“No problem,” Andy had said, turning the van around, “that’s the beauty of starting early. We’ve got plenty of time before we have to meet the others.” Mistake number two.
The third was my sneaking into the house to surprise Mom with one last kiss good-bye.
Kendy
Luke and Marcus sit at the bar, keeping me company while I dice the chicken Luke grilled after finishing with the hamburgers earlier.
“You can take your pick,” I say to Marcus. “Santa Fe salad or a Mexican chicken wrap—same ingredients, except for the flour shell.”
“I’m getting hungry,” he says. “I might have both.”
It seems like I’ve been cutting up chicken for thirty minutes. “Both won’t be a problem,” I assure him.
“I’m hungry too,” Luke says. “Where’s Maisey? Let’s get this show on the road.”
I’ve been wondering where she is myself. It’s almost seven, and Marcus came into the kitchen a few minutes ago looking a bit lost. Luke hops off his barstool and says he’ll run up and get her.
“Don’t bother, Luke. She’s not here,” Marcus says.
“Well, my goodness,” I say, snapping a lid on a plastic bowl stuffed with chicken, “where has she gone at this time of day?”
Marcus says he doesn’t know, which surprises me. The late hour does too—it’s past dinnertime. Of course, she didn’t make it for dinner Monday night. She may have moved dinners to the bottom of her priority list.
Luke looks concerned. “Should we be worried?” he asks.
“I don’t think so,” Marcus says. “I made her mad this afternoon, and she took off. Wanted some space, I guess.”
We look at him as though he’s confessed to armed robbery. We are that stunned. Marcus is so easygoing, we’ve come to believe he is incapable of conflict, certainly conflict that would result in Maisey’s taking off without him. I want to ask him what he could possibly have said or done to make her that mad—it is beyond imagining—but asking would be prying, and I have resolved I will not be a meddlesome mother-in-law. Besides, we all need a certain amount of privacy. I didn’t explain to Marcus why Luke and I disappeared earlier, did I?
“Maybe she’s at Jackie’s,” I say.
“I called,” Marcus says. “She’s not with her.”
“And you’ve called Maisey’s cell phone?”
“Several times, but it always goes to her voice mail.”
“You’re not worried, are you?” I ask.
“Not really,” Marcus says.
But he looks worried.
Luke takes his cell phone from his pocket, tries Maisey’s number, and gets her voice mail too. I can’t quite read his face. Is it worry or agitation I see there?
At seven we set the table and decide to start without Maisey. Luke says if she isn’t home when we’re finished, we’ll take two cars and canvass the area. He says he’d call the police except she hasn’t been missing twenty-four hours. We sort of laugh at that, but we aren’t really amused. I wonder if they remember that about this time last year a young woman went to fill up her car one evening, and though her car was found, she was never heard from again.
We eat in relative silence, and when we hear a car door slam and footsteps on the
porch, we look up with relief. Then Maisey appears in the doorway to the kitchen, dropping her keys into her purse.
“Good,” she says. “You started without me.”
“We waited until seven,” Luke says.
She sits down, grabs the tongs, and begins filling her plate with salad.
“What do you want to drink?” I say, getting up.
“I’m fine,” she says.
I retrieve her glass from the counter, pour off water from ice that has melted, and get a Coke out of the refrigerator. This is her drink of choice when she eats anything that remotely resembles Mexican. I pour it, wait for the foam to settle, and pour some more. No one has spoken since I got up.
When I set the glass in front of Maisey, she says, “I
said
I’m fine.”
All three of us look at her.
We have no idea what to say or do. I am actually interested to know who will find the wherewithal to speak next. And what will that person say?
It is Luke who dares to open his mouth. “Is there an explanation for such rudeness, Maisey? The appropriate and obvious response to someone who brings you a drink is ‘thank you.’ ”
“Thank you,” she says, staring at her plate, “thank you
so
much.”
The sarcasm in her voice is heart-stopping.
“Maisey,” Marcus says, “you’re mad at me. Don’t take it out on your mom.”
I take in my breath and steal a look at my daughter. I haven’t entirely processed the sarcasm, and now this. I wonder if Maisey has merely misplaced her mask of civility or has intentionally discarded it. I fear the latter. Seething—she is seething. Her anger and disgust are palpable.
Maisey glares at Marcus. “Oh
really
?”
Luke and I look at each other.
What in the world is going
on?
Of course no one is eating. The lettuce, grated cheese, and diced chicken heaped on our plates look ridiculous. The routine of life has been suspended.
Maisey pushes back her chair, stands up, and stomps toward the doorway.
“Maisey!” Luke shouts. “Come back here right now. I can’t imagine what’s wrong with you, young lady, but I do know you owe your mother an apology.”
I’m sure an apology is the least of our worries.
Something is terribly wrong, of that I’m certain, and I wish to help Maisey, but no matter how frantically I search my mother’s mind and heart for something I can say or do, I find nothing.
“You two,” she says, coming back to the table, looking at Marcus and then her father, “are
so
worried about Mother— dear, sweet Mother.”
She does not look at me. She is shaking.
“Here you sit, feeling so bad that I didn’t ask her to be on our stupid team this morning, or that I didn’t ask her to go with
my
friends to see their stupid dresses, or that I didn’t thank her for getting me a stupid Coke I didn’t want. I’m so bad, is that it?”
In this moment, we have been struck dumb.
Marcus stands up and finally utters a single word: “Maisey!”
“Leave me alone, Marcus. You seem to think my mother is a saint. Well, she isn’t!”
Luke is staring at Maisey like he’s never seen her before.
“Oh, Maisey,” I say, but she doesn’t seem to see me or hear me.
“Okay, everyone, listen up. It was a summer’s day nine years ago in this very kitchen that I found my precious mother pressed against my dad’s uncle, kissing him like a crazy woman. Mr. Impressive himself, wonderful Clayton Laswell, was all over my mother. It was disgusting. It made me sick, Dad! It
makes
me sick!”
Maisey looks at her dad, tears streaming down her face. “I’m so sorry, Daddy.”
Then she turns to look at me, furiously wiping the tears from her face. “I hate you, Mother. Do you hear me? I hate you, hate you, hate you! You
so
deserved to lose the baby! He probably wasn’t even Daddy’s!”
She runs from the kitchen, and this time Luke doesn’t stop her.
“I’m sorry,” Marcus says to Luke and me, following her.
“Aren’t we all,” Luke says to no one in particular before he gets up and walks outside.
Where is he going?
I cannot ask. I have just been stripped of the right to ask even an innocuous question. Perhaps he has gone to the outbuilding to work on any number of his tools: a tractor, a push mower, a weed eater, a chain saw, a tiller, a leaf blower.
“My dad’s a good fixer,” Sammy said to me a lifetime ago.
“My husband is too,” I said.
Or perhaps Luke didn’t make it that far. Maybe he’s merely sitting on the patio, trying to breathe in the fresh evening air, wishing for twilight to envelop him.
I sit here, my hand over my mouth, looking at the abandoned dinner table without really seeing it. After a minute, maybe two, I stand up to clear the table. The contents of the plates, I put in the trash; the salad left in the large serving bowl, I store in a sealed container; the ranch dressing bottle, I meticulously wash and place on a shelf in the refrigerator. Then I load the dishwasher, wipe the counters, clean the table and place the crystal bowl of lemons back in the middle of it just so, and deposit the damp towel on the sliding rack.
What to do now?
Maisey
“Go away!” I shout for the fourth time.
Marcus has been out there the fifteen minutes I’ve been lying here in the dark. I know he will knock again, call my name again. Oh, how I wish he would just go away and leave me in peace.
In peace? Now, that’s funny. There will be no peace. There has been no real peace for years.
And now what have I done?
It has made me sick, but I have kept Mother’s betrayal to myself for nine long years. I’ve told no one.
No one
. Why, why, why did I let those words come out of my mouth tonight, after all this time? If I could, I would take them back, just as I wanted to shove Marcus’s words back in his mouth this afternoon. How could I have hurt Dad that way? I have protected him all these years, and now, because I could not control myself, I have broken his heart.
I saw his face.
I saw shock on Marcus’s face, but I saw desolation on Dad’s. Maybe that is what I have feared all these years. Well, the frustration and rage finally erupted, and I don’t want to know what the landscape will look like now.
Oh, Clay, I hate you as much as I hate my mother.
Mother taught me never to use the word
hate
, and I have never uttered the merciless word—at least aloud—until tonight. Tonight the dam of restraint has broken, and I seem to be drowning in hate. I’m horrified to think that when I was a little girl, I sometimes felt guilty for loving Clay as much as I loved Dad. He and Rebecca didn’t seem like a great-uncle and a great-aunt; they seemed like grandparents, only younger. I thought they were so cool.
But Clay ended up completely ruining what should have been some of my happiest memories. I don’t want to remember learning to ride a bike, because I learned in his driveway. He ran behind me for hours, holding on to the back of my banana seat until I could quit wobbling and maintain a steady line. It was his garage I ran into when I foolishly forgot to brake; it was his bushes I fell into when his son, home from college, drove into the driveway and scared me to death; it was
the ointment from his medicine cabinet he smeared all over my scraped palms and knees. And it was he who somehow made the scratches disappear from my new bike too. I never knew how he did that.
I rode that bike until the summer before I started middle school. Clay insisted it was much too small and that a new bike would be a great graduation present. He took me to a bicycle shop to pick it out—bigger and fancier but the same cobalt blue—and I rode it until the day I found him with my mother.
As soon as I got home from camp I told Dad I was too old for a bike. He was surprised and said he was going to store it in the garage in case I changed my mind, but I told him to give it to some kid who didn’t have one, that I would not change my mind. He said he didn’t know a kid who didn’t have one, and I said we could take it to the Salvation Army. We donated things to them all the time.
I didn’t get on a bike again until last fall, when Marcus wanted us to ride a scenic trail with some of our friends. “I haven’t ridden for so long,” I said, hoping that would serve as an excuse. He came back with, “You know what they say—it’ll come back to you.” And it did. It turned out to be a beautiful day and a good way to spend it, and in my heart I blamed Clay for almost missing it.
Until Dad and Mother put in our pool, a gift for the whole family when I graduated from fifth grade into middle school, we spent as much time at Clay and Rebecca’s as we did at home. Not only did Clay teach me to swim in their pool, but he also taught me to fish in their pond. We have a picture of me when I was only five years old, holding up a three-pound bass I had just caught. I would remember that day clearly without the picture. I wanted to help fillet my whopper of a fish, but Clay said I’d have to wait for that experience. On another day Clay jumped into that pond after me when I fell off his fishing dock, and on another sunny afternoon, he obliterated a copperhead that crawled too near my tennis shoes while I stood reeling in a perch.
Deciding we should call it a day when he killed the copperhead, he collected all our gear and put me on his shoulders for a ride back to the house. He said I was light as a feather and added, as he did many days, “You’re the only baby we’ve got, you know.”
“I’m six; I’m not a baby,” I said.
“Comparatively speaking,” he said. And that I couldn’t argue—Clay’s boys were in college, and his daughter and Dad’s sister were college graduates, both married less than a year.
I was done with Clay the day I walked into that kitchen and saw him with Mother. Of course, if I wanted to keep what I saw to myself, I had to act pleasant around him, or at least decent. But at that point we didn’t see him and Rebecca all that often anyway. They had a grandchild by then and more on the way. I was in middle school and busy with my friends, we had our own pool, and the next year Mom started teaching in another district. It was manageable.
There’s another knock on the door, slightly louder than the previous taps. “Maisey,” Marcus says, “I’m not going away.”
“Please do.”
“No.”
“Just for a while.”
“No.”
I walk to the door, unlock it, and stand holding it. “Obviously, I’m not fit company.”
“That’s not required,” he says. He walks across the room and leans a pillow against the headboard and sits on the bed.
“Come here,” he says. “Let me hold you.”
I stand looking at him in the dim light shining into the room from the hallway. “I’m too tired.”
He laughs.
I smile.
“Well, truly, I am. I’m done in, too crazy to sit and be held. Will you go buy me some sleeping pills? If you really want to help, go buy me some sleeping pills. I need sleep.”
“I might, but come let me hold you first.”
He is stubborn. He calls it persistent.