Are You Sitting Down? (25 page)

This routine was
well-known
to me and
reassuring
, a longtime tradition from our childhood.
I remember us emptying all of the bags by the end of
each
week, but they were magically filled again when we came home from school.
I sat down on one of the beds
now
to enjoy the rich sweet candy.
I peeked into another bag to find a piece of pe
ppermint.
I hated peppe
r
mint now.
Mom kept pieces in her purse when we were kids to appease us during a car ride or while sitting in church.
The teller at the bank or the secretary at the doctor’s office always had a jar of mints for us to pick from too.
I don’t think I ever really liked it as a child.
I just accepted the treat and its sweet flavor as a free piece of candy.

A small green army man was in another bag.
I lifted him out and
stood
him up
in the palm of my hand
.
He was down on one knee and aiming a grenade launcher to the sky
.
There were probably two or three more in other bags hanging on the little tree, more
piece
s
of
my
past that had never changed.
I always swore
that when
Mom
ran out of things to fill the bags, she
just dug the
army men
out of our toy closet
to make us think we were getting new ones.

Back then,
Sebastian enjoyed the army men more than I did.
We had
hundreds of them, and they were always popping up between the cushions of the sofa,
clogging
up Mom’s va
c
uum cleaner, or becoming mangled out in the yard after being run over by Dad’s lawnmower.
Blowing them up with fir
e
works in the backyard on the 4
^th
of July was practically a rite of passage for all three of us boys.
Eventually, I preferred the GI Joe and Star Wars figurines with jointed and movable arms and legs.
Their costumes and rugged faces were much more appea
l
ing to my imagination.

“Aren’t you too old to be playing with those?”
Ellen asked, standing in the doorway.

I blushed a little having been caught in the act.

“Have you checked the tree in your old room?”
I asked.

“Stickers, paper dolls,
and—”

“Peppermints!”
We both said at the same time.

“You hate them too?”

“I’ll give them to the kids,” she said.

“You are just like Mom.”

“Scary, isn’t it?
”
Ellen walked over to the tree and b
e
gan to look in a few of the bags on the tree.
“No fair, you got choc
o
late.”

“There’s more?”
I asked with excitement.

“You’ve already had one?”

“Yep.
A truffle.”

“I think I’ll have a truffle too, if you don’t mind,” she said digging it out of
one of
the
other
bag
s
and sitting down on the bed opposite me.

“Go ahead.
We should raid the other trees before an
y
one else comes upstairs.”

“Good idea.”

We were quiet as Ellen enjoyed her chocolate
.
Then, she spoke up again as the silence became awkward.
We both knew what the other was thinking.

“You aren’t going to ask me about Mark?”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to.”

“Did Mom tell you that?”

“Not really.”

“Well, she just doesn’t want any of us to put a damper on the holiday by discussing our problems.
It’s the one day of the year we are supposed to pretend nothing has ever happened in our lives.”

“I’ll still be in town the day after,” I offered.

“The 26
^th
?
I’ll see if I can pencil you in.
I think Kwa
n
zaa begins that day though.”

“Kwanzaa?
Don’t give Mom another excuse to try to get all of us together!”

“True.
So, how are you doing?”

“I’m good,” I said with a shrug.

“How are you really doing?”
Ellen asked reaching over and putting a hand on my knee.

Before I knew it, I’d spilled a rant of words that must have been bottled up inside of me, and only because I knew Ellen didn’t mind listening.
I had always been closest to her out of the four of them.
I told her about how much I missed Justin, and how lost I felt without him.
He had been my first true love
, the only person I’d spent any length of time with that mattered.
I didn’t know how to start over.
Right now, I didn’t know if I even wanted to start again.

“There are few second chances in life, Travis, and the ones we do get are only at things that don’t really matter.
We only get one really meaningful true love in our life.
Sure, we’ll find love again, but we’ll compare all the others to th
e
one that meant the most.
”

“You said we?”

I felt a bit selfish, taking into account her own looming setbacks,
but
I went ahead and asked her though Mom had a
l
ready filled me in
on Mark
.

“Mark wants a divorce.”

“Why?”

“He says I’m still distant, which I am.
I know he’s my hu
s
band but I just don’t know if I’ll ever be able to trust the touch of a man again.
Mark can’t even come up behind me and kiss me unexpectedly on the neck without me flipping out.
When I do let him hold me, he says I still feel tense.”

“Doesn’t he know these things take time?”

“It’s been two years.
I guess he’s tired of waiting.
I can’t blame him.
I’m tired of waiting too.
”

“What are you waiting for?”
I asked.

In my mind, I expected her to answer with something prosaic like waiting for her dignity or self-respect to come back, maybe she was waiting for the day she’d wake up and find that it was all just a bad dream.
None of us are that fort
u
nate.
I
n
stead, she looked down to her lap and just shook her head.
Like me, she didn’t know what she was waiting for.

“I
have no idea
,” she answered with a soft exhale.

“I know it sounds horrible to say this, but I thought things might have improved for you when the Judge died.”

She thought so too, and said things were actually looking up as soon as the trial was over.
A bit of the burden had def
i
nitely been lifted from her ba
ck, and the stress it had on their marriage had finally begun to cease.
She kept the entire new
s
paper from the day a story about the Judge, the trial, her, or any of the other women involved
didn’t
grace the front page.

When she was told about the Judge’s death, a sigh of relief did escape her.
However, her days of knowing he was safe b
e
hind bars were over.
The questions racking her brain began again.
What if the judge faked his death to escape prison?
What if he came back to
Ruby Dregs
to seek revenge?
They were far fetched ideas, but they easily planted a seed of worry in her head.
Ellen had to go to his grave to prove to he
r
self there was no reason to worry.
Then, the dreams started.

Every night, if she was lucky to get to sleep at all, she relived those horrific sessions in his office.
She felt his hands crawling on her and she’d wake up screaming and kicking the covers off the bed. He had to be dead, haunting her from the afterlife, but still she had to go to his grave for reassurance.
Mark thought she was sick.
He refused to go to counseling.
And so, he too waited, taking two years to decide that the best solution was to distance himself from the problem.

“I’d preferred if he’d just left me.
He could have just skipped town and changed his name without telling any of us.
At least then I would have felt I wasn’t the only one going mad b
ecause
of
all of
this.
I could have blamed Judge Railen for one more thing instead of blaming myself.”

Ellen broke into tears.

“Don’t say that,” I said taking her hand.
“Mark didn’t do that because he love
s
you.”

“Mark blames himself.
If he had not lost that factory job, I would have never gone to work at the courthouse.”

“And the judge might still be on the bench and taking advantage of other women if you hadn’t.”

“It drove one of the other girls to suicide, having to sit there in a courtroom next to another judge and verbally say all the things
Judge Railen
d
id
to her, while Railen sat there across the room looking at her. She hung herself that night after giving her testimony. I’d be lying if I said I never thought about doing it too
, Travis
.
The kids, and Mark at the time, were the only things keeping me going.”

Seeing Mark in the restaurant with that other girl i
m
med
i
ately popped into my head.
My conscience was telling me Ellen needed to know.
I imagined a small devil on one shoulder and a tiny angel on the other.
But weighing the consequences, I wasn’t really sure if telling her would be a good or a bad thing.
Besides, it was Christmas and now was definitely not the time.