Honey, Baby, Sweetheart (29 page)

“So? Your mother can go anywhere she wants,” Peach said.

“Yeah,” Mom said.

“Besides, Lillian needs a drink,” Peach said.

“She looks parched,” Miz June said. Lillian fanned herself.

“I’ve done everything else,” Mom said. “I can go in there.” She was really pleased with herself, you could tell. Chip Jr. looked my way, rolled his eyes heavenward.

Harold pitched his cup into a nearby garbage can. “I’m ready for another.”

The blast of air-conditioning felt good. A man in cowboy garb, Dad’s fill-in, stood on the stage, smiling with wide white teeth and singing “Jubilee.” He had pulled a small girl from the audience, and she was pounding a tambourine with the frozen, feared movements of a hostage at gunpoint. Her parents clapped and snapped pictures, which she’d be sure to hate when she was older. Peach steered the wheelchair to a table in the back, the frog balloon swaying and bumping into things like a drunk in a bar.

We sat down. A waitress, spilling breasts, came to
take our drink order. Miz June started to move a bit to the music.

“Is she expecting a big tip because we got to see her knockers?” Peach said loudly, over the music.

Chip Jr. clamped his hands over his ears. “He hates knocker talk,” I said. We got our drinks. Harold had decided to pay the tip, judging by where his eyes were glued. The cowboy singer started in on “This Land Is Your Land.” My father was a much better singer. I was hit with the sudden reminder that we had a baby sister, Chip Jr. and I. I pictured the faux cowboy on the stage with a baby, drooling on his fringe, grabbing hold of his nose with a little hand, patting the round end of the microphone. I shut out the image. I wanted to clap my hands over my ears, same as Chip Jr. and the knockers. The faux cowboy looked my mother’s way. He winked at her, an overdone, lounge-singer wink. Peach elbowed her.

“He sure likes you,” Peach said to my mother.

“Is he one of Dad’s friends?” I said.

“How should I know?” she said. “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

My mother looked smug. I slurped my drink. Done. If the faux cowboy pulled my mother up there to play the tambourine, I was leaving. Chip Jr.’s fist was clenched tightly, the fossil still in it. He drank his Coke so fast, he’d be burping cannonballs.

Everyone finished their drinks as the faux cowboy was wrapping it up for a break. The audience broke into a smattering of applause. He started handing out signed
photos of himself. I had a few of those of Dad, which he had given me.

“Ready to go, gang?” Peach said.

“Yay. Get me out of here,” Chip Jr. said.

“What about you, Ann?” Miz June said.

“Yes,” Mom said. “I’m ready.”

“The sign says a magician is next,” Harold said.

“We’ve got places to go,” Miz June said.

We shoved our chairs back, maneuvered once more to the door.

“Bye, folks,” the faux cowboy called to us.

“Bye,” we said.

“Did you get your picture?” he waved a handful of his photos.

“No, thanks,” my mother said. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”

I have to admit. The way she went out those swinging saloon doors would have made any cowgirl proud.

After the three corn dogs he’d eaten, Harold farted halfway to Eureka, although he said it wasn’t him. Both he and Lillian eventually fell asleep, and Miz June finally let my mother drive, as she said she couldn’t see well in the dark. One night, she told us, she’d slammed on the brakes and skidded half a block, narrowly missing what she thought was a boy with a backpack about to cross the street, but was actually a pair of mailboxes. So glad she shared that. I felt better with Mom behind the wheel. The funny thing was, as far as the
metaphorical Car of Life went, this time she really
was
driving.

When we got to the motel and opened the trunk to get the bags, the frog balloon leaped out and made my mother scream. It waved around in the night air as if pleased with its trick. It reminded me of Chip Jr.’s phase of hiding behind my bedroom door and jumping out, scaring the crap out of me.

We got ready for bed in the new motel room. My mother made her phone calls, and used her fakey voice talking to Joe Davis, her shoulders curved around the phone for privacy, while we pretended not to listen. She called our own answering machine. She listened for a long time. Five messages from Travis Becker, she said.
Five.

My heart lurched at his name, the idea that he’d been calling. There was power in the knowledge that I hadn’t been there when he did. I felt a surge of wanting, and yet his name, spoken in that motel room, made me feel that unpleasant sensation of biting into hot food and finding it cold in the middle.

“Call him,” my mother said. “Deal with it.”

“You just got finished saying how these calls from the motel were going to cost you a fortune,” I said.

“Call him. It’s worth every penny.”

“I don’t want to call him.” I didn’t want to hear his voice. I wasn’t sure I could be as strong as she wanted me to be.

“I rode the roller coasters. I went into that saloon.”

“Yeah, you made eyes at the singer, too,” Chip Jr. said.

“I did not,” she said.

Chip Jr. wiggled his eyebrows up and down, tried to give the motel dresser a sexy look. My mother threw a pillow at him.

“Call him and deal with it,” she said. “Let it go. You can do it, Ruby.”

I wasn’t sure about that. I wondered if there were some pieces of your life that would always be too monumental to ever leave you. Some events in life that were fossils embedded in rock, the wrinkles etched on an old person’s face, words imprinted in a book. Permanent, permeating. I told Mom what I was thinking.

“You’re right,” she said. “Yes. Words imprinted in a book. But Ruby, then you turn the page.”

“I can’t do it while you’re both here,” I said.

“We’ll go in the bathroom.”

Chip Jr. scurried off the bed. Mom followed him. They shut the door. “Make some noise in there, or something,” I called to them.

Chip Jr. began to sing “This Land Is Your Land.” My mother must have socked him. “Ow,” he yelled. I tried to read the plastic card on the phone for directions. I still remembered Travis Becker’s number.

The phone rang. He picked it up right away. I realized he was probably still recovering, lying in bed. I pictured a glass of water by his bed, with a bendy straw. I pictured his mother bringing him meals, little yellow-brown bottles of pills he’d swallow with his head back and his neck stretched.

His voice sounded strong as ever. He might have just been out riding his motorcycle, having just parked it on the lawn. I thought of his golden hair, nearly white in the sun. I thought of us that day by the train tracks, feeling each other’s hearts. I felt like my insides had been gathered up in a fist. I was clutching on to him, and there was a sick fear of letting go. I didn’t understand the feeling. It was loss, I guess.

“Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to call you. You didn’t even come see me in the hospital.”

“How are you feeling?” I asked. I could imagine the groans from the bathroom. I heard Chip Jr. spinning the toilet paper roll. I couldn’t help it—I started to cry.

“I can’t hear you. Where are you?”

“Eureka.” Tears rolled down my face. A few slid between my cheek and the phone.

“What? Shit, I can barely hear you.”

“I asked how you’re feeling.”

“The drugs are great. When they wear off, I hurt like hell.”

“I’m glad you’re all right,” I said. It was true. I couldn’t have lived with the thought of him being permanently hurt that night, or, God forbid, dead. I touched my fossil on the nightstand, circled it around with my finger.

“Come over and see me. You can take my mind off the pain. I’ve been lying here thinking about the possibilities.”

“The only reason I called was to tell you that I can’t see you again.”

“Right,” he laughed.

“I mean it.” I pictured those saloon doors, the way they swished closed behind my mother. I’d been so proud of her. I wanted to be as proud of myself. That thing I was clutching ripped away from me. And it hurt. But it felt good too. “Not just can’t. But don’t want to.”

“I don’t believe you. I got you wrapped around my finger,” he laughed.

“I see you for what you are,” I said. I was still crying. I wish I hadn’t been, but I was.

“Right,” he said. He chuckled again.

“Travis? Fuck off.”

I slammed down the phone. I looked at it. I was surprised how beautiful it looked. Proud and strong and solid. This phone on a nightstand in a motel in Eureka, California. A fine, terrific, fantastic phone. A model among small appliances.

“I’ve never heard you say that,” my mother said coming out of the bathroom. Chip Jr. was still in there.

“I never have said that.” She put her arms around me. I wiped my tears with the back of my hand.

“Wow,” she said admiringly.

“Not bad, huh?” I said into her shoulder. I suddenly felt exhausted.

“Not that I want you to go around saying it all the time or anything.”

There was a knock at our door. My mother got up to answer it, opened it a crack, then wide. “Oh, my God!” she screamed. I walked over to look. Chip Jr. got up from
the floor of the bathroom, where he had been sitting, trying to figure out how they replaced the Kleenex in those little built-in cabinets in the bathroom. The metal plate lay on the floor.

“Check out those snowflakes!” Chip Jr. said.

Peach had Harold by the elbow. Miz June rolled Lillian into our room in her wheelchair. She was already dressed for bed too, wearing a short flowered nightgown that showed her thin, veiny legs, pouchy flaps of elbow skin.

“I hardly see what the big deal is,” Harold said. But it was true: He looked hysterical. The pajamas were the kind you’d see on a stuffed bear, soft and flannel, and Harold’s round stomach stuck out round and hard. Chip Jr. patted it.

“Twins,” Peach said, and we all cracked up.

My mother gave Chip Jr. some quarters from her purse, and we went out to the soda machine and brought back a few cans of Mountain Dew. Everyone sat in our room and drank from plastic cups and played hearts with a pack of cards Chip Jr. had thought to bring along. I often remember that particular night, how strong we all were. How we were as vital and alive as a thunderstorm. Harold, with his tennis shoes worn without socks and his snowflake pajamas; my mother with the pencil behind her ear for keeping score on a piece of motel stationery. Lillian, with that bow at the neck of her nightgown, small, satiny, and girlish. That bow was as fragile as a whisper, as tender and vulnerable as a wave good-bye. And yet somehow, even in this, there was strength.

What they say is, life goes on, and that is mostly true. The mail is delivered and the Christmas lights go up and down from the houses and the ladders get put away and you open yet another box of cereal. In time, the volume of my feelings would be turned down in gentle increments to near quiet, and yet the record would still spin, always spin. There was a place for Rose so deeply within myself that it was another country, another world, with its own light and time and its own language. A lost world. Yet its foundations and edges were permanent—the ruins of Pompeii, the glorious remnants of the Forum. A world that endured, even as it retreated into the past. A world visited, imagined, ever waiting, yet asleep.