If You Really Love Me (13 page)

C
ARY
’
S
GRANDPA
,
JT Baker, answers the door when Saul and I stop by the Baker apartment after leaving the mall. He is a slender man with a potbelly and long dark gray hair. He looks pretty much the same now as he did when Cary and I were kids. He was a truck driver before he retired, which seemed like the coolest job in the world when I was little because he got to handle all those monster rigs. He smoked a lot of cigarettes then. According to him, that was the only way he could stay awake on those long, cross-country trips. He also said that if he ever found out Cary or I took up cigarettes, he’d make a special trip from Phoenix to kick our asses. I’m not cut out to be a truck driver. I’m not fascinated by the rigs anymore, and I’d probably fall asleep at the wheel.

“El, you rascal,” JT says when he sees me, “where have you been hiding yourself? I’ve been here three days now, and this is the first I’ve seen of you.”

“Hi, JT.” I give the man a hug. He is still a smoker: I can smell the cigarette exhaust in his clothes. “Sorry I haven’t been down before now. I’ve been kinda busy.” Actually, I’ve been avoiding him. It’s stupid, but I feel resentful toward him for taking Cary away. “Where are Auntie Jeanne and Cary?”

“They’re in the kitchen, working on tomorrow’s dinner.” JT looks over my shoulder at Saul. “And who’s this fella?”

“JT, this is my boyfriend, Saul Brooks. Saul, this is Cary’s granddad, Jerome Baker.”

Saul steps forward, extending his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Baker.”

“You can call me JT, son. That works for Ellis.” JT shakes hands with Saul and then looks at me. “Whooey, El. You got yourself a walking mountain here.”

I can see the tremor go up Saul’s neck at that. “I’m not really that big.”

“Hell, you’d almost make two of me, easily,” JT replies, and he cackles out a laugh.

“Way to insult the dude, Grampa,” says Cary as he walks in from the kitchen. “Don’t pay him any attention, guys. He’s had too much spiked eggnog. Come on in, take off your coats.”

“Actually, we can’t stay,” I reply. “I just wanted to drop by and say hi to JT. Saul and I are gonna hang out with Mom tonight.”

Cary gets a spooked look on his face. “Uh… didn’t your mom tell you…?”

“Tell me what?”

“She stopped by this morning for coffee with Jeanne, Cary, and me,” JT says. “She told us she’d be spending the night with… Breeze, I think the name was. She probably left you a note.”

The pain closes around my throat like a fist. Mom and I have always spent Christmas Eve together. Always. Even when she had a boyfriend. She’d just bring the guy up to the apartment to hang out with us—

And she won’t do that with Breeze. Because of me.

JT slaps his hand on my shoulder and gives a little squeeze. “Come on. Spend the evening here with us. I made a big thing of chicken salad for dinner. We’ll make sandwiches and hot chocolate, and I’ll whip everybody at poker.” He shifts his gaze to Saul. “You’re not a card shark are you, Arnold Schwarzenegger Jr.?”

I quickly look at Saul, and again I see the stiffening in his neck and face, as if he is trying to freeze out the embarrassment that blushes across his cheeks.

Cary slides an arm around Saul’s shoulders. “Don’t listen to him, man. That’s the liquor talking.” He guides Saul toward the kitchen. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat.”

B
Y
TEN
o’clock, JT is nodding off. Cary’s back in the kitchen helping Auntie Jeanne. So Saul and I say our good-nights, bundle up in our jackets, and leave.

Outside, on the landing at the bottom of the stairs, I stop Saul. “Are you okay?”

The embarrassed look comes back to his face, even after all the time we spent playing cards with Cary and JT. “Yeah.”

“Seriously, don’t pay any attention to what JT said back there.”

“Arnold Schwarzenegger is way bigger than I am.”

Not for long. Not at the rate you’re going.
“Yeah. You’re right.”

He takes my hand. The cold is bitter, but it has begun to snow, and we stand there for a while, watching the fat white flakes spiral slowly to the ground like sprinkles against the dark of night. Most of the windows at the apartments are lit up with strings of multicolored lights. Everything is so still. It almost feels magical. Then we climb the stairs to my apartment.

My empty apartment.

The lighted Christmas tree blinks merrily away in the corner of the living room. There are none of the usual aromas of cakes and pies baking. We’re having dinner at Auntie Jeanne’s tomorrow, but even so, Mom would always bake desserts, some to take down for dinner and some to have around the apartment for us.

“It’s getting late,” Saul says in that way that actually means
I’ve got to go.

“I know.” I turn to him as we stand there in the middle of the living room in our jackets, and I grab him and bury my face against his neck. He is holding the shopping bag with the gifts I bought earlier, so he can only hold me with one arm. That one arm feels pretty good, and I don’t want to let go. I don’t want to be alone tonight.

He seems to read my emotions. He pulls back so he can look in my eyes and says, “I’ll stay with you.”

Relief and gratitude rise like heat in me. I get so choked up I can’t even say thanks.

“Just let me send my folks a text.” He lets me go, puts down the bag, and takes out his cell phone.

W
E
DON
’
T
talk. We don’t make love. We don’t have to. Stripped down to our T-shirts and boxers, we lie in the dark of my room, snuggled beneath the blankets, Saul holding me from behind. The only sound is the soft crinkle of snowflakes hitting the window outside. The love between us is a physical thing that wraps around us like the warmth of a cozy fire, carrying us gently through the night.

T
HE
CLINK
of a glass wakes me.

I raise my head from the pillow. Saul is snoring gently behind me. Carefully, I slide his arm off me and slip out of bed. That clink is familiar, so I’m not afraid of anything like a break-in. My heart starts racing just the same. When I step into the hall, barefoot and in my underwear, I can see the light is on in the kitchen.

I make my way there quietly. “Mom?”

She’s sitting at the table, wearing jeans, boots, and a sweater. There’s an open bottle of wine on the table, and she’s holding a glass in her hand. The glass is full, so it doesn’t look as if she’s even taken a sip yet. She’s staring at the tabletop. She doesn’t look happy or upset or anything. Her stare is blank. I walk up to the table and stop.

“Mom? Is something wrong?”

She doesn’t look at me. “I saw the extra jacket in the hall closet. Who do you have back there? Saul?”

A brief, bright spurt of panic sends a tremor through me. “Yes, ma’am.”

She nods vaguely. “Good for you.”

And then she just keeps sitting there, staring at the table, which is not at all what I expected to follow. I know for sure now something is wrong. “Mom, what happened?”

“We had a fight.”

“Who did?”

She looks at me as anger sharpens her features. “Who do you think? Breeze and me!” She shoves her chair back and bolts to her feet. I move back, giving her space. “She doesn’t want to come between you and me,” Mom says as she paces back and forth. “She’s been saying that for almost two weeks now. She won’t let it go, even with me telling her to leave it alone.”

Mom paces and paces. I see the anger in her face, growing stronger with each fretful step she takes. Suddenly she stops and looks right at me. “You messed this up for me,” she snaps. “You’ve got no right to interfere in my life like this!” She looks around, grabs the big black metal spatula off its hook on the wall, and she comes at me.

My instincts take over, panic making my heart thump in my throat. I dodge sideways, trying to get away, and my right foot slips on the linoleum. The side of my body hits the floor hard. Mom towers over me, the spatula raised high over her head, her eyes shooting bullets down at me. Immediately I curl into the fetal position and cover my head with my arms, afraid of what the edge of the spatula will do if it hits my eyes.

Thankfully, Mom doesn’t aim for my head. I feel the sharp, stinging blows on my hip, my butt, and my thigh as she swings and swings and swings. She shouts at me with each strike. I close my eyes, trying to keep quiet and ride it out, but it hurts,
God it hurts
, and I’m grunting, gasping.

“Stop it! Stop it!” His presence moves between us in a rush, solid and full of relief like a cloud blocking the harsh desert sun. I open my eyes and see Saul standing in front of me. He isn’t touching Mom in any way. He just has his hands out like a warning, like a cop waving for a pedestrian to back away from some danger.

Mom looks puzzled, as if she can’t understand how Saul came to be here. But she is still furious. The rage and pain is deep in her eyes. As big as Saul is, it seems at any moment she is going to shove him aside and come at me again.

“Please,” Saul begs, “if you have to hit someone, hit me. I can take it. I’ll take it for him.”

For a brief time, it looks as if Mom is still going to light into me again. Then she throws down the spatula, pushes past Saul, steps over me, and runs out of the kitchen. Her bedroom door slams hard a moment later.

“Come on, man.” Saul reaches down and slides his hands under my shoulders. As he helps me to my feet, I flinch at the zip of pain in my left leg. I look down and my thigh below the boxers is already bright red.

“Are you okay, El? Are you okay?” Saul asks in a worried, wrecked voice. I tell him yes, tell him nothing’s broken, and there’s no permanent damage, just some pain where I got hit. But he asks me again and again, every few minutes, and no amount of assurances seem to be enough for him.

I
N
MY
room, in my bed, Saul wants to know what happened with Mom and me. I tell him the truth: that I was avoiding Breeze, which caused problems between Mom and Breeze, which caused problems between Mom and me.

He seems confused by my explanation. “I don’t get it. I don’t get why your mom would hit you like that. I’ve pulled some screwups—major screwups—and my mom and dad never laid a hand on me.”

I could tell him that Mom never laid a hand on me either, until I was fifteen. But I don’t want to tell him about the first time she hit me, so I don’t say it. Instead, I say, “Mom was really upset.”

“Okay, but she was
whipping
you.”

“Yeah. And it was my fault.”

C
HRISTMAS
STARTS
out awkward, but it gets better really fast. Mom apologizes for last night and then she, Saul, and I share a silent breakfast of muffins and coffee. The two of them look as uneasy as I feel. After that, I give Mom her present. She opens it and breaks into a smile like a kid getting a new toy. It is a bottle of her favorite perfume, the one she doesn’t buy often because it’s so expensive.

“Ellis, this is wonderful,” she says. “But how—”

“I made some money working for Mr. Luigi down at the Southern Market,” I explain.

She smiles again, and she hugs me. “This is nice of you. Thanks.”

Then she surprises me. She goes into her bedroom and comes back with a gift-wrapped box, which she hands to me.

“Go on. Open it,” she says after a few moments of me sitting there holding the box in my hands like it’s something that floated right out of thin air.

It’s the first real Christmas present from her in years. I rip open the box and gasp. “Mom. You got me a cell phone? I can’t believe it!”

“My provider had a great Black Friday sale,” Mom says. “Adding you to my plan will only cost me an extra fifteen dollars a month. I can afford that. And with Cary leaving and you going off to college in a few months, I think it’s time you had a phone of your own.”

“This is great. Thanks, Mom.” I hug her. It seems that things are a little better between us now, but they are not fixed. The idea of her with Breeze still bothers me.

“Okay,” Mom says when I let her go. “Ladies first in the bathroom. I need to make a phone call before we go down to Jeanne’s for dinner.”

After Mom goes to the bathroom for her shower, I lean against Saul on the sofa. We are both still in our underwear. “Sorry things got so weird last night,” I whisper.

“It’s okay,” he whispers back. “I just hope your Mom doesn’t hit you anymore. I won’t be able to stand it if she does.” He takes my hand in his and holds it. Then, out of the blue, he starts that weird tapping with his index finger against the back of my hand.
One two three, pause. One two three, pause
. From what Mr. Brooks told me, this is part of Saul’s compulsive disorder. After being with Saul, I realize this tapping in threes is something he does when he’s upset or anxious. I want Saul to be happy, and if the tapping somehow helps him cope, I want to let him keep tapping away. But I know now it’s not good for him to do this.

“Saul, stop.” I put down my new cell phone and place my free hand over his so his fingers can’t move anymore.

He tenses up. “I… can’t.” He starts to pull his hand from mine.

I hold on tighter. “Yes you can. Think of something else. Think of something happy.”

His hand clenches into a fist between mine, and he gets so rigid I don’t think he can even breathe. He relaxes suddenly, his hand opens, and it seems that the tapping is gone for now.

He breathes out heavily. “Do I seem crazy to you?”

“No, Saul. God, no.”

“My mom and dad think I’m crazy. They want me to see doctors.”

“They just want to get you some therapy.”

He pauses. “You talked to my parents? When?”

“I talked to your dad that day you took me to your house.”
The one and only time you have taken me there.