'Mary Lou?'
She shook her head and tears came to her eyes.
'Mary Lou,' Stephen repeated, but she waved him off, the ridiculous charm bracelet jingling against her wrist. 'Why are you still wearing that?' he asked, obviously resigned to what her answer would be.
'A memento,' she said, sliding the bracelet around her wrist.
'They're supposed to be lucky,' he said, glancing back at the cross, stroking the soft wood again.
'Supposedly,' she said. The worst news of her life had come on the day she had been given the trinket, and Mary Lou could not help but shiver at the evil that discharged from the thing like poisonous gas.
Stephen stared at his hand on the cross, his displeasure evident. The bracelet, like so many things between them, was a secret. Stephen had told the church he was taking a sabbatical to minister to the poor in the Blue Ridge Mountains when in fact he had joined his brother in Las Vegas for a convention of the Greater West Coast Waste Management Association.
That his brother was a garbage man was not something that Stephen liked to brag about – by different accounts the brother was a neurosurgeon, a banker, a missionary – but Mary Lou had been pleased enough when Stephen had brought back the charm bracelet for her. He'd said that he had used all his blackjack winnings to buy it especially for Mary Lou. The bracelet had been displayed in one of the shop windows at the Venetian and he had passed by and instantly thought of her. It was only later that she had noticed the flaws: at some point, the bracelet had been broken and inexpertly welded back together; some of the charms had sharp points that tore her clothes. The snake got caught on her sleeve all the time and the tiny cross's Jesus was horrible to witness, His pain so evident in his features that Mary Lou could not stand to look at it.
Despite all of this, she had taken to wearing it at night and her dreams when she managed to sleep were filled with horrible visions: a bear traversing the darkness in search of human prey; a grown man slit stem to stern; severed hands reaching out as if to strangle her in her sleep. Even when she woke screaming, the skeleton key caught in her hair as if to unlock some horrible secret in her brain, Mary Lou had refused to remove the bracelet.
As if knowing all of this, Stephen suggested, 'Maybe you shouldn't wear it.'
'Why?' she asked, knowing he would not have an answer. It was a reminder; her own Scarlet Letter.
Stephen stood there uncertain, then finally left her with a slight bow, as if he was conceding this round. She listened as his footsteps receded, first a dull thud against the carpeted aisle, then a sharp clicking on the tiles in the foyer, and he was gone. Stephen was better at exiting than most men.
Brian, Mary Lou's ex-husband, had stuck around about ten years too long. She had known for some time that he was cheating on her, but her Uncle Buell's words about a divorced woman still hung heavy on her shoulders. So, she had left it to Brian to do the leaving, and Brian had hated her for that, as had their son. Both men had come to see Mary Lou as weak, a punching bag who would take any amount of abuse but still hang in there, waiting for more.
Pud was worse. Not that she thought of her teenage son as 'Pud'. She had named him William when he was born, and insisted most of his life that it not be shortened to anything crude like Willy or Bill. Pud was the name William had given himself two years ago, around the time puberty had hit and he had started listening to rap music and wearing his pants so that the crack of his ass showed when he bent over. She had watched her darling son change into an unknown creature, a pseudo piccaninny with his blond hair tightly braided in corn rows and his clothes hanging off his body like a wet paper bag on a stick. His language changed, so that she could not understand a word he said, and he sang along to that awful music, saying 'nigga' this and 'nigga' that, a word Mary Lou had never used round him and was ashamed to hear coming from his mouth. At the same time, William could not stand black people, and went out of his way to make derogatory comments about them, even when Mary Lou had people from the church over.
Though she loved her son, the smile William had given Mary Lou when he told her that from now on he would only answer to 'Pud' made her want to slap him for the first time in her life. That mischievous set to his lips as he said the word, as if Mary Lou was an idiot and did not know that 'pulling your pud' was slang for male masturbation. She had been a substitute teacher for the first few years of William's life. She had heard worse than pud in the teacher's lounge.
Her biggest problem with William was his anger, though she had no idea what he had to be angry about. Brian spoiled him, even as he refused to be seen in public with the boy. Anything his son wanted, he got. Two-hundred-dollar tennis shoes and an eighty-dollar skateboard (no helmet) that William had tried once and never again were just a few of the things Brian used to justify paying less child support to Mary Lou. They were constantly arguing over this, with Brian screaming and Mary Lou crying because her anger was such a tight knot inside her that it could only squeeze out tears. Child support was not the only thing Brian was supposed to pay. By court order, he was responsible for half of the upkeep of the house. Still the roof leaked when it rained and there were not enough buckets in the world to catch the water. No matter how much Mary Lou cleaned, mildew grew on the cabinets in the kitchen and walking into the house was like walking across a loaf of moulded bread. Thank God Pud had his two-hundred-dollar tennis shoes to keep his feet from having to touch the ground.
The sound of hammering came from outside the chapel, and Mary Lou slowly moved to the edge of the pew so that she could stand. The bracelet clunked against the armrest, and she glanced around before grinding the edge of the praying angel into the soft wood until it bit out a small gouge. Cramps seized her belly as she tried to rise, and Mary Lou thought for the first time about going to the doctor. A quick calculation of the remaining money in her chequebook convinced her that was not a possibility, even if she sent William to his father's to eat.
She gritted her teeth as she pushed herself up, groaning from the movement. Sweat dripped down her back, and she tried to think about something cool to counteract the sensation. What came to mind was the church retreat she went on last Christmas, and how her life had been unalterably damaged by what had happened there.
Gatlinburg, Tennessee, was about as close as the South came to having a ski resort, even if they still had to blow fake snow on to the mountains most days just so people could slide down on their skis. Brian had agreed to take William for a week, a miracle in itself, and Mary Lou had managed to get the church to help pay some of the cost in exchange for extra help with the youth group.
She had gone to Gatlinburg with no illusions that she would ski. Mary Lou had never been athletic. She was a large woman who did not embrace the outdoors unless it was on a beach somewhere with a pina colada close by and a trashy book. What she had envisioned for herself was sitting in front of a roaring fire, her feet propped up as she read a romance where the women were strong and the men were worshipful. In the evenings, there would be dinners with various members of the congregation, then some socializing. The event was billed as a religious retreat for singles. As a recent single, Mary Lou qualified for this, but she had not gone with the intention of meeting anyone. There were far too many complications in her life without putting another person in the picture.