Chapter Two
Heather

“Life’s what happens when you’re busy making plans.” It was something her father had said, just once. She couldn’t quite place the exact moment, but if she had to rely on her gut, Heather knew full well it was when he was hitting her mother.

Sometimes, she didn’t blame him. 

Heather rubbed the sore ball of one foot with the toes of her other. She rested in the recliner, the ugly patterned one Wyland had bought in college and refused to sacrifice. Now Heather was forced to contend with a chair that belonged somewhere in Navajo country and made her seriously consider purchasing a one-way ticket back to Chicago. 

A good thing, comfort, because lately she had imagined life growing thorny spikes seeking her spine, the thick flesh that sat smugly on her hips. The Ackerman curse. She looked like her mother’s side of the family, like the lot of them had placed their orders and out popped Heather—a thick-bellied, squatter version of her mother. It had been a cruel cross to bear, but all her life Heather had been well-versed in cruelty. She claimed it as a second language.

She thought now—the greens, the taupes, and Indian reds blending beneath her backside—how “cruel” was a dialect her mother knew most fluently. It wasn’t her fault, though, could never be Caroline Hammel’s fault because doing dishes was a task in futility, and walking to retrieve the mail was death in sunlight, and throwing anything away was an arthritic spasm waiting to happen so everything bellowed inside their three-bedroom home, but nothing ever got out. 

A plate of cookies watched from the side table as Heather thoughtfully picked at her lips. She touched the cookies with a curious fingertip, then poked them until their sides began to crumble. She couldn’t eat them. They reminded her of her mother’s face, utterly perplexed as to why a child wouldn’t eat a casserole with the bulbous head of a maggot popping out of it.

According to Heather’s father, the meals used to be decent. Her parents had married in Florida in a northern town called Sopchoppy, home of the Ackerman line of descendants and more notably, the Sopchoppy Worm Gruntin’ Festival. Heather had regretfully discovered this tidbit of information when she had first started dating Wyland, and he insisted on knowing everything about her. They had stayed up one night at his apartment—drunk off amaretto sours—scouring the Internet for more insight into the “ticking beats” of Heather’s heart as Wyland had put it, only to find that she belonged to a sect of necks so red, they could probably be easily identified by the Hubble telescope. “I forgive you,” Wyland had said, giggling until he passed out on his bed, leaving Heather to wonder what it was she was apologizing for and why the entire evening consisted of exposing her heart when his was still soundly shielded.

Heather stopped rocking the recliner, her toes extended into the shaggy square of rug. She had set up the fan, so it blasted a stream of air directly into her face. The ceiling fans were on and so was the A/C, but she could never cool off completely unless she could feel air freezing the edges of her nostrils. The fan reminded her of being seven, her father setting up three electric fans in their feverous kitchen back when there had been room to do something like that. Her mother had gone to bed early because the lighting in the living room was searing her eyeballs, which meant Heather had her father all to herself.

“She was no Julia Child, but she knew how to make a solid meatloaf.” Her father had nodded as he talked, wholeheartedly agreeing with himself. It was a strange occurrence to be up long enough to see him dressed down in an old Disney World t-shirt, Donald Duck busting out of the logo with his white-feathered fingers grabbing for her. Usually, her father came home sometime around eight, sometimes later, still wrinkled and lifeless in his suit. 

At that time, the meals hadn’t gotten out of control and neither had Heather’s mother.  Mostly, the food was just burnt or void of seasoning. Heather figured it was her mother’s way of sticking it to her father, who refused to let his wife paint, or write poetry, or go out and see her friends.

“It’s a waste of time, Caroline. You can’t even keep this house clean so why should you be able to do whatever you want?” Heather’s father had said one evening when the mashed potatoes resembled tasteless lumps of puss. Her mother hadn’t put her to bed, but Heather was under her comforter by 9:30 like always, setting a rhythm to her evening that wrapped itself around her arms and legs like ribbon. Her Polly Pockets loomed large on her bedside table, and she sometimes spoke to them in her thoughts, figuring anything that looked so large in the shadows should be able to hear what she was thinking. They never talked back.

“I can’t do it all. Criminy, Ben, look at this place. How am I supposed to tackle all of this?” “All of this” consisted of eighteen hundred square feet, three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The house was older, and sure, sometimes the faucet leaked, and the toilet ran like the tub was chasing it, but Heather figured those were grown up problems, and her mother, being a grown up, should have known how to solve them.

Heather had tried to work it out in her head when she heard the smack—loud and crisp—and could practically see her father’s hand connecting with her mother’s jaw. She always got a sick feeling when she heard the sound, sick because it pleasantly settled in her stomach. She liked knowing her mother, the woman who was as stingy with hugs and kisses as she was with salt and pepper, got exactly what she deserved. Heather sometimes counted them, checking off the delicious sounds on her fingertips, knowing she was storing them deep inside of her so she could use them some day. And one day she did.

Vienna Sausage. The girl’s real name was Vienna Oaks, and even though Vienna was the one with long, lean legs, and Heather was forever cursed to drag along the Ackerman stumps, Heather decided the nickname “Vienna Sausage” suited her better. She noticed Vienna only because she was the girl who spent part of the summer living at her grandparents’ funeral home and the entire school year being best friends with Heather’s crush, Wyland Turnbull.

Vienna’s mother was a drunk. Everyone still remembered the incident in kindergarten, the evening before the Christmas party when their parents were invited to help decorate their classroom. Louise Oaks attempted to make out with her husband and a few other unsuspecting fathers under the guise of mistletoe before passing out in the book bag closet. Heather had been too young to grasp the significance of this. She had been too young to pluck the ripe lump of Vienna’s pain and mold it into a weapon to nurse the wound springing from her own mother dropping her off and refusing to come in to help decorate for the Christmas party. But in second grade, lines were drawn sharper, and Heather knew exactly which ones to cross.

“She wears a white coat and everything. I think she works with microscopes.” Vienna was at her usual spot in the cafeteria, disturbingly close to Wyland, whose blond curls inched closer and closer to Vienna’s right ear. Heather was sitting farther down the table with her clump of cohorts, Rachel Osterhaut and Amber Fritch—two people she hated almost as much as Vienna but did her best not to let on to the fact.

Heather knew Vienna’s mother only worked at the Clinique counter. She overheard her mother chattering on the phone about it to one of the few friends she still had left. Heather’s mother would cover the speaker with a cloth napkin she plucked from one of the mounds of dirty towels spilling out of the laundry room as if covering her mouth negated the fact that she was disobeying her husband. Heather sometimes felt the urge to swipe the napkin and stuff it down her mother’s throat.

“Microscopes? That’s so cool,” Wyland had said. Poor, stupid Wyland, Heather thought, feeling the need to place his curly blond head at her prepubescent chest just so he could hear how much she loved him. She stilled her breath and savored the way her spine sparked on fire whenever something brilliant came to her. 

“She’s not a scientist, you dip shit.” Heather was proud that she had correctly remembered the name her father had called her mother the evening before after throwing what sounded like a ceramic bowl at the wall. All morning she had to pinch her arm to remind herself not to say, “stick shift.” 

“What?” Vienna looked up from the opposite end of the lunch table. She was so pretty that it made Heather even angrier. Aloof, as if to say, “Who me?” with her blue-orbed eyes and a lower lip that gently quivered. Yes, you, you stick shift, Heather thought, biting her tongue for saying it wrong in her head.

“I said your mother isn’t a stupid scientist. She works at the makeup counter at the mall. And I hear she drinks alcohol out of the perfume bottles.” Heather swallowed the power of her words, each one a comfort in her belly. “Some mother,” she added, trying not to think of her own, who was probably peeling at a curled corner of wallpaper or taking a nap after throwing away all their spices down an already clogged kitchen sink.

“You’re mean,” Wyland said, breaking the silence and simultaneously breaking apart his crustless peanut butter sandwich. He handed over half of it to a sniffling Vienna. In that instant, Heather saw a part of herself she always had a hard time pinning down, the desire to make everything better.

Heather tore from the table. Rachel and Amber launched their mouths open like water-craving fish. She ran to the bathroom, locking herself into a stall. She cried with her head against the toilet’s cool, dirty porcelain.

That day she vowed never to eat during lunch again. She was going on a diet, and she would make Amber and Rachel go on one, too. It was a vow that tattooed itself permanently on the inside of her mind once she got home later that day and realized that her father had left and was no longer coming back home. Eventually, she would read it like brail with her imaginary fingertips, once the food on her dinner plate began to move, and her mother turned their messy home into a filth-clogged artery.

The front door opened. It was Wyland. His suit was still sharp from Heather ironing it earlier that morning, but his tie gnarled with afternoon heat. It negated something in her, his tie, because even though Heather’s vision had blurred from the pain shooting through her sciatica, she had pushed forward the last seven months, refusing to let laundry, bills, the overhead lighting get the best of her. But that tie snapped inside of her chest. It rubbed her heart raw. 

“So who died?” Wyland said. She caught a glimpse of the shorn curls limp at his ears as he passed the recliner.

“My mother,” Heather said, betting whether or not her husband would listen to her ticking beats now.

#

“FOOD POISONING,” HEATHER’S father had revealed an hour earlier on the phone. “The woman whose stomach could survive a jar of rancid pickled beets couldn’t survive a day-old container of milk.” Heather nodded to no one, the fan drying out her eyes. 

“Isn’t it ironic?” Ronnie, her father’s longtime girlfriend, sang softly in the background. She laughed, her noise loud, strong, and Heather had a hard time processing the sound of it.  They lived in Maryland, had opened a boutique pet grooming shop, and referred to the dogs they shaved as “clients.” Her father had become the antithesis of the man she used to know, but Heather figured this might have been because she didn’t know him very well in the first place.

Heather had to agree with Ronnie, even though doing so fed her already pounding head. It was ironic. And disgusting. Perverted. Sad. Heather imagined all these words billowing in the fiery cloud of heartburn assaulting her chest. There was no good way to get rid of it. Amber had told her to drink hot lemon water and lie completely still. Amber was an idiot.

“So, what position did you two do it?” Amber had immediately asked the night Heather had told her she was pregnant. The three of them, four including the baby Rachel had insisted strapping to her chest, had gone out to dinner one Thursday evening like they did every week. Heather had felt like that particular meal was an initiation into a cult. It didn’t help that Rachel and Amber had shown up accidentally wearing the same outfit.

“What are you talking about? What position?” Heather asked. Her eyes darted from Amber—milky white and red headed—to Rachel, tanned and obscenely curved. 

“The position. The Shettles method. What did they teach you at that college of yours?” Amber lifted her glass of wine and took a satisfying gulp. When she lifted her arm, her blue and white striped top had sunk in where her breasts should have been. For as long as Heather could remember, Amber had prayed for breasts, lighting candles at the chapel at their school, St. Mary of Sorrows. She’d cut class and sneak in during community masses to pay homage to a God she only cared for based on his ability to provide her a stellar rack. But God had ignored Amber—even after popping out two kids—and bestowed this gift on Rachel, whose breasts were trying to sneak out of their identical scooped neck top. Heather felt like she was looking at the “before” and “after” versions of the same pathetic woman.

“They taught real things. Math.”

“Oh math, schmath. They should have told you how to get knocked up properly. Doesn’t seem like you’re using math much anyway.” Amber smiled, her teeth smug and stained a light shade of lavender. That was the problem with moving away. Her two best friends had found themselves or at least their uteruses, so when Heather had the misfortune of finding her way home to Burling Gates after college, she was no longer the leader of the group. She was the pledge hopelessly awaiting her acceptance into “I Crappa Kids” sorority.

“Doggy style for a boy. Missionary for a girl. Oh, and no orgasm if you want a little princess,” Rachel said to Viola, whose head was attached to her mother’s giant bosom. Heather hated that—the way Rachel just whipped them out in public. She had mentioned this to her mother once while the woman was hunched over on her kitchen floor. “Some people just have no shame,” Caroline had said to Heather while clipping coupons from an out-of-date circular, her toes comfortably buried beneath a pile of rotting trash.

“That’s depressing, isn’t it? Letting him have all the fun?” Heather said. It was for show, that comment. She hadn’t even received as much as a kiss from Wyland since the tryst that had led to her mess of a pregnancy. They just weren’t that way anymore. Wyland had stopped wanting to know the little things that buzzed constantly in her head, and even though she used to think he cared too much, it had been a good deal better than knowing he cared too little. 

Amber smirked and set her now barely filled wine glass down near the edge of her plate. Heather was surprised Amber hadn’t licked the glass clean. 

“Only if you care more about yourself than your children. From the moment of conception, you are their caretaker, their everything, their whole entire world. And it’s up to you to determine from the get-go who they’ll be, what they’ll achieve in this life. So yeah, depressing if something like that doesn’t appeal to you.” Rachel nodded, and Heather stifled the knee-jerk reaction to launch her water glass at Amber’s satisfied face. It was hard to take anyone seriously who had dropped out of college to spend countless weekends in Kansas City, loitering outside of the UAMS College of Medicine. Amber had taken such pride in landing a pediatrician for a sperm donor that she attempted to bring it up sporadically. Like the time Heather tripped over her shoe and chipped her tooth during their morning walk. “Brent would know how to fix that. I mean maybe not personally, but he can recommend someone to you.” Fortunately, a cardiothoracic surgeon had moved in next door to the Fritches. Now Amber just brought up the audacity of the surgeon’s wife sunning topless in her own backyard. 

“I don’t know what position. I hadn’t researched the issue further than sixth grade sex-ed class,” Heather had said, and the subject was dropped, Rachel cooing into a sticky baby face and Amber fitting a breadstick into her mouth, a peg in its hole. 

They dirtied it, Heather had thought later that night when insomnia took over, and she quietly escaped the confines of Wyland’s unconscious arms hugging her in the dark. Heather walked the path of their kitchen—crisp white tiles beneath her feet—and blamed her two friends, her only friends since moving back to Burling Gates for the reason she was unhappy to be pregnant. Her eyes played with the shadows, moonlight streaming through the window above the sink. Heather had buried the truth under her skin like a splinter. It festered there alongside other truths, including her warped relationship with the man haunting her on the phone. Her father’s quick shock of breath through the earpiece jarred Heather into the present. When he said, “We shouldn’t joke,” it was barely audible, and Heather assumed it was out of earshot of his unfiltered girlfriend. 

“Your mother was a good woman. Loony, but good in her own way. So, listen, Ronnie and I are swamped with the store, and frankly, I don’t think we’ll be able to make it out for the funeral.” Heather held her breath, the word “funeral” knife-sharp in her ear. “You’re covering the arrangements, right? I’ll wire you my half. Just let me know the cost.” 

Heather had agreed, “i’s” dotted, “t’s” crossed. She would arrange what needed to be arranged, but still, she was surprised by his offer. It had met her skin like the edge of a can, the truth biting and snagging at her: her father was there for them in death, not life. The thought snapped at her like someone jolted out of a nightmare.

“How do you know she died?” Heather had asked, rubbing her arm until it began to hurt.

“She called me. Can you imagine? She’s crumpled on the floor breathing her last breath, and she calls me,” her father said a million miles away, clipping the stray hind hairs of a Pomeranian. His voice reached its feelers through the earpiece, but she didn’t give him an inch. “Funny, how love never dies,” he said. Heather thought it a shame to have no way to dig her fingernails into his throat through the phone. 

“Hilarious,” Heather had lent as an afterthought, hanging up. She had picked the phone back up, cryptically calling her husband to come home after several failed attempts at reaching her mother, and she waded through the past she had shared with her mom, her dad, and a regret named Vienna until her hips had gone sore. 

Wyland stepped in front of where she sat in the recliner. His contrary tie filched her attention.

“Should we go check?” he asked, and she wanted to strangle him, to hold him, to cry until she felt loose, undone. She wanted to say, “Of course, we should go freaking check,” because it was cruel for him to have to ask.

She grabbed her bag and waved him away when he came to help her up from the recliner.  She slowly followed her husband to the driveway, a small sliver of hope that her father had only inhaled too much fur to think clearly guiding her way.

“What happened to your door?” Heather asked as she waited for her husband to unlock his car. There was a streak of paint missing from the passenger’s side.

“Don’t know. Angry buyers, maybe.” He put his sunglasses on, putting an end to the discussion. Heather had a fluttering thought as to whom the culprit was, but she refused to grasp it. 

“I don’t know why you’re worried. Your mother’s stomach is stronger than a frat boy’s,” her husband said, starting up the still-warm engine. “I’m sure we’ll get over there, and she’ll invite us in for cockroach a la mode.” 

Heather’s head rested against the cool glass. She watched Wyland’s fingers tap on the wheel. He was still in his button-down but had removed his jacket and went to relieve his tie. He jerked it until it made a limp noose around his neck. 

“Work?” she asked.

“It’s work. That’s for sure,” he replied, jamming his A/C vents closed. He was always cold by nature, wearing a sweatshirt around the house even in the heat of summer or tangling his limbs around hers in the evenings, stealing her heat. “There’s an open house I have to set up a booth for. Some Burling Gates Business Society thing. Hollywood’s being a creep and won’t give me the details.” 

“So, he’s not letting up?”

“What would the use in that be? If he didn’t have me to mess with, he’d have to acknowledge his wife is knocking boots with the yard guy.” Heather lent a weak smile out of habit. It was an old joke between the two of them at the expense of Mark Hollywood, Wyland’s father’s right-hand man. But the humor in it had curdled. 

A couple of days after moving back to Burling Gates from Chicago and into their home on Middle Dale Lane, Wyland had paced their living room floor, muttering, “It’s not fair. It’s not fair, right?”  His feet were bare; he had no t-shirt on. They were in between loads of laundry and wading amidst peanut shells. Bubble wrap popped deliciously beneath Heather’s bare toes.

“Mark’s been there longer, you know.” She could see Wyland shivering. His lower jaw refused to set right with his upper one and he concentrically moved his fingers into his biceps. He hated her for being late on the laundry, for keeping him cold. For wrecking the way things were supposed to work.

“I know, but I’m his son, Heather. We moved back on the promise that I’d get to be co-owner and now my dad’s making me Hollywood’s pet. You just don’t get it. You don’t have to work.” She suffered on that last sentence for a moment before she walked soundlessly into their cubicle of a laundry room and started the washer.

Later he would find her in their tub, sunk like a stone in a tepid pool of water. He would slip in behind her, and she would place the back of her head on his shivering chest. He wouldn't even have to say he was sorry because all she needed were his arms locked around her belly.

“What time do you need to get back?” she asked as the car’s A/C blasted doubly hard against her face. The streets, old and familiar, sullied her view. Her old house—her mother’s house—was in the older part of Burling Gates, a subdivision called Otterman’s Village. She had always hated the sound of it and the fact that living in Otterman meant not being raised in Green Acre Estates like Amber and Rachel. She never invited her friends over, bullying Amber into hosting middle school sleepovers at her house. Heather would stay up those nights when her friends would pass out, sugar drunk off Skittles and would jot down notes in “the fat book,” a kitty-covered spiral notebook she used to write down everyone’s weight during lunchtime at school. On those evenings she would walk the hallways of Amber’s home, writing down “eggshell paint” and “antique Queen Anne chair,” pretending she could redecorate the inside of her own house and turn it into something it could never manage to be. 

“You trying to get rid of me so soon? You know I don’t have to be back at any set time.  Perks of being the boss’s kid,” Wyland smirked, jerking the wheel to the right as the car glided into the driveway behind her mother’s rusted out van.

“No. No not at all.” She looked up and smiled at him, even though she hated to smile, knowing her face was wide enough at seven months pregnant. He smiled back, initiating their usual dance, but she moved her hand when he went to touch it.

“Moment of truth,” her husband said, killing the car, birthing the silence.