He says it’s a dog whistle that he can hear when these men talk, or even when they’re not talking. Something in their body language. “I can really sniff them out,” he’d boasted. “What about love?” I asked him. “Oh, I love them,” he immediately said. “How could I not? They take such good care of me.”
He’s always the one to leave these relationships, to break up with some of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. But he moves on. Usually quite suddenly. It’s like a stray cat you’ve been feeding and sheltering, and you think you have a relationship, an understanding, but then it disappears and you find out months later that it easily transferred its affections to a neighbor down the street. The stray has a different name, and a different affect to its walk, and pretends not to recognize you.
“You give out that signal, yourself,” Thomas once told me. Perhaps. But something else about me must send a correspondingly forbidding signal because I haven’t exactly been deluged with men over the years.
First my boys were small, and I was too busy raising them and earning an income. When the boys began to need me less, as teenagers, I ventured into a couple of ill-advised relationships. There was Jonah, a neighbor whose wife had just left him, taking the kids and leaving him the rental apartment and the dog. I was his rebound relationship. I knew it at the time, but still, to be touched like that after all those years. To be a sexual being again, however unequal the exchange of affection. He moved on eventually, leaving just a note taped to my backdoor handle, to which the dog was also attached.
After Jonah was Mike, who owned the gas station down the road where I got my aging Subaru repeatedly patched up. That turned out okay. Mike took my oldest, Paul, under his wing and taught him car repair at the shop. Not that he had to do much teaching, Paul was a natural. It was never something I could get excited about as a profession for him, but he has nevertheless done well, today operating his own repair shop at the age of twenty-nine. I’m proud of him.
My youngest, Jackson, is more ambitious, wants to forge his way. He went to junior college and then dropped out to get a programming job at a start-up. He’s got the bug for what they call entrepreneurship, which I call greed. Yes, I’d call Jackson greedy. He sees all the wealth around him, and wants his share. Pigs get fed and hogs get eaten, that’s what I’d tell him when he was a kid and wanted more than his share of pancakes. That first start-up failed, as did the next two. You only hear about the Facebooks and the Googles, but not about these other small businesses that rent cheap space in industrial parks east of the freeway in Santa Clara and come and go. I had to do a little protecting of John from Jackson, I’m afraid. Smelling the presence of money, Jackson hoped John would invest in his latest scheme, don’t ask me what it was, it involved some kind of software to solve a pain point in the medical device industry. He wanted John to give him a couple hundred thousand dollars as seed money. “You’d be an angel investor,” Jackson had said during the sales pitch that I ultimately couldn’t prevent from happening. “You’d get every cent back plus a fat return.” John said no, and Jackson never forgave him. He hasn’t stopped asking me for money either. Between Jackson and Thomas, my salary went pretty fast every month. It’ll have to stop now that I’m on my own. I’ve even decided to rent out the back guest bedroom, and with that, I should be able to scrape by, make the mortgage and still have enough to eat.
I hear a car pull up outside, and Thomas is finally here. He walks into the house an hour and fifteen minutes late, much more confidently than he ever did when John was around. “Hey sissy,” he says, and gives me a peck on the cheek. He accepts a cup of coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs. He wolfs that down, asks for another. I start cooking again. I’m glad to have the company, glad to have something to do for someone else. It’s been almost eight weeks now, and I am nowhere near acceptance of John’s death. A friend came over and packed away his things because confronting them every time I looked in the closet or in the bathroom proved too devastating.
“So the gravy train got derailed,” he says, and motions around the kitchen. “Have you figured out if you’ll be able to keep all this?”
I nod.
“Let’s go into the backyard,” I say, and he follows me. It’s getting a little scruffy because I fired the gardening service that trims the grass and carts away the debris. Too expensive. I’m doing what I can, but the weeds grow faster than I can pull them. Like everything else in my life, the once-gorgeous garden appears a shambles. I am going down fast.
We pull out chairs from under the sun umbrella, bask in the warmth of the June morning.
“You look terrible,” I say, noting his bloodshot eyes.
“So do you,” he replies sharply. I hadn’t meant my words in a hurtful way; I was just concerned. His words, however, sting.
We sit for a moment in silence.
“Well, what do you expect?” I say, finally. “After all that’s happened.”
“What’s the verdict,” he says.
“About what?” I ask.
“How much money is left?”
“It depends.”