Flavor of the Month (19 page)

Sharleen rose from the bed and pulled the covers over Dean’s body. She noticed the bulge in his briefs, and quickly covered it.

Dean continued to cry. “But the dreams, Sharleen. I get so scared. I can’t go to sleep without you holding me, Sharleen. I never had to before.”

Sharleen thought of her own, more recent bad dreams, but bent over him and kissed him on the forehead. “I’ll be right here in the other bed, right beside you. Nothing bad’s going to happen to you, not as long as we do what God wants us to do.” She pulled back the covers of the other twin bed and slid in, then turned off the light, leaving her mother’s Bible on the table between them. “Now, just say your prayers and go to sleep. The Good Lord will watch over us. And don’t forget to pray for Boyd and Daddy, and especially for Momma, and thank her for her guidance.”

Dean sniffled. “Okay, Sharleen. I will, if that’s what you want.”

They lay in silence for a long while. Sharleen knew she would not be able to sleep, but hoped that Dean would finally drift off. And she prayed he wouldn’t dream. Not one of the real bad ones anyway. She continued to lie there, wide awake, as Dean’s breathing slowed. She missed his warmth beside her, but now she knew what Dobe had meant. Still, it was hard to relax without Dean next to her. Silly, because their daddy couldn’t hurt them now. It mustn’t be right to be with Dean. Hadn’t Momma’s message practically said that exactly?

Eventually, she heard Dean’s breathing even out into sleep. She tried to sleep herself, and dozed a little, but just as she became aware of the first streak of light on the horizon outside her window, she heard him.

Dean had started to thrash in bed, whimpering. “No,” he moaned. “No, please!” Sharleen couldn’t bear it, but forced herself to stay in her own bed. It will pass, she thought.

But Dean’s cries grew louder, and his movements in the bed more violent. “No! Daddy! Please!” he cried out. She knew he was having one of the bad ones, but she was resolved to do the will of God. It was torture, though. Dean writhed, groaning. She picked up Momma’s Bible on the nightstand, hoping to find words of comfort. She clicked on the small light over her bed, and ran through the pages of the Bible. Dean quieted down, but he still wept in his sleep. Sharleen closed her eyes and prayed. “Oh, Lord, please help me do the right thing, and give Dean peace in his sleep. Momma, help me.” She, too, began to cry softly, and once again opened the Good Book, to Psalms, her favorite. But once again Dean moaned, a deep, pained cry.

She flipped a page or two and stopped at Psalm 133. “Behold,” she read in the dim light, “how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!”

She stared at the page, running her finger over the text, over and over. Then Sharleen put the book back on the night table and said in a whisper, “Thank you, Lord.” She got out of bed and went over to Dean. She touched him gently to make room for herself, and got in next to him. She put her arms around him and whispered in his ear, “I’m here, Dean. Everything is going to be all right now.”

Dean had wakened as Sharleen came into his bed. Without opening his eyes, he nuzzled deeply into Sharleen and said, “Don’t never leave me alone, Sharleen.”

Sharleen rocked him gently in her arms. “No, Dean,” she promised, “I never will.”

Mary Jane was suddenly and completely awake, but she knew the effort of opening her eyes was beyond her for the moment. She lay there, her body fitting into the familiar depression of the lumpy mattress. Her skin quickened from the cold in the damp, unheated room.

She allowed her eyes to flicker open for a moment, saw as much as she could bear, then shut them again. Oh, God! No. She hadn’t meant to wake up. At least not here. Couldn’t she do
anything
right? She was a nurse, for chrissakes. She was lying on the bedspread, no blanket, still wearing the black dress she had worn to the funeral yesterday, now twisted about her body. One black pump lay on its side at the bottom of the bed.

The funeral. I came back here after the funeral yesterday. And then…? And then I had a drink, she remembered. And that was as far as she could go for the moment. Another chill ran through her body, this one forcing her to sit up, the sudden movement making her lightheaded. She turned to the edge of her bed, very slowly now, and lowered her feet. She sat there for a moment, gathering her resources for the next movement. And then, without warning, she vomited.

When she was done, Mary Jane looked around the sparsely furnished, unadorned room, feeling like an intruder, even though this was the bedroom in which she had grown up. Hell, she’d felt like an intruder
then!
Her eyes fell on the closet door, knowing the remains of her childhood were in cartons in there. The smell of mildew mixed with the smell of her vomit. Slowly, she stood, tottered over to the bureau, and wiped up the mess with an old tattered towel. She opened the half-rotted window sash and dumped the fetid rag outside.

Even after all these years, it still hurt that her grandmother had packed all her belongings into boxes the week she went away to nursing school. Mary Jane could never bring herself to go through the boxes of old clothes, clippings, yearbooks, and memories, but she still resented her grandmother for erasing all signs of her presence. The resentment lingered now, even after the old woman was dead.

Mary Jane wrapped a robe around herself for warmth, closed the bedroom door behind her, and walked down the worn wooden stairs, her stockinged feet making shushing sounds as she moved. For a moment, in the silence between steps, she could almost hear Snowball, her old black cat, walking at her side, thumping down the steps to join her at her lonely breakfast, his tail swishing back and forth in excitement. That cat—long dead—had been her only comfort growing up. Now Midnight was her only friend back in New York. Well, she told herself, not much has changed.

She walked into the kitchen and looked around at the chaos, resenting her grandmother even more for her slovenly ways than for the poverty of spirit that engendered them.

She picked up the coffeepot from the stove, filled it with cold water and coffee, and placed it on the flame. She waited for it to percolate while she recovered from the effort, seated at the stained white-enamel table, her chin in her hands. Her eyes swept the mean room, coming to rest on the stack of empty soup cans off in one corner. The shelf over the cracked porcelain sink held a few chipped plates and mugs from the five-and-ten; the wallpaper was faded and bulging in spots, probably from the many leaks the house regularly sprung each spring. The green-and-brown-enameled stove stood on six metal legs, the surface dark from layers of grease untouched for years. The linoleum was worn through before the sink and the stove, exposing older, tattered linoleum and the gray splintering wood underneath.

She looked out the grimy window at the steel-gray day, and the other pieces of the day before began to slip into her consciousness. The funeral, the burial. The few people in the church were there out of neighborliness, even though Mary Jane’s grandmother had been anything but neighborly. Only one other person made it to the grave, Mrs. Willis, Grandma’s closest neighbor, who lived a mile away.

After hearing the first thud of dirt from the shovel hit the cheap, unfinished pine box, Mary Jane had settled the bill with Mr. Robinson and gotten back in the rental car she couldn’t afford. She drove Mrs. Willis back home. Then she returned to the desolate farmhouse. Yes, and had a drink.

And another. And another. And cried. At least I cried, she thought, as she poured out the coffee. But I didn’t cry for my grandmother. I cried for me. And then, she admitted, she’d walked into her grandmother’s room and taken every pill on the nightstand, washing the whole collection down with the Chivas she’d brought with her from New York. She planned never to wake up, never to face another bleak morning. Because at thirty-four she knew she had had her shot—an important part, a special man—and it was over. If a fat, plain actress couldn’t make it by thirty-four, should she expect it would be better at forty-six? At fifty? I’ve ended my great expectations, she thought.

But her suicide obviously hadn’t worked. The irony of it—a nurse who couldn’t find the right prescription for suicide! There had been a lot of pills, then the rest of the Chivas. Then, at last, blessed unconsciousness, unconsciousness that she hoped was permanent.

But she’d awoken to this: the ugliness and filth of herself and her surroundings.
This
is what I came from, and, despite all my work,
this
is all I am. Trash from trash.

There wouldn’t be another Sam, or another part like Jill, or another friend like Neil, or another theater group like the troupe. She sat at the table, too sick, too tired even to cry. She remembered the Dorothy Parker suicide poem and added a stanza of her own:

Pills taste awful;

Vomit stinks;

But I’ve had a crawful—

The suicide thinks.

The coffeepot began to bubble as she walked into the pantry to look for something she could eat to calm her sick stomach. Saltines, maybe. She surveyed the contents of the shelves, mostly squat mason jars containing the dried peas and beans and preserved vegetables her grandmother had religiously put up every year but never used. Rows and rows of aged tomatoes and carrots and string beans. The short wall of the room held perishables, each tightly enclosed in a baggie with a red wire twist at its neck. Her eyes fell on some crackers; she knew that this was the only solid food she could manage. She took the plastic-bagged box from the shelf, untwisting the tie as she walked back to the littered kitchen table.

She poured a cup of the coffee, reached into the box of crackers, and removed the opened portion. She bit into one tentatively, tasted its mustiness, spat it out, and pulled out one of the other waxed-paper sleeves. She was about to open it when she noticed it was already unsealed at the wrong end. Through the opaque wrapper, she saw something. Something grayish-green.

A mouse? She almost dropped the packet, but it didn’t move, and she looked more closely. No. Not a mouse. Mary Jane tore open the wrapping and sucked in her breath. A rubber-band-wrapped bundle rolled onto the table. Mary Jane stared down at it for a moment before she croaked the word out loud.

“Money!”

The bills had been so tightly rolled, it took her some time to get them unfurled and laid out in denominations on the table: all $637. The shock of the discovery forced her to sit back in the creaking chair. Where had this come from? For an instant, she wished her grandmother had known about the money, then realized the truth…her grandmother had put it there!

Oh, no, Grandma, she thought. Why? What did you hope to do with this money? Then, at last, Mary Jane cried for the crazy old woman, mourning her grandmother’s missed opportunity of spending this money, which Mary Jane guessed must have taken a lifetime to save.

As her tears abated, she sipped her now lukewarm coffee, trying to think. How long had it taken the old woman to save over six hundred dollars on her egg money, her vegetable sales, her Social Security? Mary Jane wondered.

She realized she had never thought about her grandmother’s finances before. She’d always accepted the fact that they were dirt-poor. Grandma had told her over and over how she, Mary Jane, lived out of Grandma’s charity—“when I haven’t even enough for myself.” But was that the truth? Surely her grandmother had received Aid to Families with Dependent Children after Mary Jane’s mother had been killed and her father incapacitated. And hadn’t her grandfather, long dead, been with the railroad? Had there been a pension? What about the V.A.? Was there a pension from the army for her dad? It also had never occurred to her that her grandmother had made extra money from leasing out her grazing land to farmers. The belief was always that that rent was barely enough to pay the mortgage, but could there be more? And had the mortgage been paid off? Like a dreamer, waking up, she shook her head. It was probably a crazy idea, but Mary Jane stood, dropping the opened crackers to the floor. She walked to the pantry.

Mary Jane ripped open the other package of crackers. Nothing. Of course not; silly idea. Look at this place. Worse than Miss Havisham’s. Dust and cobwebs everywhere. Grandma was dirt-poor. But what if there
is
more? she thought. What else is in the pantry? In the house?

Trembling, she began to pick up each mason jar of vegetables, to study their contents through the dusty glass. Halfway down the row, the heft of one of the jars in the back was different. She returned to the kitchen, washed off the dirt, and looked. Hurriedly, she released the vacuum seal with effort, reached in, and removed a plastic-wrapped bundle: another roll of bills. Her heart thumping in her chest, her hands shaking, she counted out the money. Almost two thousand dollars.

She poured a fresh cup of coffee and slumped into the chair, her heart still pounding. More than two thousand dollars! And if there was this much, there was more.

Looking down at the growing stack of bills, Mary Jane knew with certainty: My grandmother never loved me. She took me in when my mother died and my father went into the V.A. She was the only family I knew, but she never loved me. No wonder I always felt like a burden. She remembered, as a child, when she asked for something, as children do—money for the movies, candy, a toy—the words of her grandmother’s refusal. “No, can’t afford it, not now that there’s two mouths to feed. Now that I’m saddled with you.”

So she had soon stopped asking, and even stopped expecting. She expected nothing, and felt everyone was “saddled” with her, as if she were some unspeakable burden. And when she lost her scholarship because she’d had to take a night job while going to nursing school full-time during the day and her grades had dropped to B’s, she accepted without questioning what her grandmother had said: “Can’t help you out. I can barely feed myself.”

Mary Jane crashed her fist down on the table. The old woman had lied. Where had this money come from? What if there’s more? She stood up and looked around the room, at the ridiculous stack of empty soup cans that had been washed out and saved for no discernible purpose. She kicked at the pile, sending them clanking across the floor, kicking at each one, bouncing them off the walls, stomping on some as they rolled along the floor.