Unburying Hope (25 page)

“I’m sorry,” Frank lowered his voice, “I
didn’t want to say anything. But now you’ve got the proof in your own
hands.
 
Your boy is messed up.
 
Time for you to break it off.”

“How could you?”
 
She pushed back from the table.

“Celeste, I’m worried that by being so close
to your dream relationship, you’re not seeing the whole picture.
 
He’s been really on edge lately when
he’s stopped by the office.
 
And he
took both of our legit meds away from us.”

Celeste crossed her arms, distracted.
 
“He calms down when he’s with me, so he
visits sometimes.”

“What does he do all day?”
 
Frank signaled for another round of
drinks.

“No, I’ve had enough,” she snapped.

“Come on, let’s not fight.
 
We’ve got another 20 minutes, we can
have one more and then spend all afternoon laughing at Jeannie.”

Celeste smirked, memories trumping her pain
for a flash of seconds.
 
Those were
good afternoons, breezily helping customers while signaling to each other as
Jeannie dealt with the old ladies and collected their gifts.
 
They’d lean over and sample the
brownies or hard candies until the afternoon wore on and they tired of it,
clocking in each customer in the hopes that they would soon hear the closing
bell.
 
An empty exhaustion would
end their day and they’d hug, say goodbye and head to their now separate
evenings, Celeste to the bus, excited to see Eddie, and Frank to the gym.
 
Those afternoons made up for the
evenings that they no longer whiled away together.

But his words still stung.
 
“You know, Frank, that someone could
say we’re addicts because we used to drink whenever we were together.”

“What?”
 
His eyes flared.
 
“We barely
ever get drunk anymore.”

“Yeah, not since Eddie.”

“Hey, if you can’t handle the truth about your
boyfriend, you don’t have to take it out on me.”

“I’m just saying.
 
You’re quick to slam him for losing weight.”

“His face is gaunt, Celeste.
 
Why don’t you see that?”

She bit her lip in anger.
 
“Now you’re just being an ass.

“Seriously?
 
You don’t see it?”
 
Frank looked her in the eye, “When he drops in for a visit sometimes, he
looks like he’s going to explode.
 
He’s always looking right and left at the door, like he thinks the cops
are watching him.
 
You see his legal
drug cocktail, you’ve written it down yourself.
 
How can you lie to yourself anymore?”

“Fuck you.”

“What?
 
How dare you?”

They’d never raised their voices at each
other.
 
Celeste felt adrift.

“I’ve seen guys high, Celeste.
 
You haven’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you live in your little world, partying
to find a man.
 
Your eyes are
closed to what some people are doing to survive.”

It was like another slap on her cheek, “I do
not live small.”

“I didn’t say you live small.”

“Eddie thinks I do,” she let out.

Frank shook his head.
 
“You have chosen a fine life.
 
It’s nice, it’s safe.
 
We got you out of granny clothes, now
you look your age.
 
He’s wrong.”

She felt torn, not knowing to whom to be
faithful.
 
“I don’t want to talk
about him with you.”
 
She stood up
and pulled money out of her wallet for the lunch bill.

“Celeste, wait,” Frank said.
 
“We’ve been friends for a good long
time.”

“Friends don’t rip each other’s hearts out,
Frank.”
 
Celeste stormed out of the
restaurant, barely feeling the cold wind on her face when she got to the
street.
 
She reflexively pulled her
knit scarf up around her neck, but unzipped her black jacket.
 
Her hands were numb, it felt like all
the blood had left her head, her arms and legs and pooled in her half drunk,
acid filled stomach.

She had to get back to her seat at work.

The boss always glared at Frank and then at her
when they came in late from lunch.
 
She’d have to hurry, but maybe walking back to her desk without Frank
wouldn’t set the boss off today.
 

The day would not flow, she’d ignore Frank,
gut through any conversations she’d have to have with customers and count the
hours until she could walk out the door, not knowing how she’d ever sit back
down on her swivel chair in the carefree way she had before Frank exploded his
bomb on her at the lunch table.
 

Things might never be the same, but that’s
okay, she thought grimly.
 
Eddie
wanted to take her to the tropics.
 
She didn’t want to go below water again, but she’d try.
 

Chapter
Twenty-Seven

Celeste was rattled.
 
She never had liquor at lunch and she had no stomach for two
drinks of hard liquor these days.

The stark hollow loneliness that Frank was
able to express for her echoed her own for him.
 

She couldn’t read men.
 

When her mother died, she’d not known who or
where her father was, whether he was the phone lineman in the cherry picker
under which she walked on her way to the bus, if he was one of the men who
lined up to give her money through the plexiglas, or if he was dead and buried
in a box in some unknown cemetery.
 

She had missed him though, as much as she spat
when someone mentioned his existence as a precursor to her own.
 
Growing up without a father meant that
she cringed when other fathers enveloped her friends in hugs at school plays or
parent-teacher conferences.
 
Because her mother worked two jobs, Celeste was one of the few ‘latch
key’ kids in her class.
 
The
ritualistic ending of the school day was not joyous for her in the way that it
was for her schoolmates.
 
When they
skipped to the driving circle to get into cars and were handed snacks, she
shuffled off through the side door to the world of big people, where she tried
to fit in.
 
Standing in line for a public
bus, stealthily slipping into a bus seat, reaching up to pull the rope to ring
the bell so that the bus driver would stop at her stop.
 
She had to act independent, so that no
one asked her with whom she was travelling, since the answer was hard to speak.
 
“I’m alone.”

By watching her mother’s face, though, she
caught what she needed, the eyes lighting up with happiness when her mother
first saw her in the evening.
 
Always tired, with a repressed short temper, her mother was able to
express love, so that there were moments of pure peace, where Celeste crept
into her mother’s arms, in the wing chair by the window, lay her head on her
mother’s shoulder and, for a few precious moments, Celeste could just be.

When school events asked for a father and a
mother, she didn’t mind saying ‘my mother is coming alone’ because she knew
that together they weren’t alone.
 
Together they were closer than some of the fathers and mothers who loved
their children but despised each other.

She had a ghostly black hole for a father and
a saint on a pedestal for a mother.

How do you have a relationship then, Celeste
wondered, when no one around you has a successful partnership?
 
Frank was the closest person she had to
family, and it had been shockingly easy to uproot him to keep Eddie around.

Had Eddie asked her to push Frank aside?
 
Eddie didn’t care that Frank was
gay.
 
He told her that he’d served
in Iraq with a gay kid from the Bible Belt and when the kid was blown up by a
mortar shell, the company had mourned, really mourned the kid.
 
He had been the only one in the platoon
to break down barriers with traumatized guys after they’d gone into firefights
and seen dead civilians, dying children, screaming robe-shrouded grandmothers,
the collateral damage of doing their job.
 
The kid had been able to sense fear and just sit with another young
soldier after an ambush until that soldier came back to full capacity.
 
So the unit didn’t care if he was gay
or straight, they just knew they needed him around for future fights and were
heartbroken when they had to hoist his lifeless torso onto shoulders and carry
him over a rocky hill back to base camp, leaving behind a hand and a foot that
they couldn’t find under the barrage of mortar fire within which he’d died.

She had closed Frank off on her own.

Maybe trying to get off alcohol was too
much.
 
Maybe her body needed a
cocktail to quell the loneliness.
  
But she felt a welling up inside, a longing for her best self, and she
didn’t want to be altered anymore.

And yet, here she was, woozy at work.
 
Why?
 
Because it hurt to realize that she didn’t believe that she
could have both a friend and a lover unless they were the same person.
 
Eddie might not be able to be both, but
she refused to choose Frank and lose Eddie.
 
  

She couldn’t think clearly, and she blundered
through two transactions with customers, asking for more money each time because
she hadn’t hit all the buttons on her keyboard.

Then a woman came to her window with a child
whose small fist hammered at the plexiglas with a tiny car that she clutched in
her hand.

Celeste blew in anger, “I’m not going to help
you with her being an ass like that!”

“Did you just call my 3-year old an ass?”
 
The customer put her face right up to
the squawk box, shrill voiced, “Come out here and say that to my face, Bitch!”

Celeste waved them away and put her plastic
‘closed’ sign up.

The woman pulled the girl off the countertop
and stormed back in line.

Jeannie whispered over the desktop, “What is
wrong with you?”

Frank waved her off, “Leave Celeste
alone.”
 
He motioned for the woman
to cut the line and come to his window.

Celeste rubbed her temples.
 
She should stand up and go home.
 
Now.
 
But there was no longer an early bus, there was only one
route left from work to home and it didn’t leave until after closing time.

Maybe she should just stay, gut through.
 
The line was dwindling anyway.
 
The alcohol made her gregarious.
 
She’d marry Eddie.
 
Frank would come around.
 
She’d find a house with Eddie, in a new
town where they could, he could, recreate himself, leaving behind whatever
memories he couldn’t forget from Afghanistan.
 
She’d set up a nice house, she could finally feel grounded, take
some time to figure out what she’d do for the rest of her life now that she had
the things she’s always longed for, a partner and a home.
 
This job had been fine to start
with.
 
But if the plexiglas hadn’t
been there, with two lunchtime cocktails in her, she might have ripped the car
out of the little girl’s hand.
 
Not
good, she thought, not good at all.

She shook her head to get the cobwebs and
growing exhaustion out, then pulled aside the plastic ‘closed’ sign, toppling
it onto the floor next to her chair.
 
‘Klutz’, she heard her childhood dance teacher’s voice say in the back
of her head.
 
She reached gingerly
for the sign but couldn’t grasp it while sitting on her swivel chair.
 
Rather than fall on her ass, she
instead forced her lips into a bright smile and looked forward, yelling ‘Next!’

The sudden reappearance of the enraged
mother’s face against the window shocked her, toppling her off her chair.
 
She grabbed for the counter and stood
herself up.

“Oh, you can help someone else but not me and
my daughter?”
 
The woman shook her
fist at Celeste.

Celeste could see Frank and Jeannie standing
up but she leaned towards the plexiglas, “If you can’t control your daughter,
don’t bring her here!”

“She was fine until you were a bitch,” the
woman turned her head, yelling, “Where’s the Manager?
 
Get me the Manager.”

Celeste felt arms pulling her away from the
window but she also felt herself grow large and strong, “She wasn’t fine, she
was slamming her damn car at my window.”