The Night of the Comet (31 page)

“I guess he doesn’t want to talk to me.”

“I guess not. You’re in the enemy camp now.”

She set the grocery bag down on the table and began unpacking it. “It’s not much, but it should tide you over until the stores open again. Got bread, eggs, milk … I need to pick up some more of my clothes and things, too, while I’m here.”

She stopped to take in the rooms—the paper and clutter, the dishes piled in the sink, the stray pieces of clothing. “Jesus, it looks like a train wreck in here.” She asked quietly, “How’s he holding up?”

“He’s holding up fine!” our father answered from inside the bedroom.

I shook my head:
Not fine
. My sister mimed smoking a cigarette and pointed to the backyard. I took some bread, grabbed my father’s blanket from the couch, and, still wearing my pajamas and slippers, followed her outside.

The day was crisp and sunny. We settled on top of the old picnic table at the rear of the yard, resting our feet on the bench. The table wobbled precariously under our weight. The light off the water was so bright that it made us squint.

“Did you do something to your hair?” I asked.

“I got it cut,” she said, holding up the ends of it. “And I brushed it.”

“It looks good.”

“A compliment! How unusual.” She pulled her Kools out of her coat pocket. “You want one?” she asked, offering me the pack.

“No, thanks.”

“Strictly a dope man.”

“Ha.”

As she lit up her cigarette, I ate a piece of bread and watched the Martellos’ house across the water. Yellow leaves littered the yard and boardwalk. The curtains were closed, the patio furniture rolled out of sight. I knew they were gone for the holiday, but I couldn’t help watching the house anyway, half hoping to see an arm, a head of black hair flashing behind a window.

Megan said, “Mom said to be sure to tell you hello and that she misses you and she wishes you would talk to her.”

“I did talk to her. She telephoned.”

“She said you were angry and wouldn’t say anything.”

That was more or less true. My mother had telephoned, more than once, in fact. But what was there for me to say to her? That I understood what she was doing? That I didn’t have any problem with her running out like she did?

“You might try calling her back, you know,” Megan said.

I shrugged and didn’t say anything, and Megan let it drop.

“So how’s he doing?” she asked. “The same?”

“The same.”

I told her how our father still wasn’t leaving the house; how he spent his days rereading all his notes and papers on the comet, or watching the
Skylab
on TV, or just lying in bed like a sick man. “I don’t think he’d bother to eat if I didn’t bring food to him. I don’t know what to do. I’ve never seen him this way before.”

“Paps and Grams invited you all for Christmas dinner. You should try to get him to go.”

“I don’t think he will.”

“No. No, probably not,” my sister agreed. “Not with Mom there.”

In the distance we could hear neighborhood kids shouting and playing outside with their new Christmas toys. I felt suddenly older than I’d been a week ago. I pulled the blanket around my shoulders.

“What’s going on with you guys?” I asked.

Megan said that she was still sleeping on the couch, our mother still in her old bedroom. It was awkward staying with our grandparents, my sister admitted, because our mother hadn’t told them the whole story yet, only that she and our father had had a fight, and so they didn’t realize how serious the situation was. Grams and Paps treated her like she was just some hotheaded teenage girl who’d run away from home for the weekend; they seemed to think that if she’d only go back and apologize, everything would be all right. That didn’t make it any easier on our mother, naturally. Megan wanted to get her out of the house later this week, maybe drive up to New Orleans for the after-Christmas sales and help her shop for new clothes.…

As my sister rambled on about living arrangements, the Martellos’ house didn’t just disappear. It squatted there unmoving on the other side of the water, a reminder of what had led us to where we were now.
I hated to even think about it myself, but I needed to know. When Megan stopped talking, I finally asked her.

“Has Mom told you anything about Frank? Do you know what’s going on between them?”

She sighed. “It’s complicated.”

“Just tell me.”

She took a long drag on her cigarette before saying, matter-of-factly: “She says she loves him, and he loves her, and no matter how uncomfortable that might make some people, she has to do what she knows in her heart is right.”

“So it’s true? They really were, you know—”

“Having an affair? Apparently so.”

“She told you that?”

“We’ve talked about it, yes.”

Megan took another puff of her cigarette and blew out the smoke, coolly, as if she encountered this kind of thing every day. I’d suspected it myself, ever since the party at their house, but having our mother’s affair with Frank Martello verified, brought out into the daylight and stood up naked in front of us, was still shocking.

She went on to tell me how after our parents’ big blowup last week, the first thing our mother did was drive to the Conoco station and call Frank from the pay phone. Megan had been with her in the car, so she’d witnessed the whole thing. Frank couldn’t talk just then—he was having dinner with his family—but he promised our mother that when he got back to town after New Year’s, they’d discuss everything like rational adults and find some solution. He only wanted what was best for her, he told her. Our mother was counting the days now until Frank’s return.

One good thing to come out of all this, Megan said, was that she and our mother were finally getting to know each other better. Since spending more time with her, Megan had come to see what a strong, independent-minded woman our mother really was. Lydia’s only problem, my sister said, was that she’d been trapped for all these years in an unhappy marriage. As our mother described it, she felt like she’d been standing under a dark cloud while everyone else was enjoying the sunshine.

But Frank had helped her to see that she had as much right to happiness as anyone; he’d been really wonderful for her that way. If she didn’t like a situation, Frank told her, she should change the situation. It was as simple as that. She was an adult, after all; this was her life, and she should be able to do with it what she chose. The only thing that kept her standing under that dark cloud was habit and fear. There was the sunshine; all she had to do was step toward it. “We make our own happiness,” was how Frank put it.

My sister paused to take another pull on her cigarette. I didn’t see how she could be so calm talking about all this. She seemed to be overlooking the whole sleazy aspect of it—the fact that our mother had actually been sleeping with our neighbor behind our father’s back. But when I thought of this, when I pictured Frank Martello cupping my mother’s head in his hand and whispering to her,
We make our own happiness, Lydia
, it made my stomach clench.

“That guy’s a snake,” I said.

“You don’t think our mother deserves to be happy?”

“What? No, of course she deserves to be happy. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying I don’t trust Frank Martello. All this ‘sunshine’ and stuff. What’s he up to? How well does she know him, anyway? What does she think’s going to happen? He’s going to leave his wife and family for her? And then what?” I slipped my sister’s cigarette from her fingers and tried to smoke it.

“You sound like Dad now.”

“Well, maybe he’s right. This whole thing is crazy. It’s like our mother’s been brainwashed or something.” I coughed on the cigarette smoke. “And what about us? What’re we supposed to do? She can’t just abandon us like this.”

“See, you’re not even thinking about her. You’re only worried about yourself. You’re worried about who’s going to clean and cook and wash your clothes for you. That’s why you’re feeling so anxious. But we’re all adults here. We can take care of ourselves.” I started to say something but she went on. “We need to be thinking about our mother right now. Lydia’s going through some very challenging times, and she needs all the support we can give her.”

“What about Dad? You think this is fair to him?”

“You think he’ll even notice she’s gone? He’s practically ignored her for years. What difference could it make to him now? All he cares about is his precious comet.”

“Yeah, but …”

“Honestly, did our parents look like a happy couple to you? Did they? I’m surprised they lasted as long as they did. Lydia probably should’ve done this years ago. I applaud her. I think it’s very brave of her. For the first time in her life, she’s doing what she wants and not what everyone else wants. At last she’ll be free to pursue her own dreams.”

“You
applaud
her?”

My sister must’ve been listening to too much Joan Baez—“We Shall Overcome” and “I Shall Be Released” and all that. She was enjoying this whole separation mess much more than she should have been. In fact, hearing her go on about “free to pursue her dreams” and “doing what she wants,” I got the feeling Megan was speaking more for herself than our mother: it wasn’t our mother’s freedom that my sister was so excited about, it was hers. And since when, by the way, did she start calling our mother by her first name, like they were best friends from school?

I swallowed a gulp of cigarette smoke and had a fit of coughing. The picnic table creaked beneath us. Megan took her cigarette back from me.

“Those’ll kill you, you know,” she said.

“Thank you, Doctor. I’ll be sure to remember that.”

I felt dizzy, either from the cigarette smoke, or from everything Megan had told me, or from both. This was all happening too fast. One day we were a regular family, maybe not exactly delirious with happiness, but normal enough, and the next, my mother had fallen in love with our neighbor and run away with my sister, who was coming now to deliver food and collect more clothes.

I looked around our scrappy yard: the trees along the bayou, the rusted chain link fence, the tilting garage shed, my bike resting on the ground over there. Though I’d never held any special affection for it, the place at least had a dependable familiarity. I felt a version of the same sentiment for our household. Our family was like the wobbly
picnic table Megan and I were sitting on: four legs supporting some planks, a simple enough structure, nothing remarkable, but it did its job. If you altered it in any way, broke away a leg or pried off the top, it hardly qualified as a table anymore. Then it was just—what?—a pile of scrap wood, something to haul away to the dump, and then only the memory of a table. Maybe soon you were even missing the rotten table.

I adjusted the blanket around my shoulders. I was beginning to shiver; it was colder outside than I’d thought.

“How long do you think this is going to last?”

Megan looked at me curiously. “How long?”

“Yeah.”

“I hate to tell you, little bro, but I don’t think this is just a temporary situation.” She confessed that she wasn’t sure how our mother’s relationship with Frank would turn out; we’d have to wait until he got back after New Year’s to see how he arranged things with his family. But regardless, Megan didn’t see how our parents could stay together after this.

She squinted dramatically through her cigarette smoke. “I do believe we are witnessing the end of Mr. and Mrs. Alan Broussard as we knew them.”

“You mean like … divorce?”

“Don’t act so shocked. It happens all the time. Why not them?”

I protested. Maybe it looked bad now, I said, but in a couple of weeks, a couple of months at the most, they’d find a way to get back together. Then things would return to normal. They had to. We couldn’t go on living like this. This was impossible. This was … this was a disaster.

“Or what other people might call real life. Better get used to it, Junior. You’ve got decades of it ahead of you.”

She bent over and stubbed out her cigarette on the picnic bench, then tossed the butt toward the bayou. And with that, she got up to go back inside. I stood by while she packed clothes in bags, took her old guitar, and said goodbye to our father through the bedroom door. Then she got in the car and drove back to our grandparents’ house, leaving me to stumble and shiver through the ruins of our home, washing dishes, picking up clothes, wondering how we could even begin to build a new life out of this rubble.

PETER
opened the door for me and my father, and a wave of warm, smelly air washed out from inside the house.

“Come on in!” Mr. Coot called.

The heat in the living room was turned up so high that it was like wading into a warm pond. And the smell—it was a rank, shut-in odor that made me instinctively close my nose and breathe through my mouth.

Mr. Coot hobbled around the corner of the couch to greet us. “You made it,” he said, and put his hand out for my father.

“Merry Christmas, Lou. Thanks for having us.”

Lou—Mr. Coot—was around my father’s age, with a large belly, a thick neck, and dirty blond hair that he wore slicked back in a flip from his forehead. He walked with a kind of waddle, on account of his hip, and when he wasn’t dressed in his gas station uniform he liked to wear blue jeans with suspenders, as he did now.

“You didn’t have to get all dressed up,” he said, eyeing my father’s tie.

My father shrugged and said he wasn’t sure, it being Christmas and all.

“Oh, hell no. We take it easy here. Casual attire required.”

We happened to be there because I’d mentioned my parents’ separation to Peter, who told his father, who invited us over for dinner. We all bumped into the small front room behind Mr. Coot, who went on talking loudly, not looking at any of us.

“Told Pete, you know, it’s a shame, they’re there all by themselves, we’re here by ourselves. I said, Pete, go ask them. We’re neighbors, after all. No need to be strangers. People are people.”

My father proffered the bottle of whiskey he’d brought. “Sorry, I couldn’t find the wrapping paper. It’s, ah … Well, that’s all we have.”