Cut and Run

3

A hundred and seventy miles south of Houston, Whit Mosley couldn’t sleep, and he walked from the guest house he lived in at the back of his father’s property, past the blue quiet of the pool, up to the main house. His father, Babe, sat at the kitchen table, finishing a chocolate milkshake, eating the sweet slurry with a spoon.

‘Hey,’ Babe said. ‘You want one?’

‘No,’ Whit said. ‘You won’t sleep if you eat that.’

‘Sleep is a thief of time.’

Whit sat down across from his father. ‘Irina asleep?’

‘Zonked.’ Irina was his father’s much younger wife, a year or two younger than Whit, wife number five, a Russian girl Babe had met through a marriage-oriented service and brought to Port Leo from Moscow. ‘She’s tired all the time. Tired of me being sick.’ He shrugged. ‘She won’t have that much longer to worry about it.’

‘Daddy.’

‘Whit, it’s okay.’ No self-pity colored Babe’s voice. ‘She’s too young for death, to be a widow.’ He licked chocolate from his spoon, ran a hand over the blondish gray stubble on his head. ‘She’ll go on. And she’ll always love me. But she ain’t gonna go back to Russia, and she don’t have her citizenship yet, so if she remarries kind of quick, don’t hold it against her.’ He clinked his spoon back into the glass.

‘Can we talk about my mother for a minute?’

‘Not with food in my mouth. What brought her up?’

‘I want to know if there’s anything you never told us about her,’ Whit said. ‘For example, did she cheat on you?’

‘What possible difference would any of this make now?’

‘Don’t shield me. There’s no point in it.’

‘I believe she did. She got bored with me, frustrated with having so many kids so quick. I never had proof.’

‘You ever hear the name James Powell?’

Babe shook his head. ‘What you up to, Whitman?’

‘Nothing.’ Whit picked up his father’s ice cream glass, rinsed it out in the sink.

‘Who the hell is James Powell?’

‘Nobody. You ever think about my mother? Wonder if she’s alive?’

‘Rarely.’ Regret in his voice, as though this admission meant weakness.

Whit didn’t look at Babe as he loaded the dishwasher. ‘You ever want to see her again?’

A long silence took hold, the kind that carries a weight with it.

Finally Babe said: ‘This will sound nuts, but Ellen probably thinks about us more than I think about her, shug.’

‘But she left us. She didn’t care about us.’

‘Whit, you won’t remember this, but most of the time she was a real good mother. She held onto you boys tight. Like a life preserver. You all were her chance for normalcy. A life like people are supposed to have. But she liked… excitement. Once, right after we were married, I had to go up to the bank in Rockport. We pull up and she said, out of the blue, Babe, what if we robbed it? She had this glittery look in her eye. Like she was hoping to be Bonnie and I was gonna be Clyde. She gave me this sideways glance I’ll never forget. We went to Vegas on our honeymoon and she’s pregnant, I come back from the bathroom and she’s betting a grand – all our gambling money – on a single blackjack hand. She won and I got her the hell away from the table. It scared me. And the years after that I’m filling her up with babies and I guess that wasn’t excitement enough.’ He shrugged. ‘Finally she left. But you can’t leave a large family and pretend they never happened. I figure she died a long while back, otherwise she would have called you and your brothers.’

‘You said I don’t remember her,’ Whit said. ‘But I remember her scent. I never knew it was gardenia until I was older. I didn’t imagine it, did I?’

Babe nodded, smiled. ‘Yeah. She used a soap that smelled like gardenia.’

‘Why did you marry her?’ Whit realized he had never asked before.

‘Because we got pregnant with Teddy. But the reason I loved her was…’ Babe stopped. ‘She’d walk into a room crowded with people and read it in an instant, like a map. Know who was mad at who, who was wanting who, hardly without two words being spoken. It was funny to me that she could do that. A little hypnotic, too. And she was smart. Pretty but not bitchy about her looks. After she was pregnant, and we’d only known each other about six months, marrying seemed like a fine idea. I loved her and she would have been a great partner in business. I figured I wasn’t gonna do no better.’

‘You didn’t feel trapped?’

‘No.’ Babe shook his head. ‘Sure, I had money, and she didn’t, but Ellen trapped herself. Wanted to be tied down. Forced herself into a structured life. Her mom and her weren’t much more than vagabonds, working jobs up and down the coast. She never knew her dad and her mama died right after Teddy was born, you know. I really didn’t have anyone else to ask about her. After she left, we all sort of felt we’d been fooled into knowing her.’

‘She got tired of normal.’

‘She never appreciated normal.’ Babe stood. ‘Shug, I’m gonna go and sleep next to my beautiful, sweet wife and not talk about Ellen any more.’

‘Would you want to see her, Daddy?’ Whit asked.

‘You mean see her face-to-face?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yes,’ he said after a moment. ‘I would. I don’t wish her ill. But I would like to know what was so goddamned more important than you boys. If she wanted to leave me… fine. But you boys only got one mama. She stole the most precious thing in the world from you and your brothers, Whit, and you deserve an explanation. An apology.’

‘I don’t need her apologies,’ Whit said. ‘Perhaps you do.’

‘It’s water on the moon to me.’ Babe stretched his thin arms above his head. Whit’s throat thickened. His father looked the worst he had since his drowning-in-drink days. The healthy glow of long-term sobriety had been replaced by the dimming paleness of the enemy within, chewing through his father’s liver.

‘You’re like your mother,’ Babe said. ‘I don’t mean it bad. But she had to kick over the anthill to see what would happen. You’re the same.’

‘We could look for her. So you could know what happened to her.’

‘Asking if I want to see her and actually trying to track her down are two different things, Whit. I wouldn’t waste my limited time on Ellen. I’m invoking the I’m-dying-so-I-get-to-be-an-asshole clause. I forbid you to look for her. In case you’re considering it.’

‘I never read that clause.’

‘Respect my wishes. Please.’

‘All right,’ Whit said. He could change his father’s mind later, if Harry Chyme found his mother. He knew he could. He hadn’t heard from Harry in a week. ‘It’s all hypothetical, anyway.’

‘I’ll see you in the morning. Love you, shug.’ Said more often now, in the sunset of life.

‘I love you, too.’ Whit watched his father leave the kitchen, in his slow, tired shuffle.

I don’t have much time left to find her, Whit thought. Not much at all.