Jackie felt relieved once the man was gone, but the interruption had ripped into their glee too, and she couldn’t locate the exact space where it tore, or she’d try to put it together again.
Terry grabbed her hand, but they didn’t walk far before they decided to turn around on the path and head back for the car. He said he was hungry all of a sudden, starving. They talked about what they would order, fried chicken and corn bread for her and red beans and rice for him.
She didn’t ask him whether he would meet up with Michael or not. It was obvious he wouldn’t. He hadn’t said it that way because he was a people person; like her, he had trouble saying the word no. He’d come up with some excuse the day of and press on as if he had never even seen him though. She was proud of him for that, even before it happened.
Even still, a weight hung over them while they ate, and though she’d picked up new lingerie from Macy’s and planned to put it to use that night, she turned over when he tried to touch her. He asked what was wrong, and she said nothing, she was just tired. But when he went to sleep, she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling for hours.
A couple of weeks later when Jackie got home, her answering machine was blinking. Her parents had called her four times. She’d just left them at work, and everything had been fine, but in the time it took her to drive back to Stately Grove, they must have talked to Sybil. Jackie wasn’t surprised. She’d known this was coming. She’d expected to be angry when the day hit, but if anything, she felt relief.
She put off calling them back for the time it took to fix supper, set the table, bathe the baby, but she found her calmness grew thorns the longer she waited. Terry was working late, so she had to wait until the baby fell asleep before she returned the call. Of course today it took longer than normal, four stories instead of two, three songs instead of one. She normally waited ten minutes after his eyes closed to give him time to sink into a slumber that she couldn’t rouse with footsteps or door creaks, but tonight she left as soon as his head fell back against the blanket, grabbed her cordless, stepped out on the balcony with the door ajar, and dialed the number.
Mama answered on the first ring.
Jackie couldn’t catch it all; she heard Daddy’s voice stream in too; they must have been on separate receivers, screaming over each other, barely decipherable. For every few sentences, she was able to catch one.
“What were you thinking? It’s not just you anymore, Jackie Marie, you’ve got that baby to take care of too.”
Then Aunt Ruby, who was probably sitting next to Mama: “The cat is out of the bag now.”
“We’re not trying to run your life but you’re not doing a good job of it yourself.”
“We know he loves you but he’s an addict.”
“He’s not lying to you, he’s lying to himself, and he doesn’t even know it. That’s what’s so sad.”
“You can’t fix a man who doesn’t want to be saved. You’ll just wind up paying for his sins in the end.”
And then Aunt Ruby: “A leopard damn sure can’t change its spots.”
“And you know it was wrong too, that’s why you were trying to hide it. Sybil said if she hadn’t gone over unannounced, you might have kept that secret till Christmas.”
Aunt Ruby piped in again, “What is done in the dark will come to the light.”
Jackie didn’t say anything, just waited for the uproar to die down. Then she heard herself speak as if the voice was coming out of somebody else’s body, slow as tar drying. “I love you, but this is my family now. Me, Terry, and T.C., we have to make our own decision about what’s best for us.”
Her daddy was hot on the heels of her explanation. “And who’s going to be there when it all falls apart again, huh? Answer me that. You’re ruining yourself, Jackie, lowering yourself beyond recognition, messing with him. You’re throwing away everything your mother and I worked so hard for, and I can’t spend my old age bailing you out.”
For the rest of her life, Jackie wouldn’t forget that comment. She and her daddy weren’t as close as they had been, and she felt a pang in her chest whenever she saw him with Sybil, but most of that jealousy was mitigated by T.C. When she had the baby, she realized how much a parent loved a child, and she assumed her father’s feelings for her were at least as sturdy. Because of that perspective, all this time she had also assumed that when he asked her how she was doing, when he drove her car to the lot for oil changes, moved her furniture, stopped by unannounced, and paid her light bill, that there was nothing else in the world he’d rather be doing. In reality though he’d been building up anger with every check he signed, every mile he drove, and the last thing she wanted was a favor laced in resentment. She waited for her mama to cut in with a word that might coat the ferocity of what had just been said, but there was only silence, a heavy resolve as though Jackie were the one who needed to explain, as if she would do anything differently if the circumstances tumbled into her lap again.
“Then don’t, Daddy,” she said, just as cool as rainwater, and she threw the phone across the cement. She heard it crack, saw the batteries tumble out.
“It wasn’t the phone’s fault,” she heard her husband say. Terry was back, walking up the steps toward her.
“What?” Jackie asked, still angry and looking for some way to distill it.
“I said, it wasn’t the phone’s fault. Whoever got you so mad, that’s who deserves to be thrown out. Now you gotta fork over thirty more bucks.” Terry smiled, and Jackie felt herself sigh.
“Some people you can’t just throw out,” she said.
“Your parents.” Terry had reached their floor now and leaned against the balcony beside her.
While she’d been talking to her folks, two police officers had pulled up across the street, cornered a young guy walking with his pants hanging past his drawls. She couldn’t hear what they were asking him but she could see the young man shaking his head, heard him shout, “I ain’t do nothing.” He couldn’t have been more than seventeen.
Jackie shook her head. “It’s nothing,” she said. And it was in the scheme of things. What mattered was Terry was here. He had been working at that pharmacy for a couple of weeks now. His passion for it seemed to be fading, but he’d get his first check next week, and pretty soon they’d be looking at places again; fingers crossed, they’d have enough for a down payment in the East. Still she couldn’t shake the feeling of that call having emptied everything meaningful inside her; the filling she had managed to hold on to even when Terry left her seemed to be splayed out on the concrete just like that phone.
“Gotta be more than nothing,” Terry said. He kept his eyes on the boy downstairs while he spoke. “Your parents found out I’m back, huh?”