Free Mulberry Wands by Kater Cheek Page A

“touring” as he put it. The gigs never paid much, and
sometimes Mom would have to look for extra work to pay off the tab
in some bar in Prescott or Tucson he’d run up while performing
there, but she never complained about him once he was back. When he
was home, everything was fine. She didn’t resent the bills so much
as she resented him leaving.
    One time he was gone for two weeks. Mom’s
friends and Dad’s bar buddies whispered that they thought maybe
he’d met some showgirl and gone to try his luck in Vegas. Mom just
pressed her lips together and said nothing.
    He thought she was angry then, but when the
trooper showed her the crumpled license plate and asked her to
identify the body, she got angrier than he’d ever seen her. She
stayed angry for years. Dad wasn’t ever coming back, when he said
he would. A man who didn’t keep his word wasn’t worth spit.
    Paul didn’t get along with his mom very well
after that. She’d taken out an insurance policy on Dad, which was
generous enough that it meant she didn’t have to work for a few
years. That had been a mistake, as the structure of getting up and
putting on her public face was the only thing keeping grief and
anger from hollowing her out. She stopped going out, just sat at
home and watched soaps and game shows all day.
    In just a year, it ruined what was left of
her personality. She became bitter, gloomy, difficult to live with
even if one were kind and sympathetic. Impossible to live with if
you were a shallow and angry young man with better things to do
than hang around with his old lady, getting into fight after fight
that started with a sardonic word and ended with screaming and
slammed doors.
    Paul and Carlos were nearly inseparable in
those days, and he stayed at Carlos’ house as often as he could.
Paul took jobs whenever he could find them, and when he couldn’t,
he hung out in the bar with friends, drinking slowly so that his
pay would last a little longer. He didn’t touch his half of the
insurance money. He’d already planned on using that money for
something big, he wasn’t sure what yet. He’d been thinking
something like a car and a trip around the world, until the war
started to loom large in their television and he decided to buy a
one-man college ticket out of the draft.
    Mom said he used her home like a flophouse,
crashing there just long enough to get back on his feet and go out
again. That was true. She said other things too, equally true and
more unkind, until Paul realized he was too old to live under a
roof that wasn’t his. One night after a long and bitter spat, he
packed his things and left, swearing that he was going to go away
and never come back.
    “See that you do,” she said.
    It took him almost two decades to break that
promise.
    In 1984 the city had changed so much as to be
unrecognizable, and so had Mom. She had altered the course of her
life while he was in the light, gone down further and bounced back
up on her own. When he came back into the darkness again and looked
up her new address, she was living with another man, newly married,
with a couple step-kids. He’d been wearing the exact same clothes,
which is why he wasn’t surprised she thought he was a ghost.
    Apologizing cost less than he thought it
would.
    She forgave him, and apologized for being
less of a mother than he needed, and suddenly, they were like two
strangers on a bus saying sorry for bumping into each other. The
emotions that had bound them had been severed so completely that he
didn’t even feel regret anymore. He said goodbye, for good this
time. She went back to her new life, and he went back into the
light.
    Mom died a few years later. There were
hundreds of people at her funeral, none of whom he knew.
    He had left the earth, and the earth had
healed itself of his passing. It was a frightening, exhilarating
freedom to know that your loose ends have been tied and that you
never had to leave the light ever again if you didn’t want to.