There was a crash. I lay in the dark, eyes open, hoping it was a one-time deal. Lydia and I’d had contact after 10:30 before and it never was good luck. Something heavy slid across the floor and there was another, smaller crash. What would Beaver Cleaver do if June was so drunk she trashed the living room?
He’d go help her to bed.
As I pulled myself out from between the sheets, a big crash came, followed by Lydia’s raised voice. “Cheers. You’re dead, Les, and I’m not.”
The TV lay on the floor sideways. The big crash had been a couple of book boxes going over—science fiction and Westerns. Lydia stood with her back to me, her head up toward the moose.
“Mom?”
She turned. “Honey bunny?”
“What’s up?”
Lydia waved her shot glass in the direction of the moose head. “Les and I were toasting our new relationship.”
I looked at the big head mounted on the wall. “Les?”
“Short for Less Like Drinking Alone. That’s his name. We’re buddies.”
I pointed to the television on the floor. “You made a social blunder.”
Lydia tried to follow the direction of my point and almost fell. She caught herself with one hand on the end of the couch. “Social blunder, my ass. I knocked over the goddamn TV.”
I moved into the room to catch her if she went down. “Any chance of you going to sleep?”
“You’re joking your mama, aren’t you, sweet prince.” Lydia closed one eye to focus on me. Her skin seemed paler than usual and her hair needed washing. Her posture wasn’t worth a poop. Her mouth opened and shut before she spoke. “I had you too young.”
“Are you sorry about that?”
She took a step back and fell into a sitting position on the couch. Took her a second to recover. “I don’t think in those terms.”
“You’re sending me mixed messages, Lydia. Caspar’s shrink said you shouldn’t send me mixed messages.”
“Oh my God.” She slapped her hand over her mouth and spoke through her fingers. “I’m sending my baby mixed fucking messages.”
I stood there in my blue-striped pajamas, watching her. “Maybe I’ll go back to my room.”
Wrong thing to say. Lydia’s lower lip quivered and the tears came. I had to go through the arm-around-the- shoulders, patting-her-hair, apologizing-for-the-world deal. She blubbered. “You’re all I’ve got. If he takes you I’m all done.”
“He won’t take me.”
“I’m twenty-eight and everything good that’s ever going to happen to me has already happened.” She sniffed a couple times. “And I hate myself when I do it, but sometimes I blame that on you.”
“Lots of good things might happen to you.”
Her face turned to me. “Name one.”
I looked at the TV on the floor, then at the moose, Les, then back at Lydia’s tear-blotched face. “You might win a contest.”
She pouted. “I haven’t entered a contest.”
“Tomorrow, that’s what we’ll do, we’ll enter a contest. Now’s time for sleep.”
She jerked away. “No.” She held up her index finger, left hand, as if making a point. “I have a chip.”
How was I supposed to handle that? “In your nail?”
“Everyone says my hands are my finest feature and I have a chip.”
“We’ll fix it right up first thing in the morning.”
“To hell with you, Mr. Solicitatious to the Drunk. We’ll fix it now. I may be stuck in the hell hole of the West, but I will never let myself go.” This from a woman who was on the verge of sleeping in the same clothes she’d slept in last night.
Her head nodded at the book boxes spread across the floor. “I was looking for my nail kit.”
“And the TV?”
“It slipped.” She stood up too quickly and sat back down. Then she stood up again. “The bathroom.”
“I’m tired and sleepy, Lydia. Use verbs.”
“My nail kit that Mother Callahan gave me is in my overnight bag in the bathroom.” Getting out an entire proper sentence must have exhausted her because she sat back down again. “Help me to the John, honey bunny.” She held out both arms.
“Nope. If you can’t walk on your own you can’t play with scissors.”
“Bastard.”
“What’s that make you?”
Lydia bounced off both walls on her way down the hall, then through the open bathroom door. When I got there she was leaning over the sink with her forehead and nose propped against the mirror, staring into her own eyes a half-inch away. Lydia stuck out her tongue and touched the tip of it to the mirror.
I said, “You’re licking the mirror.”
“I’m making contact.”
“With who?”
“Myself.”
“You’re licking the mirror.”
The bathroom was actually the niftiest room in the house, although I tend to think that about any house. It had this claw-foot bathtub and a commode that sat about two inches higher than what I was used to. Made crapping feel awkward until I discovered
A big stump rested next to the toilet, acting as a table or counter space or some such, and Lydia’s overnight bag sat on the stump. While Lydia went into close-range self-hypnosis and connected with herself, I decided to sit on the side of the bathtub and watch.
She suddenly turned to me. “Sam, have you ever had a hard-on?”
“Mom.”
“I was thinking about the hooker’s twats on Les. Have you ever experienced a hooker?”
“I’m thirteen, Mom.” That twat talk was all bravado, like most of my off-color language. Women had twats, I was certain of that, but I wasn’t certain exactly to the inch where they were located or what they did.
“And I realized I hadn’t seen your little thing in years. It was so cute when you were a baby. We had this black speckled basin I used to wash you in, and you’d always pee straight up, then we’d both giggle and have the nicest time.” Her cheek was stuck to the mirror now, in the center of the fog circle left by her breath.
“Lydia, don’t you know how much it embarrasses kids when their mom talks about cute naked stuff they did as babies.”
Her head slid down a notch. “Then you went to grade school and came back a smartass.”
I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there, hoping this kind of crap wouldn’t warp me when I grew up.
Lydia kind of lunged-fell sideways into the overnight bag, and junk exploded all over the place—toothbrushes,
