Heart with Joy Read online

  Heart with Joy

  A Novel by

  Steve Cushman

  Published by Canterbury House Publishing, Ltd.

  www.canterburyhousepublishing.com

  at Smashwords

  © 2010 Steve Cushman

  Book design by Aaron Burleson

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cushman, Steve, 1969—

  Heart with joy / by Steve Cushman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-9825396-3-7

  1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 3. Mothers and

  sons—Fiction. 4. Maturation (Psychology)—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3603.U84H43 2010

  813’.6—dc22

  2010019846

  For Juliet and Trevor

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following for help, guidance, and friendship along the way: Joyce and Chuck Snyder, Valerie and Mike Hale, Roger and Gwen Hart, Barbara Hughes, Amy Rogers, Frye Gailliard, Judy Davis, Sonja Boles, Debra Coble, and Wendy Dingwall. And Juliet and Trevor, once again, I can’t say thank you enough.

  1

  The year I turned fifteen two things happened that took me by surprise: my mother moved out and my father decided to run a marathon. My mother left first. On February 8th, I came home from school and found Mom packing two suitcases: one with clothes, the other with her old typewriter and drafts of the novel she’d been working on for years. She told me she was going to Venice, Florida to help run her parents’ motel and to try and finish her novel.

  Of course, I wanted to go with her, but she said she wouldn’t be gone too long, that she was only staying down there until her father hired a manager. Mom told me I should finish the school year here in North Carolina and if she was still living in Florida at the beginning of summer I could come spend time with her there. Part of me wanted to believe she moved down there because of the reasons she had said. But the other part of me, the part I tried not to listen to, knew this was a separation of sorts between my Mom and Dad. While I had never seen them fighting or yelling at each other, which is how I thought unhappily married people acted I rarely saw them do much together in the year or two before she left.

  Dad worked fifty to sixty hours a week as a nurse so Mom could stay home and take care of me and work on her writing. I spent most of my time with her, cooking or walking or talking. She liked to talk about her novel and I liked to listen to her, particularly after she’d been drinking and the words seemed to slide out of her mouth, her soft southern accent rising to the surface.

  Six weeks after Mom left, at the beginning of April, my father came home from work one night, and without a word to me, changed out of his light blue nurse’s scrubs into sweat pants and a long sleeved T-shirt. He stretched for five minutes on the porch steps, then ran out of our front yard.

  It occurred to me as I lost sight of him, that he might not come back at all. And I thought if he didn’t come back Mom would be forced to either return home or let me live with her in Florida. Either way, we would be together again. But that first night, he made it home in about thirty minutes. He stood out on the porch, hands on hips, covered in sweat, breathing like a man taking his last few breaths. When he came inside, Dad poured himself a tall glass of water and drank it in one mouthful. “I needed that,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant the exercise or the water.

  For dinner I had made meatloaf and corn. I didn’t think my cooking was anything special, but my father never complained about it. The first few weeks after Mom left, he would bring home pizza or maybe a box of chicken from KFC. He’d even forgotten about dinner a couple times. When this happened, I would knock on his bedroom door and ask, “Dad, what’s for dinner?”

  After a long silence, he’d say, “I could go get something.” I would tell him not to bother and go make grilled cheese sandwiches or hot dogs or hamburgers again.

  These foods might sound like a teenage boy’s idea of a perfect meal, but I missed my mother’s nightly servings of vegetables and chicken or fish. Mom loved to drink wine and listen to music, especially Van Morrison, and dance around the kitchen when she cooked. She’d showed me everything I knew about cooking, the important parts of any recipe and she told me to never cook chicken on high, but to always cook steak on high. So once it became clear that my father would not be taking over the nightly cooking chores, I found Mom’s old cookbooks, her little box of recipes, and started cooking for my father and me.

  After his shower that first night of running, Dad picked at the meatloaf I’d made and said, “Julian, I’d like to run a marathon.” His face was still pink and his dark hair was wet in spots.

  “A marathon?” My first thought was that he’d gone a little crazy. He had no right to think he could run twenty-six miles. It wasn’t that he was incredibly out of shape, or fat, but he was soft and looked nothing like the few joggers I’d seen in our neighborhood. The closest thing to exercise he’d done in the last few years was mow the yard.

  “There’s one in six months, over in Charlotte. I think I can do it. It’ll be a lot of work.” He rolled a forkful of meatloaf around in his ketchup. “I’ve got to do this.” His eyes were bright, brighter than I had seen them in a long time.

  He ate the rest of the meal quickly, like a starving man, then walked back to his room. His nightly routine, since Mom left, was to take a shower as soon as he got home from work, then eat a silent dinner with me before disappearing into his bedroom where he listened to Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” CD until he fell asleep.

  Alone in the kitchen, washing the pan I’d used for the meatloaf, I realized that was the longest conversations we’d had since our big fight two weeks earlier. I can’t say why I picked that particular morning to confront him about her leaving since she’d already been gone a month by then. But as I listened to the shower running that morning, I grew angrier. I thought if there was someone to blame for Mom’s leaving it was my father. I had to find out what was going on. When I’d asked before, he said to ask her, but I wasn’t going to let him get away with that this time.

  He walked out of the bathroom with the towel wrapped around his waist and seemed surprised to see me standing there in the hall. “Morning,” he said.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, trying to stay calm.

  “What do you mean?”

  “With you and Mom.”

  “Julian, I don’t want to talk about this now. I’ve got to get to work.”

  “You always have to go to work. That’s the problem. That’s why she left.”

  His eyes narrowed and for a moment I thought he might hit me, though I couldn’t remember the last time he’d spanked or even touched me. ”Did she tell you that?” Dad asked.

  “No. She didn’t have to. I’m not stupid. We never did anything together as a family.”

  “What do you want me to say?” he asked, closing his eyes, starting to lose patience.

  “Admit it’s your fault.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “If you want to believe it’s my fault she left, then fine believe that.” He shook his head and walked in his room to get dressed for work.

  I went outside, shaking with anger. I paced back and forth, cold and barefoot in the backyard. When I heard his truck pull out of the driveway, I went back inside and grabbed the first thing of his I saw. On the living room mantel was an empty white ceramic pot, about a foot tall. It was wide at the bottom, but tapered toward the top where there were painted purple and yellow flowers. And about halfway up there were a pair of blue lines, like racing stripes, circling the pot.

  This piece of pottery had been there for as long as I could remember and I’d be
en told more than once by my mother not to touch it, that it was my father’s. But at that moment, what I wanted was to destroy something of his, to make him feel as bad as I did. I lifted the pot high above my head and threw it at the wall. It shattered. Take that, I thought, you deserve it.

  When I returned home that afternoon, I swept all the pieces of the pot into a dustpan and threw them in the garbage. My father didn’t seem to notice the pot was missing because he didn’t mention it, or the fight and my accusations of blame, and neither did I.

  2

  The morning after my father announced his plans to run a marathon, I was sitting in a chair on our back porch, eating a bowl of corn flakes. I liked to sit out there all alone, in the mornings, particularly since it was the beginning of April and in the fifties, cool but not freezing.

  “Young man.”

  It was a woman’s voice. My first thought was that it might be something on TV, but neither my father nor I watched TV in the mornings and he’d been gone for almost an hour already. He usually left for work by six. Then I heard the voice again, “Young man, I could use a little help here.”

  It was coming from my neighbor’s backyard. Old Lady Peters lived alone in the two-story white house next door and the fence between our yards was so overgrown with shrubs that I couldn’t see anything over there except for the tree tops and her porch’s roof. I rarely saw her outside and the only time I had ever stood face to face with the woman was the day she ran over my right leg, back when I was ten years old.

  I wanted to open the sliding glass door and step inside and pretend I hadn’t heard her but knew I couldn’t. Maybe she’d fallen and was injured. Mr. Taylor, my social studies teacher, was always talking about the importance of making the right choice in moral decisions, and here I was faced with one. I wished my father was still home, so he could go and check on her, but of course he wasn’t.

  I cleared my throat and started down the steps. Her yard was surrounded by a six-foot, wooden fence and her shrubs extended a couple feet higher. My heart beat fast as I walked to the gate between our two houses. What did she want with me? I lifted the handle and took a deep breath.

  After she ran over my leg, my parents told me not to go in her yard again. Not that I had had any desire to go in some old lady’s backyard. Last year, I accidentally threw a Frisbee over the fence but didn’t bother going after it. The next day, I found the Frisbee in the middle of my backyard.

  Once inside the gate, I saw a mulch trail bordered the shrubs, surrounding the entire yard. To my right, I could see a bricked patio with a wooden table in the middle of it, a flowering dogwood next to the patio and a screened-in porch. I took a couple tentative steps forward, still nervous about entering this yard that had been offlimits to me.

  When I heard a loud meow, I looked down and spotted a cat. It was black except for a white patch on his underbelly. I was about to pet the cat when I heard her voice again: “You going to stand there or help?”

  I turned back to the patio and saw her this time. For some reason, Old Lady Peters was on her knees, reaching into the house’s crawl space. Maybe she was stuck and needed me to pull her out.

  I walked over and bent down beside her. She crawled out of the shallow crawl space.

  “Just reach in there,” she said, wiping the dirt off her hands.

  “See if you can grab it.”

  It? What exactly was it? I slid down into the cool dirt that surrounded the house. Was it another cat? A snake or a spider? With no clue what I was looking for, I reached in deep, felt my hand brush something soft and small, but it moved. My first thought was that it might be a hamster or a gerbil. As I pulled my hand back, whatever it was bit down on the tip of my index finger. “Ouch,” I said, pulling my hand out, expecting to see blood, but instead there was only a tiny indention at the tip of my finger. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt.

  Old Lady Peters sat a foot away, on her knees. Under a pair of overalls, she had on a long sleeved white shirt. There was a yellow bandana around her neck and on the ground by her knees was a large brown gardening hat.

  All the kids in our neighborhood had speculated about her age, and my closest friend at the time, Dennis Kindl, said he thought she was well over one hundred. This close to her I could see her face was so pale that the blue veins under the surface were traceable against her flesh. While I was no expert on guessing the age of old people I didn’t think she’d quite reached ninety.

  “What are you waiting for?” she asked, setting the hat on her head.

  “What is it?”

  “A bird. He won’t hurt you,” she said.

  This time I held on as the bird bit into the tip of my finger and pulled it out. It was no heavier than a store-bought egg.

  “A house sparrow,” she said. “I put a bell on that cat’s collar and he still gets a couple birds a week.” She took the bird from me and curled it in her hands. A few feathers stuck to my palm.

  Without saying anything else, she turned and headed up the steps that led to her porch and disappeared inside. I stood up, not quite sure what to do. The cat walked between my ankles, purring loudly, the silver bell jingling around his neck.

  Turning away from the house, I saw what those shrubs had always hidden from me: her backyard. The yard itself wasn’t fancy, just a square of grass split in half by a brick path. On each side of the path was a birdfeeder and birdbath. Toward the back of the yard were a couple of tall leafless bushes with a bench between them. And those tall shrubs surrounded the whole yard, as if some sort of natural fencing from the outside world.

  I stood there, expecting her to come out and say something to me. After a couple minutes, when she didn’t re-appear, I headed back out her gate, escorted by the cat, to finish getting ready for school.

  3

  I wasn’t good at sports, didn’t belong to any clubs or participate in extracurricular activities, so school was just something I did for eight hours a day, like a job I didn’t get paid for. Since Mom left, I usually daydreamed through much of the school day, thinking about whether or not she was coming home, and how if she didn’t, I was looking forward to spending the summer with her in Florida. And while I never mentioned it to either of my parents, how I planned to move down there and live with Mom for good if she wasn’t coming back.

  But I’d spent a good part of this day thinking about what happened earlier with Old Lady Peters. I knew she lived alone and her son came by every Sunday morning. I assumed they went to church and the grocery store because she always wore a dress and when they returned he would carry bags of groceries inside for her. Before leaving, he’d set her garbage cans by the road. On Monday nights, he stopped by and put the garbage cans away.

  Her son was tall and thin. He drove a grey Lexus and whenever I spotted him on Monday evenings he always wore a suit. I never saw him in a pair of shorts, even in the middle of the summer, pushing the mower around her yard.

  On the day Old Lady Peters ran over my leg, Dennis and I were playing catch. I stood on the edge of her yard while he stood under the oak tree in my front yard, throwing an old baseball back and forth. Dennis threw the ball over my head and it rolled into Old Lady Peters’ driveway, under her car.

  Her driveway was not paved like all the others in the neighborhood but lined with multi-colored stones. The stones were about the size of a quarter, beautiful and dusty—there were yellows, oranges, blues, pinks, greens, reds— every color you could imagine.

  Sometimes on Sunday mornings when Old Lady Peters was at the grocery store, we would take some of the stones and throw them into Dennis’ pool and then dive under water, collecting as many as possible before coming up for air. That summer, Dennis had the record—sixteen.

  As I headed toward her driveway, I wondered where the stones came from. Neither Dennis nor I knew the answer, but believed they must come from somewhere far away, maybe Florida or Hawaii, some place where they had palm trees. It didn’t seem possible they could be from North Carolina and especially
not from Greensboro, which was one of those quiet towns people said was good for starting a family but not too exciting for a teenager.

  As I crawled under the car, the stones dug into the back of my legs. I remember how the car’s undercarriage was covered in grease and what looked like clay from a baseball field. I tried to picture her spinning donuts in our little league field, but that didn’t make sense. When I turned back to Dennis again, he was staring up at something in the oak tree.

  I couldn’t reach the ball, so I kicked it out the other side. Then I heard a loud strange sound, sort of like a train. It was the car starting above me. I crawled out as fast as I could. I had almost made it when the front wheel on the passenger side rolled over my right leg, just above the ankle. After I screamed, the car stopped and everything grew quiet. But here’s the strange thing: my leg didn’t hurt at all. It had been buried into the stones, into a leg-shaped crater that had somehow opened up in the ground.

  When I looked up, Old Lady Peters stood above me. She wore a red dress with white polka dots and was pointing her finger at me. “Young man, what are you doing under my car?” she asked, more

  annoyed than surprised to find me there.

  I stood up, pushed past Old Lady Peters, and ran home with Dennis following behind. My mother was sitting out on the back porch, typing away on her old typewriter, a cigarette between her lips, an ashtray full of butts next to the typewriter. After calming me down, she drove me to the emergency room for X-rays. Thankfully nothing was broken, only a slight bruise on my calf that lasted a couple days.

  The following weekend, my father and Old Lady Peters’ son stood out in her front yard and had a brief conversation, which ended with the two of them shaking hands and Dad coming inside and telling me not to go in her yard or talk to her again.

  After school, on the day I’d pulled the sparrow from beneath Old Lady Peters’ house, I was walking up my driveway, passing her gate, when I heard her voice again: “The bird didn’t make it.”