Daddy, being a truck driver, was gone more than he wasn’t. Daddy was an OTR driver, which meant “over the road.” He spent his days traveling from sea to shining sea, hauling some sort of freight or hazmat across the country. We missed him more than anything when he was gone, Momma especially, but when he came home, he made up for it, as he showered Momma with slobbering kisses and touched her in places that made her blush. She would get all dressed up for his return, curling her hair, and painting her lips berry bliss. He always had something for Lily and me, something he’d picked up from Vermont or Georgia or wherever it was he was traveling—a key chain or a postcard, a mini Statue of Liberty. It was like Christmas morning when Daddy was home, like summer vacation. And he brought stuff for Momma, too, but that stuff he wouldn’t show her, not until Lily and I had gone to bed, but I could hear them at night when they thought I was asleep; I could hear them in their bedroom, laughing.
We didn’t have a whole lot of money, there in that prefab home just outside Ogallala, but Momma, she sure loved to shop. Of course we didn’t have the money for the kind of stuff she wanted to buy, so instead she took Lily and me to the fancy stores just so she could try on dresses and stare at herself in the mirror. This was one of those things we did when Daddy was away, though Momma said, “don’t ever tell Daddy,” ’cause she didn’t want him to feel bad. But Momma talked a lot about one day. One day she was gonna have that salon of her own instead of cutting hair in that bathroom that belonged to Lily and me. One day we were going to get a bigger house that hadn’t been premade. One day she was going to take us to some place called the Magnificent Mile in a city known as Chicago. Momma told me about it, about this Magnificent Mile. She talked about it as if it was a fairy tale, and I wasn’t really sure if it was real or not. But Momma was sure. She talked about stores with names like Gucci and Prada, and what she would buy in those stores if she could. One day. She had a list of those things, what she wanted to see before she died. The Eiffel Tower, Audrey Hepburn’s gravesite in some small town in Switzerland, the Magnificent Mile. We didn’t have a lot. Even at eight years old, I knew that, though there wasn’t ever a time I wished for more. I was happy there in that prefab home near Ogallala, and even though Momma talked all the time about her one days, I didn’t ever want a thing to change. Momma used to say, “We don’t have much, but at least we have each other.”
And then one day, we didn’t even have that much.
CHRIS
Heidi has this need to make everything right. She recycles to a fault. Cans and bottles, the newspaper, batteries, remnants of aluminum foil. She returns hangers to the dry cleaner; rips me a new one when I come home with a plastic shopping bag instead of remembering to bring a reusable one from home. I hear her words, haunting me in my dreams, her metallic tone parroting: That’s recyclable, in the off moments I attempt to slip an envelope or a scrap of paper into the garbage can of all things. Our milk comes in glass bottles which are reusable and insanely expensive.
In our home, trespassing spiders are never killed but rather, relocated to the balcony or, in the case of inclement weather, to the basement storage units where they can reproduce among cardboard boxes and unused bikes. Smashing them with a shoe or flushing them down the toilet would be simply inhumane.
It’s the reason we have two cats. Because she found them as kittens under the Dumpster behind the building. What was left of their mother lay nearby in a bloody tangle, the rest of her serving as fodder for a stray dog. One day Heidi carried them into our condo, each one of them only a pound or two, dirty, covered in shit and garbage, their bones showing through sporadic fur, and declared, “We’re keeping them.” And as is the case with most things in our marriage, she didn’t ask. She told me. We’re keeping them.
I named them One and Two because Odette and Sabine (yes, both girls; I am indeed the only Tom in this household of Queens), as Heidi suggested, sounded plain dumb. Feral cats don’t deserve human names, I told her. Especially not fancy French ones. One is a calico, chatte d’Espagne, as Heidi says. Two is all black with longish hair and neon eyes. Bad luck. Evil. The thing hates me.