“Nothing was ever my own,” is how Cindy described it. “Clothes, shoes, toys, whatever. They were always somebody else’s first. The only reason I ended up with anything was because the other person didn’t want it anymore.”
That was something Cindy and me shared, I guess, the feeling that we were sort of like somebody else’s castoffs. I never had a father other than Pops, and though Cindy had a father she often wished she didn’t. Her mother always came over for Christmas and Thanksgiving, even when all we had was that cramped little one-bedroom and only a card table in the kitchen. And Cindy always took her out to get her hair done on her mother’s birthday, but as far as I know Cindy never once invited her father anywhere or even asked how he was doing. Up till the trouble started I’d only ever seen him twice myself, and that was enough for me too, I guess. I wish it had stayed that way.
Anyway, none of this really has anything to do with the rest of the story. Or maybe it has everything to do with it, depending on which theory of life you subscribe to. Personally, I’ve come to believe that theories are of small value when it comes to actually living your life, to making all the hard decisions you have to make and then dealing with the consequences of those decisions.
And there are always consequences, that’s the one truth I know for sure. That’s something you kept telling us, Spence, remember? And reminding us that sometimes the good consequences are as hard to swallow as the bad.
“You just do it,” is how Pops would put it. “You do it and then you live with it.”
Okay, that’s enough for tonight. I got to work in the morning, same as always. Better catch a little shut-eye if I can. Talk to you again soon. I promise to get to the point next time.
The thing I remember about that day all the trouble started was looking out the kitchen window and wondering if I was going to get wet riding my motorcycle to work that morning. Cindy was always good at knowing what I was thinking, and she said, “You want me to get the girls up?”
It wasn’t quite 6:30 yet, which meant dragging the girls out of bed a good hour earlier than usual so she could give me a ride to work. Then she’d have to rush back home, get Dani and Emma fed and dressed for daycare and get herself ready for her teller job at the bank. We’d done it before but I always felt bad asking her to do it. Back when I finally got my job at the rock-crushing plant and we were able to get this house, our plan had been to pick up a secondhand compact for Cindy as soon as we could put a few dollars aside. But then Pops got another ticket for driving too slow, and he said we could probably have his Lumina next June because that was when his license came up for renewal and the odds were ten to one against it being renewed. So that was when Cindy decided that instead of buying a car she wanted us to try for a boy one more time, and after that I would get a vasectomy. It was important to both of us that all our kids were planned and in every way intentional. We both agreed there are already too many people on the planet, and though we understand the math behind zero population growth, it also seemed that since we were both only children, with three grandparents and one mother already gone, and two fathers more or less missing in action, then we maybe deserved a little wiggle room for a third child.
So Cindy read a book about the various tricks we could try in order to increase the chances of having a boy, things like using lemon juice to change the pH of Cindy’s body and so forth. The thing that made the most sense to us was when she read that the boy sperms are faster swimmers than the girl sperms, but the boys die off sooner. The girls are slower swimmers but they have more stamina. So the thing to do was to get the boys as close to their target as possible before they all tired out and died.
We used the position illustrated in the book, and afterward Cindy laid on the floor for an hour with her legs up on the bed and a fat pillow under her butt. All this was supposed to give the boy swimmers a downhill swim, I guess. We did that two nights in a row and then the next morning Cindy said, “Well, it took. I’m pregnant.” I said she couldn’t possibly know that already and she said, “Trust me. I know.” She was so sure of herself she wouldn’t even let me buy her a pregnancy kit at Walmart. “Waste of money,” she said. “I know what I know. I know I’m pregnant and I know it’s a boy.”
There’s no use arguing with a woman when her mind’s made up, so I just quit trying. Besides, she’s spooky like that sometimes. Seems to know stuff she has no way of knowing. Which only makes matters more worrisome for me since I got into this trouble I’m going to tell you about.
Anyway, it wasn’t two weeks later she was puking before breakfast. So I guess she did know what she was talking about. Whether the book did or not remains to be seen.
The reason I’m telling you all this is so you’ll understand what our situation was when the trouble started. Despite the inconvenience of not having a second car, the situation was full of hope. We were still living paycheck to paycheck but life was really starting to look good for us, and not in a pie-in-the-sky kind of way either. We even picked out a name for our new boy: David Russell. He had Pops’ first name and my name for his middle name. We still didn’t know for sure that he’d be a boy but I decided to think positive and maybe all our good thoughts would work the necessary magic.
I had a new job and a new vasectomy scar, and Cindy and Dani and Emma and Maybe-Davy and me all had a new house to live in. It wasn’t a castoff house either. It wasn’t a hand-me-down. It was brand-new construction, three bedrooms and two bathrooms. It’s only sixteen hundred square feet on a quarter-acre lot in a small development of twelve homes lined up along both sides of a cul-de-sac. I wasn’t crazy about having a house that was exactly like eleven other families’ but Cindy loves it. “It makes me feel normal for a change,” she said. “Like we’re all in the same boat together.”
And then one gray morning my whole world went upside down. If I had let Cindy drive me to work that day instead of riding the motorcycle, it never would’ve happened. Gee always used to say, “God works in mysterious ways.” But as much as I loved her and appreciate all the things she did for me, I think maybe my former staff sergeant might have understood life better than she did.
“If you even once happen to look the wrong way,” you used to tell us, “if you so much as fucking blink out here, you’re gonna find yourself getting raped by an elephant.”
And that’s exactly what happened to me that day, Spence. I looked the wrong fucking way.