Are You Sitting Down? (23 page)

Bending to pick it up, I smoothed out
some of the creases with my hands.
The paper was so old some of the ink transferred to my hands, blackening them.
I immediately n
o
ticed the date.
The paper was from two days after Justin had died.
I laid the paper on the coffee table and picked up more pieces of it from the floor.
Unraveling the wadded paper and smoothing the
pages
out on the glass top of the table, I felt like some television detective slowly recovering some sort of ev
i
dence, or an archeologist digging up clues to our past.

Some of the pages were missing, probably in another box or thrown away because I had not used them.
The hea
d
lines were words I don’t remember reading.
When a mother loses her only son, the rest of the news in the world is easily forgotten, if heard at all.
The rectangular pieces of the newsp
a
per were still quite wrinkled but intact, and I stacked them neatly on the table giving the gazette back its shape.
I found one page that had a neat long rectangular piece missing from where someone had cut out an article.
It was a full page ad for
a
car lot.
I immediately turned it over
to find the
obituary page.
I d
id
n’t remember cutting out the article on Justin, but I must have.
I d
id
remember where it
was though
, t
ucked between the pages of the Bible in my nightstand drawer
.
I walked upstairs to my bedroom to get it.

I don’t know how much time had passed between
trying to take
down the tree and sitting on the bed to read Justin’s obituary
again
.
Hearing
Manny com
e
in the front door brought
me back.
I looked at the tissue in my hand, soaked in tears and stained black from the newspaper ink on my hands.

“Helen?”
h
e called from downstairs.

“I’m up here.”

“Why are you taking down the tree?”

I wanted to tell him that sooner or later we all ha
d
to move on with our lives, but I’d already grown tired of him telling me that.

“
All t
he lights burned out,” I yelled down the stairs.

I heard him grumbling about the mess on the floor.
I could hear him picking up the strands of lights and stuffing them into a trash bag.
Like the cat and the bedspread, he cleaned up
the
problems and took them to the curb.
I checked my face in the mirror to find a smudge of black ink on my cheek from touc
h
ing my face.
A clean line ran through it from where a tear had fallen.

“Guess who I ran into at Greer’s?”
h
e said as I was coming down the stairs.

He was always running into someone there, or at the bank, in line at the post office, or in the parking lot at work.
It was always someone from church, back when I went, or an old neighbor I’d done a favor for once.
It was never anyone I’d thought of since.
I never remembered them.
Manny often had to go through neighbor genealogy to get me to remember.

“Sheila.
You remember Sheila.
She’s Mr.
Barnhill
’s granddaughter.
Her
parent’s lived in the old
Parker
house b
e
fore she was born.
Mr.
Barnhill
passed away about a year ago.
The Barnhill’s moved to town, but they would bring her out here to go to church sometimes with her grandparents.
She went to high school with Justin.”

Half the time, I still never remembered.
Later, I’d fade into a daydream with their name on my mind.
Bake sales, pa
g
eant plays, piano recitals, trips to the grocery store all flooded my mind like I was thumbing through a directory in my brain.
Faces flashed from church pews, department store aisles, or community barbecues.
Eventually, I sometimes found the one Manny had run into that day just as they were back then.
I never knew how long ago it had been since I saw them last.
Every event was placed in time either before Justin’s death or after, and I had not seen too many people outside this house after it.

“Who?”
I asked him as I stood there and watched him pic
k
ing up the
mess
I had made.

He always waited for me to respond, a sign that he knew he had my attention.
He stood up from kneeling on the floor.
His sweater had risen up a bit to reveal a roll of pink flesh.
With the movement of my eyes, he saw that I had noticed so he pulled the sweater down.
He huffed out a large breath before speaking again.
Getting up from the floor took a lot out of him.

“Who did you see?”
I asked again to speed things along.
He was accustomed to my impatience.

“Travis White,” he said through another exhale.

Now, that was a name in need of no explanation.
He popped into my head immediately.
I knew exactly who he was, although I had often wished I didn’t.
It was hard to think of my son without thinking of Travis, but I eventually learned to dream of a Justin prior to him meeting Travis
.
It kept
Travis
from
creep
ing
in to the memories.
He wasn’t there
back then.
He didn’t know the Justin I knew
. Yet.

I wanted to walk away and leave Manny standing there.
I clinched my fists closed and then opened them again.
The imprint of my nails in the flesh of my palms stung.
Manny looked at me like a happy puppy that had just pissed on the newspaper.
He was waiting to see a smile grow on my face, but it just would not sprout.
Instead of waiting for my reply, he conti
n
ued.

“He’s in town to see his family for Christmas.
All of his brothers and sisters are staying at his Mom’s house for the holiday.
You remember
Lorraine
, don’t you?
Nice lady.
She hasn’t aged a bit.
I see her at church all the time.
She always says hello and asks about you.”

I didn’t believe him, the part about
Lorraine
asking about me anyway.
I doubt anyone ever asked about me as much as he said they did.
It was a lot like when a couple gets a divorce late into their marriage, if Manny and I were to divorce now after forty-two years.
The neighborly thing to do is to ask how one of us is doing, but no one wants to ask because they fear they will embarrass you.
They think it might be rude to ask.
No one wants to know your business when you might need a shoulder to cry on.

Since we weren’t divorced, maybe Manny wasn’t lying.
I’m sure at one time or another, right after Justin’s death, ev
e
ryone did ask about me.
Manny had rehearsed his answer and recited it by heart many times
by
now.

“She’s fine.
Thanks for asking,” is probably about all he knew how to say.

Fine
is a routine word which really means, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
It’s used to politely dismiss the subject.
So, eve
n
tually, they just stop asking.

I never cared much for Travis.
Even before Justin’s death, I blamed Travis for what my son said he was.
I blamed him for taking Justin away from me and off to that stinking city to live in sin.
The thought of two men together still sent my stomach on edge, but it’s a different sickening when your son comes home and tells you that’s what he likes.
I forbid him to tell anyone else.
I wanted to put soap in his mouth and erase it like a cuss word slipping
out of him
when he was eight years old.
I wanted to bend him over my knee and wear his ass out with a belt.
I cursed the heavens every night.

Why me, Lord?

After he told us, it was as if I didn’t know who he was.
Everything we thought we were doing to raise our child right was a lie.
Were we not praying hard enough in church?
We were there every time the doors were open.
I wanted to blame Manny.
He was a eunuch when it came to being a father.
He wasn’t here enough.
He didn’t spend enough time with Justin.
He didn’t pass along the manly traits and actions a son should inherit instinctively from his father, if Manny had them to pass down at all.

Or was this my sin
, my punishment,
for having married Manny?
Justin was my only child, a blessing I was humble to receive.
But maybe I smothered him.
Maybe I babied him too much.
I forced him to take piano lessons.
I made him sing in the choir.
I never encouraged him to play with other boys when he was small.
Maybe they picked on him or picked him last for games, if they picked him at all.
Maybe Justin preferred to play with the girls.
He did like stuffed animals when he was a young child, instead of trucks and dirt.
Did that make him
gay
?

I wasn’t there to watch my little boy grow up every second, or was I there to
o
much?
Maybe Manny and I are both to blame for what our son became.
Was it our fault he didn’t ask a girl to prom?
He didn’t even go to prom.
Did he search his health class textbook for answers about sex because he had no one else to turn to?
D
id
they even write about that sort of thing in textbooks?
I don’t know, and I obviously didn’t know enough about my son, or
about
what he was
, to
answer his questions or even my own.