Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine Read online

  “I’m fine, honey,” her mother said, as if this explained everything. “But come on home. I’ll make you some breakfast. Do you want some biscuits? I think I have some granola from the last time you were here, that kind that you like.”

  “Don’t you dare make breakfast, Mom,” Missy said. “Just rest, and I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “What about coffee? You must be tired.”

  “Mom,” Missy said but couldn’t find the strength to continue. She took a deep breath, knowing her mother was still waiting for her to answer, calmly waiting as if nothing was wrong and Missy was just in the area and had decided to visit. “We’ll make breakfast together when I get there.”

  “Okay, honey,” her mother said, and then hung up the phone before Missy could say anything else.

  When Missy pulled into her mother’s driveway, she noticed that her mother’s Cadillac was parked in the grass, leaving the carport open for Missy to park her own car. This was one of her mother’s habits, moving her car out of the way whenever Missy and her family visited, as if they deserved the covered parking, and Missy now realized that her mother had probably come out here to move the car before Missy arrived. She immediately felt a burning frustration for her mother’s constant selflessness, but that quickly gave way to sadness, the idea of her mother hobbling into the driveway in order to move her own car.

  In the house—Jesus Christ, the door left unlocked so that Missy (or another intruder) could just walk right in—she found her mother sitting in her easy chair, listening to talk radio. Missy shuddered at the sight of her mother’s injury, an angry line of stitches that ran from temple to midcheek. The entire right side of her face was bruised and puffy with swelling. Missy put a hand to her mouth to stifle any sound of alarm, and her mother smiled when she saw Missy in the doorway. “Honey,” she said, rising unsteadily to her feet. “How are you?”

  “Mom,” Missy said, rushing over to her. “Sit back down. Are you okay? What happened?”

  Her mother fell back into her chair and then took a sip of water before answering. “It’s just awful, honey,” her mother began. “I was cleaning up in the kitchen last night and someone knocked on the door. It was Leland King, one of Duncan’s boys.”

  Leland had gone to school with Missy; he’d been a few years younger than she was, a skinny, weasel-like boy, his little frame always supporting layer upon layer of camouflage. His brother, Donnie, had been one of Missy’s best friends, and Leland had often hung out with them, but he was so quiet, always sitting at a remove from them, nervous and twitchy like a feral cat.

  “He asked if he could come in, said he needed to ask me something, so I let him in and made him a cup of coffee. I thought about calling Duncan, because it was strange that Leland was here at that time of night. I don’t think I’d seen him since you were kids. But he wasn’t acting strange, just sipped his coffee and made small talk with me about his family and what he was doing now; turns out he married some girl from Charleston and they had just moved back here to live with his brother while he looked for work. Finally, he said he needed to borrow some money, about three hundred dollars, and he had run out of people to ask. Now, you know I don’t keep that kind of money in the house, and I told him as much, and he got real agitated and was crying a little, and that scared me. But I couldn’t do a thing about it at that point.”

  Missy wanted to tell her mother that she should never have let Leland in the house, but she knew it was pointless. Everyone knew everyone else in Slidell, and it would have been impolite to turn someone away. She remembered that when she was a child ladies would come in and out of each other’s houses to borrow ingredients for dinner, random children would take up space in the living room, no boundaries that kept one house separate from another.

  “He asked if I maybe could loan him some jewelry that he could pawn, and then when he had money he could get it back and return it to me. I knew he was in a bad way, but I wasn’t going to give him any of my jewelry. Some of that stuff has been in our family for generations. I want to pass that on to you and Kayla.”

  “Mom,” Missy said, moving her mother along.

  “Well, he got real quiet for a few seconds; he was still crying, though. Then he told me that when he was in high school, he was here at the house with you and a few other friends and you were all going to the Dairy Queen in Custer, but he said he couldn’t go because he didn’t have any money. Do you remember this, honey?”

  Missy shook her head. On any given night, she and her friends were driving to the Dairy Queen to hang out.

  “He said I gave him five dollars and told him to go with the rest of you. He said it was the nicest thing anyone had done for him up to that point, maybe ever. Now, I have no memory of this at all, but I imagine I did it. I tried to help out all you kids when I could. Anyway, I thought he better go back to his brother’s house. I said I should call his brother to come get him, and then, honey, it was so fast, he jumped up and tried to grab me. I don’t know what he thought he was going to get out of it, since I didn’t have the money and that jewelry is hidden in my closet in a lockbox. I don’t think he even knew what he was doing, but he knocked me off balance, and I fell and hit the edge of the table. I guess I passed out for a second or two, but when I woke up, he was gone, and I managed to call 911 and they took me to the hospital.”

  Missy leaned over her mother and embraced her, which her mother accepted without comment. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” Missy said.

  “I’m tough,” her mother said, but, to Missy’s ears, there was no emotion or genuine belief behind it, even though it was most certainly true.

  “They caught Leland, I think,” Missy said. “They said something about it at the hospital.”

  “Yes, I told the police, and they picked him up at his brother’s house. This all happened while I was at the hospital, but they said Leland’s been in trouble before, all mixed up with drugs, and that he confessed almost immediately when they picked him up. I almost feel bad for him, if I’m being honest.”

  “Don’t feel bad, Mom, for crying out loud. He beat you up. He’s an awful person.”

  “I said I almost felt bad for him, honey,” her mother replied.

  “And who drove you home? The nurse said some man picked you up.”

  “It was Willy. I called him and he was there in no time,” her mother said.

  Willy was the man who cut her mother’s lawn and had done so for as long as Missy could remember. He was nearly eighty himself, Missy guessed. He was probably the person who interacted with Missy’s mother the most, doing odd jobs around the house whenever something needed fixing, occasionally eating lunch with her, watching TV. Missy felt happy to know that someone in Slidell was watching over her mother.

  “Have you slept at all, Mom?” Missy asked.

  “Off and on. Not really.”

  “Do you want to sleep now? I’m here, so you’ll be fine.”

  “It’ll mess up my schedule; it’s almost morning anyway. I should just get on with the day. You should sleep, though. You drove all this way.”

  “Mom, I can’t sleep if my eighty-two-year-old mother who just got out of the hospital is going to stay up.”

  “Do you want breakfast, then?” her mother asked.

  It was useless to resist. Breakfast would be prepared no matter what she said. Her mother was already reaching into the refrigerator for a package of bacon. Missy nodded her assent, and the two of them made biscuits and gravy and bacon and a pot of coffee. They ate at the table, the same table where her mother had sat with Leland King the night before, and they watched the hummingbird feeders that were strung along the window move in the breeze. Her mother winced with each bite, the way it irritated the stitches, but she seemed to be genuinely okay. Missy had expected the worst, to be bathing her mother and wheeling her from doctor to doctor, but she was hours past getting assaulted by some meth head and she was reading the newspaper as if nothing had happened. It was this matter-of-factness
that had always disconcerted Missy. It seemed impossible to complain about anything because her mother dealt with more, and without any visible complication.

  Missy and her husband could barely pay their bills on time; the apartment was back to being a complete wreck a day after it was cleaned; she had been trying to read a single novel for the past eight months without making it past page fifty. But her mother had cleaned up her own blood off the kitchen linoleum the minute she had come home from the hospital, not even a trace of what must have been a terrifying experience left behind.

  While they were washing dishes from breakfast, Missy’s husband called to check on her. “How long do you think you’ll be there?” he asked the minute it was established that her mother was not dead or incapacitated. “A few days at least,” Missy replied, and she noticed her mother shaking her head and gesturing to her that she could leave anytime. “Just to be safe.”

  “Kayla is mad that you didn’t take her with you,” he told her.

  “I’ll be back soon,” Missy replied.

  After Missy hung up the phone, her mother said, “You don’t have to stay on my account, honey.”

  “Just a few days, Mom. I’m here, so I might as well get to visit.”

  “What about work? You can’t just miss work and expect them to be okay with that,” her mother said. Missy had worked as a receptionist for the travel agency for ten years now, but her mother was constantly worried that she was going to be fired. It had always interested Missy that her mother believed she was a fingernail away from losing her job.

  “It’s fine. I can stay for a few days,” she said, ending the conversation, and the two of them returned to the rest of the day, taking out the garbage, paying bills, watching a game show that Missy did not understand on even the most basic level but which seemed to greatly interest her mother.

  “This is nice,” her mother said, “just the two of us.”

  Right after lunch, someone rang the doorbell. Missy made her mother stay seated while she answered the door to find Leland’s brother, Donnie, shuffling awkwardly on the welcome mat. When he saw Missy, his face burned red with embarrassment.

  “Shit, Missy,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m so sorry.”

  She had seen Donnie from time to time when she was visiting her mother, but it was always a shock to see how much he had changed since they were in high school. As a teenager, he’d been skinny like Leland, pasty and freckled. Over the years, he had gained a ton of weight, which had turned his proportions to a boulder with arms and legs. He had a beard that wasn’t yet at ZZ Top levels but was certainly long enough to suggest an insane backwoods survivalist. Now he was standing in front of Missy, who could not imagine letting him inside.

  “I just wanted to check on your mom,” he said, still shuffling as if he had created a brand-new dance. “I feel like shit about this. My brother is a fuckup, but he generally only fucks himself up.”

  “She’s okay, I think,” Missy finally said, taking pity on Donnie’s awkwardness at having to make this visit. “She got roughed up pretty bad, Donnie. She had to get stitches, and her face looks awful.”

  “I know; the cops told me all about it. Well, I just wanted to tell her that I was sorry and that as soon as Leland gets out of jail, whenever that is, I’m sending him and his wife on their way. He won’t stay in Slidell. He should never have come back in the first place.”

  “Okay,” Missy said, sensing that she needed to get back to her mother, to spare her this scene.

  “Are you staying with her?” Donnie asked her.

  “For a few days,” Missy replied. “Until she feels better.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll see you around,” he said, the slightest smile forming under that thick beard.

  “Okay, then, Donnie,” Missy said. She closed the door softly and locked both locks, Donnie still standing in the doorway.

  “Who was that?” her mother asked. “Was it Willy?”

  “It was Donnie,” Missy said, deciding for honesty. “He wanted to apologize for Leland.”

  “Donnie was always the sweetest boy. He’s done right by his mom and dad, running the lumberyard for them and whatnot.”

  They watched more TV until her mother finally sank deeper into her easy chair and began to breathe in rapid, shallow bursts before settling into sleep. Missy took an afghan off the couch and draped it over her mother. The swelling on her face had gone down, and the angry red line of the cut had started to fade back into her skin, replaced by a deep purple bruise. Her mother’s mortality, inevitable, growing more and more likely, still seemed impossible to Missy. Her father had died so early, when Missy was only ten, and it had always seemed to her that those lost years had transferred to her mother, that she had gained another forty or fifty years tacked onto her own life. But it was hard to be immortal when twitchy fuckers like Leland King were busting into your house and beating you up. Missy thought they should install a security system but realized the complication of it would dumbfound her mother; plus, those systems only worked if you didn’t open your door voluntarily and let intruders into the house.

  Just then, Missy heard a knock on the screen door, and she found Willy on the steps, holding a paper bag. Missy opened the door to let him in, and he carefully scraped his work boots over the welcome mat for what seemed like twenty minutes before he came inside.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “Sleeping right now,” Missy said. “But she seems okay.”

  “Good,” he said, his deep voice like a proclamation from God.

  “Thank you so much for taking care of her yesterday, Willy,” Missy said, giving him a hug. She could smell the familiar scent of pipe tobacco on his overalls as he embraced her. Sometimes, when she had come to visit for the holidays, she could smell that smoke on her mother’s clothes. She had often wondered if Willy and her mother were a secret couple—the sly intimacy they maintained with each other and had for years. When Missy was younger, she had hoped her mother and Willy would marry and that she would have another father, but she knew a black man and a white woman, especially when that woman was her mother, would never happen here in Slidell.

  “I told her she needed to stay at the hospital,” he responded, looking sheepish, “but I think June honestly felt like she was inconveniencing everyone in the hospital just by being there. Sometimes she’s too polite for her own good.”

  “What’s in the bag?” Missy asked.

  Willy looked confused for a second and then seemed to remember the paper bag he was holding. “Medicine,” he said. “The doctor at the hospital gave her a prescription for pain pills, and I picked them up this morning.”

  Missy took the bag from him, and the two of them stood awkwardly in the hallway, unable to think of more to say.

  “It’s good that you’re here,” Willy finally said.

  “Just a few days,” Missy said.

  “Still good,” Willy said, before he nodded, as if affirming something he’d only been thinking about. “Tell her I came by to check on her,” he said, and then he clomped back to his truck and drove off.

  When Missy returned to the living room, her mother was slowly waking up, her eyes unfocused, and she seemed shocked to find her daughter in her house.

  “It’s me, Mom,” Missy said.

  “I know it’s you,” she said. “Who was that at the door?”

  “Willy. He brought you some pain pills.”

  “Well,” her mother said, lightly touching her stitches and wincing. “Let’s have some of them.”

  One hydrocodone knocked her mother into a comalike sleep, and Missy was left to wander the house, trying to figure out what to do with her time. She checked her e-mail and made some phone calls to her husband and work, and only thirty minutes had passed. It was less than a day since she’d arrived to help her mother, and she was already thinking of when she could leave, could return to the routine of her life. As evening arrived, her mother awoke, and Missy forced her to stay in bed, bringing her
water in a giant plastic mug and giving her back issues of TV Guide to read. For dinner, Missy made grilled cheese and a chocolate milk shake, which her mother ate without complaint. The medicine seemed to have worn off; her mother had shaken off the cloudiness of the drugs, but she kept asking for her pocketbook so she could give Missy a hundred dollars to give Kayla.

  “This house is yours when I die, honey,” her mother said suddenly, in between sips of milk shake.

  “Let’s not worry about that right now,” Missy said.

  “The house and everything inside it,” she said. “That’s why I wouldn’t give Leland King that jewelry.”

  “If someone comes to the house again, Momma,” Missy said, “and they ask for the jewelry, just give it to them.”

  “I’m going to get your father’s shotgun from the attic and keep it by the door,” her mother said, smiling as if remembering something wonderful from long ago.

  “Let’s see what’s on the TV,” Missy said, flipping the channels until she found a cooking show featuring a caricature of a southern cook, a show she knew her mother hated. She took the dirty dishes into the kitchen, and even after the entire kitchen was cleaned, she stayed away from her mother, checking her e-mail on her phone, flipping through coupons in the newspaper, until her mother called her back to the bedroom.

  “I’m going to bed, honey,” her mother informed her. “Your room is all made up and ready for you.”

  “Call me if you need anything, Mom,” Missy said. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “You’re so good to me,” her mother said, and Missy walked back into the kitchen, the entire night ahead of her.

  Missy wished she’d brought that novel from home, now that she finally had time to read it. She briefly examined the books on the shelves in her mother’s living room, a strange assortment that looked like they’d never even been opened: a biography of Hitler, some Sidney Sheldon novels, three books on typewriter repair, Roots, and Agatha Christie’s autobiography. Instead, she took a long bath and drank one of the Michelob Lights that her mother kept for Willy when he came to visit. She kept willing herself to get tired, to let the warm water and the alcohol seep into her and put her to sleep, but she was wide awake. Her body seemed to understand that she was free of her daily responsibilities to her husband and daughter and wanted to do something fun. Among the very limited options, the house creaking softly around her, she decided to drink another beer.