Between the Sheets

by Molly O'Keefe

  But the day after that picture had been taken, Dad preached from the pulpit the sins of pride. How it distracted people from truly understanding God. How those with too much pride would never know love. In a twenty-minute sermon he crushed Mom from his position, crushed the two of them and their happiness that had not welcomed him.

  And that was only a minor trick of Dad’s.

  Anything Mom accomplished—her promotion to manager of the plant, her raises—he had to diminish. He had to make her smaller and smaller until she disappeared.

  Shelby was seven when she realized that no matter what she did, how hard she prayed, how good she was, it wouldn’t matter, because her father would never love her. Not really. From that moment he no longer had any power over her; he could beat her until she bled but he couldn’t touch her. Not where it mattered.

  So he turned his attention to his best audience, the person he could reduce to rubble with only a glance.

  Evie.

  This is your fault, he’d say to Shelby while Mom scurried across the floor to clean up broken dishes. To wipe up blood, holding closed the torn sleeve of her dress. All your fault.

  But instead of giving him what he wanted and drawing his disastrous attention away from Mom, Shelby withdrew even further and became a knowing, willing accomplice to the systematic abuse her father heaped upon her mother.

  The thought of it—the memory of it—made her sick and she closed her eyes, pressing her face against her mother’s hair.

  If I could change the way I was, Mom, I would do it. I would do anything to change the past.

  “I look at these photos and keep thinking I’ll see what I saw,” Evie whispered. “I’ll see why I married him. Why I felt like he was all I deserved.”

  “You deserved more than him,” Shelby whispered, but Evie shook her head.

  “I was older, and I wanted a family and then … then there he was. So handsome and charming …” Her voice faded to dust. “I’m sorry I was too scared to take you and leave. I’m sorry I made you stay.”

  “I stayed with you. Wherever you were was where I was going to be.”

  Evie’s grip on her hand was cold iron. “No,” she whispered. “No. That’s not the way it should be. None of this is the way it should be.”

  “Mom.” Evie was growing agitated. Restless. Shelby put her hand around her mom’s shoulder, holding her close. “It’s us, Mom. It’s us together and it’s going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay.”

  * * *

  Ty’s involvement with the Outlaws had happened slowly. Or at least that was the way it seemed. There was of course the good chance that Ty had just been too drunk to notice.

  When Ty was twenty-five, Pop, his grandfather, died in a motorcycle accident. It had been raining and Highway 12 was slick, and Pop had been staunchly antihelmet. He’d died instantly, which wasn’t a whole lot of comfort when it could have been prevented.

  After the funeral, Ty went off the deep end. For a while it was just too much partying. He never met a bottle of Jack he didn’t want to get to the bottom of, and then he met Vanessa, whose brother, Chad, was a sergeant-at-arms with the Outlaws, and before he knew it he was partying with her brother and his club, some of whom he’d known from working off and on at Pop’s shop.

  Nana kicked him out of the house. Said he was a disgrace to Pop’s memory. It still stung when he remembered the cold, calm way she’d said it. The tears in her eyes that she would not let fall.

  It must have just killed her to do that. Just gutted her. And he hated that he’d put her through that.

  After being kicked out, he moved into the apartment above Pop’s shop even though at the time he’d barely been showing up to work. Ed, the manager, had threatened to fire him a million times. He told Ty the only reason he was still around was because Pop would have wanted Ed to keep an eye on him.

  If he started to wonder what the hell he was doing, Vanessa would give him another bottle, another joint, let him fuck her in the bathroom of the Outlaws’ compound, go down on another girl so he could watch.

  Would start a fight so he could whale the shit out of some guy.

  But nine months after he fell in with the club he woke up in the shitty trailer outside the compound with Vanessa passed out beside him, a roll of cash in his pocket, and a gun on the bedside table.

  A gun.

  He’d sunk in way too deep. Rock-bottom too deep.

  He packed up his shit, then woke up Vanessa to get her to come with him. He even proposed to her. But she’d refused, laughed in his face. Told him to go to hell. And then when he walked out of that trailer she’d chased after him, in a shirt and panties, crying, begging him to come back.

  And threw rocks at his bike when he rode off.

  He’d said goodbye to Nana, promised to turn his life around, and went to St. Louis, where he didn’t know anyone and no one knew him and he could figure out who he was without Pop, without Vanessa, without the bullshit drinking and fighting he’d been doing.

  To his huge surprise, the first thing he realized about himself was that he really liked church. He’d suffered through his share of Sunday services with Nana and Pop, but once he was on his own, he sought out a church and found the perfect one—a weird little Unitarian down on the south side off Kings highway, with a good choir and a black female minister who preached such kindness that he felt bathed in goodness just being in her presence.

  For the next seven years he’d traveled around the states, working odd jobs, making friends, leaving whenever the impulse struck. But the first thing he did when he pulled into a fresh city was find a church. Find some goodness.

  And now he was trying to get Casey to do the same.

  “No way!” Casey cried, slouching in his seat at the table, a spoonful of Cheerios dripping its way to his mouth.

  “I told you that was part of the deal,” Ty said, trying to put a shine on his boots. They were mostly a lost cause, but he remembered Pop shining up his boots every Sunday, so he figured he’d do what he could to follow tradition.

  “The deal sucks.”

  “I think the swear jar is going to start including the word sucks.”

  “That sucks.”

  “That’s it. You owe a quarter.”

  “You can’t just change the rules like that!”

  “I can. I’m the dad. Now go. Finish your cereal and go get dressed. That green polo I bought you that you never wear and your khaki pants.”

  Casey made a big show of stomping back to his room, and Ty finished the last of Casey’s cereal and put the bowl in the sink.

  His cell phone rang and he shoved his feet into his boots as he answered.

  “Hello.”

  “Someone from Mark H. Luttrell Correctional Facility is trying to get in touch with you. Do you accept this call?” It was a recording and it took him a second to figure out what it meant.

  He jerked the phone away from his ear and looked at the screen. Mark H. Luttrell Correctional Facility. Jesus Christ.

  “I accept,” he said.

  “Ty?”

  “What are you doing, Vanessa? We agreed you wouldn’t call for six months.” To give the kid a chance to settle in. To give him a chance to forget and maybe forgive. Though, frankly, Ty hadn’t been working too hard on the forgiving part.

  “I just wanted to talk to Casey.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Ty. I’m his mom. You can’t pretend I don’t exist.”

  “I’m not pretending you don’t exist! But you can’t call out of the blue and expect to talk to him. He needs a chance to be prepared.”

  There was a long silence and he expected a swearing diatribe to erupt, but instead she only sighed, a shuddering, audible sigh. “That’s fair, I guess.”

  It was a Sunday miracle.

  “Will you tell him I called?”

  “Yeah, and if he wants to talk to you, we’ll call you.”

  “How is he doing?”

  Ty le
aned against the counter and rubbed at his forehead. He was going to break the skin one of these days. “He’s good. I mean we’ve had some problems, but he’s a good kid.”

  “He always was. He was the best kid and I …” He heard her muffled sob and would have given anything in the world to be able to hang up the phone.

  “You threw it away, Vanessa. And I can’t let you back into his life unless I know you won’t hurt him like that again.”

  There was a loud sniff and a husky laugh. Not quite as mean as it had been in the past, but still tinged with the old Vanessa awfulness. “Look at you. I never would have guessed you’d be such a good dad.”

  “Good” was a mighty stretch, but considering how badly she had done, he looked like a saint.

  “Yeah, well, me neither. I gotta go, Vanessa.”

  “Tell him … tell him I miss him.”

  “I will,” he said, unsure if he would.

  He hung up and tossed the phone onto the counter. When was it too early on a Sunday to drink?

  “Was that my mom?”

  Ty whirled at the sound of Casey’s voice at the doorway. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

  He couldn’t change this for his kid. He couldn’t make his mom go away. But it didn’t stop him from trying.

  “Don’t worry about it.” He got really busy with his keys and his wallet.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Casey asked, his voice all high and broken. “My mom called you from jail and I’m not supposed to worry about it.”

  Ty ran his hands through his hair. “Yeah … that’s probably not possible, huh?”

  Casey stood in the doorway, in the green polo and the khaki pants and without his armor. Without his attitude. A boy. Just a boy.

  Ty took a deep breath. “She wanted to talk to you but I said I had to discuss it with you, and if you wanted to talk to her, we’d call her. She says she misses you.”

  Casey flinched, his hands reaching down to tug at the hem of his shirt. He stared at a spot three feet in front of him and Ty had this weird instinct to go and stand in that spot, to give the kid something to look at. To see.

  I’m here.

  I’m not going anywhere.

  You are not alone.

  But in the end he didn’t do it. He stood where he stood. Casey stood in the doorway, and the distance between them seemed like a foreign country with armed guards and a language he could not begin to understand.

  “I don’t miss her,” Casey whispered.

  Good, he wanted to say; she’s not worth missing. But there had been a time in his life when he hadn’t been worth missing either and he’d turned his shit around and … ah, hell, he had no freaking clue what he was doing.

  “You don’t have to talk to her if you don’t want to,” he said.

  Casey shrugged as if it didn’t matter, but Ty was no fool. He was just clueless.

  “Let’s go, Casey—we’re late,” he said.

  For one long second Casey stared at him. Right at him.

  Ty couldn’t handle it, couldn’t handle the pain and anger and confusion in his son’s eyes, and like a coward he looked away. He grabbed his keys from the counter and headed out to the garage, to the truck and across town toward salvation.

  Chapter 9

  Sunday was one of those strange Arkansas winter days when a warm wind blew up from the gulf and it felt like spring had arrived, months early, a totally welcome surprise visitor. Outside the church, mothers gave up the fight to keep their kids in jackets and let them run around in shirtsleeves. Everyone was caught at one time or another lifting their faces to the honeyed sunlight only to close their eyes and breathe deep.

  But Evie had on her winter coat and leather gloves. Her steel-gray hair pulled back in the bun she wore every day. Her face folded into familiar lines of worry.

  “These kids will catch cold,” she said with a sniff.

  “It’s nearly sixty degrees.” Shelby ran her hand over the worn nap of Mom’s coat. It was ancient, something that should have been given to some charity years ago, but somehow the ugly afghan coat survived every purge. “Aren’t you hot?”

  “I’m fine. I wish someone would put a coat on those boys. They’ll catch cold.”

  Evie watched the closed front doors of the church, waiting for them to be thrown open. They could go around to the back, where the doors had been open since seven, but Mom wouldn’t have it.

  She came at God head-on.

  “Good morning, Shelby!” It was Colleen, the school secretary. “God’s grace is shining on us today, isn’t it?”

  It’s a Gulf Stream thing. She didn’t say it, because no one outside the Methodist church wanted to hear that.

  Beside her, Mom beamed and said, “Amen.” She and Colleen clasped hands.

  “Those your boys?” Mom asked.

  “The Billings boys? No. And thank the Lord.”

  “Someone should get them jackets.”

  The church doors were thrown open and the greeters, Mr. and Mrs. Gingerich, got down to the business of handing out the programs and special earpieces for the hard of hearing.

  Back when Daddy was preaching, Shelby and Mom used to sit in the front row. They were human props, part of Daddy’s spectacle: the devout wife, the faithful daughter. Their heads bowed, eyes squeezed shut, lips moving in prayer. Mom at times would actually weep and Shelby had stared at her, aghast and amazed, that she could muster up that kind of emotion to share with Daddy’s congregation.

  The more Daddy wanted Shelby to show, the less she gave him. Everything he wanted to pull and drag out of her to hold up in front of that group of strangers as proof of his ability to care for their souls, to shepherd them into God’s holy light, she denied him.

  The only thing she’d ever known about that congregation at the old church down the road was that they believed in Daddy. Which was nothing to recommend them.

  Now that her faith wasn’t part of a spectacle, Shelby took Mom to sit up in the balcony, behind Fred, who ran the sound and took care of the feed into the radio station down in Marietta.

  Mom sat and got out her hymnal, looking in the program and then finding the first hymn and then the second, marking them with her fingers. It was a little trick she used to keep herself rooted.

  The sight of her mother’s small but strong fingers wedged into the pages of that hymnal made Shelby both impossibly sad and proud at the same time.

  Mom had run the sixth biggest Del Monte plant in the state at a time when women didn’t do that. Not at all. She taught Shelby to change tires and her oil. Fix leaky faucets. Mend and re-mend, hem and re-hem. Mom taught her to be endlessly useful to herself. And even though so much of her was eroding from beneath, creating giant sinkholes of memory and personality, Evie was still able to be useful to herself.

  Shelby settled into the pew beside her mother and crossed her legs, promising herself she would only look at her watch twice in the next hour. Twice. That was all she got.

  Pastor Mike began his welcome.

  There were a few whispers and mutters behind her as a latecomer came up to the balcony and the floorboards at the top of the steps creaked. She turned just in time to see Casey sliding into the pew beside her, his face lighting up when he realized who he was sitting next to.

  Beside him, his mouth wide with surprise, until he seemed to realize it and schooled his face into an expressionless mask, was Wyatt.

  She’d put last night behind her. Shoved all those details, those feelings, the shocking way her body had unraveled and imploded under his touch, down deep into some secure safe in her memory.

  But at the sight of him, in the same blue sweater he’d worn to her house, those memories staged a jailbreak and wreaked mayhem in her mind.

  Yeah. Look at you.

  She tore her eyes away from his surprised face and stared blindly at the front of the church.

  “Hey, Ms. Monroe,” Casey whispered, but before Shelby could say anything, Mom leaned over and shushed him.

 
Shelby gave him a wink and then tried very hard to pay attention to the church service.

  But painfully, as if her whole left side were sitting far too close to a fire, she was aware of Wyatt sitting there two feet from her. Her cheeks were hot, her neck, her breasts. Every single place he touched Friday night suddenly lit a spark and she couldn’t stand her own skin. Her own body. She wanted to shed herself like a coat and run out of there.

  “Sit still,” Wyatt muttered, and she turned toward him, astounded that he would attempt to chastise her, only to find him giving his son a pretty good death stare.

  Beside her, Casey managed to sit still for about thirty seconds before he started squirming again.

  “Casey,” Wyatt whispered. “I’m serious. You made me a promise.”

  “I said I would try,” Casey whispered back. “But it’s so boring.”

  Inspired by her own boredom, she grabbed the pencil from the guest register and flipped her bulletin over to a blank page. She drew a tic-tac-toe board in the corner and pushed it toward Casey.

  “Tic-tac-toe?” he whispered. “Am I six?”

  A laugh bubbled out of her and now her own mom was giving her the death stare. She composed herself and drew a hangman and the spaces for a ten-letter word.

  “Hangman,” he whispered. “I like it.”

  She pointed to a blank spot where he could write down his guesses and handed him the stubby pencil. Over the top of Casey’s bright head, Wyatt was watching her, and despite her years of experience ignoring things, she could ignore him for only so long. Almost as if her eyes were magnetized and he was true north, she could not help but look at him.

  Only to find him staring at her, specifically her neck revealed by her ponytail, his eyes hot, his face set in hard lines.

  Burning. Agitated. She turned away, focused on the game she was playing with Casey. The Hallelujah he seemed to be in no hurry to guess.

  Did Wyatt show up at her church on purpose? she wondered. Was this some kind of weird stalker thing after Saturday night, after she’d asked him to leave?