Good Buddy

by Dori Ann Dupré

  Buddy’s full smile – something that came out only once in a while – was huge. She could see his teeth. Buddy was one of those people who rarely showed happiness or joy in the form of a full tooth smile. But today, there was one. Molly ran toward him, and the floodgates opened. She cried months’ worth of suppressed tears as she jumped into his arms. He held her tightly, full of fear that if he let her go, the Judge might change his mind and make her leave their home.

  No words needed to be said between them. It was one of the happiest moments of her twelve years, even though she knew deep down inside that it wasn’t the end of it. At least it was a win. One small win. But in Molly’s mind, it was the most hope she felt within her entire frame since the day she learned that her mother went for a run and would never come back.

  Cate rubbed her back with the tips of her fingers and said gently, “Congratulations to you both. It’s okay to breathe now.” Molly’s head stayed firmly in the crook of Buddy’s neck until he put her down on the couch like she was still a small child.

  As Molly came out of her one recent happy memory and looked over at the ever-rising giggling and laughter going on between Kaitlin and the boys in the classroom, Mr. Davies opened the door and pushed a TV on a stand inside the classroom.

  “Class, please…everyone…go back to your seats.” He plugged in the TV and tuned the channel to the news. “Everyone, listen. There is something happening that you all need to know about.” His voice was desperate, almost like he was scared. “History. Now. You’re going to witness history today right on this television. A horrible history. Every day for the rest of your life, you will remember this day, this moment, this classroom, who’s sitting next to you and how you will feel.”

  The class went completely silent. Even though they were basically just a bunch of self-absorbed, drama obsessed, videogame playing Seventh graders, telling them that they would be a witness to history was an awfully big way to grab their full attention.

  “Planes have flown into the World Trade Center in New York. The news is saying that they believe it’s a terrorist attack,” he announced, almost like he was out of breath and entering into a panic. “There is another plane that’s flown into the Pentagon in Washington DC, and they’re saying that there’s another plane out there that no one has contact with…maybe…headed for the Capitol.”

  Molly sat back in the hard and uncomfortable chair that adorned public school classrooms across America. The students sat still and upright in their seats, quiet and serious, young minds fully engaged with their teacher.

  The news finally came up onto the screen with live video and split screens, and as Molly and her fellow classmates watched devastation and carnage and smoke and fast speaking pretty people on the news who seemed flummoxed and baffled, even though they had been trained to talk through tragedies, she knew that no matter what happened in her case with Buddy and her grandparents, the world would never be the same again.

  As she took all of this in, the sadness and magnitude of this day, Molly had a moment of clarity…the kind that usually only happens in the midst of a crisis. She knew that she needed to – against Buddy’s wishes and without his permission – tell her grandparents her own feelings about everything. She needed to confront them in her own way.

  Life was too hard and too short to be anything but honest with the people in your family and with the people who say they love you.

  Chapter 12

  September 12th, 2001 – March 2002

  Grassy Knolls

  Buddy stood at the bottom of the small grassy knoll, thinking about the JFK assassination. He wasn’t yet born when that national tragedy occurred; however, as a boy, he recalled an afternoon when he was very young, at work with his mother in Delta’s Hair Salon in Killeen. He sat on the floor in a corner coloring…inside the lines…of a large dog in a coloring book. Kenny bought him a fresh pack of crayons from the new drugstore near their house, and he was using a new brown one – its tip sharp and ready. He tried to stay within the lines but went outside a little bit along the dog’s floppy ear.

  All the ladies were talking about where they were when President Kennedy was shot by that crazy Communist with three names. They all kept referring to a “grassy knoll.” And, ever since that day, whenever he saw a grassy knoll, he thought about those ladies and their expressive stories…their own memories from Texas in 1963.

  “I was cuttin’ hair in my daddy’s place when it happened!” his mother’s best friend May Ellen shared with her friends that day. “My friend Martha asked me to cut the back of her hair so she could look like the girl on Mickey Mouse Club. My daddy had a tall stool in his office. So, I took Martha in there and started cutting her hair with a pair of scissors I found in his desk drawer. Then we could hear people in the hardware store gettin’ loud and the TV volume being turned up. Martha got up with only half her hair cut off, and we watched everything in shock. My daddy was wearing his white work apron and crying right there in the store! I don’t think he even cried when my mama died!”

  “I was in school sitting next to Bobby Walton. I went to the private school. Bobby was so dreamy, and I had the biggest crush on him. I don’t remember the class we were in at the time. In fact, I forgot everything else that was going on whenever I was around that boy. But not on that day! We were trying to sneak a piece of bubble gum in our mouths without getting caught when the school secretary came in the room to tell us about President Kennedy,” another hairdresser named Donna told everyone. “My most vivid memory was a quiet girl in the class who always kept to herself…well, she started bawling like a baby…like the President was kin to her!”

  “I was shopping with my mama. She let me skip school that day. We were trying to find a dress for a birthday party. I remember walking by the department store window, and there was a crowd building up inside of it near the television sales area. All the TVs were on and showing the same thing. Mama and I went inside and watched Walter Cronkite for a long time. My mama cried like a black person…what’s it they call that kind of crying?...wailing?” one of the customers shared.

  Buddy listened to the ladies that afternoon long ago and took in everything they said about President Kennedy’s assassination. It was something he had not been witness to, something that sounded like a cartoon on a Saturday morning involving talking animals instead or a scary storybook that he would only find at Gary’s house…because Gary’s mother was a little on the dark side. Someone so important getting shot in his car in broad daylight was unheard of back then, as far as he knew. And now, as he stood in front of yet another grassy knoll in Texas, he found himself a newly minted witness to a national tragedy of his own generation. He would always know where he was and what he was doing on the day the Twin Towers fell.

  This was the spot that the nice gentleman in the Veterans’ Cemetery office directed him. Buddy’s legs stretched out as he walked among the small gravesites, the white tooth shaped hunks of cement informing the living that they were in the dead’s garden now.

  Buddy always thought it was weird what humans do. Bury each other. Put each other under the ground to rot away. And then erect simple or elaborate monuments above it.

  Approaching a small flat marker, which also held a small American flag sticking out of the ground, he read:

  Kenneth Bellinger

  CPL

  US Army

  Vietnam

  JUL 26 1945

  SEP 2 1982

  A good man

  Apparently, a man who had tried to help Kenny with his drinking and his mental problems paid to have him buried in the Veterans’ Cemetery near Killeen after he died. He was the one who found Kenny on the floor – very much alive – back in 1975. The paramedics worked hard to save his life, but because he had gone too long without oxygen to his brain, Kenny remained in a vegetative state for years. No one ever claimed responsibility over his medical care, and the man felt
so badly about everything that he decided to look after Kenny in the hospital from time to time. The man died in 1994, but before he passed, he asked that a letter be given to the police detective who had been assigned to Kenny’s case.

  When all the files of Kenny’s cold case were reopened upon the revelations of Tammy Jo McVicar in that North Carolina courthouse conference room on a sunny day in 2001, that letter was unearthed at last. And Patchett the Hatchet handed it over to Buddy privately, out of his mother’s presence. It was dated September 11th, 1982.

  Dear Buddy,

  You didn’t know me real well, if you remember me at all, but I met you a couple times when you were just a little boy. I know by now you are almost grown, and I hope that wherever you are, you’re happy. Your stepfather Kenny would’ve wanted that for you and your mama too.

  I’m writing this letter because I want you to know about the man your mama shot. I’m sure she did it because he was going to hurt her or even you. And I’m sure he wanted her to shoot him, too. Your stepfather was suffering for a long time with a disease in his mind and he didn’t feel like there was much of a way out of his suffering except for alcohol.

  By the time that I found him on the floor, he was almost gone. After what I saw happen to him afterward that in the hospital, I probably should’ve left him there to die in that house. It would’ve been more humane.

  He’d done some bad things, I know. He hurt your mama something fierce and kept her living in fear for a long time. He put all his pain onto both of you, and he could’ve killed your mama, I’m sure. But I want you to know that something happened to Kenny that also happened to a lot of the boys who went over to Vietnam. It took a while for it to surface in Kenny after he got back, but he was slowly losing his mind and taking you and your mama down with him. And I know that was bad.

  Kenny was a good man before that started happening. He worked for me, and I could always rely on him. He worked hard, always did extra and was a good friend to everybody who met him. He loved fast cars and wanted so bad to afford a nice car for you one day when you were old enough to drive. He loved your mama so much that he talked about her all the time and how she made him feel. Only men who are truly in love do that. And he loved you too. Like you were his first born son. He said you both made him want to be a better man.

  I remember him telling me at the warehouse how he had met this dark haired beauty and her good little boy, who she called Buddy. He always called you his “Good Buddy.” He was so happy when he became a stepfather to you because you and your mama gave him something he always wanted – a family. He never had much of a family when he was a boy. And I know that you might not feel like this is true, but Kenny meant to do right by you and your mama for the rest of his life.

  I don’t know where it all went wrong for Kenny, but somewhere along the way, maybe around the time when your mama lost the baby, he started slipping away from all of us. He changed completely. I’ve seen it happen to so many good men here in this town after Vietnam, and lots of the boys ended up losing their families because of it. Some call it “shell shock” and the doctors are now calling it “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

  I don’t know about all the fancy names of things that doctors talk about, but I do know that I had suffered from some of that myself years ago – until I found the Lord who helped me heal.

  I’m telling you all this because I want you to know that your stepfather was a very sick man who needed the kind of help that only doctors or God could give him. But he never got it in time. He wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t evil. He wanted to do right. And he loved his family.

  I hope when you read this, you’ll be old enough to understand that life can be just a cruel and dark place at times, and no matter how much good you do and how hard you try and how much you love, sometimes a man is just broken and cannot find his way back to wholeness.

  When Kenny finally passed away, I wanted him buried proper because no family claimed him, and I felt that he deserved a resting place among his brothers. I paid for him to be buried at Fairfield Veterans Park with the rest of the men interred there, some who died on foreign soil, in defense of freedom. Kenny may have died in a hospital, a shell of the man he once was, but the best part of him – the part you and your mama saw for a while - died in Vietnam right along with your real father.

  I wish you and your mama well, Good Buddy.

  Sincerely,

  Hollis Foster

  Buddy folded the letter back into its years-long deep creases and stuffed it back into the envelope. Putting it into his pants pocket, he walked closer to Kenny’s gravestone, bent down, and allowed his fingers to trace over the etched stone. He sat down on the neatly manicured grass which covered his remains hidden deep down and underneath the ground.

  As hardened memories of those last few years of living with the likes of Kenny Bellinger and his anger and drinking and destruction began to take over Buddy’s emotions, he let himself feel it…really feel it…for the first time in his entire life. He allowed himself to weep over those lost years, years that were taken from him as a boy. And he wept over the years that Kenny lost, too, years he never had to get the help he so desperately needed, years he spent as a shadow, a wasted soul never to see the light of day again. As a boy, he grew to hate him for what he did to his family. As a man, he realized that life’s not always so black and white.

  “I’m sorry, Kenny,” he said softly at the cold white stone, which stared back at him in eternal silence. And then as if there was a wrinkle in the space beyond life and death, he swore he heard a faraway but familiar voice whisper, “That’s a ten-four, Good Buddy.”

  Scrapbooking

  Tammy Jo sat on Julie’s old double sized bed, which was primarily used for any out-of-town guests who happened to need a place to stay. It was raining outside, and she felt the quiet wrapped around her unlike most mornings since Julie’s passing. The rest of the world was watching the day after and the day after that of the September 11th attacks on all the news channels, and Tammy Jo just could not watch it anymore. She hadn’t slept in two days. It took until nighttime, but she finally got word that her niece Randi, who worked for a marketing company in Manhattan, was safe and had escaped the North Tower in time.

  Life was weighing heavily on her, and as she wiped another tear from her eye, she gazed down at the large box, which sat open on the floor with a pile of scrapbooks inside. Tammy Jo reached down and picked out her favorite one, a large book with a leather-bound cover and “Julie Marie McVicar” inscribed on the outside in gold italic print.

  When she was a young mother and Julie was just a toddler, a friend, who was also in the same boat, got her into the art of scrapbooking. At first, she found it tedious because she wasn’t the most creative woman in the world. But then, she found that she truly enjoyed it. Immensely. It calmed her down, made her incessant worrying more of a dull buzz in the background of her heart. She could live with it after cutting paper and pasting it into pretty pages of stories. The madness in her heart became less paralyzing.

  Scrapbooking made her take her time, slow down, work at a delicate pace, take in the details of her daughter as she grew up, notice the little things. Even when she started working and building her company when Julie was much older, it was scrapbooking that kept her grounded and sane. Some mothers read a lot of books or sewed or knitted or joined a gym for their space and peace. Tammy Jo would disappear into her box of photographs and scraps of paper and specialized photo tape that didn’t yellow over time.

  She’d take the photos of her daughter throughout the years and paste them onto nice pages, adorning them with colored paper and embellishments and funny captions, until she completed an entire book. She finished about four of them during Julie’s childhood and figured she’d continue doing them as Julie went through college and got married and had a career and her own children. Then she’d start scrapbooks for her grandchildren. But that
didn’t happen. Instead, the scrapbooks, just like her entire relationship with her daughter, simply stopped in time.

  As she flipped through the pages of Julie’s photographed childhood, her blond hair wild in the sunshine, her smile as bright as the future she could’ve had, her joy spreading throughout each captured moment, as she waded in a kiddie pool and ran through the sprinkler and chased her father around the backyard on a warm summer evening. She was a fun child, so full of life and laughter, and each photo brought back those early years of motherhood – the exact feelings and smells and thoughts that make up that crippling disease called “nostalgia.”

  Why did nostalgia only seem to include these bright and sunny times? Was it our brain’s way to temper the pain of the general suffering of real life in real time? Why did nostalgia insist on only going back to those years, the ones where motherhood appeared to be the happiest and most fulfilling? To a time when a mother didn’t feel like such a failure at everything she did for her child? When youth was not just with the young…but also remained within the hearts and minds of the mothers who held a child she loved more than anything…and that child loved her back the same?

  She was hard on Julie when she got older because she knew that girl could’ve had whatever kind of life she wanted if she applied herself. Then Julie did the dumbest thing, the stupidest thing, the very thing that young women have done throughout all of time…fall head over heels in love and then surrender herself to a man long before she ever got to do a damn thing for herself. Her entire identity. Lost in a man. Yet again. Progress for modern women ultimately went straight back into the toilet.

  And because she was the mother, she was the only one who would do anything or say something to her daughter about her poor choices. Fathers just go to work, come home…and then if they have enough energy…might say a few words. They only observe the hard things…and at a good distance. Fathers do their own thing, and let the mothers do all the dirty work. Fathers are only perfect in the eyes of their baby girls because they don’t ever have to utter a harsh word or speak the ugly truth. Fathers can disappear to have a beer with their golf buddies after being gone all day and then just swoop into the house with a rose or a ten-dollar bill and be the greatest parent who ever lived. If mothers did that, they’d be classified as “selfish” and “neglectful.”