I'm Your Girl. J.J. Murray
on a conversation with myself while the train chug-a-chugs in circles.
3
Diane
I like living alone, and I even like living in a house that continuously falls apart, all at once sometimes. I’ve met some interesting men that way, and they don’t have to bathe or dry their socks in my bathroom.
It all started about three months after I moved in, not that my house in northeast Roanoke—which is mostly blue-collar and white—would ever be the first cover home of Better Black Homes and Gardens. At first, it was a series of little things. Nothing major, just minor problems to fuss at like drafts, creaks, funny smells, and peeling paint and siding.
After all these minor headaches, the small deck at the back of the house simply fell into the yard, taking a huge strip of siding with it, after some heavy rains during my only week off from the library last summer. Why do bad things always seem to happen on your vacation? I called around for estimates, didn’t have the $2,000 (over my dead body!) necessary to rebuild it “to code” (whatever that means), and ended up taking a card off a wall at the entrance of Food Lion for a handyman. I called and left a message, and the next day Robert Maxwell showed up.
I have only dropped my jaw past my ankles once or twice in my life, and when I saw Robert Maxwell, my jaw was dragging on the ground behind me, grass and little stones and dandelions all up in my teeth. Imagine a six-five black Fabio with good hair, muscles on top of muscles, a smile right out of GQ, and hands the size of tree stumps. I showed him the damage to the deck and the siding.
“It’ll take me uh couple uh three days,” he had said real slow. “It won’t be no trouble ’tall.”
Except for his constipated, country accent, I had enjoyed my handyman. I had watched that mountain of a man through the miniblinds in my bedroom. That man could dig him some holes and cut him some wood, and the way his sweat dripped down his massive back to his behind…I had even thought about smoking cigarettes afterward. I had felt like such a ho. When it rained on what was supposed to have been his last day and he hadn’t shown up, I had been depressed all day and prayed all night for a sunny day.
On his last day, while he was laying and nailing the floorboards, I had brought him some sweet lemonade and sat on the finished section wearing my tightest shorts and an electric pink tank top.
“You do nice work,” I had said in my hoochie voice.
“Thanks,” he had said.
“You sure five hundred will be enough?” I had wanted to tip him real nice with my body. I had wanted to climb Mount Maxwell. I still do.
He had looked at me with those sleepy eyes of his. “My wife says I shoulda asked for more.”
His wife. Of course he had a wife. She has to be the happiest woman in world history. She probably has an orgasm every time Robert opens the front door to their house.
“She say one of our boys needs him some braces, and my oldest daughter needs her car fixed.” That added up to at least four children. Robert Maxwell was a potent man.
I had felt terrible for taking advantage of him just to save me some money, so I had paid him $750 cash after taking an advance out on my MasterCard. I had reached up to shake his hand, and I had watched my hand disappear into his. “Take care,” I had said, hoping to see my hand again.
“Call me anytime.”
And I do. I call that man, a real man that only the Lord God in the highest heaven could make. I have Robert Maxwell’s number on speed dial, and I call him every time something inside or outside the house breaks, just to see him in the flesh.
I even break stuff…just because.
Hmm.
I think I’ll need him to redo my sidewalk. It’s all pitted like the surface of the moon. Yes. He’d have to break it up with a jackhammer or sledgehammer….
That makes me dizzy just thinking about it. And maybe I’ll get some real cigarettes this time, you know, to support Virginia’s economy.
But can I see the sidewalk from my bedroom window? Hmm. I may have to get comfortable in the living room. But can you pour concrete in December? I bet you can’t.
What else can I break around here?
4
Jack
Merry Christmas, Daddy….
“Stevie?”
I sit up too quickly and hit my head on the slats for the top bunk of Stevie’s bed.
Again. When will you learn?
How did I get here?
You were drinking heavily.
I only had three—
Five.
Okay, five mugs of eggnog. At least I won’t need breakfast. I’ve already had my dairy and eggs for the rest of the week.
I look up at the torn black lining under the top bunk. One little hole, and Stevie had found it, taking one tiny finger and rrrrrrrr-ip. And instead of fixing it properly, I had only duct taped the sides and put a few pushpins here and there.
It did the job.
But it looks tacky.
I’m a grown man sleeping in my boy’s bed. Funny, I hardly had to do that when he was…when he was here. Noël did most of the soothing in this house, whispering him back to sleep whenever he had a bad dream. He would call out only to her in the night.
And here I am calling out to him in the morning.
Merry Christmas, Jack.
What am I going to do today? There’s no need to check the mailbox since it’s a holiday. That’s one of my few daily errands. It takes forty-seven steps to get to the mailbox. The fact that I know this makes me sad.
It took you forty-three yesterday.
It was cold. I had to move fast.
I’ve been waiting for my first novel to come out, a romance of all things, as if romance will ever happen to me again. I had waited too long to find a wife, to start a family…and to buy a safer vehicle than that van.
Stop thinking about that van.
I go to the kitchen and turn on the coffeemaker before I realize I haven’t put in any coffee. The water that drips into my cup is slightly brown and smells like coffee, but it tastes like…hot brown water. Instead of searching through the mess I’ve made of the kitchen pantry for the coffee, I take a tea bag I used yesterday and dunk it into the water. It should be good for at least two more cups.
You’re going to need vice grips to squeeze out any flavor.
Probably.
I return to the living room and plug in the lights of the tree before curling up on the love seat with my “coffee water tea.”
“It’s a nice tree, honey.”
It never was, but Noël was always looking for something positive to say. The four trees I bought for us before…the accident…leaned right or left, were too bushy or had bald spots, or were too short or too tall.
One even had a bird’s nest.
Yet, after we decorated those trees, they always looked better—in Noël’s eyes, anyway—than any tree in any window in the neighborhood. We used to walk through the neighborhood looking at other people’s trees, and though there were many grander than ours, Noël always said, “It’s a nice tree, honey.”
“Thank you,” I say now. “Thanks…honey.”
Change the subject. You’re already out of Kleenex.
I’ll use napkins.
You’re out