by John Fulton
I looked back at my mother and asked her the same questions my father asked her whenever she threatened to leave. “Where are you planning to go? You don’t have any money. You don’t know anyone in Salt Lake.”
“Don’t you dare play that game with me, Steven.” She pointed at me with her book of matches. “Anyway, I have a job. I can take care of myself. I can take care of us.”
“Where?” I asked. “I just want to know where you’ll go.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’m just going to say it.”
“Say what?”
“I’m just going to say it.”
“Then say it.”
She hesitated, lit another cigarette, crossed and recrossed her legs beneath the table. “Jenny, you should listen, too, okay?” But Jenny was all artist. She was bent over her masterpiece and determined not to let the world interfere with her work. I had to admit, she was doing good work. I mean, she was definitely overachieving. She’d already laid out a plush layer of grass in a Crayola green so vividly and evenly applied that you almost believed in that grass. Now she was doing the fence in a brown that somehow teased out the rough, uneven graininess in real wood. The only thing that bothered me was those animals—the way they had all been thrown in the same enclosure together. You obviously don’t do that with animals. Of course, it wasn’t the purpose of that sort of picture to teach common sense. Still, it seemed like something a three-year-old should know: you don’t put the cat in with the chickens.
“Steven,” I heard my mother’s voice say, “please look at me.” I was stuck in that farmyard full of happy, stupid animals who should have been tearing each other apart and weren’t. “Steven,” she said again. I looked at her. “I have someone else,” she said in this very calm, soft voice.
The music over the intercom then was “Silent Night” played by violins. Someone somewhere asked a waitress why they had to be playing Christmas music, and I heard her say, very distinctly, “It’s the only music we have, I’m afraid.”
“What?” I said to my mother. But she wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was looking out the window. I wanted more food, but my plate was empty. I’d even eaten the quarter-slice of dill pickle and the piece of parsley garnish. There was nothing left. I just wanted to bite into something, so I grabbed a chunk of fried fish from Jenny’s plate—a crab claw or something—and had to spit it out into my hand because I hated the weird ocean-stink taste of seafood.
“Here,” my mother said, quickly swooping it up with a clean napkin and rolling it into a neat, white ball that she placed back on Jenny’s plate. She knew how to make anything look good. She really did.
“Someone else what?” I felt something happening to me, tears maybe. They just came in a rush and fell over my clean plate, red from the ketchup on my chin as if I were bleeding. I didn’t know why her voice had to be so calm, so even and sure when she’d said that.
“He’s serious about me.” She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the haze of smoke she’d just blown into the air where she seemed to have fixed her eyes on some very complicated and painful thought. “He’s serious about us,” she said.
“He doesn’t even know us,” I half shouted. I wanted to bark or growl or yell. But instead an odd thought came to me. “Isn’t that illegal? Can’t Dad make you stay with us?”
“Isn’t what illegal?” she said.
“Fucking someone else when you’re married. Isn’t that illegal? Haven’t you been fucking him?”
“You watch your mouth, mister,” she said. She reached across the table and snatched the wrist of my good hand and squeezed it in her grip with surprising strength, until my bones started to hurt. “I’m not going to stand for accusations like that,” she said. She let my hand go and pointed her cigarette at my forehead. “You wipe your mouth. Right now. Wipe it!” I obeyed her. Sandy came then with my hot-fudge sundae. She must have sensed something because she quickly put the sundae down in front of me and took away the plate with my red tears on it. “Please eat your dessert like a civilized person,” my mother said. When she saw that I was going to obey her, she said, “I’m sorry, Steven. I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that. This thing isn’t easy for any of us.” She looked out the window again where the rain came down steadily and the heavy traffic on Main rushed by, spraying water from the gutters onto the sidewalk. “I wish you would listen to me, Jenny,” she said. Jenny was changing crayons and eyeing the variety of animals over which she was laboring now. “All right, fine,” my mother said. “I’m going to talk and hope that maybe you’re hearing me. Good enough.” She looked at her cigarettes and seemed to be counting them; then she looked at me. “His name is Curtis Smith. He’s a lawyer, divorced. He works very hard and has a couple of kids a little younger than you and Jenny. They live between his house in the Avenues and his ex-wife’s house. I know him because his mother stays at Oak Groves. He treats her very well, visits her almost every day, makes sure she has fresh flowers in her room, that she’s taken care of. That’s important, you know, the way a man treats his family.”
“So you’ve only known him for a month?” I knew this must be true since she’d started working at Oak Groves within the last month. “That’s not long enough to know anything,” I said. “Even I know that.”
“That’s my business, not yours, Steven.” I could see, however, that this fact bothered her. “Curtis loves me,” she said. “I know that. He comes to Oak Groves almost every day. You can tell when a person is honest with you and when a person isn’t. He’s honest. I know that, too.”
“Do you love him?” I asked. Jenny lifted her picture into the air and looked at it. She was trying to gauge something—what color to use, how thickly to apply it, maybe. The thing that got to me was that she was crying—her face running with tears—only silently and in a way that wasn’t interfering with her work, because she was still doing an amazing job with that picture. It made my throat catch, seeing Jenny like that. When she’d cry, she’d bawl and scream and snot up and shriek. I’d never seen her cry quietly, to herself, the way adults cry. I pushed my half-eaten sundae away. It was too much—to sweet, too heavy—and my stomach began to ache.
My mother was looking at her hand with the cigarette in it. I noticed that it was not trembling anymore. It was steady. She knew very well that Jenny had lost it, but she wasn’t going to let that get in her way. “I know enough about him to know that my reasons for wanting to be with him are good ones,” she said. “I know that.”
“Dad loves you,” I said. “Dad loves you more than anyone.”
“Maybe he does,” she said. “But he’s like a child that way. It’s too much, and it’s the wrong kind of love.” She looked down at her cigarette in the ashtray. “I think your father needs me. I don’t think he really loves me. If he loved me, he wouldn’t keep doing this to me.” She tapped his report card with her fingers.
“That’s not true,” I said. “You know that’s not true.” She couldn’t contradict me this time because both of us knew how absolute and irrefutable the fact of his love for her was. He loved her desperately. He always had. “I love you,” I said. “But if you do this, I’ll stop loving you. I promise I will.”
She smiled at me and let out a tired-sounding laugh. “This isn’t about you,” she said. “Really, it isn’t.” She put out a hand to touch my face, but I pushed it away. “Okay,” she said. “I understand.”
“Don’t say that,” I said.
“I want you to understand,” she said. “I want both of you to understand. I’m running out of time. I can’t take care of your father forever. I’m still reasonably pretty. I’m young enough to do this, and I might not be next year. I guess I can’t expect you to understand that, can I? I guess that’s too much to ask.”
I looked at her then and saw her perhaps the way a man would see her. My mother was a pretty woman, beautiful even, thin and tall with a narrow face and shoulder-length blond hair. She had a scar on her left cheek—a dash of tender white
flesh—from falling on the ice as a little girl. Her breasts were larger than average, as far as I knew, though not something you noticed right away about her. She had nice posture, and people, strangers, often complimented her on that, asked if she was a dancer. Her parents, both dead, had been proud people and had taught her how to carry herself accordingly, she’d told me. She had a small waist, which she claimed the cigarettes helped her keep. She might have been thirty-five or thirty-six that first year in Salt Lake; she’d had me as a very young woman not long after my father and mother had met in Bozeman, where she’d dropped out of nursing school, against the will of her parents, to marry my father. I had seen her shake her head many times and ask me and herself out loud why she just hadn’t waited a little longer, at least until she’d finished school. She must have been even more beautiful then, and I thought about my mother as a young woman, before she had been my mother, and how she had been willing to give up her education for my father, how they had met in the bar at the Grand Henry Hotel, where a piano player always performed jazz standards and where my mother sat with a girlfriend named Edith, who had also been pretty, but nothing compared to her, according to my father. My mother had been the only young woman in the early 1960s in Bozeman who wore her hair short. He bought Edith and my mother drinks and had been so struck with her from across the room that he was able to be completely honest when he approached their table. “I couldn’t help but notice you,” he’d said. And that’s all he’d needed to say. She nodded and thanked him for the drink, and he sat down and told her how he worked for the large mining company in town and how they were paying for his education to become an industrial designer, which sounded to her like something to become, though she had no idea what an industrial designer was. My father couldn’t stop looking at her, and my mother—who was only eighteen then—felt awkward getting that kind of attention from a man while her friend sat next to her. She wasn’t used to alcohol, and the drink that my father had bought her had given her courage, though not enough to ask for his number or where he lived. She may have worn her hair short, but she was not the kind of woman to ask and do the sort of things that men were supposed to ask and do. So my mother and her friend left without exchanging numbers or addresses with my father. The next evening, my mother sat alone hoping that he would be there, and he was. And that is the simple story of how they met, though I did not even want to think of that just then because it put me in mind of how my mother must have met Curtis Smith, surrounded by all those old people at Oak Groves. It made me wonder what that meeting must have been like, how impressed she was when he brought his old mother flowers and visited her every day and asked about her health and how she was sleeping and eating and whatever else a good son would ask about his mother. I did not want to have to look across the table at my mother and see how in her all-white nurse’s uniform with her name tag on her chest—MARY PARKER, it said—she looked clean and maybe even a little younger than she was. I’d always known she was a pretty woman. But that afternoon was the first time I saw how a man might want my mother, and it was not a very pleasant thing to see. That her life expanded beyond the boundaries of who she was to me and my family only angered me.
“If we went with Curtis,” she said, “I could quit my job at Oak Groves. I could quit today.”
“Stop saying we,” I said.
She looked at me very hard. “I’m sorry, Steven,” she said. “But whether you like it or not, you’re dependent on me. Your father can’t take care of you. You know that.”
“Are you going to quit?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet. I don’t like taking care of sick people. The mess of it.” She was remembering Mr. Warner—the dead Mr. Warner—and started to freak a little again. “I just end up hating them for being sick and old and needy. That’s not fair to them, or to me. You understand that I’d go on doing this for you and Jenny. I’d watch a hundred Mr. Warners die. But I can’t go on doing it for your father. Not for one minute more.”
I smiled at her as nicely as I could. I knew what I was going to say next and I wanted it to work, to win her over. “Then keep on doing it for Jenny and me. Just for now. Just a little while longer. Please.”
“Of course,” she said, smiling back and looking at me as if she understood what I wanted, as if she wanted it, too. She reached across the table and put her hand in my hair and tousled it. “I would. I really would. But I’m running out of time, kiddo.” She took her hand away and picked up her cigarette. “Curtis would like to meet you. He’d like to meet both of you this afternoon. He’s looking forward to it.”
“No,” I said. “No way.”
She was looking down at her water, staring at it as if she were trying to make it boil. She hadn’t seemed to hear me. “We’ve just got to take this one step at a time. Right now, we’ll go take care of Mr. Warner. We’ll worry about the rest after that.”
That’s when I felt all that food I’d shoveled in grumbling inside me, hot and acidic. My stomach turned and a sharp, building pain pulsed at the center of my gut. I had to go. It was urgent. “Where are you off to, Steven?” my mother asked.
“To take a dump,” I said, loud enough for the other diners in the restaurant to hear. I didn’t mind if I ruined everybody’s appetites. What did it matter at that point what I said? I moved quickly past a family of three extremely blond little girls all dressed in the same pink overalls and strung in a line of clasped hands between their blond parents. They sang a song and the littlest one picked her feet up and hung above the floor as her bigger sisters carried her. God, did I have to hold it. It was a matter of intense focus and willpower, and when I got to the end of a short hallway and pushed on an unmarked door that was locked, I damn near lost it. I leaned against the wood with my forehead and clenched my entire body—bones and muscles and skin—until the need subsided, and I had somehow come through okay.
“Over here, kid.” This large bum dressed in a hunter’s orange winter coat stood at the opposite end of the hallway holding open the door to the men’s room. I launched myself toward him and into a yellow-tiled bathroom that stank of rotten eggs and cigarettes, though it looked clean enough. As soon as I had landed myself down on the toilet seat, I found that I no longer had to go, that, in fact, I no longer could go. I tried to relax, but it did no good. My stomach muscles were clenched and the urgency of a moment ago was gone. In the stall next to me, I heard the bum take off his coat and unzip himself and come to the seated position where—and this surprised me, this was something I have always remembered—he began humming in this very beautiful baritone the song “Stormy Weather,” which I knew pretty well because my father liked to sing it with his broken voice in the shower. Through the space at the bottom of the stalls, I could see his black, muddy boot with blue jeans scrunched down over it tapping to the tune. I don’t really know the words to describe his voice, except to say again that it was beautiful and crept down in this soft, dark register that was lower than I’d ever heard any man’s voice go so that I could let the whole weight of myself fall into it and lie deep down there and not do anything but listen. And then gradually, in the midst of that gorgeous humming, he did his business—a slow, watery letting go—while I sat locked in my stall, clenched up and unable to do mine and trying to hold on to his voice even as he shat next to me and added his own sharp, distinct smell to the already spoiled air of that rest room. I wanted to cry, then, perhaps because of the slow, obvious perfection of his voice, or perhaps because of the almost suffocating stink in the air. I didn’t, though. I looked up and read a string of disgusting bits of graffiti. “You’re the log maker,” one read. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” another said. “You fudge packing ass lover.” They were spiteful words, and as I read them the huge bum next door kept up his merciful humming and I listened, trying to find the shadowy bottom of his voice, trying to fall all the way to its dark floor, trying to break through to a place so deep that I could no longer rise up, a place so far away that I could never leave and go back out to
that particular day, which was buried and forgotten now in the stink and beauty of that restroom. I just sat on the toilet and listened to him. When I heard the bum rip into the toilet paper, I fastened myself back up, watched myself slide along the strip of mirror above the sinks, and left the bathroom. It was bright and loud and too spacious out in the restaurant now, and I half wanted to return to the men’s room. I made myself hurry back to our table, though I couldn’t help asking myself if all the bums smoking in that restaurant and trying to keep out of the rain didn’t have some secret gift, too, a great voice or an ability to dance or some other facility you’d never expect. I thought for sure that someone somewhere would pay the man in the bathroom to hum—pay him money so that he wouldn’t have to be homeless. I wondered if all grungy people everywhere didn’t have something beautiful that they could do. I hoped so.
When I got back to our table, Jenny told me that our mother had left to pay the bill and make a phone call. She was gone long enough for the bum from the bathroom to sit down at the table next to us with a Mormon missionary, who ordered decaffeinated tea—he wouldn’t pay for coffee—and toast for the bum. Another missionary sat a few tables away, ministering to a teenage girl whose long blond hair was stringy and soaked. Both missionaries wore suits and ties, and the one at the table next to ours had large pink ears and very short hair that was still beaded with water from the rain. He couldn’t have been older than eighteen, and I was sure he knew nothing about his companion’s amazing voice. The missionary was talking about how God spoke to him. “Really?” the bum asked. “You hear his voice? What’s it like? Is it like a human voice?”
