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It’s been a pretty good couple of weeks. Mom is working at the nursing home, and believe it or not, she actually likes the old folks. She still drinks but never seems to pass from that good phase of the buzz. She is easygoing and maybe even happy. Even she and Mitch are hitting on all the right cylinders, and I doubt he is seeing Theresa at all. Summer is stretching out long and lazy, and the conversation with Dylan about how terrible things were seems overblown and dramatic. She’s not an alcoholic. She’s nothing like Jake was. It was just a bad patch, and now things are better. I feel guilty about having talked to him about her like that.
Mom has already gone to work, and I’ve had a slow start, lounging in my bed, feeling lazy in the sultry heat of this rainless summer. My mornings are all like this, slow and lazy, since I don’t go to work until two. Mom is sometimes home when I go in, but not always. In my unhurried way, I’m waiting for my toast to come up out of the toaster when I catch sight of Mitch in the front yard, leaning into the passenger window of a car. I step to the window to see who he is talking to. I squint, narrowing my eyes to see inside the dark interior. Then I recognize the car, and all my peaceful calm happy evaporates in a flash. Before I even know I have moved, I am standing on our rickety front deck, glaring hard at the back of Mitch’s head. Glaring hard and hateful at the car puttering on the bubbling black-oil-and-rock road.
He turns, either because he feels the heat of me radiating toward him or because she has told him. He cuts his eyes over his shoulders to look at me, straightens, taps his palm on the inside of the car, and it begins moving again. His eyes lock on mine, and I try to freeze my face and not look away. “Who was that?” I ask when he is about halfway through the ankle-deep lawn.
A small grin quirks at the edge of his lips, and he says, “Aw. Hell. You know who that was.” He shoves a hand up into his lank hair and pushes it back from his high forehead. It flops down, making him look boyish.
“You still fuckin her?” I demand. His charm isn’t going to work on me. Not today. Not when she is doing so well.
“You watch your mouth.” He comes to me, standing at the base of the deck, below me, looking up. “You don’t need to be talking like that.”
“Well, are you?”
“It’s not like that, Alison.” He squints into the light; he is handsome and shiny with a sheen of sweat making his skin glisten.
“Just answer me.” I cross my arms over my breasts but become aware of the way they get pushed up, spilling over the top of my bra. I shift and tug my tank higher on my chest, bowing my shoulders forward, trying to diminish my breasts at his eye level. He sees all of this with an amused glint in his eyes.
“You want to talk?” he asks and settles himself on one of the steps, patting the other, with his black, oil-stained fingers, for me to come and sit beside. I go down but don’t sit; instead I stand, leaning against the hot tin of the trailer. “You want the truth?” he asks.
“Yes,” I hiss. Finally somebody is going to say something true.
“Well, then sit down here beside me, and we’ll talk.” Two beats pass, then I push myself off the tin and settle on the step next to him. “You know I love your mama.” I blow air out of my nose. Whatever. “I do. You may not think so, but I really do. We been together, what, four years? I love her, but a man needs something more.”
“That’s such bullshit.” I spit, but I’m not really angry, I know it’s kind of true. “She needs you. She’s been really good lately,” I say.
He shakes his head, looking out across the tangled lawn. “No, I thought I could help her, but she’s beyond me. I tried. Damn, you know I tried.” I don’t really know anything of the sort, and I give him a look that says as much. “Come on, Al. You know how she is. Good this week, happy, easy, but next week she won’t be.”
“But she’s trying.”
“Is she?” he asks, glancing back to me, then away.
“Of course she is.” She has to be trying, doesn’t she?
“Really?” he asks, but what he means is, “You know that’s not true.” I shrug. “I mean, hell, I like a good party and to mix it up, but not all the time. I want her to lay off the booze but she won’t.” “Won’t” comes out as two syllables, his Southern Illinois accent shining through.
“Have you talked to her about it?” I ask, reaching down, plucking a blade of grass and beginning to shred it.
“Talk to her about it as much as she will listen.”
“You think she’s an alcoholic?” I ask.
“Hell. Sure she is.” He leans back. “I just can’t keep doing this. I’ve tried with her, I mean really tried to make it work. She’s a good woman. I love her and all, but damn. I never know who she’s gonna be when I come in the door. I piss her off more than anything.” True. He does piss her off.
“Only ’cause she knows you’re sleeping around.”
“That’s not true. Come on, Alison. You’re a smart girl, and you ain’t a baby anymore. If we’re gonna be honest, let’s be honest,” he says, and I nod. “I didn’t cheat on your mother for the first three years we were together. She accused me a lot, but I swear I never cheated.” He shifts beside me and leans forward with his elbows on his knees.
“What about when I was in the sixth grade?” I ask. “That was what she said happened then.”
“No. There was no other woman then. I just didn’t know she had so much shit, you know, in her head when we got together. She just scared me off for a bit.”
“So why’d you start?” I ask, ready to go to bat for my mother.
“I’m real sorry. But I want to be with someone who knows I’m there, who wants me to be there, doesn’t just need me. Sure as hell doesn’t feel like she needs me either. She doesn’t want a damn thing to do with me most times.”
“Well, then you should just go so we can move on.” A lump rises in my throat, but I push around it to speak.
“I will. Soon. I’m sorry.” He sounds like maybe he has a lump in his throat, too. “She’s got a good heart, you know. She’s just so messed up. That ain’t no kind of life.” I nod. She is broken. “I wish I knew what had broken her, maybe then we could figure out how to heal her.”
I nod, splitting a blade of grass. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know who my daddy is?”
“Nope. She never mentioned it.” We sit for a bit longer, him staring out at the road, me staring down at the grass in my hand. “We done here?” he asks when I don’t say anything but just continue shredding one blade of grass after another. I nod, and he stands up, ruffling my hair, and goes out back to get the lawnmower and attack the yard.
I sit. When did it happen? I really do remember her being different when I was little. She couldn’t be room mom if I were in kindergarten now. What happened to her? When? Who? Was it Ed? Did he hurt her like he hurt me? Was he the evil in her nights? Was it when he left? Because she was good, even when we moved here, wasn’t she? That’s the problem; I don’t know anything about my mother. She is a mystery and always has been. I have no history from her, no story of parents, brothers or sisters, or even where she came from, and for the most part I’ve never asked. When I was little, I remember asking her about my grandparents, and she had only answered, “We don’t have people, little bug. It’s just you and me.” Hearing her voice in memory, saying the little love name she had given me when I was small, makes me suddenly weepy. It made me feel then like we were of the fairy folk when other kids were having grandparents into the classroom to look at their work. She was so good then, making me feel like we were special. She told me when I was little that I was a moon fairy who slept on the moon at night. I believed her for a long time, in that secret part of me where all children want to believe.
I sit until Mitch has finished mowing the back and made his way toward the front. He sees me still sitting and stops the mower, sweat pouring down his face. “You okay?”
“Do you know anything about her?” I look up but can’t see him clearly, just a haloed silhouette.
“What do you mean?” he asks, rocking back on his heels and squatting there in front of me.
“Do you know where she grew up? Did she have brothers or sisters?”
He shrugs. Clearly I am not the only one she has locked out. “She’s always been real private.”
“Secretive” is the word I would use. Have we just never asked? Have I never asked her who she was outside of myself? I know I haven’t.
“Did she ever tell you anything about Ed?” I ask.
“That the fellow who bought you this land?” I nod. “She never told me much more than that. I thought maybe he was your daddy?” I shake my head. I don’t know who my daddy is, but I know Daddy Eddy was not him.
“How did you meet her?” I ask, thinking to gather some piece of her history for myself.
“At the Uptowner. Drinkin’.” I should have known. I drop my grass and turn to go back inside before he starts mowing on the front.