Good Buddy

by Dori Ann Dupré

  Julie laid still, digesting all that Buddy shared with her. She didn’t think that she could possibly love Jonathan Cordova any more than she already did. But here it was. More love. More admiration. More appreciation for the fact that this wonderful, humble, thoughtful man was brought into her life, into her daughter’s life. There was no fanfare and no fireworks, no mind-blowing crazy story that they shared around fire pits on Friday nights. It was just two lonely people with some ugly life scars who found each other, became friends, and then fell in love. It wasn’t the kind of love that knocks you into the street, only to fizzle out when the passion fades. It was the kind of love that lasts and stands the test of time, the kind of love where passion simmers within the lining of what they shared. She knew right then without one single doubt in her mind that no matter what life threw at her, as long as she had Buddy, she would always be alright.

  “Can I hold Gabrielle?” Molly asked, waiting to sit down in the chair near her mother’s bed.

  Loretta walked over to her, and as Molly backed herself up, Loretta placed Gabby into Molly’s arms. Molly held up Gabby’s tiny head in the crook of her elbow, her rosebud mouth moved slightly in a sucking motion. As she slept, her eyes twitched a bit. Molly put her index finger on Gabby’s forehead and rubbed it gently.

  “She’s so light, so tiny,” Molly whispered.

  “Just over six pounds,” Julie reported.

  Loretta laughed. “That is a small baby! Buddy was over nine pounds if you can believe that.”

  Buddy looked over at Joe. Joe winked at him. Life was pretty damn good.

  Hiking

  Molly picked up her new lime green backpack and slid it onto her back. It was stuffed with a water bottle, sunscreen, a parka, a hat, twenty chewy oatmeal bars and a pack of Swedish Fish. Buddy closed the trunk of his car, threw his backpack over his shoulder and walked up to Molly who was waiting on him. She was excited. She had never gone hiking before.

  Buddy announced to her a week ago that at least once a month, he wanted to take her on a nice hike in one of the North Carolina State Parks. This morning, they woke up early and drove two hours and a half hours to Hanging Rock State Park for their first outing. It would be about a six-mile hike if they completed the whole thing, which was a good haul for a nine-year-old girl with no experience.

  Julie and Gabby were left at home. Gabby was still sleeping a lot, had on-demand nursing needs, and Julie needed to work on some of her Back to School cutting and pasting for her classroom.

  It was end-of-summer warm – but not too warm – up in the higher elevation, and Buddy wanted to be sure that the two of them started this new monthly bonding tradition before Molly started to become too serious in a sport or activity like so many of the other kids seemed to do these days. She had been playing recreational soccer for the past year and was surprisingly good at it.

  Buddy had pegged her to become a distance runner like her mother, but when Molly brought home a flyer from school and asked to be signed up for a soccer team, Buddy figured it would give her something active to do to help with her above average energy needs. Plus, being a part of a team would help her make friends.

  Molly was a nice girl with a big soft heart, but other kids thought she was a little on the weird side because she was a lot smarter than everyone else and appeared to live in her own world at times. Soccer was the magic pill, rather than something like Ritalin, that cured Molly of the constant hopping. And because she was the fastest player on the soccer team and scored the most goals, everyone wanted to be her friend.

  They started out at the foot of the trail, taking in the pin-pointed map on the park display board. There were signs indicating where to hike and some photos of the different plants and critters and birds that nature-loving hikers might encounter while walking along the trails. Buddy wore a pair of cargo shorts and a tee shirt along with a new pair of boots he bought from an outdoors store.

  “Ready?” he asked Molly.

  “Ready!”

  They started to hike, and within two minutes, Molly said she wanted to eat one of her oatmeal bars. She stopped, pulled one out, took off the wrapper and shoved the small treat into her mouth.

  “So, tell me. Are you ready to take on the Fourth Grade?” Buddy asked. School was starting on Monday.

  “Yeah. I’m excited about it. Kara and Kelcey from my team are gonna be in my class and Mom said that I’m really gonna like Mrs. Schell as my teacher.”

  “Which ones are Kara and Kelcey?”

  “Kara’s the one who always plays defense. She’s the big one with blond hair. And Kelcey was the goalie.”

  “Ahh, I remember now. Kara takes people out,” Buddy laughed, recalling how during one of the games, a girl on the opposite team literally bounced off Kara as she stood in the box like an oak tree. The parents on the sidelines were laughing. Even the parents from the other team were laughing.

  “Yeah. She’s so big. She should play football with the boys instead,” Molly said, putting one Carolina blue Nike in front of the other.

  “I liked playing soccer when I was younger…when I was in college. We would play pick-up soccer just for fun outside the dorms. I wish that I could’ve played when I was your age. Maybe I would’ve been good at it like you are.”

  “How come you didn’t play when you were my age?”

  “No teams, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t really remember a whole lot about when I was your age. A lot of it is a blur,” Buddy admitted, realizing for the first time that he had specific memories of being nine and not one of them had anything to do with a normal boyhood activity, like playing on a team or riding a bike or going to school or having an ice cream cone on a hot summer night.

  “Wow, is that what happens when you get old? You can’t remember anything?”

  “Hey now. I’m old but not that old.”

  “Okay. So, do you remember anything, anything at all from when you were nine? Like even one memory?”

  Buddy thought about it some more. He saw himself sitting on an old dusty couch next to his mother somewhere, deep inside of someone’s dark house. He was wearing a pair of shorts and had a big scab on his left knee. He didn’t remember how he got it. The scab was still dark purple and black but bright pink around the edges and starting to itch a lot. He spent the time sitting on that couch picking at it until it started to bleed again. There was an older woman in a big dress which sat on her like a tent. She had fat rolls coming off her arms, a long dark braid in her hair, and she was sitting in a chair across from them. She was nice.

  He saw himself sitting on a train, watching a lot of empty brown spaces go by in the window. The seat was a dark green and had a hole in the cushion. He put his finger inside of it and made the hole bigger by picking at the foam stuffing inside. His mother slapped his hand and told him to stop. He remembered having to get up from his seat to use the bathroom, and when he got inside, he could see that someone had vomited in the toilet. So, he peed onto the vomit.

  But the most vivid memory in Buddy’s head from when he was nine-years-old was the day he and his mother were sitting at a bus stop. It was early in the morning, fairly cold, and they were all alone. No one else was there, or seemed to be anywhere nearby, and he recalled feeling scared and anxious. He held a paper bag that said “Safeway” in his arms, which housed two shirts, two pairs of pants, two pairs of underwear, a pair of socks, a copy of The Boxcar Children, and a toothbrush.

  A lady pulled up in a big gray car. She had dark curly hair just like his mother and wore a whole lot of makeup on her face.

  “Hey, y’all. Are you Loretta?” she asked while chewing some gum.

  His mother stood up from her spot. She was frail and wore a pair of jeans and a long brown coat. Leaning her head down to the window, she replied, “I am. Are you Mary Stuart?”

  “I’m Dixie, her sister. Mary Stuart sent me. Y’all get in, and I�
��ll take you to her.” She popped her gum.

  His mother, starting to become accustomed to being called, “Loretta,” got into the front seat, and Buddy slid into the back. His nerves were a little calmer now; he was taking his cues from his mother’s body language. Dixie drove them for quite a while, and Buddy watched all the greens, yellows, oranges, and reds go by. He was sure he had never seen anything like it before, except in a picture book at the library. He saw plowed fields and piles of yellow brush and open blue skies and big green tractors.

  When they arrived into the heart of a small town, passing by a gas station and a small grocery store, Dixie pulled her car into a short gravel driveway and walked them onto a huge porch, stretching all around the front and sides of the entire house. It had a two-person swing sitting off to the side.

  Dixie opened the screen door and yelled inside. “Mary Stuart? It’s me!” Then she turned to them and smiled, “Come on in.”

  Buddy and his mother walked inside. Immediately, a rather round, bubbly, big toothed woman with curly dark hair and ruby red lips, wearing an equally red shirt, walked out of the kitchen. She wobbled over to them like they were long lost family members. “Oh my, I’m so happy y’all are here! You made it! Bless your heart, what a trip y’all musta had!”

  She hugged his mother tight, like she could press all one hundred pounds of her completely into her bosom, making his mother disappear altogether. She grabbed Buddy like he was her nephew from far away, hugging him just as tight. She pulled away and put her fingers under his chin.

  “Dear boy, you’re just lovely. Like a blossom. My Lord in Heaven, look at those eyelashes Jesus gave to you! How lucky you are! You know how many ladies pay good money for such things?” She took a deep breath and then sighed. “You and your mama, I’m so happy to finally meet y’all both.” Then she leaned down and kissed his forehead, no doubt leaving a large red lipstick stain behind.

  Buddy had never met anyone quite like Mary Stuart before. She talked funny and was real loud and everything was such a big deal…but in a good way. She made big exaggerated sighs when she talked about the goings-on in the town that day, and her hands were always moving. She fed them a big lunch, a full meal with cornbread and mashed potatoes and fresh green beans and fried chicken she made herself just that morning. They even had something called Brunswick Stew that she got from the Methodist Church ladies’ ministry covered dish the day before. She let them use her bathroom to clean up from all the days they spent on trains and busses to get there…all the way to Welby, North Carolina.

  When they were done cleaning up, and Buddy’s hair was still a bit damp, she drove them several miles away along country roads to a large piece of farmland, which had an older looking farmhouse, some small rustic shacks, and a barn with a one-bedroom apartment on the top of it. Mary Stuart pointed up at its perch. It had steps all up the side that led to a small white door. “That’ll be all yours. It’s not much, but it’ll do for now, ‘til you get yourself all settled somewhere more permanent.”

  A large, weathered middle-aged man came out of the barn wearing a pair of jeans, a flannel shirt and a John Deere ball cap. His thick brown hair came out of the bottom. His face was wide and friendly, and he had small creases near his eyes when he smiled at them. Sticking his hand out, he shook his mother’s hand and said, “Ma’am, my name is Joe Horton. Y’all are welcome to stay here as long as you’d like.” And Buddy knew that he meant it.

  As Buddy and Molly walked along the trail, Molly was as quiet as a church mouse, listening to him tell her this mountain of information. She took in this story about her stepfather’s past, a story she had never heard before, a story that Buddy had never even once shared with Julie. Molly figured that there was a lot more to this story, but either Buddy didn’t remember it or Buddy wasn’t interested in telling her.

  “So, is that when Nana and Grandpa Joe started to be boyfriend and girlfriend?” she asked suddenly, breaking the extended silence between them.

  “No, they didn’t become boyfriend and girlfriend until a long time later,” he explained.

  “Do you know where you lived before you got to Grandpa Joe’s? Where you came from?” she asked.

  “I lived in Texas, but really, I don’t remember a whole lot about it. It was a long time ago.”

  “How come you don’t ask Nana about it? I bet she’ll remember.”

  Buddy thought about how he and his mother never spoke of the past, how they never discussed his stepfather Kenny or his real father or where they used to live or the handful of memories he held onto when they fled. They never discussed their real names or their real family or even the bus and train rides all the way out to North Carolina from some place dry and plain and brown. But he knew that whatever they left behind was bad and something his mother had no desire to ever address again. And that fact had never changed in all the years they’d been gone.

  When Retta Bellinger became Loretta Cordova, and when Daniel Kaspar Junior became Jonathan Cordova, it was as if they had been born again, never to recall their real names and real lives and real selves. They became new people in every way, only he was reborn at nine years old, and his mother was reborn at twenty-nine.

  “Not sure, kiddo. Nana doesn’t like to talk about those years. So, we don’t. And it’s okay. I’ve had a great life since coming to North Carolina, especially a couple of years ago when I met you and your mom.”

  “My grandparents live in Texas. That’s where my mom is from,” Molly offered.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Wouldn’t it be neat if you lived in the same town as my mom and just didn’t know it? Like maybe you were in school together or had the same dentist.”

  “Ha,” Buddy said. “That would be neat. But I doubt it. Texas is a big place. One of the biggest in the whole country.”

  “My mom doesn’t talk to my grandparents, so I don’t really know them at all,” Molly said, sounding sad. “Never even met them except when I was really little. And I don’t remember it.”

  “Did you ever meet your father’s parents?” he asked. He knew that Gabe’s mother was dead and his father wasn’t a part of the picture.

  “When I was a baby, I met my grandmother. She was real sick at the time so I think it was when she was about to die. But I don’t remember that either. There’s a picture though. Me, my grandmother in a red toboggan hat and my daddy…all together.”

  “Life’s been a little tough on you, shorty,” Buddy said to Molly, who seemed to be handling the six miles of rough terrain with no problem. They stopped and sat down for a few minutes, drinking some water and sharing some Swedish Fish.

  “I guess so. But I think life is tough for everyone.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah. Some have it worse than I do.”

  “Like who?”

  “Well, there’s a boy who was in my class last year whose dad has cancer, and they say he’s gonna die soon…and a girl in Mrs. Holloway’s class who has some other kind of cancer. She’s always having to miss school for doctors and told me that the treatments made her real sick. Like, she throws up a lot and can’t eat anything cold.”

  Buddy thought about how fortunate he had been to have exactly what he had as a boy. Molly was right. As bad as it was, it could’ve always be worse.

  Molly continued, “So instead of just seeing the sad things in my life, I try to see how lucky I am. I have my mom and you and Bo and now Gabby. Nana and Grandpa Joe. My friends in school and my soccer team. The biggest thing is that I know that I’m loved,” she explained, showing more of life’s wisdom within her pinky finger than most people have in their whole bodies for their entire lives.

  Soccer Dad

  Somehow, Buddy got roped into being a coach for Molly’s soccer team. It wasn’t one of those situations where the coach held a parent meeting and asked for a volunteer to help him with coaching the team. It was
more like a sudden and direct: “Here, take over, I got overlapping games today with my oldest son’s team.” So then, Buddy was left standing on the sideline with a huge mesh sack of soccer balls, some flat orange cones, and a blank white dry-erase clipboard.

  Molly was just beside herself with excitement to have him as her coach. Buddy was less than enthused about it, because while he played some pick-up games in college with his friends, he was like most American men and modern day fathers who get thrown into serving as their kids’ soccer coach – not real up on the rules and strategies and game play and training needs. He knew that the team who scored the most goals…wins. You can’t use your hands. That was really the extent of his soccer knowledge.

  Molly sat on his left knee dressed in her yellow jersey and black shorts as they both looked over the clipboard’s starting lineup for the Saturday morning opener.

  “I think you need to put Hailey and Allison on defense to start, rather than Kara. Kara has been doggin’ it in practice,” Molly explained.

  “Yeah, but I like Allison better on the wing. I think she does better up there than on defense. Kara can’t really play anywhere else, and I think today, we’ll only have one sub because of some birthday party that the twins are going to.”

  Buddy couldn’t understand modern-day sports programs. When he played baseball as a boy in Welby, you would be cut from the team for missing practices; and if you missed a game, you’d be cut and then also tarred and feathered in the center of town. Missing a game for a birthday party? That just didn’t make any sense to him. But that was the way it was in the late Nineties, so Buddy rolled with it, like he rolled with everything else in life he didn’t understand.