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Melanie’s eyes are locked on mine.
“She said some nonsense about being in a cult, and I rushed all the way here…only to find she’s done quite well for herself.”
Melanie laughs playfully and then she throws her hands up. “Surprise!”
I laugh too.
Melanie’s mother looks from her daughter toward me and then back. She’s not sure what to think.
“Looks like I’d better get packed,” Melanie says.
“Good thing you got a head start.”
Her mother’s expression is expectant. “Okay, then. But you’ll have me for dinner when you return.”
“Maybe—” Melanie starts.
“Of course,” I say. “We’d love to.”
Her mother looks practically giddy. She’s glowing. “Your father is going to be so happy.”
I wave as she backs out of the drive.
She lets down her window and waves back. “You two be good.”
“You be good,” my father said.
I was none of it. I shook my head, stomped my feet, and clung to his leg. I was only five, so he still tolerated small acts of defiance. “Why do you have to leave again?”
“It’s my job, son. A soldier can’t bail on his duties.”
I hadn’t thought to ask him why he couldn’t say the same for his duties as a father. It was what it was. “Plus,” he added, patting my head. “It puts food on the table.”
That part was a lie. I don’t think I told him that either. At least not then.
When my father was deployed, which was most of the time, he left me in the care of his sister, my Aunt Jeanie. Jeanie was a dreadful woman. She was addicted to men and booze, and was emphatically not addicted to raising a child that wasn’t hers.
I’m not your mother, she used to say. As though I could forget.
My mother died a few years after I was born.
At least that was the story I was told. Another lie in a long string of them.
Later, I would learn some truths are better left unknown.
Take, for example, the fact that cockroaches littered our house. Ants crawled up the wall. I was young and inexperienced. I thought everyone had them. I assumed everyone lived like that. Aunt Jeanie used to say the roaches would outlive us. They could outlast a nuclear explosion. I read it in a book, so it made sense. Until the first and only time I brought a classmate home, and I learned other people did not, in fact, live in filth. Jeanie had a very unique housekeeping schedule, which usually picked up right before my father was due home on leave. This was back before I learned how.
“I’ll send you something special when I send the money for the month,” my father said each time he walked out the door. Maybe it absolved his guilt, maybe he really meant it. I’ll never know.
My eyes met Jeanie’s. By that point, we both knew any money my father would send would be blown on liquor, unemployed men, and other stuff I was still too young to know about. Real food, sustenance, was an after thought. “Sorry, it’s pasta again,” she would say. “And, yes, without meat. Have you seen the price of ground beef these days?” she’d ask, taking a long pull on her cigarette. That’s what I remember most. To this day, pasta still tastes like Marlboro Reds to me. You’d think I’d hate it. They say you never really get away from that which you know.
When I was older, I brought her the grocery store flyer. I pointed out the price of ground beef. Then the price of her beloved Jack Daniel’s. I surmised that if we cut her consumption in half, we could afford meat a third of the time she cooked. She thanked me with a broken nose.
It wasn’t always bad. We did have meat and other food that consisted of more than noodles right before my father was due home. Jeanie made sure of that. I was so happy during those times, I’d mark the days on my calendar. Often, I’d eat so much I’d throw up. The rest of the time, it was NoodleO’s. That is unless one of Jeanie’s men was joining us, and then she’d go the extra mile and boi
l the pasta herself.
“Sorry, kid,” she liked to remind me. “Money’s tight again this month.” She’d look at the man sitting at our table. “They send our men over there to fight and pay them diddly squat.”
