Sticky Kisses

by Greg Johnson

  “Since we couldn’t make it for Easter,” she said, “Mom and I decided—well, we thought she could come here.”

  “It was all my idea,” Lucille said, “and don’t worry, I’m not staying long.” She sounded plaintive, as usual, but she smiled as though she had not heard herself. “I got here yesterday, and I wanted to come to the hospital, but the others thought—”

  “We cooked up the idea of a surprise party,” Valerie put in. “To celebrate your homecoming, you know?”

  Thom grinned, embarrassed. “I’ve only been gone for two days.”

  “It’s almost Easter, too,” his mother said. She gestured toward the table. “See, I found a cake in the shape of an egg.” For a moment they dutifully admired the cake, a pink-and-green confection that read “Happy Easter, Happy Birthday, and Welcome Home, Thom!” The dogs were swirling madly around Thorn’s ankles, whimpering.

  “They’re dying for some of that cake,” Warren laughed.

  “So am I!” Connie proclaimed. He grabbed Thorn’s arm. “Come on, honey, you need to sit down. And you’ve got some presents to open!”

  “I know your birthday’s three weeks away,” Abby said, with an apologetic smile, “but since Mom is flying back so soon, we decided to celebrate that, too.”

  Thom shook his head. “This is amazing. Really.”

  “And don’t forget your mom’s visit—that’s worth a celebration in itself!” Connie said. “I’d planned to have her get inside a giant cake and spring out like a dancing girl, but Miss Abby decided that was a bit much. Lucille was game, though.”

  “Oh, Connie,” Thorn’s mother said. She waved one hand in his direction, a shooing motion.

  Amazed, Thom looked from his mother to Connie. She’d arrived only yesterday, and already she was being ribbed by Connie? Called by her first name?

  He said, “I see everyone’s gotten acquainted while I’ve been gone.”

  With a flourishing gesture, Warren had pulled out a chair for him at the head of the table. Thom sat, and the others quickly took their chairs. Begging energetically, Mitzi had contrived to get lifted into Thorn’s arms, Chloe into Warren’s, and now the dogs were sniffing energetically toward the cake.

  “Girls, settle down,” Thom said. “Hasn’t anyone been feeding them while I was gone?”

  Abby laughed. “We’ve all been spoiling them.”

  And so it went, a couple hours of chit-chat, laughter, their usual hilarity tempered by Lucille’s presence but not much, Thom thought, and what surprised him was how readily his mother laughed at his friends’ jokes, even Connie’s ribald quips, and how shyly she kept stealing glances in Thorn’s direction when she thought he wouldn’t notice. The four years had been kind, at least to her appearance: she wore her red-tinted hair short and pixie-like, and her silk floral-print dress (an Easter dress? or one bought especially for this reunion?) accentuated her trim figure. When she laughed, her hand went to her mouth, a girlish gesture he found endearing, but so far she’d exhibited no sign of her childish stubbornness, the readiness to criticize or complain. It wasn’t, Thom thought, as if she were ignoring the sizable elephants in the room—their long estrangement, the unspooling bad memories that preceded it, the complex and forbidding details of Thorn’s illness—but more as if she’d dismissed or forgotten them. He hoped this wasn’t just for his friends’ benefit; he hoped harder that the moment they left and it was just he and Abby and their mother, the old threesome, she wouldn’t instantly revert (he was ashamed of the thought) to Mother Hyde. He didn’t have the energy for that.

  For the moment he laughed and joked along with the others. Whenever his mother’s eyes met his, he sent back a big, ready smile. He would do whatever she wanted, so long as it would be easy and would not hurt.

  This reunion was so amazingly painless, he thought. They talked about random things—movies they’d seen recently, how little the city was doing to prepare for Freaknik—but no one asked about Thorn’s health, and before long Thom understood the elephants somehow had lumbered out of the room altogether. He took sips of the potent but delicious rum punch Valerie had made. He ate the cake and Haagen-Dazs, which Abby served deftly to everyone, easily resuming her old, familiar role. He opened the gift bags and exclaimed over the wallet and CDs and cologne. His mother’s gift was a pair of gold cuff links, and though he never wore cuff links the gift pleased him. She had wrapped the box herself—he could recognize those awkward handmade bows at a hundred paces—and that touched him as much as the gift itself.

  “These are great,” he kept saying, holding the cuff links up to the light.

  “They’re 18-karat, I believe,” his mother said shyly.

  “Oh, Lucille, they’re lovely!” Valerie cried. “I gave Marty cuff links for our anniversary one year, but they weren’t half as nice as these.”

  Pace, who in deference to Thorn’s mother hadn’t shouted “goddamn” a single time, said in his gruff voice, “I’m lousy at shopping, I never buy gifts. I wish I did, but I don’t. So dinner’s on me tonight, OK?”

  Thom laughed; he reached across and squeezed Pace’s wrist. Pace was well known among his friends for “ignoring” Christmas and birthdays, and he liked receiving gifts even less than giving them. His friends understood and didn’t mind. Pace was generous in other ways.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Thom said.

  “But I want to, god—” He broke off, blinking behind his rimless spectacles. The others laughed.

  Abby said, “Mom, weren’t you going to…?”

  “Oh, yes!” Lucille cried. “I almost forgot. Thom, I’ve got something else for you.”

  She hurried out to the kitchen and returned with another small box wrapped in the same pink-and-green paper. Embarrassed, Thom opened it quickly. “Mom, this is too much…”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, really,” Lucille said, glancing down.

  It was an ordinary videotape, the label inscribed in his mother’s distinctive left-slanting caps: EASTER MORNING, 1971.

  “At Christmas time,” she said, with no guilt-inducing inflection in her voice, though Thom listened for one, “Millicent showed us a video she’d had made from her old home movies? You know, the girls opening their Christmas presents, going off to their proms? So I thought: I ought to do that, too.”

  Connie grabbed the tape from Thorn’s weak grasp. “What a great idea! Let’s all watch it right this minute!”

  The tape went around the table, hand to hand.

  “I love watching home movies,” Warren said, glancing anxiously at Thom.

  Pace, who handled the tape as though it were a hot coal, mumbled “Terrific idea” and passed it to Valerie.

  “My God, it’s from 1971!” she cried. “Thom, you must have been just a baby!”

  The others laughed.

  “He was a week shy of seven years old,” Lucille said, with a touch of pedantry, “and Abby was nine. We had a big backyard, and their father used to get up at dawn and hide eggs all over the place. They’re so cute in this movie—we took film for more than an hour, can you imagine?”

  Thom rolled his eyes. “This is an edited version, I hope?”

  “Yes, it’s twenty minutes,” Lucille said. “This nice man at the video place made us several tapes. He divided them up into holidays, so we have a few Christmases on one, a couple of Thanksgivings on another. But I thought I should bring the Easter one,” she said, a little proudly. “I thought that would be appropriate.”

  Though Thom tried to dissuade them, everyone insisted they wanted to see the video at once. A few minutes later they’d gathered in Thorn’s bedroom—his only TV was in there—and sat watching an impossibly small Thom and Abby, dressed for church in their Easter finery, as they ran wildly around the backyard with Easter baskets in tow, bending every few seconds and holding up an egg triumphantly for the camera.

  “Thom, that Easter basket is bigger than you are,” Warren laughed.

  He remembered the basket, elaborately woven of
tan straw and shaped like a cowboy hat turned upside-down. Each year, he would wake on Easter morning and find the basket just outside his bedroom door, stuffed with glossy artificial grass, pink and green, that felt silken when he pressed his face against it, and with brightly colored candy eggs. Blaring reds and yellows, pastel greens and blues. Some filled with marshmallow and others mostly sugar, so cloyingly sweet you winced as you ate them. And the basket always held an Easter bunny, made of pure chocolate, inside a box with a cellophane window; he and Abby would save the bunny for last, eating the smooth chocolate one body part at a time. This was usually after church and the big breakfast Lucille made when they got home, and the Easter egg hunt in the backyard. That’s where their father had hidden the real eggs, carefully dyed and decorated by Lucille the night before, using little kits she bought at the supermarket. Thom watched as his seven-year-old self, long-limbed and gangly in a pale-blue jacket and matching clip-on tie, careened around the backyard, finding eggs hidden in pine-straw, tucked behind patio furniture cushions, nestled inside potted plants.

  “I could never get them to eat the real eggs,” Lucille said, sadly. “They just liked the candy ones.”

  Abby said, a smile in her voice, “I remember how we’d have this sugar high for the rest of the day.”

  “I know that feeling!” Connie cried. “Oh, look, Abby, you were such a doll.”

  Thom watched as his nine-year-old sister in her frilly pink dress and petticoats and black patent-leather shoes bent daintily over the coiled-up garden hose, then reached down inside and drew up the “prize” egg. Always there was one egg Lucille had dyed bright gold, and whoever found the golden egg got a twenty dollar bill to buy whatever they wanted at Toys “R” Us. Abby held up the egg, dazzling in the sunlight, turning it in her hand as though following her father’s instructions.

  Then Thom rushed into camera range. He bent forward to sniff the golden egg and then laughed, putting one hand over his eyes as if embarrassed. Their mother, looking impossibly young and pretty in a pale yellow linen dress and white shoes, got into the picture, too, exchanging silent words with their father as she arranged the children on either side of her. The three of them stood there motionless, squinting against the sun, as though forgetting this was a movie camera, not a still camera; and obediently they smiled; and obediently the children both held up their Easter baskets so the camera could zoom in for a close-up. In the background against the house, there were blooming crimson and pink azaleas. The glimpses of sky overhead were a bright ceramic blue. The grass about their feet looked so richly green that it might have been artificial, too.

  Easter, 1971.

  Unexpectedly, Thom felt an egg-sized lump at the base of his throat, so there was a catch in his voice as he said, “Abby always found the gold egg, and then she’d always buy me something at the toy store, too.”

  “I didn’t always find it,” Abby said, gently.

  “Always. You always did,” Thom said.

  Everyone stared at the TV screen, none of them even glancing at one another. The room had filled with the kind of tension you feel in public when intimate matters are revealed. Thom lay in the center of the bed, propped against two pillows, with Abby and their mother sitting on either side of him. Connie, Pace, and Warren stood back near the headboard, while Valerie had taken the small chair against the wall, a chair Thom used for one purpose: putting on and taking off his shoes. They’d all indulged in the murmuring, cooing noises people made when confronted with pictures of cute children, but there was nothing much else to say.

  Then something unexpected happened: the TV screen went black, and suddenly there between Thom and Abby wasn’t their mother but their father. He remembered now that Lucille would always insist, near the end, that they trade places so her husband would be in the movie, too. Thom stared hungrily at his father, who had crouched down in his crisp gray suit, just like the ones he wore to the bank, and slung an arm around each of his children. Again Thom and Abby gave those fake toothy grins children use when ordered to smile by picture-taking adults. Clumsily, the camera zoomed in. Their faces blurred, but then they came into focus again. Thom saw that one of his lower teeth was missing. He saw how his father’s wedding ring, on the hand depending from Thorn’s thin shoulder, glinted brightly in the sun. His father looked friendly and solid, but impenetrable. He was their father, but he could have been any man. Tall, dark-haired, smiling. About the same age then, Thom thought, as his son was now. Present and accounted-for in April 1971 but gone now, vanished, leaving behind three orphans watching helplessly from this bed.

  Again the tape went black.

  “The end!” their mother said, with forced cheerfulness. She rose as if to retrieve the tape but then stopped near Valerie’s chair.

  On his other side, Thom could feel the stiffness in Abby’s body—her arm and leg were pressed against him, and he could feel how they’d tightened, tense as bowstrings. With a brother’s privilege he squeezed her thigh through the blue jeans, startled by how thin she’d become.

  “What do you think?” he asked. “Oscar performances or what?”

  When she didn’t answer, Thom looked up, then followed his sister’s gaze across the room where Valerie sat slumped in the chair, Lucille bent down with an arm around her shoulder. Valerie was weeping. Quietly but seriously weeping, her shoulders shaking, one hand cupped across her eyes.

  Connie crossed to them. “Val, honey, are you OK?”

  Warren said, “Let her alone for a second, Connie. She needs to cry. I think I need to cry.”

  He gave a brief, strangled laugh.

  Connie grabbed a few tissues from Thorn’s bedside table and handed them to Valerie. Wiping her eyes, she looked at Thom.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to spoil your—your birthday party, or—”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Thom said. “You’re not spoiling anything.”

  Warren might know why she was crying, but the others did not. Lucille kept patting her shoulder, mechanically, for once in her life at a loss for words. None of the others spoke, either.

  After a minute Valerie’s crying fit seemed to pass. She kept wiping her eyes, glancing around at the others with a look of apologetic pleading.

  “You know, I grew up in foster homes,” she said suddenly, in a surprisingly husky, composed voice. “Shuttled from one to another, from the time I was five all the way through high school. So I’m a sucker for families—for families in movies or TV, or for your family. Any family. You guys know, I hope, how wonderful it is to have—to have a family.”

  Valerie blinked away the last of the tears and wiped her face again. Her skin was pale and clammy, her cheeks stained with mascara. Her eyes looked red and miserable.

  She repeated, softly, “How wonderful it is.” Then she went silent, too, and left them to think about that.

  Chapter 9

  “I’m worried about him,” Abby’s mother said. “I don’t think he’s well.”

  Valerie shook out her napkin, patted Lucille’s arm. “I know you’ve been a big help,” she said. “He’s having a difficult time, I realize, but I’ll just bet—”

  “He’s been so good to me—so sweet,” Lucille said, gazing past Abby’s shoulder. “But still, I can tell that something’s not right.”

  Valerie began, “I certainly know the feeling. When Marty…”

  Abby had tuned out. She sat by herself on this side of the table, facing the mirrored wall and banquette where the host had installed Valerie and Lucille, who had dressed the part for today’s outing to the Peasant Uptown, the best restaurant in the city’s ritziest mall. Entering, Abby had judged that this elegant light-filled space with its crisscrossing black-tied waiters and sumptuous décor—the gilt-trimmed mirrors, exotic plants and potted trees, crisp tablecloths and massive silver and one heavy-headed pink rose for each table—was about ninety percent women on this late-April afternoon. Near the entrance a tuxedo-clad pianist sent the cascading notes of
a Mozart sonata back through the skylit room to mingle with the odors of warm spicy food borne among the tables by deft and smiling servers.

  Every few minutes as Abby glanced over her shoulder, she regretted gesturing her mother and Valerie into the banquette seat, which forced her to face the mirrored wall behind them. For the first time in weeks, she had shed her blue jeans, reluctantly assembling the black-and-gold outfit she’d worn to that Christmas party with her brother all those months ago, and halfheartedly she’d applied lipstick and mascara. The results were not encouraging. Today her mother and Valerie wore new spring outfits (maybe they’d bought them together, for Lucille had become Valerie’s new shopping partner after Abby lost interest), and Abby saw they’d both spent time recently in a beauty salon; her mother’s makeup was softer and more flattering than usual, and her coral-pink nails looked freshly manicured. Abby thought, with the kind of grim humor she allowed herself these days, that she must resemble some black-clad retainer tagging along with these two elegant ladies; or some poor relation, maybe, brought along as a special treat. Smiling, she did allow her gaze to settle in the mirrored space between her mother’s and Valerie’s busily chatting heads, but the pale sharp-boned face hovering there was not smiling, after all. She looked haggard, careworn. In a face she’d always considered fairly ordinary but youthful, Abby was able to glimpse—and for the first time—the hardening lineaments of middle age.

  “What do you think, Abby?” Valerie said. “Has he seemed that way to you?”

  Startled, Abby focused on Valerie’s pert triangular face with its puzzled little girl’s blue eyes that brought Abby a spasm of guilt. Valerie was buying their lunch as a “thank you” for all the kindness Abby had shown her as she coped with her turbulent marriage. In short, for being such a good friend, for so many acts of kindness, consideration…. Valerie’s gratitude could be overbearing at times, but Abby had agreed to this lunch excursion, though she’d insisted on meeting them here at Phipps Plaza since she had another Buckhead appointment at two o’clock. Yes, she would come to lunch, but Valerie didn’t owe her anything, Abby had insisted. She really mustn’t feel that way.