Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (12 page)

About an hour later, Green's doctor called Mary out into the
hallway. Dr. Gannaway was a young guy, about thirty-five, with a goatee. He told her he didn't think Green would walk again, at least not for a while, not until he went through some therapy. He had acute hemiplegia on his left side with a mild case of dysarthria. Mary glanced over her shoulder—Green was asleep in the room behind her. She was having a hard time concentrating on what the doctor was saying. A loud voice in her head had been telling her all afternoon that she needed to pack her bags and get as far away from this as she possibly could. She was doing her best to ignore the voice, but it was getting difficult. The doctor continued to talk:
hemiplegia, dysarthria
. She felt like she was at Walmart, reading the ingredients on a tube of toothpaste.

“How about talking?” she heard herself say.

“He'll work with a speech therapist, but for the time being he can communicate through writing. He had a very severe stroke, Mrs. Geneseo.”

“What about moving him? We're actually not from here. We're from Vegas.”

“Let's see how things go. One day at a time, Mrs. Geneseo.”

“You don't have to call me that.”

Dr. Gannaway gave her a quizzical look.

“Mary is fine.”

“Very well, then. Mary.”

“One last question. Should I be looking for a home for him, an assisted living place or something?”

“He'll be here for a couple days, then let's see how things go. One day at a time.”

That afternoon, a speech therapist gave Green a flip pad and a golf pencil and urged him to write.

He wrote,
Brazen Bull. Seth. $100
, and showed it to Mary.

“But we don't have a hundred dollars,” she whispered.

Green looked at Mary with downtrodden, heavy eyes, and she knew what he wanted her to do.

 

“He should have named the kid Bascom. That's what you did. That would have been the right thing to do. That would have honored you. Bascom V. In the line of Bascoms. I'm, of course, four: William Bascom IV Waldbeeser. BB. Buddy Bascom. You honored your father. Lomax Waldbeeser. I don't even know his middle name. Wait a second, I do. Archibald. Lomax Archibald Waldbeeser. He's going to grow up to hate his parents.” Buddy went to the window and pulled the drapes shut. “Just like I hate you.”

He turned around to face the chair he'd positioned in front of the window, giving the pillows stacked on it a view of the parking lot filled with traveling salesmen's cars and the neon sign proclaiming the HILLTOP HOTEL. Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Highway 81. Buddy carefully set his derby hat on top of the pillows and stepped back.

“I used to daydream about you calling me BB. I just wanted you to call me son. I mean, you never called me anything. You were there but not there, smoking your cigarettes or out in the barn cursing under your breath. Remember when you said to me, ‘I know what I want to do, but when it comes to doing it, I can't?' Seems like a lie now. You did what you wanted to do. Remember that time in the living room when you squared off into a boxing stance? You and your father. A goddamn boxing stance. He was an old man and you go at him like you're Rocky Marciano. You were always . . . I don't know. You were always disappointed. In everything. It didn't matter what it was. Tom McNeeley wanted
to talk about you. After you died. He tried to explain that I shouldn't think of you as less of a father for what you did. You were my father is basically what he said, like I should forgive you just because that's who you were. What was it about your life that you hated so much? It doesn't seem to be enough to say that I don't understand. I mean I'm mad at you. That's what I want to tell you. I just want the chance to tell you that. But I have to tell it to a stack of pillows. Look at us. Look at how you left us. Look at you. Your hat. Let me . . . there.” Buddy adjusted the hat and looked at the pillows stacked on the chair, the hat on top of them.

The Brazen Bull was exactly what Mary had expected. The bartender wore a Harley Davidson tank top and dabbed at her eyes with a wadded napkin while the television at the end of the bar showed
Days of Our Lives
. Mary knew the type. She probably lived in an apartment above a restaurant, went to the mall once a week to get a new pair of earrings, maybe a new bra, a Victoria's Secret model if she could afford it, which she hoped to show off to the “right” guy.

Mary went up to the bar just as
Days of Our Lives
went to a Dove soap commercial. The bartender turned to Mary. “What can I get you?”

“Tomato juice. A few shakes of hot sauce. Two olives, pepper, and a lemon.”

“A Virgin Mary?”

Mary smiled at her, though she hated when bartenders said “Virgin Mary.” It sounded as if they were making an accusation.

The bartender stabbed two olives with a cocktail spear and dropped them in the red liquid and set the glass on a coaster in front of Mary. “Three dollars.”

Mary had one hundred and seven dollars in her purse. That
morning, she had cashed in a large jar of change she'd found in the closet, which netted her seventy-three bucks, and had found eight dollars in the inside pocket of one of Green's suit coats. She also knew that Green kept an envelope with a twenty-dollar bill in the glove compartment of the minivan. The other six dollars she'd already had in her wallet.

“By any chance, do you know someone named Seth?”

The bartender pointed to a preppie kid lining up a pool shot. Mary thanked her and carried her drink over to the pool table. She set her hard-shell cue case on a pub table and stood off to the side, sipping her drink and watching Seth and the guy he was playing, a man wearing tight jeans and a leather vest over a white t-shirt. He looked like a cowboy. The cowboy was about her age and cute in a rough-around-the-edges way. What about this guy? the loud voice in her head asked. About your age. Seems your type.

Seth knocked in the shot he had lined up—an easy cut shot, four ball into the side pocket. He followed that up with a straight-in shot—seven ball in the corner pocket. He then put the cue ball into position to make the eight ball, which he did, in the corner pocket nearest the jukebox.

“Goldarnit, Sethy,” the cowboy said. Some money exchanged hands, but Mary didn't see how much.

“Anyone have a winner?” Mary asked.

Seth and the cowboy looked at her.

“Go ahead,” the cowboy said. “He's all yours, darlin'.” He walked by her slowly, as if he were drinking her in with his nose. Mary hoped he was drinking her in. Maybe if she stood with her hip cocked out like so, he'd take a real good look at her. “He's a shooter.” After the cowboy passed by, Mary glanced over her shoulder, hoping to catch him looking over his shoulder back at her. He was looking instead at the bartender, who was watching the soaps on TV, chewing on a sip straw.

Seth broke, and at the crack of the cue, the balls shot out
all over the table like scurrying ants. When they came to a stop, Mary looked at the break. There was good spacing between the balls, no problem areas like three or four balls clustered together or the worst, two balls off to the side against the rail, like they were in the corner on a date. The thing Mary liked about eight ball was that every game was a new game, a new start, but the objective never changed: clear all your balls, solids or stripes, and knock in the eight ball before your opponent did. What she didn't like, however, was that at one time, she used to think that pool, or any game for that matter, represented life, and that all it took to succeed at it (life) was some determination. That morning, she realized what she'd been denying for the past thirty years: no matter how much determination she had, there wasn't any point thinking her life was going to get better.

Seth missed his shot, and then Mary took over, making three balls in a row, all easy shots: six ball straight into the side, four in the corner pocket, and the one ball, a rail-runner, into the corner pocket by the jukebox. The cowboy whistled. “She's got your number, Sethy.”

She was able to beat Seth with ease. When the game was over, he counted out fifty bucks and handed it to her. Mary in turn added another fifty and dropped the whole pile of cash on the pool table.

“That's a little steep for me,” Seth said.

“Green owed you money,” she said. “A hundred bucks. Now we're square.”

“Green?”

“You made a bet with him last week,” Mary said.

“The guy in the purple suit?”

“Yeah, he had an accident.”

Seth said nothing as Eight Ball put three quarters in the pool table's coin tray.

“Is there a Mary Geneseo here?” the bartender called out.

Mary turned around. At the bar, a delivery guy held a bouquet of red roses. “You Mary?” he said.

Mary leaned her cue against the pool table, and the guy came over and handed her the roses. They were heavier than she'd expected. She stuck her face into the blooms and smelled their fragrance. Inside the bouquet was a small card that read,
Love, Green
.

“Hey, lady, just ‘cuz you get flowers don't mean we don't get a chance to win our money back.” Eight Ball said, racking up the balls. “Let's see if you're any good at nine ball.”

Mary put the card in her cue case and started to unscrew her cue. “Sorry, I have to go to work now. But I'll be back.”

Lijy woke up, and he wasn't in the bed. His side was cold like he'd been gone for a long time. She couldn't remember if they'd gone to bed together or not. Sometimes, she would wake up in the middle of the night wondering if he was home or not. Now she heard his voice coming from downstairs and remembered a few hours earlier, rolling over and wrapping her body around his, but he hadn't been asleep. He'd been staring at the ceiling.

Lijy threw back the covers, slid out of bed, and put on her robe. She thought she'd find him at the dining room table, piles of coins in front of him, a jeweler's loupe around his neck. However, when she crept down the stairs, he was standing in front of a dining room chair, which was stacked with sofa cushions. “Tell me,” he said to the cushions. “Please. Just tell me what I'm supposed to be feeling.”

“Buddy, are you OK?” she asked, walking into the dining room. It was just after two in the morning. “I can help you, Buddy, but you have to let me.”

The first time she'd noticed this type of behavior was on the drive from California. They'd stopped at a diner somewhere in
Kansas, or maybe it was Nebraska; it didn't matter. When she came out of the restroom, she saw Buddy in the booth carrying on a conversation with the empty bench seat across from him. At first, she thought she was seeing things, but her eyes weren't deceiving her. He was talking to himself, and whatever he was talking about and whomever he thought he was talking to, it was getting heated. When she approached, he practically hissed through his teeth, “Right now you are the center of your universe. It won't always be that way.” Then he looked up at her, smiled, and motioned for her to have a seat and stuffed a napkin into the collar of his shirt.