Byrd Page 9

  They go through the introductions and the reading of the preamble and the welcome and the steps. Then Irv announces tonight’s topic: expectations. He reads a passage out of the Big Book. “Who wants to start the discussion?” he says. “Bryce?” Even though they aren’t supposed to call on each other.

  Bryce nods. “I’m having trouble with my wife’s expectations.” The others laugh like he’s making a joke. “It hasn’t been three weeks and already she’s making plans. She talks about how long she’s waited to do things other people do. Join the choir. Take square-dance lessons.” He looks at the shoes to the left of his. Long white running shoes, narrow as a woman’s. Chuck. “She tells me I ought to drop in on our daughter after meetings. We have a daughter in Greensboro. ‘Drop in,’ she says. Like I’m not the last person on earth my daughter wants to see.”

  “Remember the reading,” Irv says, though they aren’t supposed to give advice. “What do we do with expectations?” He looks around the circle.

  “Let them go.”

  “Let them go.”

  “Let them go.”

  “They’re not mine to let go,” Bryce says.

  “I don’t mean your wife’s expectations,” Irv says. “Or your daughter’s. Yours. Let them go. Live in the present. One day at a time.”

  They’re all watching him. Their faces look worn, ancient.

  Something in him relaxes.

  At the end of the meeting they all stand up and hold hands and pump their arms and chant: “Keep coming back! It works if you work it, so work it, you’re worth it!” Bryce holds Irv’s hand, which is meaty and hot, and Chuck’s, cool as a bone. The chant is embarrassing. They grin at each other and roll their eyes. This is part of the program, to go through embarrassing motions together so that no one can judge or be judged.

  Afterwards he feels light. He feels like celebrating. If he knew where to find a bar in Greensboro he could go out for a drink. Just one, and feel even lighter.

  As a child he was small for his age, stunted by asthma, the runt of a litter of five boys.

  His ma spent her evenings at prayer meetings and left him with his brothers, who ignored him, and Cicero, who passed out on the couch. When his ma came home she would put Cicero to bed first, then Bryce, like nothing was the matter.

  No one else at his school had a father named Cicero. That, plus being small, plus having asthma, plus coming from the mill village, made him a natural target for bullies. He learned two lessons at school. One: every day would be a new fight. Two: he would always lose.

  Dark fall night. A thumbnail moon.

  The bookstore where his daughter works is in a nice old house in a neighborhood of nice old houses. He stands on the sidewalk across the street, out of the streetlight, in the fat black shadow of a magnolia tree. He’s pretending he belongs here; maybe he lives in one of the houses and his wife doesn’t allow him to smoke inside so he’s come out for a cigarette before bed. The store’s front window gives off a dusky yellow glow. He can see Addie behind the counter inside, talking to a customer. Her red hair is a curtain; he can’t see her face, only her hands, fluttering the way they do. Books excite her. She won prizes for reading when she was small—all those silver dollars.

  He has always been a little afraid of her. She isn’t soft like her mother. She has sharp edges. Sharp green eyes.

  One day not long ago he listened in on the extension while she and her mother were talking. “It’s a disease,” Claree was saying.

  “Is that what you call it?” Addie said.

  They say in the program that you can’t change the past, that your life starts now. But Bryce doubts he can start over with his children. He doubts they will let him. What he needs is a new person, someone who doesn’t know him yet, who doesn’t know enough to be angry or ashamed. A grandchild. Someone who will give him a chance to be good again, to show there is love in him. Because there is, or there’s starting to be. If he can love Irv, he can love anybody.

  He drops his cigarette on the sidewalk and grinds it with the toe of his boot. He shoves his hand in his pocket, fingers his new chip. He still can’t believe he’s in a program where they give poker chips as prizes. Or that getting them matters to him. Addie would laugh. She is stepping out from behind the counter, coming toward the window like she knows he’s out here. But he is contained in the shade of the magnolia, safe in the dark.

  Invisibly, he waves at her.

  He passed his asthma down to his son.

  Sam used to get so sick at night he couldn’t lie flat. He would sit up in his bed, rocking and creaking his bedsprings and keeping everyone awake. Claree would give him his Primatene spray; she would rub his back with VapoRub; she’d put VapoRub in the humidifier. But there were nights when nothing worked and they had to take him to the hospital. Bryce always drove. He drove as fast as he could.

  In the hospital, the lights were so bright they made a noise, a high-pitched whine like a mosquito. Sam had to sit on a metal table in his spaceship pajamas, wheezing, whee-haw, whee-haw, while they waited for the doctor. “Don’t cry,” Bryce would say. “Crying takes too much breath.”

  Winter, and he’s sitting in Addie’s apartment.

  She’s out of coffee, she tells him, but she can make hot chocolate.

  “Sure,” he says. “Hot chocolate would be good.”

  She goes to put the kettle on.

  Her rooms have flowered wallpaper and everything smells like mothballs. She is like an old lady, except she is young. Thirty-six, thirty-seven? No children, no husband, no boyfriend, according to Claree. She has lived in this apartment forever, and worked in the bookstore downstairs. Maybe she feels safe here. Maybe, for her, safe is enough.

  “I’m glad you came,” she says, setting their mugs on coasters.

  “You are?” He looks at her. “Have you cut your hair?”

  “No.”

  “You look different.”

  “So do you.”

  They sip their hot chocolates. All her furniture has slipcovers.

  She says, “You didn’t drive all the way to Greensboro just to see me.”

  “No.” He tells her about his meeting. “I would have dropped by sooner,” he says. She asks about the program. How does it work? What do they do at meetings? What are the steps?

  It isn’t her hair, he realizes. It’s her eyes that are different. They aren’t hard when she looks at him. Careful, but not hard.

  “What was it like to stop?” she says. “Do you miss it?”

  “Sure,” he says. “It’s like giving up anything you love.”

  “Oh,” she says. Her voice, too. There’s something new in her voice, something that doesn’t dismiss him. “Where are you now?” she says. “Which step?”

  “The fourth. I’m taking a personal inventory. Listing good and bad things about myself. Guess which list is longer.”

  She stares at him, almost smiles. “Remember the time you tried to smoke your pencil?”

  “My pencil?”

  “Your golf pencil. It was in your cigarette pocket and you pulled it out and stuck it in your mouth and told Sam to light it. And got mad when it wouldn’t draw.”

  He forces a laugh. In her way she is being kind. This can’t be the worst thing she remembers.

  “Did you need help with the good list?” she says.

  “That’s not why I came.” He’s a little irritated—with himself or her, he couldn’t say. He finishes his hot chocolate, which is no longer hot.

  “You have good taste in clothes,” she says. “You’ve always been a snappy dresser.”

  “Thanks.” He’s wearing his navy sweater and brown wool slacks, the zip-up boots.

  “You cook. You always made us breakfast on school days—bacon and eggs. Saturdays you grilled chicken. You made your own barbecue sauce.”

  He wants to say, Grilling out isn’t something you get credit for.

  “You had your picture on a billboard,” she says.

  “It embarrassed
you.”

  “Everything embarrassed me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  She shrugs.

  “No,” he says. “Listen to me, Addie. I don’t know how to make amends. I’m not that far along yet. But I want you to know I’m sorry.”

  “You took us for ice cream on Sundays,” she says.

  Sundays had been his sober days. He remembers hot afternoons in the Tastee Freez parking lot, Addie and Sam in the back seat, their sticky cones dripping on the vinyl, Claree with her hot fudge sundae—no nuts—eating with her tiny spoon as slowly as she could, making hers last long after he’d wolfed down his banana split.

  “You can stop now,” he says. “This is starting to feel like a eulogy.”

  It will happen in the spring. At work, at his gray metal desk. He’ll open his bottom drawer, take out the lunch Claree has packed for him, a meatloaf sandwich with lettuce and mustard, and feel a stab of pain in his shoulder. At first he won’t want to believe what’s happening, but he will know. The body knows. He will reach for the picture on his desk, an old family snapshot Cicero took with his Brownie camera. Blurry—Cicero’s pictures always came out blurry. In the picture they’re on the porch, the four of them: Addie in her puffy dress, Bryce holding Sam in his baby blanket, Claree leaning on Bryce’s arm, looking up at him, her face young and trusting.

  The pain will dart into his chest. He won’t be ready, but he will close his eyes anyway and force a quick prayer, Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, knowing as he prays that there are too many unchangeable things and not enough time to accept them all, even if he had all the time in the world.

  “You bought us good shoes,” Addie says. She’s staring at his boots, making him glad he polished them before coming over. “You believed in good shoes.”

  Dear Byrd,

  I wish you could know my mother, your grandmother.

  When my father died, she insisted on being the one to prepare his body for the viewing. She didn’t think he would trust anyone else. I took her to the funeral home, to a little room in the basement that reeked of formaldehyde despite exhaust fans that roared so hard they made our teeth chatter. My father was laid out on a table in the suit she’d chosen, his charcoal double-breasted, with a gray shirt and pink necktie. His mouth was set in a mostly straight line except for the very corner, which turned up in what looked like the beginning of a smile, like he’d just remembered a joke. My mother took off his glasses, polished them and put them back on. She smoothed makeup over the pink blotches on his face. She combed Grecian Formula into his hair and dabbed cologne behind his ears—Old Spice from the set I’d given him for his birthday. Then she stood back.

  “He looks nice, doesn’t he?” she said. “Dignified.”

  I tried to see what she saw, another version of my father—young, handsome, hopeful.

  My mother came over and slipped her arm around my waist. Her arm weighed nothing. “You know,” she said, “he wanted to be different. We both did.”

  Now that she is alone I try to visit as often as I can. She still lives in the house I grew up in, though she’s made some changes. New vinyl siding—she wanted something she could clean with a garden hose. A new azalea garden with red and pink bushes given to her when my father died. She has taken down the sweet gum tree that used to shade the driveway, the tree my brother once crashed into on his silver Huffy, his first ten-speed. I remember how he came flying down the hill on School Street, turned too wide, jumped the curb, hit the tree, and was thrown into the yard. I remember the whump when he landed. He didn’t know anyone at first; he didn’t recognize anything except his bike. He asked if it was damaged. I remember he said “damaged” because it sounded wrong, too old for a nine-year-old boy with blood and dirt in his mouth.

  On the sweet gum stump there’s now a cast-iron cauldron brimming over with petunias, my mother’s latest touch. She is redecorating her life—new flowers, new sunshine, clean new siding. Her kitchen cabinets are freshly painted; the room is brighter now. She insists on cooking when I visit and never lets me take her out. She never stops being the mother. She always pays for my gas. As soon as I arrived today, she wrote me a check for twenty dollars. You should see her penmanship. She makes her letters exactly as she was taught. Her checks are too beautiful to cash. I carry them around until she calls me complaining that she can’t balance her checkbook.

  We sat at the table in our regular places and held hands for grace. “We’re grateful for so much food,” she said. “Too much for just the two of us.” She asked God to bless everyone who wasn’t there—my brother and his wife, my father.

  Silently I included you.

  We had chicken pie and fresh summer vegetables and Sara Lee coconut cake for dessert. Then—always my favorite part—we cleared the table and washed dishes together, standing shoulder to shoulder at the sink, not talking, as if we already knew everything the other might say. My mother hummed “The Impossible Dream” in her crackly alto.

  At the end of the song, she asked me, as if this somehow followed, “Didn’t you go to school with the chiropractor’s son?”

  I almost gasped. She was asking about your father, though she doesn’t know he’s your father. She doesn’t know there’s a you. I’ve kept this part of my life a secret. But I have long suspected my mother of a kind of clairvoyance. An innocent, oblivious kind. She knows things she isn’t aware of knowing.

  “We were friends,” I said.

  “My friend Mary does his mother’s hair. It’s a shame about his little boy.”

  “What little boy?” Can you imagine what was going through my mind?

  “Something’s wrong with him, Mary says. He can’t talk. The family’s spent all kinds of money on doctors. He can make sounds, Mary says, but not words.”

  “What little boy?”

  “He has a funny name,” she said, frowning, trying to remember. “Smoky? Dirty?” She passed me a soapy bowl. It slipped out of my hands and crashed in the sink.

  My mother gathered the shards. “You’re tired,” she said. “Go lie down on the couch. Take a little nap. I’ll finish these.”

  Somehow, in all the years of trying to get on with my life—almost six years now—I never once imagined your father starting a family with anyone else. Being a father to some other son.

  I especially never imagined that I would hear about it from my mother.

  As I was leaving, she stood on her front porch to wave good-bye as she always does. She waved me into my car; she waved as I backed down the driveway and kept waving as I rounded the corner on School Street. I waved back. We waved and waved until we could no longer see each other.

  Then I drove home and wrote you this letter.

  Dear Byrd, your father has a family and it isn’t us.

  Key of the Angels

  Dusty’s birthday. He is five fingers, his whole hand.

  As soon as his mother wakes up he can open his present. His mother’s name is Elle: it sounds like the letter and looks the same forward and backward. She is sleeping in because it’s Saturday and on Saturday his father gets up with him. His mother works in a restaurant. She works late waiting tables. She waits for people to decide what they want to eat and drink. He and his father wait for her to wake up.

  “More Cheerios, buddy?” His father calls him buddy but his name is Dusty, short for Dustin, which his mother picked out. Dusty Rhodes.

  He’s tired of cereal. What he wants is a taste of his father’s beer. He leans across his father’s belly and grabs. His father’s hand is long. It wraps all the way around his beer. His father says it’s good to have long hands if you play guitar, which he used to do, and sometimes still does, but only for Dusty.

  “Okay,” his father says. “Just a sip.”

  They are watching his favorite video, Home Alone. The burglars are trying to get into the boy’s house but they keep slipping on the ice. Dusty has never seen ice on sidewalks, only in drinks.

  “Want to wa
ke your mother up?” his father says.

  Dusty shrugs. Sometimes his mother gets mad when they wake her up.

  “Not talking today, buddy? Taking the day off?”

  Some days are talking days and some aren’t, it depends on how he’s feeling. He likes words, he likes thinking about them, but not saying them out loud. When he tries to talk, the words get stuck in his mouth and he has to roar to make them come out. His mother once took him to a doctor who showed him how to move his mouth in different ways. At the end, the doctor said, “He’s fine. He just needs practice. More conversation, less TV.” His mother said thank you very fast and pushed Dusty out the door and took him for ice cream.

  “REH RAYER UH,” he says to his father. Let’s wake her up.

  “I think you just did,” his father says.

  Elle is pretending to sleep. Under the bed is an expensive present Roland picked out without her. She can hear them in the next room watching Dusty’s Home Alone video with that awful little blond boy Dusty loves. Dusty is making his sounds. A good day, a talking day—it means he feels safe. She imagines him nestled on the sofa next to Roland, the warm, lumpy weight of him. She rolls onto her side and pulls up the sheet. She would like to wrap herself in their voices. She would like to stay in bed forever, feeling like a family.

  The sun heats up the room. This is the nicest place Elle has lived since she came to California, a clean, carpeted two-bedroom in a big complex far away from Venice Beach, away from crowds and traffic and the constant gushing of the ocean. Away from that dingy little apartment Roland made her move out of while his North Carolina girlfriend was visiting and Elle was pretending not to mind.

  It wasn’t long before he asked her to move back in.