Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (12 page)

"I swear. I haven't had a date in months."

"Well, I suppose you better tell me about yourself then," she said.

Holly started to ask me all kinds of questions. I told her about my life in Maple Rock, about Father Mack and my mother, about the new house in Northville. I told her that my father had left for the moon.

She said, "I know. I can sense that in you, your disappeared father."

"I sometimes believe he really is on the moon," I said.

"Of course," she said.

"But, you know," I said, "of course, he's not."

She looked up at the sky, where the moon was now orange and low, the tentative brightness of a harvest moon underneath a flurry of stars.

"I don't doubt it at all," she said. "Of course he is there. Many people are there."

"You think so?"

"Sure. Why not?"

She went into the kitchen and I followed her and sat down at the table.

"But you can't come back from the moon," she said. "Not once you send your soul there."

She sat in the chair across from me and crossed her legs, pulled an orange from the bowl in the center of the table, and started peeling it. I watched her eat a few pieces of orange. Then she held one out to me, and I reached over and took it with my mouth.

"I need a shower," she said.

"Great," I said. "I'll take one too."

Afterward, skin still damp from the long shower, we went out on her back porch and turned all the lights off in the house and sat next to each other in our towels, glad for the faint breezes that stirred the air that night.

We drank herbal iced tea while we sat at an old wooden table next to the frantic flame of a citronella candle. Holly said she liked my company, and it wasn't just the fucking. I confess that I had never heard a woman talk about sex in the blunt and natural way that she talked about it. At twenty-two, it was thrilling as all hell.

***

WHILE MY FAMILY
and Mack made plans to move, packed boxes, and picked out window coverings and carpet for the new house, I went to see Holly as often as possible. Some days, I would pick her up from work and we'd drive around in the last light of the evening, stopping to get dinner in one of the many strip-mall Middle Eastern restaurants near her house. Sometimes we'd go to the used bookstore in Farmington and browse through the fiction section while Skip, the owner, softly played banjo in the front of the store. Holly would point out novels she had liked, ones that I had never read—
The Stranger, The Immoralist, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
I would buy them for myself and read them with a close eye, as if they were maps to her psyche. Sometimes we'd go bowling and Holly would let herself smoke a cigarette— habit she'd quit some time ago. Sometimes we'd smoke a joint in her car and then head over to the bargain theater at Livonia Mall and see any movie that was playing. We saw some terrible movies. High and excited to be in the cool, dark theater, we'd giggle uncontrollably and stuff our faces with popcorn and Sno-Caps. There wasn't much to do where we lived, but we found ways to make the evenings interesting. At the end of the night we would go back to her house and get into bed. My heart still raced while we undressed, and my hands sometimes shook so badly it took me a while to undo my belt.

Some nights Holly and I would go straight back to her house and just sit on the chairs in the backyard. She would put her bare feet on my lap and I would rub them. I had never rubbed a woman's feet before, and the act struck me as so intimate that it occurred to me I would be more embarrassed if my mother saw me at it than if she walked in on me having sex.

I suppose what Holly really wanted me there for was to listen. Though she would often make jokes about how she was using me for my young body and tight ass, she seemed to want me there more than anything in the hours after we'd made love, when we would sit in the dark and she would tell me everything that was hanging around in the shadows of her heart. She would tell me about Manny and how she knew he wasn't long for this world.

"His soul, it was always just straining at the edges of this world," she said. "Maybe all mothers say this, but his spirit was too gentle for this world. His asthma reflected his waning light and energy."

I was not somebody who could come up with any sort of thoughtful responses to these proclamations, but I listened. Sometimes she would stop talking abruptly and leap up to go to the kitchen and make us some drinks. Other nights she brought out photo albums, and she'd show me pictures of Manny at the zoo, Manny with a balloon, Manny petting a kitten.

Once, after such a night, I went to see her at work the next day, hoping she'd have time for a quick lunch. The orange girl at the front desk of the salon told me that Holly had called in sick again and had canceled all of her appointments. She looked annoyed and said, "I hope you didn't have an appointment with her too."

"No," I said. "I'm her boyfriend."

"Oh, really?" the orange girl said, stretching out the word
really
with her high-pitched voice.

I went to my car and when I turned and looked back at the salon, four women were standing in the window watching me. I waved sheepishly. They burst into hysterics and began slapping each other on the arm.

There was no answer at Holly's house and so, for the first time, I let myself in with my key. I found her sleeping. She opened her eyes when I came into the bedroom and then she shut them again without saying a word.

The room was hot, so I turned on the ceiling fan. I undressed and got into bed next to her. When I woke up a few hours later, I heard the shower running and went into the bathroom.

"I think I need to paint the living room orange," Holly said. "I need a change in the energy here. Everything feels so stagnant."

"Let's do it," I said.

"You don't have to help," she said.

"No, I want to help. It'll be fun."

After our shower we drove to Home Depot and came home with a few gallons of a color called summer honeydew. I had on my good khakis and let them get covered in paint.

We painted together all night. She played some music—Chet Baker, which seemed to me to be the saddest music I'd ever heard. We stopped at midnight and made squash curry. It was too spicy for me, but I got used to it and we sat on the floor amid the drop cloths and paint cans and ate. Her face was sweaty and gleamed in the light of the kitchen. I had thoughts racing around in my head—could I live like this forever, with this woman, cooking curries and painting the walls honeydew? For a minute, I thought I could. I thought we would. The half-painted wall, one-third honeydew and two-thirds beige, seemed ridiculous and beautiful.

OUR HOUSE WASN'T
the only house in Maple Rock that had gone up for sale that summer. Gradually the neighborhood was shifting. White families were moving out and new ones—blacks and Arabs and Mexicans—were moving in. Sometimes you'd hear racist remarks at the bar or in a grocery store, but to be honest, I don't think these new neighbors were the reason people were moving out of Maple Rock. They—the now-single or the remarried women of my mother's generation, mothers with children grown or almost grown—wanted to leave behind the lives that had fallen apart on them. Some of them were moving to smaller, cheaper houses; some, like my mother, were headed to bigger homes and better neighborhoods. But most of them wanted out. It was hard not to wonder what would happen if one of our fathers returned from the moon to find the locks changed, a new family sitting down to dinner while a stranger tried a key in their lock.

Still, despite the
FOR SALE
signs here and there, most of my own friends were still in Maple Rock. The Black Lantern was still open for business—Spiros's nephew George was the main bartender now—but I had lost interest in drinking at a bar once it became something I could do legally. Plus I liked being with Holly more than being with my friends. I liked having sex with her more than I liked drinking, loved the feel of waking up sweaty and spent better than the feeling of waking up dizzy and hungover.

One afternoon I saw Nick's rundown pickup truck in the parking lot of the Black Lantern.

"Mikey!" Tom Slowinski yelled. He and Nick were sitting at the bar. There was a half-eaten pizza between them, and an empty pitcher.

Nick put a few bucks on the counter and motioned to the waitress for another pitcher. "Let me get you a beer, pal," he said.

Nick and Tom were working construction. They started at five thirty in the morning at the site of the new mall on the other end of town. They knocked off at three o'clock most days and headed straight for the bar. The mud on their work boots, the sweat stains on their T-shirts, and the dirt under their fingernails made me realize how lazy I had been that summer.

Walker Van Dyke and Pete Stolowitz came over. They, too, looked as if they had just come out of some sort of mud pit. "Where've you been, Mikey?" Walker said.

Nick poured me a glass.

"His mother says he's been spending a lot of nights away," Nick said. "He's neck deep in pussy, I guess."

I shrugged off the comment with a smile. I didn't feel like telling them. I gave them a smile to let them know Nick was on the right track, downed my beer, and left.

"Ah, come on Mikey," Tom said. "Take a night off. Get shit-faced with us!"

I headed over to Holly's, and when I pulled into the driveway in front of her house, I looked in my rearview and saw Nick's big red truck swoop in behind me. Nick and Tom were laughing, waving their middle fingers in the air.

I got out of my car and tried to get them to go away. But then Holly came out from around the side of the house. She was holding a watering can and dressed in her short denim shorts, flip-flops, and black halter top.

Nick and Tom tumbled out of the truck.

"Uh, these are some of my friends. They just happened to drive by when I pulled in," I said.

Nick and Tom made their introductions.

"They're about to leave," I said.

"Can I get you guys a beer?" Holly said. "You look like you just got out of some kind of hellish job."

"We'd love a beer," Nick said, while Tom winked at me.

We went around to the back porch and sat down. I sat in the chair facing the house, and Nick and Tom sat on the opposite side of the table. Holly went inside for the beer.

Nick whispered, "Older woman? Excellent."

"Did you see those tits?" Tom said. "Major league."

He grabbed at the imaginary female flesh and kissed it, making frantic gestures with his tongue.

"Oh, baby," Nick moaned.

Holly reappeared, holding four bottles of beer. "Is that for me gentlemen?" she said.

It was the first time I'd ever seen Nick's face go bright red out of embarrassment rather than anger.

He mumbled some kind of apology.

"They think you're a babe," I said.

"Excellent," Holly said, setting down the four sweating bottles. "Very sophisticated friends."

Nick and Tom could barely look at her until she said, "Aw, come on, boys. I'm just teasing you. I'm flattered."

They smiled sheepishly while they shook hands with Holly. I didn't like it, seeing Nick and Tom so close to Holly. I didn't like the fact that Nick and Tom knew what Holly looked like and where she lived, that they were on her back porch, that they were drinking her beer. It was like buying some beautiful cabin in the woods, on a secluded, pristine lake, and then having some developer building an amusement park right next door. All the stupidity and chaos of my life had followed me to Holly's house, and now she seemed less real than ever.

BY AUGUST
, I had started to go over to see Holly every day. I had not found another job—not that I was really looking—and if I stayed home, I'd be stuck in the bustle of packing boxes and wrapping china.

Mack was waiting up for me one night.

"It seems like you have a new girlfriend," he said. "You're gone a lot."

"Hey, you've got no right to butt into my life," I said.

"I wasn't," he said. "I think it's great. Love—women, heck, let's be honest, women and their beautiful bodies—are the only thing that makes life worth living."

"What about God or whatever?" I said. "What happened to all that?"

"When you love a woman, when you know her intimately, that's when you know what God is capable of," he said. "That's all the proof you need."

I shook my head. I didn't want to hear that my mother's naked body was proof of a divine being.

What Mack wanted to tell me was this: he didn't need the money from the sale of the house. He was going to take down the
FOR SALE
sign.

"If you want to go Northville with us, great," he said. "But we shouldn't force you. If you want to stay here, well, welcome to your new home. It's all yours. We'll sign it over to you. We don't need the money, and well, given the fact that your parents bought it twenty years ago, it's got a very low monthly payment. It's almost paid off."

I asked Mack why he was doing this for me. I wasn't used to my mother dating men who had any concern for me at all.

"Because I'm bad with money, I guess," he said. "And because if I learned anything as a priest, it's to try and put myself in somebody else's shoes, and man, when I looked at your shoes, I could tell how hard it would be to move now."

"You don't have to do this," I said.

"Look, Michael, it's not like this place would sell very fast anyway," he said. "People aren't flocking to Maple Rock. Once you're on your feet, you can take over the payments and taxes. You'd be doing us a favor."

"Geez," I said.

"Anyway," he said. "This place is all yours now. And you can keep the Buick."

I managed to say thank you, but I couldn't think of anything else to say, even though the conversation seemed to beg for some closure.

In the morning, over cereal, my mother said, "I heard Mack talked to you last night."

"He did," I said. "Thanks."

She looked at me like I was this little kid who'd just come out of his room after a tantrum. "Don't thank me, thank him."