She woke the next morning with her face glued by tears and alcohol to the pages of one of her notebooks. When she dragged herself to the kitchen in search of coffee, Clayton was waiting, pacing. He took in her unbrushed hair, her puffy, bloodshot eyes, and her untied robe and cleared his throat. “I think we need to talk about the way the two of you are handling your . . . situation,” he said.
On their fourth day, Markie, desperate, applied over the Internet for a job in a town about forty miles from their old house. The company was in a hurry to fill some new positions that sounded low-level and mind-numbing, but it meant that after the online application and a brief phone interview the next morning, the job was hers. Plus, it was a work-from-home position, perfect for someone so mortified about her fall from marital, societal, professional, and financial grace that it was difficult for her to face her own son, let alone the rest of the world.
On the fifth day, she hunched over her laptop and scoured the listings for rentals she could afford on the measly piece-rate wage she would be making. Another loan from the First Condemnatory Bank of Clayton and Lydia Wofford would have killed her. To her surprise, she found a landlord willing to cut a deal. On the sixth day, she broke the news to her parents.
And on the seventh, she loaded Jesse back into the car and sped away, to the promise of a town where no one knew her, a job she could do in seclusion, a house she planned to invite not one single guest to, and a life she could tread lightly on the emotionally safe surface of. She planned on going through the motions rather than becoming truly engaged, while she licked the wounds caused by her own bad decisions and waited for the shame that filled her from the top of her skull to her furthermost toenail to recede. Assuming it ever would.
Chapter Two
Jesse inched his way slowly down the wet truck ramp, sliding one foot back, then the other. Markie followed him carefully, trying to match her forward steps to his backward ones in both length and pace. At a different time, she might have suggested they call out their movements to make sure they were in sync—a simple “Right, left,” or “Now, now.” But he was rationing his words lately, and she knew if she asked him to blow a few dozen on Saturday morning, it could be Monday before he spoke again.
They had managed to get all the smaller things into the house before the rain started. They were leaving the heaviest items for Kyle, who promised he would be there by nine. He had missed the loading process at the old house earlier. A “thing” suddenly came up, he told Jesse by text—they should get the neighbors to help put everything on the truck. He would catch them at the new place to help unload. Jesse wouldn’t admit he was upset with his dad for flaking out. For a while, he wouldn’t even admit Kyle wasn’t coming.
But by ten, he had stopped looking down the street for signs of his father’s car, and at ten thirty, he climbed into the back of the truck, where Markie was studying her watch and trying to keep her anxiety in check. She had until noon to return it to the rental place or she would be out another hundred dollars for the late-return penalty. Since Kyle was as diligent about paying child support as he was about being places on time, every penny mattered.
Jesse caught his mother’s worried expression and quickly turned away, and Markie braced herself for the scowl she knew she’d see when he faced her again, the narrowed eyes and curled lip that said, If you knew we couldn’t manage things on our own, why did you kick him out? The boy had become a master of disdainful looks, reproachful head shakes, and long, accusatory exhales.
It would be so much easier, Markie thought, if he would voice his displeasure out loud, tell her precisely what his issue of the day was with her. She could stick up for herself then—not that she felt she had any defense, but there might be some hole in his argument that she could dig herself out of, some inaccuracy in his reporting of the facts that she could set him straight on. At the very least, she could bust him for using a disrespectful tone. What could she say in response to an aggrieved sigh?
To her relief, when he turned back to her, his expression wasn’t reproachful but pensive, even sincere. Scanning the waiting bed frames and mattresses, the couches and armchairs and the large wooden table, Jesse clasped his long, thin fingers together and lifted his spindly, pale arms over his head in what he presumably thought was an athlete’s stretch. “No problem, Mom,” he said. “We can handle it. We’re, like, totally fine.”
Markie let go of the breath she didn’t know she had been holding. This was the thing about Jesse: just when she thought he was going to incinerate her with a death stare or walk off in a huff, he would say something nice instead or smile at her, sometimes even pat her on the arm. He was like the little girl in the childhood poem, the one with the curl on her forehead—“When she was good, she was very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid.” Markie had a new respect for the fictitious little girl’s emotionally exhausted parents. The vacillations were so draining.
She regarded Jesse sideways, a brow arched. The other thing about him was that he was fourteen, and over the prior twelve months, his body had done the bubble-gum thing, getting thinner as it stretched longer. His arms were thicker at the elbows than the biceps, his legs wider at the knees than the quads. He was embarrassed to wear shorts, and the jeans he was sweating in on that humid first day of August sagged low, not because it was the fashion, but because there was no tush to hold them up. No belt, either: the last time Markie offered to buy him one, he declined, telling her in typical Jesse-ese, a language that allowed only short phrases and abhorred elaboration, “Belts aren’t a thing, Mom.”
He wore small, round, wire-frame glasses, which, combined with his smooth, pale face, made him look a little like a young John Lennon. (When he was in elementary school, she was allowed to say Harry Potter.) His dark bangs would have completed the look if he weren’t tossing his head sideways every thirty seconds to keep them off his forehead. He was a kid who would be picked first for some kind of academic challenge, in other words—a geography bee, a who-can-name-the-kings-of-England-in-date-order contest. Maybe, in his coolest moments, a video-game competition. But something physical, like unloading a truck full of furniture? In the rain, in ninety minutes, with a fortysomething, sagging-in-the-middle mother for a teammate? Not a chance.
But in addition to generously offering up seven words and the trace of a reassuring smile, Jesse gave Markie this certain look, one he had first used the day his father left. It was a push-pull of confidence and desperation, of let-me-take-care-of-you-Mom and please-don’t-doubt-me-or-I’ll-doubt-myself, of man of the house and frightened little boy. It made Markie’s heart simultaneously burst with pride and break with sadness each time she saw it.