More Than Enough (12 page)

I looked at her then and saw her perhaps the way a man would see her. My mother was a pretty woman, beautiful even, thin and tall with a narrow face and shoulder-length blond hair. She had a scar on her left cheek—a dash of tender white flesh—from falling on the ice as a little girl. Her breasts were larger than average, as far as I knew, though not something you noticed right away about her. She had nice posture, and people, strangers, often complimented her on that, asked if she was a dancer. Her parents, both dead, had been proud people and had taught her how to carry herself accordingly, she'd told me. She had a small waist, which she claimed the cigarettes helped her keep. She might have been thirty-five or thirty-six that first year in Salt Lake; she'd had me as a very young woman not long after my father and mother had met in Bozeman, where she'd dropped out of nursing school, against the will of her parents, to marry my father. I had seen her shake her head many times and ask me and herself out loud why she just hadn't waited a little longer, at least until she'd finished school. She must have been even more beautiful then, and I thought about my mother as a young woman, before she had been my mother, and how she had been willing to give up her education for my father, how they had met in the bar at the Grand Henry Hotel, where a piano player always performed jazz standards and where my mother sat with a girlfriend named Edith, who had also been pretty, but nothing compared to her, according to my father. My mother had been the only young woman in the early 1960s in Bozeman who wore her hair short. He bought Edith and my mother drinks and had been so struck with her from across the room that he was able to be completely honest when he approached their table. “I couldn't help but notice you,” he'd said. And that's all he'd needed to say. She nodded and thanked him for the drink, and he sat down and told her how he worked for the large mining company in town and how they were paying for his education to become an industrial designer, which sounded to her like something to become, though she had no idea what an industrial designer was. My father couldn't stop looking at her, and my mother—who was only eighteen then—felt awkward getting that kind of attention from a man while her friend sat next to her. She wasn't used to alcohol, and the drink that my father had bought her had given her courage, though not enough to ask for his number or where he lived. She may have worn her hair short, but she was not the kind of woman to ask and do the sort of things that men were supposed to ask and do. So my mother and her friend left without exchanging numbers or addresses with my father. The next evening, my mother sat alone hoping that he would be there, and he was. And that is the simple story of how they met, though I did not even want to think of that just then because it put me in mind of how my mother must have met Curtis Smith, surrounded by all those old people at Oak Groves. It made me wonder what that meeting must have been like, how impressed she was when he brought his old mother flowers and visited her every day and asked about her health and how she was sleeping and eating and whatever else a good son would ask about his mother. I did not want to have to look across the table at my mother and see how in her all-white nurse's uniform with her name tag on her chest—
MARY PARKER
, it said—she looked clean and maybe even a little younger than she was. I'd always known she was a pretty woman. But that afternoon was the first time I saw how a man might want my mother, and it was not a very pleasant thing to see. That her life expanded beyond the boundaries of who she was to me and my family only angered me.

“If we went with Curtis,” she said, “I could quit my job at Oak Groves. I could quit today.”

“Stop saying
we
,” I said.

She looked at me very hard. “I'm sorry, Steven,” she said. “But whether you like it or not, you're dependent on me. Your father can't take care of you. You know that.”

“Are you going to quit?” I asked.

“I don't know yet. I don't like taking care of sick people. The mess of it.” She was remembering Mr. Warner—the dead Mr. Warner—and started to freak a little again. “I just end up hating them for being sick and old and needy. That's not fair to them, or to me. You understand that I'd go on doing this for you and Jenny. I'd watch a hundred Mr. Warners die. But I can't go on doing it for your father. Not for one minute more.”

I smiled at her as nicely as I could. I knew what I was going to say next and I wanted it to work, to win her over. “Then keep on doing it for Jenny and me. Just for now. Just a little while longer. Please.”

“Of course,” she said, smiling back and looking at me as if she understood what I wanted, as if she wanted it, too. She reached across the table and put her hand in my hair and tousled it. “I would. I really would. But I'm running out of time, kiddo.” She took her hand away and picked up her cigarette. “Curtis would like to meet you. He'd like to meet both of you this afternoon. He's looking forward to it.”

“No,” I said. “No way.”

She was looking down at her water, staring at it as if she were trying to make it boil. She hadn't seemed to hear me. “We've just got to take this one step at a time. Right now, we'll go take care of Mr. Warner. We'll worry about the rest after that.”

That's when I felt all that food I'd shoveled in grumbling inside me, hot and acidic. My stomach turned and a sharp, building pain pulsed at the center of my gut. I had to go. It was urgent. “Where are you off to, Steven?” my mother asked.

“To take a dump,” I said, loud enough for the other diners in the restaurant to hear. I didn't mind if I ruined everybody's appetites. What did it matter at that point what I said? I moved quickly past a family of three extremely blond little girls all dressed in the same pink overalls and strung in a line of clasped hands between their blond parents. They sang a song and the littlest one picked her feet up and hung above the floor as her bigger sisters carried her. God, did I have to hold it. It was a matter of intense focus and willpower, and when I got to the end of a short hallway and pushed on an unmarked door that was locked, I damn near lost it. I leaned against the wood with my forehead and clenched my entire body—bones and muscles and skin—until the need subsided, and I had somehow come through okay.

“Over here, kid.” This large bum dressed in a hunter's orange winter coat stood at the opposite end of the hallway holding open the door to the men's room. I launched myself toward him and into a yellow-tiled bathroom that stank of rotten eggs and cigarettes, though it looked clean enough. As soon as I had landed myself down on the toilet seat, I found that I no longer had to go, that, in fact, I no longer could go. I tried to relax, but it did no good. My stomach muscles were clenched and the urgency of a moment ago was gone. In the stall next to me, I heard the bum take off his coat and unzip himself and come to the seated position where—and this surprised me, this was something I have always remembered—he began humming in this very beautiful baritone the song “Stormy Weather,” which I knew pretty well because my father liked to sing it with his broken voice in the shower. Through the space at the bottom of the stalls, I could see his black, muddy boot with blue jeans scrunched down over it tapping to the tune. I don't really know the words to describe his voice, except to say again that it was beautiful and crept down in this soft, dark register that was lower than I'd ever heard any man's voice go so that I could let the whole weight of myself fall into it and lie deep down there and not do anything but listen. And then gradually, in the midst of that gorgeous humming, he did his business—a slow, watery letting go—while I sat locked in my stall, clenched up and unable to do mine and trying to hold on to his voice even as he shat next to me and added his own sharp, distinct smell to the already spoiled air of that rest room. I wanted to cry, then, perhaps because of the slow, obvious perfection of his voice, or perhaps because of the almost suffocating stink in the air. I didn't, though. I looked up and read a string of disgusting bits of graffiti. “You're the log maker,” one read. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” another said. “You fudge packing ass lover.” They were spiteful words, and as I read them the huge bum next door kept up his merciful humming and I listened, trying to find the shadowy bottom of his voice, trying to fall all the way to its dark floor, trying to break through to a place so deep that I could no longer rise up, a place so far away that I could never leave and go back out to that particular day, which was buried and forgotten now in the stink and beauty of that restroom. I just sat on the toilet and listened to him. When I heard the bum rip into the toilet paper, I fastened myself back up, watched myself slide along the strip of mirror above the sinks, and left the bathroom. It was bright and loud and too spacious out in the restaurant now, and I half wanted to return to the men's room. I made myself hurry back to our table, though I couldn't help asking myself if all the bums smoking in that restaurant and trying to keep out of the rain didn't have some secret gift, too, a great voice or an ability to dance or some other facility you'd never expect. I thought for sure that someone somewhere would pay the man in the bathroom to hum—pay him money so that he wouldn't have to be homeless. I wondered if all grungy people everywhere didn't have something beautiful that they could do. I hoped so.

When I got back to our table, Jenny told me that our mother had left to pay the bill and make a phone call. She was gone long enough for the bum from the bathroom to sit down at the table next to us with a Mormon missionary, who ordered decaffeinated tea—he wouldn't pay for coffee—and toast for the bum. Another missionary sat a few tables away, ministering to a teenage girl whose long blond hair was stringy and soaked. Both missionaries wore suits and ties, and the one at the table next to ours had large pink ears and very short hair that was still beaded with water from the rain. He couldn't have been older than eighteen, and I was sure he knew nothing about his companion's amazing voice. The missionary was talking about how God spoke to him. “Really?” the bum asked. “You hear his voice? What's it like? Is it like a human voice?”

“Sure,” the missionary said.

“A man's or a woman's voice?” The bum seemed very interested.

“A man's,” the missionary said. When the toast and tea came, the missionary made them say a silent prayer and they bowed their heads and closed their eyes. The bum's thick fingers drummed slowly on the tabletop.

After the prayer, the bum opened his eyes. “I didn't hear any voice,” he said. In the bum's huge hands the slices of toast seemed as small as playing cards. He ate each slice in two or three bites, and then looked over at our table. “Is anyone going to eat that?” he asked, pointing at Jenny's full plate of fish.

“It's not mine,” I said. I was wishing that our mother would return. I was wishing that people would stop asking us for things. It didn't much matter to me anymore whether he could hum or not. I just wanted to be left alone.

“To whom does it belong?” the bum said. He actually said that—
“to whom”
—with this very exact pronunciation. I pointed to Jenny, who was finished with her coloring and was now just looking at what she had done. “That's splendid,” the bum said. “Really. Your sister has something there.” She didn't know, of course, what I did—that this man was himself a kind of artist and that his opinion meant something. We all looked at her picture—the missionary, the singing bum, and me—and I think we all saw that it was a little remarkable—the perfection of each animal, the green of the grass, the brown of the fence, the golden circle of the sun in a sky that she had touched with blue and tinted with silver and somehow managed to give depth to. We all looked at her then, at her face, still red from tears. She was done crying, but you could see that she was still suffering.

“I didn't hear God's voice, either,” Jenny said. I guess she'd been praying along with them, and that upset me. I didn't know why she insisted on being religious.

“You have to keep an open heart,” the missionary said. The fact that he was just a few years older than me didn't stop him from pretending to be the only one of us to whom God spoke.

The bum pointed at her plate of fish. “Go ahead,” she said. He ate rapidly and neatly, and I couldn't help feeling that I was tired of giving people things that day, even if they were things we didn't want and even if this guy was hungry and, as I knew, exceptional in his way. I could understand then why my father had yelled at the man with nice shoes. I could understand his feeling that we worked hard for the little we had, that feeling that anything could be taken away from you, that somebody else having something meant that you couldn't have it, that feeling—simple and immediate—that you could lose everything in an instant. I was pretty sure the bum would leave us alone now, though I was wrong about that. When my mother returned, she left a four-dollar tip on the table, which was a lot of money for us, for my father and me and Jenny, anyway, even if it was nothing to Curtis Smith. When she turned her back, I snatched two dollars from the table, and the bum, leaning back in his chair and looking full and satisfied, winked at me as if we were both in the same business of taking whatever we could get.

Four

WE DIDN'T TALK MUCH
on the way to Oak Groves. The rain had become a fine, grainy mist that speckled the windshield, and I was thinking about the dead man. I didn't know anything about him, even though he'd had everything to do with what was happening now. He was making my father unlovable. He was making my mother decide to go with a man called Curtis Smith, whom she barely knew. A dead man was doing this. “Who was Mr. Warner?” I asked.

“He liked to be called Colonel Warner,” she said. “When he could recognize his name, anyway. He didn't always know you were trying to talk to him. If he did understand that he was being addressed, he wasn't very nice to you.” She paused. “He was no one, really.”