Authors: Ericka Clay
Dear Hearts
Dear
Hearts
A
Novella
Ericka
Clay
Copyright © 2015 by Ericka Clay
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in the
United States of America
This book is a
work of fiction. The characters, places, and dialogue are all fictional. Any
similarity to real people or places is entirely unintentional and coincidental.
Cover Design ©
2015 Tipsy Lit
Tipsy Lit
For
Matthew, for loving a crazy lady like it’s the most natural thing to do.
Table of
Contents
ONE
Mitch
People do things out of love, I
guess, but I also got this theory that you do them because there’s a story building.
It starts when you’re born, cut out of your mother’s gut, pushed through her
privates - what have you. And it continues, spiraling like yarn around a
finger until you’re choked up into it, and you realize no matter how hard you
pull, strain your muscles, maybe even break a bone to free a hand, that you are
as much a part of it as it’s a part of you.
But
I’d never say this shit out loud. I’d get my ass kicked.
“Tits
on that one,” Jimmy says. It's no longer a command like, “Hey, check out
the tits on that one.” Mainly it's just a fact of life. Women have
tits and Jimmy loves that fact.
We're
in the parking lot of Double Dee’s or “the titty restaurant” as Jimmy calls
it. It's a secret though because his wife, Pam, hates the place and
Elena pretends she hates us coming here, too, mimicking Pam down to the cocked
head like she's listening to God. “It ain’t church right,” Pam usually
says through a nostril because she's always got one clogged due to
allergies. And Elena just nods along to her nasally whistle. But
later on, when Wren's asleep and we sit on the couch and drone out to 20/20,
Elena will laugh, the whiskey fresh on her breath, and call Pam “a bonafide
cunt.” It's my favorite thing about her - the fearless taste of her honesty.
“Whatcha leaving for baby?
Just got here!”
Jimmy says to the waitress in the parking
lot and leers at her unfortunate breasts. They're sandwiched into her
uniform shirt, their bald heads shining with afternoon sweat.
“Why
you think I’m hurrying?” she answers back but winks as she crouches down into
her dinged up Impala. There are puddles in the pockmarked gravel, and the light
shines up bright against her. And that’s when you can see the cracks in her
pretty face, a dry sort of sadness breaching through skin and expanding to the
childless car seat in the back.
Sometimes
I feel like I can see what everyone else can’t. Or won’t.
“What
I wouldn’t give,” Jimmy mutters. Jimmy's one of those people I've known
forever which means I can't unknow him. I tried once, right after Elena
and I got married and moved out to White Smoke to start our waterproofing
business, but Jimmy caught wind that I was getting the hell out of dodge - also
known as Helena, Arkansas - and he thought that would suit him just fine, too.
Fast forward to Elena's and my first wedding anniversary which Elena spent
mopping up Jimmy’s celebratory vomit on our kitchen floor. Unknowing
would have been a blessing.
“Work,”
I say, nodding at the wooden double doors up ahead. “But yeah, nice
tits,” I add and drag on my Marlboro before grinding it senseless into the
ground beneath my work boot.
The
door opens to a blast of fried air from an overhead vent. It's subzero
and Jimmy notices it, too, because he whispers, “Hope at least one of them
ain’t wearing a bra.” I smirk and fork my way through the waitresses and
truck drivers hounding the waitresses. In the back there's a greasy
little office that houses the greasy little manager, Louis MacArthur, who
everyone calls Louie Mac. When I knock on the office door, I hold my
breath.
“You
two numb nuts again,” Louie says with affection. His face is a mask of
hair, and I can't tell if he's actually talking. But then he starts to
hock something up in his throat, and it's hard to miss the noise grunting right
out of him.
“Mmm…”
Louie says
,
chewing down whatever it is he's just spit
up. “Listen, now fellas. I think we've got ourselves a warranty
issue on our hands.” He lifts his own hands that are lightly stained with
rust-colored barbecue sauce.
“I
told you, Louie. This one ain’t a warranty. We just went around
back and checked the pipe penetrations that we did two weeks ago. They’re
all good to go,” I say. The word hurts.
“Ain’t.”
It slices off my tongue and feels like it's taking a part of me with it.
But I smile, relax my face. I want Louie to believe we bleed the same
blood.
“Now, now, Mitch.
I know
you guys, trust you guys, but that was a bitch of a storm we got last
night. Even The Super Duo has to admit that.” I try not to wince at
the nickname Jimmy uses whenever he introduces us to a new customer. “I’m
Jimmy, this here’s Mitch and after we plug up that sonofabitch leak, you’ll be
calling us
two The Super Duo
.”
“Louie,
I get it, but I swear
,
it’s not a warranty. I’ll
go show you out back.” I make to leave the rancid little office and its
dully piped Tim McGraw tune, but Louie stays in his place and only moves to
cross his hairy arms against his chest.
“I
really don’t want to have to get Elmer involved here,” he says. I look at
Jimmy for back up but he's busy eying a series of group shots of the wait staff
over the years. The one labeled 1986 is a teased hair, blue eye shadowy
mess, but Jimmy isn’t taking note of their faces.
“No
need to call, Elmer,” I say and a shot of the old man blinds my eyes for a
minute. Elmer's our contact at Setting Sun Properties.
Fat gut, fat head, fat tuft of white hair poking out of one
nostril.
Nigger this, nigger that
every
two seconds the man opens his mouth.
Each time I come face-to-face
with Fat Elmer, I want to scream “Fuck you!’ just like I want to do now to
Louie who's excavating his fly with a finger to check if it's unzipped.
But I don't. There it is ladies and gentlemen, the story yanking at my
fingers and toes: I never do a goddamn thing.
“That’s
what I thought. So now you boys, you go and fix it up real nice and then
get back here for a free lunch on me,” Louie says, smile a mile wide, and I
catch a shot of his barbecue stained teeth.
"Sure
thing," I grunt, Jimmy breaking his titty spell behind me, and we make our
way around back again to sweat our nuts off and fix whatever needs
fixing. I don't look Jimmy in the eye once.
~
“You
still baby trying?” Jimmy asks as we eat our free Double Dee’s lunch special.
He wipes a stripe of mustard off his chin while I try to decipher the question.
“Baby trying.
Oh, are
me
and Elena still trying to have a baby?”
“Yup,”
Jimmy says, his chin taking a dip.
“Yeah,
you know not rushing anything. But yeah.” It's been seven months
this go round. Seven months of sticks and pee and Elena wiping her nose
on her pink, puffy robe. “Maybe something’s wrong with me,” she says
sometimes and the rotating fan puffs up ribbons of her hair so I have a clear
shot to her neck, press my lips against it.
Nothing’s wrong,
baby. Nothing’s ever wrong with you.
One
time Wren walked in. She was quiet, a fifty pound ninja. She didn’t
say anything and Elena didn’t see her, but I did behind Elena’s curtain of
hair. She curled her hand and clawed at the air a little.
Hello
,
I mouthed back and prayed she wouldn’t tiptoe into our bathroom and spy the
toilet filled with blood.
But
I don’t mention any of this to Jimmy who has three boys and would knock out
cold if I even hinted at bodily fluids.
“Earth to Gomer.
You done
‘bout pass out from all the titties?” The
table of camo at our right overhears Jimmy’s quip and starts throbbing with
laughter.
Hunters, sitting sore thumbs in their sticky
red chairs.
I don’t have the heart to tell them deer season is
five months away.
“Nah.
Just
thinking,” I say.
“Don’t
hurt yourself,” pipes up a goofy looking bastard with a cocked Browning cap on
his head.
I'll
try not to.
~
There's
a leak at a church, a leak at another church and then there's a leak at Jugs
McCormick, the strip club over near the hangar. The call came in while
Jimmy was taking a piss at The Philips station, and when he got back in the
truck and I told him where we were heading next, it was like watching a kid on
Christmas.
After
work, we grunted our way through unloading the truck at Triple
A
storage, lining up the water blaster and caulking guns on
the metal racks we rigged up when we finally moved our shop out of Jimmy’s
garage, or Pam’s garage as she often reminds him.
And
now I’m headed home after dropping Jimmy off, waving at him and Pam who I'm
sure got a nasally whiff of the lunch beers on Jimmy’s breath. They live
in the woods, Jimmy and Pam, so my truck rides out the bumps in the back dirt
roads until I'm up on pavement again. I head to Arrowood Hills, the
neighborhood where my house sits on a cul-de-sac that the trash guys miss at
least roughly three times a month.
I
think about it: a decent day’s work, really.
Made
eight-fifty split two ways.
But I don’t really think in money,
more in terms of dance shoes and doctor’s appointments and those damn pee
sticks, snapping together like a ladder, one you could easily fall off of if
you weren’t careful.
When
I walk into the house, the smell of clean hits me which is a relief on one hand
- no more stench of sweaty g-strings or women with the bodies of goddesses and
the eyes of a broken heart - but on the other, I know what Elena's done all
day. It can get really bad when the OCD hits her, and by the glimpse I
get of her worn raw cuticles as she wraps her arms around my back, today is one
of those days. Her hair reeks of bleach.
“Jimmy still alive?
All those
tits didn’t give him a coronary did it?” she whispers because Wren is down the
hall humming. I picture her forking her fingers through Barbie
hair.
“He’s
something,” I say and smile, greedily taking in Elena’s face. It's wrong
of me because I know I should turn on my heels and lift up my daughter like
other daddies do, the kinds in movies with the shirts and ties and briefcases.
But I'm not like those movie men, so the only thing that settles me is Elena's
face, the pale moon shade of it, the vulnerable line of tears at her lids she
dutifully keeps in check.
“I
made the appointment.
Two months from now but still.
We got in.” The tears grow stronger and I hug her, her body smaller than
mine but tougher because she's willing to undergo appointments and procedures
to have a child, to give Wren a sibling. Her lips graze at my neck even
though I’m rough with grit and sweat.
“Go,”
is soft in my ear, Elena always knowing what's best for me. I walk slow
though, preparing in my mind a question, “How was your day, pumpkin pie?”
because it sounds like something a little girl would want to hear. But
before I can ask it, there's wailing in Wren’s room. A single, long
shriek cuts out of the threshold and into my heart. So does the stink of
urine.
“Oh no, oh no!”
Wren says with
horrified eyes when she meets me in her doorway. I'm seeing something I'm not
supposed to see, a seven-year-old girl who's just lost her bladder like a baby
and has her blanket wrapped around her waist to hide it. It's something
that’s
been
happening a lot, twice at school,
three times at home, and it's yet another reason that makes it difficult to
just sit and hold her like a good daddy would.
I
can’t fix her.
“Here,
let me,” Elena says and she softly shoulders me out of the way. She sends
me a look - a "leave, leave, leave” look - because our little girl's
panicking and she needs someone who knows how to whisper out the fear.
So
I do. I leave.
~
She
eats dinner in her room, Wren. She's too embarrassed, even too
embarrassed for me to softly kiss her forehead. So I wait until there's
no noise in her room, and after I change into the worn house shoes Elena bought
me three Christmases ago that make me feel like I'm padding through an insane
asylum, I inch open her door.
Sitting
on the edge of the piss blanket, now scented with a heavy dose of Ivory soap, I
watch Wren’s face move and jerk, responding to the trail of images in her
head. Her eyes run like lines of traffic beneath her lids, and I know she
feels a good deal more than she lets on. I can see it already, the
story’s tentacles growing, driving a wedge between her and possibility, and as
her pupils skate against the back of her eyelids,
I
can't keep it stowed in my stomach any longer.
I
crouch down and whisper in her ear. “Run.”
~
I
pad into the kitchen, watch Elena take the whiskey from a back corner cabinet
while I tear the flimsy lid off a pudding cup. I suppose if anyone would
stumble into our home at ten at night, they’d think everything’s on the up and
up. One small bottle of booze, one seven-year-old tucked in her clean,
safe bed. But there's only one bottle because we can’t seem to keep any
more in the house.