Back Roads

by Tawni O'Dell

  “What about your husband?” I asked.

  “He won’t want it,” she said, kind of irritated. “He went out to dinner.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I stabbed a fork through it like I was afraid it might escape and plopped it onto the dirty plate in front of me.

  “You want a beer?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  She came back with a Michelob. I almost had it in my hand before she asked, “Wait. You are old enough to drink, right?”

  “Well, not legally.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen. Well, twenty. Just about twenty. I’ll be twenty in a couple months.”

  “That’s it?” she breathed out, and took a seat across from me. “My God, you’re a baby.”

  I couldn’t believe I didn’t lie. I might as well have told her about Brandy Crowe too, and how I had freaked out at the prison with Mom, and how I used to pee my pants when Dad hit me too hard, and any other embarrassing thing I could think of that might help her figure out I was a total idiot.

  “I thought you were older,” she added.

  “I’m old for my age,” I said with my mouth full of pork chop.

  She laughed. I didn’t mean it to be funny. I was dead serious. But it was okay with me if she thought it was a joke. Ask any woman what was most important to her in a man and she would say a good sense of humor. Of course, they were all lying but a sense of humor must have counted for something or they wouldn’t have always been bringing it up.

  “This is great,” I said about the pork chop, and I wasn’t sucking up to her. It was the most tender, juicy, flavorful thing I could ever remember putting into my mouth.

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling.

  She seemed to like the compliment about her cooking more than the one about her house.

  “Jody loved them too. She ate two whole chops by herself.”

  The door banged open and all three kids came running in. Callie’s kids were vanilla-skinned with big dark eyes; Esme with blue-black, Snow White hair and Zack with a fawn-colored mop.

  They skidded to a stop and stood beside each other. Esme leaned into Zack, and he gave her a two-handed shove. A pink tongue popped out of Esme’s angel face, and Zack grinned like a soldier who’s seen too many battles.

  “You forgot to close the door,” Callie told them.

  “Can we have something to eat?” Esme asked.

  “You just had dinner,” Callie said. “Go close the door.”

  “We want dessert.”

  “We want dessert,” Zack echoed.

  “I haven’t even cleaned up the dishes yet. Maybe later.”

  “Did you eat these pork chops?” I asked Jody.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I loved them.”

  “You hate pork chops.”

  “I hate your pork chops. They taste like napkins.”

  “It’s probably just the marinade.” Callie laughed. “It’s a very simple one. Apple cider, lemon juice, honey, soy sauce. I could give you the recipe.”

  “And your macaroni and bean soup recipe,” Jody added, eagerly.

  “That’s an easy one too,” Callie said, then gasped, “Where are your shoes?”

  They were all barefoot.

  “Outside,” they answered.

  “It’s not summer yet,” she scolded them. “Go get your shoes back on. Right now.”

  “Cruz wore shorts today to school,” Esme argued with an imperial tilt to her chin.

  “Which Cruz?”

  “Cruz Lewandowski.”

  “Do I care what Cruz does?”

  “His father’s an educator,” Esme pointed out.

  Even Callie rolled her eyes. “His father’s a gym teacher. Now go get your shoes, and Zack, it’s time for you to come in.”

  They all went tearing out again, their pounding feet on the wood floor sounding like a tiny fleeing army.

  Callie sat down across from me and opened the beer for herself, sighing.

  “There are five Cruzes in their class. Do you know what that’s all about?” she asked me. “The only Cruz I know is Santa Cruz and I have a feeling that’s not what people around here are naming their kids after.”

  “I think he’s some guy on a soap opera,” I answered.

  “Oh. Okay. That would make sense.”

  She took a swig from the beer and stared off into space. I finished the pork chop. I didn’t think she had noticed, but she reached out and pushed a bowl of potatoes in my direction without looking down at them. All mothers had that empty plate reflex.

  “Funny how you can like a name and then find out the reason for it is stupid and then it’s ruined,” she said, kind of absentmindedly. “And vice versa. A name might seem really dumb and then you find out the reason for it is interesting or sentimental and then you like it.”

  I wasn’t listening to her but I heard her. I was busy shoveling potatoes in my mouth and staring at her because she wasn’t looking at me so I didn’t have to worry about eye contact. She had one perfect black freckle in the hollow of her throat like a speck of pepper.

  “I always wondered about Misty,” she said. “Did your mom just like that name, or was Misty born on a misty day?”

  I swallowed the last spoonful of potatoes. They had a ton of garlic in them. They were great too.

  “My dad picked out Misty,” I answered her. “She’s named after some chick onHee Haw from when he was a kid. I think she was a centerfold too. Dad never got over her, I guess.”

  Again, I was being serious but Callie laughed. She brought her beer bottle to her lips and giggled around the neck. I could see her tongue inside the brown glass.

  I started feeling hot again but it was a slow melt this time, not incineration. I realized we were having a conversation.

  “Where did you get Esme from?” I asked.

  “It was the name of a model and mistress of one of my favorite artists. A French Impressionist.”

  She held up a finger signaling for me to wait before slipping out of her chair and out of the room. She came back lugging a big, glossy book. She set it down in front of me and flipped it open to a sloppy picture of a vase of flowers, a bottle of wine, and an artichoke, then she sat down again and went back to her beer. I studied the page out of courtesy.

  “He paints like Pierre Bonnard,” I said.

  She gasped. It was the only time I had ever heard a real one outside of bad TV.

  “You know who Pierre Bonnard is?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You must have a wonderful art teacher.”

  “I don’t have any art teacher,” I told her. “I haven’t had art since third grade.”

  She put her beer down, frowning. “I can’t believe it. Don’t tell me they’ve finally cut the art program,” she said angrily. “I know they’ve been threatening it for years. They’ve got some nerve saying there’s not enough funds when they just budgeted all that money for new football uniforms and a bunch of videos so kids can watchMoby Dick instead of reading it.”

  I didn’t bother telling her the only movie about a whale in our school library wasFree Willy . I couldn’t believe how mad she was getting over art and books. I knew she had gone to an out-of-state egghead college that no one around here had ever heard about because it didn’t have a good football team. I hoped she wasn’t the intellectual snob type who thought she could venture out into the real world and bring civilization back to the natives, and we were all supposed to crowd around her with our jaws hanging open while she dangled her enlightened views in front of us like shiny beads.

  I wanted to tell her this and see if she would get madder. I thought about what it would be like to get her mad enough to try and take a swing at me. Then I would have to grab her and restrain her. I pictured her struggling and screaming for help, and me clamping my hand over her mouth. She would open her mouth to try and bite me, and I would stick my fingers inside. She would start gagging, but I’d push them down deeper an
d deeper into her throat until she fell to her knees. Then I would turn her over and press her face against her favorite rock.

  “That really upsets me,” she went on. “I feel like driving over to the superintendent’s house right now just to put him on the spot and hear him stammer through the ridiculous justification for this.”

  I almost didn’t hear her over the blood pounding in my ears. My hands were killing me under the table, and I looked down at them. They were white-knuckled and clenched. I slowly, painfully unfolded my fingers and saw tiny new welts near the crescent scabs where I had broken the skin Friday night listening to Amber fuck a guy who was too stupid to run away from gunfire. I should have shot up his truck for that reason alone. That would have been my JUSTIFICATION.

  I blinked. The word hung where Callie’s face had been. I blinked again and she was back.

  She was looking right at me and for a moment I was sure she had read my thoughts. I swallowed and hoped sweat wasn’t pouring down my face.

  “Nobody cut the art program,” I confessed. “Art’s an elective.”

  “Oh.” She gave me a quick embarrassed smile. “Why don’t you have it?”

  “It interfered with a study hall.”

  She took another gulp of beer. “Then how do you know who Pierre Bonnard is?”

  I pressed my throbbing hands together. Nothing hurt worse than a human scratch except for a human bite. My dad only bit me once, and it was because I bit him first. My mom said I was the only one of us kids who went through a biting phase.

  “My mom had a set of note cards that used to belong to her mom,” I explained. “She got them as a souvenir from the Art Institute of Chicago. Mom’s from around there originally. They had one of his paintings on the front. ‘Table Set in a Garden.’ ”

  “So you’re familiar with his work?” she asked eagerly.

  “I’m familiar with his note cards.”

  I watched her throat pulse as more beer slid down it. I pulled my eyes away and dropped them back to the book.

  At first glance, I hadn’t liked Callie’s artist nearly as much as I liked Mom’s. The painting on Mom’s cards had lots of warm green light and soft smudged colors and a tablecloth with a bright pink stripe: the kind of table I would have liked to sit at with Jody.

  The painting in the book was set in a shadowy corner of a room. There was an open window and it was day outside, but no light was coming in. The flowers were a glaring white but looked waxy and dead. The bottle had been opened but was still filled to the top with a weak brown wine. But the thing that really bothered me was the artichoke. Its sharp leaves were outlined in blue-black and each tip had a dot of red so bright it looked wet.

  Looking at it again I realized the reason I didn’t like it the first time was because it gave me the creeps, but that was exactly why it was a better painting. It was probably a lot harder to scare someone with an artichoke than it was to tempt someone with a sunny garden.

  “I like Impressionists,” I said.

  Right after I said it, I regretted it; realizing immediately that I had to add something to it.

  I fumbled around inside my head, not trusting any of the observations I came up with. Until a couple minutes ago, I thought Impressionism was Dana Carvey doing Ross Perot.

  “They don’t seem to care about what things really look like,” I tried. “It’s like they care more about how looking at something makes a person feel.”

  She smiled at me. It was a beautiful smile: one she made with her eyes, not just her mouth; one that came from her heart, not just her head because I had touched something inside her that no one else ever did anymore. I didn’t know how I knew that but I did and even though I wanted to violate her a hundred different ways physically, I didn’t want to go anywhere near her soul.

  “That’s the definition of Impressionism,” she said softly.

  “Yeah, I know,” I lied.

  I got up from the table.

  “I’m going to be late for work,” I told her. “I’ve got to go.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, getting up too. “I didn’t realize you were on your way to work. Wait a minute.”

  She left and came back with a sloshing Rubbermaid container.

  “Hot and sour soup.” She held it out to me. “You said you liked Chinese.”

  I stared at it but didn’t take it.

  “Please,” she urged. “Esme and I are the only ones who like it. I have so much extra.”

  I took it. I didn’t even say thank you. I never thanked her for the dinner either. I didn’t think about it until I was in the truck. I should have gone back and said it.

  Driving away, I caught myself staring at her hills and wondering if her grandpa gave them to her before or after she got married.

  “Where’s Esme’s dad?” I asked Jody.

  She pulled some school papers out of her backpack. She wanted to show them to me now in the truck since she would be asleep by the time I got home from work.

  “Her mom said it’s his night out with the boys,” she answered me. “She said her night out is going grocery shopping. She said that’s marriage for you.”

  I looked at the star at the top of Jody’s addition and subtraction work sheet and nodded.

  If I had a pretty wife who could cook, I would never leave the house except to go to work so I could keep her. The rest of the time I would spend having sex and eating, and I would be deliriously happy.

  I didn’t know how happy she’d be, though. I wondered if I would care.

  chapter ( 6 )

  I went ahead and told Betty about my visit with Mom at our next appointment a month later. At first I wasn’t going to because I didn’t want to talk about it, but Betty wasn’t all bad so I did it for her sake. Sort of a personal favor. Boy talks to mother for the first time since she killed his father: it was a shrink’s wet dream.

  She almost fell out of her chair when I told her. It got her more excited than the time I told her about how Dad used to take Misty hunting with him instead of me and every time he’d say to me, “She’s more of a man than you’ll ever be.”

  Shrinks loved it when dads cut down their sons. Verbal emasculation, she called it. I didn’t care what it was. He was right.

  It wasn’t that Misty was butch. She was slight and freckled and had a glossy ponytail the color of an acorn and long, thick eyelashes like tiny feathers from a baby bird’s wing. But she was definitely a tomboy. Especially around Dad. They watched pro wrestling together and worked on the tractor mower together, and he took her to the Penns Ridge Speedway to see the stock car races. And she was definitely more of a hunter.

  Betty got up and left her office and came back with a glass of water for me when I started talking about Mom. She had done the same thing when I told her about Dad and Misty. I figured it was something she had read in one of the psychology textbooks she kept at her other office where she saw real patients instead of charity cases. There was probably a whole chapter in one of them about water and Kleenex and when it was appropriate to offer them.

  I left some things out of my description of my prison visit, but I didn’t make up anything. I was beginning to think I should because Betty was looking pretty disappointed. She kept tapping her forehead with the eraser on her pen and saying, “So you didn’t really discuss anything of substance,” and she kept asking me why I thought the sunflower fields outside the prison bothered me and I kept saying, “I don’t know.”

  “When are you planning on seeing her again?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You are planning on it, aren’t you? This was a very big step for you, Harley. You need to keep moving forward.”

  I needed to keep looking out the window. I was glad Betty’s office was at the back of the building instead of the front where the view would have been the Eat N’ Park. The parking lot wasn’t much to look at, but the maples bordering it were nice. They were covered with bright, new leaves now and drooping with seed helicopters.
r />   “Are you sure you don’t want to take off your coat?” she asked me.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  She sighed and crossed her legs and looked at her notes. She started tapping her forehead while tapping one toe in the air. I noticed her shoes. They weren’t her usual scuffed black pumps that gapped at the sides when she walked. These were a soft silver-green like the wrong side of a leaf. Not a mark on them. Not even on the soles.

  They didn’t go at all with the coarse, putty-colored dress she was wearing. It wasn’t just the color that was wrong. I thought of Cinderella finding herself in rags again with one glass slipper still sparkling on her foot.

  Betty saw me looking at her shoes, uncrossed her legs, and tucked her feet under her chair like she was concealing an accident.

  “Let’s go back to the comment you made about feeling that your mother is more concerned about the girls than she is about you. Why do you think that’s true?”

  “I know it’s true,” I corrected her.

  “Then why is that? Why is she more concerned about them?”

  “Because they’re girls.”

  “Why should that matter?”

  “Parents are always more concerned about daughters than sons.”

  “Let’s not generalize. Why is your mother more concerned about your sisters than she is about you?”

  “There’s more to be concerned about,” I said.

  “Such as?”

  “They can get pregnant.”

  She raised her eyebrows at me.

  “Not all of them right now,” I added, frustrated.

  “Your sisters getting pregnant is something you worry about?”

  “No.”

  “It’s something you think your mother worries about?”

  I slumped down on the couch while trying to think of an answer I could give her that she couldn’t respond to with another question. I finally gave up.

  “No. It’s just a fact.”

  “Okay.” She nodded. “And what else is there to be concerned about?”

  “They can get hurt easier.”

  “Do you mean physically? Or emotionally?”

  “Both, I guess.”