Chapter 10
My mother isn’t one of those women who can use one product for blush and lipstick and eyeshadow. She isn’t even one of those women who can use one moisturizer. She’s not a make-do kind of person. She’s more the make doo-doo kind of person, and she is doing just that.
“How can he expect me to get by without my foot cream?” she asks me about my father, who has had about all he can take of my mother’s bad behavior and her talking to him through me.
“I kind of have my hands full,” I tell her, thinking I need to have a heart to heart with both my older children and spend a little time with my little one.
“Well,” she says with a sigh, turning her pack of cigarettes over and over on the table, “don’t let me bother you. But, if it’s not too much trouble, could you possibly tell your father that I’d like to go home now? That way, dear, I can be out of your hair as soon as he’s ready and you won’t have to worry about us anymore. Since your hands are so full, and all.”
I explain that they don’t have to go (though nothing would please me more), and somehow, amazingly, she’s got me pleading with them to stay when Jesse comes in the door and rushes downstairs.
“Hold that thought,” I tell my mother as I head for the steps to follow him and I hear her indignant rush of breath as I go.
In the basement Jesse is by the cabinet where his father kept–and left–his tools. “You get Danny’s bike fixed?” I ask him.
“Uh huh,” he says, without looking at me.
“Unusual to need a phillips head screwdriver for a bike,” I say casually, trying not to be accusatory. I’m saving that for where Dana was on Halloween night between 9:50 and 10.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Mom,” he says, and he turns to me with glistening eyes.
“Why, baby?” I ask, and I reach out for him but he resists my embrace. “You know you can tell me anything, don’t you?”
Stiffly, he tells me he isn’t keeping anything from me. And then he melts against my body and lets me hug him almost as tightly as he’s hugging me.
“What is it, Jess?” I ask him. “What’s got you tied up in knots?”
“I just love you, Mom, that’s all,” he says into my shirt.
“I love you, too,” I say. “I wish you’d let me help you.”
He sniffs and rubs his nose with his sleeve and I resist telling him that it’s gross because a) he’s in pain and b)soon enough he will be too old to hold and comfort and wipe his nose. Maybe he is already.
I remind him I’m here, I’m always here, and arm in arm we come up the stairs. He offers to take Maggie May for a walk and take Lys with him, and I accept. Grandpa offers to tag along and I signal him that I don’t want my mother around for the next few minutes.
“Juney, I’ll go buy you some foot cream. You like the one in the tub, right?” he says, knowing full well that she will go with him to be sure he gets the one she wants, and who knows what else while they’re at the mall.
She tells him he always gets her the wrong thing, and doesn’t he notice anything? I don’t know who is playing who, but they both are out the door and finally it’s just me and Dana in the house alone.
“So where were you on Halloween?” I ask her as I lounge against her door frame trying to look merely curious.
“What do you mean?” she says. I’d have bet money on her answer, and I’d have won.
“I don’t want to do this in front of your grandparents,” I tell her. “Or your brother and sister. It’s cold out and Lys will want to come in in a few minutes. So where were you?”
“I told you,” she says. “I was out trick or treating with a bunch of kids and we all got soaked and we went back to the Lyons’ house and watched HBO.”
“And got out of your wet things?” I ask, prompting her.
“Well, we were really wet,” she says.
“And who was there when you were getting out of your wet things?” I ask.
She can’t quite look me in the eye. I start the list, “Kristen, and Kimmie, and. . .”
She names a few other girls.
“And Kristen went into the den, along with Kimmie, and the other girls, and then it was just you and. . .?” I say.
Dana turns three shades of red.
“And how naked did you get?” I ask, leaving who she was seen by for the moment.
She says she just took off her wet jeans.
“And he?” I ask, and my heart is in my throat and I’m trying to keep my breathing even.
“He didn’t take off anything,” she says.
“But you let him see you,” I say.
“It’s no big deal,” she tells me. I’m trying to remember the last time she let me see her naked, and I can’t.
“Oh, it’s a big deal,” I say.
She looks up at me with huge eyes that are awash in tears.
“I know,” she says, and she grabs a pillow and hugs it to her body.
And I wonder, as I have at every stage of my children’s lives, am I really up to this?
The front door slams open against the hallway wall. “Maggie’s loose!” Jesse yells from downstairs. “She saw that new little dog the Haitkins have and she took off and I couldn’t get her. You have to come.”
I look down into the hallway. “Where’s Lys?”
Jesse’s jaw drops and he looks out the storm door. “She was right behind me,” he says.
