My mother cared. She counted and registered every point, bent over her sheet of paper like an accountant, and smug, like Marley and Scrooge at the takeover meeting. She didn’t just win; she proclaimed victory, throwing her hands in the air like a heavyweight boxer or the owner of a thoroughbred who had just won the Triple Crown. But at least her mobility improved, because when you play a board game with that kind of physical abandon you hardly need physical therapy. I took quite a few kitchen breaks while she pondered her next moves.
And we battled on. I don’t mean the kind of battles that rocked the neighborhood on Saturday night in Buckthorn (no patrol cars with whirling lights and sirens for us) or gave rise to the kind of outlandish behavior that could be owned up to, rescinded, and forgiven later. What a relief that would have been, but it was probably too Catholic for us. Still, just because you’re atheist doesn’t mean you can’t be Presbyterian too. Battles with my mother had a kind of religious fervor and longevity, the type of silent, drawn-out grudges and disappointments that go on for years. It was as though every Christmas we gave each other the same hair shirt. I doubted she would ever get over my playing piano at the bar in a lousy casino, rather than a fancy concert hall or anywhere else at all. But this all stemmed from her belief that I was a prodigy who had wasted her gifts, when the fact is I never was a prodigy, or virtuoso, or any of those things they called me. I mean, it was Beethoven who wrote the damn thing, not me. I was only a talented piano player (okay, excellent, but it had nothing to do with me) and decent crooner who got paid for entertaining people who had just lost a bundle at blackjack.
But after all, these weren’t the best of times. She missed her guy, and I my father, and neither of us knew how to talk about it. Not so strange for tongue-tied me, but I think because of her profession she was frustrated by her inability to make things better through conversation. In the end we handled it this way: if my casino shift permitted it I’d play a few pieces she enjoyed before bedtime (Debussy mostly, never the Chopin or Bacharach, and certainly not that eye-rolling Charles Aznavour song my father sang on her birthday) and she avoided asking me anything at all about “that job.”
* * *
The rest of April ticked along as normal, but in May the minutes seemed to crawl along dragging the days behind them. Wasn’t it time for Honey to start — how had she put it? — making it hard for me not to see her?
My mother grew stronger every day, and I went on knocking out favorites over at the Crescendo. The manager even upped my pay. So it’s not as if life wasn’t carrying on. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that Eldorado charging down the highway in the wrong direction in T-minus three, two, one. Some nights, on my way home from the casino, I swung the Chevy around and drove toward Torrent, thinking to check things out. But check what out, and where? Honey knew where I lived, while I didn’t have a clue about her. So when the city lights came into view I filled up the tank at one of those lonesome, floodlit stations on the outskirts, turned around, and headed back to Buckthorn. One night I thought I saw her pass me going the other direction, so I wheeled the Chevy around and set out in pursuit, and by the time I caught up with her I was back at the gas station again. But of course it wasn’t her at all, just some other sleepless woman charging down the highway at 3 a.m. in pursuit of a ghost she couldn’t catch.
We were almost into June when the house phone rang one night at about 10, just after my mother had gone to bed. As soon as I picked up she jumped right in with a comment about how she could barely remember her own whereabouts, but she never forgot the number of the old landline we gabbed away on as kids.
We talked for roughly twenty minutes about this and that, as if no time at all had gone by since the drive up to Crystal Lake. She was still in the rented room and on the lookout for work in Torrent. Several job applications were on the go. Pounding the pavement, that kind of thing. She’d heard through the grapevine that my mother was on the mend and apologized for not calling sooner. She had convinced herself that I knew her number and that I’d call if something was up, but then wasn’t so sure after all and decided to risk being pushy.
“So here I am. And I want to catch up with you, find out how things are going. But in person, if that’s okay with you. Would you meet me? For dinner, I mean?”
I didn’t say anything for several seconds, and I don’t know why, since I’d known the answer before the phone rang, days before. You know that old saying: she knows the words but not the music? Well, I knew the words and the music but, for some reason, couldn’t get down to singing — until she said, “I know how much you’ve got on your plate and I’ve come back dragging a fair bit of crap with me. Just tell me you’re taking care of yourself, and let me know if I can do anything. You can always call me back, if you want, when things calm down. Dinner, or lunch, anytime you say.”
I put the pause behind me and fell right in.
And I didn’t think about those few stuck seconds again, at least not until much later.
4.
I settled in at a table next to the front windows so I could keep an eye on the parking lot and, you know, get a jump on her arrival. I hadn’t been to Chez Antoine for years, not since it was Café Stella and Honey and I had once, at fifteen, had a mind-blowing, budget-decimating lunch with Inez.
Nobody admitted the occasion was to celebrate the old man having left home never to return (by June they thought he was gone for good), but that’s what it was. And that explained why, for the first and last time, money was no object. Inez simply burned through a personal credit card she’d found in the zipped compartment of his abandoned golf bag. “He hid the card with his balls,” Honey said, which caused quite a bit of hilarity by the time the three of us had started in on the Chardonnay.
Inez wore her favorite saucer-sized sunglasses and a leather fedora with a feather stuck in its brim. Honey said the hat made her look like a pimp, or a pimp’s wife.
“I hope you never have cause to know what a real pimp looks like,” Inez told her, as she lit her Player’s Light. When the waiter hustled over and asked her to put it out she asked him what his problem was, because after all we were seated on the patio with all sorts of fresh air wafting about.
I would have been embarrassed if my mother had done this sort of thing (and it would have meant she really had lost her mind) but Inez had the rock-star moxie to carry it off, and because we were with her we were a rock star’s kids.
I’d never had a drink before that lunch with Honey and her mother, unless draining the last inch of my father’s beer at age eight, while he watched the ballgame, could be counted as a drink. Honey, on the other hand, had been kicked out of junior prom for being drunk, or high, and making out with some boy on the dance floor, which was an exaggeration, because I was there and she’d barely touched the guy. She just made it seem as if she had. Still, the three of us made so many toasts that day, and Inez gave us “just a splash” of so much Chardonnay that soon I was too dizzy to think. Add to this the variety of specialties she ordered: calamari, garlic bread, two kinds of pasta, mini pizzas, a plate of greens, cheese, fruit, dessert. And more splashes.
Stella’s was intimate, the patio tiny. Some of the diners found us annoying even before Inez lit another cigarette to “round off the banquet” and refused to put it out. The manager insisted we leave and I was just remembering all of this (and barfing in the back seat on the way home) when I saw Honey pull into the lot.
Dust swirled around the Eldorado as she came in off the highway and up the side road to the parking lot, more like coming in for a landing. She got out and shoved the door shut with her hip.
She had one of those tiny leather purses, not much more than a wallet with a long strap, and she tucked it between her knees while she pulled a sweater over her head. I figured she had left the key in the ignition as she’d done since the old days. She always said the car was so temperamental nobody would figure out how to get it started, never min
d drive it away. I watched her bunch her hair, or some of it, into an elastic as she crossed the parking lot, the tiny purse bouncing on her hip, the cuffs of her jeans half lodged in her boots like some kind of buccaneer. There had always been, since childhood, so many mismatched clothes, stuff from the thrift store, hand-me-downs from the boys next door. But on Honey everything seemed to add up.
She pushed through the restaurant door, her boots soft on the carpet, dropped the purse on the window ledge, sat down across from me, and leaned in.
“What do you think? Anybody here who might recognize us from the bad old, good old days?” She promised not to order even one item from the celebratory luncheon fiasco, particularly not “that nasty creature in the shell,” though we did order a bottle of wine, red, which I’d been getting used to, as I said, while staying with my mother. But “getting used to” isn’t anything like savoring. This fact is so obvious, but I’m embarrassed to say that at the ripe old age of twenty-four I had no sense of palate, or any idea, until that night at Chez Antoine, what it meant to savor anything other than a few single moments with my fingertips resting on the keys of a piano. Because what a bottle of wine it was, so red it was almost black. It opened something up in me. The first sip went straight to my head, or somewhere I didn’t know, and it carried on from there.
Honey sniffed her glass, sipped, rolled it around. Her theatrical side had returned full force. “Cherries dipped in chocolate,” she said, “straight off the vine. And a hint of sun-baked, cracked leather; the kind you find in an old Fiat parked in the sun. Now close your eyes, Nic, and imagine we’ve pulled off the road next to a sunny vineyard for a little picnic: a stick of crusty bread, a hunk of fantastic cheese. And what else? Let’s see: those jumbo olives stuffed with goat cheese, or hot peppers. And fresh butter cooled in a little stone pot of some kind. And, oh, no knives,” she said. “We’ll tear everything apart with our hands, like the beautiful savages we are.” A bit of silence then, while we savored that whole imaginary feast of hers. And I didn’t realize how far we’d traveled together until her glass chimed against mine. The wine went down easy, let me tell you.
All through dinner I yammered on. I bored her to death, I’m sure. On and on about stuff she already knew. The gory details of Buckthorn’s downhill slide since the market crash, the grand old houses (fire-traps, according to some) broken up into suites, the garbage pit full of crap from Torrent, the wind turbines screwing with people’s minds, the sour gas wells, the stalled building developments. Nothing horrible seemed to have escaped my attention since she’d been gone. I felt jolly as I related it all though, because of the red and her.
“Did you know,” I whispered, elbow on table, glass tipped toward her, hunched in as if we might get kicked out all over again if someone heard what I was about to confide, “that all the apple orchards, and I do mean all . . .”
“All,” she said. “You mean every last one of them . . .”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Each and every one has been dug up, ripped right out” — you would have thought they’d been ripped, tree after tree, straight from my heart — “and replaced with vineyards.”
She glanced at my goblet. “To make wine, you mean?”
I rushed to agree (before I got her point) and then, pretty inebriated, I confessed to being an idiot and said that I’d always been a bit suspicious of fruit-tree huggers anyway. “After all, what’s a piece of apple pie in comparison to this fantastic ruby potion sent from the gods,” I said, and to hell with how stupid it sounded, because she found it funny, and what else mattered?
My god, life was good that night sitting across from her with all those glasses of wine and laughs between us, most of life’s chaos left behind. I mean, life sucked in Buckthorn, but you just never knew what might be waiting around the bend.
And then I inquired about Inez. I told Honey that I couldn’t wait to see my mother’s face when she found out that the girls from you-know-where were back in the neighborhood, and that she’d be thrilled and relieved to see them again — if things worked out that way.
Honey put her fork down, her plate not yet empty. I waited, eager as ever, to get the scoop. What did I imagine? She’d mentioned they traveled a lot, and how it had taken longer and longer to settle in, so I pictured them screaming down the blacktop in the Eldorado, a new adventure every day. It was dizzying what the two of them could pack into a lunch, after all, or even breakfast. In those early years when I dropped by in the morning to pick up Honey for school, I’d stand in the foyer and feel like I was teetering on the edge of one of those Bruegel prints in my mother’s office. A mere three people (before the old man left) seemed to be everywhere at once and doing god knows what. Coffee boiling over. Lost socks. That horrible father hollering in the background while Inez ironed away and dropped cigarette ash onto his pants and the dog chased its bowl around the kitchen. I can still see Honey, wearing the shortest skirt she could find, doing up her blouse as she opened a can of dog food. And the music: full volume at 8 in the morning. Once or twice the cops dropped by to say the neighbors didn’t appreciate being dragged into a rock concert so early in the day, which I’m sure left Inez mystified. I was a nervous wreck, late for school every day.
But the point is I pictured them gliding through those lost years like a mother and daughter Thelma and Louise — but a different car, with a different ending. And when Inez got one of her terrible headaches Honey would bed her down in the back seat and carry on through the desert night, her scarf blowing in the breeze, the moon on high.
And it was as if she read my mind because she squared her cutlery up neat against her plate, sat back in her chair, and said, “Shit, Nic. I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’ll just come right out with it: Inez didn’t make it.”
I lost my words again — returned to form, I guess you could say. She didn’t need to tell me twice. Even then I wasn’t one of those people who just can’t believe horrible news when they hear it. Instead I thought, That’s how I should have told my mother about my father, rather than beat around the bush as if somehow I could change the bottom line: Dad didn’t make it.
Now Inez too. And that’s how it goes: people die. One after the next and no letting up, and then it’s on to Club Silencio, as Honey used to say after we watched Mulholland Drive twice in one night, pulling out all the stops just trying to understand. Because there’s nothing that can’t be understood if you go over it enough times, right? If you damn well insist on getting the point, and don’t let up until you do, all will be revealed.
And for some reason, I guess because my brain was stained with all that magic Cabernet, I heard the echo of Honey’s voice say, Dude’s dead, I presume? And I started laughing and then, you know the old cliché, crying. And Honey had to throw some crumpled-up cash on the table, pull my jacket around my shoulders, and drag me out of there before we both got kicked out again, like back in the bad old, good old days. Or whatever the hell they were.
She drove me around while I sobered up, the windows rolled all the way down and our hair blowing every which way, a reversal of the roles we played as teens when I did the driving before dropping her, still pretty stoned, at home. Since then she seemed to have learned how to handle alcohol, because I would have sworn she’d matched me glass for glass that night and yet never once inched over the double line. We headed back to the lot at Antoine’s and I picked up my car. She insisted on following me to the outskirts of Buckthorn before heading back up the highway to Torrent. It was close to 9 by then, but she reminded me how much she loved driving at night, so don’t think twice.
We exchanged cell numbers and said goodbye at the filling station where she pumped $10.50 into the Caddy’s tank. I wanted to add more, but I knew she wouldn’t let me. She reached out the window and took my hand before heading out.
“Back in touch soon,” she said. “And we’ll have a good long talk about everything.”
I
watched her drive away, her and the Eldorado bathed in that peculiar light that pours itself down from gas stations at night, and then a flash of red as she tapped the brakes and pulled out onto the highway.
* * *
About a week later a guy from Buckthorn Realty dropped by while my mother was at a physiotherapy appointment. He’d called a couple of times and I’d put him off. I didn’t want to hear him go on and on about how sorry he was about my father while his eyes measured up the square footage over my mother’s shoulder.
The visit lasted about twenty minutes as we stood in the backyard under one of the old maples. He talked about a new development “up the way” and pointed across the highway toward the acres of cornfields rustling in the breeze. I told him straightaway that my mother had no plans to sell. Somewhere along the way he realized we’d taken algebra together in high school so we proceeded to shoot the breeze a little. He never expected to end up selling Buckthorn for a living, or imagined that anyone would want to buy it; I couldn’t believe I was still playing oldies and pop standards at the casino, and people wanted to listen.
And then he remarked that he thought he saw Honey Ramone in town the other day, as if the statement was an afterthought. When I didn’t reply he added that he’d heard a rumor about “something heavy going down out west.” I could see he was waiting for confirmation, so I let out a phoney laugh and said something to the effect that rumors had swarmed Honey like blackflies since she was fourteen, so the chances of “something heavy” being b.s. were sky high, almost guaranteed. Then I looked at my phone, told him it was time to pick up my mother, and we both turned to go.
Honey Page 4
