The First Time (16 page)

“On the contrary. I’m flattered. I mean, I guess I would have been more flattered had you spoken of how handsome I am, how irresistible you find me, but revenge is good. I’ll settle for revenge. When did you have in mind?”

Mattie searched his eyes for signs he might be mocking her, found none. “My afternoon is looking pretty free,” she said.

“Then what say we get this show on the road.” Roy grabbed his napkin from his lap, dropped it over what remained of his steak, and signaled the waiter for the check. “Where should we go?”

Mattie was slightly taken aback by the speed at
which things were progressing. This is what you wanted, she reminded herself, recalling the new satin underwear she’d purchased on her way out of the mall. “We might as well go to my place,” she offered, knowing that Kim was planning to attend an after-school football game and wouldn’t be home till dinner.

“Not a great idea,” Roy said. “Outraged husbands have a way of turning up when you least expect them.”

“There’s no chance of that,” Mattie said.

“He’s out of town?”

“He’s out, period,” Mattie explained. “He moved out a couple of weeks ago.”

“You’re separated?” Roy Crawford looked stunned, as if he’d just crashed into a brick wall.

“Is that a problem?”

“It’s a complication,” Roy acknowledged, straining for a smile.

“A complication? I would have thought it was just the opposite.”

“How can I put this?” Roy Crawford shook his massive head. “I quit school at sixteen, never even graduated. But I’ve done very well in life—why? Two reasons. One, I follow the opportunities, and two, I keep things as simple as possible. Now, if you were still living with your husband, then our getting together would be one of those great opportunities, a simple matter of two grown-ups getting together for a little fun. The only thing you’d expect from me is a good time. Opportunity without obligation.” He paused, waved away the waiter, who’d approached with the bill. “The fact that you’re no longer with your husband complicates things. It means your expectation level has changed.”

“I don’t expect anything from you,” Mattie protested.

“You don’t right now. But you will. Trust me, I speak from experience.” He paused, looked around the room, then leaned in closer, as if about to impart some deep, dark secret. “At the very least, you’ll expect a relationship. You
deserve
a relationship. But I don’t want any more relationships. I don’t want to have to remember your birthday or go with you to pick out a new car.”

Mattie gasped.

“I’ve insulted you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

“No,” Mattie said, her head spinning from the combined speed of his rejection and the accuracy of his prediction. “You haven’t insulted me. You’re absolutely right.”

“I am?” Roy laughed. “I think you’re the first woman who ever said that to me.”

“I give pretty good attitude myself,” Mattie said. A woman with short, wavy hair passed by their table, and for an instant, Mattie thought maybe Lisa had followed her here, was about to shout her diagnosis for all to hear and assess. “I guess it wouldn’t make any difference if I told you I might not be around that much longer.”

“You’re moving?”

Mattie shrugged, smiled sadly. “Thinking about it.”

“Well, don’t move too far away.” Once again, Roy signaled the waiter for the bill. “My walls would be lost without you.”

Live hard, die young, Mattie was thinking as Roy Crawford handed his credit card to the waiter. Leave a beautiful corpse.

Y
ou never tell me I look beautiful.”

Jake groaned, flipped onto his back, then onto his left side, pulling the scratchy pink wool blanket up over his ears, trying to block out the sound of his mother’s voice.

“How come you never tell me I look beautiful?”

“I tell you all the time. You don’t listen,” Jake’s father said, his voice gruff, disinterested.

Jake heard the distant rustling of the newspaper in his father’s hands. He groaned louder, in a vain effort not to hear what he knew was coming. He’d heard it before, had no desire to hear it again.

“Why don’t we go out somewhere? Let’s go dancing,” his mother pressed, dancing into the forefront of Jake’s dream, filling it with her blond hair and dark eyes, her wide floral skirt sweeping all other images aside. He saw her swaying suggestively in front of his
father, who sat resolutely reading his newspaper and refusing to acknowledge her presence. “Did you hear me? I said, let’s go dancing.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“I haven’t been drinking.”

“I can smell the liquor on your breath from here.”

His mother’s pout filled the giant screen of Jake’s unconscious mind. “You don’t want to go dancing, fine. How about a movie? We haven’t been to a movie in months.”

“I don’t want to go to a movie. Call up one of your girlfriends, if you want to go to a movie.”

“I don’t have any girlfriends,” Eva Hart snapped. “You’re the one with the girlfriends.”

Jake flipped back onto his back, unconsciously humming his displeasure.
Time to wake up
, a voice inside his head was whispering. Whimpering.
You don’t want to hear this
.

“Lower your voice,” his father warned. “You’ll wake the boys.”

“I bet you don’t tell your girlfriends to lower their voices. When they’re screaming for more, you don’t tell them to lower their voices.”

“For God’s sake, Eva—”

“For God’s sake, Warren,” she mocked. Jake saw his mother’s face contort with rage.

Warren Hart said nothing, returned his attention to the newspaper in his hands, bringing it up in front of his face, effectively banishing his wife from his sight. No, Jake thought. That’s the worst thing you can do. You can’t ignore her. She won’t just go away. His mother was like a tropical storm, her fury gradually building
and gaining strength, sweeping away everything in her path, unmindful of whom she hurt, totally consumed by her need to wreak havoc, to destroy. She was a force of nature, and she could not be ignored. Didn’t his father know that? Hadn’t he learned it by now?

“You think I don’t know about your little friends?” Eva Hart demanded. “You think I don’t know where you go at night when you say you’re going back to the office? You think I don’t know everything about you, you miserable son of a bitch?”

Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it
.

Eva Hart punched her hand through the middle of her husband’s newspaper.

The memory lifted Jake’s left hand into the air, brought it crashing to the bed with a thud.

His father jumped from his chair by the living room fireplace, tossing what remained of the newspaper to the beige broadloom at his feet. The small room seemed to shrink with his expanding rage. “You’re crazy,” he screamed, pacing back and forth behind the brown velvet sofa. “You’re a crazy woman.”

“You’re the one who’s crazy.” His mother lunged forward, lost her balance, almost knocked over a lamp.

“I’m crazy for staying with a crazy woman.”

“Then why don’t you leave, you miserable bastard?”

“Maybe I will. Maybe that’s just what I’ll do.” Jake watched his father grab his jacket from the hall closet and head for the front door.

You can’t leave. You can’t leave us alone with her. Please, come back. You can’t leave
.

“Don’t think I don’t know where you’re going!
Don’t think I don’t know you’re just using this as an excuse! Where the hell do you think you’re going? You can’t walk out. Goddamn you. You can’t leave me here alone!”

Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go
.

“No!” Jake heard his mother scream, her fists pounding on the back of the door that slammed shut in her face, her anguished cries racing from the living room and down the hall of the tidy bungalow, pushing open the closed door to Jake’s bedroom, the room into which his brothers had run at the first sound of trouble, the three of them piling up a mountain of books and toys against the door, the makeshift barricade useless against the force of their mother’s growing hysteria.

Jake watched from behind closed lids as the three young brothers, ages three, five, and seven, huddled together in the safe space he had created at the back of his closet, his older brother Luke staring vacantly ahead, his younger brother Nicholas shivering with fear in his arms. “It’ll be all right,” Jake whispered. “We have water and a first-aid kit” He indicated the items he’d stashed away in the event of just such an emergency. “We’ll be fine as long as we stay quiet.”

“Where the hell are you, you miserable kids?” Eva Hart shouted. “Have you deserted me too?”

“No,” Jake moaned, tossing back and forth in the queen-size bed. The child Jake put his fingers to his lips. “Ssh,” he cautioned.

“How can you all desert me?” his mother cried out in the darkness of the tiny room. “Is there nobody in this miserable house who loves me?”

Jake’s lungs felt the pressure of three children holding their breath. He groaned in pain, flipped onto his right side.

“I can’t live this way anymore,” Eva Hart cried. “Do you hear me? I can’t live like this anymore. Nobody loves me. Nobody cares what happens to me. You don’t care whether I live or die.”

Nicholas started to cry. Jake lay a gentle hand across his mouth, kissed the top of his Buster Brown haircut.

“So, that’s where you are,” their mother said, her feet heavy on the brown carpet as she approached the closet door. Luke jumped up, grabbed the handle of the already locked closet door, held it tight as the knob twisted in his hands. “Damn you,” their mother yelled, kicking the door before giving up. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.” They heard a crash. My model plane, Jake thought, the one he’d spent hours painstakingly putting together. He bit his lip, refusing to cry. “You know where I’m going now? You know what I’m going to do?” Their mother waited. “You don’t have to answer me. I know you’re listening. So, I’m going to tell you what I’m going to do, because nobody loves me, and nobody cares if I live or die. I’m going into the kitchen, and I’m going to turn on the gas, and in the morning, when your father comes home from sleeping with his girlfriend, he’ll find us all dead in our beds.”

“No,” Nicholas sobbed into Jake’s arms.

“No,” Jake said, pushing the blanket off his shoulders, kicking it away from his toes.

“I’m doing you a favor,” their mother said, tripping over the books and toys she’d knocked over, falling
down, picking herself back up, hurling a shoe at the locked closet door. “You won’t even know what’s happening. You’ll die peacefully in your sleep,” she muttered, stumbling from the room, a maniacal laugh trailing after her.

“No!” the child Jake cried, clinging tightly to his brothers.

“No!” Jake shouted now, his arms flailing out in all directions, slamming against his pillow, smacking into the space beside him. He heard a gasp, felt flesh and bone beneath his open palm, opened his eyes to the sound of Honey’s terror-filled cries.

“My God, Jason, what’s happening?”

It took several seconds for the child to grow back into the man, for the man’s eyes to focus, for his brain to register where he was. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, his forehead wet with perspiration, the sweat dripping into his eyes, mingling with his tears. “God, Honey, I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you?”

Honey wiggled her nose with her fingers. “I don’t think it’s broken,” she said, reaching out to caress his bare arm. “What was it—that dream again?”

Jake lowered his head into his hands, his whole body clammy and cold. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

“You have a lot on your mind.” Honey reached over and turned on the light by the side of the bed. Immediately, the distant browns of his childhood were replaced by the warm peach of his present surroundings. Honey tossed the red curls away from her face, smiled helplessly as they bounced right back. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

He shook his head, his hair wet against his forehead. “I don’t remember half of it.” A lie. He remembered every shrug, every shiver, every word. Even now, with his eyes wide open, he could see himself, a child of five, crawling out of his secret hiding place to open the window next to his bed, managing to pry it open only a few inches, but enough, he assured his brothers repeatedly, as they sat huddled together throughout the balance of the night, to make sure they were safe. The gas couldn’t harm them now. “I guess I’m still not used to sleeping with the window closed,” Jake offered sheepishly.

“You think the window has something to do with your nightmares?” Honey looked understandably confused.

Jake shrugged, shook his head, waved away her concern with a toss of his hand. He was a grown man, for God’s sake. His mother had been dead for years. Surely he could learn to sleep with the window closed.

“I’m really sorry, Jason. It’s the cats. Once somebody opened the window just a few inches and Kanga got out. It was days before I got him back.”

As if on cue, both cats jumped on the bed. Kanga was an eight-year-old orange tabby; Roo was four years old and jet-black. Both were male, and neither had taken to the idea of sharing their space with a Johnny-come-lately, two-legged rival for their mistress’s affection. Jake returned their dislike. He’d never been much of a cat person, preferring dogs, although Mattie had always refused to have a dog. Mattie, he thought, pushing Kanga off his leg and climbing out of bed, slipping a navy bathrobe over his naked body. Why was he thinking of her now?

He watched Honey disappear into the bathroom, her bare buttocks jiggling provocatively atop skinny legs, her hair a chaotic red mop. Seconds later, she emerged from the bathroom wearing a white terrycloth robe, her hair gathered into an elastic band and piled atop her head in a conscious effort to impose order, although already several tendrils had come loose and were running down the back of her neck. “Why don’t I make us some coffee?” Honey suggested, glancing at the clock on the end table beside the bed. “It’s almost time to get up anyway.”

“Sounds good.”

“How about some bacon and eggs?” she offered.

“Coffee’ll be just fine.”