Big Cherry Holler - Adriana Trigiani [32]
“Have you asked Jack Mac who she is?”
“God no.”
“Why not?”
“Because in every Bette Davis movie I have ever seen, when the woman asks the man that question, the man always says, ‘I’m sorry, yes, you’re right, you’re so intuitive, yes, I love her. And I don’t love you anymore. So set me free so at least one of us can be happy.’ ”
“Don’t base your real life on bad melodrama,” Theodore says, rearranging the sugar packets in their plastic holder.
“Do you have a better idea?” I ask him as I blow my nose.
The waitress comes over to take our order. She doesn’t even look concerned. She just picks up my wad of tear-soaked napkins and dumps them in the trash on the way back to the kitchen. I guess a lot of people face their demons in the middle of the night at the International House of Pancakes.
“Why would your husband call me and brag about you and how hard you work and what a great wife and mother you are and how you need a weekend away because there isn’t enough he could do to ever thank you, if he was leaving you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have got to get a grip.”
Theodore’s exasperation soothes me. Maybe I am crazy. “I know I sound totally irrational—”
“Listen to me. This thing, this blackness and doom you feel, is just a tiny storm cloud of feelings passing overhead. You are at a crisis point. I don’t think it’s about Jack Mac and Etta. It’s about Joe.”
“I’m dealing with Joe.”
“Joe isn’t here to deal with. That’s your problem,” Theodore says tenderly.
“I hate myself. I was a terrible mother to him.”
“You were not!”
“Do you know that I yelled at him every day? Do you know that he got spanked? And I swore to Jack I’d never spank the kids. But he turned on the water in the tub and left it and it overflowed and ruined the ceiling and I went crazy. I took him to sit in Etta’s time-out chair. He laughed at it! In fact, he never sat in it. The thing had cobwebs on it!”
“So you spanked him. What else?”
“I was so busy trying to make him behave that I missed everything. I was chasing him all the time. Correcting him. Begging him to sit still. Whatever it was.”
“He was a demanding kid.”
“But I didn’t appreciate him. I wanted him to be more like Etta. And he wasn’t. He was a tornado. Even the way he got sick in the end. Etta gets a cold, and it takes her half the winter to get over it. I see bruises on Joe one morning, and six days later he’s dead. Don’t you see? He was this unbelievably vibrant color, this amazing shot of purple that flew in and flew out, and I was too busy trying to make him into something else. I blew it. I totally blew it. And now, three years later, I just want to apologize to him. To tell him I’m sorry for not seeing what he was.” I’m stunned that I am not crying. Theodore looks at me.
“Feel better?”
“I sort of … do.” The waitress refills my coffee and dumps some more half-and-half onto the table. “Really, yeah, I’m fine,” I tell Theodore and then the waitress, who ignores me and checks her reflection in the window of our booth.
“No, you’re not. You wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be asking me if you look old. Somehow Jack knew you needed a deeper conversation. One that cannot be had over the phone.”
“Did he say something to you?” I rise up in the booth by my chin like a rattlesnake peeking out of a basket.
“No. He did not,” Theodore says calmly. His tone of voice makes me sink right back down into the booth.
“How do you know so much about men?”
“I’ve been one for a long time.”
“Right.” I stir my coffee. I don’t care if it’s my second cup and it’s the middle of the night. “You should thank God you’re not married.”
“I could never be married.”
“Good thinking.”
“It’s not for me.”
“You’re smart.”
“No. I’m gay.”
The IHOP becomes very quiet. It’s almost as though I can hear the pancake batter pouring onto the griddle through the swing doors.
“You are?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, when?”
“Since I can remember.”
The thoughts kick up in my head in a thousand different directions. Questions pop up: How? Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Is there