“I saw him kiss you, Mama.”
Sylvia stopped to think if she had ever kissed James Martin. She had wanted to and had imagined his body, his face. Some mornings she woke up almost choking with longing imagining his arm slung over her waist, his dry, scratchy foot pressed against her leg. She’d felt like a teenager dreaming about him wanting her, telling her how pretty she was and how every part of her was just what a man desired—her skin, her rounded hips. They had never kissed. He hadn’t wanted to. James Martin would never desire her. Don traveled with a friend with a big rig on overnight trips when he could. Helping Buster out, he’d called it, but Sylvia suspected he was helping himself. That night she and James had stayed up late. They had waited until the kids were asleep before they started drinking but drank well into the morning. I’ve got a girl’s mind, he’d told her. He’d wanted to sleep with her that night to please her, because he thought she needed it. But the sure knowledge that once again she was not desired kept her from saying yes. They never got so close to sex again.
“I never kissed him. That’s not what you saw, Ava. That I know.”
“I saw him kiss your head,” Ava taunted.
“You think you know everything.” Sylvia was suddenly too tired to stand. She felt her weight sink into the bed, into the mattress, into the black hole that followed her, always had, was sometimes just a step or two behind her and would swallow her one day, sure enough, that much she understood. “I need a rest.” Sylvia stared at the ugly low shag carpet on the staircase, willing her legs to move. She turned to her child. “And let me tell you this, I wouldn’t have taken my clothes off in front of anybody in those days for everything in the world.”
Ava snorted like she’d heard something funny.
“Don’t you laugh at me!” Sylvia felt her hands shake. “I was fat and I was miserable. I didn’t have any friends. I had a fool for a husband. Just like you.”
“I’ve got what I need.”
“Do you? You don’t know what the hell you’re thinking. You can’t go live with somebody like you know him. What’s wrong with you? Don’t be in a rush. That man’s not going anywhere? Wait and see what happens.”
“Don’t even try that, Mama. You’ve made some bad decisions. Should I just be like you? Is that what you want? You do know that Don is no prize.”
“He is not Don to you. He is your daddy. A sorry bastard, but the only one you’ve got.”
“Let’s just stop talking now. Can we do that?” Ava asked.
“Oh now you don’t want to talk. All right. You think I don’t know. I was by myself. Just like you. I didn’t want that for you, but maybe we are just lonesome people, I don’t know.”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“I know what I did. It wasn’t what you think. I know what this is about. You might fool yourself but you’re not fooling me,” Sylvia said.
“I don’t care. I really don’t. What difference does it make?”
“Yes, you do care, because you think you know something. You think you’ve had something on me all these years. I shouldn’t have spent time with him. That was a mistake. But this is wrong.” Sylvia wagged her finger. “And, you don’t get to treat me any way you want to.”
“This is about me and Henry, Mama. This is just about me. Not you. I’m being a bitch.”
“I can see that,” Sylvia said. She felt her head go hot. She held her breath, tried to count, get her right thinking back.
Ava’s face had screwed from angry to tortured. She wished she could cry, but she couldn’t feel anything but the cracking apart, the hollow feeling of impotent despair.
Sylvia turned to the door. She couldn’t watch her daughter’s crumbling face. If she didn’t get out of the room she might throw up.
“I am nothing, Mama.”
“You better stop it. Just stop it.”
“That’s how I feel now.”
“Well stop it! I don’t care how you feel. You don’t get to feel the way you want to. What’s wrong with you? You’ve got a life people would kill for.”
“I don’t give a shit. I can’t live for you or anybody else. That’s not on me. Quit trying to make that about me.”
“Okay.” Sylvia sighed and started down the steps. “I’m glad you know everything and see everything. You’re so smart, aren’t you? So Henry has a child. Well, guess what? You don’t want him any damn way,” Sylvia yelled. “You probably never have and you know good and well that I’m right. If this is going to defeat you, I don’t know what to tell you. Fight for your life, Ava! That’s what it comes down to.”
“Fight for your life. That is so funny coming from you. They might as well have buried you with Devon.”
Sylvia turned her back on her daughter. She felt unsteady on her feet. “You don’t get to say that to me. I hope your child never looks down on you or talks to you just to say how much better she is.”
“Mama? Please, I’m sorry,” Ava called after her. “I shouldn’t have said that. Mama?”
How many times had Sylvia wished she’d been dead and buried too. If they had let her she would have crawled into the ground with him, the glad relief of the end of pain. Only people who have not felt the kind of pain she had would ever believe that death was the worst of life’s outcomes. She climbed the rest of the way down the stairs to the kitchen though she couldn’t have told you how she got there. What was there to do? Wash the sludge of juice from the bottoms of a few glasses? Sweep the faded linoleum on the floor that never looked clean anyway? She couldn’t stand the thought of moving her limbs. When Devon was a boy his hamster had gotten stuck under the very same refrigerator still there in the kitchen. The poor little thing had died there before they could find him. Days later, the stink announced to them where the hamster had fled. There is an instinct to hide, and against our better thinking we find the darkest place to squeeze ourselves into. Someone has to be able to find you on those days. Somebody has to pull you out. Sylvia slowly got up from the kitchen chair and went up the stairs to her child, her breath ragged from the climb. Sylvia avoided her daughter’s face and yanked the covers off of her, exposing Ava’s naked legs.
“Mama, please mama,” Ava cried into her hands like a child.
“Get up, Ava,” Sylvia held out her hand to help Ava up from the bed. “We’ve got to go.”
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