by Andrea Cale
Misty would reach their apartment after 2 a.m., around the same time the club patrons found their own beds, but instead of having her wallet thinned out by overpriced cocktails and cover charges, her pockets would be filled with the hard-earned cash necessary to piece together life as the primary earner for her son and mother.
Before finally lying down to rest, she’d peek in on her sleeping boy and recognize that each service of deep-dish pizza had been worth it. Each visit to a customer who asked to be served more quickly than another to make a game or movie had been worth the stress.
On this September morning, Misty began working her bed-head of long chestnut hair into a better ponytail as her mother poured them each a cup of tea.
“You know what I don’t get?” the elder woman asked.
Misty winced slightly and braced for one of her mother’s signature observations of the world. She stirred two spoonfuls of sugar into her tea in an attempt at sweetening her own mood.
“What’s that,” Misty managed without a hint of annoyance.
“Take the mall, fah’ instance. If I go in a shoe sto-ah, at least fo-ah different workers ask me if I’m needin’ help. If I walk in a depahtment sto-ah, I can’t browse through a rack of underway-ah without someone bahtherin’ me and askin’ me the size of my own rack. If I trot down the atrium, I can’t pay the cell phone guy in the kiosk not to skay-ah me out of my wits and harass me into talkin’ about cell phone plans. They don’t believe me when I explain how we share a cell phone, by the way.”
“But?”
“But if I’m in the mahket and I need to find out where the damn honey for my tea is hidin’, I can’t get some attention from a wakah there for the life of me. It’s like tryin’ to make eye contact with a pokah playah. They pretend to be stackin’ a shelf or fixin’ a fruit, but believe you me, they know I’m there and they ignoah me. Sometimes they start walkin’ the other way even.”
The elder woman steamed, took a sip of hot tea, and swallowed hard before continuing.
“So why is it, my dear daught-ah, that when I want to shop in peace, people are on me like a hot young chicky, yet when I need help, they treat me like a diseased old hag? It’s uncanny.”
“Mom, it happens to everyone,” Misty answered. “It’s the difference between a structure with commission and one without.”
“Commission,” the elder woman hissed. “Wayah I come from, you help someone who needs help. You let someone be if they don’t want to be baa-thaad. People would get more business that way. You mahck my words.”
The family’s ironing board let out a screech as Henry’s grandmother unfolded its legs in preparation for her cashier’s shift at the Belmont Street gas station in Brockton. She tightened her shoulders at the sound. Mornings before work were her least favorite times of day. She wasn’t thrilled with her job, her bosses, or the moody people who flowed in and out, but the gig was enough to get her home in time to take care of the grandson she loved so dearly. Henry very quietly loved her back.
Misty’s mornings, on the other hand, were like most others’ evenings. Aside from some household chores, mornings were times when she could enjoy a little peace. Once her mother left for work, she’d take a bath, read, or watch part of a movie. Her love of film was one hobby that hadn’t vanished since becoming a mother.
Misty was generally most relaxed in the morning, but not today.
“Do you think something’s wrong with my Henry?” she asked.
“Oh, he-ah we go again,” said the elder woman, waving her iron-free hand in disapproval.
Misty felt like her relationship with Henry had begun to slip away.
“Mom, Henry doesn’t even ask you to bring him to the restaurant to see me anymore.”
Misty felt his painful shyness like only a mother could. And as mothers often do, she blamed herself. She regretted Henry’s lack of a male influence, and on bad days she questioned whether she should’ve found a way to stick it out with Chad. Deep down, she knew Henry was better off without him, but Chad would’ve at least been able to teach Henry the trick to scoring a punch ball home run, she told herself.
Unbeknownst to Henry, Misty knew her son’s embarrassment over the game well. As other parents drove away from the schoolyard without needing to look back at their kids running happily toward the playground, Misty often watched her boy drag his feet toward a sea of students without saying hello to anyone—except for Oscar.
“I swear if it weren’t for his friendship with Oscar, I think I would look into hiring a psychiatrist to help us,” she said.
“With what money? And better yet, what fo-ah?”
“Maybe he wouldn’t be so withdrawn if he had a father.”
“Oh, that angry bump on a log? The boy would surely need a shrink if that man were in the pictyah. So would you. And so would I. Henry will have a man in his life someday. You just need to get out on the mah-ket more, if that’s what you really want.”
“How? When? And I thought we were talking about Henry anyway.”
A wide range of men hit on Misty at the restaurant, but she had been out on only a handful of dates since Chad. The brief relationships all ended the same way. None of the men she attracted could see past either the living arrangement with her mother or the fact that Misty was a mother herself.
The elder woman took a sudden pause from wrestling with her iron. A thought hit her nearly as heavy as one before she softened her tone.
“Have you evah been in love, my love?”
Misty knew that the feelings she had for her son compared to the feelings she had for all of her ex-boyfriends combined were as different as a grand slam and a foul ball.
“Who needs another love when I have Henry?”
Misty also knew that she wasn’t being honest with her mother or herself. Even though the clearest window she had to true love was her two-hour peek into the lives of characters in classic romance films, they made her realize how greatly she wanted it for herself. With every viewing of Casablanca, Moonstruck, or The Bridges of Madison County, Misty wept for the characters’ heartbreaking quests for love. Whenever a film ended happily, her mood would swing up for just a moment until real life set in again, making her face what she was missing.
Misty’s mother sensed her own child’s pain and immediately sought to fix it with a change in subject.
“What wuh we talkin’ about?”
“Finding honey in a haystack,” Misty said.
The elder woman wasn’t sure if her wise daughter was referring literally to her hunt that morning in the supermarket or the missing love in Misty’s life. She didn’t want to take a chance in guessing incorrectly.
“Henry! We wuh talkin’ about Henry,” the elder woman said. “Listen, the boy is fine. He’s shy, so what? There’s nothin’ wrong with being shy. I may not have attended the fanciest of schools, but one thing I know about—even mo-ah than you, my smaht cookie—is time. In time, Henry will come into his own. He’ll be mo-ah and mo-ah confident in himself. He’ll do it with ah support, with o-ah without a man in his life. You mahck my words.”
Back at the playground of the elementary school in Brockton, the morning bell cut through sounds of play and turned them into a mix of groans. The signal to start the school day was actually a relief to Henry, but he kept that to himself. And as he turned to head into the sanctuary of the classroom, the fiery red leaf broke free from under his sole and took flight in the September air as though it were experiencing new life and dancing for the kids beneath it.
Henry had no idea, but this school year was going to be very different than the others.
CHAPTER 7
CAROLINE
The Troubled One
A dozen years after her mother’s fatal car crash, eighteen-year-old Caroline tugged gently on her treasured locket and wished it still belonged around the neck of the woman who wore it before her.
As she sat in a room filled with overstuffed bags and moving boxes before the start of her new school year
, Caroline was a flashback of her stunning late mother. The red hair was their most obvious similarity, but those who knew Lindsay found smaller details, including their similar cheekbones and freckle patterns, uncanny. Caroline’s image brought her father great joy and memories on some days and depression and heartbreak on most others.
Even though Caroline on the surface was her mother right down to her locket, she was someone very different from the wild, free-spirited woman who created her.
Caroline stared nervously at her boxes and bags as she touched the necklace again. Zipping it to the right and zagging it to the left was Caroline’s habit whenever she sought comfort from any strong emotion, including her most common one of troubled.
She was troubled, of course, as a young lady working her way through life without a mother. Caroline had sweet memories of her mom, and she longed for the warm, overwhelming feminine love that the woman once brought to her childhood.
Lindsay’s death, as traumatic as it was, marked only the first link in a locket chain of more trouble for Caroline.
Several years earlier, on the one-year anniversary of her mother’s passing, Caroline’s father had been called into the front office at Harper Manufacturing. After a year on the job, he had developed a sort of immunity to the machine’s loud noises, but the sound of his name being called off the floor was unfamiliar. It jolted him to a stop from otherwise rhythmic work.
Kenny had folded his plastic work goggles in the neck of his shirt and smoothed the sides of his hair with rough hands. He reached for a roll of mints and unraveled the sticky wrapper to free one up. He took a deep breath and hoped this wasn’t the end of the line for him at Harper. It had been a long, painful year following his wife’s passing, and he didn’t know if he could survive adding another complication to it.
He was greeted in the front office with a phrase he hadn’t heard since the night of his wife’s death.
“Please have a seat, Ken,” the woman from HR had said gently.
Kenny had recalled Officer Rory’s same request in his living room exactly a year before. With a look of dread that he couldn’t think to hide, he once again took a seat with great fear.
This time, the conversation wouldn’t go as Kenny expected.
“We have an opening,” the woman had said. “It would be a promotion for you.”
For the first time in many hours—or possibly even days—Kenny smiled just the tiniest bit.
“We could use a new machine tenderer.”
Her news was as refreshing and mood-changing for him as the dips he used to take in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay with his wife. Not only could he be finished with sorting earplugs, cufflinks, and a variety of small medical parts that the machines thanklessly and monotonously spit out at him, he would be taking on the very position he admired and studied since his first day at Harper. Kenny didn’t know whether the higher-ups at the good company noticed his desire for the position or just felt sorry for his loss a year ago to the day, but he didn’t care. His little family could use a break, no matter how or why it came.
“Your quality assurance rankings are the best on the floor,” the HR woman had continued. “Your attention to detail is flawless. Your attitude is great. You’re dependable. These things haven’t gone unnoticed, and they aren’t taken lightly here. You deserve a shot at a position with more responsibilities.”
Kenny had realized the timing of the offer might have been a coincidence after all. Maybe for once, someone wasn’t just feeling sorry for him. Maybe he had earned the promotion through nothing but hard work, he thought.
At Harper, hard work was measured with flags. A yellow one meant a box of productivity was being reviewed. A green flag signaled a box passed inspection and was ready to be shipped. A red one meant someone’s work was rejected. Even though the single father had perhaps the most valid reason of any man on the floor for being distracted from his job every once in a while, he was the only one who had never gotten a reject flag. Ironically, red was his favorite color. It was his late wife’s color. It was his daughter’s color too.
“There’s a catch, I’m afraid,” the woman had said.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“The opening is for the evening shift only.”
Kenny had covered the evening shift a few times, when a worker called in sick and the company needed a second staffer on the floor for safety regulations. He knew the shift’s hours were firmly set for 3 to 11 p.m. He hung his head at the thought and smiled, not out of happiness, but as though he’d just won the lottery and lost the ticket.
Caroline was only seven years old when the promotion had come her father’s way. Kenny knew back then that if he accepted it, she’d be getting out of school as he was heading off to work. They would be like lonely individual cars weaving through Pawtucket’s S-curve in opposing directions every afternoon, traveling to and from their complicated lives.
Kenny had thought of his extended family and wondered if there was anyone left to lean on. His parents, who would’ve at one time lobbied for the opportunity to take care of their granddaughter, were getting on in age and had migrated to Florida. Kenny had an older local cousin, but he worked evenings as a chef at the great Cassanto’s Restaurant in Providence’s Federal Hill neighborhood. As Kenny sat in the plastic chair of the HR office, he couldn’t help but get distracted by the thought of his daughter’s uncanny ability to eat one of his cousin’s cannoli in less than a minute. The image of Caroline with various flavors of pastry cream on her freckles turned Kenny’s bittersweet smile into a more genuine one.
“I’m sorry,” he had replied. “Don’t get me wrong, this is the job of my dreams, and I appreciate it, but I have to take care of my little girl in the afternoons. My seven-to-three shift has been perfect for that. Thanks for thinkin’ of me.”
“What about after-school programs? A nanny? A sitter? It’s up to you, Ken, but if this is something that’d be good for you and your family, we’d like you to have the job over anyone else.”
Kenny had known that even with the promotion, he would still be a single parent struggling to make ends meet. He couldn’t afford additional childcare programs or a nanny. His body slid down the plastic chair as he thought. A babysitter could be an option. Kenny pictured his cousin’s son Jeremy, a teen who always seemed to be looking for odd jobs for extra cash. If Kenny was able to make arrangements with his nephew, not only could he accept the machine tenderer position, he might have just enough to give Caroline the dance classes she had been so quietly and patiently wanting.
“Can I get back to you tomorrow with a definite answer? I may be able to work out somethin’ for my daughter.”
Kenny had arranged to pay a small fee each week for Jeremy to watch his little girl. The arrangement lasted until she was twelve, when Kenny felt she was old enough to take care of herself.
But even from the age of seven, she would’ve been better off faring alone. Similar to many relationships that turn toxic, Caroline and her second cousin’s time together started off well. They played board games, read stories, or put on a Disney film. Caroline’s favorite was Cinderella.
But in little time, Jeremy grew bored and annoyed with babysitting. He wasn’t ready to quit though; he needed the extra cash for firecracker purchases during occasional weekend drives to New Hampshire, or for booze from the mysterious woman around the corner from Kenny and Caroline’s apartment. Like too many troubled teens, Jeremy could’ve used a babysitter of his own. Being responsible for someone else was not a position for which he was ready.
Eventually, Caroline had begun noticing the creepy looks her young caretaker gave her. When Jeremy talked to her, she noticed a change. Sometimes he looked at her, but not in her eyes. She began retreating to her room after school.
“I’ve got lots of homework to do,” she’d say before fleeing like a little bunny with light, quick feet up the steps, leaving her heavy school bag downstairs. “Lots.”
She would often hear sounds of talk s
hows down below while she brushed her doll’s hair or rearranged her room, which was her fortress. She’d take comfort up there and pretend it was her own Cinderella castle, knowing that just like on the night of her mother’s death, it was possible to be in a separate world despite being in the same apartment with someone.
The arrangement with Jeremy had soon turned from tolerable to tragic. Every six months or so, perhaps when he had a particularly bad or good day, Jeremy would slowly slither up the steps like a snake in hunt of its rabbit.
The quiet sound of Jeremy’s slow, shoeless feet on the stairs made Caroline’s heart beat even faster than the signal of the cop’s lights dancing on her curtains had on the night of her mother’s death. Like a rabbit feigning its own end, she pretended to nap with her back to the door. On his first couple of intrusions upstairs, Jeremy had stayed in the room, lingering about for a minute or two before slithering back down to bad afternoon television. But as time progressed, he had become a little more hungry and a little more daring.
On a few of the worst occasions, he had put one hand on the girl’s body and another on his own. He let out a disgusting hiss that made her stomach turn. While Caroline wouldn’t comprehend what was happening until many years later, she knew in these moments that she hated whatever it was.
Each traumatizing encounter with Jeremy marked another link on a growing chain of seemingly endless trouble for the girl. Jeremy’s abuse was even more devastating to her than the unbearable absence of her mother. At least she hadn’t seen her mother’s death coming. She hadn’t tortured herself like her father had with anticipation over that. The years with Jeremy were a different ongoing state of dread. For five years, Caroline did not know what her afternoons were going to bring. She’d spend the rest of her life trying to forget them.
