Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [40]
Whatever the reason for his cruelty, for years I strove to be a better Saint in the hopes it would bring my mother back. I even tried to walk on water. Can you imagine a more pathetic kid?
Four years later, almost to the week, my mother reappeared as suddenly and as inexplicably as she’d vanished, taking up the space in our lives she’d filled previously as if she’d never been gone. Nobody talked about it except Constance, who once intimated that while my mother was physically a strong woman, there was some moral weakness she needed to overcome. I never learned where my mother spent those four years, or what she’d done, or who she’d done it with. I don’t believe my father ever found out, either. Were I to hazard a guess, I would say she ran off with a man—a practice that became a habit later in life—perhaps someone she’d met on the street while hawking religion.
My first sixteen years we lived in rooms on the third floor at Six Points, sharing a bath down the hall and eating downstairs with the others in a communal dining hall. Three weeks after my sixteenth birthday, I ran away and spoke to an army recruiter in San Diego. I hadn’t done well in school, but I must have learned something in the public library, because after they tested me, they decided I was army material. A forged parental signature and a fake ID with a backdated birth date completed my induction. I spent four years in the army, during which my only contact with my past was an infrequent exchange of letters with Constance Desmond. Years after she left Six Points and remarried, she sent me a photo of herself with three small children, all of them looking happier than crooked politicians. It made me feel good to know she’d finally found her place in the world.
My mother left my father again, this time for good. The church eventually disintegrated, and my father moved to the Southwest. When his third wife died in a car accident, he moved from Arizona to North Bend. Later, I failed to tell Allyson and Britney he’d had a stroke. It was only one of my bad decisions in the past few years.
I couldn’t help wondering who might visit if I were in 111. My girls, of course. But children grew bored easily, and were I in the same state as Joel McCain or Holly, they wouldn’t come back often. The guys from work might show up, but their stopovers would be perfunctory and less frequent as time wore on. Karrie would visit once or twice, no doubt thinking about the Christmas party at McCain’s, when we’d had too many drinks and ended up on the sofa in the basement.
Aside from my girls, there was really no one who cared.
My friends in the department were mostly gone. And as far as women went . . . I’d buzzed from one to another like a wasp moving from plate to plate at a picnic. Newcastle said I was searching for the mother I never had. “Men with abandonment issues,” he said, “like to dump women before the women dump them.” At the time, I’d thought his pronouncement ridiculous.
Until she ran out on me, Lorie had been the only woman in my life, but this year alone there’d been Karrie, Suzanne, Holly, Heather, Mary Kay, the other Suzanne, Tricia, and Tina, still friends all. Except for Karrie, I’d made love with all of them and then dumped them. Karrie and I had not consummated the relationship, though we’d come as close as you could without actually having intercourse.
At the time I’d had my reasons for dumping all those women, but right now I couldn’t think what they were.
20. FIELD & STREAM, LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL,
ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST
It was tougher finding a parking spot near Tacoma General during the day. On the third floor I asked