Hick - Andrea Portes [54]
“No, sorry, it’s a kid game.”
Clement still has his eyes fixed on the ground.
Mr. Comfort smiles like everything in the universe is exactly as it should be, now and evermore. Edna looks like she’d like to take this kid all the way to the chopping block. I’m starting to wonder how long it’s gonna be till Eddie comes down and turns this little scene of domestic drama into more like a circus of insanity.
“Wull, I’d better go. it’s getting late—” I start to move my chair back.
“No no no. You just stay put. Just stay right there,” Clement says, reaching his hand out and touching me on the elbow. And then I see it, some little crack in the Wedgwood, and I can see, behind his eyes, deep into the back of his late-night dreams, a pleading from the same place of shame and desperation that I hail from. It stops me in my tracks.
“Well, we’ll just be going to bed, then.” Mr. Comfort says it, leading Miss Horse with him in a semi-circle and then back upstairs. She follows, obedient, clopping her way out the picture, not failing to look back, one last look at Clement that says she’ll get him, she’ll get him, just give her time.
“That’s not my mom. In case you’re wondering,” Clement whispers, making sure they’re well out the way before opening the cooler and grabbing a beer.
“Wull, yeah, I could tell.”
“She’s my step-mother.”
“Oh.”
“But when my dad’s gone, she likes to pretend she’s my wife.” He says it quiet like he never said it before and it doesn’t exist.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
There ain’t nothing to say to that. And I don’t. I don’t try to follow up or pretend it never was or act concerned or play after-school special. I don’t try to do nothing but just sit there.
And now I know the secret of why, even though he’s from rich-ville and even though he never had to contend with the stomach-grumbling and the screen-door slamming and the late-night breaking of glasses, even though all those things have escaped his privileged silver-spoon life, he’s still not unscathed from those late-night humiliations you might just have to contend with if someone leaves you alone with a trusted uncle or a horsemouth step-mother or a friend from the First Baptist down the way.
And then I realize, for the very first time, that you might just be sitting in a wingback chair in the middle of your mansion, counting your presents on a cool winter night, staring up at some giant Christmas tree that costs more than Jesus, with all that glitter and those bows and ribbons outshining each other under the lights, but if you’ve got someone, some horsemouth, paying you a visit in the middle of the night, well, then you might as well be setting down in a shack in crapsville, cause you still ain’t safe and never will be.
I look up at Clement and he looks back at me, and it’s like I met him eight million years ago before time began, and when I met him then, it was just like when I met him now, and when I meet him again, in 2090, it will be just like this moment, on and on until the end of time and even past.
And I could set the rest of my life in this moment. I could settle in and let the dust pile up around me and let the leaves fall off the trees, one by one. I could let the snow pile up and then melt, and the buds come out and turn into daffodils over and over again for the next hundred years, with me, here, set in this moment with Clement, from the beginning of time and to the end.
But that would have to be in another world where Eddie wasn’t coming up straight behind Clement with a look on his face that could freeze Texas. Before Clement even sees him coming Eddie’s got me by the arm, dragging me out the chair, bumping me into the table and then halfway across the concrete.
Clement stands up and starts to follow. His friends stare frozen from the pool. He tries to make a beeline in front of Eddie, but Eddie cuts him off, wheels around and socks Clement in the eye, dropping him to the ground before he knew he’d been clocked. They are two different species.