“I didn’t let them do anyth—,” I started.
“You did, Michael. You did. You didn’t tell either of them that you weren’t going to act as some little go-between for them to manipulate,” she said, and walked away a few steps. I thought maybe she was going to her car. I wondered what I would do if she did go get in it; stay or go.
“God, why do I always feel like the token gay on one of those reality shows?” she asked, with her back turned.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She half turned, already reaching for a cigarette. I wondered how many packs a day she smoked. “It seems like,” she said, smacking the pack against her wrist three times, “no matter where I go, or what I do, it’s always some battle about me and my sexuality. And it’s just—,” she slid the pack out of the clear plastic, “just not like that for Diane. No one in her life even makes it an issue,” she pulled the little plastic tabs open, and removed one of the white cylinders. She placed on between her lips, “No one ever asks her to go to church, or when she’s gonna’ settle down with some nice boy—.” She lit the end of it.
“Oh,” I said, “mom corner you again?”
She inhaled, held it, exhaled, all looking off at some point beyond the houses. “Dad,” she said. I nodded. “You lucked out; they’ll let you go off for two years and not excommunicate you.”
“Excommunicate?” I asked
“Yeah, like when a bishop or someone in the Catholic—,” she started.
“I know what it means,” I said, and the calm in my voice surprised me, “what makes you think that they would kick you out or whatever if you stopped coming around for a little bit?”
She inhaled, exhaled, looked at a cloud passing overhead, then back at me, “They’re old, Michael. Katy is gone, you’re not ever here; who’s going to take care of them?” she said. I don’t know why, but it felt like she was dodging my question. She went on smoking, and neither of us said anything for a little while.
Mom’s perfume hung heavy in the car. Staring at her white hair from behind, it seemed like a rock; dry and dull on the surface. She sprayed it into place so thick that when she moved, it didn’t. Her reflection in the passenger side window had a tiny little smile. I knew it wasn’t real. It seemed like she was practicing. We all knew the questions would come, and we all knew that she’d be the one to field them.
My father drove, of course. That meant the entire way there I nearly got whiplash from his continuous speed up/brake suddenly approach to keeping the speed limit. Mom had put him in a white button down shirt, and the collar was too tight. I could imagine the little red marks under there. Later, when he took it off, it would look like someone had tried to hang him. His face was blank. His eyes matched.
My mother had insisted on dressing me. Upstairs, I found she’d already gone through my suitcase and pulled out clothes for me. They were laid on the bed, the shirt even tucked into the pants, and the tie knotted around the empty collar. My mother’s definition of me was flat on the bed. While I stood there looking at it, feeling very weird, she walked by the door and said “Don’t forget to polish your shoes, dear.” For a split second, I was twelve again.
The ride was quiet. My parents stopped listening to the radio a long time ago. “No big band jazz stations anymore,” and “talk radio is just as full of obscenity as the pop stations,” my father said. I heard the wind move around the car the whole time.
When we pulled up in front of the church, I tried not to gasp. The last time I’d come in town, we hadn’t gone. In fact, I hadn’t seen the building in a while. It was falling apart. I could see the places on the roof where they’d patched, the job was so bad. One of the windows was covered over in brown paper bag duct taped to the frame. The antenna lay on its side at the crest of the building’s roof, and seemed ready to slide at the first major gust of wind.
Five other cars were in the parking lot; all of them old, rectangular, like mom’s. Dad pulled the car into a space and I swear I heard mom hold her breath for a second, then let it out. The half-smile never moved.
As soon as I got out of the car, I noticed a bee hovering around the radio antenna. I wondered how long it had been there; had the little guy followed us all the way from the house? It seemed unlikely. It seemed, too, that I was wondering about things a lot more than just yesterday. I thought about how, at some point, I was going to have to survive a plane ride home. It didn’t make me very happy.
“Susannah?” an old-woman voice called. I snapped back to find a turtle coming toward my mother. A huge old woman with a little metal cane was hobbling in our direction. She had shock white hair, and I could tell she’d recently had it styled, though it was dead. I tried not to think about pine trees a week after Christmas.
“Mrs. Dodgeson,” mom said, turning to me, “come here and say hello to Mrs. Dodgeson, Mikey.” I walked just behind her. My father was just behind me. The old woman reached us, and I was almost knocked over by her perfume. Her eyes seemed to thin out and stretch along the edges through her thick glasses.
“How are you today, Susannah dear?” Mrs. Dodgeson said. She kept glancing at me with these tiny little jerks of her eyeballs. I tried not to think of someone playing poker.
“Just fine, Enola. This,” mom said and gestured toward me, her little half smile ironed on, “is Mikey. He’s in town with us for a few days.”
“Mikey?” she said, her hand coming up and laying on my arm, “gracious. He does work in mysterious ways. Lord Jesus, but he does work in mysterious ways. Why, I haven’t seen you since you were yea high,” she said, and made a gesture with the hand that had been on my arm. She seemed relieved to be able to look at me, finally. I didn’t follow her gesture. I knew where she remembered me from. Like most old people, though, she assumed I couldn’t remember anything. “Why, you were even small for your age. Do you remember me, dear?” It seemed like she’d picked up this habit in her old age of exhaling on certain key words. It made them sort of shimmer, but like new paint over rotten boards.
“Yeah,” I said, “I do.” Already I didn’t like her, because I didn’t like that she’d made me feel any of this. “You worked in the cafeteria at school.”
“Oh, bless the children. I sure did. My my my my my but look at how you’ve grown,” she said. The ‘at’ she said was really close to the ‘look’, so it sounded like “lookit.” I tried not to think about the Sheriff.
“How are you today?” I asked. Today was making me feel smaller and smaller. I had to keep checking myself to make sure I wasn’t growing younger.
“Well, the hip acts up whenever the weather gets cold like this, you know,” she said and my mother made a sound, and cocked her head to the right. “And the left foot, you know. I may not make it through the winter with it still attached, they say. Thy will be done, though, I say. It comes and it goes, dear, it comes and it goes,” as if to illustrate this, she then began hocking up phlegm. I had to stop myself from grimacing. Even back in third grade, when we’d all sort of figured out about spitting, none of us had ever made sounds like that.