Eat Your Heart Out (23 page)

“It just really gets me that she started going to church. What'd she think? Jesus would make all of her bullshit okay?”

“You don't believe in God?”

“No. Absolutely not. I absolutely do not believe in God.”

Earl starts laughing.

“What? Why's that funny?”

“Your mama didn't either. She said all that about accepting Jesus Christ in her heart to make Lori happy. I could tell. She didn't believe. Not for one second.”

Cheryl stumbles up
the stairs, trying her best to be quiet and not wake Lori. Earl decided to stay outside and smoke one last cigarette before coming in. Dizzy and drunk, she needs to go to bed as quickly as possible. If she waits and sobers up, even a little, she won't be able to sleep tonight.

Cheryl passes Mama's picture on the way to her bedroom. Then she moves back and stares at it for a long, still moment.

We do look alike, thinks Cheryl. So much alike.

We smile the same way. Our eyes are the same shape. Her face is round like mine. We sit the same, straight-backed and never comfortable. A pain I inherited and now wear as my own.

Cheryl watches her vision blur, then focus. She's crying.

She can't remember the last time she cried.

She puts her hand on her stomach and then slowly makes her way to her bedroom.

She lies on her back, her hand on her stomach. Then she says to what's growing inside her the same words that she fell asleep to as a child.

“I'm not going to be like her.”

And then, “I promise, I'm not going to be like her.”

“Mama! Mama! Give
me those keys!” yells Cheryl, fourteen and scared shitless.

Mama can hardly speak, but she wants the keys to meet her boyfriend at the bar. Her friend Joan just called and said he was chatting up some dumb bitch. Cheryl-Lee thought Mama was due for a night in of drinking and passing out, so she'd sat herself at the dining room table trying to get some schoolwork done. But when Mama got the phone call, Cheryl-Lee knew she would have to hide the keys. But Mama was swift on her feet tonight, emboldened by rage and jealousy.

“Fuck off, Cheryl-Lee!” Mama yells at the top of her lungs. The neighbours can hear, Cheryl is sure, but she doesn't have time to feel humiliated.

“NO! You give them to me right now! You are not driving tonight!”

She moves closer to Mama, trying to find a good way to wrestle them away from her. But she grabs the keys too quickly. Now Mama's got her and isn't letting go.

“Mama! Let go! Mama, Mama, you're hurting me! Let go!” Cheryl-Lee wheezes. She can't breathe.

Mama lets her go. Cheryl-Lee has to take them, she can't let her drive like this. She moves slowly away from Mama and then swings back, grabbing the keys from her hand.

It takes Mama a second to know what's happened, and Cheryl-Lee is already running when Mama grabs her. Mama spins her around and punches her, twice, hard, right in the nose.

Cheryl-Lee brings her hands up to her face to protect herself when she sees red all over. She's bleeding, and it's bad. It's broken, she thinks. It's broken.

She turns around, hand over her nose, and runs up to her room. She locks the door and throws the keys under her pillow. She tries to stop the bleeding with her bedsheet.

The next morning, Mama, hungover but sober, drives Cheryl-Lee to the hospital. They tell the nurses in the
ER
that she fell. Mama tells her that she's quitting, for good this time.

Cheryl-Lee believes her.

As the years passed, Cheryl realizes that's the most difficult part of being an alcoholic's child.

You believe them, every time. The disappointment hurts more than any broken bone.

And it never heals.

“You are such
a pretty girl, Cheryl. I don't know why you need all those tattoos.”

It's eleven o'clock. Cheryl's hungover and it's hotter than hell. Lori made her drive to the house to start sorting Mama's things.

Cheryl turns left, without looking. Why bother? No one else is on the road.

“God also gave me free will, right?”

“That's not the point I am making. You are beautiful and you don't need them.”

“Here, Lori, this one is religious,” says Cheryl, pointing to her bicep, lifting both hands off the wheel.

“That is a skull wearing a top hat smoking a cigarette,” says Lori. “Watch the road!”

Cheryl stops the car abruptly. Lori scowls. She parks it by the side of the road.

And we're here, she thinks.

This is worse than I remembered, but I can't back out. The funeral is day after tomorrow. I need to get this done today.

It's a small house, brick, one and a half storeys. The lawn is dry and overgrown by weeds. Cheryl looks in the mailbox. It's full of junk mail and bills. Literal white trash. The gravel driveway leads to the front door.

Here goes nothing, Cheryl thinks as she walks into the house.

“Why is it so dark in here?”

“Shannon liked it dark,” says Lori.

She runs her hand over the wooden bookshelf; it's dusty. Filthy. The same poster of John Wayne and some stupid horse is hung on the wall in exactly the same place.

Lori can keep that.

She walks through the front room. It's as if she's walked into a movie set untouched for ten years. Still the same couches, only they're ripped now. A picture of her as a little girl in a pink Goodwill dress on a small scratched table. Cheryl remembers that dress.

“Okay,” she says, “let's get this started.”

She has no energy to be sentimental. She doesn't want to start remembering things. She just wants to go home.

“I'll start in the kitchen, you want to take the upstairs?” Lori asks.

Cheryl sits in
Mama's bedroom on a cardboard box marked
ODDS AND ENDS
. So far, she's thrown out everything she's found in it.

Clothes, sheets, books, it's all in there. There's not a single thing she wants for herself. She sits on the box, unable to move.

What the fuck am I doing here? she thinks.

How strange it is to sit with everything Mama had, to be surrounded by her things, things she kept her whole life.

Cheryl has seen so many shrinks, talked to so many people, but she could never make sense of why she got the mama she did. Cheryl started being mad and then she got sad. Now she was just numb but always acutely aware of Mama. Cheryl knew Mama was far away, but she felt so near. How could a mama so absent also be so present?

She gets up from the box and looks around the room, deciding what to pack next. She puts her hand on her stomach absently. After a few seconds, she feels movement.

“What the . . .”

Then she remembers.

The baby. Did it kick?

“Lori?” she yells down the stairs.

“Yeah?”

“I'm going out.”

Then, after two smokes in rapid succession, she gets in the car and drives away without looking.

“Why can't you
forgive her?” asks Ben.

It's springtime, the year they got together. They're happy. As happy as they know how to be.

Cheryl has just started talking to him about Mama, and he's the first person she's ever wanted to be honest with. She thinks she loves him, how she knows to love, anyway. Her heart is inexperienced, not yet worn in like a baseball glove. Not misshapen and sagged. She's tender with him.

“I just . . . can't.”

“Do you miss her?”

“I miss what I never had. I've spent my whole life missing something I've never had.”

“Do you ever want to forgive her?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don't you?”

“Because she's never going to change.”

He nods.

After a while, he speaks again, only softer and slower this time.

“I just think that you only have one mom, and one day you're going to wish things were different.”

Maybe, she thinks.

“No. I won't.”

Maybe, she thinks again.

Maybe.

When Cheryl gets
into town she realizes she's starving. She hasn't had a burger in five years, but it's all her body wants. She stops at a roadside Burger Bar, taking in how green everything is. She'd forgotten the green.

She walks into the restaurant. There is Elvis paraphernalia, pictures of 1950s movie stars, and flags everywhere. She sits in a booth near the door. She just wants to eat and get out. She checks her phone.

Ben still hasn't contacted her.

A small older woman, skinny except for an unfortunate potbelly, comes to take her order. That's what I'll look like in a few months, thinks Cheryl before she catches herself.

“What can I get you?”

“A burger.”

“Anything else?”

“Fries. Is it too early for a beer?” she asks, then laughs.

The lady laughs back.

“We don't serve.”

The lady looks at her and smiles. Then her faces changes.

“Shannon's daughter?” she asks.

“Yes,” says Cheryl, not moving.

“Sweet Jesus,” says the woman.

“I'm sorry, have we met?”

“No. No, we've never met, but I knew your mom.”

“Yeah?”

The lady stares at Cheryl, then catches herself.

“Yeah. Yeah, I'm so sorry for staring. You just look so much like her.”

Cheryl feels the walls contracting, inching closer.

“Yeah?” says Cheryl.

“You sound just like her too.”

Cheryl can't remember how Mama sounded. She would have sworn that she did, but now that she thinks about it, she can't.

“Well, we both smoke. Or smoked.”

The lady sits down in the booth.

“I am just so sorry about Shannon.”

“Thanks,” says Cheryl. She pretends to be sadder than she is so the lady will think she needs to be left the fuck alone.

“You know, she used to come in here on Saturdays and have all us ladies in the back laughing. She was a card, your mama.”

Cheryl smiles, tightlipped.

“When we heard she'd passed, well, we were all just so sad. She was too young, you know. Earl told us it was a heart attack. That's so awful.”

That was big of Earl. A heart attack does sound better than drunkenly falling to your own death.

“Yeah, she had a bad heart. Smoking.”

Cheryl smiles. This lady isn't going to leave me alone, she thinks.

“I'm sorry, I just feel like I know you. Your mama talked about you so much. What a big-city girl you were. I just heard so much about you I feel like we're friends.”

Cheryl's smile tightens.

“Yeah, and how you couldn't come down here because you were so busy with work. I just wish we'd gotten to meet while your mama was still here.”

“Yeah, I wish we'd met too.”

“We're all going to the service.”

Cheryl nods. “Sorry, can I make that onion rings, instead?”

Almost back at the kitchen, the waitress turns to Cheryl. “It's just so good to meet you finally.”

“Sure,” says Cheryl.

When her food comes, she can't eat it.

Outside, she calls Ben. He doesn't pick up.

Cheryl is back
in Mama's bedroom.

She drove back to the house as dusk fell. Lori had already left. There was a note on the door that read, “Let yourself in, dinner in fridge at home if you want it. Earl picked me up. God Bless, Aunt L.”

Cheryl took the note off the door, crumpled it, and then threw it with the rest of the mess on the lawn. No way she'll be home for dinner. She promised herself on the drive back that she was going to get all this stuff packed away today, even if it meant staying here all night. Even if it killed her.

“There is no fucking way I'm coming back here tomorrow,” she whispers, walking through what Lori's packed up of the kitchen and living room. After the bedroom, there couldn't be much left.

Cheryl decided to go through Mama's top drawers. She'd thrown out all the underwear and socks. She was on the last drawer, filled with scarves. They smelled like cheap perfume. Mama must have worn them when she went out whoring.

She's just about got them all out when she feels something hard and square in the farthest corner of the drawer. She pushes the last few scarves away and grabs envelopes with the name
David
written across the first one.

Who's David?

Then, without thinking, she takes them and sits on Mama's bed.

The first letter is dated May 5, 1976. She looks around the room, scared, then realizes that no one is watching. She puts her head down and reads.

Shannon,

I just read your last letter, and I don't know what to say.

I can't love you. And I don't know why. But I can't love you how you love me. Not how you want me to.

Don't leave him. Not for me. Stay with him, let him be your husband. Don't leave him.

I won't be there waiting for you. I don't know why. I just know that I can't ask you to.

David.

Cheryl looks back at the date. 1976. She wasn't born, but Mama and Dad were together.

She flips the page. It's not David's writing anymore. It's a letter in Mama's writing. One she sent, that he sent back to her. It's dated three days earlier.

She knows what this letter would say, should say. She doesn't want to read anymore, but like a witness to a car crash, she can't look away. She is the passive onlooker, the third party, watching dumbfounded as they slide toward each other in slow motion.

David,

I hate myself for writing you this. But I have to write you because I need to know one way or another. I need to know what's going to happen, in black and white.

Two years.

I know that I am with Joshua. I know that he does love me. But I don't love him, not how I love you. I feel like there is a code written on my heart and only you can read it. I could carry on forever just being loved halfway.