​FOURTEEN

Elena

Secrets are no longer secrets, except for mine, of course.

Mitch comes clean, but I hate saying it like that because when he tells me about Sheila, I feel like I've taken a mud bath.

He finds me out on the patio, and I close my eyes when I hear his sound. I think, Go. Please just go, but he scrapes the empty metal chair across the concrete and sits in it. Looks at me. There's no whiskey because we've already run out.

“What's she like?” I ask. There's a Mai Tai in my system—the only alcohol I've had all day—but that's been quickly absorbed, slurped up by my blood, and now my shaky hands are taunting me.

“Not you.”

“No duh.” Blonde, just some fling, he tells me. I look up, and he's crying. The traitor has the audacity to cry.

“Oh, yes, this must be so incredibly painful for you.” The ice in my voice chills even me. It's strange how quiet we are when usually we go at it so hard, our neighbor pokes a glaucomic eye through her blinds.

“Elena.” That's all he says. My father left when I was seven. Sela's age. My father left for a woman he met two counties over while taking our steer to market. Her name was Angela, burnt red hair, painted nails to match. She looked like one of the women in my brothers' dirty mags. He brought her over to meet us when he knew our mama would be cleaning over at St. Ann’s, and I was actually grateful he did something so perverted like that. Teach the “we” master a lesson.

But then it was time to go after he sucked down one of the beers he brought for my brothers, and after Angela glossed my cheek with her sticky red lips, it was time for him to say goodbye. He looked good. Handsome. Happy. Everything that comes from leaving the ones that grasp your limbs and weigh you down.

“Elena,” he had said, brushing my hair with his hand. And then he was gone.

I hear whimpering, and it's my husband. He reaches for my hand, but I smack it like one of the mosquitoes circling our heads.

“Don't be such a faggot,” I say.

#

I save up the money I get from Hattie's in an old jar of Jiffy peanut butter that I keep in the empty spare tire well in the Grand Am. I take it out for oil changes or on the off chance that Mitch fills up my car, which he hardly ever does. He knows the Grand Am is an extension of me, and you just don't touch the extension.

I think about Mitch now as I'm dressing the mannequins on the display near the front of Hattie's. Our weekend was a pretty rough one as far as actually associating with one another goes. He left, in fact. Said he was going to stay at a hotel which I know is code for “meet with my side piece.” But I didn't care. I didn't want to look at his face, and frankly, I was afraid of what I'd do to him in his sleep.

“Thinking deep thoughts, huh?” Tanisha says, dumping another box of warped winter coats at my feet. That's another thing about Hattie's, nothing is ever in season, so I'm left to dress a series of blank-eyed dolls in soiled jackets that smell slightly better than a fat man's armpit.

“Something like that. Mitch left.” I say it because I need to say it. Pam and Jimmy know it’s all hit the fan, but I can't quite bring myself to talk to them about it. And as much as Jesus may have an opinion on the matter, I really don't want to know what it is.

Sela knows, too. Sela's bladder also knows because it kept me up half the night, scrubbing sheets in our coffin of a laundry room. 

“Ain't that something,” Tanisha says and squats down, pretending to rifle through the box because Hattie is sharking through the snow boots at the back of the store, asking customers if she can show them anything.

Tanisha's decked out in her gold lamé pants, her “fancy pants” that she wore the day I applied to work at Hattie's. I was wondering why on God's green earth Hattie hired someone who looked louder than a siren, but Tanisha knows how to sell. And besides, most of the clientele are Tanisha look-alikes anyways.

“Yup. I'm leaving him.”

When Tanisha opens her mouth I see the tiny glints of gold that match her pants.

“Careful now,” she says. “I'm thinking maybe we go with the purple windbreaker for the middle one,” she adds for the sake of two-ton Tammy who has a “Southern, Loud and Proud” t-shirt on and is harboring close to our right. When she moves away Tanisha hisses, “The kids. The kids feel it most.” And I know that. I've got Barbie sheets mildewing in my washer as proof.

“What do I do then?” I say. “Just Another Manic Monday” is leaking down the walls, and I think of that word, “leak.” “The whole world's leaking,” I say to him sometimes, and for us, that's a good thing. It means money. And I think of my jar of peanut butter, my measly lump of bills in it and my stupid TV in the storage unit that started to depreciate the moment I bought it. I can't raise Sela all alone.

“You guys need time for yourselves. That's what I do when things get heated with me and Jonesy. There's an old woman who lives on the floor below us, and I send Tasia down there to count pieces of butterscotch or whatever the heck they do while we work things out. Helps,” she says. I'm not so sure seeing that Tanisha comes off as the type of girlfriend you get a restraining order against, but I nod. She might be right, and considering she's the one doing this parenting thing solo, I figure she doesn't have the time to be wrong.

After work and after I start to smell faintly of old cheese, I grab my purse and leave my “Ask Me How I Can Help?” tag in my locker in the backroom. I spot my Mom mug with its missing “M,” and consider how a Dr. Pepper and whiskey would change my life in the most amazing way. But I fight the tug by calling the one person who screws up my life harder than any drug.  My mother.

#

Keeping my eyes on the road ain't easy with the devil in my ear. 

“Well, I'll b—”

“Save it,” I say. “Tell me about Daddy.” I can hear her breathing as I whip down Pyle Drive and stop short at a light that turns red way too fast. Pain shoots down the back of my neck, but it it's nothing compared to the way I feel when she speaks. 

“What's there to say when nobody loves you?” Ugh, her voice. Nails on the chalkboard of my life. It's at least three octaves higher than most women's, and she does this thing where she whispers at the end. Like she doesn't want me to know what she's really saying. I wave my middle finger around my head at the car in front of me that's still idling even as the light turns green, but that doesn't even make me feel better.

“He loved you. You drove him away,” I say. It was pathetic to watch. Even at five, when Daddy was still at home, I could taste my mother's desperation slick in the folds of her skin. “Here's the ham, Harold. Glazed just like you like it, Harold.” Her words gave me cavities.

“I did no such thing,” she says, and “thing” is barely audible. Here comes the guilt. Wave after wave, pounding and breaking into me. But then I remember the nail polish incident. How after he said her pot roast tasted like an unwashed foot, I went to her room and found her nail polish in an old, empty egg carton shoved under her bed. I took out the red and started painting my dolly's nails in my room, door closed. And after my father had left to wash the taste of feet out of his mouth at the bar, she found me and “the whore's paint” and ripped it out of my hand. She scrubbed me so hard in the bath my skin rubbed raw against my sheets that night, and I cried for Jesus to save me.

“You drove everyone away,” I say. She laughs, and it flutters about like a mosquito.

“I didn't drive you away. Y’all left. Y’all just got in your trucks and zipped on out, and here I am left to make stories up when the women at Mass ask how my little Elena is. How the hell should I know?” The cussing means she's scared. It's like spooking a rat into a corner, nudging it a little with a sharp stick. So, I nudge a little harder.

“I think the funniest part is that you didn't realize he was cheating on you. Like you were just too stupid to see it.” I'm on the tail of the guy in front of me, Mr. Sleeps at Green Lights. I'm so close I can taste his back bumper, and I think of doing it. Slamming hard into him, running him off the road.

“You don't know what it's like.” She breathes “like,” and I inhale, break a little and let Mr. Sleeps at Green Lights speed off. This time his finger is the one making the rounds.

“I do,” I say, and the break is real this time. The TV floods out of me, my secret job, the pain of raising a child whose face is the perfect blend of mine and Mitch's and how hard it is to look at her sometimes, to know that one day she could be in her car and have the relentless thirst to ruin the life of the person in front her. I don't talk about Mitch's affair. 

“It's okay, baby, it'll be okay.” I'm crying so hard I have to pull over into the parking lot of BJ's Buffet. I wipe hard at my face, pretend I'm tuning the radio dials so the black guy leaving Jester's Pawn Shop doesn't see I'm crying. I reach into the glove box for a leftover McDonald's napkin and make the mistake of looking in the rearview mirror. Atrocious.

“You know, Mitch isn't your father. And heaven knows you ain't me,” she laughs. That laugh. That was always a good thing, much better than her voice. It was real; it was from somewhere low, deep. Maybe her spleen. It came out that time I told her that I met a guy named Dave and was going to shave my head so I could live as his wife at the commune. She laughed so hard, I thought she'd chip her tooth.

“You're better Elena. You are. And God knows your child has a better set of parents than you did, so guess what? She'll be better than you, and she'll live her life knowing she has two parents who love her so much that they worry about every little thing when it comes to her.” I nod to no one, to everyone. There's a couple walking into the pawn shop now—barely twenty, I guess—and I think I'm being generous. She pushes the stroller, one of those cheap contraptions, and I can see the baby is only in a diaper, naked feet. But the guy's arm is around her shoulders, and he leans in, kisses her on the cheek. The woman laughs.

“I don't want to tell you what to do, and I've had more than enough experience knowing you wouldn't follow my advice anyways. But I just want to tell you, don't be like me or your father. Try, Elena. Just try as hard as you can.”

When the phone is quiet, and my mother is where she should be, crying in her kitchen in Helena and no longer in my ear, I think about the other time. The time we made blackberry jam—just me and her—and how out in the sunlight, the rays spoking through the trees, she said I was the prettiest thing she'd ever done. That I was the prettiest thing she ever would do.

I think of Sela, and I already know.

I have to try.