One
They came blinking into their new fluorescent-lit freedom with hollow, dusty stares. Having served their time with the county for drug offenses or battery convictions or any one of a million knucklehead schemes supposed to deliver them to lives much plusher than this, they were set loose to try again. About a third of them had family waiting. A third of those got warm embraces, while the rest met shrugs and listless escorts back to the parking lot.
Almost all stopped first at the county-run snack bar for cigarettes. While waiting for his brother for almost two hours, John Husted calculated that with the county markup on cigarettes being at least fifty cents above retail, each ex-con immediately reimbursed the system a tiny portion of the cost of jailing them.
Those who knew John Husted best sometimes told him that he overthought things.
The de-incarcerated came one by one, ambling down the bleak linoleum hallway to rejoin society. Each clung to a sad paper bag that held their belongings.
“I hope he brought me something,” John’s mother, Rose, said expectedly as she strained to see around all the bodies in front of her.
“He hasn’t been on vacation, Mom,” he sighed. “Remember? Mike’s been in jail.”
His mother’s memory began failing alarmingly after John’s brother got sent up eleven months earlier. Along with all the other frustrations this presented John, the worst was having to remind her over and over again that her eldest son was a convicted criminal, this time put away for possession and a gun charge.
Her dementia still played games with her; catch her on a good day and she’d remember the sad news about Mike. But when rattled or tired, the most basic memories drifted away from her and came back in confused tatters. If they came back at all.
Every time John explained Mike’s situation to his mother, the look on her face gently went from despair to blissful acceptance. As if to think, “I am sorry to learn this about my son, but in no time at all I get to forget it all over again.”
They scanned the parade of the freshly sprung, and there he was: big brother Mike, looking shabby but still clinging to a bit of his rock-and-roll swagger. The tattoos still snaked up his forearms, and the ratty rock star hair still framed a well-sculpted face made flinty by hard living. Now forty-five, Mike’s hair thinned up top.
Mike signaled to his brother from across the room with a cool cock of his chin, but then his expression darkened as he saw their mite-sized mother standing at John’s side. She darted across the room and hugged him before he could deflect her, her cheek pressed to his scarecrow-like sternum.
“I wish you had been on vacation,” she said quietly.
Baffled by this welcome, Mike pried himself from her grip. John turned to steer the family out the door.
“Hang on,” Mike said as he got in line to buy cigarettes.
* * *
They took a booth at Denny’s. Mike left jail flat broke and his mother paid for his cigarettes with the last few dollars in her purse. This was going to be on John.
Mike shoveled half the breakfast menu into his mouth while his mother ignored her chicken salad and spoke excitedly. “It was between Mrs. Kerry and Delores Steddick, but the judges felt that the azaleas along the edging made the difference, with the colors. And those were my idea,” Rose boasted. “Mae told me that I had to be in the picture with her in the bulletin, but my hair—”
“Ma, you told me this story,” Mike interrupted. “Like in every letter you sent me. You and Mrs. Kerry, kickin’ the other flower lady’s ass. I got it.”
He sawed into another waffle, oblivious to the fact that his curtness caused his mother to withdraw and grow smaller. Mike was using the exasperated tone with Rose that John fought to control the past several months, not always with success.
“Sorry,” she said.
Because Mike brought their family reunion to an awkward silence, John felt it was his job to find them a new topic.
“Tell us about jail.”
Mike stared a hole through his younger brother and ground his teeth as Rose revved back up. As John knew she would.
“Your father would be so ashamed. He was a respectable man. And look at your brother. John has a good job, a lovely family. Never once a bit of trouble from him. What is wrong with you?”
John wasn’t surprised to hear his mother play the Larry card. His father died thirty years ago, his ghost only resurrected after all those years to tell Mike how far he had fallen from his father’s expectations. Teenaged Mike and the old man fought bitterly right up until the day in 1985 when a sudden stroke killed Dr. Lawrence Husted. The loss crushed Rose and she never recovered a complete reattachment to her life and the sons she was left alone to raise. When John began to notice her memory slipping a couple years earlier, it was impossible to tell if this was a new crisis or just the manifestation of what had become a crippling frailty since her husband’s sudden death.
Other than to nag Mike from the grave, Larry Husted didn’t come around much anymore.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Mike said. “I was just holding the gun for a guy.”
“And the dope?” John asked snottily.
There was a time when Mike would kick John’s ass for this, but John thought he could take him now. Mike was two years older than John and he had abused his body horribly since he was a teenager. Maybe Mike knew this as he scowled into his sticky bun.
“Well, I want you to go see Mr. Lennox,” his mother pushed on. “He told me he might be able to find you some work, out of respect for your father.”
“I know, Ma. You told me in the car, like fifteen minutes ago. Geez.”
“Sorry.”
The waitress, pretty and probably not even twenty-five, refilled Mike’s coffee. He winked and she smiled, not finding him as skeevy as John would’ve wished. Mike the alley cat, back on the prowl.
“Well, I have to go see a man about a horse,” Rose said brightly, throwing off the family prickliness as she rose from the booth. She always used this expression whenever she had to go to the bathroom, claiming her generation found it amusing while trying to be discreet.
“What the fuck’s the matter with her?” Mike asked John once their mother was out of range. “Can she remember anything?”
“She’s okay when she’s relaxed, when she’s poking around the house or arranging lunches with her friends,” John said. “But stress sets her off. She didn’t want to come today.”
“So why is she here?” Mike asked with a pissed-off edge. “I told you to pick me up. I don’t need her seeing me this way.”
“So don’t be this way,” John said. Mike accepted John’s attempt at shaming him with a sneer.
“She’s not even seventy,” Mike said.
“She’s almost seventy-five. I’ve had her in with her doctor. He thinks it’s Alzheimer’s.”
“Fuck…” Mike said.
“She’s taking pills that might slow it down, but there’s no stopping it,” John said. “But it’s good, you getting out now. You can move back into the house, not pay any rent while you’re getting yourself together, and you can keep an eye on her. You need to learn to talk to her better.”
Mike scoffed. “Hey, that’ll fly for a while, me taking care of her. But I’ve got plans,” Mike drawled. “Steve Hoover’s got a job for him and me that’s gonna keep me on the road pretty much full-time.”
Mike had that self-centeredness of an addict that caused him to drop names as if John had been paying close attention to his schemes and committed the various players to memory. John had no idea who Steve Hoover was, but he assumed he was Jerry Boyd, and that Vasquez guy, and the cousin of that meth freak Mike had lived with for a few months who was going to make them all rich moving black-market baby formula. Steve Hoover was probably just the next scabby-souled bum who was going to lead Mike back to county lockup, if not worse.
“She needs you right now,” John said. “I have been handling this on my own for almost a year, and I’ve got my own life to deal with.”
“Well,” Mike sniffed, “I’ll do what I can. But, you know, I got my shit, too.”
He refocused on his breakfast while John stared out into the parking lot. Mike flirted with the waitress some more. When the bill came, he grunted a kind of thanks at his kid brother.
With the tab paid, they stood to leave. They stared fretfully toward the ladies’ room.
Mike snagged the waitress. “’Scuse me, Debbie. I’m a little worried about my mother. Think you could stick your head in the john and make sure she’s okay?”
The waitress smiled, touched by his concern. Mike managed to help his mother and turn his concern into part of his seduction. It’s a gift.
They followed the waitress to the bathroom door, then waited awkwardly. They heard their mother’s voice echoing angrily from inside.
“Can’t a woman go to the bathroom without being spied on?” she barked at the waitress as they emerged, then she turned her wrath on her sons. “What’s the matter with you two? Are you in such a hurry to send me home and get back to your lives?”
John quickly grabbed their things. Rose yanked her coat away from him and began struggling to put it on, flustered with the eyes of the customers upon her. Mike and John caught the wordless signal from the waitress: their mother had been lost and confused in the bathroom. Being found out made her pride bristle.
“Thanks,” John whispered to the waitress as Rose fumed and ice water doused Mike’s seedy growls of romance.
“Yeah,” Mike mumbled to the waitress, suddenly laid bare as a guy old enough to have a mother old enough to suffer things like this. “Thanks.”
Rose continued to strain to get her arms snaked through her coat sleeves until John finally took it away with a gentle firmness and she allowed him to help. They exchanged the silent sigh the two of them had been sharing more and more.
He put his hand on her back and guided her toward the exit. Mike held the door.
Copyright © 2018 by Tom Matthews
