“I said okay when you said a few days. When were you really plannin’ to come? Ten years from now?”
“There isn’t any need to yell about this, Charlene. Not here.”
“You’re worried about me yellin’? You have left us, and my yelling is your main worry right this minute?”
“Look…I don’t want to fight,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d want to see me, is why I haven’t been around. And I figured we’d get in a fight, and I didn’t want that, especially in front of the kids.” They never argued in front of the kids—if Charlene was going to bless him out, she would wait until they were alone.
“I thought I would wait awhile for things to settle down before I came around. I need to get myself a little straightened out first, Charlene. That’s all.” He wanted her to understand, but he didn’t know how to explain. “And you know you can page me if there’s an emergency. I’ll call you back.”
He thought for one horrible moment that she was going to hit him.
Then she took a deep breath and put her hands on her hips. “What are we supposed to do in the meantime, Joey, while you’re gettin’ yourself straightened out? Are we just supposed to sit and wait?” Her angry eyes demanded an answer.
“I guess not,” he said, and clamped his jaw tight. His mind was whirling, and he was afraid he was either going to cry or punch her. He simply had no sense of control over himself these days. It was a safe bet he wasn’t going to say anything right.
“Oh, Joey.” Charlene rubbed her upper arms. Joey looked so lost that she had an urge to hug him. Then, squinting in the bright light, she looked out at the Suburban.
“Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter about me. You can leave me, write me off like I never existed, but are you just going to let your children feel like you’ve abandoned them? That you don’t love them anymore?”
His eyes came up.
Her panic had given way to righteousness for her children. She grabbed it and held on to it. “No matter what you do, you cannot deny those are your children, and they need their father.”
“Charlene…I know they are my kids. I love them, but right now they are fine with you. You’ve always been a much better mother than I have a father.”
Her tender inclination vanished. “I didn’t conceive those babies by myself,” she said.
He blinked and looked away.
“Joey, no matter how you think you don’t measure up as a father, that doesn’t mean you get to quit being one. You are their father, and they need to know that you still love them. That just because you’ve left me, you are not leavin’ them. I suppose they’ll survive without your constant presence, but they won’t be able to get over it if they believe that in any way they caused you runnin’ off.”
He frowned and gave that shake of his head that was really annoying Charlene. She waited, but he didn’t say anything. Joey could do that—wait her out. Most of their arguments had always been one-sided, because Joey would just shut up, and she felt called on to speak and get things out. He was putting it all on her now, just like he always did.
“What are you going to do, Joey?”
He shrugged, pulling inside himself in the way that made Charlene so mad that she wanted to turn around and walk off. She wondered if she should just tell him what to do; maybe she should say to him: “Joey, just get in your truck, we are goin’ home.”
She said, “Joey, can you come speak to them right now? Just talk with them, set up a time to go out for pizza or something. Show them you will always be their daddy. Make some sort of explanation to them, Joey, and assure them that you love them.”
His blue eyes came up to hers. “Do you think that Larry Joe is gonna go along with that, Charlene? He hasn’t said two words to me in three months.”
She bit her bottom lip, then said, “He’s your son, Joey. You two may not see eye to eye, but he is your son. They are your children, and you need to come over there now and speak with them.”
She turned then, trusting he would follow, and he did. The back door window on the Suburban went down, and Jojo poked her head out and said in her worried little voice, “Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, pumpkin.”
As Charlene slipped into the seat, she saw a relieved smile on Joey’s face. It was a smile that made her hurt.
He crouched and talked to Danny J. and Jojo through the window for a couple of minutes, asking how they were and what they were doing and would they like to go for pizza tomorrow night.
He never said anything to Larry Joe, who wouldn’t even look around at his father. Larry Joe kept his face straight ahead and rubbed the beginnings of his mustache, and every thirty seconds he gunned the motor to keep the air conditioner working effectively, no doubt thinking of his aunt Rainey’s delicate condition. Charlene just gripped the armrest and kept her lips shut tight.
Four
The City Hall thermometer reads 104°
When Larry Joe pulled into the drive, the empty corrals were spread out in front of Charlene. The scent of dust came in the window Jojo lowered in order to call to the three horses that came running up to the pasture fence. “Hello, Bo…Dog…Lulu. Hello!”
Gazing straight ahead, she watched a dust devil go twirling past the gaping barn door and the training pen, where the gate was hanging open, one corner snagged on the ground. Joey was always going to fix it.
Larry Joe followed the curve to the house and parked, as they always did in the summer, beneath the cooling shade of the big elm. While the rest of them got out, Charlene sat there, staring at the house. At the door where Joey had swept her into his arms and carried her across the threshold. She had slipped from his arms just inside the door, and, trying to catch her, they’d both ended up on the floor.
Larry Joe bent and looked at her through his open door, rubbing his hand over his short-cropped, sun-kissed hair.
“I’m goin’ over to Randy’s, Mom, until we have to go to work,” he told her. “You’ll be here to drive Mom anywhere she might need to go, won’t you, Aunt Rainey?”
“I’ll be here until Monday, hon.”
Looking to Charlene again, he said, “Guess I’ll go on, then. I have my pager, if you need me.”
Charlene gave him a hurry-away wave, saying, “Be careful,” and kept from flinging herself at him and holding on.
Her eyes lingered on his wiry shoulders as he strode away and got into his bright yellow truck. The engine roared, and he sped off down the driveway, leaving dust billowing up around the Ford logo on the tailgate.
Jojo stopped at her window and looked in. “Maa-ma?”
“I’m just going to sit here awhile, honey,” she told her.
“Come on in, y’all,” Rainey said, “Your mother just needs some peace and quiet for a few minutes. I’ll make us some milk shakes. The ice cream will be perfect for that now.”
Charlene didn’t seem to have the energy to move. She had this fearful feeling that she might simply fall to pieces, her arms and legs scatter all around, if she got out and moved. She felt guilty; mothers weren’t supposed to come undone. And one thing she had always been was a good mother. She might have failed in the wife department, but no one could say she had failed motherhood.
Opening the glove box, she got out several 7-Eleven napkins, to be ready in case she started crying. While she was rifling around in there, she found the vehicle insurance verification—the date to expire was two days away, which startled her a little. She generally kept on top of these things.
She sat there, staring at the form. She had always kept the checkbook and paid the bills. That wouldn’t change for her. What was Joey going to do? He hadn’t written but about five checks in all their married life, and those were when Charlene had been in the hospital having a baby. Maybe Joey intended to go off and live his life while she continued to write checks for him.
Lifting her eyes, she gazed out the windshield, her mind going through all the imaginings a woman in her situation was prone to.
She bla
med Joey; she blamed herself; she blamed God; she blamed “the slut”—and she blamed herself again. She went through every single thing she had said, cursing her stupidity and Joey’s idiocy, and then went through every single thing she wished she had said. This involved arguments dating back twenty years.
She planned revenge. She wanted Joey to suffer as she was suffering. She planned to mark him out of the family Bible and to shred the Mobetta shirts he had left in the closet. She planned what she would wear to court. She planned to drop dead to show him how he had hurt her; and to be done with the shame of being a woman who could not keep her husband. She planned how she could flaunt herself with other men to show him. She planned what she would say to the “the slut” when she ran into her at the IGA. She planned how she could get “the slut’s” black hair to fall out. She planned what she would say and do when he showed up at her door and begged to be allowed to come home. She planned with all the fury and relentless accusation of a brokenhearted woman who has been set aside.
Once she looked down and saw that she had shredded not only the napkins but the insurance form.
“Mama’s still out in the car, Aunt Rainey.”
Rainey was coming in from the laundry room. Jojo sat on the kitchen counter, looking out the window while finishing her milk shake, sucking and making noise with the straw. Rainey noticed that her niece watched her mother continuously in a manner of a little puppy that doesn’t want to let its human out of sight.
“Yes, she is, sugar.” Rainey glanced at the clock. Charlene had been sitting there thirty minutes now. “I’ll take her out a milk shake. Bet she needs it.”
Rainey, who had suffered only a brief week of nausea, had in her pregnant state become quite cognizant of her own nutritional requirements, and since this crisis with Joey, she had begun to worry greatly over her sister’s diet, which had in the past week consisted mainly of coffee, ice tea and bags of Murray cookies. She feared Charlene might now be in such an emotional state that she could have a breakdown, or even a heart attack. Plenty of perfectly healthy people had heart attacks under stress, and after sweating great heaps of calcium and magnesium out of their bodies. Hoping to insure against such a catastrophe, she ground up a couple of her own calcium and magnesium tablets and added them to the drink, along with a smidgen of cod liver oil.
Charlene was gazing right out the windshield, but Rainey didn’t think she really saw her come up. She sort of jumped when Rainey spoke to her.
“I brought you a milk shake.” She passed the glass through the window. “You need something nutritious and cool.”
Charlene’s face was pale as buttermilk, and the wisps of hair curling around her face were wet with sweat.
Rainey said, “You’ve been sittin’ here for a half an hour, hon. Why don’t you come on in and cool off?”
Charlene’s golden-green eyes looked up at her and then at the house. “I don’t think I can go inside,” she said. “It’s like I know I’ll be goin’ in without Joey.”
Rainey’s throat got all tight. “Well, it isn’t like Joey was in there that much,” she said, with some aggravation because Charlene was scaring her. “And until today, you haven’t laid eyes on him in a week.”
She watched Charlene’s manicured fingertips shake as they played with the straw in the glass.
“Honey, let’s go sit on the porch, where it’s cooler.”
Charlene shook her head.
“Charlene, you could get heatstroke.” Rainey considered opening the door and pulling Charlene out.
“It’s not so hot in the shade here,” Charlene said in a voice that sounded as if she was sort of fading right away.
Feeling as if her presence was needed to keep Charlene here on earth, Rainey went around and slipped into the driver’s seat.
Looking for something to say, she began, “Do you know the sight I saw last week? Helen out in her yard in these little shorts that show her fanny every time she bent over. She’s had her eyes lifted—does she think that the job went all the way down to her thighs? Her face may look forty now, but her thighs still look a worn fifty-two.”
“Helen’s havin’ a hard time right now, with Freddy like he is,” Charlene said in a sad voice that put Rainey to shame.
“Well, I know. I shouldn’t be so judgmental.” Rainey worried her fingernail in a slit on the leather steering wheel cover. “I don’t think that runnin’ around looking purely tacky is a great help to dealin’ with a husband who’s had a nervous breakdown, though.”
She was of the opinion that Helen and Freddy drove each other crazy; this seemed to be a general consensus with everyone, really, even her Harry, who was a psychiatrist. Harry put it nicer, however, saying that Helen and Freddy were codependents, which Rainey said was a fancy way of saying they made each other crazy.
She saw Charlene absently playing with the straw she’d stuck in the milk shake. Rainey told her to just take a little sip. “It’ll make you feel better, hon. You haven’t hardly had anything all day.”
“Well, some good’s comin’ out of this. I’m losin’ weight.”
“You do not need to lose weight,” Rainey said. “It is never good to go losing weight when you are under stress.”
Rainey wanted to cry for Charlene. Mostly, she guessed, she wanted to cry for herself, because seeing Charlene like this made her very shaky. It seemed like all of her loved ones were sort of falling apart. Her brother Freddy had cracked up; her sister-in-law Helen was turning to tacky; and their daddy had taken up flying the Confederate flag with zeal. Now Joey had let them all go, and Charlene was barely holding on. This was all very frightening to Rainey. For most of her life she’d been the one who couldn’t seem to get it together. Now that she had pretty well straightened her life out, everyone else seemed to be going to hell in a handbasket.
Charlene held the milk shake on her thigh while she stared at the dashboard. Rainey reached for the glass and took a couple of good sips. She didn’t see a need for the healthy drink to go to waste.
“I keep thinking the silliest things,” Charlene admitted. “I was thinking that maybe if I went into the shower, I’d have a good cry.”
“I don’t think that’s such a silly thought,” Rainey said. “The shower is good for cryin’. The water washes the tears away and covers the sound. I cry in the shower all the time.”
“You do?”
“Well, not lately,” Rainey admitted, giving a little smile.
Charlene looked away out the windshield. Rainey saw in an instant how it must appear to her sister: Rainey with her whole life just blossoming out, while Charlene’s was withering and dying on the vine. She felt suddenly very guilty over her good life. And afraid, too.
“Talk about silly thoughts,” Rainey said, “you know what I’ve been thinkin’? I’ve been thinkin’ that Harry is my third husband, and I wouldn’t have gotten the courage to marry him but for looking at how you handle things, Charlene. Sometimes I get scared. Sometimes I think it is impossible to stay happy forever, and what if someday it all falls apart with Harry and me.”
“It won’t. You’ll have ups and downs, but you and Harry are made for each other. He’s your third and last.”
“I’m not certain people are made for each other.” Now that she was thinking of it, she was beginning to feel really badly. “If you and Joey can’t make it after twenty-one years, that doesn’t bode well for the rest of us.”
“Rainey, you are my dear sister, but right now I am in my own crisis, and I don’t need to share in a fantasy crisis with you.” Charlene fairly shouted at her.
“I’m sorry,” Rainey said, contrite. “I just want you to know I understand. You aren’t alone.”
Charlene looked at her, squeezed her arm and sighed greatly as she again gazed out the windshield.
They both sat there for a few silent minutes in which Rainey felt helpless, but then Mason MacCoy popped into her mind.
“What were you and Mason talking about this afternoon?” she aske
d.
Charlene looked startled. “Who?”
“You and Mason, when you were waiting for Joey to come out of MacCoy’s Feed and Seed Store?”
“Oh, he’d just brought some feed he thought Joey had ordered. We were talkin’ about the weather. You know. He was just bein’ nice.”
“Well, it sure looked like you two were having a full conversation. Mason is a real polite person. He used to come in to Blaine’s when I worked there—came to get his grandaddy’s medicine, and Lord, that was a bill. He paid for a lot of it, too. I guess he lived with his grandaddy and took care of him. The rumor is that he’s been in prison, but I don’t know if that is the truth.”
Charlene said, “I just thought we would work it all out, and Joey would come home.” She apparently had not been listening to Rainey.
“I sort of thought so, too.” Rainey was really surprised that Joey had not come home. She was surprised that he could possibly make a move without Charlene helping him. “And he still might.”
“Why do you think Daddy never left Mama when she had that affair? Even when she had you, he never left her.”
Rainey had to look down, and her heart beat fast. “I don’t know. People just do things differently.”
“I was really scared then that Daddy might leave. I would hear them talking sometimes. They’d fight, and Daddy would storm out, and Mama would make chicken pot pie or maybe just biscuits, and eventually Daddy would come home to eat it. I’d ask her, ‘Mama, why are you cookin’ so much?’ and she’d say ‘I’m makin’ enough for your Daddy, when he comes home.”’
There was a tone in Charlene’s voice that made Rainey shiver.
“I made those two chocolate cakes last week for Joey, tryin’ to be ready if he came home,” she said. “He loves my chocolate cake from scratch.”
Rainey knew this, even though Charlene hadn’t said it at the time. Then she realized she was playing her fingernail in the slit on the steering wheel cover. The truck was wearing out.
Driving Lessons Page 4
