Family Blessings by LaVyrle Spencer
But even that thought brought fresh tears.
The last time she looked at the clock it was 4:34 and it hurt to pick up her head.
SHE awakened at 10:13 and jerked upright when she saw the time. She was over an hour late for work! She managed to get to her feet, then plopped back down, cradling her aching head. The bedspread was rucked into ridges like a topographic map. Her pillowcase needed washing. A pile of soggy tissues lay around her feet. Oh God.
Oh God.
Oh God.
Let me get through this one day and then I’ll be better.
WHEN she forced herself to rise and began shuffling around, someone knocked on the door. Startled, she swung about just as Joey opened it and said doubtfully, “Mom, you all right?” “Joey, what are you doing home? Isn’t it a school day?”
“I didn’t go today.”
She was still dressed in the clothes from last night, wrinkled and misshapen—shirt, dress, nylons, sweater and all. It struck her suddenly how she must have scared him.
She closed her eyes and put a hand to her head, trying to stop it from bonging.
“Mom, what’s wrong?”
It seemed as if he stood a quarter mile away. She trudged to him and draped her arms around him loosely. “Christopher and I broke up last night.”
“Why?” he asked innocently.
His simple inquiry started the flow of tears again. The salt stung when it reached her raw, swollen eyelids.
“Everybody’s having a shit-bird, that’s why!” she said defiantly. “And it’s so unfair, and I . . . I . . .” The damned bawling started again. She hung on Joey’s shoulders and showed him how girls act when they lose their boyfriends, wailing like wind in a knothole, abashed but unable to stop herself. Lord almighty, what was she doing blubbering on the poor kid’s shoulder? He’d have enough of this when he was seventeen and broke up with some girl of his own.
Awkwardly he put his arms around her. “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t cry. I’m still here.”
“Oh, Joey, I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sc . . . scare you.”
“Gosh, I thought it was going to be something awful, like you got cancer or something. If it’s just Christopher, why don’t you call him up and get back together? He really loves you, Mom, I can tell he does.”
She got control of herself and withdrew from his arms. “If only it were that simple,” she said, shuffling toward the bathroom. She switched on the light, made it to the mirror and mumbled, “Ye gods afrighty.”
Joey had followed her to the doorway and stood looking in. “You do look like something on the floor of the meat-processing plant.”
“Gee, thanks.” She pushed the hair back from her forehead, what few strands weren’t already standing up like dandelion stalks. She’d never known a face could have so much color without having been beaten up.
“Don’t you think you’d better call the shop and tell Aunt Sylvia why you’re late?”
“I’m not telling her one damn thing,” she stated evenly, “except that I’m not coming in today. If she doesn’t like it she can go suck a dead gladiola. What about you? I suppose I’d better call school and tell them I’ll be bringing you in late.”
“Could I not go today, Mom?”
That got her attention. She leaned back from the mirror and focused on him, still standing in the bathroom doorway. “Not go?”
“Let’s both play hooky,” he suggested. “We can think of something fun to do together.”
Last night’s engulfing cloud of depression began to show a sunny underbelly.
“You mean you want to spend the day out gallivanting with an old broad with purple sags all over her face and eyes that look like cow guts?”
“Yeah,” he said, giving her a cheeky grin. “Sounds kind of fun.”
She wandered over to him and leaned against the bathroom wall, propping one hand on her hip. “What are we going to do?”
He shrugged. “I d’know. We could . . .” He thought awhile, then finished brightly, “. . . go play a few games at the video parlor or go out shopping at the Mall of America, or how about having breakfast someplace, then going to a matinee? I could drive.”
Out of the pit of her stomach started a gut-chuckle that grew as it rose, bringing an actual smile along with it.
“Oh, so that’s your motive, is it?”
“Actually, I just thought of it now, but the whole program sounds better than going to school.”
She surprised him by boosting off the wall and kissing his forehead. “Okay, it’s a plan. Give me a half hour to repair the locker plant damage and I’ll be ready to take off.”
They decided they’d take turns choosing what to do next. They started at Circus, dropping thirteen dollars and fifty cents into various machines until Lee finally won a round of Afterburner over her son. Their next stop was the Dairy Queen Brazier, where they ate burgers, fries and banana splits. After that they drove clear over to St. Paul to Joe’s Sporting Goods to check out the end-of-the-season ski sale, then to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where they decided the Dutch artists were their favorites.
The day became one of those memorable pages out of the book of life that they would, in the future, turn to again and again. It was something they’d never done before, playing hooky. She had raised her children under the good old upper-midwest work ethic, but abandoning it for once bonded Lee and Joey as no parental guidance ever could.
Joey talked about his girlfriend, Sandy, and how nice she was, and admitted he was beginning to get “those feelings.”
Lee talked about Christopher for much the same reason.
Joey said he really liked his math teacher, Mr. Ingram, and was thinking maybe he’d take geometry and trigonometry in senior high because Mr. Ingram said he was gifted in that area.
They talked about what Joey would like to do when he grew up.
“I don’t want to be a cop,” he said.
That brought up Greg, and how well they’d done in that regard, but what kinds of things still reminded them of him.
Joey asked if she’d ever done anything like this—playing hooky— with Janice or Greg. She said she hadn’t; she’d been too busy after Daddy died, going to school, then starting the business, then worrying that an hour away from it might cause it to fail.
Joey said he liked her a lot better this way.
“Which way?” she asked.
He shrugged and said, “I don’t know. You’re just . . . happier, looser. I mean, you just said it yourself. A year ago you wouldn’t have let me skip school. You’d have put me in the car and hauled me over there, then we wouldn’t have gotten to do all this stuff together. You’ve changed a lot since Christopher’s been around.”
“Have I?” she asked sadly.
“Well, don’t you think you have?”
Was it Christopher who had changed her? Greg’s death? Or just getting older and wiser?
“Well, son,” she said, dropping an arm around his shoulder, “it’s been a heck of a year. Nobody goes through what we’ve been through without changing because of it. Anyway, I’m glad you like me better.”
They were strolling along beside a marble carving called “Veiled Lady” when Joey stopped and looked his mother square in the face.
“Don’t let them rip you off, Mom. Grandma and Aunt Sylvia and Janice, I mean. I know they’ve been telling you all kinds of stuff, but I think you should marry Chris.”
She studied the statue, wondering how a veiled face could possibly be carved in stone. Yet there it was, face and veil both clearly visible in solid white rock.
She turned to Joey and took him in her arms. People nearby glanced curiously at the two of them, but Joey had matured enough to accept his mother’s public displays of affection without cringing.
“I want to, Joey, so badly. But it’s causing so much divisiveness in our family.”
“Well, heck, what do they know?”
His unqualifled support buoyed her heart. “T
She released him and resumed moving down the deep corridor, her footsteps echoing, his squeaking as they ambled along.
“It means a lot to me that you told me,” she said. “This whole day means a lot to me. Last night I didn’t know how I was going to make it through another day. I thought I’d shrivel up and die without Christopher. But look. Here I am, enjoying this art gallery, proving how resilient the human spirit is. You helped me make it through the first day, and if I can make it through one, I can make it through the rest.”
“So you’re not going to see him again?”
“No, I’m not.”
They kept walking.
He gazed up at a painting on his right.
She gazed at one on her left.
“You know what I think, Mom?”
The question repeated itself and came back to them in the lofty space through which they moved. Her wrist was hooked on his near shoulder. His hands were buried in the pockets of his unzipped winter jacket.
Click . . . squeak . . . click . . . squeak. Her flats and his taped-up tennies moved on together.
“I think you’re making a big mistake.”
THAT thought returned often during the slow progression of days while Lee and Christopher remained apart. How sluggishly time moved without the impetus of planned happiness to speed it along. How burdensome the duty of work without the leavening of play at its end. How lonely doing alone what one has done with another for so long. They had eaten so many meals together, listened to so many songs on the radio, been in each other’s houses, used each other’s bathrooms, refrigerators, hairbrushes, silverware.
Reminders were everywhere.
He had left an Anoka police department ballpoint pen beside her telephone. On it was printed EMERGENCY? CALL 911. She felt as if every day were an emergency in which she was struggling to make sense out of the backwashes of life. Not an evening passed that didn’t require immense resistance to keep from calling him the way the pen advised.
Foods she made reminded her of how he liked them. Popcorn. Chinese. Spaghetti and meatballs. Eating supper across the table from only Joey, Lee contemplated how in only three years he would be graduating from high school. Then what? Would she eat alone forever?
One day she turned over a flowered tablet and found a note he’d written when he’d stopped by on duty. It said Anoka fairgrounds— alarm system. He’d been called out to check one of the buildings and had left her with a peck on the mouth and an apology for not being able to stay longer.
She opened her glove compartment one night and found a small, powerful flashlight he’d bought and put there, scolding that she was too trusting and needed to safeguard herself more often than she did.
A magazine in her living room lay open to an article he’d been reading last time he’d been waiting for her to change clothes.
The washing machine spun itself off kilter again and she was nearly in tears before giving up and asking Jim Clements next door to come over and get it leveled for her.
She opened a cupboard door and found the vase in which he’d sent her the roses from another florist.
Countless times a day, the black-and-white Anoka police cars drove past the window of her shop. She never saw one without her heart giving a lurch that left her feeling empty and yearning for the rest of the day.
But nighttimes were the worst, lying alone in her bed, missing him with her body as well as with her mind, wondering how many more good years she had left and decrying the fact that she was squandering them to appease her family. Every night at eleven she would battle the urge to pick up the phone and say, “Hi, what are you doing? How was your day? When will I see you?” One night she actually lifted the receiver and dialed, then hung up on the first ring, rolled over and cried.
She tried to hide her despondency from Joey, but it lived inside her like a parasite, sucking away at her ability to enjoy life as she had before, to find fulfillment in her son’s achievements and day-to-day activities, to feel satisfaction at the end of a well-worked day, to search out the good rather than the bad.
No, when she’d sent Christopher away she’d sent him with her optimism, humor, satisfaction, happiness—all the positive forces that had always driven her life. She tried to recover them, but her attempts at displaying her old spirit for Joey’s sake looked, she knew, pitifully false.
ITwas much the same for Christopher. Days without her took on a pointless mechanism. He worked. He ate. He lifted weights. He practiced at the shooting range. He took his Explorer in for an oil change. He took Judd to see a Bruce Lee movie. He didn’t realize how he’d been avoiding his apartment, with all its memories of her, until the day he ran out of uniforms. How long since he’d done laundry? Eaten in the apartment? Opened the living room blinds?
He did what he had to do.
He washed and ironed his uniforms. Vacuumed the carpeting. Watered the plants. Changed his bedding.
The smell of her was still in it. Cosmetics, sex, woman— memories came billowing up out of the hot water when the sheets hit the washing machine.
She’d left a small bottle of hand lotion in his bathroom. She’d said he never had any when she wanted it, so she’d bought a bottle for her ever-rough, stained hands. After their breakup, he would sometimes uncap the lotion and smell it like a recovering alcoholic uncaps his liquor, sniffs it and makes wishes.
There were other reminders, too.
In his bathroom half a box of condoms.
In his refrigerator some strange-flavored pop she’d bought one time on impulse, saying it sounded so weird she had to try it. Chocolate-cherry soda. He kept it there in the hope that someday she’d come back and drink it as she’d planned.
In his Explorer a pack of tissues from the last time she’d had a cold.
In his living room the sofa where they’d first laid full-length together, the floor where they’d made love, the radio station they’d listened to while doing it, the plants she’d let him keep after Greg died and into whose soil she’d often stuck her finger to check for dryness.
The location of her flower shop, just around the corner from the police station, necessitated his passing it countless times a day. He never did so without glancing up hoping to see her watering plants in the window or coming out the door. But he never did. He saw only potted flowers behind the window glass and customers using the door.
Loneliness took on a new meaning during those late-winter days without her. Once he was in a drugstore buying deodorant and razor blades when he passed the racks of greeting cards. At a revolving one he paused, randomly plucked out several cards and read them.
I love you because . . .
I’m sorry . . .
When you’re not here . . .
The sentimentality bludgeoned him as he read card after card and thought about sending one to her. One? Hell, he wanted to send her ten, a dozen, a card a day, their messages were so poignant. He loved her, he was sorry, when she wasn’t here the green vitality of his life wilted.
THEY had been apart nearly six weeks when he went one Monday morning to Fred Moore Junior High to deliver some papers to the liaison officer. He was just approaching the glass-walled office when the door opened and Lee came out. They saw each other and stopped dead in their tracks. Their hearts leaped. Their cheeks took fire.
“Lee,” he said as the door drifted shut behind her.
“Hi, Christopher.” She touched her chest as if her breath had grown sketchy. The halls were silent and empty with first hour in session.
“What are you doing here?”
“I washed Joey’s gym shorts this weekend and naturally he forgot to take them this morning, so I had to drop them off. What are you doing here?”
“Dropping off some papers for the liaison officer.”
They tried to think of more to say, but nothing mattered. All that mattered was looking into each other’s eyes again, sending the silent messages that nothing had changed, the hurt lived on, th
She was dressed in familiar clothes—her denim jacket with a lavender smock peeking out at the neck.
He was resplendent in his navy blue uniform with its silver badges and buttons, crisply knotted tie and visored cap.
The shiny floors of the school hall reflected the two of them standing motionless, loath to go their separate ways. But they could not stand there forever with their lips parted and their emotions turbulent.
He recovered first, shifting his weight to the opposite foot and rolling up the papers in one hand. “So, how’s—” He cleared his throat and began again. “How’s Joey?”
“He’s just fine.”
“Everybody else?”
“Oh, everybody’s fine. How about Judd?”
“The papers are about him.” He flourished the roll. “The court put him in permanent foster care and I think he’s much happier already. He’s in a house with four other children, and every one of them is from a different ethnic background.”
“Oh, good. I’m so glad. I know how much you care about him.”
A lull fell, then he asked, “So what have you been doing?”
A rapt expression had come over her face, a look filled with utter mesmerization. She acted as if she hadn’t heard his question as a whispered admission fell from her lips.
“My God, I’ve missed you.”
“I miss you, too,” he said, pained.
“Every night at eleven I think about picking up the phone.”
“All you have to do is do it.”
“I know. That’s what’s so hard.”
“So nothing’s changed with your family?”
“I don’t talk to my family much.”
“It’s that bad?”
She couldn’t begin to do justice to how bad it had been.
“I thought it was supposed to get better without me,” he said.