by Ashley Ream
“Yeah, she was the one so keen on selling.”
“The Midwest, you said?”
“Kansas, maybe. One of them real flat places. I remember thinking it was good he was selling it out here. Cars don’t last long in them middle states. All that salt they put on the roads in the winter corrodes the metal something awful. Never buy a classic car that’s been livin’ out there. It won’t last you.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that Mom might have known he was leaving, might have insisted he sell the car before going, taken her cut.
“Thank you for your time,” I said and took a step back.
I turned to climb back over the padlocked gate, and Jasper gave one last bark in case I had any fancy ideas.
“Wait a minute,” the man called out. “I can open the damn thing.”
I waited for him to cross the wide lawn and thought all the things I’d never thought as a kid. Had it been my father’s choice not to write or send birthday gifts or had Mom told him not to? What about when she died? Did someone tell him? Why did she lie to me? Why act surprised?
Up close the man’s neck was burned red with white creases where the skin folded. He smelled like engine oil and soap, and when he bent over and pulled a lump of keys out of his pocket to unlock the gate, his shirt sleeve pulled up and showed a tiny bit of gold watch on his wrist. Jasper had trotted up to him and was sitting at his foot, panting under the sun. I knew how he felt. After only a few minutes, I felt the prickly pink of sunburn threatening.
The man unlocked the gate, and I went through, then turned to say good-bye.
“She had pretty red hair.”
“Who did?”
“The woman. I got kind of a thing for redheads. I just remember cause it looked natural like. Not that bottle red that don’t look nice.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You color your hair?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“Good. It never looks nice.”
I nodded, unsure of what to say. This John Frieda side of my new backwoods friend was unsettling.
“Come on, Jasper.”
He locked the gate and walked back up to the house with the German shepherd behind him. Once he was inside with the door shut, the silence was so complete it pressed down on my eardrums. No birds. No people. No cars. No nothing.
I walked back to the car and started the engine.
I’d inherited my hair color from my mother. “As close to black as it could be without being Chinese,” Aunt Trudy used to say.
I had no idea who the redhead was.
I drove on to Fresno with my brain spinning out, my thoughts pooling on the floor like an unraveled roll of toilet paper.
I stopped at the first chain drugstore I found and went in for gauze pads, ointment, and liquor. I ripped open the packaging right there at the cash register and squeezed the oily, clear gunk onto the cut on my arm, which had pulled away from itself on either side like a rip in a couch. The skin around it was an angry red.
“You gotta be careful,” the girl behind the counter said. She was round, Hispanic, and not a day over sixteen. “That could get nasty infected.”
I only needed it to hold together for another two weeks, sort of like having a rental car. As long as it runs, right?
I put on too much of the ointment, pressed a gauze pad to it, and then—with the help of the counter girl, who told me she was thinking about going to college to become a nurse—applied four strips of no-ouch medical tape.
“Why not be a doctor?” I asked, stuffing the trash back in my plastic sack along with a not-so-great-but-as-good-as-they-had bottle of tequila.
“Doctors are assholes.”
“Especially shrinks,” I agreed.
“Yeah,” she said and nodded, even though I was willing to bet the closest she’d ever gotten to a shrink was a school counselor, which was probably close enough.
Three stoplights later I found a chain hotel/motel with a big red sign on the building that said $119/NIGHT POOL AND FITNESS CENTER in white letters. I took a front parking spot, a complimentary newspaper, and a Chinese take-out/delivery menu from the front desk.
In my room, I turned on the Discovery channel, sat on the unwashed comforter with the busy floral pattern so useful for disguising bodily fluids, and unwrapped my complimentary plastic cup. I poured the tequila into it one shot at a time. I could’ve drunk from the bottle, but I’m a lady.
Three shots in I ordered kung pao shrimp and egg rolls and watched beavers mate until both the beaver and the food came.
15 Days
Tequila does not go with duck sauce. I don’t care what anyone tells you.
It was 10 A.M., and I had a cold, wet, industrial-grade washcloth pressed to my face and the back of my head resting on the tub. The lights were off, and the blackout blinds were drawn. I was, I decided, prepared to leave my room and go in search of a hangover cure just as long as the world agreed to turn off the sun for the next twenty-four hours.
By 11 A.M., I was in a chain diner that served breakfast all day and separated its booths with frosted glass dividers. While I’d waited for a table, two kids in matching green soccer uniforms complete with knee-high socks had run around pretending to score goals. One of them stepped on my foot in cleats. I cried out louder than was necessary just to get their mother’s attention. It hadn’t worked. She had no sympathy left for bystanders. Then my table was ready.
I ordered coffee from a woman with long, yellowing, unpainted nails that reminded me of witches and glittery eye shadow she was at least sixty years too old to wear. She brought the whole pot. I wasn’t sure if that was normal or I just looked that bad, and I couldn’t see through the divider to check on anyone else’s table.
The coffee was the kind you don’t want to drink black but is all right with enough cream and sugar. I tasted some and then added more cream every few sips as I made room in the cup. I no longer wanted to vomit, but it was unmistakably true that my skull had been cleaved in two somewhere over my right eye. I drank more coffee and talked myself into moving enough to pull my cell phone out of my pocket.
I called information and winced when the operator picked up. I kept my eyes closed for the entire call. Things were better that way. “Anywhere in Kansas… Jerry Pritchard… None?… Thank you.”
I hung up. It was a long shot anyway.
“My husband was from Kansas City. Lit out of there so fast, you’d think somebody set his pants on fire.”
Oh, good, I thought, a chatty waitress.
“I’ve never been to Kansas,” I said.
“Ain’t in Kansas. Kansas City’s in Missouri, which don’t make a damn bit of sense, but there you go. You know what you want yet?”
“Mexican scramble.”
“Bacon or sausage?”
“Sausage.”
“White or wheat?”
“White.”
“Buttered?”
“Dry.”
“Got it.”
She walked away, and I drank more of my cream laced with coffee and artificial sweetener. Then I called back the operator with the too-loud voice.
She must’ve been in the bathroom because a guy picked up.
“Jerry Pritchard in Missouri,” I told him. “Anywhere in Missouri.”
He came back with three numbers. I made him wait while I dug in my bag for a pen. I didn’t have one. I didn’t even have a lipstick. I told him I’d call him back. He offered to put me through to the number of my choice.
“Are you kidding?” I asked. “I didn’t even think this would work.”
Then I hung up, which is when I noticed my heart was pounding. I liked it better when I was just looking. I liked it better when the universe wasn’t throwing me a bone. I liked it better when I didn’t have to think about what I’d say when the asshole picked up the phone.
“Hi, remember me? The fruit of your loins?”
I probably wouldn’t say that. Loins is a gross word.
I drank more
coffee because caffeine would certainly help lower my heart rate and tried not to think so damn much. I wished I had some of my pills to take. I wished I had some pot.
I’d plugged his name into a search engine a few times a year for ten years. You’d be surprised how common names are. Nothing that was clearly him had ever popped up. There were a lot of things that might have been—a Rotary Club listing, 5K race results. I’d thought, for a while, that a man in Texas who blogged about conservative politics might have been him, but he turned out to be lifelong military, which couldn’t have been right. Cyber-stalking strangers, squinting at Facebook photos for a family resemblance, all of those things felt safer.
My waitress came back ten minutes later with a pile of bright yellow eggs flecked with diced tomato and green onion and oily, reddish chorizo. Next to it, lying like felled logs, were good ol’ American sausage links with toast triangles piled on top. She set the plate down in front of me, and the eggs wiggled a little wave.
“Hey, you know anything about a little town about forty miles from here off Highway 99?” I asked. “It’s not even a town. It’s like a neighborhood or something. Maybe twenty-five houses all by themselves.”
“Creepy quiet?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t be going down there, honey. That’s them Word of Our Savior people. Gonna go all Branch Davidian one of these days.”
“It’s a cult?”
“You better believe it. You go down there you’re likely to end up wearing brand-new sneakers, drinking poisoned Kool-Aid, and going to meet your maker on the big spaceship in the sky. The county sheriff don’t even like going down there.”
“Great.”
“They all run into their houses and pull down the blinds like you’re gonna bite ’em or something. Got a neighbor that was trying to sell magazines door-to-door. That’s who told me. What a waste of time that racket was. You want any hot sauce with that?”
“Yes, please.”
She came back a minute later with hot sauce, the check, and four aspirin that she dropped next to my coffee cup.
“Been there,” she said.
Always nice to know you really do look that bad.
Outside, the sky was bright and the sort of pure light blue that people paint nurseries. I sat in the car with a napkin and the pen I’d used to sign the credit card slip. I looked at my cell phone and then out the windshield for a while. An old woman with a cane in one hand and her husband’s arm in the other stared at me as they shuffled and clomped past on their way to pancakes. They were both wearing dress pants, and her purple rayon blouse was tied at the neck with a big bow. I hit the speed dial. Jenny’s voice mail picked up. I didn’t leave a message. I was supposed to be the boss, the grown-up, the one with answers. I wasn’t supposed to ask her what I should do.
Quick like pulling off a Band-Aid I dialed information and got the three numbers. I wrote them on the napkin and then tossed it in the glove box. Yesterday’s white plastic sack from the drugstore was still in the passenger seat. I changed the bandage on my arm just to have something to do that wasn’t thinking, then turned the car south, turned the radio up too loud, and headed home.
Hours later, showered and curled up in bed, I gave my full attention to the yellow legal pad on my lap. I’d been practicing this letter in my head for a year. I wanted to get it down now. There would be a lot to do at the end, and this wasn’t the sort of thing you rushed. I would probably need to do several drafts.
Dear Richard,
I’m afraid things have gotten bad. I guess that’s an understatement.
I tried all the medicines. I swear I did. I tried them until I couldn’t remember if I’d eaten breakfast, until my face got puffy, until I was nauseated and dizzy, until I couldn’t poop and I couldn’t fuck.
The black just gets you, you know? It sneaks up behind you and drags you underwater. It holds you down there for as long as it wants until suddenly it lets go and you come shooting out like a cork. You’d think it would be better, having the highs to go with the lows, but it’s so much worse. It makes you crazy. It makes you feel crazy, always waiting for the next swing. It scares people. It scared me. The black gets blacker and the highs get higher and you can’t poop and you’re all alone inside your head, and it’s so fucked-up in there. You just get crazier and crazier like a train picking up speed, and you know something bad is going to happen.
It was time to jump off the train, Richard, before the brakes failed and somebody got hurt.
But it was good while it lasted, huh? Remember that time right after we got married when we had that crappy little apartment with no closets and the homeless guy that would sleep by the dryer? We were watching Wheel of Fortune because we were too poor to pay for cable, and we heard water dripping. We checked all the faucets, but we couldn’t find it until you looked up and saw it coming out of the ceiling. Remember? And the whole thing just made this big crack, and it started to gush, just whoosh right into the living room like Niagara Falls. We were screaming and running around, carrying the TV outside with the plug dragging behind us, trying to save everything. You were great. You were great the whole time, and none of this is your fault. None of this is anyone’s fault.
There is not one thing anyone should have done differently or should have seen coming. There was a cosmic spin of the genetic wheel, and I just lost is all. It just happened, and it could have been anybody and turned out to be me. I’m sorry I lied to you about being a different kind of sick, but I didn’t want you to feel like you had to rush in and save me. I knew you’d want to, but you couldn’t. It would’ve hurt both of us too much for you to try. But having this is like having a cancer. You just have this ticking time bomb that finally goes off. It’s nobody’s fault and everybody tries. When it’s real cancer, everybody tries. There are medications like poisons, and your face gets puffy and you’re nauseated and you’re dizzy and you can’t poop. And sometimes still it doesn’t work. It gets so bad that everyone sees how much it hurts and that it’s not going to get better. They have mercy on the patient in the bed, and they turn off the machines. They give them painkillers and make them comfortable, and when they go, everyone says it’s a mercy.
It is a mercy, Richard.
Except, when you’re sick in the head, nobody turns off the machines when the pain gets too bad, even when everyone knows it’s not going to get better. They just keep pumping in the poison and telling you to talk about your pain like that’s going to make it better, and eventually you just run out of things to say. It’s the same pain all the time. All the time.
I just needed some mercy.
I’m sorry. I hope you understand and can forgive me someday.
Please visit Ramona’s and my mother’s graves if you can.
All my love,
Clementine
14 Days
I sat at the kitchen table. The sun was well on its way to precisely overhead. I had showered and then straightened my hair products, throwing out the ones I wouldn’t be needing anymore. I wiped out the sink with a wad of toilet tissue and then went to the fridge for breakfast and spent some more time throwing out expired condiments. It occurred to me it would no longer be prudent to purchase unripe fruit. I made toast and then ate a Twinkie when the toast proved woefully inadequate. I made coffee and stood at the counter while it dripped. I did not look at my computer. I did throw a glance at the unfinished canvas across the studio.
I hated it. I hated everything about it, which was normal. Each piece has an emotional life cycle that plays out in my head. Inspiration, excitement, doubt, loathing, hope, determination, acceptance. I was hurtling through doubt and planting my feet firmly in loathing, which wasn’t as upsetting as it used to be early in my career. I didn’t know that was normal then. It took a few years for me to see this always happened and a few more to discover it happens to every artist. We all hate everything we do at one time or another. Eventually, we forgive ourselves for sucking so damn bad and go on because there’s n
o other choice. They should teach that in art school.
I still didn’t want to work on the piece of crap. Not at all. Never again. I would’ve thrown it out the window if it would fit through the opening, which it would not. That was too bad, because work was the last excuse I had not to sit down at the computer, and I didn’t even have that.
I went to the desk in the corner that used to be Jenny’s, a small wooden thing simple enough to have been made by Shakers, and opened the single center drawer. I took out the large spiral-bound book of checks, each with a stub attached for record keeping. It was half-empty, with just those little receipts left, all filled out neatly and completely in Jenny’s looping hand. I wrote out a check for her to cover the night at the museum, put it in an envelope, added a stamp, and walked it down to the mailbox.
When I came back in, the computer glared at me from the kitchen table. There was no more avoiding it. I opened the browser and typed each of the three numbers I’d received into the cross directory. One came back Springfield, which a trip to the mapping function told me was down by the Ozark Mountains, spitting distance to Arkansas. I hadn’t known Missouri had mountains and frankly remained skeptical. The other two numbers had the same area code and corresponded to two addresses in two different suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri. Chalk one up for the diner waitress.
I got up and poured another cup of coffee I didn’t want, just to have something to do. Then I picked up the phone and dialed the first K.C. number as quickly as I could. My stomach felt like it was being pulled through a keyhole, and my brain dumped too much adrenaline into my bloodstream, which was not helpful. After two rings, a mechanical voice of the female persuasion picked up.
“The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”
I was so relieved I wanted to laugh. It was the heady feeling of relief you get when they don’t pick you from the jury pool, and you, unlike the rest of those suckers, are free to walk out into the sunshine. I knew it wasn’t rational, but feelings aren’t supposed to be.
I stood up and walked around the kitchen, just to work off some of the nervous energy, disturbing Chuckles who was making out with my ankles. Before the euphoria got out of hand, I dialed the last number and had only one ring to get nervous before an older woman picked up.
