PRIMATES

PRIMATES

Up here, where the road dips into hollows that hardly ever see the sun, the mail comes in a beat-up Dodge Ram.   Jonathan Blair’s daddy has been the mail carrier on this route all my life.  Jonathan was my boyfriend in seventh grade.  I hear he’s on a scholarship at the university in Johnson City, the same place my mother is working on her nursing degree.  I hear Jonathan wants to make a lawyer and come back home to work for legal aid.  I know for a fact Mama won’t be back.

    Mr. Blair hands me a big Priority Mail package.  “Hey, Rochelle, you having a birthday or something?” His smile is lopsided like Jonathan’s, but without the dimple. 

“Yep, tomorrow,” I answer. 

“You must be about twenty.”

“Yep.”

“Jonathan turned twenty back in the spring.”

April second, I could say.  He missed being born on April Fool’s day by nine minutes.  Jonathan dumped me in eighth grade, but what they say about your first boyfriend is the truth, you remember every teeny-tiny thing that ever passes between you.   I remember more about Jonathan than I have ever known about Eddie, and I’ve been with Eddie since my senior year.  

Mr. Blair shuffles through a stack of mail and comes up with a handful for me.  On top is Daddy’s check, first-of-the-month, as sure as Christmas.  The rest looks like junk.

I thank him and tuck the package under my arm.   Mr. Blair tips his Peterbilt cap and the Ram eases forward, on down to Lena and Rydell’s mailbox, peeking from a tangle of purple morning glories.  

The screen door whacks behind Daddy while I’m tearing into the package.  He comes to the edge of the porch, where my legs are stretched out across the top step.  His striped pajama bottoms leave a gap of knobby ankle above his house slippers.  My eyes travel up the stripes covering his skeleton frame.  His thin shoulders give a sudden jerk, as if a shiver is passing through him.  He’s always chilly.  Even now in July he won’t turn on the air-conditioner.

Daddy has not put on anything but pajamas since his last doctor’s appointment.  He seems down and out these last weeks, making me wonder what, exactly, the doctor told him about his emphysema.  The cuffs of his sleeves are frayed.  He taps his pack of Marlboros against his knuckle and pulls out a cigarette.  His hands are all bones and veins under papery skin.

He looks down at my package.  I don’t have to say it’s from Mama.   Daddy’s eyes in their shadowy sockets  seem to know.   He draws on his Marlboro, making his mouth pucker in hard ridges, and coughs a dry hacking cough.  

I unfold a strappy dress, greenish-blue, the color of my eyes, which I bet Mama was thinking when she bought it.   I wonder what else she was thinking.  She knows there’s no place around here to wear a dress like this.      

“Snazzy,” Daddy says, when I hold it up for him to see.

Also in the package is a fat book with the title,  A Pictorial Guide to Primates of the World.  I show Daddy the grinning chimpanzee on the cover.  The chimp’s goofy grin makes me smile, but Daddy’s mouth keeps its hard line.  He stares at the cover, drawing his wiry eyebrows together.  “What the hell kind of book is that?” he mumbles.

“Just a book.”  I thumb through a few pages, photos of chimps as cute as human babies and gorillas with sagging breasts like old women.   Dr. Rineholt said gorillas in their natural habitat are nothing like our King-Kong version.   They are peaceable and guileless, he said.   Dr. Rineholt was personally acquainted with the woman who lived with gorillas in Africa.  At the video store we have the movie that was made about her.

Daddy takes a long drag on his cigarette.  His eyes squeeze into slits, like inhaling takes all he’s got.  “Just like Jean to send you something like that,” he says, finally, the words coming out with the smoke, his mouth pulling down at the corners the way it always does when we talk about Mama.  

He tosses his cigarette, half-smoked, over the rose bush into the yard, and shuffles back into the house.  The screen door flaps.   I hear his recliner chair squeak and the portable oxygen tank start up with a faint hum.   Daddy uses his oxygen all the time now, except when he comes outside to smoke.

Mama didn’t up and leave in a storm of angry words or a gush of tears.  She’d been leaving all along.   I just hadn’t paid attention.  The day she finally drove away with her grandma’s cane-bottom rocker in the back of her old Chevy wagon, I had the notion she’d been waiting it out till I graduated from high school, but maybe I was no part of it at all.  

“You can’t say you’re surprised, Rochelle,” she said as she cleared a few trinkets from her dresser and packed them in a cardboard box.  There was not much left that belonged to her by that time.   The pay in rural clinics was chickenfeed compared to private duty nursing in Johnson City, Mama had said all the time she’d been driving back and forth.  From the first, Lena made snide remarks about Mama’s patient who needed full-time care after his stroke.   She arched her eyebrows when she talked about “Jean’s professor.”  Lena, with her soap-opera mind, is Daddy’s baby sister so naturally she would take his side, but I couldn’t prove there wasn’t truth to her suspicions.

“You can come and see me any time you want to.”  Mama raised her blue eyes to me, her eyelashes thick with mascara.  “You can come with me now if you want to.”   My face was hard-set.  She looked back down at her fingernails, bit to the quick.

“You think I’d walk out on Daddy like he is?” I said.   He had just gone on disability.  Even though he was able to work in his shed, fix lamps and such, he was going down fast.  It looked bad for Mama to leave.

“Maybe you want to stick around because of Eddie Lufkin, too,” she said, wrapping  newspaper around a glass figurine, an angel from her childhood, with her birth year on it.

“Maybe so.”  I felt a mean-spirited streak shoot through my veins.  I looked at Mama’s made-up face and for one split-second something wild in me wanted to scratch my fingernails across her pretty skin.  She stooped and picked up the box, shaking the hair out of her eyes.  I crossed my arms, holding myself tight, and followed her to the car. 

Her Chevy wagon was old when she bought it, and now she’d made so many trips over the snaky mountain roads, it looked like the tires were about to fall off.  She set her box in the passenger seat.  “Well, come and see me whenever you want to,” she said again.

“Don’t hold your breath,” I said. 

I glanced down the road, where Lena stood on her porch with a broom in her hand.  She was not sweeping.  Lena couldn’t hear what I said but I imagined she could tell by my hiked-up chin that I was not begging Mama to stay.

“You’re eighteen, old enough to decide,” Mama said. 

My teeth scraped my bottom lip.  Then I said, “Is it true?”  

Mama knew exactly what I meant.  “I’ve told you, and I’ve told Vernon, and Lena, too, for that matter.”  Her eyes darted toward Lena’s porch and back.  “Dr. Rineholt is my patient.  But you want to know something, Rochelle?  I’m not sorry to be leaving.  I like it in Johnson City just fine.  Is that what you want to hear me say?”

I felt my lips curling into an ugly smile. “I didn’t want to think you’re a whore, that’s all,” I said.  Having the last word, I whirled around and left her standing as still as a rock.   I went to the kitchen sink and saw, far off in the edge of the back yard, Daddy standing just as motionless, with a cigarette burning between his thumb and finger.  A minute later Mama’s car made an eager noise and pulled away.

I love how I look in the dress, in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door.   It could be Mama in the mirror, Mama from long-ago pictures in the album she took with her, shiny blonde hair falling over her shoulders in her senior photograph, and in her wedding picture, a waist Daddy could circle with his hands.  She was eighteen and he was twenty-seven.  In the photo that sits on my dresser she has put on weight and cut her hair, but it’s my favorite.  She’s holding a baby on her lap - me in my bald, toothless stage.  She looks proud and hopeful.   

Lena’s voice sounds at the kitchen door.  “I’ve been to the garden,” she calls.  She brings a Walmart sack to the kitchen counter and takes out fat, ripe tomatoes.  Lena gives off the smell of her kitchen, greasy and cozy, the warm smell of a big supper on the table, her and Rydell and the kids passing around heaping hot bowls of fried vegetables. 

“Damn!” she says as I strike a pose in my new dress.  “Where’d you get that?”

“In the mail, from Mama.”

Lena grunts at the mention of Mama.  She lines the tomatoes up on the window sill.  “Where do you think you’ll wear a fancy thing like that around here?”

“Maybe I’ll wear it somewhere else,” I say.

She cuts her eyes at me.   This thing hangs between us, as real as sheets flapping on Lena’s clothesline in a stiff breeze.   In June, when I was going to visit Mama, Lena said, “What good do you think it will do?  Jean is the one that left.”  Two years had passed with nothing from Mama but a few phone calls.  I told Lena I thought it would settle something in my mind.  “Or stir things up,” she said.  

I used to want to be like Lena.  She was slim and graceful and funny.  Now she’s a size eighteen with bad teeth.  In those days when Lena was slender and laughing, throwing her head back, Mama was a shapeless form that smelled like the clinic’s disinfectant, a weary voice saying No.  Nothing like the woman who hugged me on Dr. Rineholt’s porch, telling me, “Life is not a straight line.  It’s not a sin to change your mind.”

Lena unpacks more vegetables, wrapped in newspaper.  “Hey, Vernon,” she calls to Daddy in the living room. “I brought you some good-looking tomatoes, and okra and green onions.”

He calls back in a thin, strained voice.  He’s stretched out in his recliner with its oily headrest, watching some game show with beeps and shrill laughter.  The footrest goes down and he sets his slippered feet on the floor.  He unhooks his oxygen and shuffles to the front door, coughing as he goes.

“How’s he doing?” Lena asks, washing the okra and onions.

“About the same.”  I ask if she’ll give me a ride to work.  Lena works three to eleven at the nursing home.  I have to be at the video store at three.  “Eddie’s picking me up tonight.”

Lena’s voice takes on an over-bright tone.  “Vernon likes Eddie.”

“Everybody likes Eddie.”  I try to lift the mood between us, saying offhand,  “We’re going to watch the Braves at Katie and T.J.’s.”  

Katie and I have grown up like sisters.  Five days younger than me, she’s about to have her second baby.  I can feel Lena cheering at the mention of her daughter. She dries her hands on a dishtowel and begins to massage the hard spots at the back of my neck. 

I rotate my shoulders.  “That feels good.”

“You’re too young to be so tight.”  She kneads harder, working my muscles like bread dough.

“You could make money at this, Lena.”

“Rydell says the same thing, says I could be a massage therapist.  I tell him I’ve got my hands full keeping him satisfied.”

“You and Rydell are terrible.  Worse than Katie and T.J. have ever been.” 

“Honey, I try to tell her.  If you want to be happy, keep your man happy.  You might profit from my advice, too.”  She peeks around me to see the look on my face.

“I’ll remember that when I get married,” I say.  She keeps watching, like she’s waiting for some announcement, but all she gets from me is a big phony smile. 

In seventh grade I would have bet my right arm I’d marry Jonathan Blair.

Mama had just started the job with Dr. Rineholt.   I was too caught up in Jonathan to think much about her absence.   Most Saturday afternoons I wound up at the Blairs’ house in town.  They turned their basement into a rec room, furnished with a pool table, television, VCR and CD player, along with some old furniture and a refrigerator stocked with Cokes and popsicles.  Already Jonathan talked about college and how he hoped to get a scholarship.  Already he talked about coming back to the mountains to do something that counted.  He thought he might make a preacher.   The Baptist church had a new young pastor that Jonathan admired, who took the youth group on retreats, and they would come back full of religion.  Some Friday nights their youth group met in Jonathan’s rec room.  He begged me to come to church with him, come to youth group.  He was always pestering me to think about good grades and college and life so far in the future it blurred. 

“You’re smart, Rochelle,” he’d say, his breath soft on my neck as we lay on an old quilt that was losing its stuffing.  “You can do anything you set out to do.”  

I avoided that kind of talk when I could.  I found ways to shush him.

Mrs. Blair never bothered us in the rec room, with Garth and Reba turned up loud.   “Ma trusts us,” Jonathan said, both of us knowing she shouldn’t.  

I doubt Mama ever suspected Jonathan and I were not playing church, those Saturday afternoons.  She had her own worries, her marriage on a downhill slide.  Most Saturdays she was in Johnson City, looking after Dr. Rineholt.  Lena was more tuned in to me.   She told Katie and me that she had once dated a young preacher herself.  “A preacher-boy will screw around like anybody else,” she said, “but when all is said and done, he will marry a virgin.”  

Jonathan ditched me for a girl in his church group but he didn’t marry her either.  Now he’s  training to be a lawyer, not a preacher.  Life is not a straight line.  Mama got that right.   

Before I go to work, I fix a plate of leftover greens, creamed corn, and meat loaf for Daddy’s supper.  I slice one of Lena’s ripe tomatoes, cover both plates with plastic wrap, and set them in the refrigerator.  Rydell or one of the boys will check on Daddy.  Lena sees to that, evenings when she and I both work.   Lately, Daddy won’t even microwave his own meal.

 Lena honks for me at twenty till three, and I call to Daddy that I’m leaving. “Remember Eddie and me are going over to Katie’s after work.”

He raises his scrawny hand a few inches, his eyes stuck to the TV, and says, “’Bye.”   He is adjusting the nosepiece of the oxygen tube as I head out the front door with my purse and my new book, for slow times at the video store.  I have dreamed of coming home and finding him in the recliner, head slumped to one side, his skin bluish-gray, no breath but the oxygen tank still humming.

 “I can get your daddy in to see a good respiratory specialist at the medical center,” Mama told me as I unpacked my bag on a high four-poster bed, upstairs in Dr. Rineholt’s moldy-smelling house.  “I’d be glad to do it if Vernon would let me.”

“I can ask him,” I said, “but I think he likes his doctor well enough.”

“Dr. Ballew?  Has that quack ever done anything for him?”  Mama folded my tank tops, smoothing out imaginary wrinkles.  “Never mind, it’s not your fault.”

I turned my bag upside-down and a tangle of socks and underwear fell out.  “Some people like Dr. Ballew just fine.”

“Some people never worked in the clinic with him.”  She pursed her lips and blew out a little breath of disgust through her nose.  “Nothing ever changes in the mountains.” 

Dr. Rineholt’s tall, thin house, in walking distance of the campus, was easy to find with Mama’s directions.  The shrubbery was so overgrown against the dark brick that it hid the windows, blocking the sunlight.   At night I could hear branches scrape against my second-story window.  I could hear groaning and squeaking.  “Don’t let the noises spook you,” Mama warned me.  “It’s just old.”   I could tell it was a run-down version of what used to be a fine, solid house.  Mama’s room looked out into a big dogwood tree that was still in bloom.  I slept in the room next to hers, unafraid of the creepy sounds.    

Mama is much more than a nurse to Dr. Rineholt.   She buys groceries, does cooking, cleaning and laundry, all that, plus going after her nursing degree like she’s leaning into the wind.   Lena will say, “You might accuse Jean of a lot of things but laziness is not one of them.” 

I asked Mama, “Are you going to get a nursing job at the hospital or are you going to take care of Dr. Rineholt?” 

We were making spaghetti together, me chopping up tomatoes, her pushing the onions around with her spatula.  Her eyes were fixed on the frying pan, her smile dreamy.  “I’ll take care of Dr. Rineholt as long as he needs me.  But you never know when things will change,” she said, as if the idea had just struck her.   “A woman has to look out for herself.  A woman can’t just depend on a man for her livelihood or her happiness.”  She fastened a look on me that said I should take her words to heart.

I set the dining room table with gold-rimmed china.  Dr. Rineholt came to the table in his wheelchair.  His thin gray hair bobbed against his neck.  He made a production of lifting his nose, sniffing, popping his eyes wide behind his black-rimmed glasses.  “Spaghetti?  What’s the occasion?”  

“It’s Rochelle’s favorite,” Mama said.  It used to be my favorite when I was about ten.

Dr. Rineholt’s thick lips pulled back, showing big white horsy teeth.  His mouth and glasses filled his skinny face. “Jean would be feeding me a TV dinner if you weren’t here,” he told me.

“That’s a bold-faced lie!” Mama said, pretending to be shocked and then wounded.  “Only one time, when I was late to class.  You’ll never let me forget it, will you?” 

Dr. Rineholt had a polished way of speaking, without any particular accent.  I was surprised by the strength of his voice, which didn’t match his frail body.  His slow speech, with some hesitations, was partly because of the stroke, Mama had explained, but it only made him sound smarter, more thoughtful, to me.  

“Dr. Rineholt is a famous anthropologist,” Mama said, not for the first time.  “You should hear the stories he has to tell.

“Jean is going a little overboard,” he said, narrowing his eyes at me.  He put down

his fork and picked up his napkin, using only his right hand.  His left hand lay claw-like on his lap. 

“I like all your pictures,” I said.  Throughout the house on walls and tables were photos of monkeys.  Some in cages, some in the arms of a fuzzy-haired man wearing thick glasses.

“I was interested in primate research when I was young,” he said.  “I worked with a primatologist for several years.”  With his good hand, he dabbed spaghetti sauce from the corners of his mouth.  He said that non-human primates can teach us a lot, that they are intelligent and honest.  I’d never thought of an ape as honest.  He said they share human traits.  “Bonobos have sex facing each other,” he said.

Dr. Rineholt was at least twenty years older than Daddy, but even half-paralyzed, he might outlive Daddy.   If he could have stood up straight, he would have been as tall as Daddy.   I wondered if Mama had ever made these comparisons.  I wondered what it was about these years with Dr. Rineholt that had washed the tightness out of her face.  

“Tell Rochelle about the rhesus monkeys,” Mama said.  

“Jean has her favorite stories,” he said, with a glance at her that seemed overly fond.   He dropped his napkin next to his plate and pushed back from the table.  He’d barely touched his food.  “Harlow was a psychologist who studied mother-infant bonding, using rhesus monkeys and surrogate mothers.  The monkeys were raised in cages with two objects substituting for their natural mothers.”  Dr. Rineholt had started to sound like he was teaching a class, no stumbling over words.  “One object was just a wire form, constructed so that the monkeys could receive food.  The other was a soft cuddly object wrapped in terrycloth that gave no food.  So there they were – one food-giving object, and one terrycloth object.  Then came the moment of truth.  A large mechanical spider was put in the cage with the monkeys.  Can you guess which surrogate mother they turned to?”

A no-brainer.  “The cuddly one,” I said.

“You’re absolutely right.”  He raised his good hand and slapped the arm of his wheelchair as if he were tapping a bell.  “The monkeys chose the soft mothers.” 

“I think it’s such a sweet story,” said Mama, “but sad.”

“Research is a two-edged sword,” Dr. Rineholt said, still in his teacher-voice.  “The primate may actually live with the researcher. Chimps have even learned sign language.   The animals become highly socialized during the research. The problem is what to do with them after the project ends.”   He took a deep breath, gathering steam for another story.   “In Africa, there is a sanctuary for research primates who can’t be returned to the wild.”

 I leaned forward, drawn into the next story.   Mama’s fork was suspended mid-air as she chewed, smiling from him to me and back at him, her face pink like a bloom.  

“He likes you,” Mama said as we loaded the dishwasher, after Dr. Rineholt had wheeled himself to his room.  She scraped plates over the garbage disposal.

“I like him, too.”  I was obligated to say it, but it was mostly true. 

“What made you decide to come see me?”  She didn’t look at me.

I held a handful of silverware under the faucet.  “I just thought it was time,” 

“You’re right about that.” 

She asked about Lena’s family and I told her Katie was due in September.  “Brandon won’t even turn two till January,” I said, thinking how strange it was that Mama hadn’t seen Katie’s first child.

“Two under two, now that’s a handful.”  She poured detergent in the dishwasher and said in an offhand way, “You still with Eddie Lufkin?”

“Yep.” 

“You going to marry him?” 

“I think he wants me to,” I said.

She washed her hands at the sink and dried them on a paper towel.  “You love him?”

“I’m supposed to,” I said.

“I guess that’s my answer.”

After she’d started the dishwasher, she led the way through the house, past all the photos of monkeys, to a side porch off the living room.  The wicker furniture must have been expensive twenty years ago.  I could make out the faded flowers on the cushions, but barely.  Bushes were grown up around the porch so it felt private, though another house was lit up past the driveway.  

“I loved your daddy,” Mama said.  “I loved him more than anything, once upon a time.”  I wondered if she was remembering when she came to the mountains as a licensed practical nurse and Daddy worked for the Blue Diamond Coal Company.  His daddy had begged him not to go down into the mines, so he trained as an electrician and kept their equipment working.  All the same, he’s dying with emphysema.

“So what happened?” 

“People just get stuck,” she said.  “Maybe it’s something about the mountains.”

I tried to imagine how it might have been between them before Blue Diamond went bust, before whatever love Mama felt for the mountains and for Daddy burned out, and Dr. Rineholt drew her away to this life.

“You know something about that, I guess.”  It sounded like a question.

I felt my neck stiffen.  “There’s nothing wrong with Eddie,” I said.

Behind Mama, the greenish lights of fireflies blinked against the dark.  “Dr. Rineholt wouldn’t mind if you wanted to stay here a while,” she said.  “If you wanted to take some courses at the college.”

My head felt thick, like I’d had too much beer.  I remembered the same feeling as Jonathan Blair’s breath grazed my cheek:  “You’re smart, Rochelle.  You can do anything.” 

I walked past Mama to the edge of the porch.  The fireflies’ blink-blink-blinking made me dizzy.  “Just because you left Daddy doesn’t mean I can,” I said.

Her voice floated over my shoulder, and I felt the heat from her body.  “Lena and Rydell will take care of Vernon.  Don’t you know Lena’s always been right there?  Your daddy might live for God knows how long, Rochelle.   You can’t tell about emphysema.” 

I realized her fingers were lying on my arm, as weightless as a flower petal.  I could feel the heavy beat of my heart in my throat.   

“It’s not a sin to change your mind,” she said.  “Life is not a straight course.”  She pulled me close and a powdery-smell I remembered from long ago was strong in my nose.  “Just think about it, baby,” she whispered.   “Don’t give an answer till you think about it.”  I felt my arms thread around her, the first time in a million years. 

Keeping the video store open till nine on weeknights is a waste.  I pass the time with my Primates book.  Chimps, apes, and animals I have never heard of, lemurs, pottos, galagos, and lorises.  One photo that looks like a chimp has the caption, Bonobo.   I think of Mama and Dr. Rineholt and the clink of silver on china.  I wonder why I wasn’t embarrassed, hearing an old man talk about bonobos having sex, or bored by his crash course in primates.  I see Dr. Rineholt’s mouth moving around big words:   placental mammals, opposable thumbs, Homo sapiens.  It all seems like a strange, half-remembered dream. 

Dr. Rineholt wheeled away from the table and we followed him through the house.  He stopped at every photo and gave another lesson.  The house was one big classroom.    

“I have never seen a house like this,” I said.

Dr. Rineholt lifted his face toward mine.  “Jean makes it a home,” he said.  “I couldn’t function when she came here eight years ago.  She gave me physical therapy.  Jean gave me back my life.”

Mama laid her hands on his shoulders, her fingers working like Lena’s when she’s giving a massage.  “Nice,” he said.  “Nice, Jean.”

A few minutes before closing, Eddie drives up in his truck, pulls into the space next to the door, eases between the lines, perfectly.  No other car is parked anywhere around but Eddie is going to do it just right.   I wave through the arc of words on the store window, and he waves back.  I’ve told him he can come in but he’d rather sit there, listening to Tim McGraw or Shania.  I close up, shut off the lights, lock the door behind me and hop into the truck.  Eddie is six-foot-two, two hundred twenty pounds.  He reminds me of a bear-sized puppy. 

He kisses me hard, lots of tongue, before we say a word.

“What’s that all about?” I say.

“Has it got to be about anything?”

 I can guess, by his beer taste, that’s he’s been to the County Line.  It’s where Eddie and his buddies from the Highway Department like to hang out, where beer is cheap and the fries are fat and sizzling.     

We back out onto the street and head out to T.J. and Katie’s.  A minute later we are wrapped in blackness, except for the headlights that shoot out into the dark.   Katie and T.J. live next to his folks, not far from town, a couple of turns off the main road, plenty of curves and dips, like all the roads up here.   We pass sleepy houses with squares of light glowing, people watching television.  Eddie opens his window and props his elbow in it.   Mountain air is always cool at night.

“What kind of book you got?” he asks.  I tell him Mama sent it for my birthday.   “A weird present,” he says, and before I can tell him that it’s really not, he reaches over and gives my leg a little tug.  “What are you doing way over there?  Come on over here.”  He turns the radio down low as I scoot next to him.  His hand slides up my thigh.

“You better watch the road,” I tell him, twining my fingers in his to keep them still.  Diamond Rio belts out a few lines.  “Mama sent me a dress, too.”

“You can wear it tomorrow night.”  I frown at him.  He says, “For your birthday.”

I’m used to celebrating my birthday with Katie.  Lena is fixing us a birthday supper Saturday night, and of course Eddie is invited.  “It’s a real dress-up dress,” I say.

“So?”  He gives me a sly, cat-like grin.  “You don’t turn twenty but once.”

The lights from Katie and T.J.’s trailer come into view, and I close my mouth on my question.  I’m glad when Eddie puts both hands on the wheel and turns off the road.

“The Braves are down in the bottom of the sixth,”  T.J.says, his eyes glued to the big-screen TV that takes up most of the room.  He is a sheriff’s deputy.  T.J., the biggest hell-raiser in the county when we were growing up.   He and Katie have been together since junior high.  Mama says nothing ever changes in the mountains, but look at T.J.

“Didn’t you fix something to eat?” he asks Katie.  She is as big as a cow but that doesn’t keep her husband from ordering her around.  “Get us a couple of beers, too,” he says.  I follow Katie into the kitchen.  Brandon tries to hang on to her legs, makes her stumble.  I pick him up.  He smells like milk and talcum powder.  He stretches his wiry little body, reaching toward his mama, whining. 

“He’s been so cross today,” Katie says.

“Brandon or T.J.?” I say.

She rolls her eyes.  “You got that right.”  She takes ham sandwiches and cheese dip out of the refrigerator and fixes a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a bowl of chips.  We deliver the food to our men and Katie says, “Let me show you the baby’s things.”  Brandon squirms out of my arms and finds his pacifier under the table. 

The trailer has four rooms and a bath, so the baby – a girl, they know – will sleep in Brandon’s room.  Katie has fixed up one crib in pink ruffles, with the mattress covered in a Sleeping Beauty sheet, across from Brandon’s bed with its bear theme.  There’s just enough room to walk in between.  Katie shows me more pink blankets and girlie outfits.

“I don’t know what to do about the curtains,” she says, touching the material, examining it as if she will find her answer.  Brown bears march on a blue background.  

“Girls like bears, too,” I say.

Katie shakes her head.  “Something in pink and blue together.  Or maybe just white with pink and blue trim.”

“White’s good.”

“Lots of diapers,” Katie says suddenly.  A little breathless laugh escapes.  She presses her huge belly.  “I’d like to get my tubes tied but T.J. wants another.”

And speak of the devil, he calls to her at that moment from the other room.  “Katie!  Get in here!”  Brandon has turned over the dip, and it’s time for more beer.

After the Braves lose, the Johnson City newsman leans toward the camera, speaking in a too-serious voice about security problems at the university.  Brandon lies on the floor in front of the TV, sucking on his bottle, his eyelashes making a soft flutter.  The air feels heavy.  I finish off a beer.  Katie leans against T.J., her feet propped up on the coffee table.

“Your mama still living with that college professor?” T.J. asks me.

“T.J.!” Katie says.  “You are so rude.”

He gives a big put-on shrug.  “All I know’s what I hear from Lena.”

“Mama is Dr. Rineholt’s nurse,” I say.  “He’s in a wheelchair.”

“Does that mean he can’t get it up?”

“For God’s sake,” Katie says.  “Shut up.”

T.J. kicks her foot off the table.  “What did you say to me?” 

“Hey - ” Eddie holds out his empty bottle.  “How about another beer, T.J.”    
T.J. kicks Katie’s other foot off the table.  “Get him a beer.”

“I’ll get it,” I say. 

Katie begins to lift herself up, off-balanced, feet turned out.  T.J. gives a little push, a little help.  “I’m going to the bathroom anyway,” she says.

“You go on.  I’ll get the beer,” I tell her.

“Two,” her lazy husband says. 

By the time Katie has come back from the bathroom and I’ve brought three beers and a Diet Coke for Katie and more chips, T.J.’s mood has turned silly.  “You kick-boxing in there tonight, baby?” he says in a high-pitched child-like voice, leaning his ear against Katie’s big belly.   Eddie and I get to hear a discussion of the baby’s kicking and Katie’s bladder.   I notice Eddie has zoned in on the baseball scores, scrolling down on the TV screen, but after a minute Katie mentions the birthday supper Lena is fixing for us Saturday night, and Eddie’s eyes lock on mine.

“Tomorrow’s Rochelle’s birthday.”   His voice is playful but there is a serious, searching look in his unblinking eyes.     

I take another sip of my beer and I begin to feel kind of drunk.  Katie says Lena is making a sour cream cake with sour cream frosting for Saturday night, and T.J. says Katie’s birthday present is going to be a new dishwasher because the old one broke down.   I hear Eddie say my present is a surprise.   I notice a slight narrowing of his eyes, and I think he’s concentrating all his powers on me, trying to peer into the depths of me, and I know.  I know it’s a ring.

I hear myself say, “Mama sent me a book for my birthday.  It’s in the truck.”  I’m on my feet suddenly, my legs moving me toward the door.

Eddie says he’ll go get the book and starts to follow me, but I say no.  “I’ll go,” I tell him in an insistent voice.  Katie and T.J. are very still, with puzzled expressions frozen on their faces.

“Rochelle - ”  Eddie’s voice pleads and scolds at once, a voice he might use to coax Brandon into good behavior.   The sound follows me like a shadow as I stumble outside, but I shut the door on it.  The cool air hits the sweat on my forehead and a chill runs through me.

The truck is lit by the moon.  I hurry toward it, wondering what would happen if I just up and drove away.  But behind me comes the light from inside the trailer, and then Eddie’s big frame blocks the door.  “What’s the matter with you, Rochelle?” comes that kind, worried voice, and I know I wouldn’t get far, and I don’t think he left the keys in his truck anyway.

I want to tell him Dr. Rinehart’s story, but I know I won’t.  I won’t speed off in the truck, and I won’t ever tell Eddie about the sanctuary in Africa for research primates who can’t be returned to the wild.   A researcher visits the sanctuary and sees one of the chimps, off in a corner looking lonesome, and she wonders if he knows sign language.  So she goes up to him and signs, Hello.    The chimp signs back, Help me.

pgallaher@copyright 2019
Published in Bellevue Literary Review
www.phyllisgobbell.com