Look How You Turned Out

by Diane Munier

"Sometimes," he says.

  I keep looking at him, waiting for him to recant or restate or something.

  He doesn't, so I stalk to the bed and lay back down, yanking the covers over me. "Nice," I say.

  I bounce around as he sits beside me. "Hey. I'm a jerk when I'm failing."

  "Failing? Who…where are you failing?"

  He’s looking at me.

  "Not me," I say. He's not failing me.

  He looks at the ceiling, flexing his jaw, shaking his head a little, lips almost pursed.

  "What is this?" I say.

  "I wanted to be there," he says.

  Oh. At the launch. "I know. It's okay."

  He's no nonsense now. "No, it isn't."

  "Okay. You want to punch yourself in the other eye? Don't be ridiculous." I say, sitting up.

  "I want him to meet his commitments," he says.

  "He does."

  "I don't want him to think…he can make a promise and blow it off."

  "Are we talking about Juney…or Obama? I mean…is it so serious?"

  He has to smile now. But I'm not smiling. Not really. "Are you this…hard on Juney?"

  He looks quickly at me. "I'm not hard on him. Do you think I am?"

  "If you make him go to band…you're…Hitler."

  "Spoken like a true headache," he says, and even his smile doesn't soften that.

  "I don't like being called a headache."

  He gets serious. "Alright. Pain in my ass?"

  We're quiet again. I'm not laughing.

  "C'mere," he says gathering me. "I mean good headache. Good pain in my ass. Good…ass," he says squeezing down there.

  I’m still not…with him. Not against him. Not with him.

  He kisses me, and I look at him close and cringe anew over his shiner and the stitches.

  Now I’m too serious. “I had to make a call. He was tired.”

  “This kind of work…,” he says, then he sighs.

  Yeah, he doesn’t have to tell me. This kind of work throws a wrench into your personal life on a regular basis.

  “You have to be able to make a call,” he says. “I love that about you.”

  “Just…not so much…or what?” I say. I do know what he’s saying, but he’s saying it all wrong.

  “I don’t know. He’s….”

  “He’s yours. I get it.”

  “No, no…,” he makes me look at him. “Bedilia, don’t say that.”

  “Okay. What do you want me to say?” I don’t add, ‘master.’ But I nearly do.

  “It’s…we gotta get on the same page,” he says.

  “I thought we were,” I say.

  “Yeah, but babe…that isn’t a one-time thing.”

  “I know that, Marcus. I’m not an idiot.”

  “You’re taking it personal….”

  “It is personal. I’m the headache, the pain in your ass!”

  “Babe, you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah I do. You mean all of it. You want to run a tight ship. Cop us into submission.”

  “Responsibility, Bedilia,” he says in a much-less cajoling voice.

  “Oh, I guess I don’t know anything about that? I guess you’re holding Chicago against me?”

  “What? No.”

  “I didn’t grow up spoiled, Marcus. I know how to meet my ‘responsibilities.’” I do the disgusting air-quotes thing.

  “I didn’t accuse you…we’re talking about his…one time.”

  “Are we? I feel like I got in your way. Your parental way.”

  “No.”

  “I mean…what am I? The girlfriend you married? Still?”

  He sighs.

  “Can you share Juney?”

  “With you? I always have.”

  “Not as his mom,” I say.

  “So if I let him sleep and get out of our deal, then I’m good with you?”

  “You got out of the deal. You didn’t pick him up, and he kept working. It’s a family business, Marcus. He worked like a little man! You messed up, even if you couldn’t help it. He’s a cop’s kid, and we have to adapt. I get that. But sometimes ‘you’ have to adapt. Otherwise, you become Moses!”

  “What am I teaching him?”

  I’m not frustrated anymore. “Responsibility isn’t Juney’s problem, Marcus. It isn’t yours. Just have mercy.”

  “Oh man,” he says, almost rubbing his eyes, but with the hurt one, I grab his hand and stop him just in time.

  "I don't know how you got along without me," I sigh. "Juney. He a…he called me Mom."

  He laughs, and he squeezes me. I pull back to look at him, to put my hand on his face.

  “I’ll text his band instructor?” I say.

  “I’ll do it,” he says. “It’s on me.”

  “You mad at me?”

  He gets out of bed, goes to his dresser drawer and comes back with a little box. "Happy Valentine's Day."

  I take the velvet covered box. He gets in bed beside me, and I open the lid to see the little silver heart shaped locket. It's beautiful and inside a picture of him, a picture of Juney. I laugh at this. "My guys," I whisper.

  He helps me put it on, then he kisses the back of my neck.

  “Am I Mom?” I ask because that is what we’ve been fighting about.

  “Not my mom,” he says moving over me.

  A few days later a severe blizzard traps us in our houses. Marcus can't be trapped, and he is out in it, gone for several days, pulling all-nighters at the station.

  Billy's is closed for two days, open the third and then just for lunch, to serve people like Marcus, or guys clearing the roads. A couple of those roads are closed for the first time I can remember.

  School is canceled. Juney and I are marooned, going back and forth between our house and Dad's. It's so much fun, rather exciting. If only Marcus could come home and not be on the backroads risking his life, I could be ecstatic right now. Juney and I have been baking, taking treats to Artie, cooking up a storm.

  I finish moving out of my old room and into my new home with Marcus. I clean Dad's upstairs and rearrange the furniture so it has two nice guestrooms and a dated but well-functioning bathroom complete with guest towels and soaps. Juney and I keep the stoves loaded with wood.

  Then the three of us work to clean Dad's downstairs. Dad makes another pile on the back porch for Goodwill.

  Then I focus on Marcus's house. I take the time to get really serious about this place. I want it to look fabulous next time Marcus pops in, I mean I want his Dudley Do-right to fall on the floor.

  Juney and I are on fire from our success at Artie's. My son thinks we should go into business as professional organizers and decorators. He's the victim of too much HGTV, which I love, and he absorbs vicariously. He's actually opinionated about where I'm moving the living room furniture. He comes up with really good ideas on how I can blend my stuff into the formerly masculine landscape. He loves to arrange my knick-knacks, my ceramic elf collection, and my brief art collection.

  While some of his arrangements are a definite no, to be rearranged by yours truly when he's back in school, slowly and subtly so he doesn't notice, some of his ideas are great.

  "I want all of your art. All of it," I say.

  He brings out a box. Then another. And one more.

  "Dad loves this stuff," he says. He then carefully explains each and every piece.

  A couple of hours pass, but we find the best ones, the most loved, the most profoundly wonderful pieces--the cop with the big, big hands and the yellow badge, the boy and his dad fishing, the dad's arm around the boy, the truck, a familiar faded red, with the father and son inside, both smiling.

  The father chopping wood and the son stacking it into a mountain that he stands upon and waves from.

  The two hands, Marcus's the outside line, Juney's the inside line.

  Artie's house, Artie in the downstairs window waving, and a girl in the upstairs window waving.

  "Who are we waving at?" I ask him.

&nbs
p; "Me," he says.

  We pick out the best, and we put them in the frames from a set of hotel prints that Elaine had given Marcus.

  Looks like she was trying to find something to fill his walls. There are eight black frames, and they are perfect. I have to trim some of Juney's art, but I do it with his permission, and pretty soon we have such a great set of originals. I have impressed myself. "These belong in New York!" I tell him.

  He grins. "They belong right here!" he says. "Dad is gonna love this!"

  I do the same with their pictures. They have a bunch, and Juney tells me the story behind many of them. Then they have gaps. Again I take generic prints out of frames, and we use stiff black paper to mount several of the photos, all Marcus, and Juney shots, sometimes just Marcus. I wonder where the Angela ones are, not that I'd hang them, but Juney might want to know. So I just ask, and Juney says Dad put them in a book somewhere.

  "Okay," I whisper, and we smile at one another. We both know how it is. It just is. There is a mother, and she has been, and now she isn't. The what and where is a play it by ear. For now, Angela is contained in a book in a cupboard, closet or attic. A good, safe place to keep her. You can't throw her away the way she…did you. So you put her out of sight, and she falls right out of your mind. But beware…there's a grand gesture in your future.

  You might even forgive.

  I pick up a shot of Marcus and Juney posing after one of Juney's baseball games. Marcus…he's happy with Juney, but his eyes…like a hurt…the thing Elaine knew. He's different now. I see it.

  Juney keeps me moving. There are a few pictures that include me. Innocent shots, a couple of funny ones, me holding up fish mostly or making horns behind Juney's head. But one…, "That's his favorite," Juney says.

  It's graduation. I'm standing in front of Artie's house. Dad took this. I don't know how Marcus ended up with it. I'm just standing there, it's nothing…I'm smirking, looking like a smart alec.

  It embarrasses me. Cause I don't know anything. I wish I could tell her to get a clue, to avoid the upcoming journey to Chicago at all costs, to run to the man across the street and declare myself.

  But she wouldn't have listened. What a punk.

  "Frame it," Juney says.

  So I do. I frame my punkness for all time. It appears in the collage and that's pretty real I guess. Here I am.

  When I hang these, and he helps me, I put the photo with me on the bottom corner of the carefully measured display.

  But later, before I go to bed, I notice the pictures are off. Off…but good. He's moved the one of me to the middle, and the bigger one that had occupied that space, the one of him and Marcus on a roller coaster at Six Flaggs, to the corner.

  He's given me the center space. There can only be one sun. I tried to defer. I could laugh because he can't know my fresh face is the last thing I want to see. But I bow to his wishes. And I'll be moving it…soon.

  The third day, Marcus makes a sudden appearance while we're eating lunch and playing Life. We both squeal and hug him from different angles. My hug is longer than Juney's. There's a bag of Cheetohs for Juney and a box of Twinkies for me. Good gas station food.

  While I'm dishing Marcus some beef stew Juney is showing him the changes, especially the two picture groupings.

  Marcus is so interested in each thing, and he keeps looking at me in between the various pit-stops on the tour saying what a wiz I am. He likes the elves. "We have a lot of them," he says, and I have to laugh at that.

  After he eats he asks if Juney wants to play a couple of rounds on the X-Box, and Juney does, of course, so they start the game, and I do the dishes and feel Marcus's eyes on me, and when I look he winks. So as soon as the dishes are done Marcus says Juney can play for a while, he's going to lie down.

  After ten of the longest minutes in creation in which I wipe the counters and Swiffer the floor, then scour the stove top, I ask Juney if he'd mind running some stew over to Grampa Artie.

  "Are you coming?" he asks.

  "I'll stay here to finish the laundry. Don't check the stove without Grampa watching."

  "Okay," he says, "let me just finish this round."

  I pack up the food, then I pack up Juney and watch him safely trudge across the street. "Don't stay more than an hour," I call after him. Hopefully, I've programmed him to stay for sixty minutes. I, we can do a lot in that precious allotment.

  When Juney is inside Grampa's door, I close ours and skip to the bedroom in my big thick socks. I open the door to the room, and I'm stripping on my way to the bed. As soon as I get there, Marcus sits up, the red comforter and the gray sheets pooling around his waist. His long arms slip around me. I fall on top of him as he lays back and he breathes in as we kiss like two people who've been locked up in individual cages since puberty or something.

  "Baby I missed you," he says in there.

  No talking. No time for it. I want his voice, but not mine. I've missed him. Ached. Ached.

  I get up and run back to the door and lock it, then back to him. He is laughing when I leap onto him. "Do that again," he says.

  I'm too busy kissing him to think of leaving. He pulls the covers over us cause it's the coldest day we've had yet. But we're about to make as much heat as we can.

  Juney's good for twenty minutes at least.

  "My God!" I call out like the I'm writing a psalm. He is looking at me. "You know how good that feels big man?" Tears roll from the outer corners of my eyes.

  "I love you, I love you," me.

  "I love you," he says.

  Perfect.

  Applause.

  Then we hear the front door, and, "Mom?"

  For just a beat we freeze. Then, "He calls me Mom," I whisper to Marcus for the millionth time.

  "I know," he says, and he kisses my nose. Then he rolls off.

  I hurry onto on my feet and gather my clothes.

  I blow him a kiss before entering the bathroom for a quick shower.

  "Hey Bedilia…you know what I call you?" he says.

  "What?"

  "My life."

  "Wife?"

  "Life," he says louder.

  "Oh. That's sweet," I say. Should I get back in that bed?

  "Go on," he says, getting out of the bed.

  I go in the bathroom and turn on the shower, get it right then step in. I hear the door close, and he pulls the curtain and steps in behind me. He's so tall and handsome, and I've missed him so much. And it's freaking chilly in here, and I wrap myself around him like a barnacle.

  "I wasn't ready to let you go," he says against my hair. "I never am."

  "Then don't. Stay with me forever." I'm all clingy.

  He makes me look at him. "Thanks for all you're doing. You work too hard."

  I laugh a little. "You work too hard."

  He's really looking at me. "You didn't get your period."

  "So? I can be late."

  "Yeah…but," he rubs a hand over my breasts, "these sore?"

  "No," I say. They are, but it's the period.

  "Hey…you know I'd love it."

  He's holding me under the warm spray. I bring him under too.

  "Mom," Juney yells at our bedroom door though I have to shut the water off completely to hear. "Grampa walked back with me. I wanted him to see the pictures."

  "Okay," I yell. "Don't wake your Dad." This makes no sense as my yelling would have wakened him if he was asleep and not licking the water off my back.

  "The old man too?" Marcus says grabbing a towel to put around his waist, and another so he can start drying me off.

  "Pictures my foot. He wants to find out what's been going on at the station."

  I take the towel and start working on my hair. Love time is effectively over.

  Chapter 68

  Biscuits and gravy for real. Normally I'm thinking yum, but this time, I'm holding in a gag as I set the gigantic plates before two of these four men and bite the urge to say, "You really going to eat that…horse-hockey?"

  N
ever mind it's my honey, my Marcus and Deputy David sitting across from him. They are at a table for four cause two guys came down from headquarters to meet with Marcus about running.

  They are teasing me, or something. I'm just trying not to hurl.

  I go back for the other two plates, carry them to the table and serve the two officers from out of town.

  They say something else and everyone laughs. They're just being friendly. Then one of them asks for hot sauce. I get a real big hee-bee. I feel breakfast crawling up instead of going down. My food has been confused lately.

  I make it in back and lean against the wall, near the closet where Marcus and I first rocketed out of the stratosphere together. I'm holding my stomach, willing myself to get a grip. It's so hot in here, and it smells like bacon. Major barf motivator.

  "Bedilia," Marcus says. I didn't hear his approach.

  "What? Did I seem weird out there?" I say.

  He laughs a little. "You alright baby? You look pale."

  Here goes the 'you're working too hard,' speech again.

  "I thought you were going to leave the tables to the waitresses." It goes like this. I'm management. I am here to manage the office and the personnel.

  "I was…," I'm not going to explain it. I did it special for him. Brought the plates. And I need the activity. I can only sit at a desk for so long.

  "I know," he says, and it's hug time, with the badge and all. I've hugged a badge…many times. I sniff him because I like to breathe him. I kind of snuggle against him. I wish I could spend the day here. I nearly stick out my tongue and lick him a little.

  "Bedilia, are you going to be alright?" he says.

  "Nyes." It's one of my favorite words, invented by Juney when he was trying to tell me he didn't have homework then remembered he did. Another hybrid-yno. He uses that one too when I say things like, "Did you take Scrapper outside so he can pee in the yard and not on the rug?"

  "I'm bringing the test home tonight," Marcus says.

  "Where you gonna buy it, huh? It'll be all over town before I can even pee on it," I say all grousily.

  "It's not going away, whether you know or not, it's still going to be in there," he says.

  "I just…it will be official, you know? And you'll start to ask me about it and worry," I say.

  He laughs some. "That's you, right? You're confusing us again."