by Alice Bello
Crap on toast. “You can just tell me now. Whatever it is you have for me will keep.” Yeah, like until the end of time!
“No, I need to see you face to face. So are you home or not?”
I had to find myself some handsome male friends to have on standby so I never had to resort to this kind of foolishness again.
“I’m home.”
“Come out on the porch and I’ll give you my answer and what I have for you.”
He hung up.
I stood there in my kitchen, so needing a cup of coffee, yet wanting to get this whole porch thing finished and over with. So I checked that my ponytail was still intact, and walked to my front door. If this was some kind of practical joke, I was going to castrate the bastard myself.
I walked out onto my porch. The second I did my phone rang in my hand.
“Hello,” I said.
“My answer is yes,” Raphael said, voice smug. “I’ll go to the party with you and be your arm candy.”
I rolled my eyes. “Thank you.” I still hate you. “So what do you have for me? Because I’ve got a little something for you too.”
“Look to your left,” Raphael crooned. “They’re coming your way.”
They?
I turned and about fell over. Marching down the sidewalk toward me were two hauntingly familiar women. The younger of the two looked like a much older, wider version of Paula Troy, my personal tormentor from high school, and Jake’s sister. By her side, looking identical to how she looked when I took typing class from her was Ms. Leer. Norma Leer: the wickedest, evilest teacher in the history of Wallace High.
Oh, and she’d hated me with a hellish vengeance.
Both women locked sights on me. I glanced over toward Raphael’s house. He was standing on his porch, waving good naturedly, smiling like the evil, back stabbing bastard he was.
“That’s for Sheetz, baby. Enjoy.”
“I’ll get you for this,” I hissed into the phone and hung up on him. I turned around and started to walk back toward my front door, as if I hadn’t already seen the two women coming my way.
“Stop right there!” I heard Paula bark in her most malicious, eerily familiar voice.
I sped up my pace.
“Miss Jones.” It was Ms Leer. Just the sound of her authoritative, disapproving alto made my entire body freeze as if I was being sucked up into a perverted time warp.
Slowly I turned around to find the nemeses from my high school years standing before me on my front porch, looking at me the same way they did all those years ago. Paula glared at me like she’d just found me smeared on the heel of her favorite shoe. Norma Leer leveled an icy gaze on me that could have freeze dried an entire cow.
I closed my eyes.
Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me...
I was so going to get Raphael back for this.
“Miss Jones,” Norma said, her voice as frigid as her stare, “Are you ill?”
Yes. “No, I’m fine.” I tried to smile at them, to lure them into a sense of faux civility, but all I wanted to do was run back into my house and lock the door. “Whatever can I do for you? I’d heard you both lived in Florida now.”
“We made a special trip when we heard about you and Jake,” Norma said.
“I couldn’t fucking believe it—” Paula started.
“Language,” Norma said flatly, her tone no less frosty toward her daughter than it had been to me.
Paula cringed, her head falling in a moment of shame… but then she recovered and glared at me once more. “I could not… believe it when I heard from Ann Williams that my brother had hooked up with the likes of you!”
The likes of me? As if she was some sort of prize?
I almost lost it and said what I was thinking, but more than anything I wanted Paula Troy and her ice queen mother to just go away. Being polite might be the fastest way to accomplish that.
“I had a hard time…” Norma Leer paused to contemplate what she was going to say next, seeming to mull it over in her head to nice it up. “What I mean is Jacob hasn’t dated anyone for almost two years,”—join the club—“and I and my daughter were duly surprised to hear he’d started dating again, that it was someone we both… knew.”—Oh boy—“And that it had ended practically before it had begun.”
“Jake won’t talk about it,” Paula said sourly. “He’s just being a hermit again, shut in that old house all day. So all we know is what I’ve gathered off the grapevine.”
I was gossip fodder. How nice.
“And what my daughter has gleaned from her friends up here,” she looked around at the city she’d spent most of her adult life teaching and raising a family in with clear distaste, “is that you broke up with him.”
What?
“Jake is famous for not breaking up with women.” Paula said. “It’s like a disease. Once a woman sneaks in under his defenses he’s powerless to get rid of her.”
Norma closed her eyes and cringed. “Even when it’s perfectly obvious he should.”
Paula tilted her head and gave me the closest-to-violence stare I’d ever received. “So, Hopeless Wonder,”
I was wondering when she’d start using the pet name she’d had for me in high school.
“Why did you break my big brother’s heart?”
I gulped. They had it wrong. I hadn’t broken up with Jake. He’d broken up with me, and for a very good reason. One I was not going to tell them. They’d form an impromptu lynching party and hang me from my sycamore.
“Ah…” They wanted answers, and I didn’t have any. Not any that would make them go away. “That’s between Jake and me.” I took a small step back toward my front door. “So if Jake didn’t tell you, then I really shouldn’t.”
Paula shrieked, her arms jerking as if she wanted to reach out and smack me. “I told you this little twit wouldn’t have the sense god gave a housefly!”
Norma closed her eyes, a long suffering expression on her gaunt face. “Paula, please keep this… civilized.” She was wearing the same kind of sleek, unobtrusive blouse/skirt combo she’d worn as a teacher. She really did look just as she did back then.
Paula, on the other hand, looked like a worn out, extra-large version of herself. She looked like she what her mother might look like if you didn’t know who the woman actually was. Obviously having kids and a husband—and Norma Leer—living with you drove you to pack on the pounds. And from the sun damage and stress, she really did look ten years older than she should have.
Paula turned on her mother, her expression irate and just this side of volcanic.
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child. I don’t live under your roof anymore, remember? You live under mine!”
Norma Leer’s glacial stare homed in on her daughter, and without cracking a hint of expression across her thin face, she squared her shoulders and took a step closer to her daughter.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Paula, but I helped you and that husband of yours get financed so you could buy that house. So I’d say it’s still partially my roof.”
I could see some of the wind blow right out of Paula’s sails. Good god, I was glad I didn’t belong to this family.
Out of the corner of my eye I spotted a late model, spotless white Buick Park Avenue round the corner and crawl slowly down the street. Just seeing a Buick, especially a white one, made my teeth stand on edge.
Just then Paula rebounded, stepping closer to her mother. “If you’d rather move back up here and we’ll pay you every red cent you loaned us for the down payment… I can arrange that today.”
Oh boy…
I had to give Norma credit. She didn’t flinch; she didn’t even blink. She just stared her daughter down like she owned her.
“Are you saying you don’t want me living with you any longer?”
Paula’s head snapped back as if Norma had slapped her.
“Because I thought you wanted me there.”
Paula shook her head of frizzy black curls. “I-I never… I want
you living with me, mother. That hasn’t changed.”
I suddenly felt I was intruding on a very confusing private battle.
The white Buick slowly made its way closer and closer to my house, and every inch it came closer made me all the more nervous.
It couldn’t be. I’d lived here for nearly two years and she had never once come to visit. I hadn’t seen her since Christmas.
I didn’t know what car she was driving anymore, but she’d always had a thing for white Buicks.
I bit my lower lip and closed my eyes.
Not now, please god, not right now.
I already had two unstable lunatics from the bitch dimension having it out on my front porch—and god help me when they realized again that they were here to terrorize and torture me and not each other, I’d be in for it.
I certainly didn’t need—
The white Buick stopped right in front of my house, and the tinted window on the driver’s side door wound down a few inches. I saw wisps of platinum blond hair swept up into a meticulously tidy hairdo.
Oh sweet Jesus… what do you want me to give up to make this go away?
Sex?
Men?
Chocolate?
What!?!?
The tinted window slid back up into place and the Buick’s engine died. The driver’s side door opened and a lithe, fragile looking woman without a line on her face, but possessing the bearing of a woman in her sixties, stepped out of the car. Every inch of the woman was prim and proper, and groomed to an inch of its life.
Nothing on her stood out, it all just added to the whole. And as she had since I was old enough to remember her, she wore a tailored blouse with a matching suit/skirt. Sensible heels adorned her feet and she made not a sound as she made her way up the walk to my porch.
She didn’t smile—Doris never smiled. She simply stepped up the steps to the porch and stood, silently appraising the squabbling mother and daughter, and then she turned her pretty, emotionless eyes on me.
I suddenly felt like I had been sucked up into a black hole, frozen and suspended weightlessly as I was pulled slow and mercilessly toward the hole’s center and certain oblivion.
Then she spoke: “Hope. I trust I’m not interrupting anything important.”
Paula and Norma stopped fighting and both turned toward the meticulously groomed woman.
“Ms. Jones!” Paula said, and literally jumped back as if confronted with a rattlesnake. Norma Leer simply blinked and smiled in that way people do when they’re only being polite. “Doris. It’s been too long.”
Doris ignored Paula, gave a straight-faced nod to Norma, and then hit me again with her twin bi-frost tractor beams.
“Mother?” My mouth was dry as church dust, my heart was either beating too fast to count or had stopped beating all together—and, of course, my hair decided to come loose and blow into my eyes at just that moment. “W-what are you doing here?”
Fighting or no, Paula scampered to the other side of the porch and literally hid behind her mother.
I didn’t blame her one bit. Paula Troy was a bully and a bitch. Her mother was the nastiest piece of work the teaching profession had ever churned out.
But my mother, Doris Mingier-Jones, was the most terrifying human being to ever walk the earth—and she’d been the head librarian of the main branch of the San Antonio Public Library for twenty-five years.
If Paula thought the woman had been tyrannical at keeping the library a bastion of quiet and organization, she should have lived with her. I’d heard of her going door to door, forcing parents to make their children cough up their overdue books and pay the late fees on the spot. I’d heard she once called the police to remove a student from the library that was coughing too much and was “causing a disturbance” with her cold.
I’d witnessed grown people cross to the other side of the street to avoid walking past her.
She was evil, she was the devil, and she was my mother—God help me.
Growing up I’d been expected to get straight As, to keep my room spotless, to wash the dishes every night until they shined and to place them in perfectly stacked, organized rows in the cupboards of the kitchen.
And I’d been expected to be perfectly silent unless I had been spoken to.
My father wasn’t one to make waves, so Doris ruled our house with an emotionless passive aggressiveness that would have made even the most strident social worker back out of the house with her pen drawn like a knife.
“I heard you’ve been consorting with Jacob Troy. That you’ve been seen all over town with the man.”—Oh shit! She’d heard.—“Why am I the last to hear about my own daughter having a boyfriend?”
Clenching my eyes shut I wished for a sinkhole to open up at my feet and suck me in. Death by sinkhole had to be preferable to this.
“There’s nothing to tell you about, mother.”
Paula and Norma’s eyes lit on me with a heated malevolence.
“What I mean is… Jake and I only dated for a few days, and it’s over already.” I dared a glance at the angry mother/daughter team. “And that was over almost two weeks ago.”
Paula took a breath to say something, but Doris beat her to it.
“Well, that’s a relief.”
Both mother and daughter turned and stared open mouthed at my mother.
Doris continued without noticing the heated glares she was receiving. “I was hoping you’d return to college and earn a real degree,”—she meant a degree that wasn’t in the arts—“one that would help you secure a career.”
Here we go. Doris had never approved of me going to art school. And she approved even less of my current employment.
Doris’ face almost broke into an expression when she said, “And I was hoping you’d give me a grandchild or two before I was too aged to enjoy them.”
My jaw dropped. Doris wanted grandchildren…
“B-b-but… Roy’s engaged!”
A line almost formed in my mother’s forehead. “They’ve been circling around setting a date for over three years now. And it seems the only lesson your brother learned in high school was the use of birth control.”
My knees started shaking. Doris wanted grandchildren and had already given up on my brother to provide them for her. That meant…
Oh hell…
That meant she was going to start focusing on me to give them to her. And that meant…
She was going to start trying to coerce me to change; to find a new vocation, to settle down with a man she considered appropriate.
And she’d do it with the same ruthless, emotionless passive aggressive commitment she’d used in her long and fearsome career.
A hoard of Mongols would turn tail and run for the hills if they came across her.
No… no, no, no!
Doris straightening her perfectly pressed linen skirt, “Though you are running out of time—”
“I’m only twenty-six!”
“—I’m glad you decided against getting involved with a blue collar worker.”
I saw a shift in the body language of both Norma and Paula. Mother had just verbally slapped them both in the face. Norma had married a mechanic—Paula’s dad.
“What the hell does that mean?” Paula barked menacingly. But when Doris turned her head toward her she fell back behind her mother again.
“It means I expect more from my daughter than for her to allow herself to be weighted down by a… by a mentally inferior, economically stunted man.”
Norma Leer’s back straightened, her chest puffing up like a badger getting ready to attack on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. “Now see here, Doris—”
My mother cut her off with an absent wave of her hand. “I know that was the choice you made with your life.” She pointedly looked to behind the woman at her daughter. “And you can see all the good it did. No matter what your education level, you couldn’t counteract the fact that both your children fell into the trap of menial labor.”
Norma and P
aula looked about to tear my mother to shreds.
“Your son followed your husband into a blue collar dead end, and your daughter married a man who…” If I didn’t know better, I would have thought my mother had smiled for a split second. “A man who empties septic tanks for a living.”
Wow, she really went there.
What happened next was… just terrifying.
Paula exploded in a litany of curse words and lunged for my mother. Norma held her back by the arm, but she was also chewing out Doris in her own, more genteel way.
Doris stood there nonplused. She didn’t tense a muscle, not a hint of emotion crossed her face—hell, it seemed the summer wind that was still blowing my unruly hair into my eyes wasn’t even touching her.
That was until Norma brought up my father.
Talk about a sore subject.
“You have a hell of a lot to talk about!” Norma roared. “Your husband couldn’t hack medical school, so he became an optometrist!”
I took a slow, silent step back, trying to blend into the background.
“He is a doctor,” my mother said, her voice flat with anger, her arms crossing over her chest. It was the most emotion I’d witnessed coming from her in years.
Norma smiled malignantly. “An eye doctor who’s screwed up enough exams in this town that he had to move his practice to Sweet Water.”
I took another step back, and another. Luckily, by the time I reached my front door all three women had forgotten all about me and were glaring at each other with pure, Jerry Springer fueled rage.
As they burst into a cacophony of screams, bellows and wails, I slipped into my house, gently pressed the front door shut, and threw all the locks shut: deadbolt and chain.
I high-tailed it back to my kitchen and secured the back door. It didn’t have a chain, but the deadbolt would do.
I plopped my ass down on a stool by my center island and dropped my face into my hands.
This was bad. This was so much worse than… well, than anything.
I had three terrifying women having it out on my front porch. I would drive to Tibet to avoid any one of them, but together? I wasn’t sure I could live here any longer.
Maybe I could move?
Something Norma Leer said suddenly struck me. She didn’t call her son Jake; she called him Jacob—so had my mother.
