“Speaking of music…” I force some distance, preparing for my bombshell to do the same. “I’m not alone. Ace and Johnny are outside.”
She takes a deep breath, gets up from the table, walks to the guitar and sits down with it on the love seat. Her fingers start plucking. Once a trigger, now therapy—I wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t witnessing it.
“Only if you want to see them.” Only if it will help, not hinder, her recovery.
“Ace didn’t ask for any of this,” she says, her eyes focused on her fingers dancing up and down the strings. “It’s all just so strange. Like a dream. I should see him, right? I just hoped to be further in my recovery. And what about you? You’ve waited eighteen years to be my priority. I’m headed in a direction to finally make that happen. I don’t want anything or anyone getting in the way of that.”
“That’s not his intention.”
“Oh. Right.” She hits a sour note. “Wren is his mother. A really good one.”
“That’s not what I meant. I’m sure he’d like to get to know you.” This you. The same as a part of me is intrigued by the Mr. Cooper who ran with me. The biological component, nature maybe, weaving its way into my conscience—how does it compare to nurture. How does it define who I am. Who I could be. Who I am destined to become.
“Ace is a lot like you.” I point to the guitar she holds and plays. “In music alone, you have something that brings you together.” They both have a knack for working on cars too. Even Wren compared their personalities that night in the blood lab. “It’s just that we’re both almost grown, becoming our own priorities.”
“That’s what makes all of this so confusing. I was never the mother to you that I wanted to be. How do I make up for that while trying to make up for lost time with Ace too. I know we can’t go back and start over. I don’t even want to do that. I want to be your mother. And then, Johnny…”
Her fingers stop. Like there is a direct link between him, hearing his name, and detaching from music. “What does he want with me. He got the same results I did, right?”
From the rehab center parking lot, I watch Shelby drive away in her namesake. On the tip of my tongue is the same request of Johnny’s chauffeur—drive away.
I swallow it and lie to myself: You’re only doing this for Johnny.
“Ready, kid?” he says, as if doing it for me bolsters his own courage.
In the homey meeting room, Maisy sits stock-still on a love seat, an acoustic bass propped up on a stand beside her.
I walk in. Johnny crutches in behind me.
Her furrow softens at his injuries before being replaced by a gleam. He ran out on two legs. He’s crawling back on crutches.
This room is like home. I can feel it in the tension between them. They are my parents. Only Maisy is Pop and Johnny is Mom. Maisy still loves him.
My eyes dart to Johnny—tip in the center of the bull’s eye. How did he talk me into this.
He looks from me to Maisy. She looks from him to me. Shifting eyes and pin drops, it’s like the showdown at the O.K. Corral. No sidearms and bullets, but words may prove to be as deadly. Who’s going to say them first?
“Maybe I should wait outside…” Similar to the dry mouth I experience before a fight, my tongue barely articulates, stale with adrenaline—the metallic taste of suspense.
“It ain’t ‘family therapy’ without the family, now is it,” Maisy says, trying to lighten the mood, but her voice trembles.
Fear or fury? I elbow Johnny. Say something!
His intercostals flex, protecting tender ribs from the jab. He groans at me—thanks a lot—before he bumbles at Maisy, “I…uh…I’m…” For such a powerful singer, he’s having a hell of a time finding his voice. “I’m sorry…I hurt you.”
A delayed reaction, Maisy does a double take. Maybe not the kickoff she had imagined, not what she had expected to hear, it is what she needs to hear.
Like a cat following a ricocheting ball, my eyes track in a semicircle from her to Johnny. How did he know to say that? He tried to tell us: he knows a thing or two about rehab.
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” he says louder and with more conviction.
Maisy sinks into the love seat, sinking into unwanted emotion. The beginning of forgiveness, maybe.
“I’m sorry, God knows I am,” Johnny says again, not only for her but himself, releasing a captive conscience. “For what I did to you. To all of us.” His crutch groans beneath the weight of his well-knit frame, taking a few steps toward the love seat.
Maisy pulls the guitar from its stand and props it on her lap. The neck of it, like a railroad crossing arm, sticks out over and restricts him from the seat next to her.
He plops down on the Ottoman in front of her instead, looking a bit like the Tin Man—a stiff arm and a stiff leg and stiff posture trying to balance it all.
The intimacy is too much. She looks away from him and studies the bass—therapeutically, maybe—her fingers intrinsically plucking. “What did I ever do to you? Besides love you,” she says, her words the melody of the sober rhythm.
Johnny doesn’t answer. How does anyone answer that question.
“It should’ve been him. It could’ve been him. Had you never touched me, it would’ve been him. I would’ve been okay. He would’ve been alive. We all would’ve been better for it.” She keeps playing, as though she isn’t really present at her own catharsis.
I’m glad she is playing. For whatever reason, it makes the uncomfortable tolerable. Couldn’t I just be a fly on the wall rather than humanly present.
“You didn’t want me when you had me, but that didn’t stop you. How could you be so selfish?”
Johnny doesn’t answer that question either. I hope he knows more about rehab…
“All I wanted was a little support. A pat on the back, maybe, for making what I thought was the best decision at the time. ‘I understand. I support your decision, even though I won’t be here to support you through the decision. I’m sorry, we fucked up. Good luck and goodbye.’ Nothing. You were just gone.”
“I fucked up,” Johnny finds his cue. “You did the right thing, the honorable thing. Mason should be here right now. Music should’ve blessed him, not me. It ain’t fair. I know that now.”
She shakes her head, still playing. As if she doesn’t believe—or doesn’t want to believe—that he believes what he is saying. If he is to blame, then why has she taken it out on herself all these years. “‘All for one and one for all. No one gets left behind,’” she almost sings their teenage naivety.
“We were so young,” he says.
“And dumb,” she adds.
They actually kind of laugh and look at each other.
“I was so scared. I wanted to believe in myself. I wanted to be better than I was. I wanted to be who I was when I was with you,” she whispers, the root of her struggle—unrequited love.
Do I want that life. Music. The road. Self-absorbed. Giving up everything and everyone for it? I want to be who I am when I’m with Shelby.
“But you were always so strong,” Johnny whispers back, unimaginable that he was the only person who brought out the best in her. “And I did love you, Maisy. Me and every other guy in the holler.”
“You loved music more,” she says, rekindling her own love for it on the bass. “The smartest one in the bunch.” There is sincerity in her sarcasm. “And look at me now,” lastly she addresses her long-gone femme fatale status.
“I am looking at you, as fascinating and talented as ever.”
Her eyes meet his, suspiciously. “This place ain’t nowhere you haven’t been, huh. You’ve done this before. Acknowledgment, apology, amends.”
He nods. “Did you follow my career at all?”
“I made it a point not to. When you chose it over us, music was as gone as you were. I couldn’t stand to even listen to it,” she says, her tone a mix of remorse and apology to the reunited friend—the bass that she plays.
“It was all I had. Bu
t it wasn’t enough. I wrote so many songs about it, you, us, her…or him.” He must be as confused as I am about who belongs to whom. “I don’t know, maybe I should’ve sent them to you.” He shrugs.
“If they were as bad as that poem you wrote to her…or him, I wouldn’t have gotten anything out of them anyway,” she says.
His ribs thwart the effort of a genuine belly guffaw. “I should’ve sent them to you, saved myself the first twenty flops. You were always good at picking hits.”
“I was good at a lot of things.”
“Yes, you were, the coolest chick I knew. And everyone wanted a piece of that. But Mason was the only one who deserved you.”
She chuckles, like oh, how honorable of you. “That wasn’t your call to make.”
“I should’ve went about it differently. I know that now.”
“Yeah…me, too.”
It ends just like that, along with her solo. Some inside rehab resolution that I don’t understand.
“Thank you…” she says, and it takes me a moment to realize she is looking at me “…Ace, for being here. Without your presence, that conversation would’ve went south in a hurry. You remind me of a guy I used to know.” She quotes herself from the day we worked on the Shelby together. Only this time her intent is not to drive a wedge, to belittle—but to unite, to honor.
“He plays just like that guy too,” Johnny says.
Again with Mason. I thought I reminded her of Johnny? I don’t want to know.
Maisy gives a sampling, fingers plucking and delivering beats above the sound hole the way Mom said that Mason had mastered. “I’d give anything to hear him play again.” She offers up to me the bass and the seat beside her.
“Only if you show me what you just did there,” I say, still trying to master percussive acoustic guitar.
“Oh, I’ve got those beats for days.” She laughs, some peculiar aw ah aw sound.
“Now we’re healin’!” Johnny hoots, grabbing his ribs, not as easily mended as feelings.
And we’re jammin’…for hours. At least she speaks my language.
Miss Patterson, under pressure and already detained for peddling prescription pills, admitted to murdering my father. A crime of passion, there was no premeditated thought.
According to Silas Haskell, whose cousin-in-law is a cop, Miss Patterson overheard my father ranting to Boone that day at the river from her garden, which sits at the back of the river’s edge. My father sounded manic. Miss Patterson feared what he might do. He blamed her for my mother’s problems, which became his problems. She never sold to my mother any pills that my mother didn’t ask for.
She never sold that many pills, only thirty a month, only what she was prescribed. She never intended on selling them to begin with, merely giving some away here and there where she deemed medically appropriate to people who could not afford their own. How could such a humane gesture ultimately prove unhelpful, harmful, criminal.
Word got around. People began to approach her. After enough approaching, she sold her first handful—a syringe container full—to Grandpa for my mother, swearing it would be her last. But ten dollars a pill, three hundred dollars a month feeds a lot of unfed people.
She never sold over ten to any one person in any month. How could that hurt them. With any luck, it would keep them away from the harder stuff. She only sold to people she knew and could trust—adults, no teens. Albeit, Destiny sneaked them from her father’s medicine cabinet.
Maybe there was more to it, eventually. Could it be justified as a penance of sorts. People like my mother were going to get the pills any way they could. At least this way they were putting something back into the community they take so much from. Not one of them had a hundred dollars to donate, but they’d come up with a hundred dollars for ten pills. They were actually helping, putting food in neighbors’ bellies. The outcome justified the method, she tried to convince herself.
Not too convincingly, though, as she kept telling herself after every monthly prescription ran dry that it would be her last. Especially after my father caught on to her. Ironically, like addiction, even selling them took on a life of its own—eventually taking my father’s life.
In a frenzy, she fled from the garden to her car where she pulled Grandpa’s gun from the glove box. He had given it to her for self-protection. You don’t need no drug-seekers intimidatin’ ya, he said. Hypocrite. She bibbidi-bobbidi-boo’d it off, never intending to use the gun.
But once Boone left, my father stood at the river’s edge. From the look on his face, she thought he might jump in it, swim across, and get rid of her—getting rid of his problems. And if he didn’t take her life with his bare hands, at the very least would he expose her? They would revoke her nursing privileges and slap her with a hefty fine. She was barely holding on to Hot Brown and the soup kitchen as is. A fine would take it all. Then there was the possibility of jail. She rots away while the community she’s cared for over the last forty years rots away without her. No, she wouldn’t let that happen.
“I know you’re there, Imogen!” my father called from across the river.
Like the rest of us, he usually called her “Miss Patterson.” Imogen. The way he said it—so hateful, offensive—he was beyond reason, she thought.
“How could you do this! She trusts you. We all do!”
If everyone trusts me so much, why doesn’t anyone trust that I need help! Isn’t it obvious that I’m breaking my body and my bank for this community. No one cares! she wanted to yell back, but stood stock-still behind the bushes. With the gun in her hand hanging to her side, the weight of it was like carrying Appalachia—unpredictable. She’d never used a gun before. Would she be forced to use it?
“I won’t concern myself with who else you’re selling to, but you’ve made your last sale to Maisy. You hear! Gus, too.”
Should she concern herself with how many others he has told or will tell. She hoisted the cumbersome gun from her side, her small hands barely wrapping around its stock, and leveled it through the bushes.
“You and Gus! How could you!” My father raged and then slumped and started to cry. Kneeling at the river’s edge and turning stones in his lost hands, he mumbled incoherently about me, music, life, dreams. He mumbled about how he’d sacrificed so much and it meant nothing to my mother, how he’d been so gullible, how Grandpa and Miss Patterson had gone behind his back when all the while he believed they were helping him help her get clean.
Now you know my pain! Helping people who can’t be helped. It’s not your fault! she wanted to cry back, as much for him as for herself. The commiseration alone was enough to let the heft of the gun guide itself from the bushes and back to her side.
Until my father sprang to his feet and threw rocks gathered in his fisted hands across the river in the direction of the shrubbery that masked her. “You leave Maisy alone! You leave us alone! Or so help me God, I’ll…”
For a woman who had never used a gun before, she answered with haste the question would she be forced to use that gun, drawing it one last time and pulling the trigger. How could you! Mason’s last words echoed in her own voice, whirling around and around in her mind like the bullet through the bushes.
Appalachia let loose. It poured rain for days. It washed everything away from the scene. No footprints, no residue, no identifying markers. Only one rap sheet cataloging my father’s past troubles with the law remained. No wonder it was ruled a deal gone wrong.
As hastily as she pulled the trigger, she threw the gun into a hole and topped it with the pawpaw tree she looked forward to growing. There, she thought, a tree that the deer won’t eat. What was done was done, never to be thought of again.
Until the flood this past spring washed her garden into the river. Sweeping with it Grandpa’s gun to be later discovered by some good-for-nothing teenagers drinking and drugging at the river after the summer heatwave brought with it a flash drought.
If those kids took as much interest in helping their community as
they do in getting wasted, she wouldn’t have had to sell prescription pills trying to save it.
She may have a point, but I don’t feel as sorry for her anymore.
And I don’t know what to think about Grandpa. It is believable that he neither knew nor suspected Miss Patterson at the time of my father’s death. There must be tons of other guns that carry the same bullets as his, matching the one pulled from my father’s body. But once they found his gun at the river and dubbed it a ballistics match, he knew to whom he had last loaned it.
He suspected her then, enough to cover for her.
Ain’t no way she meant to do it, Grandpa said. She does a lot for this community. More than he ever did. It wouldn’t miss him.
Have I missed him? Has my mother missed him?
Things—initially and progressively worsening—have turned the corner in his absence. Is he that wise? Kinnected. Grandpa knew what he was doing when he covered for Miss Patterson.
Rounding the drive in the Shelby, it’s like I never left. Like Grandpa never left. Time here stood still.
An unseasonably tepid late-January day, it’s not enough to take the bite out of the air. Yet he sits on his tree stump on the front porch. Another stump sits in front of him, holding a splayed book. His hands hold a piece of wood and a knife. His jaw holds tobacco.
“You never looked so good reading and whittling and spitting,” I say, the first I’ve seen him once again a free man.
“Mm hmm.” Ting! “Wish I could say it never felt so good, honey.” He still thinks it should be him in that prison cell instead of Miss Patterson. It’s in the way he says “honey” with more contempt than affection.
In all the change around me, Grandpa was the one person whose feelings I thought would never change for me.
My eyes do a double take, thrilled to see but skeptical of the Ibanez—my father’s Ibanez—leaned up aside the front door.
“Now don’t go draggin’ out yer magnifyin’ glass.” Grandpa chuckles, a derisive ring to it. “The Cooper fella hunted that down, brought it by. Thought ya might wanna keep it.”
Just Shelby Page 29
