by R. R. Banks
"Well, thanks for this," I said.
I started for the kitchen and he started to follow me. He had only taken a few steps when I heard a high pitch snarling, a fierce hiss, and the shouted profanity that I'm sure my aging neighbors absolutely loved. I whipped around and saw The Reverend clinging to Garrett's thigh, his claws firmly implanted. Garrett was spinning around and rocking back and forth, his hands up above his head as if he was doing everything he could not to grab the cat and throw it. As for me, I was doing everything I could not to just stand there and laugh.
"Holy Frijole!"
Garrett’s eyes snapped up to me.
"That's it?" He shouted. "That's your entire reaction? Your cat is trying to gore me alive and you throw an antiquated and vaguely culturally insensitive exclamation at me?"
I stomped over to him and grabbed The Reverend. It took a few tugs, but finally, he retracted his claws and let me pull him into my arms.
"It wasn't an exclamation," I said. "It's his name."
Garrett was examining his leg and he looked up at me quizzically.
"What?"
"His name," I said. I held the cat out to him. "The Reverend Holy Frijole."
"The Reverend Holy Frijole," Garrett repeated.
"Yes."
"Well, he isn't very welcoming for a cat of the cloth."
"Maybe he's just a good judge of character."
Garrett looked at his thigh again.
"I'm fucking bleeding."
I looked and saw that there were several pinpricks of blood spreading through his jeans. I suddenly felt a little guilty.
"I'm sorry," I said. "You want me to get you a Band-Aid?"
"I don't need a Band-Aid,” he said. “I just came in here to say…"
"To say what?" I asked.
The Reverend hissed again, and Garrett rolled his eyes.
"You know what? Never mind!"
He stomped back out of the house, slamming the door behind him.
Feeling even lower than I already had, I went to the kitchen and put the trifle dish in the sink. I filled it with dish liquid and hot water to try to soften the petrified trifle stuck to the sides and fought the tears that were forming in my eyes.
These men can take out burning buildings, but they can't manage to get raspberry off of glass.
Spending time with other women celebrating the joyful events of life can be a wonderful way to ease negative feelings and soothe an aching heart.
Guessing how much tissue paper you would need to shove up your shirt and create a fake baby belly that would rival that of the mother-to-be while eating tiny pastel foods, and trying to force yet another giggle at the thousandth time that someone made a baby joke, or guessed the gender was not one of those ways.
I got through the series of ridiculous games. I ate my weight in Petit fours and coordinating buttermints. I watched as Sandra opened a seemingly endless stream of gifts. I even made a half-hearted guess that she would be having a girl sometime in the next two months. Finally, I felt like I had made it through a respectable amount of the celebration and I bowed out. I felt exhausted as I drove home, and I was relieved to see my mother's car sitting in front of the house. I didn't know how she managed it, but she always seemed to know when I was at my lowest point and needed her, yet she also knew when I needed my space and to be left alone. Now was one of those moments when I was indescribably grateful that she not only knew me that well, but that she had a key to my house on her keychain.
I walked into the house and found her sitting on the couch with The Reverend curled up in her lap, purring shamelessly.
"Now you're nice," I said.
"Father Beans is always nice," Mom said, leaning down to kiss him on the top of the head.
"There's a certain firefighter who might argue that," I said.
I dropped down onto the couch beside her and saw her eyes light up.
"A firefighter?" she asked. "What firefighter has been in your house?"
I realized what I had said and groaned, putting my face in my hands. I hadn't intended on going into all of the details with her about it. Now, though, she was looking at me with the hopeful expression I had seen before and always managed to ruin.
"He was here to bring my trifle dish back to me," I said. "That's it."
"Oh," she said. "I hoped that…"
Her voice trailed off, but I knew what she hoped. It was the same thing that she always hoped. It was what she had been hoping since the day that I had called her from the hospital and tried through my sobs to explain what was happening with Michael. The words 'psychotic break' were reverberating in my mind and I was struggling just to make sense of everything that I was experiencing. The doctors were trying to tell us what had happened and what to expect, and I was trying with everything in me to support Andrew, to hold him up and be strong for him. But I was too young. I was too young for this to be on me and to be taking the pressure onto me. Every time that I saw Michael during those days that we spent in the hospital, I wasn't sure who I was seeing. He seemed like a completely different person, but I could see glimmers of the man I knew he was. I could still see beyond the devastating impact of whatever had shattered him and of the medications that the doctors kept pumping through him. There were moments when he seemed lucid when he would look at me as if he completely recognized me and knew what was going on. In those moments he would communicate with me at an almost feverish pace as if he was trying to tell me everything that he possibly could before he faded away again. He knew, in some way, what was happening to him. It was as though he was locked inside himself. There was one moment, three days into that hellish stay, when he looked at me, grasped the front of the sweatsuit that he perpetually wore, and told me that he knew that blue was his color.
The doctor who was standing in the room with us looked at Andrew with an almost pitying expression on his face.
"See? He isn't making sense. He doesn't know what he's saying."
But he did know what he was saying. I knew exactly what he meant. It was something that I had said to him countless times during our relationship. Any time he was picking out clothes. Any time he couldn't decide what to wear when we were going out, or to a dance at school. Anytime that he got dressed up for me, I would tell him that. He was trying to tell me in a way that I would understand that he was still there, he was still in there. I clung to that moment with near desperation. I held it close to me, letting it convince me that it would all be OK, that he would get better, that he would come back. We were only able to stay with him for a few days before we needed to come back home and return to our lives. A few weeks later he was finally discharged and came home. I hoped that in the familiar environment surrounded by his family and with me by his side, Michael would come out of it. That day never came. Instead, six months after his discharge the police found him under an overpass, a weapon in his hand.
He was gone. He would never recover from that. Never again would I see a lucid moment or a glimmer of who he had been. While his body kept going, who he was, the person who I loved so much, was no longer there. He had dissolved away under the illness and it seemed that no one around me could really, truly understand what that put me through. It was in many ways worse than a death. He was still there, breathing, his heart beating, and his body walking through each day. But he would never again be the person I fell in love with or who I had built my future around. What had happened within his mind had not just taken Michael away from us, it had taken everything that I saw for my life. I had been standing on the very brink of all that I had wanted unfolding in front of me, and giving me a future I was so excited to explore. Then suddenly all of that disappeared and I was standing on the edge of emptiness.
That had paved the way for a series of disastrous relationships after him. Each one with a man who seemed stronger and more powerful, but only proved to be controlling, cold, unfeeling, and even cruel. My mother had watched me go through each of those relationships, trying to support me and help me to see
what I was going through, what I was putting myself through. I couldn't imagine how painful it was for her to watch her only child so lost. I admired her strength and courage. Each of those relationships had only built on the one before, eventually leading me into a rushed marriage to the first man who I thought showed me tenderness and compassion. Within a matter of weeks of our wedding day, I learned that he was the worst of them all. I hadn't stayed. I hadn't lost myself completely and what strength and courage I didn't have, my parents had for me. They saved me. They ensured that I got through that and that I still had a life ahead of me. But though neither of them would ever say it, I knew that deep inside of them they were disappointed. They had hoped as much as I had that my marriage would be the fairy tale that I had been hoping for and that it would whisk me away into a life of happiness and fulfillment. Now I was two years beyond my divorce, and there were times when I loved the life that I had made for myself, even if it was just me and The Reverend, but there were other times when it seemed that I was no closer to happiness and fulfillment than I had been that day when I signed those papers that gave me back my life.
I was so young and yet in my years, I had managed to live more life than many women twice my age.
My mother gently lifted The Reverend out of her lap and put him aside so that I could lay down and put my head where he had been. She gently ran her hand through my hair and we remained in silence for several long minutes.
"Do you remember when your father went zip-lining?" she finally asked.
I nodded.
"Of course, I do. I was terrified that something was going to happen to him."
"But it didn't,” she said. “But he never would have known that if he had let everyone around him control his thoughts and had listened to the voice inside him that said there was always a chance he could be hurt. He would have just stopped and stood there and looked at the zip-line and wondered what was on the other side. Instead, he found out."
Chapter Thirteen
Garrett
"She's done it. She's finally done it this time. She ruined my life."
I came out of the kitchen tossing a round of pizza dough back and forth between my hands and looked at Jason questioningly.
"Did something happen at baseball practice?" I asked.
"Yeah, something happened. Miss Martin happened."
The mention of her name made my heart tighten, but I tried not to show it. I still hadn't told Jason that I knew Gwendolyn. I figured that there were some things that were probably best left unsaid.
"What did she have to do with your baseball practice?" I asked.
"I got all the way through practice only to have Coach call me over at the end and tell me that I wasn't going to be able to play in the game next week."
I gestured for him to follow me into the kitchen so that I could keep making dinner. I put the dough onto a pizza stone and finished shaping it before adding a swirl of sauce. It was a recipe that I had picked up from my early years of firefighting and I still considered it the best thing that I made.
"Why can't you play in the game? You said that you've been doing so well at practice. Your coach even said that you were going to get to start at that game."
"Exactly," he said. I could hear the anger in his voice, but it was also trembling with emotion that he was fighting not to show. "I was supposed to start. They're going to be scouts there from some of the top schools. Now they're not going to be able to see me play."
"You still haven't told me what Miss Martin did that made it so that you can't play in the game."
"She failed me."
"What?"
"We had a test at the beginning of the week and we just got our grades back. She failed me. Coach told me at the end of practice that test grade pushes my cumulative grade too low for the school to consider me still eligible to participate in sports programs."
I knew that he was telling me the truth and because that series of words was one that never would have come out of my son's mouth unless they had been said to him directly.
"I don't understand," I said. "Your grade in one class is enough for the school to not let you play baseball?"
He nodded.
"It's a new policy. Rather than just looking at total GPA, you are required to maintain certain grades in all of your classes. If they drop under that grade at any point, it's immediate suspension from any participation in team activities other than practices until the grade comes up. That means that I'm not allowed to play in any of the games until I'm able to get my grade up in that class. We don't have another test for another three weeks. If there aren't any quizzes or projects or anything that can boost my grade, that means that I have to miss all of the games during that whole time. Coach could bench me for the rest of the season."
I grabbed my phone and scrolled through my contacts. I found the coach and called him.
"What's going on with Jason not being able to play next week?" I asked when the coach answered.
"Before the end of practice this afternoon I was told that his History teacher alerted the office that his grade had dropped below the threshold for student-athletes. I had to let him know that because of the grading policy and according to his teacher saying that there's no way he'll be able to lift his grade up by the game, he won't be able to play in it."
"Just like that?" I asked. "No warning or anything?"
"There's nothing that I can do about it," he said. "I'm not the one who has control in this situation. The restrictions were put in place by the school and I can't change them. Trust me, I have tried to figure out a way that I can work around it. I want Jason out on that field next week as much as he wants to be out there. But there's really no way. The only person who can change the situation at all is his teacher. If she'll change his grade, he can play. "
"Alright," I said. "Thank you."
I hung up the phone and dropped it back onto the counter. I looked over at Jason where he stood adding toppings to the pizza. He looked at me with hopeful eyes. I could see how much this meant to him and how unexpected it was. I was furious. Now it just seemed like Gwendolyn was being petty for the sake of being petty. She could have at least given him a few extra points just to push him over the threshold, so he was able to play. I knew that I needed to do something about this.
The next afternoon I didn't bother to stop at the front office before heading through the hallways and into the Humanities wing. Students were still streaming out of their classrooms and they stepped out of my way as I stalked toward Gwendolyn's classroom. She was standing at the desk going over a paper with one of the students and she looked up at me when I walked in.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked.
Gwendolyn looked at the student beside her.
"We will finish going over this next class, OK?"
The girl nodded and took the paper, tucking it into the thick notebook in her arms and scurrying out of the room. Gwendolyn crossed the room angrily and closed the door before turning to me.
"How dare you come in here like that?"
"I needed to talk to you, yet again, about the way that you are treating Jason."
She crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her eyes at me.
"And what is it that you think I'm doing this time?"
"You failed him and now he's not able to play in the game next week."
She gave a short, mirthless laugh and walked back over to her desk. She picked up a folder and flipped through the pages inside, taking one out and flattening it on the surface of the desk in front of her.
"I didn't fail him. He failed."
I looked at the paper that she had put on the desk and saw that it was a photocopy of the test. She had slashed at it with a red pen and scribbled comments in the corners.
"How many questions would he have needed to get right to not fail?"
"Does that really matter?"
"It does. Because you could have shown a little bit of heart and given an extra credit question or two to help
push him over."
"Are you seriously standing here telling me how to do my job again? First, you tell me that I shouldn't punish him when he's disrespectful and doesn't do his work, and then you tell me that I need to just pass him for the hell of it?"
"It's not for the hell of it," I said. "Do you have any idea what you're doing by making it so he can't play next week?"
"I didn't make it so that it was anything," she argued. "He's the one that did it."
"Stop being so fucking passive-aggressive. You know exactly what I mean. You talk a big game about how you think that he needs to apply himself so that he can be successful, but did you have any idea that he is incredibly talented? Did you know that his coach says that he has exceptional potential? Did you know that there are scouts that are going to be at the game that could be watching him?"
"He's only a sophomore," she said.
"It doesn't matter how young he is," I said. "They're looking at him. The longer that they look at him, the more they'll be thinking about him. That means that he could have top schools trying to get him during his senior year. He could even start a professional career. This one grade might not mean anything to you and you might think that you're making some sort of meaningful moral stand, but what you're doing is putting his future at risk. He's going to miss so many games that it might be the end of his season if another player takes his spot and starts doing well. Do you have any idea what that would do to him?"
My breath was coming out of me in hard pants and I could feel the heat rushing up my body. I was standing only a foot away from her and I could see the flush across Gwendolyn's chest and smell the hint of her perfume.
"He needs to be held accountable," she said. "You need to stop coddling him."
"And you need to stop being so unreasonable," I said.
She narrowed her eyes at me.
"Don't tell me what to do."
I closed the space between us in one step and grabbed her around the waist, yanking her up against me so hard she gasped when her body crushed against mine. I closed my mouth down on hers, kissing her ruthlessly. I forced my tongue into her mouth and held her tightly against me, pressing my hips forward to ensure that she could feel my cock growing harder. It strained toward her, craving her, and I nudged it into her belly insistently. I used the pressure of my body to force her back toward the desk until she was leaning back and then tore my mouth away from hers.
