Joe (12 page)

Merion crossed quickly over to her
mother’s side of the room, which was divided from Alberta’s half with a sliding
curtain. She went over to the window and took a seat in the visitors’ chair.
For several long moments they both sat silently, looking out at the
multicolored tulips and the plush green grass.

“What’re you doin’ here?” asked her
mother, in that slow way she always had. Ruby Gellar had grown up in Mountain
Home, Arkansas, and though she had left her home to move to Kansas City at the
age of seventeen, her voice still reflected the slow Southern drawl.

“I came to visit you,” Merion said. Her
mother’s question didn’t bother her. Ruby was ninety-one, and still had all of
her physical health intact, but her mental capabilities had slipped further and
further away over the years. Most of the things she babbled about made no
sense. It didn’t bother Merion as much as one might think. She just liked
hearing the sound of her mother’s voice. It didn’t particularly matter what the
words were. Her mother’s voice had always been there to soothe her, a security
blanket in a world that had become all work and routine.

“I knew this man once,” her mother
began, “really, I ‘pose he was justa boy at the time, because I was justa girl
of sixteen myself. But anyway, his name was George Handbrook. Yes, that was it,
George Simon Handbrook, but everyone just called him Jackass George.” Her
mother brought her small, withered hand up to her mouth and suppressed what
seemed like a giggle. Merion was watching her, but Ruby just stared out the
large window, her eyes glassy with time’s touch. “I got in trouble for saying
that once in front of my ma. I said, ‘Jackass George got suspended today for
bringing a shoebox full of dirt and earthworms to school,’ and she slapped me
upside my head. Yes she did.”

Merion remained silent, hoping her
mother would continue. It had been months since she had last heard her so
vocal. Her throat closed a little as she realized that someday, probably in the
not-too-distant future, all she would have left of her mother was her stories.

When it became evident that her mother’s
thoughts had gone elsewhere, Merion said, “What about George, Ma?”

Her mother’s tiny frame jumped a little
at the question. She trained her gray eyes on her daughter, as if noticing her
presence for the first time. “Meri?” she asked, her eyes growing wide with
wonder and maybe a little relief. “Am I dead?”

Merion shifted uneasily, readjusted her
position in the chair. She reached a hand up and rubbed the back of Ruby’s
neck. “No, Ma, you’re not dead.” After a moment, she added, “You were telling
me about Jackass George.”

Eyes going glassy once more, Ruby turned
her gaze back out the window. “George...?
Oh,
George. That’s right.
Jackass George. He was a jester, that boy. Every Saturday in the summer all of
us teenagers used to meet up at the Lake, Longview Lake, and drink beers around
a fire. Some of the more...
easygoing
girls and boys would even go for a
swim without their skivvies. I told em, I said, ‘There’s snakes in that water,
and don’t ‘spect me to be suckin’ no poison out if’n you git bit. Them
copperheads is nasty things, I told em. But Jackass George had got his name for
a reason.”

Though she was trying to pay her full
attention, Merion was beginning to wonder where this story was going. Her
mother always told a story for the purpose of a lesson, never really for entertainment
or enjoyment, not even when Merion had been a child. She also kept circling
around something else her mother had said, or rather,
asked
: ‘Am I
dead?’ And, worse, the tiny bit of relief she’d thought she’d seen in her
mother’s eyes while she asked it.

“So, wouldn’t you know it, that Jackass
went and got himself bit by one of them copperheads an’ all a us had told our
parents that we’s goin to the bowling hall. Well, you don’t git bit by no
copperhead at no bowling hall, no ma’am.” Her mother paused for a moment and
coughed lightly into a white lace handkerchief. Merion waited patiently for her
to continue, just as she used to do as a girl when her mother would be going on
one of her tales. In the stories that her mother told, Merion would always get
wrapped up with wondering what it must have been like to live at the time her
mother did.

Ruby Gellar was born Ruby Anne Leasworth
in the year 1924. She had been but a baby when the Great Depression fell hard
on the county, knocking America to its knees. She’d had a cousin who’d died of
rabies, a mother who’d died when she was nineteen because of medical problems
caused by malnutrition. She’d watched the world evolve over the course of the
years. Inevitably, she knew and had seen things that very few will ever know or
see. She’d lived damn near a century.

“An’ you know what happen’ then? Well, a
park ranger stops by the lake to make sure ain’t nothin’ outta sorts, and I’ll
be darned if he ain’t have the anti-venom and the stuff to fix ole George right
on up.” Now her mother stopped and looked at her, as if really seeing her
daughter for the first time since she got here. Her face went grave and serious
and somehow older, much older than old, if that was possible. Merion knew what
was coming next: the Lesson, the Moral of the Story. Her mother said, “God
takes care of drunks ‘n fools, Meri. Drunks ‘n fools.”

Merion wrung her hands together in her
lap, suddenly wishing that she hadn’t come here today, wishing that she didn’t
have to pass back through that white-light hallway before she would be able to
get out. Be free. “I know, Ma,” she mumbled. “Drunks and fools.”

Her mother reached out and placed her
bird-like hand over her daughter’s. Her steel gray eyes studied her daughter.
“You ain’t no drunk, Meri, and you ain’t no fool…You sure I ain’t dead?”

Swiping a lone tear from her eye with
her free hand, Merion forced a small smile. “No, Ma, you’re not dead.”

Merion left shortly after that, damn near
racing down the white-light hallway in her haste to escape. She had kissed her
mother on the head and told her that she would be back to visit this weekend,
and Ruby cried then. The first time she had seen her mother cry in years and
years. Ruby went on insisting that she must be dead, and if she was, why
wouldn’t Merion stay with her? When she started screaming about drunks and
fools and something else about Mondays, the nurse had come in the room and
gotten her to take a little blue pill. A few minutes after that she just sat
staring out of the wide window, her eyes glassy with age and blockaded tears.
Merion slipped out, almost ran through that awful hallway, and burst through
the sliding glass doors as quick as dog on a snapped chain.

She cranked the car radio up, but the
station was playing Jimmy Buffet’s old hit, ”Come Monday,” and she shut it
right back off, slamming her fingers on the button so hard that she broke a
nail.

That’s
what her mother had been screaming
about, the coming Monday, some crazy shit about the coming Monday. Oh, and
about how Merion wasn’t no drunk, and wasn’t no fool.

She drove home in silence, feeling sorry
for her mother. Ruby had always had her problems. People even used to laugh at
her when Merion was little, saying that her mother was a loon. Well, maybe she
wasn’t a loon, maybe she was just a little
touched.
Not so unlike the
raven-haired girl, Simple Joe. But Merion, even after being raised by her
mother and in turn becoming her caretaker as her mother aged, would never even
fathom such a possibility, had never even considered it.

After all, she wasn’t no drunk, and she
sure as shit wasn’t no fool.

Chapter
Twenty

Mina

With
her only class of the day finished—a morning class that began at 9:30 and let
out at 11:15—Mina sat under a large oak tree on the sprawling green lawn in the
middle of the four main halls of UMMS. Everyone at UMMS called this area the
Quad. The four halls–Imperial, Hopkins, Markus, and Blue—surrounding the two
carefully manicured acres of the Quad were massive buildings, each of them made
of tan-colored stone and capped with rust-red rooftops. Walkways led off in
every direction, flanked by flower beds and ornate white lampposts. The grass
beneath Mina was thick and healthy, and she ran her fingers over it as she
watched Davis tossing a football back and forth with a few guys from her
Sociology class.

Things had gone well today. Davis had
sat next to her in the rear of the class, reading a car magazine and causing no
trouble whatsoever. Even Professor Stanley had commented at the end of the
class as they were walking out how well her boy behaved. Then a guy in her
class—she thought his name was Kyle—had asked Davis if he wanted to play some
ball in the Quad. Davis had lit up, flattered that a college boy would invite
him to play. Mina took a deep breath as she watched them now. Other students
had joined in, about five of them total, and they were all tossing the ball
around to each other.

“Afternoon, ma’am.” A deep voice behind
her, almost right in her ear, made Mina jump in surprise.

She smiled when she saw who it was.
“Hey, Russ,” she said.

He gestured to the grass beside her.
“Mind if I sit?”

Mina looked up at him. She had met
Russell just this semester in her Spanish class. He was only taking that one
class because he was a detective and his department was paying to for him to
attend in hopes that he would learn the second language. He was twenty-seven,
about Mina’s age, and had transferred to Kansas City from Dallas, Texas. He was
a big man, with a slow drawl and a good nature. Russell had also promised Mina
that he could get her a job in the forensics department at his work after she
graduated with her degree in chemistry and biology. Plus, he didn’t look too
bad in his jeans and old cowboy boots. She wouldn’t admit it, but she was
starting to think she had a crush on him.

She gestured with a hand and nodded her
permission. “I didn’t know you had class on Fridays,” she said.

Russell sat down beside her, staring out
at the area where her son was playing with the other students. “I don’t,” he
said. “Just came up here to pick up some books from the library. Saw you
sittin’ over here, thought I’d say hello….That your boy down there?”

Mina took her eyes off of Russ and
looked out at her son again, Davis’s wiry muscles pumping as he ran to catch
the football, his chestnut hair—the same color as her own—blowing carelessly in
the wind. A smile touched her lips and she nodded. “Yep, that one’s mine.”

Russ nodded in return, and Mina averted
her gaze when she realized she had been studying the rough stubble on his
cheeks, wondering what it would feel like pressed against her skin. She cast
those thoughts aside right along with her glance. She had been down this road
before and had ended up a single mother raising two boys, struggling to give
them a good life. She figured she would date later on, after she had a steady
job and some security for her boys. She didn’t have time for a boyfriend right
now. But she would have time later. Course she would. There was
always
tomorrow.
Right?

“Good looking boy,” Russ commented, and
Mina realized that she had grown quiet.

Struggling for something to say, she
spat out the first thing that came to mind. “Yeah, I love him, but he sure is a
handful.”

Russell laughed, a deep, hearty sound
that warmed her. “Sure he is. He’s a boy. You should start worrying if he ain’t
causin’ no trouble.”

As if sensing that he was a topic of
conversation, Davis looked up to where his mother was sitting and waved. Mina
smiled and returned the gesture.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said.

Another laugh, more a small chuckle, but
warming nonetheless. “Course I am. Used to be a boy myself, ya know,” he said,
giving her a slanted smile. Then he slung an arm around her shoulder, and for a
tiny moment, Mina stiffened. But it was just a small moment, and when it passed
she felt herself settling into his embrace, basking in the rightness of it.

The world had left her jaded; that was a
sharp truth. She had been only sixteen when she’d gotten pregnant with Davis,
and the life she knew as a child had been whisked away in that sudden way that
change only has. Suddenly she had become
responsible
for something.
Suddenly she had become an
adult.
Suddenly she had been expected to take
the wheel and steer not only herself but this other little person down the road
of life and take only the best paths that it had to offer, which often seemed
to be the ones that ran uphill. When she was in the mind of it, after Davis or
Dominic had done something particularly upsetting—like say, getting expelled
from school–she would equate the adventure of becoming a parent with selling
your soul. Maybe not to the devil, but a soul-sell nonetheless. But the truth
was that her children had made her stronger, wiser. Her children had made her
better.

She liked Russell, there was no denying
that, had liked him since she met him. She had known him for only
three-and-a-half months, since the beginning of this semester, but they often hung
out for a little while after Spanish class, and she felt that she knew him well
enough to admit that there was a definite attraction here. But there was work,
school and children, and no time for romance in between. Soul-sell indeed.

Russ looked down at her, his lips
tilting up in that lazy smile of his, showing straight white teeth behind them.
“What are you doing on Saturday?” he asked.

The question was so unexpected that Mina
pulled herself out from under his arm by sitting forward. He let it rest in the
grass behind her. “Working,” she said, feeling her cheeks going rosy. “Got the
kids during the day and then I work at the restaurant from three-thirty until
ten-thirty. Why?”

He smiled, and Mina’s heartbeat sped up a
touch. “Good. There’s a carnival in town. Let’s take your boys go before you
got work,” he said. When she just looked at him, he added, “I’ll win you a
teddy bear.”

All of her usual lies and excuses passed
through her head in the space of a second.
Sorry, can’t, we’ve got a lunch
date with my mom. She hates it when I cancel. Wish I could, but Dominic has
Little League that day. Oh, sucks, but I have an electrician coming over to fix
a few things I really need to get fixed. Next time, sure. Definitely. Next
time.
But she couldn’t get the words through her lips. Most of the time it
was easy to turn guys down, because the ones who usually approached her were in
no way studs or charmers or even men with all of their teeth. Turning them away
was the equivalent of shooing flies. Mina was an attractive woman, her figure
and her features only growing more appealing even after giving birth to two
boys. She had curly, light brown hair and naturally golden skin, full lips and
hazel eyes which added up to achieve an exotic look that managed to scare away
most men, the exception being those who had been turned down so many times that
they had nothing to lose. Those men, and the very rare, truly confident,
good-looking man. A man like Russell Remington.

But she didn’t have time for a
relationship right now, and there was that whole jaded-by-the-world thing. She
almost laughed at this thought.
Cry me a river and break out the violins.
And
just when she was about to spill one of her excuses and turn Russ down, a
feeling struck her. It was a tiny, almost unnoticeable feeling that seemed to
do one lap around the base of her stomach and then disappear from existence,
leaving only the ghost of its purpose behind. Mina knew what it was, what it
meant. It had saved her hide on a few memorable occasions, taught her a lesson
or two, and unlike most of us, she had learned how to acknowledge and trust it.
It was a simple, powerful thing, a borderline gift that we, as civilized human
beings, do our best to brush off and ignore, usually to our own peril. We don’t
want to cause a scene, oh Lord, no, not a
scene
. We don’t want to seem
panicked, overreacted, and definitely not, absolutely not,
paranoid
.
What would others say? What if we pissed them off? That small feeling that
sweeps stealthily through your gut doesn’t mean a thing. It’s an irrational
effect of emotions.
Intuition.

Mina put her faith in it wholly. She
hadn’t always taken notice of it so carefully. She’d had to learn things the
hard way first, but Mina was a fast study, and her interest in this disregarded
gift had intensified after she’d had children. And it had been a damn good
thing it had, because there had been a few times that following her intuition
had saved her from bad happenings, real bad happenings.

So while her head screamed at her to
reject Russ’s offer, her gut whispered that that would not be the best idea.
Somehow Russ was important. Somehow, though the path that paralleled his
appeared to slant uphill–and it scared her because she had been left high and
dry in the past–she knew that it was one she should follow at the moment. She
may not end up marrying Russ and growing old with him. He may even break her
heart. Hell, she may only see him for a few weeks and then break it off
herself. But somehow she knew that he was going to save her from even worse
heartache by just having been a portion, no matter how large, of her life.
And
I always trust my intuition, because that bitch knows what she’s talking about.

“That sounds like fun,” she said, and
gave a genuine smile.

Russ grinned. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll
pick y’all up at ten an’ we can ride out there. Sound good?”

“Sounds good.”

More students were filing out of the
four buildings now, clogging up the walkways and taking spots on the lawn and
zipping by on skateboards and bicycles. Mina looked down and checked her watch.
“Oh, it’s noon,” she said. She turned to Russ. “I gotta go. Davis has a dentist
appointment at one all the way out in Blue Springs. Do you have my number?”

Russ shook his head. “Nope.”

She pulled a piece of scrap paper and a
pencil from her bag and wrote it down. She handed it to him. “Um, I guess I’ll
see you on Saturday, then,” she said.

Her cheeks heated up again. She was out
of practice in the dating world, and Russ would definitely be the best-looking
man she had ever dated. He was built well, handsome in a masculine way, short
spoken. He was the type of man who knew better how to listen and think than to
talk and sound foolish. She was beautiful, yes, but he was too, and he made her
nervous.

“Most certainly,” he replied, wrapping
his strong arms around her in a sweet hug. He smiled down at her. “You go on
and get your boy to the dentist before you lose him in this crowd.”

He released her, and she waved Davis
over to join her. There was a huge grin on his face.

“That was awesome, Mom,” Davis said as
they were walking back to the parking garage to Mina’s car.

She wrapped an arm around his shoulder
and gave him a little squeeze, suddenly realizing that she felt good. She felt
good and
happy.
She felt like everything was going to be okay. It had
been a long time since she’d felt this way; she couldn’t remember the last.
“I’m glad, honey. I’m glad you liked it.”

Davis was still beaming. “What’s not to
like?” he asked. “There’s so many people and everyone gets along and everyone
is friendly. I didn’t realize college was so big. I mean, there’s got to be
five hundred people in the Quad right now.”

Mina smiled at his use of the name
Quad.
This is what he wants, she thought. He wants to feel like a big boy. No, he
wants to feel like a
man.
“I was really proud of you today, Davey,” she
said. “You behaved like a grownup. Thank you.”

Davey had behaved well, but he was wrong
about one little thing. There were not five hundred students passing through
the Quad at this particular time of the day, there were
fifteen hundred.
And
this was only Friday. On Mondays, the average number of people in the Quad
doubles at this time.