Natalie didn’t know if Hank would make it much longer without a doctor. His doom—and hers—imminent. She had run out of ways to keep him alive and didn’t know if the pressure she had applied for the last twenty–four hours had prolonged his life by even a minute. One thing she did know, nature would take its course in its own time. Her dad used to say, “There’s always hope,” but any ray of optimism for her future beyond the next few hours had disappeared behind the darkest cloudbank.
Within a few minutes, a buzzing sound started low and then began to build in intensity. Natalie realized it came from the driver’s seat. Tony was asleep and snoring. She decided to take the opportunity to work further on Rudy. She had caught him glance toward her several times in the last few minutes, but he hadn’t spoken.
“Do you have any family?” Natalie kept her voice just above a whisper.
“Aunt in California,” Rudy said and turned to his left as much as his restraints would allow, “but you know that from the newspaper story. Most of the rest are back home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Detroit.”
She hoped to engage him in personal conversation, to further endear herself to him, but her real priority was the search for ammunition to continue to drive a wedge between him and Tony.
“So, your family still lives there?”
“Yeah, son of an automaker. Family’s worked in the industry for years and Father has made his career on the assembly line.”
Something in the way he referred to his dad as “Father” and not “my dad” struck her as odd. It was like a name and not a title of respect. Even though she couldn’t read his face in the darkness, she sensed Rudy feared his father. She kept her thoughts to herself for now, though, to see where the conversation might lead.
“And your mother?”
“Don’t have a mother. She died a short while back.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, and looked toward the dark figure in the passenger seat.”
Her attitude toward her parents had mellowed while she struggled to get her life and career started. They may have always been strict and rule bound, but she realized now it was because they were trying to protect her. They did love her after all, she always felt that. But even with all her mom’s well-meaning: teaching her how to grow up to be a good wife—planning and cooking meals, or canning fruits and vegetables—dragging her to youth Bible studies, her dogmatic demands that Natalie pledge her life to the heavenly trio—Father, Son and Holy Ghost—Natalie missed her mom. Now, looking back, the issues she had made mountains of seemed petty little insignificant things—emotional outbursts she should have been able to control but for some reason seemed unable to predict, not to mention stop. She had even taken to calling her mother once a week on Saturday morning.
A call she just realized she failed to make this morning.
Natalie’s heart broke. Last Saturday they had a minor fight over her Cindy’s choice in friends—a familiar theme to Natalie. Cindy, now age fourteen, had decided to turn Goth and that came with a collection of friends in black clothes, black hair, black makeup and piercings in places they had no business. Mom didn’t like the looks of them. Natalie said, “It’s just a phase, Mom. Cindy will grow out of it in a couple of years.” But her mother was too horrified of being seen anywhere with her daughter, let alone at church, and wouldn’t accept what Natalie had said. “It reminds me so much of you when you ran off after school with some boy we didn’t know,” her mother said, the hurt in her voice still palpable even though it had been almost two years since the day she left home “To this day I don’t know what happened.” That was the day Natalie lost her virginity, but she had never been able to admit that, so she concluded the call with an abrupt, “Mom, I have to go.”
But I didn’t call today. What’s she thinking? Did she believe Natalie too angry to carry on a civil conversation? Had her mom tried to call her? Did she even know Natalie was missing?
A pool of tears she didn’t try to contain choked her voice as she continued the conversation with Rudy. “I can’t imagine losing my mother. You miss her don’t you?”
“Yeah, but it’s a good thing she’s dead.”
She realized this wasn’t the easy conversation she had contemplated but chose to pursue it. “Why would you say that?”
“’Cause when all this comes out,” he said, “if she wasn’t dead, the grief of all this would kill her. It’s better she’ll never know.”
“You’re probably right,” she said. She couldn’t imagine how she would feel if a child of hers turned criminal. The decision not to tell her parents about the movie roles she played since she turned eighteen had been her way to cover the guilt she felt in her onscreen appearances. She couldn’t imagine her mother calling her friends at State Street Church to boast about the nude scene her daughter had done.
She needed to move the conversation forward to explore anything she could use. “Tell me about your father?”
“Father?” he asked. “He didn’t care much about me when I was home and he sure the hell won’t care about me now. Between the assembly line and the bars, he was rarely home when I was a kid, and when he was home, it wasn’t good news.”
“Why’s that?”
“He had what me and my brothers called a ‘pitcher meter,’”
“A ‘pitcher meter?’”
“Yeah, we could tell just how many pitchers Father had drunk by his temper when he got home. The more beer the more the meter rose, and the angrier he got.”
_____
©
Jearl Rugh 2012
All
Rights Reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment