Honey

by Brenda Brooks

  Something heavy went down out west? News to me. But I’d fall down dead before I dug for more information from a guy from Buckthorn Realty. And anyway, whatever tales he’d heard, they were the usual gnats and rumors. Sure, she made it easy sometimes, but it was all crap in the end.

  If there was anything more to say, I imagined she’d do the telling herself.

  5.

  I tried contacting her a few times (eleven) over the next week.When I didn’t reach her I worried that my drunken reaction to the news of her mother dying might have led her to believe I couldn’t handle the heavy stuff, what with my own father’s death so recent.

  Then she called during one of those brief moments when I was thinking of something else. She was at Robinson’s clothing store on 3rd, five blocks away, and could I come down and give her a hand with something? I thought maybe the car had broken down as she was passing through on her way to . . . somewhere, anywhere, else.

  When I got to Robinson’s, the clerk, Lisa Robinson, an old high school acquaintance whose family owned the store, stood chatting Honey up next to the discount blouses. Honey shot a wide-eyed “save me” past Lisa’s shoulder as I came through the door. The three of us chatted a bit, and then Honey asked if I’d join her in the change room to offer my opinion on a couple of possibles. Once inside, she thanked me for the rescue and said something to the effect that Ms. R certainly had a lot to talk about for someone who lived in a town where not a fucking thing ever happened.

  “I don’t think she’s gonna let me out of here without buying one of these babies,” she said, and nodded toward a couple of blouses hanging next to the bench. She insisted she really did want my opinion, as always, so I sat down while she stripped off her T-shirt. She tried on the pink blouse, and then the white, as if nothing was strange, as if her trying things on in that stuffy change room of our youth, in a department store that was going downhill so fast it had four racks of clothes left, was the most natural thing in the world.

  I hadn’t realized how thin she was, her jeans low on her hips and belt cinched to the last notch. Even her wrists seemed slight somehow, an elastic band around one of them. Some of her bra’s fancy lace had worn away and a tiny brass safety pin held one of the straps together. When she caught my glance in the mirror I got self-conscious about having seen so much and rushed ahead with my opinion: white was the right choice, classic, without a doubt the nicest shirt in the store and it went great with her hair (whatever that meant). And then I felt faint, or what I assume people mean by faint, because it hadn’t happened to me before: cold sweat, dizzy, a bit nauseous. She had just tied back her hair with the elastic from her wrist, and I guess she saw my distress and asked if I was okay. I said the room was even stuffier than I remembered, unbearable, and excused myself.

  I swept past Lisa at the cash, dodged a bit of Buckthorn Saturday traffic, and sat down on a bench next to the cenotaph. A warm breeze rushed high in the horse chestnuts and down along the footpath in the park. It dried the sweat on my face but didn’t seem to cool me. I felt a bit fevered, as if I might be catching a summer cold. For the first time since my father died I recognized how empty I felt and at the same time full of loss. You would have thought one feeling would have displaced the other but instead they ganged up, and I had to lean over with my hands on my knees to get a grip.

  Ten minutes later the little bell over Robinson’s door rang and Honey came out wearing the white shirt and a pair of beige pants, the old, frayed T-shirt and jeans nowhere to be seen. She came straight over. I figured she’d take one look at my eyes and grill me until I told her what the hell was wrong, and what could I say? The back of your neck is so pale? Your torn fingernails on the buttons of that shirt undid me?

  She sat down and rested her hand on my knee, the little plastic price tag thing still attached to her cuff. I took her wrist and tugged it free.

  “What a fucking situation,” she said. I nodded even though I didn’t know exactly what she meant. The comment just seemed a general sort of truth, something you could say anytime at all, and who could disagree?

  She slipped a pen out of her purse, searched in vain for a piece of paper, and took my hand and scribbled a street address on my palm. She had an appointment across town at 2, she said, but would I meet her around 7? Then she checked her watch, swore, and rushed back to the car.

  I recognized the street address. Anyone within 200 miles would have: Havenhurst, the five-story condo development that had once been the Co-op Flour Mill warehouse north of the county line. The news had been full of stories about its hopes, and failures, back in 2007. People in town said the so-called industrial conversion looked like a big silo and that they should have left the original brick alone instead of spraying it trendy black. But its problems went deeper, especially once the roof started leaking.

  People had taken to calling it Haven’t-Hurst. All you had to do was cruise by in the evening to see why: the building itself almost invisible in the dark with only two or three apartment windows glowing faintly against the night sky.

  * * *

  It was only a forty-five-minute drive to Havenhurst, but I got there early and cruised around the neighborhood. Not that “the neighborhood” was much more than secondary and gravel roads bordering leased wheat fields and the ghost of the abandoned golf course already overwhelmed by thistle and a sea of long, mauve grasses gone back to nature.

  She buzzed me up at 7 sharp, and right away I saw that whatever appointment she’d had that afternoon must have gone well because she was feeling good — and a little stoned. She was always so energetic, even wired, but pot softened and slowed her down to the point of blurriness, but maybe the problem was my eyes.

  She wore the same shirt and pants she’d bought at Robinson’s, the pants folded up to her knees, the shirt half-unbuttoned in the heat and shirt-tails hanging out. I figured the apartment must be hers, and god knows I looked forward to the tale that led her there, but the surroundings gave nothing away. It could have been anyone’s stuff, what little there was — and that turned out to be true. It was a half-furnished penthouse that rented cheap at $950 a month, utilities and parking included because nobody wanted to live at the address, she told me, except a long-haul trucker and a guy who worked the highways twenty miles north, both on the ground floor and hardly ever home.

  I was barely inside before she dragged me out to the balcony to admire the view. I’m not good with (or accustomed to) heights so I held back a little, not that it wasn’t impressive even for our humble neck of the woods: the shimmering wheat fields stretching off to the east, Fortune Bay in the north, and those deep lakes farther out — a layering of worn mountains to the west. But who really cared about the view just then? I wanted to know what the hell was going on. She sat us down on the sofa and filled me in.

  The appointment had been at the bank in Buckthorn. A loan, I thought. But no, they hired her. She started Monday. I took the fact that she was so thrilled about this to be a sign of how low she’d sunk, because the last thing I ever thought Honey would do is work in the financial world, never mind gush about a job at the branch in Buckthorn.

  She must have got up and poured me a glass of wine, because there it was in my hand. I couldn’t deny that I felt the need for one of those good, long drinks I took while standing alone in the kitchen listening to my mother arrange her wooden tiles into V-I-C-T-O-R-Y.

  She told me I looked “a bit twitchy” about her news. I denied it, which wasn’t too hard because I couldn’t help being relieved about her return. I could hardly believe it. Honey in Buckthorn rather than, I don’t know, staring out at the water on some island to hell and gone in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  “It’s just I never thought of you as a bean counter, or whatever,” I said and then kicked myself for demeaning the very job she’d just managed to find.

  “No shit,” she said. “But, it pays better than wearing a blue vest with How May I Help You? s
crawled on the back. At least at the freakin’ bank it’s a breeze: I take people’s money and give it to someone else. At Walmart I’d go off my rocker and bludgeon some asshole with a portable barbecue and end up in the big house, or some nice little domestic cage near my loser hometown.”

  And here was something new: she said that she’d “done a stint” at a bank in Torrent sometime after she and Inez left Buckthorn. “I had a hotshot job,” she said. “Lots of money, for a while. The car, the clothes. But I’m not bragging. I didn’t mention it before because now I don’t give a shit. I’ll spare you further appalling details.” I felt awful, like I’d put a damper on her finding decent employment, and maybe that made her pretend to undervalue it. I told her so and apologized.

  A tiny ashtray sat on the table beside her, I guess you’d call it a travel ashtray, a little brass thing with a mother of pearl lid. A book of matches lay beside it. She stretched her legs toward me (as we’d sat across from each other a thousand times in the past) and lit what I guess was the rest of the joint she started before I got there. She told me not to feel bad. She knew the job was crap. But it was something to do on the way to something else. She squinted through one eye and offered me the joint. When I held up my empty glass, a reminder that I’d just had a glass of wine she smiled a soft, slow smile and asked if I believed it was possible for a person to feel too good, which, coming from an Italian background, rather than Scottish, I suppose she thought was a rhetorical question.

  “Oh, come on. We’re not kids anymore. Live a little. I promise I won’t let anything bad happen to you,” she said and handed it to me. I took the smallest puff, and then another, as suggested, and ever so gradually felt my brain escape my skull and hover two or three feet above. My pupils grew to the size of dinner plates — I was sure of it.

  I don’t know how long we sat there, silent, like two people studying across from each other in the library at night, lost in our own thoughts I guess. Entirely at ease saying nothing. But I guess that’s the point: relax, lose track of time, even though in my racket timing is everything. Through the open balcony door a set of wind chimes — flat silver seashells, transparent and paper thin — stirred in the breeze. Not a sound down in the street since we were a few miles past the outskirts, far away from anything.

  At some point Honey asked me what time it was, but vaguely, because it’s not like it mattered. I told her it was 10 or so and lapsed back into my reverie. Did a bit more time go by? I’m not sure. I only remember her voice, as if it came from somewhere far across those fields of waving grasses and deep, cold lakes spread out far below her apartment windows.

  “I should tell you about my mother,” she said.

  As she began speaking the evening took on a slow, liquid quality, as if we were lying in a drifting gondola together. Somewhere in the back of my mind I noticed how dark the room had become, but there was no lamp, at least not handy.

  So we continued on together through the shadows.

  * * *

  After they fled Buckthorn Honey and Inez drove west. The all-night drives she had described became standard. With nothing to anchor them, the passing of time became meaningless over the days, weeks, months. Dawn, dusk, and all the disorienting miles in between — that was all they knew. It wasn’t anything like my romantic view of them: the moon, the scarves blowing in the breeze. Instead, they crashed at motels, the kind with ’60s wallpaper and framed prints of ducks flying over marshes. Hot plates. Odd jobs. Gas shortages. Never enough cash.

  “Let’s just say we rung the hell out those herbal teabags my mother was so hot for,” she said. Inez’s migraines got worse with the stress of living rough, so Honey took whatever jobs came up in order to pay for living quarters and groceries.

  “I was a hideous waitress, and the small towns had hardly any office work. Factory work, what’s left of it, burned me out in six months. My best job was doing kitchen prep at a motor lodge somewhere in — oh hell, I can’t remember. All I recall is the neon sign on the roof of the motel next door flashing away in the night: Delightful Shores, or rather hores, you know, with the all-important S burnt out. What a difference a letter makes, eh Nic? But we know that from that pathetic game of ours.

  “Anyway, I seemed to be something of a natural in the kitchen. I ended up getting two more jobs but sooner or later the chef would want to teach me all he knew, if you get my gist. Or the pot washer started giving me those long eyes and then finally hit on me. Eventually I might go ahead and compromise myself in some way with a customer of a certain type” — she rubbed her fingers together to imply cash — “and pretty soon Inez and me had to set off in the Eldorado again.”

  The medication for her mother’s headaches cost $25 a pop, so behind Honey’s back Inez turned to painkillers bought cheap online. One night she disappeared and Honey found her at the bus station counting out her change.

  “If there’s a more soul-trashing sight than an aging woman digging coins out of her change purse in front of a cashier I don’t know what that is,” she said. “She decided she was a burden to me. I told her of course she was, and I was her burden too. We were each other’s big, fucking pile of trouble to carry, and lift, and drag along with both hands, if that’s what it took.”

  She didn’t realize that her mother was losing herself to chronic depression and anxiety. Honey said that if she had known this, she would have made different choices after they moved back to the Noblesse Oblige trailer park (Inez called it the Big N.O.) east of Torrent.

  She fell silent then and returned to earth for a moment.

  “You’re cold,” she said and got up. She came back with the comforter from her bed and settled it over the two of us, her legs once again stretched alongside me. One of her feet lay exposed, barely discernible in the shadows, yet how could I see the pale tan lines from the straps of her sandals? Was that a vision from years ago, or right then, that night? It hardly mattered. It’s just that I wanted to rest my hand there, as I would’ve done without thinking somewhere back in time.

  “We were two days away from getting tossed out of that pile of crap. Work went downhill because I couldn’t let her out of my sight. So when I decided to try for a bank loan she had to tag along. I’ve learned that there’s a definite craft required in getting a loan from someone — man, woman, or child. Not that I’d ever knock over a kid’s Kool-Aid stand, or anything.” She stretched, yawned, and tossed her side of the comforter away.

  “I spent a fair bit of time getting dressed that morning, if you know what I mean, and fingers crossed the financial associate would be a guy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no slouch with women either, but it’s a whole different hustle. You need to be deft with women, a lighter touch. You know — use your words and take your time. But get in and get out before she begins to feel remorse about surrendering something she’ll regret later. Not regret, but think twice about. A loan, I mean. Fortunately she’ll deny it happened, even to herself never mind the bank, so nothing will be rescinded. But use my words? I could barely put two words together, and we didn’t have a lot of time.” She paused and lit another joint, offered it to me. I watched my fingertips accept it, raise it to my lips, then sat up, coughed a few times, and handed it back. She put it out and placed it in the tiny ashtray, leaned back, her arms beneath her head, and gazed at the shadows flickering across the walls and ceiling in the moonlight.

  As it turned out, the manager himself ushered the two of them into his office and closed the door. Honey gave him the once-over and decided the loan would be “like taking candy from a baby with a bad goatee,” because the guy couldn’t take his eyes off her. “So rude and gross. And right in front of my mother!” She laughed as she told me, because she remembered that his predictable response was exactly the kind of distraction she intended, expected, and could always rely on. “Money in the bank,” she said. “Just not his bank.”

  She had told Inez that the chances for a juicy steak a
nd glass of overpriced Shiraz that evening would be increased if she let her do the talking. When Inez complained about being reduced to a prop Honey said, “That’s right: you’re the dignified, silent fucking matriarch prop, and you have to play your part to a tee or stay in the car.” She pulled the blanket over herself again and lay back. “I felt like shit talking to her that way because she was far from full strength, but my own nerves were shot too.”

  Inez had dressed for the occasion as well: fancy scarves and silver bangles and all topped off with the ever-present handbag, a Coach hobo Honey claimed she ordered special from Saks Fifth Avenue, a good joke because they both knew it was a fake she’d bought on a street corner from someone as desperate as they were.

  The manager (mid-forties, hefty) fiddled with his computer, the smell of leather and aftershave — “Hugo Boss,” Honey said and pretended to gag — wafting around him while she laid out the situation, minus the desperation. Maybe if Inez hadn’t come along she would have been more transparent, among other things, she said. Her mother had lost a lot but not her dignity, so Honey told the manager they’d been traveling for a few years but now felt the need to settle down. She hoped that “traveling” would imply something like kicking back in Thailand or hiking in Nepal — but she knew the guy didn’t buy it. “I mean, all the poor slobs he turned away in a day? He knew as soon as he laid eyes on us.” Even so, she played her part and put her trust in the “hot quotient.” She told the manager their requirements were straightforward: a simple loan to get them back on their feet. Say, $5,000.