Back Roads (6 page)

It shouldn’t have surprised me. They had always been more accepting of Mom’s screwups than I was: more willing to forgive her for mixing up who liked strawberry jelly and who liked grape, or who got her the good birthday present and who got her something stupid. They defended her on occasions when I expected an apology.

I assumed their leniency came from being the same sex. It was just one more woman thing I would never understand like how they didn’t want you to bug them but if you didn’t bug them for too long, they came looking for you wanting to know why you weren’t bugging them. Or how all they cared about was looking good but whenever you told them they looked good, they got insulted because you were implying there was something else wrong with them. Or how they were obsessed with proving they were as good as men by trying to do things only men did, when what made them better than men in the first place was that they weren’t naturally good at those things.

These were a couple of the things I had learned about them during my captive years among their kind. The only thing I had ever learned about men from watching my dad was how to settle for less.

“Don’t you want to know where Amber is?” Jody asked.

“Amber’s a big girl now,” Mom replied.

She flipped her head the way women with long hair do to keep it out of their eyes. Then her fingers darted to her head, disappearing briefly into her short cut, and came out disappointed.

“I figured maybe she was busy with something else,” she went on, hugging herself like she was cold and walking a couple steps across the room. “I know she’s started dating.”

The innocent way she said it made me think of a boy in a suit holding a car door open for a girl in a dress while her dad puffed on a pipe and called out, “Be home by ten, honey.” It also made me realize that I had no idea what the girls had been telling Mom about our lives and about me.

“Define dating,” I said.

Mom gave me a look that said she didn’t have the time or energy right now to decipher the hidden meanings of Teen Speak, and she took a seat in one of the chairs with the unthinking ease of someone plunking down on her couch. Jody instantly hopped into her lap and laid her head against her chest and started chattering. Mom gradually began to stroke Jody’s hair, her presence next to her body acting like heat applied to a strained muscle. She kissed the top of her head and smiled and nodded at her string of sentences. I had seen the same scene played out a hundred times at home. Nothing was different here.

I turned my back on them and walked over to one of the cameras hanging near the ceiling and peered up into it. I wondered how much video the state penal system possessed of people doing this. While I stood there, I tried to decide what to do next.

I knew Betty would advise me to pop the big question. Go ahead and do it right now. She was always telling me I would never have closure until I asked Mom why she did it. I asked her once what the hell “closure” meant, and she said, “Peace.”

I told her I already knew why Mom did it. Even Mom’s attorney and the state prosecutor agreed on the reason why, the only difference was one presented it as a mother’s love and the
other presented it as a mother’s hatred. The question was, How could she do it? and I didn’t want to know the answer to that.

The next thing I considered was getting into a big fight with Mom. It didn’t matter what the fight would be about, but I decided against that too. Mom and I didn’t fight well with each other. Neither one of us had ever been able to put our hearts into confrontation. Betty called it “internalizing.” I called it being lazy and chicken.

I always thought Mom and Dad were made for each other when it came to fighting. Mom was the perfect opponent for him because she took everything he could dish out, matching the intensity of his anger with the intensity of her patience, until eventually he got tired and retreated and she could go about her life.

One time Dad got in a big fight with her while she was making Sunday breakfast. He got so mad he took an entire carton of eggs and started whipping them one at a time around the kitchen. Gobs of yolk oozed down the walls and made sticky pools on the tile floor.

Misty was just a baby in a high chair, and she laughed and clapped. Amber cut and run. Being a kid I thought what Dad was doing was pretty cool, but being his son I realized I might be the next thing that hit the wall with a splat. I stayed in my chair, waiting.

After he depleted his arsenal, he came raging back to the table and brushed the breakfast dishes onto the floor with a big swipe of his arm, then he went stomping out the door.

We waited to hear what he would do next before deciding what we would do next. We waited for a dog to yelp, or the mower to roar to life, or the truck to start, or for ominous silence.

Eventually, we heard the truck. I started eating again. Amber came back to the table. Misty craned her little head around and pointed out the door and said, “Da Da.”

Mom grabbed a dishrag and glanced around at the dark yellow carnage dripping everywhere like the sun had bled all over her kitchen. Then she walked over to her grocery list and wrote EGGS.

I turned back around and stared at Mom with Jody on her lap. She caught me watching.

“You look like you want to say something,” she said.

“Where do you keep the extra lightbulbs?”

“Below the bathroom sink, way in the back, on the right-hand side,” she answered without missing a beat.

“Do we have any?”

“I don’t know, Harley.” She sighed. “It’s been a long time.”

She said it too easily and I understood all at once that she had accepted our new lives while I had only adjusted to them. I had never known there was a difference, but now it seemed clear to me that the first had been done willingly while the second had been done in order to survive.

I didn’t want to be there anymore. I started noticing how small the room was. There weren’t any windows. The chairs were bolted to the floor. The rocker was chained. There weren’t any pillows. Or pictures on the wall. The cameras were made in Japan.

“I know, honey. It’s very nice,” I heard Mom say.

“Harley thought my banana was a crescent moon.” Jody giggled.

I swallowed a bunch of times but couldn’t get any moisture into my mouth yet I had a ton of it collecting at the top of my forehead and dripping down the sides of my face. I touched some with a fingertip and brought it to my mouth. Salty. Sweat. Claustrophobic: that was the word. A perfectly normal reaction to a tiny room without windows. I was not crazy. A crazy person would have killed that boy. A crazy person would have lived with that couch.

“It’s funny you sign your pictures the same way Harley used
to,” Mom said to Jody. “Of course he didn’t sign them ‘your daughter.’ ”

Jody giggled again.

“He signed them ‘your son.’ Amber and Misty never did that. I guess they assumed I knew who they were.”

“Harley used to draw you pictures?”

“Of course he did. I could’ve sworn I showed some of them to you. I’ve got them all in a box in the basement along with Amber and Misty’s school papers. He used to love to draw.”

She lightly kissed the top of Jody’s head again and then gently grazed her cheek across it. This was the gravy part of motherhood. She still got it even though she no longer had to deal with the bad stuff. The fights. The fevers. The bills. The spills. The nightmares. The questions. The future.

She still had us kids but we didn’t have her.

“Your daddy didn’t like it though,” Mom explained to Jody. “He thought Harley should be more into sports and hunting. Typical man.”

“That’s dumb,” Jody said.

“Yes, it is. I remember how he used to drag Harley outside and throw footballs at him. How he used to hit him if he . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she cleared her throat. “Oh well, what do I know? Your Uncle Mike used to do the exact same thing to Mike Junior and now he’s at Penn State on a football scholarship.”

She laid the picture upside down on the floor, and I imagined it smeared with tapioca.

“You want to be here,” I said, hoarsely.

Mom’s head jerked up. “Harley, that’s ridiculous.”

I saw her map in my head. I felt myself being dragged along the black line to the place where it ended at nothing. I looked behind me and instead of a little yellow house, I saw Mom done in crayon the way I used to draw her. A smiling stick figure in a dress with pale gray eyes and burnt orange hair. I still
remembered the names of the crayons: Timber Wolf and Bittersweet.

“No,” I said. “You want to be here.”

She nudged Jody from her lap and stood up.

“Harley,” she said fearfully, and took a step toward me.

The sweat had started dripping into my eyes. I blinked it away, but I still couldn’t see her well. My hands started shaking like a palsied old man’s. I looked down at them and saw sweat beads as big as raindrops forming on them. My breath came too fast for me to use it.

“Harley!” she said again, forceful this time.

She lunged at me. I heard her cry out my name again. It unfurled from her lips, violent and sudden, like a whip snap.

My knees buckled and I collapsed to the floor. Her hands were on my face. They were shaking as bad as mine. She told me to be calm. She laid her head on my heart.

I screamed. I scraped her off me and got to my feet, choking for air. I ran for the door and tried to yank it open but it was locked. I pounded with my fists and screamed for someone to let me out.

Two guards rushed in and went straight for Mom. I watched Jody run to save her picture before running behind a chair. Jody had adjusted too.

I sank back down to the floor.

The guards pushed Mom into a corner. She held her hands up in front of her face and cried, “I didn’t hurt him.”

That was the first time I saw words in the air. They hung in front of my eyes like a camera flash.

YUR SUN, HARLEY.

After my visit with Mom I decided my biggest problem in life was getting rid of that piece of pipe in the yard left over from Dad’s satellite dish, not ACCEPTING.

I spent the weekend studying it. I could saw the pipe off fairly close to the ground with a hacksaw but that would make it more dangerous because the grass would hide it, and Jody never wore shoes in the summer. She could tear open her foot on the jagged metal, and we didn’t have any health insurance. We would if we were on welfare. Or if I disappeared and the girls were put in foster care then they’d have insurance. Social Services had made this very clear to me.

I could try digging out the cement plug but that would take forever. I could dynamite it but that might collapse our well. Probably the best thing to do would be to cut the pipe down as low as I could get it and put something big and noticeable on top of it.

On my way to the truck Monday morning, I decided the couch would work until I found something better.

Misty had covered the blackened carcass with an old scab-brown bedspread. The smell of gasoline, burnt foam padding, and other flammable man-made materials still lingered in the
air. I gave it a kick to see if anything had crawled up inside it yet. I pushed it over, and I felt better.

I put in a full day at Barclay’s, then decided a Froot Loops dinner wasn’t worth driving all the way home for when I had to drive all the way back afterward for my shift at Shop Rite. It was a warmer night. I decided to grab a bag of chips and a Coke at the store and go hang out at the self-service car wash across the road in the hopes a car full of girls would come through. I was halfway there, thinking about cutoffs and soapy thighs, before I remembered I had to pick up Jody at Esme Mercer’s house.

I could have called. Esme’s mom would have run Jody home for me. But I drove out there instead.

The Mercers’ house was a strange one by local standards because the front faced away from the road toward the hills and because it was all windows, and because they had built with expensive cedar, not siding, and left the boards natural. Six years later, everybody was still wondering when they were going to paint it.

I had never been inside the house but from the driveway I could see into the front room jammed with plants and wicker furniture. Jody said they called it the jungle room, and Esme’s mom went and sat there every night after she finished washing dishes and before she gave Zack his bath.

Lights were burning even though it wasn’t dark yet. The days were getting longer. Only one more week until daylight savings time. I wasn’t looking forward to the extra hour or the hot weather on the horizon. I didn’t particularly like the cold, but I liked being covered up. Last year, retiring Dad’s jacket to the closet felt like giving up my skin.

I pulled in next to Callie’s blue Celica. The Jeep Grand Cherokee was gone. Her husband, Brad, drove it. He was vice president of something at Laurel Falls National Bank. Callie’s dad was the president. It was a very small world.

Their two dogs barked and strained at the ends of their chains until I got out of my truck and they recognized me, then the blond collie mix started whining, and the black Lab started tearing in circles around his doghouse. Dogs never forgot the bearer of affection no matter how infrequently he came by.

I walked over and untangled the Lab and scratched them both on the chest until their eyes glazed over.

The front door opened and Jody ran out. The dogs started barking again. She saw me and scowled and went running back inside, yelling, “It’s him. I don’t want to go.”

I took a moment to appreciate the view. The Mercer property dipped down to a circular pond sitting in the middle of a lawn the color of pool table felt. A twisting section of clear, pebble-shiny creek lay at the foot of their hills; and they were their hills. They owned them. Not like our hills. We just lived on ours.

Callie’s grandfather had willed her fifty acres along with the mineral rights, which meant the old man never sold out to the coal companies while everybody else around him let their land be stripped raw.

Besides the Virgin Mary, he was a dead person I would have really liked to meet.

Through the hillside trees I saw the railroad tracks, the same tracks that led to the mining office behind Skip’s house, the same ones we used to fantasize about following out to California after we bumped off Donny.

Zack Mercer ran out next. He grinned at me and whirled around to go back in and ran into his mom’s legs. She grabbed him gently by the shoulders and told him to slow down.

She looked up and gave me a slow female smile. “How are you, Harley?” she said.

“Okay,” I said back.

Then she whipped her head around in the direction of the dogs and gave them a steely, military stare. “Shut up,” she yelled harshly.

Esme and Jody exploded from the house and took off for the swing set. Zack tore after them.

Callie composed herself and walked toward me, smiling in a stirring way again. I remembered our meeting at Shop Rite and how she had gone from a childish excitement to a deep depression with the quickness of a finger snap.

“I just got off the phone with Misty,” she said.

She didn’t have any shoes on, but she crossed the sharp gravel driveway without flinching, making me wonder what the bottoms of her feet felt like.

“I called to tell you Jody could stay for a while and then I’d run her home for you,” she went on. “We should have planned on that in the first place.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“It turned out to be a beautiful day. Aren’t you hot in that coat?”

“No.”

She moved closer to me. “Did you have dinner?”

“Yeah.”

“But you haven’t been home yet.”

“I ate in town.”

“Oh.”

I got the feeling she was taking notes again. Not out of nosiness but because she wanted to reconstruct me later at her convenience, piece by insubstantial piece, like a house of cards.

She lifted one of her bare feet and brushed the top of the other one with it.

“Well, I have something for you anyway. You want to come in for a minute?”

“In?” I said.

She turned away from me again and shouted at Esme to quit pushing her brother so high on the swing.

“In the house,” she finished.

“Sure,” I said.

I tried not to watch her walking in front of me, but her jeans fit like someone had rubbed the color on with a piece of powder-blue chalk. They had been worn and washed so many times, I bet the denim felt like a puppy’s ear. I tried not to think about that while I tried not to watch.

The inside of the house was all wood too. Even the floors. Except for the kitchen floor. It was made of stones of all different shades of gray set in mortar and polished to a high gloss.

It was one of those open houses where the rooms weren’t really divided off with walls and the downstairs ceiling went all the way up to the upstairs ceiling. A big stone fireplace separated the kitchen from the living room, and a wall of glass shelves covered with knickknacks and framed pictures separated the living room from the jungle room. There was nothing but air between the shelves making it seem like the plants were in every room.

I didn’t see a TV so I guessed the big room with the fireplace was a formal living room, something we didn’t have and my mom always wanted. She said any decent house should have one room for the TV where the family hung out and another room without a TV for people to visit in. I never saw the point in that because everyone I knew preferred to visit in front of a TV.

The room didn’t look formal though. The furniture looked beat-up and there were toys everywhere. Through the doorway at the end of it, I saw a mirror over a chest of drawers and in the mirror an unmade bed.

“You want to sit down?”

Her voice brought me back from the bed. I was grateful for that.

She glanced at the table and chairs. The chairs were bamboo and had sawdust-colored cushions and the table had a glass top. The dinner dishes were still sitting on it.

“We bought that table before we had kids,” she explained
when she noticed me looking at it. “So far no one’s thrown a dish through it although Zack’s been practicing.”

She came over with a dishrag and wiped off the tray on Zack’s high chair. Their dinner smelled great, like apples and honey and charcoal.

I couldn’t even remember what real food tasted like. My mom wasn’t the greatest cook in the world, but these days I would have given just about anything for a piece of her bland meat loaf or one of her overcooked chickens.

“You have a nice house,” I announced.

The sound of my words made me cringe. I couldn’t have come up with a more uninspired thing to say if I had spent all day trying. The worst character on the worst TV show would’ve come up with a better opening line.

I knew people on TV were fake but that didn’t stop me from wanting to be as smart and funny as they were; and there was nothing like constantly falling short of unrealistic expectations to make someone feel like giving up on real life completely.

“Thanks,” she said.

“I never saw anyone use rocks for a floor before,” I added. “I saw brick once.”

“It’s terrible if you drop something breakable,” she said. “Stuff shatters like you wouldn’t believe. But it’s pretty. I love this rock here.”

To my amazement, she dropped to all fours, still holding the wet cloth, and motioned for me to join her. I got down there with her, and she pointed out a pale silver-gray rock full of glittering black and ivory chips.

“If you look very closely, you can see a tiny vein of pink going through it. You don’t notice it if you just glance at it. You really have to look.”

I did, and she was right. I couldn’t help looking at her too. I wondered how much time she had spent staring at her kitchen floor to notice something like that.

She sat back on her feet, and her arm brushed against mine. I had on my coat. Skin didn’t even touch skin but a flash of heat went shooting to my crotch, giving me a serious boner. It wasn’t a good feeling though. I realized it was supposed to be, but it ripped through me too fast like fire eating up a trail of gasoline.

I practically jumped up and took a seat at the table. She was still staring at her rock. She hadn’t felt a thing.

“Do me a favor, Harley,” she said, standing up and taking a couple plates with her over to the sink. “Eat that last pork chop for me.”

I adjusted myself inside my jeans. My zipper was killing me. I had pitched my last pair of underwear that morning. The money I was going to spend on new stuff I had ended up spending on a Happy Meal and a new dinosaur for Jody to keep her mouth shut about what happened with Mom.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Oh, come on.”

“I already ate.”

“A big guy like you can’t polish off that one little pork chop?”

I didn’t say anything. I waited for some big guy to answer.

“Please,” she said. “Otherwise it’s going to the dogs.”

“What about your husband?” I asked.

“He won’t want it,” she said, kind of irritated. “He went out to dinner.”

“Okay,” I said.

I stabbed a fork through it like I was afraid it might escape and plopped it onto the dirty plate in front of me.

“You want a beer?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She came back with a Michelob. I almost had it in my hand before she asked, “Wait. You are old enough to drink, right?”

“Well, not legally.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen. Well, twenty. Just about twenty. I’ll be twenty in a couple months.”

“That’s it?” she breathed out, and took a seat across from me. “My God, you’re a baby.”

I couldn’t believe I didn’t lie. I might as well have told her about Brandy Crowe too, and how I had freaked out at the prison with Mom, and how I used to pee my pants when Dad hit me too hard, and any other embarrassing thing I could think of that might help her figure out I was a total idiot.

“I thought you were older,” she added.

“I’m old for my age,” I said with my mouth full of pork chop.

She laughed. I didn’t mean it to be funny. I was dead serious. But it was okay with me if she thought it was a joke. Ask any woman what was most important to her in a man and she would say a good sense of humor. Of course, they were all lying but a sense of humor must have counted for something or they wouldn’t have always been bringing it up.

“This is great,” I said about the pork chop, and I wasn’t sucking up to her. It was the most tender, juicy, flavorful thing I could ever remember putting into my mouth.

“Thanks,” she said, smiling.

She seemed to like the compliment about her cooking more than the one about her house.

“Jody loved them too. She ate two whole chops by herself.”

The door banged open and all three kids came running in. Callie’s kids were vanilla-skinned with big dark eyes; Esme with blue-black, Snow White hair and Zack with a fawn-colored mop.

They skidded to a stop and stood beside each other. Esme leaned into Zack, and he gave her a two-handed shove. A pink tongue popped out of Esme’s angel face, and Zack grinned like a soldier who’s seen too many battles.

“You forgot to close the door,” Callie told them.

“Can we have something to eat?” Esme asked.

“You just had dinner,” Callie said. “Go close the door.”

“We want dessert.”

“We want dessert,” Zack echoed.

“I haven’t even cleaned up the dishes yet. Maybe later.”

“Did you eat these pork chops?” I asked Jody.

“Yeah,” she said. “I loved them.”

“You hate pork chops.”

“I hate your pork chops. They taste like napkins.”

“It’s probably just the marinade.” Callie laughed. “It’s a very simple one. Apple cider, lemon juice, honey, soy sauce. I could give you the recipe.”

“And your macaroni and bean soup recipe,” Jody added, eagerly.

“That’s an easy one too,” Callie said, then gasped, “Where are your shoes?”

They were all barefoot.

“Outside,” they answered.

“It’s not summer yet,” she scolded them. “Go get your shoes back on. Right now.”