go, anymore than you ended up on The Price Is Right the last time you burned one of these things.”
“You shut your mouth.” Neta Sue gave Kenny a hostile look. “It worked for Charlotte Kilpatrick. She burned one to get a new car, and her loan was approved the next day!”
Sean sat down squarely in my lap and shoveled dressing with a plastic spoon. I let him go at it while I cut the turkey and jellied cranberries I’d layered onto my plate.
“I wish you’d look at that.” Neta Sue nodded toward Sean. “That baby must be starvin’ to death. Poor thing.” Then she cut her eyes at Kenny. “Notice you been lookin’ a little poor lately, too.”
~
The sounds of gunfire pierced the cold night air. I snuggled further down under the bedcovers. “Hope those idiots don’t hit our house,” I said. Bullets being cheaper than fireworks, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve could be dangerous.
Kenny leaned back onto his pillow and folded his arms behind his head, unconcerned. “Too far away.”
“Make any resolutions yet?” I asked.
“Yep. Gonna buy a twenty-one-inch TV.” That was the extent to which Kenny’s dreams traveled.
“How about a bigger place to live?” I suggested, hoping to raise his priorities.
He turned his head to study me. “Like a yacht, too?”
I waited for his mood to settle. “I been thinking...”
“Your first mistake—”
“—about going to college.”
“You ain’t going.”
“Wouldn’t cost us nothing, ’cause Keslo has a tuition assistance program that would pay for everything, even my books.”
Kenny punched his pillow to fluff its contents. “You ain’t going to no damn college.”
I propped up on one elbow and turned toward him. “I want to learn to write. Teachers said I had a talent for it.”
Kenny tucked the covers tight around his middle. “Then write yourself a note. College is for smart people who think they’re better than everybody else. And you ain’t going.”
An hour later, the gunfire ceased. My thoughts about higher education, however, did not.
~
After the holidays, I went back to work. But Ricky must have felt he had more options because he refused to return to school. “I gotta take care of Momma,” he’d said when I asked him about dropping out. “She needs me more than school does.” But from what I could tell, he hadn’t found work or done anything that would have prevented him from graduating.
I let the sore subject slide until late January, when I broke down and asked Momma, “What’s Ricky doing these days?”
“He’s fixed the neighbor’s TV set and made twenty dollars this week,” Momma said, citing the sum of Ricky’s work efforts. Momma knew how to inflate Ricky’s practically inert status to make him sound almost industrious. Once she’d told me that Ricky was working at a recycling plant. Later, I’d learned he’d only been picking up cans along the roadway and selling them for scrap aluminum.
A draft sent a chill over the assembly area. My work gloves would serve dual purpose today. I shivered and checked a lens for scratches amidst the room’s eerie silence. It sounded as if everyone’s body had returned to work without their minds. I glanced across the worktable where Pearly appeared engrossed in filling out a final inspection form.
“Look like nothin’ll ever become of my brother Ricky,” I said. “He’s probably gonna end up on some assembly line like us.”
Pearly gave me a stupefied look. “There’s worse places to be, you know. Like the pen, or maybe the cemetery.”
I snickered. “Or living with somebody who makes you feel like you’re in both.”
“How much you saved now?” she asked.
I thought for a second. “About two hundred.”
“Girl, tha’s rent for a month. You almost there.”
EIGHTEEN
Sexual desire can motivate a person to do about anything, I guess. It can make you crazy enough to rip off your underpants in a Winn-Dixie parking lot and, at the same time, it can make you feel like you’re damn near bulletproof. I’ll be the first to admit, that’s pretty much how Anthony affected my thinking.
His real name was Antonio Salazar. But he said I should call him Anthony. We met during one of my short coffee breaks, when he was standing behind me at the soda machine and I was searching for enough change to do the job. “Aw, shoot,” I said, cleaning up my language for the sake of strangers.
“Need some coins?” Anthony asked. He extended his hand and opened his fist to reveal an assortment of nickels, dimes, and quarters.
I’d been short a dime, so I searched inside his open palm to locate one. Then I glanced up at his deep-set eyes, handsome grin, and perfect teeth, all of which had been more than I’d expected to find. I felt myself blush. Great, I thought, now he knows I think he’s good-looking. “Thanks,” was all I could manage.
I didn’t know what caused him to follow me back to the break room bench. Maybe my pupils dilated really large or my jeans hugged my rear a little too tightly that day. Whatever was responsible for his initial attraction, Anthony stuck to me like white on rice.
Pearly was waiting for me on the other end of that four-seat platform. When Anthony approached, she scooted her broad behind to make room for him to sit next to me. As she did, she gave me an accusing, yet hilarious, stare.
“I see you here all the time,” Anthony said, allowing his right thigh to brush against my left. “What area do you work in?”
“That one, there.” I pointed to the catty-corner modular walls.
“Huh.” Anthony chuckled. “You’re building what I’m fixing.”
Anthony spent his days around the corner from me, working as a technician, trouble-shooting integrated circuitry with a group of men to whom I’d never paid much attention. Generally, when our break times were over, the men went one direction and the women disappeared in another, a kind of corporate segregation. Break time reminded me of the way, after Thanksgiving dinner, my father, brother, and uncles all used to get up from Granny Goodchild’s table and move into the den, leaving all the gals inside the kitchen to do the cleanup.
Anthony stole a glimpse at the break room clock. “What time do you go to lunch?”
“Eleven-thirty,” I said. “I go early.” Checking my surroundings, I noticed that most of the other employees had returned to their workstations. Pearly had left without even speaking to me, which wasn’t like her.
“Me, too.” Anthony deposited his empty soda can in a nearby trash receptacle. “Maybe I’ll see you there.”
“Maybe.”
I’d little more than turned the corner before I saw Pearly waiting for me. She punched me with one elbow as we hustled to return to our group. “That man’s got the hots for you. And you workin’ it, girl.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. I ain’t doing nothing but being polite.”
“Mm, hmm. Politely stupid.” Pearly opened a door marked, “Authorized Personnel Only,” and we b
oth stepped back into joint reality. “Just ‘cause you got a car now don’t mean you can act reckless,” she continued.
“Not being reckless. I’m just thinking hard about what I want someday, same way I got my Mustang.”
~
I wasn’t sure whose spirit I was channeling when I agreed to have lunch with Anthony. I heard myself say the word “yes,” but it didn’t feel like that answer had come from me.
Over a plate lunch that could have been mule feed for all I cared, Anthony looked at my left hand and said, “I take it you’re married.”
“Yes, I am. Just not happy about it.”
I studied the thin gold band that had cost Kenny thirteen dollars at K-Mart. What did it mean? A band of eternity, but eternal what? I wondered. Anthony gave me a sympathetic smile. He was gorgeous to look at, even better than those guys in the Sears catalogs. His body smelled manly, but in a good way. “If you want to expand on that, you can,” he said.
“Some other time, maybe.”
We ate in silence for what felt like forever before he asked, “You ever think about leaving him?”
I blotted my mouth with my napkin, borrowing time. “Hardly a day when I don’t think about it.” I stared off, away from Anthony’s piercing gaze, to keep from crying. “But it’s kind of like climbing Mount Everest. You know?”
Anthony tilted his head to one side. “What’s holding you back?”
“A Remington.”
“The western painter?”