Melanie Thon - Meteors in August

“By midnight, I knew Billy was on his way back to the reservation. I planned to go after him in the morning, drag him home by his hair if I had to, but a storm whipped through the night and the snow piled up all the next day. Frozen waves blew across the road. The wind found every crack in the apartment. I thought I’d just lie down and let the bed fill up with snow. Amos and I crawled under the blankets, made a tent for ourselves and waited. I needed the damn milk. All I had was a cup of powder; it wouldn’t last long, and Amos didn’t like it. At least Billy could have brought the milk before he split.”

Nina looked at the screen door; a cool breeze filled the room. “There it is,” she said, “the rain.” It took me longer to hear it. At first it was no louder than leaves rubbing together in the dark, as hard to hear as your own heart. But in a flash the sky heaved and broke and poured out all the rain held back through the long hot days of August. Rain pummeled the side of the house with a thousand furious fists, and Nina said, “At last.”

“So you didn’t go after him,” Mom said.

“As soon as the blizzard died down, Billy’s boss was looking for him. We didn’t have a phone, so he called Mrs. Clate, the landlady. That fat bitch came banging. She said, ‘I know your husband’s gone — if he is your husband — and I say good riddance, but don’t get the idea I’m running some kind of charity home here. You pay the rent like everybody else or you’re out on your ass. I rented to you against my better judgment, but don’t think there aren’t limits to my kindness.’ Amos sat in the middle of the floor. He was barely a year old, but he burst into a full-bellied scream just like he understood every word, just like he saw the two of us on our butts in the snow. Mrs. Clate poked her head inside and said, ‘I’m sick of his squallin’. You keep him quiet or you’re out whether you have the rent or not.’ I slammed the door so fast I almost caught her nose. ‘Against her better judgment.’

“We stashed our money in a tin under the tea bags. I’d been afraid to look. Now I prayed he hadn’t left me dry. We paid Mrs. Clate by the week: on Monday, I’d need twenty dollars. I bolted the door and walked to the cupboard, picking Amos up on the way and bouncing him on my hip. I was in no hurry. The money was there or it wasn’t. Running and digging weren’t going to change anything. I dumped the tin on the table. Billy had left me nine tea bags and forty-seven dollars. ‘Look, Amos,’ I said, waving a five-dollar bill in front of his nose, ‘we’ve got two weeks, as long as we don’t eat much.’ Something about that struck me funny and I started giggling. I got cackling and rocking so hard I couldn’t stop. Then all of a sudden I was crying and Amos was crying too and we sat there for a long time, rocking ourselves and wailing at the ceiling.

“I thought, I don’t know how to do a damn thing. Best job I could get would be slapping mayonnaise on buns in a burger joint. By the time I paid somebody to watch Amos, I might as well stay home. So I paid the rent early and told Mrs. Clate I’d be back in a couple of days. She took my money, but she didn’t believe me.

“I strapped Amos to my chest under my coat and hitched down to the reservation. Billy wasn’t hard to find. I knew he’d be with a woman. I asked around. When I knocked on his door, he acted like he’d been expecting me. He told me the woman’s name was Rowena and she was his cousin, and I said, ‘Yeah, I know,’ like I believed him. She was twice my size and didn’t try to hide it. She wore a down vest over a flannel shirt. The woman looked old enough to be Billy’s mama. I figured that’s what he saw in her, some kind of mama love I couldn’t touch. I knew there was no sense in begging. How could I compete with a six-foot-tall Indian with a punched-in nose and a barrel chest? I was a wild canary and she was a buffalo. A man has to choose. I told him, ‘You wanna live down here, fine with me, but you’re gonna have to take Amos because there’s no way I can make it on my own with some kid hanging on my rear end.’ Amos was already on the floor, playing with Rowena’s boys. She had three of her own plus one that belonged to her fifteen-year-old daughter. Billy looked from me to Rowena and back again, thinking I’d put a wire cage over his head. But Rowena set us all free. She laid her hand on my shoulder. Her touch surprised me — something flowed through that hand, some kind of healing in the heat of her blood, and I knew why Billy loved her. She said, ‘He can stay.’ With three words, a woman I didn’t know gave my life back to me.”

“You left him?” Mother said. The rain streamed down the windowpanes in thick rivulets. “You left your baby?”

“Maybe it would have been different if I’d found Billy right away. The snow blinded me. But when the wind died down, I saw what I had to do. We never did get around to getting married, so all I had to do was shake hands and leave.”

“But Amos — you can’t shake hands over a child’s life.”

“Oh I’ve heard all this,” Nina snapped. “I’m some kind of unnatural mother, some kind of monster who’s deformed on the inside. Listen, I was nineteen years old; I had twenty-seven dollars and no job. I tell you, women with warm houses and cupboards full of soup and beans, women with husbands who come home at the end of every week with a paycheck, women like that, like you, Mama, have the luxury of loving their children in a natural way. Women like me aren’t so lucky. Love to us is leftover scraps, bits of rags, other people’s garbage. How much love do you think a woman has when there’s no money and no food, when the baby’s howling his head off and the landlady is banging a broom on her floor so hard your ceiling rattles?”

“We would have taken him — our own grandchild.”

Nina pounded her fists on the table. “No, Mama. Can’t you see? Look in the mirror some night and see how tired my life has made you already. If I’d brought Amos here, I would have had to stay too. What kind of life would that be for any of us?”

“What kind of life do you have now?” My mother’s voice was cool and hard as a polished stone.

“My own life,” Nina said. “My own life.” And her voice turned to water, fast and clear, rolling over every rock in her way. “I don’t mean to offend you by talking this way, Mama, but I can’t live my life the way you lived yours — doing things for Daddy, doing things for us, never taking one sweet breath that was just for you. When I hear about women who run away and leave their families, I’m not surprised. You know what surprises me? It surprises me when any woman stays. I look at you, Mama, and I wonder why you don’t hate us all. What did any of us do for you that was half what you did for us?”

The rain beat out a steady answer: nothing.

Mother cradled her head in her hands. “I have hated you,” she said, “all of you. But it goes away if you can just wait.” Her voice was so low I had to look at her to be sure her lips moved.

“How many years?” Nina said. “How many years do you have to wait, Mama?”

I closed my eyes. Nina threw a merciless light on us. I couldn’t bear to see our faces in that glare. I thought of the reservation and the dark highway, a dead dog in the ditch. I saw my mother pressed up against the sweaty body of a stranger, the trucker who listened, and I knew how badly she wanted to keep driving north.

The sky tore above us. A rip of thunder exploded in the distance. Already it seemed the rain had fallen forever, that the words in this room had made it unstoppable.

My mother spoke from the hollow box of her years. “Tell me about this life you call your own, Nina.”