Julia Watts - Finding H.F.

by Julia Watts

  I feel like she hit me. I almost wish she had. “I don’t want money. I just wanted to see you.”

  She sits up straight. “See, that’s what I’m asking. Why? Why did you want to see me?”

  Because you’re my mother, I want to say, but all I can get out is, “I thought we could talk.”

  My mother laughs. “About what? About the ass-end of nowhere, Kentucky? About my crazy mother? Look, H.F., I wanted to get out of Morgan the second I was old enough to walk. When I finally did leave, I was gonna do it free, with no baggage. And no baggage means no boyfriends and no babies. You ain’t gonna make me feel guilty for leaving, so don’t try. You should be grateful I had you at all. The only reason I did was because I was broke and ignorant.”

  This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. When I do talk, I sound like a whiny four-year-old. “But didn’t you ever think about me?”

  “Sure. Your granny sends me letters, so I knew you were all right. It wasn’t like I dumped you in a garbage can, for God’s sake.”

  I’m trying not to cry. I feel Bo’s hands on my shoulders. My mother lights another cigarette. “I mean, I’d understand it if you was some kind of famous teenage model or if you’d won the lottery and you came to find me to say, ‘Look how rich I am, look at how great I turned out.’ But coming down here the way you are, with your friend the way he is? Are you trying to embarrass me? You and your little faggoty friend want to make me ashamed, to make me feel like it’s my fault you turned out to be—”

  “You should be embarrassed. You should be ashamed.” I look up and see that Bo has got up out of his chair. “You should be embarrassed and ashamed, because havin’ H.F. is probably the best thing you ever done in your sorry excuse for a life, and you don’t have the good sense to appreciate her.”

  I can’t believe Bo’s stood up for me like that. I’m crying for real now, and when I look up, I’m surprised to see my mother is crying too. “I’m sorry” she sobs. “I didn’t mean to say that. It’s not my fault I can’t be a mother to you...not my fault I have to live in this shithole. You feel so goddamn sorry for yourself because your mommy took off and left you, but what about me? Do you think this is what I wanted? I wanted to be an actress. I was supposed to be wearing evening gowns in Hollywood, not wearing a polyester waitress uniform in the friggin’ Florida panhandle!” She looks at us with wet, red eyes. “Say, kids, why don’t you stay the night? Me and Travis got an extra room.”

  “OK,” I say, hoping things will get better and hating myself for hoping.

  Fishing the last cigarette out of a pack, she doesn’t even look up at us. She just says, “It’s the first door on the right. Why don’t you kids go on to bed?”

  I stand up to leave the room because it’s what my mother wants me to do. The whole time we’ve been screaming and yelling and crying, Travis hasn’t looked away from the TV once.

  I guess it was stupid, but I thought that because my mother was telling us to go to bed, that meant she was going to bed too. Me and Bo are sitting on a mattress on the floor in the tiny spare bedroom, listening to my mother and Travis fight:

  “I told you to pick up a carton of cigarettes on your way home from work.”

  “And what are you doin’ all day that you can’t haul your ass down to the corner store and buy the damn cigarettes yourself?”

  “Oh, ain’t this somethin’ new and different? You ridin’ my ass ‘cause I can’t find a job.”

  “You can’t find somethin’ if you don’t look for it!”

  “Oh, and you’d know all about lookin’, wouldn’t you? All that lookin’ you do at every man that gives you the time of day...and you can’t tell me you don’t do more than look. That’s how you ended up with that dyke bastard you’ve got for a daughter.”

  I put my hands over my ears and rock back and forth. “I can’t take this, Bo.”

  Bo gently pulls my hands down and holds them in his. “Well, that’s because it’s new to you. I’m used to it. This feels just like home to me.”

  “She said she was sorry she said them things to me. Do you think she meant it?”

  “Oh, sure. They treat you like shit, then they feel bad about it and say they’re sorry, and then they forget they was sorry and start treatin’ you like shit again.”

  I’m a damn fool. I had every reason to believe that Sondra would be a lousy mother, but I chose to believe different—like a dog that makes a long, hard journey to find his way back to the master who abandoned him on the side of the road. “Bo, let’s go home.”

  “We will, in the mornin’. But I can’t drive them dark country roads at night. It ain’t safe.”

  I don’t feel safe here either, but I say, “OK.” In the living room, I hear something hit the wall with a thud. I jump.

  “I’m gonna go out to the car and get our bags,” Bo says. “I’ll be right back.”

  “You can’t go out there with them fightin’ like that.”

  “They won’t even notice me. They’re like a pair of dogs layin’ into each other. They won’t notice you unless you turn a hose on ‘em.”

  Bo sleeps on the mattress, not stirring no matter how loud the yelling gets. After a while things settle down a little, and I curl up beside him. Then I hear my mother and Travis in their room, my mother crying out and the mattress squeaking. I feel like I know what every night with my mother and Travis is like, beer and TV till they get all riled up, and then two loud activities that start with the letter f. I know that when my mother wakes up in the morning, she’ll be glad I’m gone.

  I cry quietly to myself, then doze off for a little while. My eyes open as soon as the sky starts to get light. “Bo,” I shake his shoulder gently, “let’s go.” We take turns cleaning ourselves up in the mildewed bathroom, then check the kitchen to see if there’s anything we can grab for breakfast. But there’s only a case of beer in the fridge and a carton of cigarettes on the counter. Figures. There’s nothing in this house that’s good for you.

  Once we get to the end of Palmetto Drive, Bo starts heading toward town instead of away from it. “Where are we goin’?” I ask. Between my sorrow and lack of sleep, I sound like I’m on drugs.

  “Home,” Bo says. “But first we’re gonna say goodbye to the ocean.

  We stand on the white beach, watching the big red ball of sun rise over the blue water. The sky is splashed with soft colors—rose, orange, and yellow—like a watercolor painting. “It’s hard to believe anything can be so beautiful,” I say, “especially in a world where mommas leave and girlfriends leave—”

  “Now, wait just a minute,” Bo says. “The way I see it, you should be pretty happy. You’ve met your momma, and you know you wasn’t missin’ a thing. Your life’s been a damn sight happier without her than it would’ve been with her. People like your momma and that Laney girl, they’re leavers ... always movin’ on to the next person or the next place, and they’ll leave that too. I bet your momma will leave Travis before the year’s out, and I bet they’s at least a dozen boyfriends that came before him. Leavers leave, H.F. That’s just the way they are.”

  “What about Wendy?” When I was awake crying last night, I was surprised to discover I was thinking about Wendy almost as much as my mother.

  “Wendy’s different. She’s just scared of her feelings. I know what that’s like. I lived most of my life that way. But not anymore.” Bo looks at the sun for a second, then says, “H.F., someday you’ll find a girlfriend who’ll stay. And you’ve always got a friend who will.”

  I squeeze Bo’s hand, and suddenly I get a jolt like I just stuck a hairpin in a light socket. It’s a thought and a feeling all at once, and it zips from my toes, up my spine, and finally to my mouth. “Omigod, Bo, I just thought of something. You remember my mother talkin’ about your daddy last night?”

  “Yeah, everybody from Morgan knows my daddy. Why?”

  “Did you see how her eyes got all soft and glittery?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I was j
ust thinkin’... She was hangin’ out at the Hilltop when she was 15, lettin’ your daddy buy her drinks. What if she did somethin’, you know, to pay for them drinks? I mean, what if they went for a ride in his car one night, and—”

  Bo’s eyes get wide. “Well, Mommy is always accusin’ Daddy of runnin’ around with loose women—”

  “And my mother is definitely a loose woman.”

  “So, what you’re sayin’ is it’s possible we could be...” He stops talking and looks at me.

  I look back at him. We’re both tall and wiry like his daddy is, and we’ve both got blue eyes. His hair’s ash blond, but that comes from his momma. We both have the same kind of earlobes. Bo and me was born a month and a half apart, so his mother and my mother was both carrying us at the same time, two babies made with the eggs of two different women, but with Johnny Martin as the father.

  This is just an idea—there ain’t no proof for it—but I know that when Bo looks at me and smiles, he’s thinking the same thing I am: It’s possible.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “You do look like him,” Bo says as we’re driving through the sticks of south Alabama. “I’d never thought of it before because I like you and I can’t stand my daddy, but y’all do kinda look alike.”

  I laugh. “Who’da thought that ol’ macho, Civil War-lovin’ Johnny Martin would end up makin’ two queers in one year?”

  Bo grins. “We ought to get him a belt with that stamped on it: TWO QUEERS IN ONE YEAR.”

  I feel nervous all of a sudden. “We’re not gonna tell him, are we? I mean, we don’t have one iota of proof—”

  “Of course we’re not gonna tell him. He’s the worst father that ever was. But at least you’re gettin’ a helluva brother out of the deal.” Bo looks down at the gas gauge. “God a-mighty, we’ve been drivin’ along talkin’ while we’re sittin’ on empty.”

  We pull into the old-fashioned gas station we passed on the way to Tippalula. A sign says PAY BEFORE YOU PUMP, so I get my bag out of the backseat and reach for the plastic change purse where I’d stuffed all the money for our trip.

  It’s empty.

  No, I say to myself. Don’t panic. The money probably just fell out into the bag. I turn the paper bag of clothes upside down on the passenger seat and start digging through it.

  “What’s the matter?” Bo says, sounding like he’s afraid I’ve finally stopped messing around and have lost it altogether.

  “The money. There was $32.14 in here yesterday, and now I can’t find it.”

  “Shit,” Bo says. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “No, no, it’s OK,” I tell him and myself at the same time. “It’s got to be here somewhere.”

  “It ain’t here, H.F. It ain’t here because somebody took it.”

  As soon as he says it, a picture flashes in my mind: the carton of cigarettes on the kitchen counter in my mother’s house. Wasn’t that what Travis was yelling about last night? That he didn’t have any cigarettes? The case of beer in the fridge was new, unopened. While we slept the pitiful amount we slept last night, somebody took our money and went on a shopping trip. I’d like to believe they just borrowed the money—that they would’ve paid us back this morning if we’d stuck around, but I don’t think that Jesus Christ himself would be charitable and forgiving enough to believe that. “Good God a-mighty, Bo, what in the sam hill are we gonna do now?”

  Bo sighs and looks over at the two men sitting on the bench in front of the station. “I guess we can start by talkin’ to them men that’s been starin’ a hole at us the past five minutes.”

  I look over at the two old black men sitting on folding chairs outside the building. They’ve stopped their game of checkers to watch us. I suck in my breath and walk over to them. Both of them have soft gray hair and look like they could be somebody’s papaw. I pray that they are.

  “Hello,” I say. “Me and my friend was down here visitin’ colleges.” I can’t bring myself to say “visiting family.” “And I was just lookin’ in my bag, and I think we’ve been robbed. I was gonna buy some gas, you see, but now I can’t...” My voice is getting higher and out-of-control sounding, “And I don’t know what we’re—”

  “Hold on, missy,” the heavier of the two men says. “You got somebody back home to wah you some money?”

  “I beg your pardon?” A south Alabama accent is a lot harder to understand than a southeastern Kentucky one.

  “To wah you some money? By Westun Union?”

  “Oh.” Wire me some money. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  The old man takes three one-dollar bills out of the pocket of his coveralls. “Heah. You give this money to Ed to buy you some gas, then you head back thataway about 12 mile to Barcelona. Westun Union’s on Main Street.”

  “Thank you, sir.” I’m crying again. “Thank you for bein’ so nice. Give me your name and address, and I’ll pay you back.”

  “Don’t you worry about it, missy. I ain’t so bad off I can’t afford to give a little girl three dollars.”

  Barcelona, Alabama, looks about like Morgan, only a little worse. Maybe the thing that makes it worse is the way people are looking at us. Back in Morgan everybody knows who I am, even if they hate me. Here, everybody’s looking at Bo and me with skinny eyes that say, Who in the name of God are you, and what are you doing here?

  Of course, what I’m doing here is standing at the pay phone outside the Western Union, trying to decide who I can call to wire us money. Memaw would do it, but then I’d have to explain to her that we lied to her, why we lied to her, and why we’re in Barcelona, Alabama (and I’m not even clear on that last one myself).

  Bo’s daddy might send money, but he’d only do it so he could kill Bo the second he got home. Then I have an idea. It’s a risk, but it’s easy to take risks when you’ve got nothing to lose.

  “Who ya callin’?” Bo says.

  “Shh.” I know the number by heart. I say my name at the beep and pray that whoever’s on the receiving end will accept the charges.

  Wendy answers, and I’m prepared to go into a speech about how sorry I am to be bothering her and how I’ll never pester her again but that I really need her help. But I don’t get a chance to say any of this because she says, “H.F., where in the hell are you?”

  “Uh...Barcelona.”

  “You’re in Spain?”

  “No, Alabama.”

  “Well, everybody here’s worried to death about you...your grandmother especially. She called here last night nearly hysterical. She said you were supposed to call two nights ago and didn’t. She called the college that was supposed to have offered Bo a scholarship, and they said they’d never heard of him. She said if you hadn’t shown up by this morning, she was calling the highway patrol, so I guess she did.”

  “Well, tell her to call off the highway patrol. Tell her I’m all right, and I’m sorry.” I hate to think how much pain I’ve caused Memaw. After all, the only reason she kept me away from my mother was to protect me from the same pain Momma had caused her.

  “H.F.,” Wendy says, so soft I can barely hear her, “I’m sorry too. As soon as I found out you were gone, I knew it was because you were running away from something...from me and how ugly I was to you, most likely. I was scared, H.F. Scared of the way I felt about you and about what that might mean about me. But I’ve thought about it a lot. I still don’t have many answers. I don’t know if I really like girls...or if I just like you.”

  All of a sudden, I don’t even care that I’m broke and stranded in Barcelona, Alabama. “You like me?”

  “I feel like everything happens for a reason, H.F. And the only possible reason I can think of for moving to a god-awful town like Morgan is so I could meet you. Call me when you get home, OK?”

  “Uh...about getting home—”

  “Yes?”

  “Me and Bo...well, it’s a long story, but we’re out of money. We’re standin’ outside the Western Union, flat broke.”

  “You want me to wire you some mon
ey?”

  It’s hard to say yes because of all Memaw’s speeches about a Simms never taking a handout from nobody. “I’ll pay you back, Wendy. I swear to God, I will. We just need enough for gas back to Kentucky—”

  “Don’t get all poor and proud on me, H.F. It’s no problem. I’ve got to get downtown to the bank, then over to the Western Union at the City Drug, so it’ll probably take me about an hour. Barcelona, Alabama, you say?”

  “Thank you, Wendy. Thank you so much.”

  “Like I said, not a problem. I’m glad I can do something to halfway make up for how mean I was that morning. Say, my parents are going out of town for a conference next weekend. You want to sleep over?”

  I know from how hot my face is that it’s turned red. I’m grinning all over myself. “You bet.”

  I hang up the phone and throw my arms around Bo’s neck. “She likes me!” I yell. “She likes me and she’s sorry she was mean to me and she wants me to stay all night with her and—”

  “Keep it down, H.F,” Bo says, removing my arms from around him. “You can’t be yellin’ stuff like that in south Alabama. They’ll find us danglin’ from a tree somewhere!”

  I shut up. I can’t stop grinning, though.

  “Is she sendin’ the money?” Bo asks.

  “It’s true what they say about little gay boys: gold diggers, every one of you.” Bo don’t laugh, so I say, “She’s sendin’ it. It should be here in about an hour.”

  Wendy has sent 150 dollars, which makes me wonder if she was going down to the bank to rob it. The first thing we do is go to the Dairy Queen across the street and buy hamburgers and Cokes and ice cream cones. It’s the first food we’ve had all day, and it’s so good that I close my eyes when I take my first bite of burger so I can taste it better. When we’re done, I look at Bo and say, “Let’s go home.”