June was only seven days in, and 1979 was already proving to be the shit year of shit years, at least as far as things were falling for me. I was walking the three blocks from my bus stop to the crappy third floor apartment I was then living in, the temperature still baking into the mid-nineties despite the fact that it was past six-o'clock. I had a new brief case in one hand and a greasy sack of White Castle burgers in the other. My thoughts were a dark muddle...I was as utterly miserable as I'd ever thought I could be.
This wasn't the way things were supposed to be breaking for me. I'd just received my diploma from Duquesne, summa cum laude on an accounting and finance degree. I had a starter job with one of the blue chip accounting houses in Pittsburgh, bottom rung crap sure, but a nice path set out before me like the proverbial yellow brick road.
Nice...
And up until three weeks ago I had what I considered the icing on the cake...a truly first-rate girlfriend. Looking back now, over the nearly four decades that have passed, it is hard to imagine how much you can be in love with someone, how all consuming a college affair could be, especially for someone like I was back then, a virtual naïf in the realm of romance...and sizzling sex. Fuck I'd been a virgin when I'd met Michelle at a party during my sophomore year. Up to then the only notches in my belt were the occasional backseat hand-job, with a little bare tit mixed in if I was lucky.
Michelle, who was a newly arrived freshman, sucked my cock on that very first night, her dark, soulful eyes meeting mine as I unleashed in her mouth. My God, the sight of it even hits me now, down on her knees in my dorm room, stripped to the waist to expose those heavy, perfectly shaped breasts, gulping at the torrent of semen I cut loose...that absent thought filtering through my head that this most certainly wasn't the first penis to part those pretty lips. No fucking way on that!
She was terrific, tall and horny with top-of-the-line smarts. She had that "it" girl thing going too, that magnetism and bouncing personality that often made me wonder how I'd lucked into her. And she gave every impression of being as hooked as I was, marriage and kids coming up in our conversations as a given. It was just nirvana for us, with lots and lots of studying and lots and lots of orgasms.
And then, a little under two months ago, a week before my commencement ceremony, it was all gone. ...Poof! And I never saw it coming. Michelle leaning into me over lunch at a downtown diner, saying she needed to take a break from us..."a break from us", what the fuck did that even mean. She let her eyes well, and swore there was no one else ...that she didn't think there ever could be anyone else. She just needed some time. Butter wouldn't have melted in that girl's mouth; I believed her completely for two full days. And then I while I waited across the street from her apartment building...did I mention I was nuts by this point, 'cause I was... I watched her get out of some guy's red Corvette. ...Bitch! His arm hooked casually around her waist as they went inside.
I waited for him to leave...I stood there in a light drizzle until five in the morning and then walked back to my apartment in utter defeat.
Fucking wrecked...
Ruined...
Gutted and taxidermied on her wall...
I never told her what I knew in the few times we spoke since then. I spent my hours imagining her getting fucked in every way imaginable, balls-deep on his huge shaft, her face ground into the mattress as she came and came and fucking came...
And, yes, I wanted her back so bad it hurt.
Ashes and smoke... like someone had hacked off my arm or leg. Now here I was at the end of another zombified day. I couldn't focus on my accounting work, couldn't do ten minutes on the CPA exam books that cluttered my cramped kitchenette.
I turned the corner of my street and stopped short. My mother stood under the awning at the entrance to my building, two large suitcases at her feet. She caught sight of me and brought up her hand in greeting. She looked worried and very tired.
"...Mom?" I was coming up to her, staring stupidly at her. She hadn't said a thing about visiting me...two suitcases, with a small travel bag over her shoulder. The bus ride from our house was nearly eight hours, grungy depots and rusting towns stretched out as your legs went numb in the cramped seats.
She came up and hugged me, pulled back to peer into my face and then pulled me back in even tighter.
"You look terrible," she murmured.
"Gee, thanks."
"You do...you lost weight, you look..." The words caught in her throat. She reached up and softly brushed my cheek. "...It's okay, baby. It'll be all okay."
"Mom..."
"Let's go inside, c'mon," she cut in, tugging my hand lightly. "I'll let you get my bags, they weigh a ton."
I stood there and watched as she opened the door and beckoned my inside, her smile worried but very calming. I picked up the suitcases and went inside towards the elevator at the back of the hall.
XXXXXXXXXX
Two hours later I was staring down at the empty plate in front of me...my Mom had dumped the White Castles in the fridge and pulled together a fast dinner from the meager rations in my kitchen...penne in a simple oil and garlic sauce. I ate reflexively, the pasta tasted great even though she shook her head when she realized all I had was grated cheese in a Kraft container.
She was at the sink by now, running water into one of the basins.
"So how's work going," she asked. Casual, a Mom query...she could question me better that any cop.
"Okay."
"And the CPA prep stuff?"
"It's going," I shrugged, watching her back stiffen a bit.
"Okay, Kevin, now that is baloney, baloney on the work and on the studying. ...Now how are things going? And I'd like the truth this time?"
I looked down at the plate again and didn't answer.
"Hear from Miss Michelle lately?"
"I don't wanna talk..."
"That girl," came her voice. I glanced up and saw that she'd turned and was staring at me now. My mother never really came around to Michelle. She was always nice to her, polite, almost warm...but I could always read that undercurrent of distaste. Mom didn't know about the other guy, hell nobody did, except for Michelle who probably had his sperm dripping down her thigh at this very moment.
"So you still didn't say why you decided to visit?" I said, an attempt at a segue that would get the eyes off me.
"You are in trouble, that's why."
"I..."
"You are not doing well. I know that from hearing you on the phone. Your father could hear it too. You have a very good job, good prospects. This thing with Michelle has you..."
"I don't want to talk about her."
"Fine with me, but the fact is you are not handling this break-up or whatever it is, well. You look terrible..."
"I'm..."
"Terrible!" she repeated. You're not eating properly. You're not resting, am I right?
"...I'm not sleeping that good," I agreed after she waited me out. My sleep was for shit actually. I fell asleep at my desk two times in the past week...yet at night in my own bed I'd lay there looking at the ceiling.
"You are not prepping for this exam," she went on, picking up a taxation review book with her wet hand and slapping it back down. My CPA exam was coming up. It was a beast of a test, cut into three parts back then, each section two weeks apart. My first test was in just over three weeks and I knew I wasn't ready, not at all. Fail the CPA exam and you were toast with my firm, no associate jobs unless you passed with high marks on the first go-around.
"I'm not, I can't focus on things," I heard myself say, the first honest thing I'd offered since she arrived. "I'm not doin' good at work either."
"That is why I am here."
I looked at her standing there, solid, her jaw set with real determination. My mother was 54 years old then, her dark hair just starting to go gray. A few lines at the edges of her eyes and mouth, heavier now too, with maybe an extra twenty pounds since I'd left for school. She was wearing a simple green dress; a worn apron that she'd fished out of her bag bibbed over her neck. The only makeup she ever wore was a soft red lipstick, and today there wasn't even that. She was an average housewife, a mother...a fierce fucking warrior. The look on her face was pure will. She was here for me, in whatever fight there was going to be.
"I'm staying here until you are done with this exam. Until you pass it and get your head right."
I looked around the cramped apartment.
"That's a sofa bed, right? I'll sleep there. You are going to eat properly, you are going to rest, you are going to study your little fanny off ..."
"I..."
"Sixteen days until the first section," she cut in. "I checked the examination dates with Harrisburg. Now go in your room and take a little nap for yourself...one hour. Then you be at this table and write out a study plan, something I can check on as you go. Sixteen days...sixteen days and promise you are going to demolish that exam."
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Three days had gone by since my mother moved in. I ate better...she walked to the closest supermarket and stocked my fridge, eggs for breakfast, real dinners with meat and potatoes, a wedge of pie or a dish of ice cream as I tried to bury my face in a book. I still wasn't sleeping, my mind still a jumble with Michelle and work and...
I'd messed up royally at work that day, or what could have been royally had one of the older partners not picked up on my mistake. Tommy O'Hara was a wrinkle of a man, sixty but looking eighty, senior partner, a guy who was always quiet and who you'd sometimes see pour a Jack Daniels from the bottle he'd keep inside his desk.
Tommy had called me into his office and just motioned me into a chair without a word that morning. He had the auditing forms I'd been assigned on his desk, my sign-offs on each page. "Your Mother tell you I called?"
I jerked in the chair, looking at the papers, hearing him mention my Mom. I shook my head.
"Find the mistake, kid. Come on, right now!"
I was fumbling at the sheets, rattled. He'd had me working for him on a one of his large accounts for two weeks and had always been perfunctory with me, polite, but nothing more. He watched me over the top of his glasses, his voice sharp.
"Page five, right there."
I found it and let my thumb drift down the sheet. Bang, there it was...I saw it, a misquoting in the numbers for a tax liability problem, only this was a big misquoting, the numbers carrying onto the next page and the next...
"Nobody knows, you fix it up now, it stays that way. You oughta be glad I look over the work product of people I don't know, that I can still spot a screw-up like that even when I'm more than half in the bag."
"I'm sorry..."
