Don’t Take This the Wrong Way
Take me, for example, Blue O’Malley. I had three mothers who were sisters. From oldest to youngest they were Sammie, Joy, and Kay Baby. Their father went to Viet Nam, but didn’t return, so they were raised single-handedly by their iron-willed mother, Lee, in a dilapidated section of St. Louis. The middle girl, Joy, ran off to California when only seventeen and came back five years later with a son, Jeff, and a baby, me. By the time Joy returned to St. Louis, though, Lee and her two other daughters had moved to Wolf Pass, Illinois, because Kay Baby had married a guy who owned a restaurant there. Lee took me away from Joy before I was one and gave me to Kay Baby, and Kay Baby kept me until I was thirteen and turned me over to Sammie. All my mothers and Granny Lee still lived in Wolf Pass, a teeny town squeezed in between the limestone cliffs and the confluence of mighty rivers, a town I’d planned to leave forever when I’d moved to Nashville for a job at the Hermitage.
I’d been blessedly free of those past tangles for fourteen years until I grew tired of all things Andrew Jackson and accepted a job at the St. Louis Gateway Arch, a mere fifty miles from Wolf Pass.
My half-brother, Jeff, grew up to be a thief and not a good one so spent some chunks of his adulthood years behind bars. My rescue dog, Bean, was born with epilepsy and Cushing’s Syndrome that made him cry with anxiety at the tiniest upset in his routine. My fibroid uterine tumors produced such heavy menstrual bleeding, I imagined I could drown if I lay out flat. And, oh yes, three days ago, my husband of nearly five years, Owen, took his boss’s administrative assistant, Felicity, on a Caribbean cruise.
It was a Monday morning in early September as I wrote copy for a Native American display at the Arch and couldn’t stop smiling. What was called the Osage Missouri War wasn’t a battle, much less a war, but a combination of posturing and rumor caused by greed and racism. Same old, same old. Yet I smiled. The Osage had been moved from Missouri to Kansas in the early 1830s, but in 1837, hundreds returned, so the US sent in the cavalry. The Colonel in charge dressed in his full military regalia when he met the Osage, and that display of power made the Osage retreat. So the official story goes. I wasn’t smiling at the plight of the Osage or the surety of the feds that they had the right to push people about. And I wasn’t smiling that after the Osage retreat, rumor and lies turned the encounter into a battle and the Osage into bloodthirsty savages. That also was the same old, same old. And I wasn’t smiling that there were voices, some now coming from the National Parks Board itself, that urged us to present the Native American––US past gently lest we create guilt. Again, same old, same old.
The cruise ship was called Joie de Vivre, and it had been bouncing about the turquoise Caribbean a few days already, Owen and Felicity bouncing along with it. Before he left, Owen told me not to take it the wrong way. This cruise, he and Felicity, even Felicity herself meant nothing. Not in the great scheme of things. Well, what did, I asked, put like that. Then I laughed even though it wasn’t funny.
“Call in sick, Blue,” he said. “Give yourself a day off, Blue.”
He always liked saying my name.
“This is not what it seems,” he said.
I did call in sick, and mere hours later, found myself smiling. Days later, I continued to smile. Felicity was, by my calculation, number three in five years.
I was still smiling even after the Osage Missouri war write-up, when Jeff, the half-brother and thief, called and said he could get early release with community service if someone would give him a secure place to live by Friday.
“Someone named Blue?” I asked.
“Blue to the rescue,” he said.
I told him it was perfect timing, that was if he could put up with Bean’s crying.
My smiling at Owen’s going dismayed me. I knew I should be sad. I wanted to be sad. Normal women would be sad. Maybe you’re in shock our graphic artist said when I described my euphoria, saying it was like I’d lost weight, like I was so light I could make it to the top of the Arch without the little egg-shaped cable car. I hoped it was shock, but I feared it was happiness. I’d tried to forgive the affairs I’d guessed at that he’d never copped to or asked forgiveness for, and after each one I’d promised myself I’d love him more, be what he needed, though as with the Fed promises to the Osage, follow-through was the hard part. Infidelity was an unsolvable problem. One way was to dissolve our marriage, a task I’d not been ready to take on, and not just because it seemed complicated, but mostly because I believed in happy endings and knew some came after lots of troubles. Another way to solve the problem was to make myself so alluring Owen would want no one else, but with my rounding middle and frizzy hair, that seemed an even harder task with higher chances of failure. Mostly, I let our life drift about, much like the Joie de Vivre in the Caribbean. I quoted things to myself like Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 about love not altering when shit occurred.
A week after he left, Owen returned, used his key and let himself in just as Jeff and I were ordering a pizza for Jeff’s first meal in seventeen months that was not prison food. Owen came to pick up more clothes. The job he’d found even before we left Nashville was as assistant to the assistant of something in the Quality Control department at Anheuser Busch, and so he needed his suits, his collection of ties, his dress shirts. Why did an assistant to an assistant wear ties? I asked, a question Owen ignored. I guessed not self-importance, but rather a business sort of subservience, forced conformity. Owen and Jeff hadn’t met, but each had heard stories of the other, each had called the other turd or smeg head, sociopath or loser. The night Owen came for his suits and ties, though, both mostly shrugged, nodded, looked away.
Owen said he’d have to stay with Felicity a bit longer as she seemed to expect it. Problem was she believed our marriage was nearly over, and yes, it had been Owen who’d led her to think what we both knew wasn’t true. We loved each other, had from our first meeting at the bar in Nashville the night he was handing out free shots of bourbon from Heavenly Hills Distillery. Remember that? he asked. It was then my turn to nod and shrug. I remembered the chip in my wine glass and Owen’s grimace that followed his shouts of “Drinks are on Heavenly Hills.” We could get counseling, he said, standing in the doorway, his clothes draped over an arm. I said no.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, feeling cruel.
“Oh no, Blue,” he said. “Please, Blue.”
“Jeff needs your key.”
Months earlier, when we already knew we would soon leave Nashville, we celebrated Owen’s thirty-sixth birthday at his favorite barbecue joint, and he laughed when the server presented a slice of chocolate cake, sang happy birthday, and other diners clapped. I’d arranged that because I knew he’d find it funny for being cheesy. But after that, after we paid and were gathering our take-home boxes, he plopped back down on the hard wooden bench, lowered his head, and began to sob. I did what anyone would do then, moved to his side, held him, stroked his thick dark hair from his temple to his neck, rubbed his shoulders. “Please,” I said in his ear. “Oh, please.” He’d never cried around me, and though my feet were planted solidly on the concrete floor, my legs trembled. “It will all be OK,” I said. “I promise.” Others were looking and pointing, most seeming annoyed. Two waiters finally came to help by lifting him at his armpits so the three of us could steer him to the door, after which it was up to me alone to get him in the car. He cried on the ride home, and we had to sit in the apartment parking lot for many minutes until the sobs were replaced by hiccups and he was able to walk into the building by himself, then drop onto the bed without a word.
The next morning, he said nothing was wrong, called it a silly event, claimed I exaggerated, claimed he’d cried only a tiny bit out of some misplaced sentiment, likely at being fired by Heavenly Hills or at leaving Nashville.
He stretched his arms out, the palms of his hands facing me. “No thing is wrong,” he said. “I will not talk about it. I will not answer your questions.”
To my shame I eventually acquiesced, or as Kay Baby would’ve said, I took the easy way out. My usual, she’d say.
To celebrate Jeff’s first week of freedom, we met after work at a sidewalk café near the Arch and drank beer Owen’s department controlled the quality of. Jeff’s community service job was painting the interior of the St. Louis courthouse, and he’d already fallen in love with Marcie Westerhover, a flunkey, her term, whose job was to watch him paint, make sure he didn’t slack off. She had thin flyaway hair and no eyebrows and, because of a rare cancer, one glass eye, and not one of those that moved in perfect sync with the other eye. He explained her glass one was just a nanosecond behind the real one, which made him dizzy. “A good dizzy,” he said. “She’s like a rescue puppy.” When he said he wanted to marry her, I said marriage was not like rescuing a puppy, and though he was kind enough not to ask what I knew about marriage, he did disagree. “It’s like a stab in my heart when I look at her,” he said. “Powerful.” After only three days of work, he convinced her to take the afternoon off. “I corrupted her fast,” he said, and laughed. He took her to the Italian section of St. Louis for a long pasta and marinara lunch, and though they were made to wait fifty minutes to be seated, he kept calm, acted cool, and that told him he was better. Maybe rehabilitation was a real thing, he thought, and was so emboldened he proposed even before the cannoli. She suggested they get to know each other first.
“I’m an idiot,” he said to me, “a bigger one than you ever thought, than the Wolf Pass sisters ever thought.” He was willing to do it her way, let her get to know him first, but she’d transferred to a different job and the new flunkey was some guy who carried a belly ahead of him as he nitpicked Jeff’s work. And Marcie was not answering his calls.
After we ordered our second beers, he told me Joy, my biological mother and Jeff’s only mother, had wanted him to live with her in Wolf Pass during his community service, but his arrest had been in St. Louis, his theft in St. Louis, and so his community service had to be in St. Louis. “The best thing I ever did,” he said, “was steal farther away.” Joy forgave him too much, he explained, forgave him even when he stole from her. She’d hidden him out more than once, and she said he stole because he’d never been paid what he was worth. Though our subjects were unrequited love, theft, and bad mothers, both of us smiled between talking and sipping, my smiles still at Owen’s being gone, and Jeff’s at the freedom to drink out in the free world.
“Having three mothers has made you stoic,” Jeff said. “You remain unflappable even as your marriage ends. I mean, Kay Baby reported me, her own nephew, to the cops. Twice. That’s the sort of mercilessness I need.”
“Kay Baby leaving me behind was one of the defining moments of my life,” I said.
“So what is your definition?” Jeff asked. “What is a Blue?”
“I’d been calling Sonny Dad for years when they all up and left.”
Jeff looked like the actor Joy claimed was his father, a guy still found occasionally on tv as the detective in the back of the room, or maybe as the neighbor of the victim. Jeff and that guy both had wavy blond hair, deep dimples, morning-glory-blue eyes, and a contagious smile. As we sat at our sidewalk table, people at other tables smiled at him, a few waved, and Jeff waved back, winked, smiled bigger. “Or what if I’d been given to Sammie who loves herself too much to be trusted?” he asked. “Wow. Imagine that.”
“Fabulous fifty-nine,” Sammie said. My last stop before sixty will be a blowout deck party next Saturday. Come early, spend the night if you want. No excuses.” I said little but yes and OK and good idea, the same old, same old. I had trained myself to ignore her calls, but clearly not trained well enough. Still, it mattered little. If I’d not answered, she would’ve texted, maybe even driven the 50 miles to make sure I’d be there. No avoiding her need for worship. All her tenants and many other Wolf Passers would be there, knowing it for what it was, a command performance, a chance to say and pretend to mean she didn’t look fifty-nine, or fifty-five, or whatever low number they thought they’d get away with.
Not long after I told Owen no counseling, he came by with a rented pickup truck and I helped him load up our dining table and chair set. He was thick and firm, built like a mover in fact, and was able to do most of it himself. He said it was his table, too, and Felicity didn’t have one. I said I’d always hated the set anyway, not exactly true, but it hadn’t been my choice, a glass- topped table with chairs too heavy to slide.
The morning of Sammie’s party, Jeff and I leaned against the kitchen counter and ate what Jeff said was Joy’s specialty, biscuits and honey. Jeff’s biscuits were dry enough to make swallowing hard, but we pretended they were good. He said he’d been texting Marcie, proclaiming his love. He’d even invited her to the party.
“You’re a creep,” I said.
“Funny you say that,” he said. In one text he said if she didn’t want to be wooed, she could tell him to fuck off, told her he wasn’t a creep. She hadn’t said stop, he said, so must still be considering him.
“She’s hoping you’ll go away.”
“Maybe she wants a ring,” he said.
He used to be smarter. He helped me memorize the periodic table when I was in high school, coached me in my speeches for debate club. He even investigated colleges for me and finally chose the U of I because he’d found a scholarship for students from small towns, though he called it “for girls escaping narcissism.”
When Sammie said I could spend the night, stay in my old pink girly room, she said it was her duty as my mother. She’d taken me in when I was thirteen and Kay Baby and Sonny and their twins moved to Chicago to open a second Poissons Fins because the one in Wolf Pass had been called “an exciting small town fish restaurant” by both the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Chicago Tribune. I’d been with Kay Baby for a dozen years before her sudden use of the phrase nuclear family. When the nuclear family returned two years later, heavily in debt, Sammie’s joke was “Not fins enough for Chicago?”
From Sammie’s deck, I watched yellow and red lights from parked barges wink across the waters below, the wide expanse created by the merger of the Mississippi and the Illinois rivers, and thought of the Osage’s name for themselves, people of the middle waters. I told Little Pearl and her mother Big Pearl that I always looked forward to Sammie’s deck parties. I lied to Father Cassidy, that I was happy to be living closer to Wolf Pass. Kay Baby, overhearing this, patted my arm and told Father Cassidy I was always happy. She came to us a mess, but we changed her life, she said, the usual song and dance, and Father Cassidy said his usual, what a lucky girl I was. He continued with more of his usual, shaking his head that Sonny was one of only three people in Wolf Pass, three out of five hundred, to have died from COVID. And Sonny’d not had a pre-existing condition. God works in mysterious ways, he and Kay Baby both said. I sighed. I listened to others tell me being close to family, back where I was raised, was important. Even Elaine, the caterer and kitchen help for the night and one of Sammie’s tenants, hugged me and said welcome home. I reminded them all it was still an hour’s drive. Not really back, not really home, I said. I told Andy of Andy’s Grocery my husband had had to miss the party for work, but would no doubt find Wolf Pass as lovely as all of us did. Andy then launched into a long description of Wolf Pass’s beauty, sounding like the ads for tourists as he listed sailboats on clear wide waters and pelicans on high and homemade fudge and zip lines and more. Then he started talking about how much the felon rapist president would save us on our taxes, and said good times were coming, even though prices may go up a bit before going down. When I laughed, he smiled at me, and said we finally had someone looking out for the little guy.
Much like our felon rapist and much like Colonel Charles Yancy as he confronted the Osage, Sammie displayed her power with the trappings of wealth. Her house that seemed to ramble endlessly was on the tallest limestone bluff overlooking the town, and the wrought iron tables on her wrap-around deck could barely hold the abundance of drink and platters of food Elaine brought out. Sammie wore a sequined wine-red sheath that hugged her body and that Kay Baby said brought out the sunspots on her face, a dig that made Sammie sneer, that great one she had that brought the left side of her top lip to her nostril. When not sneering, Sammie looked cherubic, a pink face surrounded by pale curls. And much like the felon rapist, her power came from real estate development: she held the lease for eight Wolf Pass businesses, including Andy’s grocery, Elaine’s catering, and Poissons Fins.
Kay Baby leaned against the deck railing next to me, handed me a glass of Pinot Grigio, and told me Jeff would be back in prison before his sheets needed changing. She said it as a joke, expecting me to laugh with her at Jeff’s sad life. I assumed Kay Baby equated sibling dislike with family life because she’d competed with Sammie and Joy, had learned with her sugared cereals and juice boxes to fight for Lee’s love. And she won! Her prize was that Lee made no bones about liking her best, and her punishment was that Lee now lived with her.
“Jeff’s rehabilitated now. Give him a chance,” I said.
“Is there an echo on this deck?” she asked. “Seems like I’ve heard that before.”
A few days earlier, Owen had come by again, this time with a list that included oven mitts, the shower caddy, and the omelet pan. “You’ve mistaken us for Walmart,” Jeff said.
“Us?” Owen asked.
Then Owen told me about his other women, two more than I’d guessed at. He’d met them in ordinary ways, never seeking them out. For example, one was behind him in a DMV line. “None of them were even that great looking,” he said. “None better than you, Blue.” His point was they were a symptom, not a cause. That was when he told me to try putting myself in someone else’s mind. “See a new world, Blue” he said. “Or see the old one through a new perspective.” He meant his. He’d needed comfort when he was fired, but what had I said? I couldn’t recall, but he was eager to quote me. I’d said Heavenly Hills Distillery was just some business selling something no one needed for more than it was worth, so good riddance.
“Oh Sweetie,” I said, not meaning to, not meaning much by it except shame. Owen’s sudden smile, shamed me more.
Sammie and those she could talk into it danced to the old-fashioned rock music she played on a new turntable. Her dancing was elegantly erotic, part two of the Sammie show, I said to myself. Ozymandias at work. Many watching her smiled, and I believed they smiled because they knew her parties’ progressions, so knew dancing meant this one was at least half over. Belief was not fact, though, and Owen could’ve been right about my not seeing from other’s perspectives. Was I the only one who didn’t love these deck parties? Maybe they smiled because she was a beautiful woman dancing well.
Though they knew I was married, none of my mothers, no one in Wolf Pass, had met Owen, had shown any interest in meeting him. Nevertheless, for their sakes I’d worn my rings, a large square cut diamond on a thin platinum band on top of a thinner band. As I looked at my hand, the diamond sparkling in the light of the lanterns strung above the railings, I saw the rings for what they were, a reminder I had not loved well, maybe could not.
I looked across the deck and watched most guests bypass Jeff, move around him as if they didn’t see him, talk to him only if there were no choice. When Sammie’d learned he was coming, she’d hidden her jewels, something both Kay Bab and Elaine had called rational. “A thief’s in the house,” Elaine had said. “Makes sense to hide the goods.” Kay Baby had called it leading him not into temptation.
Easy to hate him, Glen Ellmann used to say about Jeff. “I don’t, but I can see why so very many do.” This was decades ago when Glen was Joy’s second husband. Glen had a long face and long teeth and a habit of chewing the inside of his mouth, making his long cheeks wiggle. He’d come from some town in the South, and he managed the meat and seafood section of the supermarket up above in Jerseyville. Kay Baby and Sammie made fun of him, imitating the way he gave two syllables to the word hair. Joy said they were jealous. The truth was Glen not only loved her completely but had already become the father Jeff needed.
The third time Jeff was caught stealing other children’s backpacks, Joy and Glen were forced to take time off work for a meeting with the middle-school principal, at which they heard Jeff called mean and needy and lacking discipline. Joy said that old ugly principal was the mean one for picking on her Jeff, but Glen said Jeff was grounded for two weeks. No TV. No phone. No friends. No sports. “Come right home after school,” he said, adding the word Son. “It’s for your own good, Son.”
“Sure thing, Pappa Glen,” Jeff answered. He hates us, he said to Joy. Ignore him. Joy did. She continued to pick Jeff up after basketball practice, drive him to Bobby Jones’ home up in the flatlands where the boys rode horses. She told all of us not to tell Glen.
Glen’s last act, less than a month later, was kicking and punching holes in Joy’s doors and walls, smashing the windshield on her new seven-year-old Buick, burning Jeff’s clothes in the front yard. Joy said the destruction was as good as a divorce, clearer than some legal paper. Glen had lasted almost two years.
After the dancing, Elaine brought out bottles of champagne and Sammie called for toasts. She was wished fifty-nine more years many times, called the most glamourous woman in Wolf Pass, or, by those whose leases were nearly up, the most generous. And then, even though some like Big Pearl already had their purses hanging on their shoulders, she started dancing again. It was nearly midnight by the time the storm arrived, but it was all crashings and bangings and bright lightning by the time Kay Baby, Lee, Pam and Paula, and their husbands and children waded through deep puddles to their cars. Jeff was asleep in a living room recliner, and in between the thunder, Sammie, Elaine and I heard his snores, like a metal boat being dragged over gravel. “You know he’s never been one hundred percent,” Sammie said. “The chemicals in his head aren’t the right ones or aren’t enough.”
Then she shouted that she looked better than most fifty-nine-year-olds, most forty-nine year olds, including movie stars who had daily treatments. “Did you see all the wrinkles tonight?” She asked Elaine. She fluffed her pale hair and turned toward me “You’re getting chubby, Blue. Hell, I’m in better shape than you. I hope you’re not suffering some trauma drama, going through one of your poor-me spells.” She waved her arms out to indicate all the guests no longer there. “Snide, disintegrating old farts,” she said. “Laughing that I’m old. You heard them, didn’t you? It’s all envy.”
Elaine came in from the kitchen then, dropped to the floor, and began what she said was her nightly ritual of push-ups. Her long graying hair came loose from her barrettes, covered her face, and brushed the floor like a dust mop. Sammie nearly fell as she got down to compete, tipped sideways and knocked her head on an end table before stretching all the way down. Count, they both said to me, count for us. I did not but heard them shout as I went to my room. What’s my total? How many more? Before I got into bed, I removed the rings, wrapped them in a tissue, and placed them on the dresser.
They were gone by morning.
The note read Marcie needs a diamond. PS I’ll see you at home. PPS Don’t hate me.
The Christmas after Glen left, Jeff wrapped up Glen’s Rolex Submariner watch and gave it to Joy. The heavy watch with a black face and stainless-steel band was an inheritance from Glen’s father, and Glen had kept it in a locked dresser drawer, taking it out and passing it around at family gatherings. “Don’t misunderstand,” Jeff said, though no one had spoken, everyone one of us, even Joy, even eight-year-old me, struck silent. “Pappa Glen gave me his watch before he left. It’s the god-honest truth.”
I pictured Jeff tiptoeing into my girlhood room at Sammie’s the night before, finding his way by the strobe-like lightning, carefully placing my rings in his shirt pocket. I felt the hunk of carbon from deep in the earth pulse against his chest. I imagined Marcie as a throw-away puppy like Bean stabbing at his heart.
Mary Troy is the author of six books of fiction––four collections of short stories and two novels: In The Sky Lord, Swimming on Hwy N, Beauties, Cookie Lily, The Alibi Cafe and Other Stories, and Joe Baker Is Dead. She has won the Leila Lenora Heasley Award for a distinguished representative of American and international letters, the USA Book Award for literary fiction, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, a Nelson Algren Award, a William Rockhill Nelson Award, and more. Mary has published dozens of short stories, and her books have been reviewed widely and well, including in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.