Like Me (16 page)

I asked her why and she said, “Why do I need to be there? You’ve got all of those people who just love you so much and kiss your ass and tell you that you’re the greatest—what difference does it make if I’m there?”

Later that night, when she and I got into bed, I asked her to please reconsider because it would mean the world to me if she
went. She said, “Let me see how my day goes.” I went to sleep feeling pretty good about her showing up after all. The next day I looked for her at the party. She did not attend—she went to a yoga class instead.

Some of the best friends I’ve had in my life. Left to right: Preston, Jeff, Jan, me, Anne Marie, Judy, and Chuck after my show for Fleet Week on the U.S.S
. Intrepid,
New York City. 2005
.

Although I was hurt, I knew Julia was hurt as well. I began to feel that our fragile secret relationship could not survive my career, her loathing of it, and the speculation about my personal life that came with it.

Because I had so many people who supported and loved me, she’d often ask me why I needed that from her. For years, I tried to explain to her that I could have a million people screaming my name and cheering for me, but that didn’t fill the spot in my heart that one “Congratulations, I’m excited for you, and I’m proud of you” from her would fill. I was standing knee-deep in a river and dying of thirst.

A
s much as I fantasized about living in the same house with Julia and sharing a life like normal people did, the thought of actually doing that, as a gay couple, scared me to death. In many ways, I liked our situation and had learned how to make it fit into my life. When Julia and Phillip decided to divorce, I knew that everything was about to change and that the change between “them” would certainly affect “us.”

Phillip moved out of their home, and Julia did something that I never expected. She pulled away from me and started dating a man. He was a new artist on Music Row who was trying to secure a record contract. She didn’t tell me that she was dating him at first, but I heard through the small grapevine of Music Row. People would mention their relationship to me, unaware that they were actually informing me that my girlfriend had a new boyfriend.

It was 1999. I was having hit records and touring like crazy, but finally I had a rare, much-needed night off at home. I wanted to see her, to talk to her. I needed to hear it from her that she was seeing this man. I had been with a friend earlier in the day and Julia’s name had come up. He mentioned that he knew she had plans that night to attend a Nashville Predators hockey game with Tommy Mason and that the two were an “item” now.

While driving home, I called her cell phone and left a message
asking her to call me when she got a chance. She didn’t call back. Around ten o’clock that night, I put my little dog, Miss Minnie, in the car and drove to her house. Her car was in the driveway. I knocked on the door and as she opened it, I could see that she was still in her work clothes, that she’d just gotten home. I asked her if I could come in so we could talk, but she said that she was just so tired and wanted to go to bed.

I asked her point-blank if she was dating Tommy Mason and she said that she was. I started to cry and didn’t make any attempt to hide it from her. Between the tears and trying to look at her through a screen door, I couldn’t see her clearly. My head felt as fuzzy as my vision, but I was able to make a declaration without any hesitation. I told her that I was willing to do whatever it took to be with her. I told her that I didn’t care about anything but being happy and that she was the one thing I just didn’t want to go without. She didn’t even take five seconds to ponder what I had just said to her. She was so cold and dismissive when she said, “No, Chely. It’s just too hard. We can’t do this anymore. I can’t do it anymore. It’s never gonna work. You and I are never gonna work.”

She closed the door and turned off the porch light while I was standing there, on that same porch where I had been welcomed for so many years. Now it was dark and colder than it had ever been. I got on I-40 to drive to my house, one exit away, but I didn’t take the exit. Instead, I drove all the way to Memphis and back, with Minnie asleep the whole time in my lap.

A
s I made my way home from that impromptu trip to Memphis, I had a new understanding of being all alone. I had painted myself so masterfully into a corner, and I didn’t have a friend or a family member to turn to. When my friends would suffer a broken heart, their mothers would be the first to nurture them, saying, “Everything’s going to be okay, honey. I love you, and I’ll help you through this.” It was times like those that I felt cheated that I didn’t have a mother in my life. My mother hadn’t died. She was alive and relatively well back in Kansas.

My parents had been divorced for more than three years, and I’d barely seen or spoken to my mother in that time period. In fact, things got really weird upon my return from that tour I’d taken to Japan a few years before, the one that began with the bon voyage phone call from Aunt Char—“Have a great trip, your family’s falling apart.”

When I got back to the States from the shows in Japan, I didn’t go home to Nashville because I had domestic tour dates for the remainder of the year. I got a message on my answering machine from my dad giving me a different phone number to reach him. I called him at his new, run-down apartment, and he said that Jeny had visited him to help put some touches on the place that would make it feel a little more like a home. It hurt to
hear my dad’s voice shake as he told me that my mom said their marriage was really over. He told me that he was going to get her back, but I didn’t have high hopes that he would succeed. I was excited for both of my parents to get a brand-new start. My biggest fear for my father was that he might start drinking again.

“Dad, whatever you do, don’t drink, okay? It won’t help.”

“I won’t, Chel. I promise.”

I was curious about how my mother was doing, so I called and left her a message.
A
message. Just one. Maybe I should’ve left a dozen so she’d know that I really cared, but I didn’t.

My mom and I had stayed in close contact during my first couple of years in Nashville, and I’d share with her the details about my job at Country Music USA and my plans on how I was going to try to get a recording contract. My dad would occasionally get on the phone, but he’d usually be in the background on her end of the line, interjecting and asking his own questions. Even though I continued to have regular communication with her, it became increasingly difficult for me to deal with her.

My mom was never easy to get along with, but when I was a young child, then an adolescent, and later a teenager living under “her roof,” we all deferred to her, including my father. I thought the way we were was normal. It took me well into my adulthood and experiencing being around my friends and seeing them with their parents to understand that my family dynamic was a recipe for years of pain—for all involved.

One of the first times I recall standing up for myself was just after I’d turned twenty years old. I was living in Nashville and had wrapped up my second season at Opryland, so I bought myself a plane ticket home to spend a week with my mom and dad.

The three of us were driving home from having dinner in a nearby town. The radio was playing a song by a new country singer whom I liked a lot. I said, “Oooh, turn that up. I love her voice.” My dad cranked it a notch as we cruised down the two-lane road with our bellies full of chicken-fried steak and apple
crisp. Within seconds, my mom reached over and snapped the radio dial to the off position.

“Hey!” I exclaimed, “I was listening to that.”

“She can’t sing,” my mother said.

I felt like a little kid in that backseat of my parents’ car and was inclined to let her, as usual, rule the moment. I stewed for a bit; then my mouth opened up, and twenty years of frustration came out. In the most empowered, placid delivery of my life—to that point—I said, “That’s your opinion, Mom. Maybe you don’t like her voice, or maybe you don’t think this is a good song, but she
can
sing. She’s a professional country music singer, and I’m sure she makes millions of dollars singing that song. I heard her sing live on the Grand Ole Opry a couple of weeks ago, and she was one of the best singers there. So although
you
may not think she can sing, a whole lot of other people do. Including me.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said in a low, monotone reply.

I could see the top third of my dad’s face in the rearview mirror, and after he’d dedicated his stare straight ahead to the asphalt and the dotted lines, he cut his glare up and over, and that stare reflected, then connected with mine. I saw the familiar
“I wish you hadn’t gone and done that”
in his eyes, and that look ricocheted a hundred times off metal, plastic, fabric, and glass on the inside of that car.

Something was different inside of me though. I knew I wasn’t deserving of the title about to be assigned to me: The One Who Ruined a Nice Night Out. My dad didn’t say a word, my mom was silent, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t try to fix it. I don’t know how I knew, but I did, with full certainty, that it wasn’t mine to fix.

The gravel crunched under the tires as we pulled into the driveway. My mother made a point of being the first out of the car (not an easy thing for her to do, considering polio had crippled her right leg), but in order to be the first to slam your door
shut, you have to be the first one out. When we got inside, my mother went straight to my parents’ bedroom and locked the door behind her. My dad sat in his La-Z-Boy recliner that I’d bought for him the year before, the one he spent so much time in after we brought him home from the hospital to recover from his emergency triple-bypass surgery.

With my mother locked in her bedroom and my father making his anger known only to the remote control, I went to the guest bedroom and put on my pajamas. I sat on the edge of the bed and honestly did consider knocking on her door, telling her that I wasn’t sure what had gotten into me and that I was sorry. No. I wouldn’t do it, I thought. I didn’t know exactly what
to
do because this territory was new to me, but I knew what I wouldn’t do. I would not shrink this time.

I stayed in the guest room and was reading a book when I heard my dad’s voice through his famous clenched teeth saying to my mother, “Cheri, open up this door.” She opened the door, and I could hear both of their voices rising in pitch and volume at the exact same moments—ensuring that neither heard what the other was saying. This was a skill they’d refined over the years. My dad exited their bedroom, slamming the door for effect and went back to his chair. It was late, nearly midnight. I went to the living room to talk to him.

“She won’t come out. I don’t know what’s wrong with her, Chel. It’s getting worse. Since you kids left, she’s just mean as a snake, even more than before. I don’t know what to do,” my dad said with the look of a man who’d been pushing a fifty-car freight train up a hill.

I felt confident and healthy when I said, “I don’t know what you should do either, Dad, but I know what I’m gonna do.”

While my mom and dad had been in their bedroom arguing, I had been on the telephone changing my departure out of Kansas City from four days later to the next morning. When I told my dad that I was scheduled to fly out sooner than later and that I
needed a ride to the airport, I thought he was going to cry, but he didn’t.

His tense shoulders slumped in defeat when he said, “Please don’t go. Can’t you stay for me? Your visit home is all I’ve been looking forward to. Please don’t let her ruin it. Let me go talk to her again.”

He came into the guest room a while later, and I was packing my things.

“I told her you were going home,” he said.

I knew before he went in there that she wasn’t going to be moved by the news.

“What time do you have to be there in the morning”? he asked.

Together, we figured out the travel time to KCI Airport, which was nearly two hours away, and then we said good night.

I got up early and loaded my things into the trunk of the car. I went back inside the house to use the restroom, and although I knew that my mother wouldn’t approach me to say good-bye, I thought she might make herself visible in the kitchen or something to give me one last chance to tell her how sorry I was. She didn’t.

My dad and I talked the entire ride up to the city. The only thing I remember specifically saying to him is, “Dad, I’m not married to her. I don’t have to stay. I’m just her daughter.”

It would be more than a month before I would speak to my mother again. She simply had no intention of calling me, so I broke down. I called her and apologized. I felt happy to have fixed it and to have reopened the lines of communication with her, but I knew I shouldn’t have had to be the one to go groveling and begging her for forgiveness.

Five years later, when I left that message on her answering machine, checking in on her to find out how she was doing, in light of my hearing through the grapevine that she and my dad were divorcing, I felt something familiar. Making the phone call
stung. Here I was, again, initiating a phone call that I shouldn’t necessarily have had to put into motion. Isn’t it standard protocol that when the parents decide to get divorced, they call the kids and tenderly break the news to them and say things like, “This isn’t going to change a thing, honey. I love you and your dad still loves you. We’ll always be a family in one way or another”? Or “Kids, we still care about each other; we just aren’t in love anymore. Our splitting up should actually make things a little less difficult for all of us”? Isn’t that how it goes?