Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

“Nobody wants your Yule log cake, Candy.”

“I’m just making sure. Since three-quarters of the Christmas cookies in this house just went down the street and now my boys hardly have any.”

“Don’t worry about it, Candy,” Mom scolded, low voiced. To Elias she said, “Did she like the cookies?”

“She,” Candy blustered. “Is there only one Larsen now?”

“Goddamn it, Candy,” said Elias. “Lay off.”

She shrugged and sucked the frosting from her index finger. “Don’t bark at me , Eli. Cade’s the one I’m surprised at, getting engaged while he’s off at school and then coming home to visit a girl he had a relationship with.”

I set my gloves on the table and didn’t dignify that with a reply. She hadn’t brought it up for any other reason except to imply to Elias that he was pursuing my sloppy seconds. Elias, though, took the bait like a raccoon to a tin of cat food. He kicked out the chair he’d been unlacing his boot against so it skidded across the kitchen floor just past Candy. His voice projected in a straight line. “What part of ‘lay off’ don’t you understand?”

“Eli,” said our mother in her soft voice, soothing, imploring. She said it again, and for a second I flashed on the time he fell out of that oak tree while we were building the tree house, knocked himself unconscious. She had pulled his head onto her lap then, whispering to him while we waited for the ambulance.

“She doesn’t know when to quit,” he shouted, still looking at Candy. “Mind your own damn business, will you? Bake your stupid cake and shut your freakin’ mouth for once.”

He shoved another chair across the floor for good measure, then stormed off through the back porch, his bootlaces ticking against the floor. The back door slammed. A minute later we all heard the whack of that ax slicing into what was left of the tree. Then again, and again.

It was things like that that made me leave Jill back in Maryland for the second year in a row. And it wasn’t even Christmas yet, and Dodge hadn’t even showed up.

I still remembered the day Elias announced he’d enlisted in the army. It was during that whole Piper pregnancy scare. Mom looked really startled, and Dodge gave him this peeved-off look and said, “What the hell’d you go and do that for?” That was the giddiest I’ve ever seen Elias look. I knew what he was thinking: I’m finally getting out from under your thumb, you redneck motherfucker . He and I had both left home for damn good reasons. We didn’t belong here in this house. It was like the year Dodge built Candy a garden edged with pressure-treated lumber—it didn’t look too bad from the outside, but all season the chemicals leached in and leached in, poisoning everything that grew there. And here we all were again, boxed in by the same dirty lumber. But not for long. Not together.

Maybe half the reason I was so smooth about it when Jill broke the pregnancy news to me was that last time all my histrionics had turned out to be nothing. Maybe I felt that this time would have the same outcome, because the panic with the Jill situation was more of a slow burn. But this time it wasn’t going away, and in addition to that, after a few weeks she was so sick. She couldn’t even go to class anymore, and her stupid roommate was complaining. I called up Stan, and he said it was fine if she crashed at his place for a little while until we figured out what to do next. At first it was a good solution. Stan was out a lot and worked weird hours, so when I came by after work every day we usually had the place to ourselves. We’d cook dinner, watch TV, try to work out a better plan. She kept talking about going to live at her camp around Deep Creek Lake, and I wouldn’t have anything to do with that idea. I couldn’t stomach the idea of her calling in that kind of favor from her camp friend Dave—a man I’d barely even met—and asking him to carry us until we could get on our feet. Even her living with Stan galled me every single day—seeing her purple toothbrush in the holder with his, watching him walk in the door with a bag of candy for her mixed in with his groceries, and worst of all, getting a call from him late one night and hearing him say he’d taken her to the emergency room because she looked dehydrated. The little while that Stan and I had agreed to wore on into two months, then three, and I hated feeling as if I was turning into a third wheel in the coming of my own child.

And then exams ended, and it was nearly summer. Ever since I left home to go to school, I’d found a way to stick around College Park between semesters. There was always someone whose apartment I could crash at. But this year I looked at Jill, who was pretty damn pregnant, and at my job, which paid about the same as a shoe factory in India, and knew the old plan wasn’t going to work anymore. The baby was due August 24. If I wanted there to be any chance of me going back to school in the fall, my life between now and then needed to be as cheap as possible. So I had no choice. This summer I was going back to Frasier, and Jill was coming with me.

My hero, then and now, was Teddy Roosevelt. He was all about the qualities that make a man a real man and how to be admirable and noble and all that stuff. Right there on my wall, on a postcard Jill had seen a hundred times, was his Rough Riders portrait with my favorite quote underneath it: “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.” I wish I could say the situation with Jill brought out the best in me, but in all honesty that would be a lie.

You wouldn’t believe how thin the line is between gratitude and resentment. The more you owe somebody, the more you hate them for all they can afford to give you when you don’t have shit. After all those months he sheltered her, Stan had given us more than I could ever repay. And I knew when we got to Frasier, Elias wouldn’t think twice about how he had stood by me through a stupid mistake years ago and now, 112 college credits later, I still couldn’t figure out how to operate my own dick. I should have felt really thankful about all that, but somehow it just made me want to punch somebody in the face.

Seeing Stan’s futon folded up and pushed against the wall finally drove the point home: Cade and I were leaving. Up until then I hadn’t even realized I had developed an attachment to the thing, as if it were a large teddy bear given to me during a hospital stay. In a way, it had been. The worst of my pregnancy-related illness—hyperemesis, the medical term for puking too much—had lasted only a month before Stan got spooked one night and dragged me to the hospital. Dead white girl in my living room would not look good for me , he had joked on the way. They hooked me up to a bag of rehydrating solution, kept me overnight and sent me home with a prescription for antinausea drugs. It’s possible I would have been a dead white girl if it hadn’t been for him.

During those weeks and the few that followed, I spent most of my time curled up in a nest of pillows with a bag of Starbursts and my mother’s copy of the Big Book from AA, reading inspirational quotes and stories from people who had turned their lives around. Stan thought I was nuts. Sometimes, propped up on a stack of pillows beside me and channel surfing as I read, he would glance over and shake his head before commenting about how wrong it looked to see a pregnant woman reading an addiction-recovery book. You remind me of those people on that show you always watch , he said. But it was pure comfort, all of it. Starbursts seemed to be the one thing I wouldn’t throw up. And from the Big Book I could cobble together a pep talk for myself, something that held an echo of my mother’s voice.