Monica looked at me for about one second and picked up her fork as if she were going to scoop up some hummus. She said, “Why the hell can’t you think up something like this so we can move into a nice subdivision and cook steaks out when we want? Goddamn. This isn’t working. This here?” She waggled the fork between us, back and forth. She held her eyebrows high. “It isn’t working, Clewis.”
Monica wasn’t accustomed to drinking either.
I went outside to smoke, and Lee Wayne followed me. Listen, I don’t think they had any of this planned. You’d think Monica called up her brother, said, “I’m going to leave Clewis, and I want you over here in case he gets violent,” and had her bags all packed to take off. As far as I could tell — I went back and looked at phone records and never saw a number that was Lee Wayne’s, or the county jail down where he lived — Monica’s epiphany and actions were spontaneous. “Epiphany” is a word we do use down at the city shop, seeing as there’s a guy working for me named LeCrank who has a girlfriend named Epiphany who’s always causing him to show up late for work.
I took my beer outside. The neighbors sat at two picnic tables, all of them sitting on the same side, staring at their own vinyl siding, their backs to my yard. I said to Lee Wayne, “What the hell just happened in there?”
He stretched backward, which caused his T-shirt to rise, which exposed a tattoo that surrounded his navel. It was that famous “Born to Lose” statement, and his belly button doubled as the “O” in “Born.” He said to me, “I thought maybe this was one of those Candid Camera deals. One of those ‘You’ve been punked’ things, you know. They let us watch TV in prison, pretty much anytime we wanted. We could watch TV, but we couldn’t smoke. If you ask me, it’s healthier to smoke than to watch what they got on TV these days.”
One of the neighbors stood from the picnic table, walked to a boom box, and turned up the volume. They listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Imagine that. They listened to that song that goes, “Ooh that smell/Can’t you smell that smell.” I guess it was all a joke to them, how we’d been yelling shit over there about their grilling earlier.
“We couldn’t listen to that band in prison either. They got a song about a Saturday night special, you know, and I guess the higher-ups thought it would get all of us to thinking.”
I looked toward the sliding-glass door and saw Monica pulling a suitcase behind her. “What could y’all listen to?”
“I know every lyric to Johnny Mathis,” Lee Wayne said. He began singing “Chances Are,” but in a rockabilly kind of way. He stopped after the “I’m in love with you” part and said, “Monica Marie’s always been a little bit of a hothead. I haven’t been the best brother when it comes to staying in touch, so I don’t know all the ins and outs of y’all’s matrimony. Has she been threatening to leave?”
I shook my head. I said, “I guess I better go back inside and talk to her about this.” I stomped on my cigarette and didn’t pick it up. I said, “Give me a couple minutes. Hey, if you want, you can go over there and pick some of those habaneros.” I pointed. “If they’re mostly orange, and about the size of a modern human testicle, then they’re ready to be picked.”
Monica had filled six boxes and that one suitcase that rolled on wheels. She didn’t pack up things that we’d gotten for our wedding — I’ll give her that — like the lava lamp, the matching set of Atlanta Braves shot glasses, the George Foreman grill, a great painting of Young Elvis on velvet, the microwave cookbooks. No, she only packed up her clothes, some school supplies, scrapbooks, the ashtrays she’d bought herself, and a set of knives she’d received for being Teacher of the Year at Calloustown Elementary.
Monica said, “I’m sorry, Clewis. I know this probably seems like a shock to you. And I didn’t mean it to happen like this. Maybe I’m just embarrassed that you’re embarrassed to have a brother-in-law like Lee Wayne.”
“I like Lee Wayne,” I said. “I’ve always liked Lee Wayne. Who doesn’t like Lee Wayne? He’s one of those people you can’t hate, no matter what he does.”
“I can’t have him living with us,” she said. “It won’t be good for me, and it won’t be good for you. What I’m saying is, it’ll be bad.”
Here’s that thing I do all the time that isn’t particularly beneficiaclass="underline" I began considering what Monica’s kindergartners would be like twelve years hence, when they could only come up with monosyllabic arguments. I thought of a documentary film I could make that involved showing Monica saying “Good” and “Bad” to her students over and over, then following their lives, maybe splicing some Frankenstein in between.
I said, “Who invited him to stay with us until he got his life straightened out? I didn’t. Give me a break, Monica. Come on.”
She said, “Well it must have been for a reason. That’s all I can say. It must’ve been the way things were meant to work out. I’m betting that things will change. I’ll call you up.”
And then she left, driving away in her Ford Taurus that she had use of for twelve months, what with the Teacher of the Year award.
I am not too proud to say that I sat down at the dining-room table, in front of three half-empty plates of fish taco remains, and nearly openly wept. Nearly wept. Nearly caught myself thinking about how I’d been a bad husband, et cetera. But I got all sidetracked thinking of how I should aim my handheld toward the neighbors for a few hours each night and call the documentary something like They Turn Their Backs, or Someone Go Get the Paper Towels.
“Everyone’s always talking about hiding their money down in one of those Bermuda or Switzerland bank accounts,” Lee Wayne came in the sliding-glass door saying. “Big waste of time when it comes to doing small time incarcerated, you know what I mean?”
I said, “Give me a minute, man.” It wasn’t, again, like I was crying. I needed to write down some ideas on the closest thing I could find, which meant one of the paper plates in front of me.
He dropped a dozen habaneros down on the table. “Man, I thought about hiding my money with my sister. Glad I didn’t do that. No telling where it would be now. You kind of owe me, now that I think about it. If I’d’ve hid my money with Monica, she’d’ve left here a long time ago.”
I thought about punching Lee Wayne, but he was bigger than me and there’s no telling what kinds of mixed martial arts maneuvers he learned in the county jail. I said, “There’s another twelve-pack in the refrigerator. She didn’t take the refrigerator.”
Lee Wayne didn’t walk into the kitchen. He stood upright, with his chest poked out. “I need to go get my bags out of the car,” he said.
I didn’t respond.
“Am I staying in the guest room?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You want to pitch some pennies up against the fireplace, just for fun?”
My crew needed to finish planting day lilies the next day, near what would become a walking path that went straight through the middle of town. According to city council, we would be paving over a set of railroad tracks presently — as soon as CSX freight trains quit coming through — for that “Rails to Trails” program that all the renovating towns had done already, after talking high and mighty about revitalization and quality of living so that Time and Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report could tell retirees where to retire and the health-conscious young where to relocate if they subscribed to a cardiovascular lifestyle.
What else could I say but, “You want a job, Lee Wayne? Listen, you come work for me. We’ll get you all the pennies you want, and you do what you know what to do, and we’ll split the profits. I don’t have it all worked out in my mind yet, but I will. Can you pretend to run a leaf blower, or an edger?”