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Authors: Cathy Lamb

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BOOK: A Different Kind of Normal
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And Milt, such a true friend, said, “He’s got a big head, that’s true, but it’s not a fuck. You’re confused, TJ. Do you know what a fuck is? You probably don’t. Never will. But you’re not a bright light in the chandelier, are you? You’re probably not a bright light in a flashlight, either.”
“Brighter than you and brighter than the retard, blackie,” TJ said.
I started to charge, but my mother and my brother held me back. “Don’t humiliate him, Jaden. Let him be a man,” Caden said.
“He can’t say that to Milt or to Tate!”
“Let your son defend himself,” Caden said, although I could tell he was barely controlling himself. “Same with Milt.”
“We can always send them herbs in a coffee cake that will crush their rectums, now watch,” my mother singsonged.
Damini said, “I want that coffee cake recipe, Nana.”
Hazel, Heloise, and Harvey danced about until Hazel said, “Rectum.” Heloise said, “I love Tate and Slinky.” Harvey said, “I eat I eat I eat. I not eat Slinky.”
I turned back to the scene at the bus. Tate’s teammates squared off against TJ.
“You’re gonna get fucked next time, Tate,” TJ said.
“One day I will, I hope!” Tate said, smiling. “I hope she’s gorgeous, too. Hot. Oh yeah, I’m totally into it, TJ, but I won’t use the F word because I’m classier than that. I don’t think it’ll happen to you, but for me, yes. With a body like mine it’s hard for women to think straight when they see me. It’s the arousal that gets in the way, the rush of seduction.”
Tate’s teammates chortled like drunk hyenas.
“You got lucky, Tate—” TJ said, thumping the bus.
“Hey, temper-tantrum man, loser, you lost. You lost because we’re better,” Anthony said. “Be cool about it.”
“I am not gonna be cool about it because I’m gonna kick your asses next time. This is personal, Tate. Personal. It’s you and me, Tate.” He jabbed a finger at Tate, his face squished up and pissed off.
“I can’t get personal with you, TJ.” Tate put his palms up in the air. “I’m sorry but I’m not gay.”
Tate’s team hyena-laughed again, as did the boys on the bus.
“I love the ladies, so I can’t get together with you, dude,” Tate said. “But you can find someone else. Or at least someone in your imagination. You probably want a tall, dark, handsome man who kisses you gently, hugs you close, whispers sweet things, takes control. . . .”
“Fuck you, Tate!”
“Again, dude, I can’t do that.” Tate raised his hands higher in the air in mock frustration. “I already told you! I’m not gay! I do not want to see you naked! I don’t want to do the F word with you.”
TJ’s teammates even laughed. Obviously TJ wasn’t popular.
“I didn’t say I wanted to see you naked, either!”
“You did, you said it, TJ. You’re thinkin’ about it, thinkin’ about me, and hey. Uh. Not gonna work.”
“What are you talking about, you idiot!”
“Now don’t start calling me, TJ, or texting or friending me, okay? I don’t want you to be a scorned lover or anything—”
“Shut up, Tate! I’m gunnin’ for you, you hear that, you gooky blob? I’m comin’ to get you, I am comin’ to get you!”
The bus pulled away.
Harvey inhaled sharply. “Damn. He bad boy.”
“Ya,” Heloise said. “Mean. I kick him.”
“I no like that bad boy,” Hazel said.
“Martin’s created an inferno of anger in his own kid,” I said.
“Martin’s a dangerous man. Dangerous kid, too,” Caden said, eyes serious as we watched Martin Hooks lower himself and his hard gut into his car, the dark of the night not hiding how menacing he was.
“Together those two are a lethal mess,” my mother said, tapping her manicured fingers together, her diamond earrings swinging. “I can feel it. Way down deep. They’re bad news. Very bad news for all of us. I hate bad news.”
Caden ambled over and talked to Martin.
Martin lumbered out of his car and took a lurching swing at Caden.
Caden knocked him right onto the hood of his car, where he lay like a dead pig.
“Caden is smooth as silk, isn’t he?” my mother said. “How about some wine now, dears?”
“I have some swine!” Hazel said.
“Swine in Cinderella sippy cup!” Heloise insisted.
“I drink some swine, too!” Harvey said.
“Nice hit, Dad,” Damini said, touching her heart. “That was rewarding to watch. Nana’s going to give me a recipe that will crush rectums.”
 
Tate had been able to defend himself, with humor, from TJ Hooks.
He had made friends.
He was excellent at basketball.
I was almost overcome by guilt. I should have let him play before this, how much easier his life would have been with these friendships, with being on a team.
I let my tears drip off my chin.
Parenting is often head-bangingly hard.
The next day I apologized to Tate, the apology simple, my emotions making a mess of me.
“It’s okay, Boss Mom. If you make me chicken pancakes, we’ll call it good.”
I made him chicken pancakes.
We called it good.
He is a forgiving young man. I am grateful for that, too.
 
“Thank you for the silver watering can with the roses.”
“You’re welcome.” Ethan’s voice was deep and low over the phone. I envisioned his face, his mouth, I remembered how he did not get mad when I whizzed open his shirt and he lost a couple of buttons up in my bedroom one afternoon. It was exactly like the movies. I didn’t think that buttons could fly off with such speed but, alas, they could! They did! I did it!
I felt my body heat up to the simmering level when I heard his voice. Okay, the boiling level. I had seen his body naked. I had played with that body. It was divine.
“It’s beautiful.” It wasn’t an ordinary silver watering can. It was overly large, fun and creative, and it had herb designs on the sides.
“You’re beautiful, Jaden.”
Yes, that naked body of Ethan’s was mine for the pleasing and I had found it pleasing many times since our delightful afternoon in the greenhouse. He seemed happy to handle the curves I have, again and again....
We made plans for dinner that night, when Tate was at basketball practice.
Ethan came to the house.
You know how you see a steamin’ hot love scene in the movies where the kiss goes on and on, in a totally orgasmic and out-of-control sort of way? Clothes are torn off hurriedly and dropped, shoes are kicked haphazardly away, a bra is tossed, and the hero picks the heroine up in his arms and they tumble to the bed and roll and kiss and you can tell that the sex is quiveringly, outrageously blissful?
That’s what happened to me!
Me!
Jaden Bruxelle.
It was swwwweeeettt.
 
On Sunday I decided that I should stay in bed until twelve. I never stay in bed until twelve. I never stay in bed after seven thirty.
I don’t know how to relax, enjoy, and treat myself, which is what my mother says my problem is. “You live as if every moment of your life must be accounted for and you must be doing something productive at all times, or worrying, or planning. Lord, you are boring to
yourself
. No fun! Do you not realize that life is a gift? Besides, working all the time gives a woman yeast infections.”
I told her I did not have yeast infections.
She sniffed. “Working all the time also makes women shrivel.”
“Shrivel, Mother?”
“Yes. Their intestines shrivel. Causing constipation and frustration.”
“Thank you for that vital information.”
“You’re welcome. You must play, Jaden. Frolic. It’ll make your liver happy.”
“A happy liver?”
“And a happy . . . a happy
bottom.
”
I lit a Blueberry Bobbles candle as I laughed at my mother’s prediction of a happy bottom, then went downstairs in my robe and slippers and brewed a cup of orange spice tea. It was a gray, dreary afternoon, the rain pounding down. It was peaceful, calming. I climbed back into bed after checking on Tate, who was still sleeping.
My bedroom, with a four-poster bed, is in the corner. It used to be Faith and Jack’s bedroom. I love the ornate fireplace and the windows, two of which were added in the last fifteen years. I also have a deck for watching the sunrise, that kaleidoscope of colors growing and stretching over the horizon, like mixed and blended paints.
When I was all snuggled in, I remembered the story that Grandma Violet told Caden, Brooke, and me, on a rainy spring day, about Faith and Grace when we were little. We were right here, in this bedroom, which had been hers and Grandpa Pete’s.
“Faith and Grace hid slaves under their shop in Charleston, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, even weeks, if the slaves had been whipped to bits or injured.” She rocked in the rocking chair by the fireplace as she knitted a pink scarf, all of us at her feet, the fire dancing over her auburn and white curls.
“There were two nasty, ghastly brothers, Dwight and John Stanfield, plantation and slave owners, whom Faith and Grace had refused to marry, though the men continued to bully them. Their refusal made those men furious, mark my words, and their fury turned them into stalkers, oh, curse them! They spied on the women one night after getting drunk in a bar and saw slaves being snuck beneath the shop through the shadows.
“The men were livid, as the slaves happened to be theirs. They rammed their way into the shop, then shot through the floor, flying bullets almost hitting the slaves. The slaves shook like dying, dry leaves in the wind as they faced their masters.” Grandma Violet caught our mesmerized gazes. “Faith and Grace were lovely, elegant, red-haired ladies with fiery tempers who would have shot those two clean through if they’d had the chance and not looked back, but they were stuck. Stuck like fish in a barrel.” She clicked her tongue as she told us the rest of the story, rain splattering the windows.
Dwight and John forced a compromise out of Faith and Grace that night. The women would marry them, live on their plantations, and they wouldn’t turn the women in, offering them freedom from jail and/or their necks cracked in a noose. Jail didn’t appeal to the women. There were dirt floors awash in vomit, body wastes, disease. There were rats, lice, putrid water. Starvation was a real possibility.
Faith and Grace didn’t want to agree to the marriages, but they had to, at least for the moment, the men had guns, they were violent and dangerous, they wanted to keep their necks from cracking.
Grandma Violet’s blue eyes filled with tears as she told us how Dwight and John whipped all the slaves to bloodiness that night in the woods, even one pregnant with Dwight’s child, and chopped off one finger of each slave so they would remember to never run away again. They made the women watch.
Two of the slaves later died from infections. “Faith and Grace were devastated.” Grandma Violet sniffled as she knit faster. “They never got over that trauma, oh, oh, those poor people! Whipped! Axed! Oh, how they cried, but Faith and Grace still hid two more slave women who arrived the next night, two babies strapped to their backs. What could they do? Where else would the women have gone? They had to help them.”
Grandma Violet stood up, agitated, then peered out the windows, straight down the column of maple trees, as if she could see Faith through the raindrops. “They started casting their spells, using the thimble, the lace handkerchief, the needle, and the timepiece. They chanted a death spell, centering their witchly powers on Dwight and John drowning in a swamp or being hit by a carriage, then they prayed for divine intervention.” Grandma Violet raised both hands to the heavens. “Divine intervention came on horseback.”
Two men rode into town on stallions. Best friends, both Irish. One was a blond giant named Jack O’Donnell, and an equally large ex-military man named Russ McLeary. The girls flirted with them as if their lives depended on it, which they did, at a town picnic over raspberry pie.
Soon Jack was smitten with Faith and Russ was sweet on Grace. The women told the men the truth about the Underground Railroad and the threats on their lives, and on an inky black night, the moon hidden in a plume of clouds, the four of them saddled up four horses, and they galloped far, far away. They were headed toward Independence, Missouri, and the Oregon Trail.
Faith and Grace’s guilt over deserting a safe haven for runaway slaves followed them for the rest of their lives, but they could not see being raped, every night, for the rest of their lives, by John and Dwight, either.
The first night the four rode long and hard, same with the next day, and the next night. Didn’t take too many nights under a white, shiny moon for love to strike, it sure didn’t. “Faith and Grace had the same eternal love for their husbands that I have for Grandpa Pete and your mother has for your father.
BOOK: A Different Kind of Normal
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