When Horses Had Wings (11 page)

On our way to lunch, I grabbed my purse and followed Pearly out the door.

“You better put that pay raise you’re getting in the credit union,” Pearly directed, as if she thought I knew something about banking. What few bills Kenny and I couldn’t take care of in person, we paid with money orders. Kenny cashed my paychecks before I even had the chance to look hard at them.

“Kenny’d find out,” I said, already feeling defeated.

“How’s he gonna find out?” Pearly looked at me like I was twelve instead of twenty. “Your pay ain’t gonna go down none, if you do this right. Have your statements mailed some place ’sides home.”

Pearly was the most headstrong woman I knew, other than maybe Neta Sue. She could plot and scheme better than a soap opera villainess. “Come on. Follow me,” she said. “I’ll show you where to go to open an account.”

I followed Pearly inside a room marked, “Keslo Electronics Credit Union,” and at her insistence signed up for automatic payroll deposits. She showed me how to hide ten dollars each payday from Kenny, money he’d never miss. After I’d finished filling out the paperwork, I said, “We’d better hurry, if you want to eat today.”

“Girl, I ain’t missin’ a meal over
this
,” Pearly said. But after seeing what she had in her lunch bag, I had to wonder why not.

“What the hell is that?” I eyed her sandwich with disgust—two split weenies and some hot mustard stuck between a couple slices of white bread. “What kind of diet are you on now?”

Pearly’s eyebrows arched. She gave me an indignant look. “I’ll have you know it’s a diet that
works
. I done lost five pounds. And my Ontie lost twenty.” She pulled two boiled eggs and a banana from her sack. “It’s called the egg, weenie, and banana diet,” she explained really serious-like. “You eat nothin’ but weenies the first day. The second day, you eat nothin’ but boiled eggs...all you want...and the third day, you eat nothin’ but bananas.” She retrieved an overripe piece of monkey fruit from inside her bag. “And on day four, you can eat all three.” Peeling her banana, she volunteered, “I’m on day four,” though she failed to explain the bread.

“That’ll work.” I giggled at her expression. I didn’t want to make her mad, seeing as how she’d gone out of her way to be helpful to me. But I felt I had to point out the obvious. “You could eat anything that way and lose weight. You’re not taking in enough calories for it to matter what you’re eating.”

“Aw, hush. You don’t know nothin’ ‘bout dietin’, no way.” Pearly pointed to the package of chips I’d just opened. “I don’t know why I even talk to you about it.”

“Why do you want to lose weight so bad? Especially since
your
husband loves
you
just how you are.” I popped a handful of corn chips into my mouth and chased them with a swig of soda pop.

“I know he does. But I don’t like being this size. And I don’t like the way people look at me when I go places, like they think I’m gonna eat up all the food in the buffet ’fore they get to it.” Her voice broke. “But the worst thing is when people asks if I’m pregnant.”

I could relate to that part. “Oh, I know all about that. Strangers used to say to me, ‘You
can’t
be pregnant! Why, you’re still a
child
yourself.’”

Pearly clapped her hands together and belted out a laugh. “I know tha’s right!”

We were an unlikely pair, Pearly and me. The one thing we both had in common was our struggle to accept a fate we’d failed to accurately predict.

Nothing could have dampened my mood that day. I’d taken the first few steps in a thousand-mile journey, and I felt invigorated. I didn’t get mad at Kenny later that afternoon, not even when he told me that, when he hadn’t been looking, which didn’t narrow things down too much, Sean had broken my Seals and Crofts album. The
Hummingbird
one.

SEVENTEEN

W
hile I’d been only dreaming of flying away, Daddy had actually done it. Now I knew whose defective genes I’d inherited. I’d been afraid of what he’d think of me if I left Kenny, worried about his appraisal of me as his daughter, too embarrassed ever to admit the truth of my situation. Come to find out, all that time, my morals had been higher than his.

As soon as I heard the news from Ricky, I rushed over to Momma’s house. I found her sitting in a dining chair looking like somebody had let all the air out of her body. Kneeling before her, I waited for her to bring her gaze level. She didn’t tell me the whole story, but Ricky had already clued me in on the worst of it.

“How could he do this?” She blew her nose on one of Daddy’s embroidered hankies.

“Are you sure?” I shook my head. “I mean, did you call Brother Sontag? Did you ask him if he was missing anything...like, maybe his wife?”

That must have been the wrong response because Momma let out a bawl.

I patted her on one knee, doing my best to take back my remark. “Okay. Okay,” I said, uncertain which of us I wanted most to reassure.

Momma’s eyes appeared focused on something far ahead, way off in the distance. “What am I going to do? They were already in California when he called.” She let out a wail. “California! How is that possible?” She gave me a dumbfounded look. “I never even knew he liked
avocados
!”

I tried to ignore the twisted logic behind her statement. “Apparently, there’s a lot more you didn’t know. Nobody would think Daddy would do such a thing. It’s crazy. It’s selfish.” I searched for more descriptive words. “It’s plain...wrong.”

Momma folded and refolded her handkerchief. “I’m nobody’s wife, now. And if I’m nobody’s wife, then who am I?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Nobody.”

That was too much for me to hear. I leapt to my feet. She’d just identified the crux of the problem. If she’d regarded herself more highly, maybe Daddy would have, too. I wasn’t sure how, but it seemed to me that Momma’s attitude had maligned more than her marriage. “Don’t say that. You’re my mother, and you’re...you.”

Momma shook her head. “Without Jesse, I’m nothing, Renee.” She sat up straighter. “I’m not like you.”

I hadn’t come here to pick a fight, but it sure felt like one was brewing. “What do you mean by that?”

Momma refused eye contact. “You’ve always been so...” She appeared to search for the perfect word. “
Independent
.” The way she said it, it sounded like a curse word. But I accepted it as a compliment.

~

“I don’t
freakin
’ believe it,” I said to Pearly. “He left Momma just like that, after twenty-five years of marriage, and after she’d lived damn near her whole life treating him like he ruled the roost.”

Pearly peered at me over her safety lenses. “See there. That’s why you don’t let ‘em rule the roost.” She wagged one index finger in the air. “’Cause you can’t count on ‘em to be there the next mornin’ when it’s time to crow.”

But Momma had depended on Daddy. She’d expected him to do what she’d always done—make do with what was on hand. She simply hadn’t identified that what was available included the minister’s wife.

It crushed me to think my daddy would do something like this, that he could so easily abandon his family for another one. I guessed he’d have the daughter he’d always admired, the one he liked to describe as a
natural
beauty. If he couldn’t produce one himself, he’d steal somebody else’s. But I wasn’t about to give Janice Sontag a free pass. She’d been equally at fault. Her prayers had conjured up more than the Holy Ghost in Daddy’s heart.

“He went testifying on Wednesday evenings,” Momma had said, trying to recreate the crime scene in her head. “I knew Janice went with him. But as far as I know, that’s the only time they could have been together, alone.” Momma was looking for the road signs she’d missed, the ones that had been marked,
Adultery Straight Ahead
.

“All I can say is, Daddy must have been witnessing more to his own needs than to others’.”

Momma burst into tears.

In hindsight, I realized I didn’t possess the most sympathetic ears Momma could have bent. Our thoughts were traveling in different directions. She was dying over the idea of losing her marriage, and I was living for the day I could break free of mine. Mostly, I was mad at Daddy for pretending to be somebody he wasn’t and angry at Momma for forgetting who she was.

~

Neta Sue and her big mouth had plenty to say about Daddy’s disappearance. Even on holidays, she couldn’t restrain herself enough to be civil. “You know, some folks got more sex hormones than’s good for ‘em,” she spouted. “I hear you can inherit that. Maybe you got it from your daddy.”

I wanted to run over and snatch that fake copper hairpiece of hers right off the top of her half-bald head. How dare she link Daddy’s extramarital affair to my teen pregnancy? I’d been sixteen when I made my mistake. And I hadn’t done it with someone else’s spouse.

“I doubt hormones had much to do with it,” I fired back. “Daddy’s forty-six years old.”

“Like that means anything.” Neta Sue waved off my comment and wandered into her seldom-used kitchen. “Kenny’s father ain’t found his way home yet from wherever he’s laid up. And he’s fifty-two,” she continued from the next room.

Anson Murphy had been missing for years. Or so Neta Sue claimed. She said he’d gone off one day on one of his many three-day drunks, and simply failed to return. And even now, at Christmastime, she rarely made mention of him.

But I knew Momma was sitting home thinking plenty about Daddy and about everything she’d lost. She’d had to sell the farm because she couldn’t afford to keep it. Now she and Ricky lived in an apartment in the city. Christmas for her would never again be the same. Family traditions that had once brought comfort now summoned her grief. Even the standard tree ornaments seemed out of place hanging from a four-foot, tabletop tree inside Momma’s sparsely decorated apartment. Thank goodness Momma had Ricky to be with her on Christmas Eve. I’d see her tomorrow.

I pulled a chair away from Neta Sue’s dining table. Before I could get my caboose in the seat, she barked, “Don’t sit
there
. That’s where I set Kenny’s plate. You can sit over there.” She indicated another chair. “Next to Sean.”

Kenny’s painted dishes from childhood never failed to make their way back to Neta Sue’s dining table whenever we visited. It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever seen—a grown man eating his food and drinking his tea from his toddler plate and tumbler. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her set out his baby fork, too.

After we’d all filled our plates, Neta Sue said, “Mm, mm. I cooked that turkey right good, if I do say so myself.” She’d dived right in before we had even said prayer. “Pays to work for somebody who ‘preciates you.” She pointed with her fork to the free bird she’d received from Jumpin’ Janitors, where she worked. “I even got a canister of popcorn someone left ‘side their desk. Had a sign on it that said, ‘For the cleaning staff.’” She puffed up like an inner-tube making contact with an air compressor. “People ‘members those whose work’s important.”

I’d received a free calculator and an extra half-hour lunch break on my last day of work before the holiday. And Kenny had been given a brick of cheese and a ten-pound ham. Unlike Neta Sue, I didn’t feel the need to brag on it.

Sean stood up in his chair and leaned across the table. I tugged at his corduroy britches, pulling him up short of his goal. I didn’t want him to get burned on Neta Sue’s candle centerpiece. The outer globe displayed a glass-beaded likeness of the Virgin Mary. “I wanna blow it out,” Sean whined. Earlier, I’d told him today was Jesus’ birthday. So I could see how he’d connected those dots.

“No, honey. You can’t have Grandma’s prayer candle,” Neta Sue scolded. She moved one fat forefinger like a pendulum, flashing her fake nails the way she always did when she was trying to show them off. “I’m burnin’ that so God’ll help me win next week’s twenty-five-hundred-dollar bingo pot.”

Kenny burst out laughing. “You ain’t gonna win no twenty-five hundred dollars playin’
bin-go
, anymore than you ended up on
The Price Is Right
the last time you burned one of these things.”

“You shut your mouth.” Neta Sue gave Kenny a hostile look. “It worked for Charlotte Kilpatrick. She burned one to get a new car, and her loan was approved the next
day
!”

Sean sat down squarely in my lap and shoveled dressing with a plastic spoon. I let him go at it while I cut the turkey and jellied cranberries I’d layered onto my plate.

“I wish you’d look at that.” Neta Sue nodded toward Sean. “That baby must be starvin’ to death. Poor thing.” Then she cut her eyes at Kenny. “Notice you been lookin’ a little poor lately, too.”

~

The sounds of gunfire pierced the cold night air. I snuggled further down under the bedcovers. “Hope those idiots don’t hit our house,” I said. Bullets being cheaper than fireworks, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve could be dangerous.

Kenny leaned back onto his pillow and folded his arms behind his head, unconcerned. “Too far away.”

“Make any resolutions yet?” I asked.

“Yep. Gonna buy a twenty-one-inch TV.” That was the extent to which Kenny’s dreams traveled.

“How about a bigger place to live?” I suggested, hoping to raise his priorities.

He turned his head to study me. “Like a yacht, too?”

I waited for his mood to settle. “I been thinking...”

“Your first mistake—”

“—about going to college.”

“You ain’t going.”

“Wouldn’t cost us nothing, ’cause Keslo has a tuition assistance program that would pay for everything, even my books.”

Kenny punched his pillow to fluff its contents. “You ain’t going to no damn college.”

I propped up on one elbow and turned toward him. “I want to learn to write. Teachers said I had a talent for it.”

Kenny tucked the covers tight around his middle. “Then write yourself a note. College is for smart people who think they’re better than everybody else. And you ain’t going.”

An hour later, the gunfire ceased. My thoughts about higher education, however, did not.

~

After the holidays, I went back to work. But Ricky must have felt he had more options because he refused to return to school. “I gotta take care of Momma,” he’d said when I asked him about dropping out. “She needs me more than school does.” But from what I could tell, he hadn’t found work or done anything that would have prevented him from graduating.

I let the sore subject slide until late January, when I broke down and asked Momma, “What’s Ricky doing these days?”

“He’s fixed the neighbor’s TV set and made twenty dollars this week,” Momma said, citing the sum of Ricky’s work efforts. Momma knew how to inflate Ricky’s practically inert status to make him sound almost industrious. Once she’d told me that Ricky was working at a recycling plant. Later, I’d learned he’d only been picking up cans along the roadway and selling them for scrap aluminum.

A draft sent a chill over the assembly area. My work gloves would serve dual purpose today. I shivered and checked a lens for scratches amidst the room’s eerie silence. It sounded as if everyone’s body had returned to work without their minds. I glanced across the worktable where Pearly appeared engrossed in filling out a final inspection form.

“Look like nothin’ll ever become of my brother Ricky,” I said. “He’s probably gonna end up on some assembly line like us.”

Pearly gave me a stupefied look. “There’s worse places to be, you know. Like the pen, or maybe the cemetery.”

I snickered. “Or living with somebody who makes you feel like you’re in both.”

“How much you saved now?” she asked.

I thought for a second. “About two hundred.”

“Girl, tha’s rent for a month. You almost there.”