In Broken Places

by Michele Phoenix

  “Did any of them ever keep liking you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I never stuck around long enough to find out.”

  “I see.”

  “So this is a bit of a new approach for me.” I attempted a smile and found that it felt good.

  “Well, here’s to new approaches,” Scott said with an answering smile as he pushed off the couch. “Wanna start with a cup of coffee?”

  I was torn. “Actually, I left Shayla with Bev, and . . .”

  He sighed and shook his head. “The downside of pursuing a woman who has a daughter.”

  “A half sister that I’m raising as my daughter.”

  “Your daughter, Shell. Take a look at yourself when you’re with her.”

  I recognized his good intentions, but the statement struck me as odd. “How exactly does a person look at herself in your scenario?” I raised an eyebrow as I stood. “I mean, it’s a good suggestion and all, but do I have to carry a mirror? Or just look at my bottom half? ’Cause from this vantage point,” I said, looking down at my feet, “all I can see are shoes that need polishing and a couple of things in between.”

  He was laughing when he pulled me in for the kind of hug that had my blood singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” It was a really nice hug. I especially enjoyed the arms-around-me part, which made me feel a little like a roasted marshmallow squeezed between two yummy wafers. It was “lumpscious,” to use one of Shayla’s words. But my daughter was waiting for me at Bev’s and it was way past her bedtime, so I levered myself away from Scott and did an awkward hair-tuck gesture. “I’d better be going.”

  “Yeah?”

  The happiness in his eyes made my heart crinkle.

  “Thank you for coming. Really.”

  Okay, so I’ve got to admit that the combination of the, well, affection in his gaze and the intimacy of his voice made my toes curl. Right there in my scuffed shoes, they curled up and sighed. All ten of them. It felt really strange, in a toe-sighing kind of way.

  Scott walked me to the door and helped me on with the coat he’d retrieved from the couch. Then he took my hand and kissed my fingers. “I’m glad I get to pursue you,” he said.

  “Yeah? I’ll let you know how I like being pursued.”

  “Is that a challenge?”

  “Take it however you want, Coach Taylor.”

  “See you tomorrow?”

  The thought of it made my blood launch into the second verse of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

  “Yup. I’ll be the girl with the stressed-out hair and the expanding waistline.”

  “I’ll be the guy with the ‘I’m pursuing an idiot’ T-shirt.”

  “Good—then we should recognize each other.”

  I left his apartment and tried not to laugh out loud as I walked down Kandern’s darkened streets. I did a Dorothy heel click instead.

  The funeral director’s heels clicked by on the tile floor outside the empty viewing room. Trey and I had sneaked in there moments before to get away from the chaos of sympathy and empty words. We’d been relieved, once inside, to find the Wedgwood-blue room absent of caskets and flowers and guest books and tears. It was a space that smelled of air freshener and wood polish, and it was blissfully uninhabited by the dearly departed. Trey and I slid down the wall just inside the door and found comfort in the lush carpet and even lusher silence.

  “You’re cremating me when I die,” I said, my voice a little rough from too many days of grieving.

  “You can Cuisinart me for all I care, just don’t do a viewing.”

  Mom had died just four days ago, and we’d been in full-on funeral mode ever since. She’d been considerate enough to have most of it planned, from the coffin to the plot to the Bible verses and music, but the days of grief-tinted activity had still taken their toll on us.

  “You think Saccharine Psycho will pull the alarm when she figures out we’re missing?”

  “Let her.”

  The funeral director was one of those women so intent on masking their clout with artificial sweetness that she’d quickly become “the bane of Mom’s burial,” “the inhumanity of her inhumation”—and that was just a small sampling of the terms we’d coined for her intrusion into Mom’s death. She had avalanched us with so much gushing sympathy in the past few days that we were still reeling from the kindness overload.

  “She was such a lovely woman,” Trey said in a syrupy voice, imitating Saccharine Psycho to perfection.

  “And isn’t her makeup tastefully done?” I continued in kind. “She looks like she’s just resting peacefully.”

  We let out simultaneous sighs and listened to the muted voices reaching us through the viewing room’s thick wooden door.

  “This is probably the most socializing Mom’s done all her life,” I said after a few moments.

  “No kidding.”

  “She’s taking it well,” I said. “Barely breaking a sweat.”

  “She looks good,” Trey said.

  She did. They’d done her hair and makeup well enough to hide some of the wear and tear of Davishood.

  Trey and I had spent as much time as possible at her bedside during the five weeks she’d been seriously ill and beyond medical help, though my teaching and his chefing had sometimes made it difficult. She’d been lucid almost to the end, sweet with the nurses and loving toward us. Talkative, too—like she’d needed to retell all the highlights of her life just one more time.

  We’d listened to her stories and smiled at her embellishments and patted her hand when she’d teared up. We’d filled in the blanks of dates and details erased from her mind by the rigors of survival. And we’d taken deep breaths and counted to ten when she’d tried to reframe some of our family stories in a saner, brighter light.

  She drifted into sleep midstory and drifted into eternity midsleep, weakened by her strokes and by the cancer rotting her resistance and her will. It was the gentlest, quietest death I could have wished for my mother, the woman who had gently and quietly endured the lashes and lacerations of a life spent with my dad. She’d set a high standard of dignity despite the degradation, of poise despite the poisonous contempt, and she’d honored her ex-husband to the end. It was that stubborn loyalty that galled and humbled me.

  “She was a good mom,” I said.

  Trey nodded. “She did her best under some pretty tough circumstances.”

  A question had been nagging at me since Mom’s life had fluttered to an end in her tidy hospital room. “She knew we loved her, right?”

  He looked at me with weary certainty. “She knew.”

  I took a shaky breath and pressed the corners of my eyes with unsteady fingertips. There had been too many tears since Tuesday—too many questions that had seemed to come too late.

  “You think Dad will drop in?”

  “He might. If someone tells him or he reads the obit.”

  “Will you talk to him if he does?” My courageous brother would have to speak for both of us. He always had.

  “And say what?”

  I didn’t know. None of the lines that came to mind seemed appropriate with Mom lying in her favorite blue dress in a casket across the way.

  “He probably won’t come,” Trey said.

  “Probably not. That would be too much like admitting he knows us.”

  A swollen moment passed. “I hope he doesn’t come,” Trey said softly. “He doesn’t belong here after what he put her through.”

  The high heels clicked past the door again, a little faster this time, and I could picture Saccharine Psycho scanning the halls for us, externally smiling, but internally cursing.

  “You think she was happy? I mean, for the last few years?”

  Trey thought about it for a while. “I don’t think she ever really knew what happy was. And since she didn’t expect anything better . . .”

  “Ignorance is bliss.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “She should have been happy
.”

  Trey turned his head toward me, alerted by the angry edge to my voice.

  “She should have been more than a brutalized wife,” I went on.

  “She should have been a lot of things,” he said.

  “And she could have been,” I retorted too firmly, my insurrection strengthening. “She could have done things and had things and been things . . .”

  “But she got Dad instead.”

  “He killed her. And he killed her a long time before last Tuesday.”

  “We should send him the funeral bills.”

  I swiped at the tears on my face, tired of the grief so horribly distorted by a sense of waste. “Maybe if she’d gotten out while she still could.”

  “She wouldn’t have. She didn’t even leave when he started taking his frustrations out on us, and she was supposed to be our loving mom, so . . .”

  “She was,” I said. “She really did love us. She just never figured out how to love us and Dad at the same time.”

  Trey nodded. “I know.”

  “She should have been happy,” I repeated, but the words sounded desolate this time, much less convicted than they’d been before. Maybe there hadn’t really been an option—not after meeting and marrying the man she’d claimed to love until the end.

  Trey breathed silently beside me, and I found comfort in his nearness.

  “I don’t want to be like her.” I hadn’t intended to say the words, but there they were, suspended in the air above us. I’d thought them frequently enough. Most fervently, perhaps, when I stood by her casket for the first time and looked down at her delicate hands clasped lightly on her stomach. Lightly was the word for it. For her hands and for her life. She’d never given me the impression of feeling anything really intensely or doing anything full-throttle or rushing into anything headlong. Everything had always been predictable and discreet. And I felt like her life had consequently been too delicate and largely unlived.

  “Then don’t be like her,” Trey said.

  He had a way of making monumental processes sound simple.

  “Oh, well, okay then. And how do you suggest I go about that?”

  “Figure out where she went wrong.”

  I laughed. “Starting where?”

  “I don’t know. Just figure it out and do something about it. That alone will make you different from her.”

  “Well, I’m not going to marry a jerk, for one.”

  “At the rate you’re running off the good guys, there may only be jerks left.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “No, but I’m pretty sure it’s a symptom of Davishood.”

  I gave the theory a moment of thought before discarding it. My mom’s questionable taste in men had little to do with my singleness. Or so I chose to believe. “I think I need to steer clear of polyester, too, if I’m going to avoid being like her.”

  “Wise decision.” Trey rocked his head slowly from side to side, trying to loosen the tension of the last four days. “You think she would have gone on in nursing if she hadn’t met Dad?”

  “Probably.”

  “Think of how different her life would have been. She’d have gotten a job, tried new things, met new people. . . .”

  “I know.”

  “We should have taken her bungee jumping or something,” Trey said.

  I laughed. “That would have required taking risks, and she wasn’t ever really good at those.”

  “She never met a risk she didn’t run from,” Trey said wearily, his head rocking against the blue wall. “And look where that—”

  “Shhh!” I whispered urgently. The heels were moving faster yet, this time, and they stopped abruptly outside the door of our refuge. Trey and I both had our friendliest smiles in place when Saccharine Psycho walked in.

  “Looking for us?” Trey said.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, the spark of impatience in her eyes in contradiction with her soothing tone. “Your guests have been waiting to pay their respects, and I’ve been searching high and low for you.”

  Trey stood and extended his hand to help me up from the floor.

  “We’re sorry,” I said. “We just needed to get away for a couple minutes.”

  She placed a hand on my arm in a gesture calculated to be comforting. “These are sad times,” she said quietly. “Losing a mother is one of the hardest blows life deals us.”

  I wanted to laugh. I really did. But unexpected tears somehow shoved their way past my strained sense of humor. Trey saw them and wrapped an arm around my shoulders, walking me from the shadowed quietness into the pastel bustle of grief.

  19

  THE FADED COLORS of Lewis’s living room and the austere grandeur of the professors’ dining hall had replaced the blank, bare stage. We’d even constructed a backstage area and wings by hanging temporary curtains from the beams high above and propping up makeshift walls with two-by-fours and bricks. The transformation had sublimated the performances of the students as they were carried by the sets and props to a time and context none of them had known. The only unfinished item was the wardrobe, the centerpiece of the set, critical to the story, which Scott was in the process of assembling onstage. He’d recruited the help of some of his basketball players for the job, but it still was proving to be a frustrating, unwieldy task. The pieces weren’t coming together as planned, and after two hours of effort that should have taken only minutes, with ten cast members waiting to take possession of the stage for a critical rehearsal, things didn’t seem anywhere near a resolution. I approached him to ask when he thought he might be finished, but his only answer was a scowl followed by “I’ll be finished when I’m finished.”

  So I retreated to my front-row seat and tried not to let his shortness get the best of me. Meagan and I spent the wait going over a laundry list of small details needing attention, while the cast occupied their time in various forms of stress release and Shayla wandered around the stage in tight circles engrossed in a loud and seemingly endless version of “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” Seth paced back and forth across the back of the room, practicing his final monologue at breakneck speed. Two other guys made ape sounds and flounced around in the balcony in a semblance of jungle warfare. And several others were involved in an animated discussion about the social and cultural importance of Paris Hilton. Jessica thought it was commendable that she’d made such a name for herself when all she’d been before was a pretty girl with a pedigree, while two of my more outspoken male actors compared the hotel heiress to a hollow-headed manipulator masquerading as a trashy debutante. It was an entertaining conversation, to say the least. As their voices blended with the ape noises coming down from above, the murmured lines at the back of the auditorium, Shayla’s singing, and Meagan’s incessant commentary on the goings-on around us, I wondered if I might have somehow gotten trapped inside the psychedelic chaos of Ozzy Osbourne’s mind.

  “Hold that side higher, Kenny,” Scott instructed in a tight voice, lightly hammering his side of the structure so it would line up with the set wall next to it. Kenny strained to lift the bulky frame a little higher off the ground, and in doing so, raised it so high that he pushed Scott’s side off-kilter.

  “No, Kenny!” he said in exasperation, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. I heard him mutter something under his breath as he slammed down the hammer and used brute strength to force the heavy wood back into place.

  Thomas and Kate chose that moment to step onstage and begin a sort of demented parody of the play, their voices raised in a comical British cacophony of ridiculous dialogue. On the other side of the stage, a Korean stagehand named Simon nearly stepped off the edge as he tried to maneuver a large, framed painting around the professors’ grand table. Meagan jumped into action, screaming his name as she rushed over to catch him if he were to fall.

  The noise and confusion were increasing exponentially, and as I found out too late, so was the frustration of the amateur carpenter onstage. He managed to cont
rol himself right up until the moment when Simon, who was still trying to position the frame, rammed the end of it into the wardrobe door. Kate screamed in mock horror at the gouge in the wood, which attracted the attention of the rest of the students in the room. The apes in the balcony started yelling down at Simon, giving him a hard time, and Simon started yelling back that actors were an ungrateful bunch of egotists. It was all in good fun, of course, and I was chuckling in the front row when Scott stopped what he was doing and rounded on the students with so much impatience that it scared me.

  “Hey! Would you all mind keeping it down?” he yelled, hands on hips and anger like shrapnel in his voice. “Kenny can’t hear a word I’m saying and he’s only two feet away! Just . . . chill out!”

  And he turned back to work with a stiffness I’d never seen in him before, ordering Kenny to put more pressure on the base of the wardrobe structure.

  Standing in the middle of the stage in her favorite purple corduroys and matching flowered shirt, Shayla was dumbstruck. Her bottom lip came out, her chin started to tremble, and she looked at me as if willing me to leap onto the stage and whisk her away from the man she’d never heard yell before. I felt the same way she did.

  Behind her, Scott had stopped working and was kneeling there, hammer in hand, doing nothing. Kenny still held his half of the wardrobe and seemed rather unfazed by what had just happened. Then again, he’d probably witnessed similar displays on the basketball court. So when he saw Shayla’s face, he let go of the wardrobe without hesitation and went to her before I’d had time to rise from my chair.

  “Hey, Lady Shay,” he said, crouching down beside her, “whatsa matter?”

  She didn’t say anything. She just turned her head toward Scott as her chin started to quiver in earnest.

  “What—him?” Kenny said in a nonchalant voice, pointing over his shoulder. “He’s just ticked off ’cause he can’t get his wardrobe to work.”

  “He yelled at me,” Shayla said in such an unsteady voice that someone at the back of the room giggled. That seemed to release the tension enough that others started to talk. The crisis had passed. But not onstage. Scott straightened and walked over to where Shayla stood. She watched him come with a frown so thunderous that it would have been comical under different circumstances. Kenny squeezed her arm and moved aside.