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By Root 617 0

She saw cheap men as her consolation prize. She saw me as her redemption. She sent me to church and made me study. She preached diligence and discipline. She didn’t want me to turn into my father. She didn’t smother me with love and turn me into a ’50s textbook faggot. She lived in two worlds. I marked the dividing line. She thought her dual-world scheme was sustainable. She miscalculated. She didn’t know that suppression never works. She had liquor and men over here. She had her little boy over there. She spread herself thin. She saw her worlds blur together. My father rubbed her honky-tonk world in my face. He out-propagandized her. He taught me to hate her every weekend. She scorned him every weekday. She fed me scorn with less virulence than he fed me hatred. She preached hard work and determination. She was a drunk and a whore and thus a hypocrite. The world she built around me did not exist. I had x-ray-eye access to her hidden world.

I caught her in bed with a man. She pulled a sheet up over her breasts. I caught her in bed with Hank Hart. They were naked. I saw a bottle and an ashtray on the nightstand. She moved us to El Monte. I saw a whore in flight. She might have fled to create a space between her two worlds. She said we were moving for my sake. I wrote it off as a lie. Say I was wrong. Say she ran for both of us. She ran too fast and misread El Monte. She saw it as a buffer zone. It looked like a good place for weekend revelry. It looked like a good place to raise a little boy.

She tried to teach me things. I learned them belatedly. I became more disciplined and meticulous and diligent and determined than she ever could have hoped for. I surpassed all her dreams for my success. I couldn’t buy her a house and a Cadillac and express my gratitude in true nouveau riche fashion.

We time-traveled. We covered our ten years together. We made irregular jumps back and forth. Old memories played out contrapuntally. Every Jean-the-profligate-redhead blip sparked a counterpoint image. There’s Jean drunk. There’s Jean with her ungrateful son. He fell out of a tree. She’s pulling splinters from his arms. She’s swabbing him with witch hazel. She’s holding a pair of tweezers under a magnifying glass.

We time-traveled. I lost track of real time in the dark. That counterweighted balance held. I ran out of memories and opened my eyes.

I saw my wall graph. I felt the sweat on my pillow.

I turned off my time machine. I didn’t want to take her anywhere else. I didn’t want to place her in fictional settings or wrap my revelations up and call them her life summarized. I didn’t want to write her off as complex and ambiguous. I didn’t want to shortchange her.

I was hungry and restless. I wanted to breathe fresh air and look at live people.

I drove to a mall. I walked to a food court and got a sandwich. The place was jammed. I watched people. I watched men and women together. I looked for seductions. Robbie courted Tracy in public. The Swarthy Man took Jean to Stan’s Drive-in. Harvey knocked on Judy’s door and made her feel safe.

I didn’t see anything suspicious.

I quit surveilling. I sat still. People crossed my line of sight. I felt buoyant. I was on some kind of oxygen high.

It hit me softly.

The Swarthy Man was irrelevant. He was dead or he wasn’t. We’d find him or we wouldn’t. We’d never stop looking. He was only a directional sign. He forced me to extend myself and give my mother her full due.

She was no less than my salvation.

27

The jury delivered. Daddy Beckett fell for Tracy Stewart. Bill said he’d get life without. Gloria Stewart confronted him. She pled for her daughter’s body and called Daddy terrible names. I said there was no body and no closure. Daddy got life. Gloria got life with Daddy and Robbie.

Bill threw a backyard party. He called it a pre-Labor Day bash. It was really a goodbye party aimed at Daddy Beckett.

I attended. Dale Davidson and his wife attended. Vivian Davidson was a deputy DA. She knew the Beckett case intimately. Some other DAs came down. Gary White and his girlfriend came