More Than Enough (11 page)

“You're not going to make this easy for me, are you, Steven?”

“What easy?” I asked. “What's happening? What are you trying to do?”

She put her purse on the table and took a letter from it. “I want you to see something,” she said, handing me the letter. It was addressed to my father—Mr. William Parker—at our address. I took the letter out and saw that it was his report card from Salt Lake Community College. Jenny scooted over toward me, and we both read.

It was report card season, and Jenny and I had both brought ours home a month before. I'd done well as usual, receiving all A's with the exception of one B+ in shop, a class that I loathed. Even Jenny, with her C− average, had done better than our father. “He flunked out,” I said.

“He could try again,” Jenny said.

“Not for three thousand dollars, he can't. That's what it cost us for him to flunk out. He's worse than your sister,” my mother said. “Maybe we need to ground him to the house and let you loose on him, Steven.”

“That's not funny,” I said. “Maybe he
could
try again. Maybe we could use the money from my arm. Couldn't we do that?”

My mother laughed. “It wasn't that much money, Steven. Not enough, anyway, to keep it from disappearing as soon as your father got his hands on it.”

“It's gone?” I asked. I really had thought it was more. I'd thought it was enough to keep us secure for a while, a year or two, until my father got out of school and he could begin earning a real salary.

She nodded her head.

“He could try again anyway,” I said. “Times are good, aren't they?” She didn't say anything. “Why are you showing me this?” I gave the report card back to my mother. I didn't want to have to look at it anymore.

“I want you to know my reasons, I guess. You're smart, Steven. You know we can't stay with him.”

“We,”
I said. “Don't say
we
!”

Jenny sat back in her seat now, her face going blank. She was getting the drift of this expensive, indulgent meal. She had already torn into her plate of fried fish and had managed to eat only bits of it. “It's all fish,” she said. “I guess I don't like fish.” Then she put her hands to her ears, the way she did whenever she didn't want to hear something, and said, “I don't want to talk about this anymore.” She got up then and left the table.

“Don't you say
we
,” I said again. Then I picked up my burger and began to eat it ravenously, bite after bite, the edges of the bun dripping with the white-and-red flow of ketchup and mayonnaise, lettuce and onions spilling out onto the plate.

“Slow down,” my mother said. “You're going to choke yourself.”

My eyes were watering from stuffing too much food in my mouth. I drank half my glass of ice water. My chin was dripping with condiments. “He got one D-minus,” I said through the food in my mouth. I put my index finger up. “He passed one class, didn't he? So he's not a good student. So what?”

“Please wipe your mouth,” my mother said. I picked up the other half of my burger and began to devour it, my cheeks bulging with meat and bread. “I'm not going to watch this,” she said. I had this thought then that I was like a carnivore of Africa, that I was a cat or jackal who tore and ripped chunks of food from still-struggling prey. It was a stupid thought, but it made me feel powerful and capable of anything I might need to do to get what I wanted. She looked away. I began to inhale the onion rings, one after another, crumbs falling to the plate until my mouth was so dry I could no longer chew without drinking water. I finished my water, reached across the table, picked up my mother's water, and started in on that. I just kept thinking that I was a carnivore, that nothing could get in the way of my appetite. Nothing.

“There,” I said when I was done, “you can look now.”

She looked. “Are you going to wipe your mouth?”

“No.” I could feel the food dripping down my chin. She reached over and took a swipe at me with her napkin, but missed.

“Please,” she said. “Would you please wipe your mouth?”

I didn't. I just sat there, looking and feeling like an animal, wanting to believe that this was just another one of those times when she'd threaten to leave and finally wouldn't. But something about the way she held herself, the way she was very much in control now, told me that this time was different. She actually wiped her own clean mouth with her napkin, as if that would take care of the food dripping down mine.

Jenny came back then, one hand still over an ear and the other holding one of those paper place mats kids color on and a small box of broken crayons. She sat down and began coloring in this farmyard scene with a farmhouse and a fenced-in yard with all of Old MacDonald's animals—pigs and chickens, cows, sheep, and dogs and cats—thrown in together, craning their heads out between rungs of this fence and goggling their animal eyes at you. Jenny had always been a neat-as-hell colorer, producing polished, little-kid coloring masterpieces with not a molecule of crayon outside the lines. In the past, whenever we'd had the money to eat out, she'd win restaurant coloring contests and get plenty of praise from my father for all the free meals her pictures earned over the years. It used to make me jealous. But it was just coloring. It wasn't oil painting. It wasn't even drawing. It was a knack for laying it on evenly and for observing boundaries, not crossing lines. She didn't say anything. She was in her zombie zone, where the rest of the world disappeared and where she went a lot of the time when she was upset. It was either the zombie zone or a total, all-out tantrum when Jenny got upset. She had chosen the zone, and now I had to deal with the shit while she colored. “Great,” I said. “That's very pretty, Jenny.” Of course, she just kept coloring.

I looked back at my mother and asked her the same questions my father asked her whenever she threatened to leave. “Where are you planning to go? You don't have any money. You don't know anyone in Salt Lake.”

“Don't you dare play that game with me, Steven.” She pointed at me with her book of matches. “Anyway, I have a job. I can take care of myself. I can take care of us.”

“Where?” I asked. “I just want to know where you'll go.”

“Okay,” she said, “I'm just going to say it.”

“Say what?”

“I'm just going to say it.”

“Then say it.”

She hesitated, lit another cigarette, crossed and recrossed her legs beneath the table. “Jenny, you should listen, too, okay?” But Jenny was all artist. She was bent over her masterpiece and determined not to let the world interfere with her work. I had to admit, she was doing good work. I mean, she was definitely overachieving. She'd already laid out a plush layer of grass in a Crayola green so vividly and evenly applied that you almost believed in that grass. Now she was doing the fence in a brown that somehow teased out the rough, uneven graininess in real wood. The only thing that bothered me was those animals—the way they had all been thrown in the same enclosure together. You obviously don't do that with animals. Of course, it wasn't the purpose of that sort of picture to teach common sense. Still, it seemed like something a three-year-old should know: you don't put the cat in with the chickens.

“Steven,” I heard my mother's voice say, “please look at me.” I was stuck in that farmyard full of happy, stupid animals who should have been tearing each other apart and weren't. “Steven,” she said again. I looked at her. “I have someone else,” she said in this very calm, soft voice.

The music over the intercom then was “Silent Night” played by violins. Someone somewhere asked a waitress why they had to be playing Christmas music, and I heard her say, very distinctly, “It's the only music we have, I'm afraid.”

“What?” I said to my mother. But she wasn't looking at me anymore. She was looking out the window. I wanted more food, but my plate was empty. I'd even eaten the quarter-slice of dill pickle and the piece of parsley garnish. There was nothing left. I just wanted to bite into something, so I grabbed a chunk of fried fish from Jenny's plate—a crab claw or something—and had to spit it out into my hand because I hated the weird ocean-stink taste of seafood.

“Here,” my mother said, quickly swooping it up with a clean napkin and rolling it into a neat, white ball that she placed back on Jenny's plate. She knew how to make anything look good. She really did.

“Someone else what?” I felt something happening to me, tears maybe. They just came in a rush and fell over my clean plate, red from the ketchup on my chin as if I were bleeding. I didn't know why her voice had to be so calm, so even and sure when she'd said that.

“He's serious about me.” She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the haze of smoke she'd just blown into the air where she seemed to have fixed her eyes on some very complicated and painful thought. “He's serious about
us
,” she said.

“He doesn't even know
us
,” I half shouted. I wanted to bark or growl or yell. But instead an odd thought came to me. “Isn't that illegal? Can't Dad make you stay with us?”

“Isn't what illegal?” she said.

“Fucking someone else when you're married. Isn't that illegal? Haven't you been fucking him?”

“You watch your mouth, mister,” she said. She reached across the table and snatched the wrist of my good hand and squeezed it in her grip with surprising strength, until my bones started to hurt. “I'm not going to stand for accusations like that,” she said. She let my hand go and pointed her cigarette at my forehead. “You wipe your mouth. Right now. Wipe it!” I obeyed her. Sandy came then with my hot-fudge sundae. She must have sensed something because she quickly put the sundae down in front of me and took away the plate with my red tears on it. “Please eat your dessert like a civilized person,” my mother said. When she saw that I was going to obey her, she said, “I'm sorry, Steven. I shouldn't have grabbed you like that. This thing isn't easy for any of us.” She looked out the window again where the rain came down steadily and the heavy traffic on Main rushed by, spraying water from the gutters onto the sidewalk. “I wish you would listen to me, Jenny,” she said. Jenny was changing crayons and eyeing the variety of animals over which she was laboring now. “All right, fine,” my mother said. “I'm going to talk and hope that maybe you're hearing me. Good enough.” She looked at her cigarettes and seemed to be counting them; then she looked at me. “His name is Curtis Smith. He's a lawyer, divorced. He works very hard and has a couple of kids a little younger than you and Jenny. They live between his house in the Avenues and his ex-wife's house. I know him because his mother stays at Oak Groves. He treats her very well, visits her almost every day, makes sure she has fresh flowers in her room, that she's taken care of. That's important, you know, the way a man treats his family.”

“So you've only known him for a month?” I knew this must be true since she'd started working at Oak Groves within the last month. “That's not long enough to know anything,” I said. “Even I know that.”

“That's my business, not yours, Steven.” I could see, however, that this fact bothered her. “Curtis loves me,” she said. “I know that. He comes to Oak Groves almost every day. You can tell when a person is honest with you and when a person isn't. He's honest. I know that, too.”

“Do you love him?” I asked. Jenny lifted her picture into the air and looked at it. She was trying to gauge something—what color to use, how thickly to apply it, maybe. The thing that got to me was that she was crying—her face running with tears—only silently and in a way that wasn't interfering with her work, because she was still doing an amazing job with that picture. It made my throat catch, seeing Jenny like that. When she'd cry, she'd bawl and scream and snot up and shriek. I'd never seen her cry quietly, to herself, the way adults cry. I pushed my half-eaten sundae away. It was too much—to sweet, too heavy—and my stomach began to ache.

My mother was looking at her hand with the cigarette in it. I noticed that it was not trembling anymore. It was steady. She knew very well that Jenny had lost it, but she wasn't going to let that get in her way. “I know enough about him to know that my reasons for wanting to be with him are good ones,” she said. “I know that.”

“Dad loves you,” I said. “Dad loves you more than anyone.”

“Maybe he does,” she said. “But he's like a child that way. It's too much, and it's the wrong kind of love.” She looked down at her cigarette in the ashtray. “I think your father needs me. I don't think he really loves me. If he loved me, he wouldn't keep doing this to me.” She tapped his report card with her fingers.

“That's not true,” I said. “You know that's not true.” She couldn't contradict me this time because both of us knew how absolute and irrefutable the fact of his love for her was. He loved her desperately. He always had. “I love you,” I said. “But if you do this, I'll stop loving you. I promise I will.”

She smiled at me and let out a tired-sounding laugh. “This isn't about you,” she said. “Really, it isn't.” She put out a hand to touch my face, but I pushed it away. “Okay,” she said. “I understand.”

“Don't say that,” I said.

“I want you to understand,” she said. “I want both of you to understand. I'm running out of time. I can't take care of your father forever. I'm still reasonably pretty. I'm young enough to do this, and I might not be next year. I guess I can't expect you to understand that, can I? I guess that's too much to ask.”