Lone Stars

by Justin Deabler

  “Aren’t those cookie men precious?” Bonnie exclaimed, gathering herself. She hurried to Lacy and wrapped an arm around her. “How you doing?” she whispered. “Did you tell him?”

  Lacy nodded. “What’s this big surprise you’ve been talking about?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know? Oh!” she cried as Julian entered the living room. “Doogie Howser, come give your Bonnie a hug! And this must be the tall, dark, and handsome fiancé!”

  “Philip,” he said, reaching out his hand.

  “Bonnie. You’re getting a hug too,” she said, her bayou drawl stretching a little longer like she had a crush. “Nice to meet you, Philip. I was thinking about you and praying none of your loved ones got hurt on 9/11?”

  “Oh. No, thankfully. My dad works down there, but we’re all OK.”

  “Well, we’ve got plenty of our own troubles right here in Houston.” Bonnie shook her head. “Enron? Families destroyed. Husbands of our coworkers, retirements just wiped out. Dark times we’re living in. But it’s Christmas.”

  “I’m sorry,” Julian said delicately, “about you and Mr. Boudreaux.”

  Bonnie sighed. “It’s with God and the lawyers now. And mine’s got expensive taste. I hear congratulations are in order for you boys!”

  “Thanks.” Julian grinned. “You’re invited.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it!” Bonnie whirled around at the sound of car doors slamming outside. “All right, let’s get your mama settled like the guest of honor she is.” She led a bewildered Lacy to the couch and was tucking a blanket around her friend’s legs when the doorbell rang. “Come on in!” Bonnie cried.

  Through the door came a stream of Lacy’s former students, mostly members of the GSA and a few Science Club nerds. Five, ten, twelve in total. First was Ralph Lee, who crashed in Julian’s room for a few nights after his parents caught him on a Gay Korea chat site, until they calmed down and stopped talking exorcisms. Then came sweet butch Juana Rodriguez with purple hair and more piercings than Lacy recalled, along with a big girl Lacy couldn’t place. Every one gave her a hug. Bringing up the rear was odd Calvin Washington, the only black kid in his class of a thousand that one hard year. He held up boxes of Krispy Kremes and coffee and smiled at Lacy. As the students settled in, time flowed back to her. The year of the principal saying no to the Alliance—the “homosexual stuff” was too controversial—years of hearing no from men in general, from grad school forward, until it became like a superpower how Lacy learned in time to smile nice and keep asking. And the victory she felt at that first GSA meeting? Like anybody who ever had to hide who they were—her own mother, or Rock Hudson, anybody different—could come to room 214 Thursdays at three and be themselves. And then, while Lacy sat on the couch surrounded by young faces, it dawned on her that maybe her son had given her a little compassion for her mother—too late, but there it was.

  Lacy’s boys reacted swiftly to the influx of guests, Julian playing traffic cop with the seating while Philip ran to the kitchen for mugs and plates. Her house was filled once more with sound and action.

  “Now, Lacy,” Bonnie said after a couple of rounds of doughnuts and catching up. She went to the foyer, where she had left a large Kinko’s bag. “We’ve been working on a little surprise. Philip!” she called to him across the room where he sat by the tree. “I think you’re the only one here who doesn’t know about Lacy’s vacations.”

  “Vacations?” Lacy asked blankly.

  “Look at her,” Bonnie smirked, “trying to play dumb now. We taught together almost twenty years, and there was a point every semester, right past the halfway point, where Lacy would start talking at the end of each class, and I mean each and every class, about where she’d be on vacation right then if she were rich and famous.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Lacy objected. The room erupted in catcalls.

  “Lacy, dear, one time I was doing morning announcements with Principal James—y’all know Mrs. Boudreaux likes her announcements—and he turns to me and whispers, ‘It’s started. Lacy’s vacationing. Let’s broadcast it so the whole school can hear where she’s going.’ It was a thing. So last week I got out the craft supplies and invited Lacy’s old students over to help send her to all the places she planned to go on vacation.”

  Bonnie lifted posters out of the bag and handed them out. One by one the students showed off their handiwork. Bonnie had cut out pictures of Lacy from yearbooks, or that news feature the Royalwood Observer did on her when the high school finally sponsored the GSA, and the students put the cutouts in the places they remembered Lacy talking about. A poster of the Eiffel Tower, with little Lacy on top. Lacy hanging off Big Ben like King Kong. Lacy riding a camel at the Pyramids.

  “This is Mrs. Warner in Greece,” Juana said when it was her turn, pointing at Lacy on a white cliff overlooking gorgeous blue water. Juana Rodriguez, Lacy thought to herself, family from outside Saltillo; she always asked, and never forgot, where the Mexican kids came from. “Also, I wanted to say—” Juana pulled in her lip and sucked on a ring at the corner of her mouth. “My first day at the club, you talked about Sappho, and how long women loved other women.” She opened her eyes wide and breathed. “And I felt like you liked me when no one else did. Like you were on my side. I brought my girlfriend to meet you. This is Carmen,” she said, touching the girl Lacy didn’t know. They both went over and hugged Lacy, sitting in a throne of blankets at the center of it all.

  “Um,” Calvin said at the end. “I didn’t do things like everybody else.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know, Calvin.” Lacy grinned.

  “After I graduated, I got my associate’s in graphic design at North Harris, and now I’m illustrating for some comics and a medical publisher. It’s good. I made you this.” He turned his poster around. It was a stunning drawing of a dragon flying through space with a woman rider atop—a skinny babe with gray hair and glasses and giant breasts breaking free from the tatters of a futuristic rag gown. “Dragonriders of Pern?” he said. “You gave it to me in Science Club, and the story, it got me—I started drawing. That’s you, see?” He pointed at the babe. “Holding the graduated cylinder? I speak for myself, but I feel like for everybody, when Mrs. Boudreaux put out the word about you being sick, we wanted to come say Merry Christmas, Mrs. Warner. And get better soon.”

  Folks chatted a while longer, fueled by sugar and memories, until the students started to peel off. They stayed a little more than an hour. Bonnie stacked the posters neatly by the couch, where Lacy still presided.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Bonnie said, resting her hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Boys?” She hugged Julian and Philip. “I’ve got my eye out for that wedding invitation. Don’t forget.”

  Philip took the plates to the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher.

  “That was nice,” Julian said, sitting down beside Lacy on the couch. “What Bonnie did.”

  Lacy nodded. “She’s a true friend.”

  “The Asian guy? He stayed in my room when his parents kicked him out?”

  “It happened fast,” Lacy said.

  “No, I don’t—it’s great. I didn’t know that happened. I’m sorry. About last night. And I’m sorry for…” Julian squeezed a throw pillow, trying to find the words. “I don’t want you to die.” He looked at her plaintively. His voice was sweet, full of urgent feeling like when he was a boy. “The world needs you. I need you.”

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “Maybe—” Julian wiped his eyes. “We’re supposed to fly back on the twenty-sixth, but I could stay longer. Just the two of us. We could watch HGTV. Stencil something, or whatever?”

  Lacy smiled absently. “Philip is nice. He eats pork, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I forgot some things for dinner at the store. I made a list. Could y’all go get them?”

  “Sure.” Julian stood up. “Thank you. For Christmas.”

  Julian and Philip went to the supermarket. Lacy needed a mom
ent to herself after the excitement. She looked at the stack of posters leaning on the couch. She was on someone’s mind, somewhere in the minds of her students. It hit her then, sitting alone, that it wasn’t like her mother said when she was a girl. About her future. Her life didn’t begin with Julian, and life wasn’t either-or. She stood at the head of a classroom for years, at the private school downtown, but she didn’t really become a teacher until she was a mom. She raised her kind, feminine boy, a book reader and football hater, a boy nobody wanted in those parts back then, and found herself astonished at what was inside him. And forever after she looked at her students that way, the lost causes and misfits and first-generation kids, like you never know what lies within. The way her dad looked at her once in his truck when she was a girl, and said she’d go to college. A tingle of pride ran through her. Because she could see it, she knew, after all the things that diminished her over her life—a fearful mother, marriage, men in charge of whatever—she had never truly given up on that girl who loved science and asking questions.

  She pulled the posters close to her and studied each fondly rendered picture of her globe-trotting. Paris, Venice, the Great Wall of China. Places in the world she would never go, she thought. But Julian might, with a good husband. Her son had many places yet to go.

  10

  Reading

  “What was your resolution?” his mom asked over breakfast. “For New Year’s?”

  “I don’t know.” Julian took a long sip of coffee and guided the last of his eggs onto his toast. “I hadn’t really thought that far ahead.”

  “Mine,” she said brightly, “is to get this house organized.”

  “Seems pretty organized to me,” he muttered. And he meant it. He noticed as soon as he arrived with Philip for Christmas, how the pantry looked like a strangely perfect IKEA ad, or the closet in his bedroom was practically empty, every nook and cranny of his childhood home pared down and somehow more than just holiday ready.

  “Finishing getting organized,” she conceded. “I’ve been doing a little every week. Purging on trash day, sending Bonnie to Goodwill. That’s where you come in.” Her eyes twinkled with impending mischief. “There’s two boxes in the garage with your name on them. Literally.”

  “So that’s where this was headed.” He smiled wryly at her. “Free labor?”

  “It’s stuff I thought you might want, or want to see, before I tossed it. Do you mind?” she asked. Julian nodded as he carried his plate to the sink. “You might try forgiveness,” his mom lobbed at him abruptly. “For your resolution.”

  He looked up at her, smiling cautiously beneath the stained-glass panel that hung in the pass-through—a fiery sun pattern that for years had filled the kitchen with a red-orange light. “Forgive who?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Whoever needs forgiving. Start with your mom. We’re the beginnings of all problems, right? Moms? Plenty of time to think while you’re cleaning out there.”

  “Yup.” Julian raised his eyebrows in a show of confusion and headed to the garage.

  It had been a weird, exhilarating week since Phil left. There was nothing new about how they spent their days. He and his mom did the usual things, time-killing pleasures of past visits. They went to the movies and saw The Lord of the Rings, and Julian nodded along as his mom critiqued woeful departures from the book. They watched home design shows until the same episodes reran, oohing at nice interiors and ridiculing bad choices. “Oh, come on!” his mom cried at one appalling misstep—text painted on a kitchen wall that said, Today Is a Great Day for a Great Day! “I couldn’t get up in the morning,” she declared, “if I had to read such empty words.” During commercials they made vague plans for spring break and beyond. She fought him on coming home for the summer instead of doing an internship, but she agreed to go to South Padre Island in April. It was kind of like band camp reunions, Julian thought as they curled up on the couch, cramming in the good times without grazing old wounds. He avoided talk of the Rosenblums; she left unsaid how rarely he visited. They laughed a lot, sometimes until they cried. But it wasn’t until they watched the ball drop in Times Square, the night before, that Julian began to comprehend the giddy feeling in the air. His mom was dying, not today or tomorrow, but soon.

  She wasn’t joking about the boxes. He entered the garage and spotted two large ones in the corner with JULIAN’S THINGS written on the sides. The space was immaculate, eerily more pristine than the closets. On one rack of shelving sat original boxes for appliances, the Dirt Devil and George Foreman Grill, while the other rack held four footlockers for her Christmas tree ornaments, each labeled by name. The floor was swept and mopped. And in the center of it, the only other thing left in the garage, was his dad’s old weight bench with a handwritten sign taped to it: SALVATION ARMY PICKUP (1/5/02).

  Julian slid the boxes over to the bench and started perusing. The lighter one was full of debate trophies from high school, the fruits of young ambition now coated with dust. He opened the heavier box, and under stacks of papers and school projects he found his childhood journals. His mom had kept them. But then she was the reason they existed at all. There were dozens, two or more a year until he left home, in various states of decay—edges frayed, tattered spines, pages hanging loose off metal spirals.

  He took out his first one, with the Care Bears cover—December 3, 1987, scrawled on the top line—and remembered the day his mom gave it to him. He started school that year, and he lived for his turn at show-and-tell. The teacher said to bring an object about his dad, and he was determined to show the Teeth. He had discovered them not long before, snooping in his parents’ room: four molars at the ends of a metal retainer, in the top drawer of his dad’s dresser. He waited until his mom was paying bills that day to grab them. But when he snuck in and gazed upon them, he thought of the toothy killer plant from Little Shop of Horrors—he and his mom had just watched the movie—and fantasy got the best of him. He stuck the retainer in his mouth and put on his mom’s lipstick to match the plant’s lips. Then he grabbed a framed photo of his dad in a military uniform and serenaded him with “Feed Me Seymour,” singing until his mom appeared at the door. She muscled the lipstick off with Kleenex, shouting that her son shouldn’t be wearing makeup, and sent him to his room. She came to him there later and apologized and gave him a journal as an early Christmas gift. Sitting in the garage, Julian recalled every bizarre twist of the incident, summed up in three lines on the opening page:

  Mom says Dad was in a war.

  And I should write things here if I don’t want to say them out loud.

  Or if she’s ever not around to talk to.

  He set his Care Bears journal on the bench and tugged up handfuls of others from the bottom of the box, taking desultory peeks inside, until a draft swept through the garage and made him shiver. He was still wearing the boxers and T-shirt he’d slept in. He grabbed his first journal of sixth grade, with a diva-feathered Annie Lennox on the cover, and went inside.

  “You can get rid of the trophies,” Julian called on his way to the kitchen. “But can you keep the other box for now? There’s stuff in there I want to—” He stopped at the sight of his mom leaning forward in her chair, gripping the edge of the table. “Mom? Are you OK?”

  She didn’t respond. But as he started across the kitchen she turned her head slowly, like it pained her to move, and whispered, “I think we better call somebody, Jules.”

  * * *

  Royalwood Hospital rang in the New Year and kept ringing. It was the first thing Julian thought when they finished the paperwork. They sat in the admitting lounge, his mom hunched over in a puffy jacket while he cast frantic glances around. Blue streamers hung off the intake desk. A Baby New Year sign was still pinned to a bulletin board, with his wide infant grin and jaunty top hat. It was tacky, wrong, to leave up old holiday decorations in a hospital. There had to be a policy against it. His mind raced in circles, criticizing the staff and space, because it had nowhere to go. His mom wouldn’t ta
lk to him. He asked a million questions driving over there. “Are you in pain?” “What’s happening?” “What can I do?” All she said was that her stomach hurt; her back hurt. But she grimaced. And it was the frozen detachment of her expression that killed him as they waited to be seen.

  His mom changed momentarily when Bonnie arrived. Julian had texted her when they got to the hospital, along with Phil, who immediately started looking for flights back to Texas. Bonnie threw open the door to the room they’d been parked in, and his mom’s face softened. Bonnie hurried to her, still bundled in her jacket on the bed, and murmured something a long time in her ear. His mom nodded. “Well,” Bonnie exclaimed, stepping back and smiling at Julian. “Here we are.”

  A doctor came in, not much older than Julian, he thought, and spoke to his mom about going over her oncologist’s file and figuring out what was going on. Then it started: a process Julian had never seen before, of his mom hooked up to tubes, a catheter, a chest port he didn’t know she was hiding under her shirt, pricked and drawn for blood, promised information soon. The whole time his mom nodded blankly, fingering the blankets layered over her body while her arms, now exposed in a gown, seemed to thicken. Or Julian’s eyes were playing tricks on him. Bonnie dished the latest school gossip. His mom listened, maybe. She glanced up at times with a vague smile but otherwise stared at her feet, or farther out somewhere. They existed like this for hours, morning into afternoon, pieces of day shedding their character in the fluorescent light. Nurses came in and out to check monitors. Julian and Bonnie flanked the bed. They talked and were quiet. They didn’t mention her legs clearly swelling under the coverlet.

  When the doctor returned he brought a middle-aged woman, Eastern European by accent, devoid of any bedside manner. She spoke quickly, almost cheerfully, about how lucky that she was there, a nephrologist on a holiday, and creatinine and numbers going up or down, but the gist of it was that his mom, Lacy is her name?, had unhappy kidneys, just one working really, and now it wasn’t, and soon her liver would stop too, organ dominoes, and then no more peeing and toxins would build up and make her very sleepy until she faded off. “A good death,” she finished, smiling at his mom. “No pain, not the cancer. OK, bye.” She nodded and left. The young doctor looked from them to the door, mumbled he was sorry, and followed her out.