Honey, Baby, Sweetheart (6 page)

My mother was cooking something with wine and mushrooms. The smell rose full and lush from the stove and when she turned to me I could see that she had her lipstick on and that she’d been laughing. Her face was flushed from happiness and cooking steam, and she was wearing something I’d never seen before—a sundress with cherries on it, which fit snug enough to make her seem curvy. Irritation snuck up along my insides. When it came to my father, my mother went from capable librarian who could find you the population of Uruguay in less than a minute to 1950’s housewife with apron and pot holder. It was a sci-fi transformation.
Just tell him to get lost,
I said to her once.
That is your father you are talking about, Ruby,
she had snapped.
There are things you cannot understand. We have a history together. It’s not something you
can just make go away.
Said like she was throwing a bunch of unrelated items into a pot of soup. A carrot, a grapefruit, a kitchen sponge. Finally, she sighed. She resorted to the same old comeback she used whenever we questioned her authority.
Remember, I’m the mother here, and I’m driving.
The metaphorical Car of Life. The only problem is, my mother can’t drive in reverse to save her life. She once killed a juniper plant in our yard after backing up in a hurry. And as far as my father went, it seemed like she was always going in reverse.

“What’s with the minivan?” I said to him.

“A friend lent it to me. How about ‘hello’? Jesus, look at you. You’re beautiful. Give me a hug.”

His bristles scratched my cheek. When I was little he used to do that on purpose: rub his prickly cheek against mine until I squealed for him to stop. He smelled of some strong, woodsy men’s cologne. It was strange to be there in the kitchen with the real him. When you lived with someone in your mind, they became all sorts of things—villain, hero, taking different shapes like a ghost, in ways they could never do in real life. The real him just looked so much smaller, deflated by his humanness. The imagined him could move through doors and appear out of nowhere; the real him was someone who put on deodorant every morning and clipped his toenails.

My mother didn’t seem to find him diminished, though. Judging by the light that had suddenly filled her, his absence only made her imagine him with a strength that reality would not alter. She’d sketched in the details,
applied the personal vision, same as reading a good book of fiction. She liked the version she’d created. No doubt if she saw the movie, she’d have hated it and claimed it not to be anywhere near what the author intended.

“The minivan. It’s got a baby seat in the back,” I said into his shoulder. “That can’t do much for your image.”

He ignored me. He reached down into the pocket of his jeans. It reminded me of what was inside my own pocket, the necklace there, and the thought of it gave me a surge of feeling, a jolt of something like power. “Look what I have for you,” he said.

He pulled his hand out, opened his closed palm as if revealing a treasure. In his hand lay six crystals, pointed at the ends like stubby pencils, but a beautiful color, a milky pink, translucent and delicate, a color you could feel a longing to possess. “They’re so pretty.”

“Rose quartz. Raw and unfinished, from the earth. Sleep with them under your pillow. They’re supposed to bring you harmony. Take them.” I was reluctant to reach out my palm to his so that he could spill the crystals into it. It was a bit like the White Witch in the Narnia books, with her Turkish Delight. One amazing, buttery bite and you would have no choice but to keep coming back for more. With my father, there always seemed to be two choices—only the extremes. You could be drawn in, climb inside his boat and ride a dream river while looking into the sun, the glare in your eyes keeping you from seeing the waterfall you were about to drop over; or you could stand at the side and watch other people get in,
holding a map of the terrain in one hand and your protected heart in the other.

I took the crystals and thanked him. He told me he’d made a special trade with someone for them, someone who had found them in Brazil. I tried to keep one foot on the riverbank and pictured the crystals in a bin in the Gold Nugget Amusement Park General Store, next to the giant jawbreakers and fake arrowheads and pennies the size of a baby’s fingernail.

My father came up behind my mother, snitched a mushroom from the pan, and popped it in his mouth. She elbowed him. He took another, made moaning sounds of deliciousness, then put his hands on the curved waist of her cherry dress. “You shouldn’t be cooking. Let’s go out.”

“I’ve got everything right here,” she said.

“I want to treat you. I want to take out my family. I know a great Indian place. Downtown.”

“No, Chip, that’s okay,” my mother said. I could tell she meant it. I could tell she probably got off work early just to shop for all of the ingredients of the recipe, which had been researched with care in the cookbook aisle of the library earlier that day. She’d spent more than she could afford, too, judging by the array of unusual ingredients spread out on the counter, the bags from Renaud’s Gourmet, the bottle of wine.

He pretended to bite her neck. It was getting embarrassing in there. “Sweetheart, don’t tell me you lost the ability to be spontaneous,” he said.

She flinched at the remark. Then she turned off the
stove. She grasped the handle of the pan and gave the mushrooms a firm shake. “We’ll have these for appetizers, then,” she said. She opened a cupboard door and got out a bowl, a pretty one, not the plastic one with the Froot Loops toucan on it, and tumbled the mushrooms into it. She was being sincere, even if she had to fake it. She was so far down the river that even if I held my hand up to block the glare of the sun, I would only see the tiny dot of her in the distance.

“Hey, C. J.!” my father yelled. Chip Jr. did not like to be called C. J. He was smart enough to associate people who use initials for names with owners of National Rifle Association bumper stickers. “Get your shoes on! We’re going out to dinner.”

My father went into the living room. He got this in reverse order, talking to Chip Jr. and then going into the living room. This was one of my father’s biggest problems: loving the drama of the illogical, the chaos of the spur of the moment. He didn’t seem to care that irresponsibility is spontaneity’s kid sister. Poe ran over with renewed glee, jumped on my father’s knees.

“Baby, yes. Oh, sweet baby,” my father crooned to him. I had the ugly thought that this was how he probably sounded when he talked to his girlfriends.

“Change of plan,” my mother said to Chip Jr. “Come on, we’re going out.”

“You went to Renaud’s,” Chip Jr. said. There was something close to accusation in his voice.

“So? It’ll keep. Get your shoes on.” Boy, she was
cheery. Boy, we ate well when my father came around.

After a few minutes of bustling, we were at the door and ready to leave. Poe was still following Dad around as closely as dryer lint on black socks. My mother bent down and scooped him up, aiming for the back door.

“He’s coming, isn’t he?” my father said.

“Poe? In the car?” I said.

“We better leave him here,” my mother said, and she put him back down.

“Aw, no. He wants to come. I love this dog.” My father scratched Poe under the chin. “I gave you guys this dog.”

“And life hasn’t been the same since,” my mother said.
Dumped the dog on us and left again,
she should have said.

“I came to see all of you. Even my dog.” He picked Poe up. The dog had not had this many ups and downs since that glorious and devastating day on the back porch steps. “Come on, Poe, let’s go for a ride.”

“Chip,” my mother warned. But he was already heading outside.

“You’ll be sorry,” Chip Jr. said.

There was more yellow food in the Indian restaurant than on our television during the fast-food commercials. I admit, though, it was delicious, steamy and spicy and full of inexact flavors. The hypnotic snake charmer music was soothing in a weird way, and better yet, wasn’t something my father could sing along to. We had taken my mother’s
car at Dad’s request since his was running low on gas, and it had been an easy trip. Poe had been a perfect gentleman on the ride, sitting upright between my parents as if he were on his way to Sunday church services. We all started to relax. My mother’s eyes were glowy in the red candlelight. My father took her hand, rubbed her arm, put his hand under her chin. Chip Jr. read the wine list out loud.

My father was singing something to us all when we went outside; my mother’s arm was hooked under my father’s and she was smiling. When we got to the car she dropped his arm, reached for the door handle. Then she screamed.

“Uh oh,” Chip Jr. said in brilliant understatement.

It looked like there’d been a blizzard inside that car. Poe had chewed a hole in both the front seat and back, and the interior was filled with drifts and mounds of yellowish fluff. It was everywhere; on the floor, the seats, the dashboard. Some had stuck to the roof, as if he’d somehow managed to toss merry handfuls of the stuff in the air. The scream didn’t wake Poe, who was curled up in a snug ball on top of a mound of foam, snoozing peaceful dog dreams of mayhem and devastation.

“You dumb-ass dog!” my mother yelled at him when she opened the door.

“Bad dog,” my father said without much conviction. “Well, I guess he is a puppy after all.”

“He’ll be two in a few months!” my mother said. She looked like she was about to cry.

“Time flies,” my father said.

“I told you you’d be sorry,” Chip Jr. said.

“Look at him,” my father said. Poe lifted his head at all the commotion and looked around sleepily. He had bits of yellow fluff in the hair under his chin. “Hey, nice beard, Bud.” For my mother’s benefit, I tried not to laugh, but it did look pretty funny. She was swooping foam off of the seats with wide arcs, human-snow-shovel-style.

My mother, in the passenger’s seat, bit her lip the whole ride home. Repairing the upholstery would later prove to be too expensive, so she would instead drape woven Indian blankets over the holes in the seats. This covered up the surface problem but didn’t do a thing to help the bigger issue of the exposed springs, which occasionally rose up to jab you painfully when you least expected it.

“What’s this?” my father said, feeling around the seat beside him, one hand on the wheel as he drove. He held up a small black object. “Dog even chewed off the radio dial!” He shook his head in disbelief, then he tossed the knob up in the air and caught it in his palm again, as if it were a lucky penny.

“Shit,” Chip Jr. said.

“Chip Jr.,” I said.

“No, I mean shit.” He lifted up his shoe and showed me the bottom.

I swear that dog was smiling.

At home later that night, I saw my parents in the doorway of my mother’s bedroom. My father was holding the
ring that she wore on a chain around her neck; I imagined that he’d slipped it out from under the collar of her dress, knowing it would still be there. He took her hand, and slipped the ring on her finger. She just held it there, attached to the chain, until she noticed me. They both jumped back, startled. She released her finger from the ring.

“Ruby,” she said.

“Just heading for bed,” I said.

I ducked into my room, fast. My own hand reached down into the pocket of my jeans. I took out my own necklace and I held it, coiled up in my palm.

It occurred to me then, just briefly, that our hearts had been bought much too cheaply.

WALK WITH DOG AND YOU’LL NEVER WALK ALONE,
the
Foothills Church sign read. From a good distance down Cummings Road I could see Minister Joe Davis sitting on the lawn, elbows on his knees, chin in his palm, just looking at that sign. Something about this reminded me of my brother the night before, watching those lizards. It was early morning, too early for much traffic, and I imagine Joe Davis figured not too many people would witness this demonstration of his baffled hopelessness. The unknown sign changer had struck again.

I was sent on a morning mission for my father, who, when he woke up, had a sudden craving for Something With Raspberries. This time I was hoping I would not see Travis Becker outside his house, or rather, that he would not see me. I was driving Mom’s car, which still
looked like the scene of a brutal cushion massacre.