Replacing Dad. Shelley Fraser Mickle
at City Hall: married.
The story of the goose who laid the golden egg is suspect. It’s what she does when she lets loose with a brown one that’s real.
All along I should have been suspicious of how George kept his things. His personal things: his socks and his tools, his books, and his cars. He never let himself have more than two of the same kind, or color, or make. Or loves. George was a barracuda after clutter.
I had Drew here; or at least in the next county. There was no hospital or clinic or anything in Palm Key then. But he grew up here, was my first baby here, was my first offspring of love who got to watch me turn from girl to mother, a sometime playmate or drill sergeant, an occasional fishing mate. It was an easy place to raise him. And it was still easy when Mandy came and then George the Second. No traffic to speak of, no kid-snatching maniacs. There’s something special about a place that declares a dog an official speed bump. Our dog, Lolly, got old and had arthritis so bad that he layout on the warm pavement all day, so cars had to go around him. No one complained; the weekly paper just wrote him up and declared him an official speed bump.
How could I leave a place that was so much a part of me? And yet I could no longer feel it. I could no longer see it as it was. I could no longer bear to see it as it had once been.
I was hanging over Palm Key like a kite that had gotten loose. I knew I should leave, and yet I couldn’t. My children’s father was here. I couldn’t make them leave where once George and I had been as one. I could not bear to think that also here they had witnessed the death of us.
By the time all the lawyers and proceedings got through with me, I didn’t have a pot to piss in—as Lucille Duffy said. Lucille ran The Love ‘em and Leave ‘em Day Care up on Highway 40, where I had to put George the Second when I got a job. I hate to admit this, but when George and I were in college together all I had on my mind was him. And he sure was a pitiful thing to major in, which only shows how dumb I was. I dropped out of college to marry him; of course, I accidentally got pregnant with Drew. I don’t ever tell Drew I got pregnant accidentally. He’s a smart boy (not book smart but lots of common sense), and he figured out a few years ago that his birthday comes too close to the date of George’s and my first anniversary. George’s own mother, Drew’s grandmother, spilled the beans one Christmas when she reminisced how George and I were married in the spring of 1975, and then of course Drew himself counted up that coming in September of 1975 meant he was either way premature or the spur for the wedding date. Naturally all mothers have times like that when their child comes to them and pumps them for some truth you don’t especially want to tell. So what do you do? Make up a story that is not only truer than the real one but also way the hell better. So I told him that he just drew us together. He was our love child. Our own Drew who was our beginning and would always be the center of our love. Of course his real name is Andrew, but from day one, to me and George, he was Drew.
So just how do you suppose he feels now after I fed him that sweet little number? Why did I have to make up such a good story? Why didn’t I just tell him he got dropped off by some migrating stork on the way to Miami? How do you suppose he feels now that his father has taken off to make the center of his love a five-footeight-inch hussy with pink hair? Cotton candy torch, Lucille Duffy calls her.
Please pass the matches.
Now right here, I just have to be cut a little slack, because I can’t speak generously about the woman who was teaching my child and kept calling my husband in for private conferences. I know George the First didn’t have to attend; I know he didn’t have to answer every one of her requests to see the principal, but it’s just a part of their whole mess that along with him, I burn her, too.
Shoot! We all knew George the First was weak, a Man of the Flesh.
All the time I should have just warned every woman who saw him coming. Put a flaming letter across his chest. (I might seem tough, but the truth is it took me almost six months just to call the kettle black.)
And so that’s where all that left me: two years of a beginning major in art and, unfortunately—or fortunately, however you want to look at it—the ability to type. The only job I could get right after the divorce was as a clerk in the payroll office of the county dump, which was an hour’s drive from my house and to Lucille Duffy’s, where I could leave George the Second.
Let me tell you, none of that was fun.
George the First was, and still is, good about the child support. There was just not much of anything for any of us and nothing left for me.
Even if I could have gotten George to agree to send me back to school so I could finish my degree, he didn’t have enough money to. It’d have been a lot of lawyers maneuvering and then finally seeing they were just pissing in the wind. (The kettle was always way too empty to ever pour.)
In my opinion, if a man can’t afford two families, he ought to get out of the family business. What did he think he could do: put us on Visa?
That day I met Mark, Drew and I were driving back from the Highway Patrol Station. Drew had taken three tries to pass the driver’s test. Third time’s the charm, I told him. And he said, well, that’s sure not true about George the Second—which, to me, didn’t disprove that old saying in the least.
Even though my third child, George, is, I guess, the epitome of what gives meaning to the words pistol, pill, live wire—to me he was, is, and always will be, charming. And Drew was driving along just fine up Highway40 to Lucille Duffy’s so we could pick up George the Second on our way home.
We pulled up to Bill and Lucille’s Handymart. That was easy for Drew. No one else was there. Plenty of room to park.
Lucille is big and wears her hair in tight curls all over her head, and during those first hard months after George moved out, I don’t think I would have made it without her. She and Bill lived in an upstairs apartment over the Handymart. Along with gas and groceries and snacks and lottery tickets, they specialized in fishing gear. In the back, the yard was fenced in with a swing set and sandbox and picnic table where Lucille ran The Love ‘em and Leave ‘em Day Care.
Drew held the door open for me—he’d started doing that lately—and I passed beside the plant where Lucille filed away her losing lottery tickets. It was a Spanish bayonet, a dusty green thing with long spikelike leaves that had, on each one, a ticket spiked through the heart. It looked like some kind of strange creature, a symbol of comfort or despair—however you wanted to see it—for all losers.
Lucille came in from the back to meet us. That day she was wearing a T-shirt that said PLEASE LORD LET ME SHOW YOU THAT WINNING THE LOTTERY WON’T SPOIL ME. And she grabbed Drew across the shoulders and pulled his head into her large bosom. (I myself had begun to wonder if Drew was not too old for that. I didn’t want for me, or Lucille either, to get in the way of his budding sexuality. As though I knew anything about budding sexuality, seeing as how my own had budded up so long ago, then had gotten snipped while blooming—and was now compost.)
“Well, just look at this,” Lucille said, smiling. “Driving up here good as Mario Andretti. Looking pretty as a pretty Italian, too.” She ruffled his hair.
Drew turned pink under that beautiful skin of his. His eyes are gray like mine. George used to call mine Sea Wash, the name of a paint I used a lot. A paint he said made my watercolor skies look like captured raindrops. (Should have drowned him when I had a chance.) My whole life with George is now like a footnote. It creeps in in tiny little minutes in which I remember what he used to say, the way his hair curled around the back of his ears; the yellow flecks in the irises of his eyes that, with his head on a pillow, were enhanced like chain links of gold. Even as I looked at Drew, right then, the exact curl of George’s hair was behind his ears. “He did great,” I said. “Passed with flying colors.”
Drew turned pink again and glanced at me. Well. . . flying colors is always relative.
Bill reached over the counter and handed Drew a key ring. It was plastic in the shape of a swordfish. “Here’s a little something for your birthday,” he said. “We got to take a day off soon and