In Ruth Lumley’s mind, Harold should’ve taken over the family business. He was older than Kenny by four years, and he had the education and business acumen to turn Calloustown Extermination into a thriving chain throughout the lower piedmont region of South Carolina. But Harold went two states away in order to get an associate’s degree in hospitality and tourism, received a job immediately at a resort down in Myrtle Beach, then turned his back on the entire industry in order to explore the burgeoning world of non-traditional herbs, roots, and panaceas amply supported by a number of medical personalities that provided free advertising daily on the talk shows — something both his ex-wife and mother always deigned snake oil salesman at best. He’d gotten into a conversation with the man who ended up hiring Harold away from Wild Sea Oats Resort and Spa, an entrepreneur of sorts named Bill Will who’d recently diversified from land development into what he explained to Harold as “making up for ruthlessness.” This was at a tucked-away local hangout called He Just Left. They had an all-you-can-eat Fish Sticks Night on Friday, and before Harold needed more tartar sauce he’d become convinced that his destiny involved echinacea, St. John’s wort, and garlic bulb tincture. It involved horny goat extract known as epimedium, though that word reminded him of “epicedi-um,” a word that had to do with funeral dirges that Harold learned in an English class taught by an overeager instructor who insisted on vocabulary memorization. Bill Will said he had a feeling, and hired Harold immediately, right there at the bar. Within a month Harold learned from his own wife Mollyanna that he’d become irresponsible, that he wasn’t thinking about the kids, that a place called Other Medicine didn’t exactly provide his children with unlimited swimming pool usage or free driving range privileges. He learned, too, that she’d been seeing her chiropractor on the sly for over a year.
Parked in her carport, Ruth checks her rearview mirror and says, “What now?”
Harold gets out and approaches his mother’s Lincoln. He bends down at the waist and counts all the dings — seventeen. After his mother closes her door and walks toward him he says, “You sure you should be driving?”
“Don’t make me drive, don’t make me drive! Law, whateber you do, don’ thow me out into duh got-damn macadam! — Hey, I was born on the highway, Harold. Mind your own business.” She reaches her face upward so he can kiss her. “I have never had a ticket or wreck in my life, for your information.”
She smells like alfalfa extract, Harold thinks. She smells like a combination of baby powder, alfalfa, and chicken livers. “Well something’s going on here. Maybe you’re going so slowly down the road that deer are banging into the back of your car.”
She says, “All right. Who died? Why’re you here?”
“You want to go inside?” Harold asks. “Let’s you and me go inside and talk about the community center.” He knows that if she doesn’t let him inside, then she’s trying to hide all of the photographs and cels. If she appears unconcerned about her latest décor, then he might need to worry.
“I’m on my way to the community center right now, goddamn it,” Ruth says. “Move your car, you’re blocking my way.”
“Wait a minute — if you’re going to the center, then why’d you come home and park your car in the carport? That doesn’t make much sense, Mom.”
“It’s a habit I have, that’s all. Don’t you have any goddamn habits that people don’t quite understand? Like having a perfectly great job and leaving it in the dust so your wife leaves you and your children now don’t have much of a college fund because you gave up a hundred K a year for thirty?”
Harold wonders about her blood pressure. He can’t quite tell if she’s red in the face, due to the foundation she wears that must’ve come straight out of a local embalmer’s stock overrun sale. He says, “I’ve already been inside. I’ve seen what you have on the walls. I got summoned here to see what’s going on over where you volunteer with the little migrant workers’ kids or whatever. But now I kind of want to know what’s happened to the kitchen and den walls.”
The mail deliverer pulls in behind Harold’s car and, even though it’s obvious that his appearance is known, he honks his horn. Through the open window he yells, “Hey there, Ms. Lumley, I got you another delivery won’t fit in the box without bending it.” He holds out three flat cardboard boxes.
“Just set them down there, Elwin,” Ruth says.
“On the driveway?”
“Oh, son of a bitch,” Ruth says, stomping toward the mailman. “Here. Do I need to sign anything?”
“No, ma’am. That’s it.”
“Well make sure you’re in reverse this time so you don’t bang into my car again. Or I guess my son’s car. Hell, keep it in drive and ram into his back bumper all you want.”
Harold says to Elwin, “Hey, Mr. Patterson.”
Elwin nods twice, grimaces, and backs out onto the road. Ruth Lumley’s at the door, trying to fish keys out of her pocketbook and get inside so — Harold feels certain — she can lock him out. He runs up to her just as she’s closing the door, gets his hand in, and pulls it back right before she slams his fingers in the jamb. “Go see your brother. Go visit your brother. There’s a rat problem all around here and he could probably use some help.”
“Let me in,” Harold says. He bangs on the door, then presses the buzzer and holds it. Harold thinks, “I should let the air out of her tires.” He thinks, “I can take the battery out of her car and that’ll keep her immobile for a while.” He begins laughing. “Come on, Mom, let me in. I’m having flashbacks of growing up and Dad wouldn’t let me in the house until I hosed out the back of his truck.”
Ruth Lumley doesn’t respond at first. Harold says, “Well, fuck it then,” and goes back to his car. She’ll have to come out of there at some point, he thinks, driving down to Worm’s, a place he’d not entered since high school. A couple beers, he thinks, and I’ll come back when she’s outside practicing her baton, or whatever she does.
He doesn’t hear her yell at the closed door, “They make me remember happier times. Is there anything wrong with happier times?” He doesn’t hear her tear open an envelope and exclaim, “Lamb Chop!”
When he enters the bar, Harold finds Kenny sitting on the first stool. The décor’s not changed since about the time beer companies converted from pull-tabs to flip-tops. Half-naked women on auto parts calendars adorn the walls. There’s a bumper pool table wedged uselessly in a corner, a jukebox that might offer the most selections of Conway Twitty, Ferlin Husky, and Jerry Lee Lewis on the entire Eastern seaboard. “I figured you’d be here sooner or later,” Kenny says.
They do not hug. Worm, whose father went by Worm, says, “See no time long.” He points to Kenny and shrugs his shoulders to Harold.
Kenny says, “That’s enough of that. Worm’s trying to break some kind of record for speaking everything backwards. He wants to be in that book.”
Harold says, “Coldest whatever’s me give,” but it takes him a minute to say it in order.
“To get back to your question, yes, I know all about Mom’s little hobby,” Kenny says.
Harold says, “They never have invented a better-smelling cockroach spray? Man, you reek of that stuff. It’s going to get in your pores, and the next thing you know you’ll be happy you got a brother who knows a thing or three about detoxification remedies.” He says, “I wouldn’t call it ‘little’ hobby, by the way. She must have a hundred framed photos on her walls. It’s kind of creepy. It would make a nice veterinarian’s office, though.”
Worm opens three Tall Boys and sets them on the bar, two in front of Harold and one more for Kenny. He says, “Here.”