“Your mother got really drunk tonight, so we went to bed early. About an hour later, a noise woke me up. When I opened my eyes, I saw your mother hovering over me. I asked her what she wanted but she didn’t say anything. She just leaned down toward me like she was going to give me a kiss on the cheek. But instead she gave me a deep open-mouth kiss—you know, the kind lovers give each other.”
I was horrified. I couldn’t believe my ears. My mother did what?
Momma and I hadn’t been getting along lately, and there had been many times I had complained about her drunken behavior to Sue, but this was different. A rush of shame washed over me, though I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. This was my mother who’d done this disgraceful thing to my friend. My mother. Somehow, it felt like this was my shame too. I didn’t feel my usual detached feelings of anger and disgust at my moth-er’s drunken conduct. For the first time, I actually felt like my mother’s behavior said something about me too.
I tried to explain, even though I didn’t really understand it myself. “Oh, she was just drunk,” I said weakly. “She probably didn’t know what she was doing. She often gets lost on the way to the bathroom when she’s been drinking. She probably mis-took you for me since you were in my bed.”
I flushed, recognizing that made it sound even worse. I realized there was nothing I could say that would explain away or excuse my mother’s behavior—or take away the shame I was feeling.
I really didn’t know what to think. My mother was definitely a different person when she was drunk, but I hadn’t known she was capable of something like this. I was used to feeling like she was an enigma, like the fact that she was so asexual yet walked around the house nude a great deal of the time. But this was truly baffling. She, the woman who had always accused me of being sexually precocious, had done something like this. I began to see her more and more as a hypocrite and I wondered just how many secrets she was hiding about her sexuality.
Sue was gone when my mother and I got up the next morning. My mother told me that Doyle had hit Sue the night before and that was why she’d wanted to spend the night. Sue never said another word about the incident with my mother and neither did I—not to Sue, and not to my mother. But Sue was never close to my mother after that.
I guess all that happened should have made me and Sue feel closer, seeing that both of us were in the same boat: me with my crazy mother, her with her crazy husband. We were both just biding our time before we could jump ship. But I guess sometimes knowing too much about another person ends up tearing you apart rather than bringing you closer together.
That summer got weirder as it went along. It turned out that Doyle was a jealous, abusive man who constantly accused Sue of being with other men and beat her often. Life got so bad for her that she started going to the little white clapboard church on the corner across from her house. She had never been a religious person, but sometimes pain makes you reach out when nothing else will.
Glenn was released from prison after serving only four years of his sentence. It seemed he’d found the Lord while in prison and become part of a ministry that reached out to prisoners. When he got out, he decided to join the very church across the street from Sue and Doyle’s.
As Sue explained to me later, “The first day I went to church, I looked up and saw Glenn standing behind the pulpit leading the congregation in song. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I felt like my prayers had been answered, because I’d never really gotten over him.”
She told me how she went up to him after the service, not knowing whether he was married or still felt the same about her. “Thankfully, Glenn was just as happy to see me,” she told me. “But it turns out he is married—to the preacher’s daughter, no less.”
Sue explained that even though she still had strong feelings for Glenn, she didn’t want to become a home-wrecker; he was married and she needed to respect his wife. Besides, she was deathly afraid of Doyle.
“If he caught me with Glenn, he’d kill me,” she said, and I knew she meant it. I could see the fear in her eyes as she was talking. I believed Doyle was capable of killing her in a jealous rage as well, and I breathed a sigh of relief when Sue told me she wasn’t going to pursue a relationship with Glenn, even if she did still love him.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the story. At first Sue and Glenn just saw each other at church, but their feelings for each other were too strong and they eventually started sneaking out to Glenn’s car after the Wednesday night service. Soon Glenn started coming over to Sue’s house during the day while Doyle was at work.
When Sue told me about this, I became afraid for them both. I couldn’t believe they were taking such a risk.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked when she finally told me what was going on. “You know Doyle is capable of killing you, don’t you?”
“I know, I know,” Sue said. “But you don’t understand. When you love someone like Glenn and I love each other, you’ll do anything to be with them. Your feelings of love overshadow everything.”
Sue was right. I didn’t understand. I couldn’t see how you could love
