When Horses Had Wings

by Diana Estill

  When I woke up, I found Sean had colored in his coloring book, along four feet of wall next to his bed, and all over the bookmark I kept inside Daddy’s Bible. In a fit of frustration, I’d smacked him across the back of his legs and cried, “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you do anything right?”

  Now I realized that I was the one destined to eternally screw up.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A more insightful person might have seen it coming. But I didn’t. And it was hard for me to describe the feelings I had when that sorry, no-good, sheep-dung for balls Wilmot fired me, though I can tell you they weren’t good ones. What got me most was the way he’d done it: right after Kenny had called me three times in a row, screaming like a banshee. And somehow that moron Wilmot thought I was the one who was causing trouble. He said, “Ms. Murphy, I’ve warned you before about disrupting the workplace. This is your divorce, not ours. I don’t think the entire staff needs to suffer for your bad decisions. We’ve tolerated this long enough.”

  He dismissed me just like that, after I’d done everything but wipe his ass for him for the past ten months. And now all of the sudden, he found it “intolerable” to listen to a few of my noisy phone conversations? Without a job, how did he think I was going to pay for my divorce? Or for that matter, pay my rent? That cud-chewing ox didn’t care.

  I’d been a good secretary to Wilmot. He couldn’t deny it. With perfect diction and a pleasant voice I’d learned to say, “Good afternoon. Marketing. How may I direct your call?” No one would ever guess I was a former assembly worker. But none of that mattered.

  “You can carry this down to Personnel. They’ll take things from here.” Wilmot handed me a typed memo that detailed the grounds for my termination. And termination was a good word for it. I was as good as dead. It would have served him right if I’d keeled over then and there.

  I feared I’d have to go back to working on some assembly line. With nothing but a GED and a couple of college classes to show for an education, I’d likely have to start at the bottom again—if anyone would even hire me after I’d been fired.

  Lord knew, I had neither the looks nor the coordination to take up exotic dancing.

  The journey from Wilmot’s office to the human resource center left me short of breath but not rage. I followed the familiar passage that snaked through two buildings connected by an enclosed walkway. Plodding the distance, I had plenty of time to think about all the things I wished I’d said to Wilmot, ample opportunity to regret that I’d never gotten even with him for spitting all that chewing tobacco into my trash can. I used to have to hide my waste paper basket underneath my desk to keep him from mistaking it for a spittoon. How many times had I thought to throw a used tampon in his wastebasket, to see if I could equally gross him out? Why hadn’t I done it? All he could have done was fire me. In the end, he’d let me go anyway.

  I knew I’d lose custody of Sean, for sure. By costing me my job, the only positive attribute I had, Kenny had already won. Would there ever be a way for me to escape that maniac? It seemed as though our divorce proceedings had only given him another weapon to use against me, one that extended his reach so that he could strangle me with someone else’s hands.

  I trudged through the corridor, envisioning new ways for Kenny to become a fatality. An unlimited number of industrial accidents came to mind. Maybe he’d get decapitated by a faulty fire hydrant, now that he worked in the Water Department. More appropriate still, perhaps he could die from something sewer-related. He might get eaten alive by a bunch of Norway rats. Indiscriminate ones, that is. I imagined rodents gnawing at his crotch.

  Poetic, but unlikely.

  No, he’d be more apt to fall into one of those massive vats at the waste treatment plant. That would make for an equally fitting end. I begged God to, however He chose to do it, take Kenny’s mortal life before the tyrant ruined the rest of mine.

  Once Kenny learned he’d managed to get me fired, he wouldn’t stop there. Like a hawk, he’d be sure to make another pass. With those long talons of his, escape would be next to impossible. I was as doomed as a rabbit in a freshly mown field.

  Inside the covered walkway leading to Personnel, the floor tiles, modular wall panels, and ceiling grids all merged into one massive tunnel of gray. One vast sewer drain. I could almost hear the flushing sounds. And the human waste being disposed of was me.

  I had the bend in sight, the one that led in one direction to the parking lot and in the other to my final destination. Maybe I’d bolt for the outdoors instead of progressing toward my official exit. I could see it in my mind’s eye, visualize getting into my car and simply driving away. I’d roll down my windows and let the wind rip through my hair while I headed south. To where, I didn’t know or care. When the gas tank neared empty, maybe I’d hit the accelerator and speed until I flipped my Mustang end over end.

  Naw, that plan wouldn’t work. I could end up hurting someone else. Better for me to drive the speed limit, follow those white lines pointing to nowhere in particular, drive until I simply ran out of gas and then had to stop. Yeah. I could do that. I’d likely end up somewhere in the Rio Grande, where I’d take up working as a migrant tomato-picker. Kenny wouldn’t bother me then. I’d make myself so invisible that even a skilled predator like him couldn’t find me.

  I pictured that warm burrow in the sand, the one I’d hide in, the one with an opening so narrow that nothing could crawl inside. Nothing but me. Its umber walls would cradle me, its shadowy hollows lulling me into a peaceful sleep. If only there might be such a place. If I didn’t have Sean, I might have really done it.

  But I did have Sean. And he needed me, and I loved him.

  I opened the door leading to Personnel and faced whatever waited on the other side of unemployment.

  ~

  After I’d been escorted from the building by a security guard, instead of heading due south, I drove to get Sean from daycare. By the time I reached him, I’d had a good bawl and wiped my eyes dry.

  Sean marched out to the reception area to greet me looking like he’d just been pronounced World’s Best Kid. He ran to my arms, same as usual.

  Later that night, when Sean asked me why he had to go to bed before Happy Days came on, I told him it was on account of me being sick, which wasn’t exactly a lie. I’d never felt worse in my whole life. I was sick of struggling to survive, fed up with fighting for what should have been free, and terminally tired of men in general.

  Ever since I’d confessed Kenny had been stalking me, Anthony had been seeing me less and less. He still called me, but now, when I most needed him, he seldom came around.

  I climbed into bed and swathed myself inside my peach floral-patterned bedspread, muffling my sobs. The quilted layers smelled of spring-scented fabric softener. I breathed through the covers, staining them with wet mascara. Staring at the patterns, I thought how they were the closest thing to fresh flowers I would see for a while. Unless I got lucky enough to attend Kenny’s funeral.

  No one ever gave me flowers. Anthony had given me a long-stemmed rose, once. But I didn’t count that. A woman dressed in nearly nothing but the top half of a tuxedo had all but embarrassed him into buying it for me. If the truth were told, he’d probably done it to please her more than me.

  When I next heard from Anthony, I’d tell him about Kenny’s threatening phone call and what it had cost me.

  “You worthless slut!” Kenny had screamed through the phone. “Who’d you sleep with last night?”

  I’d become smarter over time and begun parking my car in a different space, one partially hidden by a commercial dumpster. Probably, Kenny had steered through the apartment complex and hadn’t seen my vehicle. From there, he’d allowed his demented mind to drive him nuts.

  The telephone on top of my cardboard side table rang several times before I answered it. I prayed it wasn’t Kenny.

  “Hi. It’s me,” Anthony said in that deep measured voice of his. “Just calling to tell you about the interesting
day I’ve had.” He sounded different than normal, possibly because tears had pooled inside my ears and I was hearing him through water.

  “Mm-hmm, me, too,” I said, as if maybe I’d blown a tire on my way home, locked myself out of my apartment, or seen Elvis in the Laundromat—but not in any way that would have suggested I’d been fired from my job.

  “You feeling okay?” he asked. “Sounds like you’re a little stopped up or something.”

  I sniffed once. “No. I’m okay. Go ahead.”

  “You’re not going to believe who called me today.” He paused and waited for me to respond, but I was too tired to guess. I could barely remember my own name, let alone his list of oddball friends and previous lovers. If he’d heard from Darlene, I didn’t care.

  “Kenny,” he said, identifying the mystery caller.

  “What? Omigod!” I gasped. “How’d he get your name and number?”

  “Funny, I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  Anthony sounded suspicious. Surely he didn’t think I’d tell Kenny about him or our Saturday night rendezvous?

  “Maybe he trailed me to your place last Saturday night.” My fears cycled uncensored from my brain to my mouth.

  That slip of the tongue undoubtedly led to what followed.

  “He’s going to hurt somebody before this whole thing’s over with,” Anthony predicted.

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “No, he threatened you. He said, ‘If you want your little girlfriend to stay pretty, you better stay away from her.’” Anthony coughed once, like he had something lodged in his throat.

  The obstruction might have been his balls.

  “Renee, look...I’m going to keep my distance for a while, at least until after your divorce is final. This hothead needs time to cool down.”

  I didn’t even try to catch the receiver as it slipped from my hands, fell to the floor, and bounced a few times. I left the device dangling by its thin, curled cord and numbly listened to the dial tone.

  Like everything else that had happened to me that day, I didn’t have any say. To rid himself of Kenny, Anthony had made up his mind to sacrifice me. In that respect, he was no different than Wilmot. So he could go ahead and say goodbye, if that’s what he wanted. I no longer needed him.

  Perhaps I never had.

  TWENTY-SIX

  My divorce hearing took place on April Fool’s Day, at the Limestone County Courthouse. Inside the building, massive columns supported a cathedral ceiling accented with ornate moldings. The interior woodwork was nothing short of impressive: hardwood floors, solid maple congregation pews, and an elevated, hand-carved judge’s bench with a distinctly lower witness stand. It was the kind of place that, depending on your circumstances, could make you either want to thumb your nose or find religion.

  From the looks of Kenny’s attire, it must have had the latter effect on him.

  Kenny wore a gray western sports coat and bolo tie that I suspect he borrowed from one of his honky-tonk friends. Probably his attorney had advised him the same way mine had clued me in on what to wear.

  Swindle had directed me to be extra-conscious of my appearance. “Wear a dress, something like you might wear to church,” he’d suggested. I hadn’t attended any religious services since Kenny and I had married, but I’d chosen one of those out-of-style getups Momma had made me about a hundred years ago, a floral print of muted mauves and pinks with a pointy Pilgrim collar. I felt pretty sure that, in that getup, I didn’t look the least bit slutty.

  “All rise,” I heard a voice command. I wondered how I’d find the strength to lift my weight from the chair that supported me. Swindle nudged my left elbow as the judge, a sixty-some-odd-year-old man with a face like a cowpoke, took his seat atop what looked like gallows to me. I’d seen the man before, only a few months earlier, when he’d fully lived up to his reputation for being unfair. He hadn’t even flinched when he’d granted Kenny temporary visitation privileges that included Sean’s entire spring break.

  Given the outcome of that earlier hearing, I had no reason to trust that steely-eyed bastard on the bench or the system that threatened to relieve me of my only reason for living.

  If I lost custody of Sean, I couldn’t imagine what would happen to me. My reputation, from what I could tell, had been ruined already. I’d become the wayward daughter of a defrocked deacon, a harlot whose son had to be protected from her cheap ways. At least, that’s what Kenny had stated during his prior testimony.

  All those grandiose plans I’d made with Anthony had faded into the nothingness from which I’d conjured them. I’d been left with only public humiliation and private regrets. I would never again be viewed as a good mother or a decent wife. Not after this. In fact, I was the same homely, immoral, and worthless person I’d been at sixteen. Nothing had changed. And Neta Sue, Kenny, and his attorney, Douglas R. Thornton, III, were present and ready to prove it.

  Thick with the devastation of crushed dreams, the air around me smelled foul. I glanced to my attorney’s left, to the table opposite the one where Swindle and I sat, and spied Kenny scribbling away on a canary-colored tablet. Thornton appeared to be paying little attention to Kenny’s sudden interest in becoming a scribe. I suspected the lawyer knew he had a deadbeat for a client. Loser or saint, Thornton likely figured the fees generated by either one could pay his Brooks Brothers bill.

  Neta Sue sat behind them, her hair pinned into a coil, wearing a dress Andy Griffith’s Aunt Bee would have liked. The white patent leather pumps into which she’d wedged her fleshy feet looked like they’d been purchased at a swap meet. Given her outfit and her daily disposition, I assured myself she’d fool no one. Her face, like her heart, had suffered severe freezer burn. Waiting amid the silence, arms folded across her chest, she maintained a due-center, don’t-tread-on-me stare.

  With a nod, the court reporter indicated her readiness to record what certainly would be a dismal account, one that any sane person would want to avoid reading:

  Girl meets Boy.

  Boy gets girl pregnant.

  Boy does responsible thing and marries girl.

  Girl isn’t satisfied.

  Girl leaves Boy so she can find a new boy.

  Boy’s heart is broken.

  Boy wants Child.

  With only a few minor variations, the same story probably played out between those walls on a regular basis. Why record it hundreds of times? All anyone needed to do was create a standardized form and fill in the blanks with the appropriate names. From what I could tell, that must have been the method Swindle had used to ready himself for the hearing. It took all of fifteen seconds for him to reveal he’d arrived unprepared.

  “Ms. Murphy, is it your testimony today that you’ve been the primary caretaker of Sam for the past...uh...the past…” Swindle hastily thumbed the pages of his legal pad and then, settling on one sheet, continued. “Uh, five years, essentially ever since he was born?”

  “Sean,” I corrected, wondering if maybe my lawyer had suffered a lobotomy since I’d last seen him. The boy whose fate now dangled in midair, whose future was contingent upon this man’s ability to ask the right questions, was named Sean, not Sam. Did the idiot need bifocals to read his own handwriting? Was he looking at the correct page? This was the Murphy-versus-Murphy proceeding. I hoped like hell he’d brought the correct tablet.

  “I’m sorry, yes. Yes, I mean your son, Sean Murphy,” he said, as if perhaps I, too, had forgotten the boy’s name.

  When it came time to ask about specifics, Swindle gave out a fake cough and asked, “How would you describe your childcare arrangements? Where does Sam, I mean, Sean, stay when you’re at work?”

  I considered how to best answer that question since, before I’d separated, I’d often let Sean stay with Kenny or Neta Sue. “Well, I used to have Kenny or his mother babysit,” I said, attempting to do as Swindle had instructed, keeping my answers thorough and clear. “But for the past eight months, Sean’s been attending kindergarten.�
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  Swindle again searched his notes. Assuming he’d thought things through far enough to anticipate my reply, which took a broad imagination, I sensed he was unsatisfied with my response.

  I scanned up and to my right, looking at the judge whom I’d expected to find contemplatively listening to testimony. With his left hand, he tapped a pencil eraser on the dais, creating a sound that annoyed every bit as much as a leaky faucet. Using his other hand, he sifted through and sorted a stack of celery-colored legal folders, the day’s pending cases, I presumed.

  Neta Sue took the witness stand. Thornton, who’d obviously expended more review effort than Swindle, led his client’s mother carefully through examination. “And how would you describe Renee Murphy’s relationship with your grandson?” he asked, measuring his steps as he backed away from his witness.

  Neta Sue pursed her lips and frowned as if trying to recall some distant memory, like maybe the last time she’d seen her husband or the first time she’d ever said a curse word. “Well now, I’m not sure I can rightly say. I haven’t seen all that much of Renee and Sean together.” She corrected her posture and thrust out her chin. “She’s always got more important things to do than be a mother.”

  “Ob-jec-tion,” Swindle drawled as though talking in his sleep.

  “Sus-tained,” the judge said without looking up.

  Thornton began again. “What kinds of things do you believe Renee Murphy prioritizes over being a mother to Sean?”

  Swindle momentarily came to life. “Objection, Your Honor.”

  “I’m merely trying to get the witness to clarify her earlier comment,” Thornton countered, still facing the bench.

  “Overruled,” the judge said, his face buried in a folder.