It had been a horrible day. One of those days where you wake up to shit already starting, in this case my dog vomiting over and over again, and it only continues to escalate. That kind of day where the shit just builds and builds until you catch your shirt on a door handle and then Fred Durst is on your shoulder telling you to break stuff. The shitvalanche: dog in the vet, no job call backs, truck overheating, and I'm having to do asinine odd jobs for cheapskates knowing I'll never make enough money to pay for whatever extravagant bills were headed my way. Yeah, just one of those days.
I had already been to Lowes five previous times, this one making my sixth. The first three had been one and dones for a couple cheapskates, netting me 80 bucks, 65 after gas. Then, it had been Miss Beverly. Now, Miss Beverly was one of my favorite customers; super sweet sixty year old widow that was still gorgeous, and called me anytime she needed anything. One of my best customers really, even if she did stay out in rust-n-dust county. She had simply needed a new garbage disposal, one trip to Lowes. After I finished, "My hot water heater is leaking."
I should have asked then, "Anything else?" But I didn't. Checked the hot water heater, just need to replace an outgoing pipe. But wait, it looks like whoever did this before used pvc pipe instead of cpvc. Another trip to Lowes. Then... then she tells me, "Can you put this fan up in the living room?" No sweat, all the tools were in the box. There's no way I'd have to take another trip all the way into town from the dirt roads of Podunk USA, right? Well that's where I fucked up. Thinking something would go smoothly. Turns out the light fixture didn't have a mount in place.
The only thing that kept me from going on an Ed Gein inspired massacre with a chainsaw, was thinking about Cool Hand Luke. I gripped the steering wheel tight, teeth clenched, just breathing. Imagining I was at that card table, shitty hand and all, unwilling to let on. It was all I could do, the fully peaked temperature gauge of my Ford jalopy mirroring my own mental temperature. And as I, unsuccessfully, strove for calm, my mom called. Just a blown head gasket waiting to happen.
"What?" I snapped.
"You don't sound happy," her voice thick with insidious motherly love, "what's wrong?"
"I don't have time for this, what do you want?"
"Now, that's no way to talk to your mother."
And that's when one of my gaskets blew, "For fucks sake. You only call when you want something. Cut the motherly love shit, we both know that's above you. Get to the fucking point or I'm hanging up the phone."
"Fine," she snapped back, her voice resuming the cunty quality I had known since I was little. "I need money."
"You always need money, what your pipe broke and you need a new one?"
"No," she didn't even acknowledge the crack at her expense. "I need it for rent. I'm a couple hundred short for the week."
"Well, tough titty," I almost spat into the phone. "Maybe you should get out of that motel and actually find some work."
Her retort was just as acidic, "Maybe you should stop being a terrible son and help your mom."
"Really?" I was flabbergasted, and enraged. "I've helped you more times than I've made trips to Lowes. You are unhelpable. You don't want help, you just want pity. It's pathetic. Anytime I help, you just fuck it up. Even if I gave you the money, you'd just blow it on something else and be calling me tomorrow. That's what you do, you fuck everything up."
"I fuck everything up huh?"
"You heard me."
"Guess you're living proof of that," she spat. "Look, fine. Don't help me. I'll figure it out on my own."
"Good job, one step closer to being an adult," I sneered. "Next time, skip the phone call and just figure it the fuck out by yourself!" I hung up and tossed the phone onto the bench seat of my truck and let out one long, infuriated growl, "Fuck!"
Somehow, I felt calmer. As if enough of the pressure had been released to shut the chainsaw off. Still irritated, but no longer quite on the verge of a train wreck, I finally made it back to Mis Beverly's. Cool and calm, just like Luke.
"Oh honey," Miss Beverly met me at the door, "I'm sorry, I've got you running like a hare from a pack of hounds."
I smiled, and stepped inside, "It's okay. Next time we will know to make a list."
"I do enjoy a good list," she closed the door. "Now," she patted my arm, "you get to work and I'll make some food. You hungry honey?"
"Yes ma'am," I said with the fervor of a man who hadn't had a chance to eat so much as a chip all day. Things were looking up for me, pressure relieved, work almost done, and there would be food. There was a reason Miss Beverly was my favorite customer, biscuits. Her biscuits were as legendary as Aunt Meg's gravy, practically it's own food group. I was humming as I dismantled the light fixture, the taste of lightly buttered biscuits on my tongue. My stomach adding the bass beat to my internal song of the south.
The biscuits were just as good as I remembered and hoped them to be, and the food was spectacular. Fried porkchops, lima beans cooked with fat back, and some roasted butternut squash. I ate like Terrence Hill in the old west, and Miss Beverly picked at her food while making conversation, all gossip. "So, Patsy made a scene at the church this Sunday."
"What was it this time?" I asked around a mouthful of squash and porkchop, tearing into a biscuit as punctuation.
"Remember how I told you she was talking to Dale?" I nodded. "Well, turns out what she thought was talking was really just her constantly annoying him. It's just like I told Cheryl, Dale wants Jean, not Patsy. I mean, bless her, but she can just be too much." She regaled me with the local geriatric gossip, mostly relationship kerfuffles between widows and retirees. It all sounded very juvenile and Jugheadlike, and I ate it all up.
When the stories ebbed, and my pants nearly split, I helped her clean the dishes, which she half-heartedly protested against, "Now, now. I can do that."
"I got it Miss Beverly," I said, my faith in existence restored. "You already cooked. Least I can do."
She trailed me into the kitchen, "Okay, but save the bones for Popcorn. I'm sure she will love them." I winced at the thought of my dog still at the vet, no phone call yet and as late as it was, she would be staying overnight. No news was good news.
"Thank you."
As I was leaving she handed me three plates wrapped in tinfoil. She tapped the top one, "These are some extra biscuits for you, and then there's two plates, one for you and," she looked at me, wrinkled face placid and sweet, "the other one I want you to give to your mom." She must have seen the scowl cross my face as her eyes softened with a sad smile. "I don't know everything, and I'm not asking, but she's your mom. She may not have loved you the way you wanted, but she did love you the way she could."
I nodded, feeling sad and empty, "Yes ma'am."
She smiled with a warmth that only a stranger who doesn't know the real you can smile, "Good." She kissed my cheek, handed me the plates and said, "Just remember. She's in pain. She needs comfort and love."
I left with a single resolution, no way I would give my mom a damned thing. I rode home, the sun slowly fading. That point in the evening where dusk is just stretching it's dark yawn and the street lamps were on but gave off no light. Where people should be driving with their lights on, but over half selfishly drove under the haze, lightless. I chewed over every failure my mom had bequethed me. Every absence, every fight, every lost house, every night she had been passed out under the influence while a lit cigarette dangled errantly in her hand threatening to burn the place down.
And somewhere, Miss Beverly's voice reminded me, "... she did love you the way she could." The time I had fallen off my bike and scraped my forearm from elbow to wrist and she had given me half a loritab. The time my first girlfriend had cheated on me and my mom had slashed her tires. The first time I had sex and she had bought me condoms and some special lube that was supposed to make me last longer. It may not have been the right way, but it was her way.
I turned down my road, guilt and some small thread of Jiminy Cricket humming in the back of my mind. "Fuck!" Without a look at the temperature gauge, I jerked the wheel and turned around. "God fucking damnit!" I tried to convince myself otherwise, but I knew what was right. What little money in my pocket there was, and this second plate of food, would be given to her. Sometimes, being a good son was simply being there in whatever capacity she needed.
I pulled into The Quad, a small motel on the edge of town. Eleven rooms semi circled around a pockmarked parking lot, more residents than cars. Smack dab in the middle between a Waffle House and a liquor store. Whoever had built it long ago knew exactly what their clientele wanted.
I parked, somewhere between trying to convince myself this was the right thing to do and the worst mistake of my life. With a throaty sigh I grabbed a single plate and made my way to her door. The sun had fully set by now, streetlamps doing their job of obscuring the stars in the sky. A few kids ran and laughed in the parking lot playing some version of tag where it looked like all of them were "it." An oldman on a milk crate hefted a harmonica to his toothless mouth and blew:
'Oh, I tried, I tried to change,
But it didn't take, oh no,
Made my mistakes, now,
I'm singin' the snakeskin blues'
Before I could knock on the door it opened, a surprised fifty year old man that looked like he had been born in the tumble of a concrete truck just as surprised to see me. "Don't worry," he said with a wink, "best sixty bucks you'll spend." I stood there, perplexed, as the door swung shut, and the man strode quickly to one of the few vehicles in the lot. The laughter and squeals of the children mixed with the melancholic wail of a lone harmonica.
'So I grabbed a forty,
