Someone Else's Love Story (3 page)

Natty kept right on zooming his cop car across the tabletop, but I saw his eyes cut after her as she hurried from the room.

“Mimmy is fine,” I said to him.

“Mimmy is fine,” Natty repeated, zooming his car back and forth to a mournful inner rhythm. “It’s only because we are going far away for all eternity.”

I was already getting up to go talk to my mother, but I paused. “Natty! We aren’t going far, and we can visit anytime we like.”

Natty said, “Not far, we can visit,” with absolutely no conviction.

“It’s going to be fun, living in Atlanta. We’ll get to hang with Walcott tons once school starts, and you can go to preschool and make nice friends.” I met Walcott’s eyes across the table, because he knew
all
my reasons for moving. Up where we lived, everyone knew about Natty’s geniushood, probably mere seconds after I did. It had reopened all the worm-can speculation about who Natty’s dad might be. Natty, who picked up on so much more than your average three-year-old, was starting to ask questions. Up until this year, his baby understanding of biology had allowed me to tell him the simplest truth: He didn’t have one.

How do you explain to a preschooler, even one as bright as Natty, that his mother was a virgin until a solid year
after
he was born? A virgin in every sense, because when I finally did have sex, I learned my hymen had survived the C-section. How could I tell my son that his existence was the only miracle I’d ever believed in?

If neighbors or acquaintances were pushy enough to ask, I told them the dad was “None O’YourBeeswax,” that randy Irish fellow who had fathered a host of babies all across the country. But I owed Natty more than that. Maybe a good made-up story? Something about star-crossed true love, probably war, a convenient death. I hadn’t made it up yet, mostly because I didn’t want to lie to him. And yet the truth was so impossible.

Telling the truth also meant that I’d have to explain how sex worked normally, while Natty was still quite happy with “A daddy gives a sperm and a mommy gives an egg, and bingo-bango-bongo, it makes a baby.” He wasn’t interested in exactly how the sperm and egg would meet. Much less how they might meet inside a girl before she’d ever once gone past second base.

But Natty had an entirely different question for me. “Is Mimmy going to die?”

“No!” I said. “Where did you get that idea?”

“I heard her tell the phone that she would die, just die, just die when we are gone,” Natty said. I could hear my mother’s inflections coming out of him on the
die, just die, just die
parts.

“Mimmy will outlive us all,” I said and added sotto voce to Walcott, “If I don’t kill her.”

Walcott made a smile for Natty and said, “Yup. Mimmy will outlive every single one of us and look hot at our funerals.”

“We’ll come back and visit Mimmy lots, and she won’t die,” I said, shooting Walcott a quelling look. “Let me go get her, and she can tell you herself.”

I left Natty with Walcott, who, saint that he was, was asking if Natty would like to hear a dramatic recitation of a poem called “Jabberwocky.”

I went back to my mother’s amber-rose confection of a bedroom. I’d done it as part of my portfolio to get in GSU’s competitive interior design program. It was ultrafeminine without being fluffy, and the faint blush of pink in the eggshell walls suited her coloring. She sat in it like a jewel in its proper setting, but just now, she was in a mood much too heavy for the delicate curtains.

“Not cool, Mims,” I said. “Not cool at all. You need to rein it in.”

I had more to say, but as she turned to me, her mouth crumpled up and fat tears began falling out of her eyes. She lunged at me and hugged me. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”

I patted at her, thoroughly disarmed, and said, “Momma . . .” My own name for her, now mostly replaced by Natty’s.

“That was completely out of line, in front of Nathan. Completely.” She spoke in a vehement whisper, tears splashing down. “I’m an awful thing. Just slimy with pure awful, but, oh, Shandi, I can hardly bear it. He’ll forget his Mimmy and be all cozied up and close with that man, that man, that dreadful man! Worse, he’ll forget who he is!”

I breathed through the dig at Dad and said, “He won’t. I won’t let him.”

We sank down to sit together on the bed, her hands still clutching my arms. She firmed her chin at me bravely.

“I want you to put something in the condo, Shandi,” She waved one hand past me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw her favorite picture, from last summer at Myrtle Beach. It showed Mimmy hand in hand with two-year-old Natty, the ocean swirling up around their ankles. She’d blown it up to a nine-by-fourteen, framed it, and hung it in her room. Now it was perched on her bedside table, leaning against the wall. “I want him to remember me. More than that. I want Nathan to never, never forget for a second
who he is
.”

“Okay,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how Dad would feel about me hanging a big-ass picture of his ex-wife rocking a red bikini. I was positive how Bethany would feel. “I can probably do that.”

“No. No ‘probably.’ Say you will,” my mother said.

I sighed, but Natty had never spent more than a weekend away from Mimmy. He might need the picture. I could hang it in Natty’s room so Dad wouldn’t have to look at it. And Bethany never came south of the rich people’s mall in Buckhead. If she did drop by for some unfathomable reason, I could stuff it under the bed.

“Fine. I’ll hang it.”

Mimmy shook her head, fierce. “I need you to swear. Swear by something you hold absolutely holy that you will hang that at the condo, no matter what.” Her fingers dug into my arms.

I thought for a second. I’d grown up between religions, at the center of a culture war, each side snipping away at the other’s icons until I was numb to much of it. There were not many things I held as holy.

Finally, I said, “I swear on the grave of my good dog Boscoe, and all the parts of Walcott, and—I won’t swear anything on Natty proper, but I could maybe swear this on his eyelashes. Those are the holiest things I know.”

My mother smiled, instantly glorious, her big eyes shiny from the tears and her nose unswollen. She even cried pretty.

“Good,” she said. “Good.”

She stood and dusted her hands off and stretched, then walked past me to the bedside table. I pivoted to watch, but she didn’t pick up the beach picture. Instead, she reached past it, to a much larger rectangle, wrapped and ready to go in brown butcher paper. It was behind the table, but it was tall enough to have been visible.

“I already wrapped Him up.”

I knew what the package was, of course, by size and shape. The Myrtle Beach pic had been a decoy, with the real picture she wanted hung at Dad’s place hiding in plain sight behind it. And she wasn’t angry at all; I should have known that when she didn’t swallow the bite, but I’d missed it. Damn, she was good, and in her arms she cradled Praying Hands Jesus, the Jesus who had hung over my mother’s sofa for as long as I could remember. Man, oh man, had I been played.

My mother dashed her last tears away and added, smiling, “I also pulled down this picture of me and Natty. He asked if he could take it.”

With that she picked both up and left the room, practically skipping as she went to add the weight of Jesus and herself to the pile of things that I was taking to my father’s house.

A
fter lunch, Mimmy had to get to work. She owned the Olde Timey Fudge Shoppe in a nearby mountain village that was surrounded by rent-a-cabins and vacation homes. The village had a picturesque downtown with an independent bookstore, some “antique” marts, local wine-tasting rooms, and half a dozen Southern-themed restaurants. She drifted, mournful, to her car, looking prettier in the sherbet-colored sash-dress uniform than all the little high school and college girls who worked for her. I’d been one of them myself, until last week.

After a hundred hugs from Natty and a thousand promises from me to visit soon, she drove off to hand-dip the chocolates she would never sample. Walcott and I finished loading and got on the road.

Less than two hours’ worth of kudzu-soaked rural highway separated us from the city condo, even with the detour to bounce by Bethany’s Stately Manor to pick up the keys. Still, it wasn’t like The Fridge was going to invite us in for kosher crumpets and a heart-to-heart. I figured I’d be unloaded and moved before sunset. When everything you own will go into a VW Beetle, along with your three-year-old and your best friend hanging his bare feet out the side window, how long can moving take?

We drove along singing, then I told tall tales for a bit. Natty loved Paul Bunyan and Babe the Big Blue Ox, and I had learned the art of packing these tales with filthy double entendres for Walcott. When that got old, Walcott recited poetry, until he got to Emily Dickinson and started freaking Natty right the hell out, what with the corpses hearing the flies buzzing and capital
D
Death himself pulling up in a carriage. So we canned it, and Walcott plugged his iPod into my port and blasted his Natty playlist, heavy on the They Might Be Giants, as my car ate the miles. We were listening to “Mammal” when I noticed that the kind of quiet that Natty was being had changed.

“You okay, baby?” I called, glancing in the rearview. His skin looked like milk that was just going off.

“Yes,” he said. But he added, “My throat feels tickle-y.”

I shot Walcott a panicky glance. We both knew “tickle-y throated” was Natty-speak for “thirty seconds from puking.” We were in the last few miles of kudzu and wilderness. In another ten minutes, the exits would change from having a single ancient Shell station into fast-food meccas. A few exits after that, we’d be able to find a Starbucks, and then we’d officially be in the wealthy North Atlanta suburbs.

But for now, there was no safe direction I could aim him. Most of his toys were piled high in a laundry basket under his feet, and the thought of cleaning puke out of the crevices of that many Star Wars action figures and Matchbox cars gave me a wave of sympathy nausea. The passenger seat beside him was full of our hanging clothes. Walcott began searching frantically for a bag, and I rolled down every window and hit the gas. A better mother would have realized this move would be spooky for Natty; he got motion sick if he was worried.

An exit appeared, mercifully, magically close, and I yelled, “Hold on, baby!” as we sailed down the ramp. It ended in a two-lane road with a defunct Hardee’s with boarded-up windows on one side and a Circle K on the other. I swung into the Hardee’s parking lot and stopped. Walcott wedged his top body between the front seats and unbuckled Natty, while I popped my door open and leapt out so I could shove the driver’s side seat forward. Natty leaned out and released his lunch, mercifully, onto the blacktop.

“Oh, good job, Natty,” Walcott crowed, patting his back while I dug in my purse for some wet wipes. “Bingo! Bull’s-eye!”

When Natty stopped heaving, I passed the wipes to Walcott and said, “Everyone out!”

Walcott lifted Natty out and cleaned his face, carrying him across the quiet road to the Circle K lot. I moved the car across, too. Walcott set Natty down and the three of us marched around in the sunshine. After a couple of minutes, Natty’s wobblety walk had turned into storm-trooper marching. He started making the
DUN DUN DUN
music of Darth Vader’s first entrance, and Walcott and I leaned side by side on the Bug and watched him.

I was thinking we could risk driving on soon when a green Ford Explorer pulled in to get gas. The guy who got out of it caught my attention. Hard not to notice a big, thick-armed guy with a mop of sandy-colored hair, maybe six two, deep-chested as a lion. He was past thirty, his skin very tanned for a guy with that color hair. He was wearing scuffed-up old work boots with weathered blue jeans that were doing all kinds of good things for him. For me, too.

Walcott said, quiet, only to me, “Gawking at the wrinklies again.”

I flushed, busted, and looked away. Walcott liked to give me crap because my first real boyfriend after I had Natty had been thirty-five. The guy after that, the one I’d stopped seeing a few months ago, had been thirty-nine.

The guy in the Explorer finished at the pump and went inside. I had to work not to watch him make the walk, and Walcott shook his head, amused. “It’s like you have reverse cougar.”

“I’m already raising one little boy. I don’t need another,” I said, arch, just as Natty passed.

Natty said, “I would like a brother, please.”

Walcott laughed, and I gave him a fast knuckle punch.

“Maybe later,” I told Natty. His skin had lost that curdling sheen, but he still looked peaked. I got my bank card out and said to Walcott, “Can you fill the car up? I’m going to take Mr. Bumppo here in and get him a ginger ale.”

Walcott waved the card away. “I got this tank. Grab me a Dr Pepper?”

I tossed him the keys, and Natty and I went on in. The door made a jingling noise as we opened it; someone had wrapped a string of bells around the bar for Christmas, and they were still up.

The hot, older guy from the parking lot was standing dead still with his hands clasped in front of him in the second aisle. He was facing us, towering over the shelves, right at our end. As we came abreast, I saw the aisle was a weird mix of motor oil and diapers and air fresheners all jumbled in together. He was stationed in front of the overpriced detergent, looking at a box of laundry soap like someone had put the secret of the universe there, but they’d written it in hieroglyphics.