We're All in This Together (11 page)

Dale swept up the cards and started to shuffle. He sprayed them back and forth between his hands and directed a keen look
from under the bill of his tattered Red Sox cap. Along with his twenty-year-old cap, Dale's salt-and-pepper beard seemed to
exist in a permanent state of two-days' growth, which endowed him with something of the ultra-cool, imperturbable bearing
of a war correspondent. Of all Emma's boyfriends, Dale had been my favorite.

"Now. Two questions haunt me, my friend:

"First, can this streak of piss-ass luck be broken with just the simple intervention of a juju priest, or am I going to need
a living sacrifice? Second, do you believe that your mother would ever consent to marry someone so far below her son's station,
cribbage-wise?"

This second question hung in the air.

I felt heat rise up my neck. "What—?" I asked, and the word lay on my tongue like a mouthful of spoiled food.

"I'm just throwing things out here," said Dale.

I shrugged, flicked the head of the Ross Perot bobblehead on Dale's desk. Ross nodded like an idiot. Say something, I yelled
inside myself, still not sure what precisely was going on.

"What's—a juju priest?" I asked.

"Nice dodge, kiddo." Dale produced a wry grin and stuck his hat on my head. "Deal the cards, O Purveyor of Stinging Yellow
Destiny."

My mother wrote something, and then passed me her legal pad and a pen flashlight.

We were waiting parked behind a Dumpster at the rear of the parking lot adjacent to the Planned Parenthood office. She had
shut off the lights and the engine. From our vantage point, we could watch the area directly in front of the clinic through
a vertical gap between the Dumpster and the corner of the building. So far there was nothing to see. A pair of arc lights
illuminated the entrance to the lot, highlighting the chiggers that circled over the dry grass of the diamond-shaped traffic
island.

I took the legal pad and the flashlight to read:
I'm going to need
you to do some driving.

I nodded at her—affirmative. Over the years, we had lived in six different apartments, a duplex, a triplex, and for a few
weeks one summer in Rockland, a fourteen-foot boat where I slept in the cabin and my mother slept in an inflatable tent on
deck. From the time I was tall enough to reach the pedals I was trained to sit in the double-parked car while she unloaded
boxes, and to move it if another vehicle needed to pull away from the curb.

This is about the GFAs, isn't it?
This was the time of night that they made their strikes.
What are we going to do?

My mother grinned like a pirate.
You'll like it.

I tried to return a grin of my own. I rolled down the window, caught a pungent whiff of Dumpster, and rolled it back up.

The parking lot was windless. The cloud of chiggers stretched and undulated above the grass of the traffic island. I could
feel the itch of them along my spine.

My mother scratched a new message on the pad.

What are you thinking about?

This required a more complex answer than I supposed my mother might have expected—or maybe not. I was thinking about how nice
it was for the two of us to be alone, doing something together that Dr. Vic didn't know about; and I was thinking of how lame
and childish it was to feel that way, like a kid feels about his mother, not like a young man who would be old enough to apply
for his driver's license in five months.

I was also thinking about Dale, missing him, missing the times we played cribbage in his office. This, too, was deeply, inarguably
lame. After all, it wasn't like he had been a superhero or something. Dale Crispin ran a two-bit newspaper that was so cheap
you wouldn't dare to wrap fish in it. Still, I felt a little sick to remember how he asked me that question and how for some
reason I couldn't find an answer.

I looked at her; she looked back.

Sometimes it stunned me, stunned me like being shaken awake, to realize her youth. The face I saw now was not very different
from the face that my father saw roughly sixteen years ago, maybe even as they sat in a dark car like this one. The possibility
didn't strike me as incestuous. Rather, it seemed almost holy, like a magic snapshot, like some moment out of time.

What are you thinking about?

To her question, I responded with one of my own:
Why didn't you
marry Dale?

Headlights swung across the windshield, and I glanced up to see the familiar, rusted blue minivan turn into the parking lot.
My mother squeezed my arm, gently popped open the driver's side door, and slipped out into the night.

The minivan flicked off its lights and ground to a clattering halt in front of the curb. The side door wrenched open and three
GFAs piled out. There were two men carrying rolled paper cylinders, and a woman with a brush and a bucket. I recognized the
woman, decked out in her familiar baseball cap with a glittery cross instead of a city insignia or a mascot. She was the GFA
who stood on top of the van and yelled at the patients to "leave your whoremaster and return unto the lord." (When my mother
had told Dale of this singular entreaty, and of the woman's crucifix ball cap, Dale had sent us the following classified:

Now Batting:
For the Jerusalem Jesuses No. 69, at Desgnatd Whremaster, 1 Crzy Btch.)

In the mirror, I saw my mother pop the trunk. She removed something, and eased the trunk closed with only a faint click.

(Emma's stealth amazed and half frightened me. Only a mother could be so soundless. I made a silent resolution never to jerk
off again without first checking the hall and jamming a chair under the doorknob.)

The GFAs disappeared around the edge of my view. I heard one of them drop something and curse. They were at the front doors,
the point of their previous assaults.

My mother moved at a crouch around the side of the Dumpster, bracing herself against the blistered steel flank for balance.
I saw her take a deep breath and poke her head around the corner, then just as quickly pull it back. She turned and gave me
a thumbs-up. Something dangled at her side.

Now she eased out, standing up straight. My breath caught—and my mother strode directly across the lot, as calmly as if it
were broad daylight, and three possibly dangerous, and certainly felonious, worm-digging religious fanatics were not around
the corner. Clenched at her side was a small plastic bag that I recognized. It was the very same plastic bag into which I
had been dutifully depositing the Laddies' shit for the last few mornings, and tucking away in the usual place beneath the
steaks in the freezer.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but there are few instances in a young man's life when his mother is more awesome than when
he watches her sneak to the minivan of anti-choice fanatics with a bag of frozen dogshit.

A dozen steps carried Emma to the back of the vehicle. She grasped the handles of the double rear doors, and I saw her jaw
tighten as she slowly pulled the latch and opened. My mother swiveled around and threw me a quick wave. Then she climbed into
the back of the minivan and closed the door behind herself.

The next minute turned into a second minute, and then a third. They're going to come back, I thought to myself, hearing the
words like a song.
(They're go-ing to co-me ba-ack. Hur-ry the FU-UCK uh-up,
ple-ase, Mom.)
By the start of the third minute, I realized that they didn't have to come back, because one of God's Favorite Assholes had
stayed behind to sit in the van in case they needed to make a quick getaway, and he was probably at this very instant stabbing
my mother to death with the same trowel he used to dig fishing worms.

Just then one of the rear doors swung open, and my mother slipped down to the pavement. But instead of running, she paused
to shut the door, releasing pressure on the latch by infinitesimal increments, until finally she leaned into it with her shoulder.
The door fastened, and Emma let go.

She turned and faced me across the parking lot.

She exhaled. She blew kisses. She bowed.

That was my mother.

It would be more than two months before God's Favorite Assholes discovered the bag of dogshit that my mother stashed beneath
a floor panel, and sealed tight with some of the epoxy they brought along to plaster their poster to the front doors of the
clinic. Through August and September the humidity would work to warm the shit, and eventually to melt it, and swirling the
feces up with the anchovies that my mother tossed into the bag for extra spice. The smell would start out faint—an odor that
could be excused by sweaty running shoes—and grow into a more pungent, more textured stink that suggested engine trouble,
before finally exploding into a rotting, gutty stench that would seem to be explained only by the presence of a dead animal,
or maybe a dead person. When one of the GFAs finally did pry up the floor panel, a cloud of insects burst up into her face,
and she passed out, overwhelmed by the sight of something even more horrific than doll parts splashed in blood.

She climbed into the passenger seat, and I switched the car into neutral. I guided us back along the side of the building,
and around to the opposite face of the clinic, where a twelve-foot chain-link fence bordered the slope down to the interstate.

We hugged, and I felt she was soaked through, and shivering. For fifteen minutes or so we just sat there, intermittently snickering
in the dark.

Her cell phone vibrated and she answered. It was Charlie Birdsong; she'd had him stationed on the lookout in case anything
went wrong.

Charlie reported that the GFAs were gone. Mom offered to give him a ride, but he wanted to stay and finish reading
Glamour,
then go to work on the new dead baby poster. My mother told Charlie not to stay up all night doing it, just to try and scrape
the gooey head part of the fetus off. "Affirmative," I heard Charlie say. "It's definitely the gooey head that puts people
off the most."

Emma let me pilot us out to the main road. We didn't talk. She rolled down the windows and the car filled up with sweet night
smells, oak and wet lawns.

At a stop sign, I put the car into park. My mother had picked up the legal pad.

Why didn't you marry Dale?

She looked at me, a crease in her forehead. Emma licked her lips, as if she were about to speak.

I tapped the dashboard and shook my head. No talking. Not yet.

She jotted on the pad and held it up for me.
It's funny you should
bring that up. We actually just got invited to Dale's wedding. And
how much would Dale have loved this little escapade, by the way?

I briefly gazed out the window. Outside, and running perpendicular to our parked car, a bus blurred past, the lit console
and rows of darkened windows, maybe just arriving, maybe just leaving.

My mother wrote more:
He's marrying Gail Dahl, the art teacher
from the high school. You had her last year, right? Mrs. Dahl? I guess
she'll be Mrs. Crispin now, huh?

I reached out and put my finger on the original question. I didn't know what I wanted to hear, but it suddenly seemed tremendously
important.

In the harsh light of the roadside stanchions my mother no longer appeared so young. The streak of silver hair shone like
it was polished. She grimaced, tapped the pen against her chin. She wrote, I
didn't think we were ready.

I stared at the words. I took the pen. I underlined one word:
we.

She nodded at me.

I climbed out of the car and started to walk home.

But Emma refused to leave me; it was well past midnight and, after all, she was my mother. The car ground along just ahead
of me, clinging to the shoulder, while I walked behind the trunk. I watched her headlights bob in the eaves of the roadside
trees and wished to disappear, to wink out like an ember. I wished for her last glimpse of me to be in the rearview mirror,
and for the rest of her life to be spent wondering what happened, what made me burn away. A dozen or so mosquitoes took up
orbit around my head, but I refused to get back in the car.

Before we turned onto Route 12 and the final stretch to the house, I walked over to the all-night Citgo to seek a respite
from the mosquitoes. My mother parked out front.

I bought an orange soda and the Goth cashier with the fork tattooed on his Adam's apple rang me up. "Dammit. Janet." With
his purple-ringed eyes, he stared at me in stoned expectation.

"What?" I asked. "I just want a soda."

"I thought you rolled with the sex geezers?" He scratched his fork. "They don't take you to the movies, little hombre?"

"A soda," I said. I slapped a dollar on the counter.

"Dammit," he said, and took the dollar. "Janet."

I pushed out into the night and Emma wheeled around, taking the point down Route 12. By the time we reached the driveway,
my feet ached, and my bare calves pulsed with bites. When she left the car, my mother didn't spare a backward glance, just
clicked the electronic alarm, and walked inside. The only reason I didn't end the protest there and then, and start screaming
at her, was that I was too tired.

A few minutes later, my body found its way into bed. I was asleep even before they started to fight.

8.

The next morning Dr. Vic stopped me when I called the Laddies to come for a walk. "I already took them out, George," he said.
He was at the table, hunched over his morning crossword. "Come to think of it, I guess that's the way we might as well run
it for the time being. It's good for me, taking them out. I need the exercise."

"Whatever you want, Doc." I pulled my house keys off the hook by the door.

"There's that damn woman again," he said, under his breath, jotting
Yoko
or
Ono
into his puzzle. Dr. Vic tossed down his pencil and his crossword book, and stood up with a screech of chair legs. "Let me
give you a ride over to your grandfather's. We need to talk."