Steps and Exes

by Laura Kalpakian

  “How long were you married?”

  “Depends on how you count it. From the time he moved in with me and my sister? From the time we actually got married to the time I divorced him, or only to the time when he left us? A long fucking time. Six years? I been raising Jennifer fifteen years plus. Twelve of those on my own. If I hadn’t had Jennifer, I could have just said, Well, hell with it and gone on with my life. Men always break your heart, but you move on. First couple of times you think you’re going to die of the hurt, but you don’t. But when you have a kid…And Jennifer was only three. Such a little cutie when she was three.”

  Lynette paused reflectively. “If I’d just been knocked up when he left, I’d have given the baby up for adoption. But I couldn’t. She was only three.”

  “And you never remarried?”

  “Who had time to remarry? I had time to get laid now and then, but I been working and bringing up this girl, or trying to. Making beds at the Holiday Inn, slinging hash at Denny’s, pushing a broom at the mall. You name it, if it was legal, I did it. Sometimes I had to work two jobs, the mall nights and days behind the counter at the Burger King saying, Have it your way. I haven’t had it my way.”

  Lynette’s lips roiled to ease the strain across her face. Her skin was so tightly stretched, it seemed to hurt. She looked down at her hands and on her ring finger there was a small gold ring with a little bunch of pavé diamonds gleaming dully in the middle. “I have a good man now. A nice guy. He’s lived with us the last couple of years. He’s carrying the rent,

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  everything alone now because I’m out of work. Between jobs you might say. Between careers,” she snorted and her gaze rested on the inert Jennifer. “She’s been in juvie so many times—been through three or four probation officers and a string of social workers—I’d have to get off work to go to her hearings. Finally, my new job, they said if I took any more time off—they didn’t care what it was for—they’d fire me. So next time Jennifer was picked up—what was it? Vagrancy? Some small shit like that. She was just hanging out with the other druggies, she didn’t actually have the stuff on her.

  But I didn’t go to the hearing because I’d lose my job. I lost it anyway.

  Last hired, first fired. But in the meantime the new social worker calls up and chews my ass out, tells me my daughter is a flake, a drug addict, a dropout and banging gang members because I’m so busy with my career. My career—!” Lynette pealed out a raucous laugh, enough to rouse Jennifer who opened one eye and then closed it, went back to rocking. Lynette lowered her voice. “I had to take that shit. You don’t dare call them bastards. You don’t dare. But honest to God, those bastards. I did tell ’em, I’m working to support this girl. I’m giving her lunch money. I think she’s eating mystery meat in the school cafeteria, but she’s giving blow jobs in Reseda Park for drug money. She didn’t even go to school after the eighth grade. She’s shooting up drugs in the same mall bathroom where I work at night, sloshing toilets full of Pine Sol. She got arrested for shoplifting in the Disney Store! Can you believe it? Her pants were full of Pooh Bears.”

  I thought of the windup Pooh on the couch at Wade’s apartment.

  A hot Pooh? The mind boggles.

  Lynette said glumly, “I done everything I could. I tried anyway.

  What choice was there? It was me and Jennifer on our own. It wasn’t my fault. My sister’s kids, they’re in trouble a lot, but not like Jennifer. Last month cops caught her giving blow jobs in the park. Cop told me they couldn’t bust her for prostitution as long as she was a minor. She was my responsibility altogether and I thought—Oh, God, I got three years! Three years before she’s eighteen? Three more years to live like this? Cop said I

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  could have her emancipated. Then she’d be an adult and she could be busted. But think about that—having your own kid emancipated.

  Just like a slave.”

  Jennifer roused, both eyes this time. “You talking about me?”

  “Hell, no. I’m talking about Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Fuck off.” She sat up, turned off the headphones and made a palms-out gesture toward Lynette who dug into her bag and found a pack of cigarettes. Jennifer took the pack and ambled to the outside deck which is the only place you can smoke.

  “I don’t think it’s fair”—Lynette twirled her ring with suppressed anxiety—“I don’t think it’s fair that if Wade has been straight for eight years, that he didn’t call and say, Hi, how’s everything? Of course I know why. Money. That’s what I want to talk to him about.

  Money. When he left, OK, he was strung out. Bad. I was doing a few drugs myself in those days, but I never took it up as a career, like Wade did. I did it for fun, but I could see it was a real fuckup, and after Jennifer came along, I told him I didn’t want him doing drugs at home, and not around her. Not him or his druggy friends either.

  I made it stick too, and pretty soon he just left. Fine. Then, couple of years later, he calls me up one night. Middle of the night. He wanted money. I said, Give me an address so I can divorce you, you bastard. I finally did divorce him, but he never paid a cent. It’s funny, you know, because if I’d been on welfare, they would have gone after him for the money. But I wasn’t. I was working.” From her pocket she pulled a long tabulation, figuring out the months of child support at $95 a month. She went through all the math with me and the way the figures had been arrived at, all that before she put it away. “Last time he called was ten years ago. If I’d known I wasn’t going to talk to him again for ten years, I’d have said something memorable. But you know what I said to Wade that last time he called?”

  “What?”

  “I said—Wade, you’re going to miss Jennifer’s first day of kindergarten. And he said—Send me a picture.”

  Through the broad windows we could see Jennifer, her black 263

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  hair whipping in the wind, trying futilely to light a cigarette from the butt of another cigarette offered to her by a man, maybe just a kid, also clad in black leather and wearing a long, heavy chain looped from his waist.

  “Can you fucking imagine?” said Lynette. “Kindergarten.”

  I could, actually. I could imagine Jennifer Shumley on the first day of kindergarten, proud of tying her own shoes, and carrying a Pooh backpack, her hair all brushed and barretted. I could see her standing with the other kids while all the parents took pictures and some parents clung to crying children, and vice versa. But Lynette and Jennifer, I imagined, would be very bright and brave about kindergarten, Lynette in her Burger King uniform, knowing that now there were four or five hours every day when she didn’t have to pay for child care. Jennifer, I could imagine, greeting all the other little Jennifers and Ashleys and Megans. What trajectory brought that little girl to this kindergarten convict? I could recognize all the signs; I grew up in a town supported by a prison. Jennifer wore clothes that fell off her body and unclasped shoes and this made her walk in a kind of convict shuffle. Prisoners don’t get belts or suspend-ers or even shoelaces because they might hang themselves. She was a sort of understudy jailbird, her clothes so voluminous that shoplifted Pooh Bears were nothing. She could have shoplifted a station wagon and got caught only when she had to stop for gas.

  Fifteen years old—all those years to go on living—and this girl didn’t have a chance. Wade Shumley was his own Eve of Destruction, wasn’t he? Not just my daughter, my family, but he’d cut a real swath through these lives too. And how many others? Wade willingly confessed his police records, his jail time, his many failings, not merely to be deemed penitent and absolved, but to be beatified by suffering. The record of his crimes made his conversion shine all the brighter. What crimes went unrecorded? I only half listened to Lynette; I was thinking of Bethie, worried how I’d find her, and hoping the appearance of Lynette and Jennifer would convince her at last that she had been manipulated

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  by a man who despised the inconvenient truth and invented everything else.

  Once you trundle off the ferry, the ride into Seattle is a long one, tedious too, especially since I had to keep Lynette’s Plymouth in my rearview mirror at all times. And then we had to make several stops along the way, occasioned, Lynette told me, by a bladder infection Jennifer had contracted, almost cured now. Traffic on 1-5 thickened up well before Seattle and I lost sight of Lynette several times, cars cutting in and out of the lanes. Between the anxiety of the drive and the anxiety of what I’d find in Wallingford, my fingers were curled arthritically around the steering wheel by the time I parked the truck and locked it. Lynette squeezed her Plymouth into a space best suited to a VW. Talking nonstop, she had one cigarette in her mouth when she went to look for another. She took her purse and shouldered a black-and-white backpack. Jennifer too hoisted a large, soft-sided bag and followed behind us, indifferent without being relaxed.

  Lynette was volubly impressed with the condo. The drapes at Bethie’s house were still closed despite the brilliant day. I knocked and Bethie came to the door. Her eyes were vacant, but not as weepy as when I’d last seen her, though little pouches of fatigue gathered underneath. She was wearing shorts and a ReDiscovery T-shirt and she was barefoot. Without so much as a look at Lynette or Jennifer (who were behind me in any event), she said, “I guess you’ve come to apologize for calling me a liar.”

  “No, Bethie. I’ve brought some people who are eager to meet you.” I spoke slowly, carefully, so there should be no mistake in this matter of calling people liars. I stepped to the side. “This is Wade’s ex-wife, Lynette Shumley. And this”—I drew Jennifer toward the door—“this is your new stepdaughter, Bethie. Wade’s girl, Jennifer Shumley. Jennifer, meet your new stepmother.”

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  “Where’s the shitter?” asked Jennifer.

  “Is Wade home?” asked Lynette.

  Wade wasn’t home, but Bethie couldn’t say so. Couldn’t speak at all. She looked from Lynette to Jennifer, to me and back again, and only when Jennifer asked again, urgently, after the shitter did she let us in. The TV in the living room was on, some soap opera or another. There were two people swearing undying love in what looked like a hospital supply closet.

  Bethie closed the door and leaned against it. “You really will stop at nothing, Celia. You are absolutely determined, aren’t you? You will stoop to any charade to destroy Wade and me.”

  “Turn off the soap opera,” I advised. “This is real life. This is Wade’s ex-family and they’re here.”

  “And you—just magically—dug them up—” she began airily.

  “No one dug us up,” Lynette snapped. For probably the tenth time that day she drew out her clipping again and placed its frayed and tattered self on the coffee table with a glance at the same picture on the bookshelf, Wade and Bethie radiant with happiness. She told the long story again. Arnie’s army buddy’s wife. All that. Bethie, visibly shorting out by now, was able only to nod. She was mute as Launch and not as good-natured.

  “When will Wade be home?” Lynette plopped down on the couch, put her bag on the floor, saying she wouldn’t leave without talking to Wade. She’d driven fifteen hundred miles and dropped a clutch in Weed, California. If she was here all night, well, OK.

  Bethie cleared her throat. “Wade is at a board meeting of the King County Mental Health Association, discussing educational programs.

  These are important meetings for the whole community.”

  “Honestly, I don’t care if he’s interviewing the pope and the president. Same time. It don’t matter to me. I’m not leaving till I see him. It’s been twelve years. I’m not here to make trouble, but I do want to talk to him.”

  I sat down too. We all sat there and watched the TV. The scene had changed to a posh boardroom where the men and 266

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  women were all wearing smart tailored suits and talking about millions of dollars.

  “She embezzled it,” said Lynette, pointing to one of the characters.

  “Dwayne tapes it for me during the day, so I’m pretty sure it’s her.”

  Bethie turned the TV off. “Where have you come from?”

  “Reseda. The Valley. I never been this far north before. Never been north of Ventura really. Wade neither. At least as far as I know.

  As long as he was with me, he’d never been north of Thousand Oaks.

  He was a Pacoima boy to start with. Then Reseda.”

  I was interested in this. “Wade told us he was an army brat and had grown up on army bases all over the world.”

  Lynette’s lips curled. “The world of the San Fernando Valley.”

  She drummed her fingers on her knees and said Wade and Bethie sure had a nice place. “Own or rent?”

  “It’s a condominium,” Bethie explained. “Wade owns this apartment.”

  “Making lots of money?”

  “Money isn’t important to Wade.”

  “It’s important to me. I rent.”

  We’d heard the toilet flush a couple of times, but Jennifer still didn’t come back. She’d been in the bathroom a hell of a long time.

  Bethie and Lynette each sat on the edge of their seats, about to catapult toward one another. Finally Bethie eked out the words to ask Lynette how long she’d been married to Wade.

  “Long enough to have a daughter. Long enough to get divorced.

  Long enough to get sick of him and his drugged-up, fucked-up, jobless friends.”

  “All that’s behind Wade. He’s been clean and straight for eight years.”

  “Great.”

  “No, really. I mean it. He’s been better than that. He’s dedicated his life now to helping others. That’s what ReDiscovery is, a way to empower people to treat their addictive behaviors, not just their addictions.”

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  “That’s wonderful, but I don’t give a shit.” Lynette pawed through her bag, looking for a cigarette and a match.

  Jennifer slouched back in; she had re-lined her eyes, freshened her black lip liner, fluffed up the metallic bouquet beneath her nose.

  The chains looped to her pants clanked and she continually made weird hand gestures, fingers stretched and splayed in a lingo impen-etrable to the rest of us. “You got a nice place here. A room just for the computer, two bathrooms. Anything to eat?”

  “Go look in the kitchen,” said Bethie woodenly. She fanned absently at Lynette’s secondary smoke.

  “Jennifer has a bolt through her tongue and she gets burned easily,” I offered helpfully.

  Jennifer stuck her tongue out at me, pushed her black hair back to reveal studs punched all the way up her ears, lining them like little stars along a half moon. “My body is a work of art and a statement against phobes like you.”

  “Phobes?”

  “Phobes hate everything, man. Not just homophobe or Mexophobe or Japophobe, but phobic for everything. Phobes like you have to destroy what you don’t understand, everything that isn’t picture-fucking-perfect.”

  “Don’t start, Jennifer,” Lynette warned.

  “Like your picture-fucking-perfect house on your fucking-perfect—”

  “Jennifer.”

  Jennifer collapsed on the couch. “Why the fuck not?” She kicked her canvas bag ineffectually. “It’s all going to happen anyway, isn’t it?”

  “Shut up.”

  Turning to Bethie, Jennifer seemed to assess her against her engagement picture on the shelf and announced she was better-looking in the picture. “How old are you anyway? You look too young to be with my dad.”

  “Shut up, Jennifer,” Lynette warned. “You don’t know what Wade looks like.”

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  “I know what you look like,” the girl retorted. “I know how old you are. Forty-one.”

  “And so is Wade, so just shut up.”
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  “Wade is thirty-seven,” Bethie protested.

  “Maggie says he’s forty-one. She’s his mother.” Lynette took a deep, glowing drag on her cigarette and launched into an expansive description of Maggie and Arnie, how they’d left Reseda and moved to Long Beach. Now they were retired and living in Hemet. Finding no ashtray, she rose and went to a houseplant and ground the cigarette out there. “It’s good for plants,” she assured Bethie. “I read it in the Globe. It’s been proved with science.”

  Jennifer repeated she was hungry and to prove her point, her stomach rumbled. Bethie told her again to go to the kitchen, but Bethie herself could not move. She sat there, undone by the very sight of these two and the betrayal they implied. For my part, I remarked on the stunning resemblance between Wade and Jennifer, metal boogers notwithstanding.

  Bethie cut me off quickly. “You better stop, Celia.”

  “Stop what? What is there to stop? These people have driven fifteen hundred miles to see Wade. You didn’t even know they existed.

  You’ve been living with this man for a year now and you didn’t know he had an ex-wife. He told you he’d never been married! He lied! When I was last here, in this room, Bethie, I remember a lot of bullshit and blather about honesty and facing up to the past. Remember that? So who is the liar now?”

  Lynette’s alert eyes narrowed. She said maybe I wasn’t too fond of Wade after all. I said nothing. I didn’t have to. It was for Bethie to do the talking here.

  “What do you want from Wade?” she asked Lynette.

  Lynette had a nervous shrug, almost a twitch. “I just want to talk.

  Of course, I could ask for my eighteen thousand dollars. Give or take.” And from her other pocket she pulled out her tabulated figures and I thought how the engagement clipping in one pocket and the adding machine tape thrust into the other for fifteen hundred miles must have given Lynette a kind of ballast,

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  keeping her aligned with the white line on Route 5. “It took me a couple of years to get enough money to divorce that bastard, and by then he was gone, off somewheres. I couldn’t find him. He never wrote to Maggie, nothing. When Maggie got this clipping from Arnie’s army buddy’s wife, she said, Go get that bastard, Lynette.