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"Start, dammit, start you fucking piece of shit!"
Couples (young and old), families (young and old),
kitchen workers (young and foreign) wandered the parking lot and threw cautious glances at the dusty, old German car. Inside
the car was a wild-eyed, orange haired (obviously the result of a bad home dye) woman and her two children.
"Why
won't you fucking start?" Orange lady got out of the car, looked under the hood, then got on her knees and looked under
her steering wheel. Her children offered advice.
"Maybe its a loose wire, Ma," said the skinny, budding
blonde girl (was her mother a natural blonde?). "I'm fucking yanking the wires, they're intact," yelled the mother.
"Sawree," said the girl.
A small, gray-haired woman raised her eyebrows, snuggled in closer
to her man and rushed their walk into the restaurant.
Eventually, the mother gave up. She sat in the car alone
with her children and cried.
"What am I going to do? I need a car. I can't get a job without a car. I've
lost everything. My house. My brand-new nice car. My life. My pride. My everything. Oh God, could you just let me have
one stupid night out with my children to celebrate their report cards?"
She no longer cared that her children
heard her babble.
The boy, a hazlenut-haired child of about 10, who was always antsy and always in trouble for
goofing around, put his hand on his mothers shoulder. "It'll be okay, Ma. Really. You haven't lost a thing."
"What," she replied. "Haven't you noticed that we're far, far, far away from home where nobody knows
us? Excuse me, but your father is living in our nice big sparkly house with I'm sure a nice new assortment of idiot sparkling
women. He doesn't have to look for a job or worry about how much it's going to cost to fix the car because HIS cars won't
break down. His life is going along just fucking fine."
"No, Ma," said the son. "He doesn't
have love. You have love, and as long as you have love in your heart you will always be okay."
'Damn,' she
thought, 'I can't laugh in his face, I taught him that. Fuck.'
So, she wiped the tears from her cheeks, wrote
a note, left it on her cracked windshield, gathered her children and walked them home. The walk felt good. The family spoke
about their move, their new life, their old life. With each new step a memory fell and a new one was created. The children
spoke of their father. They remembered the kind moments, but most of all they grieved over the confusing times.
"I
hated boyscouts," said the boy. "He pretended to be the great Eagle Scout, the great den leader. 'This is quality
time between me and my boy, he'd always brag.' Then he'd leave me in the truck while he talked to Danny's mom. One time
we went to their house to pick up something. I sat in the car for two hours. Danny was at his Dad's house. Ma? Didn't
you think it weird that we sometimes didn't get home until 11?"
"And whenever he came home late, he
always checked every room in the house," said the girl. "He'd peek in my room and yell at me for still being awake,
and then I'd hear every door in the house open and close."
"I never noticed that," said the mother,
who didn't even bother to close the bathroom door anymore. To her son she said, "I learned to stop questioning him.
He always had better excuses than I had arguments, so I don't know what I thought. I'm so sorry. Were you cold waiting in
the car?" 'What kind of question is that, she thought to herself...were you cold, geez!' But, the son answered and
the family made it safely home.
"Ma? Can we sleep with you tonight," asked the girl. "Of course
you can," she said.
"Ma," continued the girl, "maybe God wouldn't let the car start because
he was afraid you'd get into an accident."
"Maybe so," said the mother. "Now, go to sleep."
Children wrestle and fromp in their sleep as much as when awake. So, at 2 a.m. when their missing cat decided to
come home and howl on the porch, the mother was already awake. She wriggled free of arms and legs and went to unlock the
front door.
"So you've had your fun and you wanna come back to the boring people," she said to the big,
gray cat before noticing that large splotches of blood replaced patches of soft hair. "Simba, when are you going to
learn? Look at you, blood all over the place."
Simba nuzzled her legs and meowed. She gave him some milk
and opened a can of tuna. "You know you shouldn't get this," she said, "but finish up and come to bed when
your belly is full."
Simba did and curled up by her feet, occasionally licking her toe in between licking
his wounds.
In the morning her son woke her while trying to sneak out of the bed. Her pillow, which managed to
slide between them, was soaking wet.
"I was hot, Ma. It's sweat," said the boy, sounding like a 3-year
old.
"Oh this don't smell like sweat," she said. "No, honey, I think you pissed in my bed."
"I'm so sorry," he cried and tried to run to the bathroom. "It's okay," she said, "we'll
blame it on Simba."
To herself she whispered, 'Great, my room smells like rotting cat blood and stale urine.
What next?'
And, then she smiled because she realized her bed would take a bloody pussy and a pissy pillow over
an empty heart any day.
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