Dear Hearts (3 page)

FOUR

Mitch

When I was a kid, I'd plant my
face against the black hole of the universe - stand outside, face up and wonder
if there was someone else out there whose ribs ached, welted, still warm from
his Mama’s favorite spoon.

“You
git what you git and you don’t throw a fit,” she’d say and that spoon would
come down, wood against skin, against small strips of muscle.  My Daddy
would sit in his chair, conducting the sound of each thwack with his booze
addled hand. 
Fingers gliding through air unless he was
snoring.

“What
I do?” I asked one time.  She didn’t answer. 
Didn’t
have to.

She
was an old woman at that point even though I was only twelve.  Her leg
dragged a little from the gout and every time she’d yank my head back, my
vision would catch in the wiry mass of hair in her nostrils.  You’d think
a twelve-year-old boy would be able to shoulder off someone like that,
especially if his Daddy was too drunk, too weak to intervene anyways.  But
in a strange way, I relished the thought of “thwack thwack thwack.”  Of
splinters grazing, wet eggs of sweat on Mama’s upper lip because we both needed
a little redemption when coming to terms with who I really was: a queer.

“What’s
she like?” Aaron asks.  Outside on his back patio, we're just two buddies
to the golfers on the green, downing beers, shooting the shit.  Aaron
lives on the golf course outside of White Smoke, his three floor townhouse
sidling closely to the sixth hole.  This is the third time I've been here,
and this is the part of our game we've never played before.  Question and
answer time.

“Who?”

“You
know.”  He means Elena.  Oh God, how to explain an entire
world.  I think if I were straight it would be easier: “Good in bed, good
in the kitchen - good where it counts,” and then one of those soul sucking
winks.  But it's only a hat I wear in public, and sitting with Aaron, his
body still stinging on my skin, it doesn’t fit like it should.

“She
worries a lot.  She cleans when she worries.”  I swallow
beer,
feel Aaron’s eyes on the side of my face.  “She
smells like bleach.”

“Bleach?”

“Just when she worries.
  Other
times, like vanilla, I guess.”

“Okay." 
I can feel Aaron smirking at me.  I love him.  I love being with
him.  I don’t love that he thinks he's better than me.

“I
have a wife and kids.  Not a disease.”

“Okay,”
Aaron says again, this time holding his hands up, but the smirk's still there.

“So
what’s it like to be you, Mr. Big Shot Little Rock Accountant?”  I glance
over at the house next to Aaron’s townhome where Greg Mainhardt and his leaky
basement live.  It was in Greg’s backyard, pretending I gave two shits
about the elitist prick’s water damage, that I spotted Aaron outside on his
deck.

I
think of all the stupid, usual bullshit about time stopping, the air freezing,
the moments between us staggering like an old man having a heart attack. 
But nothing about any of that is real.  What's real is the way Aaron looks
at me, like unlocking the bolt in my chest to read the words between my ribs:

I
have a wife, I have a child, and I’m attracted to men.

“Beautiful, painful, disgusting, a
fucking dream.
 
Isn’t that true about any life?” he says, another swallow of beer on his lips.

“Okay,
sure, but tell me something real.”  The golfers have left and nobody's out
in Maindhardt’s backyard so I brush my finger up and down the back of Aaron’s
hand.  He looks at me and now it's his words I'm reading.

“You
know that thing you told me about your mom?  How hard she was on
you?”  I shake my head.

“My
parents were different.  They were wonderful.  But they had the worse
gaydar.”  Aaron says, snorting a little.  His Adam’s apple undulates
with another cold swallow of beer, and I want to place my fingertips on it.

“They
loved me so much, you know, like their faucet was broken and they couldn’t turn
that shit off.  But then the day came, and if you ever decide to embark on
‘the day,’ let me give you a piece of advice: you’re a fool to think you can
handle the reactions you’ll get.”  He took another long pull on his
bottle, and I wait, but he doesn’t continue.

“So, your parents?”

Aaron
shrugs and moves his hand as a new group of golfers drives up the cart path.

“I
fixed their faucet.”

~

“You
have to leave,” Aaron says later in the foyer.  He doesn’t ask it like a
question, but we both know it is.  At least in an alternate universe it
would be, and I would roll it around in my head and then say “No, I can stay,”
already thinking about Chinese takeout and curling back up in Aaron’s down
comforter.  But just not in this one.

Aaron
presses his mouth against mine, a feeling that’s still as unwelcomed as it is
welcomed.  It feels like eyes are on us, the word “fag” guts me like a
fish.  But there’s no one here but Aaron, his shirt unbuttoned to his
chest, a faded scar where his heart is.

“Did
it hurt?”

“Bet
your ass,” he says and smiles.  It thumped wrong as a kid. 
“Ebstein’s Anomaly” he told me last time.  I said it out loud three times
so I’d remember.

“Everything
hurts,” Aaron says as I walk out his door into the edge of evening.

Bet
your ass.

~

The
cash is already wrapped in rubber bands in the console.  Sometimes we get
paid in this backwoods way, but cash is cash and nobody complains about that
fact.  So when I go inside looking like I just robbed a bank, Elena will
kiss my cheek and say, “Nice work.”

But
I don’t go in right away.  Instead I sit in the cab of the truck and think
about Elena’s voice on my cell, a quick call after showering in Aaron’s marble
bathroom.

“How’s
everything?”

“Good. 
Gonna be a long one though.  When it rains it pours,” an old joke I offered
up as an apology for Aaron humming “A Hard Day’s Night” in the kitchen.  I
had muffled the phone with a nervous hand.   

“Good. 
Listen, I just wanted to say sorry.”

“No
need.”

“Yes,
there is.  I think we need help.”

“We’re
fine.”  I said it with too much force, the “not fine” easily detectable in
my voice.

“We
drink too much.”

“Everyone
drinks,” I said although we both know it’s not true wedged this deep in the
Bible
Belt
.

“Can’t
we be better?” she asked, and I could tell she was crying.  Aaron stuck his
head out the kitchen’s doorway.  He was pointing at a pan with his
spatula.  “Omelet?” he mouthed.

“Listen,”
I’m dealing with a son-of-a-bitch right now and I don’t just mean Jimmy. 
What’s that Jim?  You got something to say?”  Aaron rolled his eyes,
and I turned my back on him, wondering if Elena could hear the tears in my
voice, too.  “It’ll be okay,” I whispered into the phone.

“I
love you,” she said.

“I
love you more,” because sometimes, I think it’s true.

FIVE

Elena

We
drink spiked coffee, smoke outside.  Ronnie's backyard is more like Disney
Land, so there's always something to gaze at when she talks about her
procedures or why her Mexican neighbor bothers her which has nothing to do with
the fact that he's Mexican. 
Allegedly.

Why
are you friends with her?
It's the question my husband originally authored
and rings through me every time I sit and smoke and drink with a woman who
knows the different shades of Lexus colors by their specific names (Neptune
Blue is her favorite).  I try to dig out an answer that doesn't make me
seem like a crazy person, but the only thing I got is that when I go over to
Ronnie's, it feels like I'm wearing my perfect skin.  Her home, her
things, her Botox injections - they all could have been mine if the universe
had swayed just a few inches to the left.

"So
who's right?

"Sorry?
About what?"

"The crow's feet?
  Luke says
he can't see them but that man is blind as a near sided bat."  Ronnie
is poking her pointer finger at her eye, and I can tell she's gotten too close
to her target because she blinks a little.

"He
is, of course.  You're crazy if you're going to let them slice and dice
you up like a plate of sushi," I say.  She laughs, and I feel warm
for a second. 

"See,
this is why I like you so much, Elena.  You never feed me
bullshit."  Like her other friends, she's thinking.  The charity
thing still gnaws at me, but it's my country roots, my
deep
South, "take no bullshit" attitude that Ronnie laps up like her kicked
up coffee. 
It's
hard being a princess
twenty-four seven.  That's why she has me. 
And the
affairs.

"How's
Mitch?" she asks.  She stretches out her feet, still bare, and grazes
the chiminea with her toe.  She has astoundingly ugly feet for someone who
likes to show them off so often.

"Mitch
is Mitch."

"You
always say that."

"It's
true."

"You
don't even realize how lucky you are."  One of the ugly pair is now
resting on her leg, and I watch her dance her finger tips against her
sole.  She drags on her Virginia Slim, and I imagine the smoke crawling
down her throat and nestling in her lungs.  I think about writing that
image down, but I don't have any paper.  And really, it's a weird thing to
do anyways.

"How so?
               
   

"You
have a man who loves you.  No, fuck that," and her head swivels
searching for little ears.  "You have a man who is in love with you,
Elena.  I mean by his very definition, he shouldn't be a man. 
An alien maybe.”

"And
you'd put Luke in a different category altogether?"

"I'd
put Luke on the moon if I could.  He's in love with making money, with the
idea of his happy little family. 
But me?
 
Nope."
  There's a gazebo out in the middle of the
yard and in front of it, a stone bird bath.  A writhing medusa acts as the
pedestal and her hair - snakes for strands - curve up and form into a
bowl.  There's a red-breasted robin flapping its wings in the water and a
spray of droplets catch the sun, and that's when I'm taken by the way Mitch's
arms feel when I stand at the toilet and look into the "what could have
been."

Lucky?
 
Yeah, real lucky.

"Well,
not that I really care.  I have my fun," she says.  "You
should try it some time."

"Cheating? 
I'd rather take a nap."

"God,
you make it sound so dirty.  Not cheating.  Just company," she
says.  The latest is Sean, the kid who manages this unending mecca they
call a yard.  Not really a kid, more like twenty-three, but considering
I'm edging thirty, have a daughter and a nine year marriage under my belt, I
could easily be his grandmother.

"I
don't need company," I say.  I go to say what it is I really do need,
but I stop because I can't find the words let alone stack them up right. 
I want another baby.  I think.  I want to stay with Mitch
forever.  I think.  I want to get in my car and not stop driving
until I see the surf and taste salt every time I breathe.

I
want a time machine.

“Everyone
needs company.  You know what I deal with?  Between the twats -
excusemylanguage
- at Junior League, and my husband, Sergeant Moneybags, and my daughter who
has the vision of a seventeen-year-old beagle, I need a little time to myself,
you know?  I need a little Ronnie time.”  I have a feeling she’d be
slurring at this point if it weren’t for the caffeine in the coffee.

“Fair
enough,” I say.  I’m not nearly as gone, and I hate knowing why.  For
Ronnie, drinking is a Saturday morning ritual. 
For me?
 
It’s a way of life.

Noon
hits sooner than later, so I nominate myself coffee cup holder while Ronnie
tries to balance her way into the house on her ugly feet.

 Before
we leave, she shows off the new Beamer they bought, but she does it while
chewing on her thumbnail.  She's snockered, and at this point is prying
Trudy's hair from her scalp, believing she's gently running her fingers through
it.  Poor Trudy has tears in her eyes behind those god-awful coke bottle
glasses and every time I look at her, I can’t stop picturing a geriatric dog.

"This
has been fun," Ronnie says as we stumble into a hug.  She kicks up
the blackened sole of her foot, and I breathe in our smell, a noxious
combination of Donna Karen and the bleach I used to scrub the bathroom grout
yesterday that’s stood the test of my morning shower.

"It
always is."  Something grabs my hand, and I almost to swat it away,
but I see
it's
Wren shouldering close to me. 
She's mousy in a way that's cute now, but won't be when she's older, and I pray
she isn't cursed like Mitch's sister, Tammy, who looks like a stillborn
kitten.  That woman is hairless and loud-mouthed and one of sixty million
reasons I'm glad I got the hell out of Helena but sometimes when I look down at
the crown of Wren's head, it's like I never moved an inch.

"Where we going?"
Wren asks when
I loop around the Gibsons' circle drive in my GrandAm.  Ronnie pirouettes
a final goodbye and the sun strikes hard against Trudy's glistening bug eyes.

"Mall,"
I say.  Mitch leaves cash wadded in the console of his truck, and
sometimes I sneak out there late at night to swipe a few bills.  The trees
aren't diving toward the ground and lightning isn't striking me dead, so it's
no big deal. 
Seriously.

"What
are we getting?" she asks.

"Whatever we want."

~

I
bought a TV.  I didn't mean to, but then Wren and I were standing in Radio
Shack at the White Smoke Mall and our faces were blown up around the
room.  She started jumping up and down, waving her hands.  Her face
was happy and for a second I forgot about her bed wetting, her school wetting,
the fact that she might one day end up like Mitch's used up sister, Tammy, so I
bought the damn TV.

"Ooooh,
shit," I say as we drive around in circles for awhile.

"What's
wrong, Mommy?" Wren asks.  I look up and see a small fraction of her
face in the rearview mirror.  She looks a little like me at this angle.

"What's
not wrong,
really.
  Hungry?" I ask and rack
my brain for places I can stash the forty-inch, flat screened mammoth that's
lightly bobbing in the truck of the Pontiac.  The damn thing hardly fits
so I spent twenty minutes and half a nail bungee cording it shut.

"Mmm,
Happy Meal," she says in that way that annoys me.  Just ask for the
damn thing, kid.  But I agree and smile because I read on the Internet how
you always have to smile around children.  They absorb sadness like
sponges.

We
start-stop through the line and I order her a Happy Meal, me the chicken
nuggets and chow down like there's no tomorrow.  She doesn't ask, but I
know she wants to eat inside and play on the diseased infested jungle gym with
the other children.  But it's too loud in there, too bright.  I feel like
I'm up on stage in that
place,
and I'm liable to trip
and spill our food for an audience of fat gutted looky-loos.

"What
did you and Trudy play?"

"House.
  She made
me be the Dad."

"Her home, her rules."

"Yeah,
but she always makes me be the Dad."

"Well
then do her the favor.  Might be the only time in her life she knows what
it's like to have a husband.
"  I
shouldn't
talk this way about her friends.  I really shouldn't talk this way to her
period.  But she has these doe eyes, this simple way of opening them up
like she wants to know the truth.  Lord knows no one else does.

"She
can be mean sometimes," Wren says.  And that hurts my heart, like
"knock it hard with a hammer and watch it crumble" hurt.

"Everyone
can be
mean
sometimes, Wren, but not everyone can be
good.  Not like you."  And I smile at her again.  But I
really don't feel like smiling.

We
coast down Pyle drive after I snatch at the lone fry that fell to the
floorboard in the passenger side and plop it and the rest of our trash in the
outdoor trash bin.  I coat my hands in hand sanitizer and do the same to
Wren's because greasy hands roughly the size of half dollars are one of my
triggers.  I don't want another bleach day.  

We
sail down through a green light, pass Fox Funeral Home and that's when I see
it. 
A1 Storage.
  I hook a right and land
next to a banana yellow station wagon with a bumper sticker that reads,
"American
By
Birth, Southern By the Grace of
God."

My
TV has a new home.

~

They
were running a special, so the first month’s rent is only a buck.  The
manager, Lara according to her name tag, helped me lug it to the unit, and I
have a feeling she doesn’t do that for all the girls. 
Just
the pretty ones.

She
gave me her card, all business of course, but kept nodding her graying shaved
head at me like everything I said was coming from God himself.

“Where’s
your toilet?” must have sounded like “Want to run away with me forever?” to her
pink tinged ears because she walked us there herself.

“I
don’t have to go,” Wren said when went into Lara’s “personal” throne.

“I
know, but Dr. Mailer said to make sure we go every couple of hours.” 
There’s that “we” again.  It’s something my mother use to do that would
royally piss me off, as if me being the only one of her kids who shared her
mutual anatomy meant we were the same damn person.  “We would like a Dr.
Pepper.”  “We want to go see Aunt Earlene.” “We just got our
period!”    

 “But
I don’t-”

 “Just
fucking
go
, please?   Please?”  I hiss
it and the finger drills into my head again.  She looks up at me and the
worst part is that she doesn’t cry.  She’s not even shocked anymore
because this is her mother.  The nightly drunk who’s generous with her
“we’s” and has a knack for taking a shit on the whole damn day.

“I’m
sorry.”

“I
know,” she says.

She
finishes up and I flush while she lets a sorry trickle of water clean her
hands.  I scrub mine too with the rose scented soap Lara has filled with
water to stretch a dime.  I use my nails, always use my nails, and when
I'm finished my hands are streaked with angry stripes, and I try not to notice
that Wren's are, too.

Outside
the bathroom, Lara is stacking up empty box in the front window display. 
She's rolled up her sleeves to show off a thick layer of fat that I'm sure she
hopes I confuse for muscle.

"Thanks,"
I say.

"Any
time, be sure to call if-" but the door swings shut behind us before I let
her finish. 
There's
still a couple of hours to
pack tight with "activities."  That's another thing they say
online about kids, that they always have to be doing something so that their
brains work right.  And sometimes I have to laugh at crap like that
because my mother put Coke in my bottle when I wouldn't take the formula, and I
turned out fine.

But
I can't laugh at it because there Wren is, strapped in her booster chair in the
back and her face is expectant-like, waiting for me to make the call. 
That's another thing about kids.  It doesn't matter if you have a headache
or you can't get pregnant again or that all you want to do is recount the years
in your aching head and pinpoint the exact moment life's sweater began to
unravel.  You're still in charge.  You still have to play the game
even if you don't feel like it.