Embrace Me (25 page)

Well, Father Brian, I thought I'd give you a little more info on my mother. Maybe it'll make the rest of this glurge easier to understand. My twelfth birthday, it all began.

My father refused to speak to my mother for almost two weeks after the debacle at the party. He'd flown out of town the night before my birthday, leaving a small gift-wrapped box on my nightstand.

“Don't open it until tomorrow. You'll be a man soon, Drew. And a man needs something to be accountable to.”

The next day, I opened it up. A gold wristwatch.

So it was time I was accountable to, not God like my mother always said. Well, well. My mother took me down past Charlotte to an amusement park. That day we rode every roller coaster at least three times. We ate corn dogs and funnel cake for birthday cake and our skin burned to the red of a hard smack. We loved every minute, laughing and running from attraction to attraction. She gave me a skateboard and the Bible I used to preach from until I left Elysian Heights.

Three days after that, my father, having returned from his trip, pulled me out of chess camp and told me of the accident. The car over-turned down a steep incline. According to him an oncoming vehicle swerved over the line and my mother jerked the wheel to miss the car. And down she went, flipping over and over, the car igniting.

Closed casket. No viewings.

Hey, but at least I had that watch.

On my sixteenth birthday he took me out to dinner in DC where we lived permanently by then and told me they actually believed her death to be a suicide. Yeah, he was that calculating. I'd started asking questions about her death, why I couldn't find anything about it in the papers from that time period, why it seemed like it almost didn't happen. He said he'd been trying to protect her reputation. She'd actually run her car into a tree. He made me assure him I wouldn't say anything to anybody. And of course I didn't. I loved my mother.

I look down on my wrist and check the time from a simple Seiko. My gold watch was damaged in the flood and I didn't care to get it fixed.

Hermy's going to be a while, I guess. At least I hope so. I don't know if I'm ready for this.

Back to the real story, then.

Daisy showed up to tape the first episode of
Faith Street
with a garment bag protecting a purple suit. She pulled it out. “Isn't it great?”

“Oh, Daisy.” I held it up by the hanger. “Purple's Charmaine's signature color. This will never do.”

She reddened. Then smiled. “Mother's idea.”

Behind her, Trician shook her head, but didn't say anything. I believed Daisy.

Daisy faced her mother. “What should we do?”

“I'll be right back. I saw a gorgeous mustard-colored dress in the window of Ivy and Rose. Hopefully it won't be too small.”

Trician hurried off on her high-heeled, pointy pumps. Her toes must have looked like electrical wire all twisted together. Honestly, there wasn't one thing about that woman that didn't turn my stomach.

At least my father never micromanaged me like she did Daisy.

I honestly kept looking for a bright spot, something that wasn't so grasping. Daisy told me her story was true. Trician grew up with nothing, alcoholic mother, distant father who spent all his time at the factory, then at the bar in the evening. Daisy said she looked it up and she figured Trician had some disorder where a person can't connect emotionally to people. It seemed pretty right on.

“You look nice.” Daisy snaked her hand through my arm. “Nice haircut.”

“You think?” We looked at my reflection in the window leading into the office of Port of Peace Assemblies of God.

“Please, you're gorgeous, Drew.”

I knew she was overdoing it. I was not gorgeous. I could have listed at least a dozen imperfections to my outward person. But the hair sat right. A little longer on top, short on the sides and in the back, like some intelligent Oxford student. No red-haired Howdy Doody on this show. I felt a softening toward her, but I shoved it down. The show was the thing. We had to retain our focus.

“Just finish up your makeup, Daisy, until Trician gets back.”

Her lips pursed. Of course she thought her makeup was finished.

She hurried off.

The day had been horrible to begin with. This show had to be a hit. We had broken ground on the new building at church and we needed more money. Add to that one of the elder's wives spent an hour in my office complaining we weren't getting enough meat at Elysian.

My father pressured me in his previous Sunday call. “Cast aside this little ministry venture you've got going, Drew, and come to DC and play with your guests for real. I've got just the position for you. You'd be a much better lobbyist than you are a preacher.”

Working with my father every day? If there's a better definition of hell, I'd like to hear it. Although I'm sure you have one, Father Brian.

Unfortunately, he was right. I would have made a better lobbyist.

Daisy came out of the women's restroom looking like a clown.

Thank heavens Charmaine Hopewell,
Faith Street's
first guest, stood with me receiving instructions from the director.

After a quick chat introducing the show, she'd sit along with our state's US Senator, Jack Tyne, a devout Catholic crusading against abortion. Jack was the real deal. He saw people like my father and those radio personalities as caricatures, in it for the power, the money, and . . . the power.

I knew this because it took me weeks to talk him into coming on the show, using every rationale I could drum up short of coming out and saying, “I'm nothing like Charles Parrish.”

And you know what? Back then, I honestly didn't think I was.

Charmaine turned to Daisy. “Oh, honey! Look at you, you pretty thing! Now I know you're used to making yourself up for stage, but TV is a little different. A little more subtle. Let me help you. Would you mind?”

“Not a bit. I had made my—”

“You're a lifesaver, Mrs. Hopewell.” I turned my back on the women. Especially Daisy. I did feel a twinge of remorse. I'm not a sociopath.

I look down on my wrist and check the time once more.

The park's deserted this time of year and the wind runnels through the gorge, shaving off microscopic bits of sandstone, carving up nature in bits and pieces. That's what Hermy the Encyclopedia told me on the way down.

Sitting at a nearby picnic table, I pull out my pack of smokes, light one, inhale. Ah yes, and press it into my arm. Nobody's around but God and the birds anyway.

This isn't confessional, but I'm waiting to see my mother, Father Brian. If I write it down, maybe I'll remember it more, remember her more. Maybe my stomach will settle down and I won't feel the need to press cigarette after cigarette into my flesh.

My last real block of memory comes from the summer of my twelfth year, a summer that crawled along in the sordid heat of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Dad still lobbied for the tobacco industry, and I was shorter than everybody else in my class at The Duke School.

Mom rarely entered Dad's world. She carted me around to school, sports—consisting of fencing, golf, tennis, piano, and chess lessons. Monica always presented a hot, bordering on gourmet, supper for my father when he wasn't taking someone out to dinner or off on some trip with an elected official. Only once or twice a week did Dad sit down at his own table. During such meals both my mother and I found ourselves as grilled as the steaks by the time we arose from our seats. Breathing with relief when he hid away in his den and we cleared the table, our eyes would meet and we never had to say what we were thinking. “It's just you and me in this life. It doesn't matter what he thinks as long as we have each other.”

A week before Mom's “car crash,” the thick summer seethed, the blacktop burned the soles of my feet, and breathing felt like an easy-listening version of swimming. Mom, from Louisiana stock, preferred the humid blanket of real-time weather to the artificial snap of air-conditioning. When Dad went away, she turned off the cool and we sweated out our days together. I never minded.

We spent our afternoons at the pool, Mom with that golden brown, Southern woman glow that served as a backdrop for her gold jewelry and her yellow and white two-piece. She'd clip along in yellow high-heeled sandals with daisies on the straps, an oversized white shirt that belonged to her deceased father billowing behind her. I figured that because she was easily the prettiest woman at the pool, the other women steered clear.

Now I'm not so sure. Maybe others saw crazy spiraling in her eyes that was invisible to my own. Maybe she was prophesying to them too.

After we came home, showered, and changed into fresh shorts and shirts, she'd assemble a meal of corn on the cob, sliced cucumbers, and some cold chicken, or maybe a tomato stuffed with tuna salad. We'd sit at the glass-topped table on the screen porch and we'd talk. I could always talk to my mother and she listened to my opinions, sometimes letting what I thought color her own. It wasn't always the other way around with Mom.

How did my father become such an influence on me? Why does it happen? Why does the aloof parent become the prize, when the attentive one, the deserving one, is taken for granted? Not that I had the chance to take my mother for granted. Maybe never having the opportunity to turn my back on her was a blessing. Maybe Dad was right.

But perhaps I wouldn't have turned my back on her at all.

Perhaps I would have ended up just like her. Okay, not crazy in Kentucky, but devoted to the Lord. What does true, all-out devotion really feel like?

Do you even know, Father Brian?

After we cleared and cleaned the dishes, we'd walk down to the pond in our development where she'd spread a blanket and we'd sit until the fireflies came out, or we'd swing in the hammock with our books. Mom loved Clyde Edgerton and T.R. Pearson, Lee Smith and Flannery O'Connor. At twelve, I'd gone through all the Newberry Award winners she thought worthy and was already onto Orwell, Steinbeck, and Hemingway. For fun, I read James Clavell and James Michener. Sometimes we stayed on the screen porch and played hearts or spades.