The Beautiful Misfits, page 14
Josie sputtered with laughter and nearly choked on her IPA, a beer so bitter it tasted like a juiced pine cone.
“I miss you at work,” Megan said and tilted her head like a little dog. “I hope you get to come back.”
Josie nodded and wondered how many divorce parties Megan planned on having. “I hope so too,” she said.
“I’m telling you now,” Monica said. “La Belleza is going down the can. There’s nobody over there with you gone and Pauline leaving any time she feels the urge to bounce.” Monica’s eyes landed on the table where a dozen men in cycling Lycra grew boisterous, flights of no-doubt high-octane beers fueling their testosterone. “Here we are yammering about that damned store again,” she said.
“When did you get a divorce?” Megan asked, and Josie hoped she wasn’t going to meddle all night as she had at work last week.
“Let’s put it this way,” Josie said, checking her phone and wondering if Dottie was having a good time with Ruby. “Not soon enough. Frank and I never agreed on anything except naming our son.”
“I know the secret to this now,” Monica said, returning her attention to the women. “Here’s the deal. See those men over there looking all fit and squeaky clean? Well, instead of meeting someone and tallying up all their fab qualities, you’ve got to pop that lid and dig in. You know how you go to a restaurant and order the World’s Best Hamburger? It looks scrumptious, so you open your mouth big as it will go and bite down?” She paused for dramatics. “Problem is, we women should always lift that bun and check out the goods first. An entrée never looks as perfect when served as it does on the menu.”
“I hear ya,” Megan shouted. “I just need to meet a fellow before all my eggs turn rotten. I’m pushing thirty.”
“For the love of God,” Monica said. “You’re barely in your twenties. Children will break your heart. Let me tell you, when your kids do you wrong, it hurts much worse than some man doing it. My twins are getting old enough to sass me and refuse to mind.”
Josie jumped in. “And then when you think you can’t take another minute of it, those same kids will turn around and fill your heart right back up. There were times I thought I’d run out of love for my son. Next thing I knew he’d picked every flower in the yard and put them in a vase on the dining room table for me.”
“Mine are refusing to bathe at night,” Monica said. “Throwing fits so massive they look like screaming eggplants.”
Josie smiled as she thought of the time when Finley was nine or ten and decided to stop bathing. We have a swimming pool, Mom, he’d protested. Chlorine cleans better than Dove. After a week of this, she suggested they go for a little day trip in one of the golf carts prevalent in her ridiculous neighborhood.
After enjoying an alfresco lunch and shopping for a new tennis racket, Josie steered the golf cart into the Splash and Dash car wash. She slid her debit card into the slot and selected Ultimate Wash offering buffing, waxing, and a protective coating.
Ready to bathe now? she’d asked. And instead of balking, Finley’s eyes lit up.
“What’s got you all happy?” Monica asked, motioning for a waiter. “I’m going to send my cherubs over to you one evening at bath time.”
“I was thinking about the time I threatened to run Finley through the ultimate cycle at the car wash if he didn’t start showering. When he saw all those bristles and flapping things hitting the cars… I can still see his face. He was excited and wanted to do it. Always was one for danger.”
Josie longed for the laughs and fun she and Finn once shared. It’s odd how she could pinpoint exactly when things went wrong for him. It was a week after he had his wisdom teeth out. He was fourteen and begged Josie to call the doctor for a Vicodin refill, claiming his mouth wouldn’t stop hurting. If she had put her foot down, said no…if this and if that. Most kids started with beer, then moved on to pot. If wired for addiction, they climbed that drug ladder to reach the opiates at the top. Finley’s pattern was the reverse, beginning with hydrocodone for vacant teeth and graduating to everything else for a vacant soul.
All that would change once she got him to Asheville and talked him into a recovery program, one that included lots of outdoor activities and sunlight. She’d found several during her Google searches, but for now, she remained a mail-in mother who sent her son letters and care packages filled with books on addiction, along with clothes and toiletries, even a Groupon for a fitness center membership. She knew from Frank that he sold it all for drug money. But it didn’t matter. The act of caring for Finn, even from afar, sanded the sharp corners from her guilt. On those here-and-there sober days, Finley might send a text of thanks and gratitude or one of remorse and apologies, promising to turn his life around, go to grad school, get a job, find Jesus. She’d saved every text he’d sent, her heart puddling with hope when he’d said: “I love you so much, Mama. I’m clean and going to meetings. I get all my drive and passion from you.”
That was before her TV drama, before he’d cut her off for good.
Monica flagged the waiter to bring mayonnaise for her fries. “I’m going to tell my twins I have a friend who’ll run them through a car wash if they don’t start sinking their little asses in the bathtub,” she said, offering the delicious-smelling fries to Megan and Josie.
When the band fired up its first set, loud in that way of too much ego, the women gave up trying to scream a conversation. “I’m going to dance,” Megan said. “Y’all wanna come?”
“I’m not drunk enough,” Monica said, eyes back on those athletes in Lycra. “Go on. You always draw a crowd when you dance. Next drink’s on me.”
A blasting techno-beat pounded the Wicked Hop’s cavernous space. The place used to be a warehouse, but a few years ago a group of beer-loving yuppies hired crews to transform it into a showplace with its expensive bar inlaid with ancient kauri wood, the oldest workable wood in the world, and beers so strong one could get a DWI just smelling them.
“Look at her,” Monica yelled over the music. “You ever seen such a display?” A crowd formed a semicircle around Megan, gawking as she dirty-danced solo, sporting moves that could get her either banned or dollar bills stuffed in her hip-huggers. “I’ll let her ride this song out, then I’m going to get her,” Monica said. “I believe she missed her true calling.”
The women laughed and nursed their beers. An hour later they hit up the Waffle House because Megan, still sweating from dancing, had said, “I can’t get full on bar food.”
“Nothing’s as good as bacon and biscuits, red-eye gravy,” Monica said, reading a large laminated menu.
Josie ordered waffles and to-go pancakes for Dottie, remembering she was out of breakfast food. She needed to get home. When she arrived just after ten, Dottie was still up.
“I tried everything to get her settled,” Ruby said. “She’s been checking the front door and windows like a little puppy missing its mother.”
“It’s fine, Ruby. I just appreciate all you do for us.”
“I hope you had a delightful evening,” the elderly woman said, threading her arms through a boho backpack seen mostly on hikers or Asheville’s trustafarians. “I must say this little one sure loves a pizza smothered in black olives. Oh, and our paint night was spectacular. Check out the Van Goghs on the fridge.”
Josie walked to the refrigerator and admired her daughter’s suns and moons. “What’s this?” she asked Ruby, holding up the other painting as Dottie rushed into the kitchen and squeezed Josie’s legs. “Maybe I should ask, ‘Who’s this?’”
“That Paul Carty, Mama,” Dottie squealed. She clutched Mary-Mary, pizza sauce on the doll’s face.
“It was supposed to be Sir Paul McCartney, my dream man before my liberal lawmaker phase,” Ruby said, bending to kiss Dottie goodnight and suddenly hurrying out the door as if she had someone waiting for her at home, which could be possible knowing Ruby. “Toodles,” she sang into the darkness.
When Dottie finally fell asleep, Josie crept into a Rubbermaid tub of memorabilia, searching for confirmation of past joys with her son. She discovered Finley’s clay handprint, the thumb crooked from a T-ball mishap. The one he’d made for Mother’s Day scripted with blocky handwriting: I love you, Mama.
She pulled out a finger painting splashed with the pastel swirls of an innocent child, the world his for the taking. Searching deeper in the bin, she found the Christmas decorations he’d crafted from preschool through third grade, including a reindeer made from a clothespin, an angel resembling a ghost, a paper-plate Santa with his cotton-ball beard in shreds. She shut the lid and knelt at her bed. The ceiling fan whirred, and its chain clacked against the wood like an antique clock ticking.
“Dear God, help us all,” she prayed. “Please help me to find a way and a path to save my son. Help me to become a better mother to Dottie and not a boozer, wallowing in what was, what is, and what might have been. Bless our family and others needing you most. Allow me to see the blessings and not the battered parts of life. I give you my will, dear God. I’m not sure I’m praying the right way. Maybe it’s all in your time, not mine. Maybe I need patience. I know I need sobriety. Help me get there, sir. Or ma’am.”
Instead of climbing into bed, she flicked on a lamp and reached for the DVD—her final moments on camera—that split-second brain crash that got her fired and sent to rehab, never to be allowed back on the air anywhere reputable.
Since everyone else had seen it, maybe she should finally force herself to watch it. Her team of therapists and doctors suggested viewing it multiple times. They’d said it would weaken the impact, and that things are much worse if we don’t face them head-on. We build them much bigger in our minds and way out of proportion to the actual event.
Now her heart skittered, and her mouth dried as if it were stuffed with breadcrumbs. She could do this. She needed to do this. She hit the play button.
“Good evening. I’m Josette Nickels and tonight we bring you a story of loss and laws never before enacted until now. For the first time in decades, a district attorney’s office has charged a suspected drug dealer with murder following a heroin overdose.” Her voice cracked on the video. She vividly remembered her stomach churning and her entire body radiating heat as if melting from the inside.
“According to arrest warrants, Adam Lamond Richardson, nineteen, of Courtside Drive in Dekalb County, reportedly killed twenty-year-old Grace Turbyfill with ‘malice’ caused by the unlawful distribution of heroin. Detectives believe Richardson administered the narcotic himself, causing the fatal overdose of the young woman, a sophomore at the University of Georgia studying psychology.”
At that point in the tape, she’d stopped reading, talking, breathing. She panted and sucked at the air, trying to get oxygen into her lungs before she passed out. She wiped her wet hands on her pink Calvin Klein skirt, then across her mouth, smearing her matching lipstick. This was when she lost it. “The average woman will eat four to seven pounds of lipstick in her lifetime,” she said, staring zombie-eyed into the cameras.
The young woman, dead from a single bad hit, had once been her son’s girlfriend in high school. She was class valedictorian, a straitlaced girl known in the choir for her perfect soprano and riveting solos. Josie had heard the news earlier that day. She vowed she could still report the story with the required disconnect. She could contain her blistering emotions stemming from the frantic calls from Finley, missing in action and crying on the phone, cursing God and everyone else for Grace’s death. Finley, who’d gone on the run again four days earlier and sounded garbled and over-drugged when he’d called. How could he have done this to her again? She couldn’t take it. No, she had to take it. She had to keep pretending to be the calm and composed Josette Nickels everyone expected when she spoke into the camera.
She remembered seeing the shock in her producer’s eyes. As Josie gasped and froze on camera, producers had scrambled and motioned frantic cues. In retrospect, sure, she should have listened. She’d held up a hand and said aloud, for all the viewers and God to hear, “Stop. I’ve got this.” She closed her eyes, counted three breaths, then faced Atlanta households with the eyes of a woman gone mad. To hell with the script.
“This was my son’s friend. He’s on drugs. Lots of his friends are on drugs. Maybe your kids are on drugs. Maybe they aren’t. Not yet, anyway.” The producers waved hands behind the cameras, signaling her to get back on track. She ignored them.
“You may recall the series I did on the opiate epidemic. It’s not over, is it? It’s a nightmare growing worse because slimeball dealers are bringing in fake heroin—nothing but pure fentanyl. This drug is the thief of souls, snatching the breath out of those who use. Their hearts just stop. And so do ours—those of us who love the addicts.”
A brief wave of equanimity had returned, and her voice evened. Always able to separate her personal life from the job—until that day—she allowed that control a single crack. And through the opening, she saw the face of her daddy holding his pretend camera as she interviewed him. God, she missed him. He’d died unexpectedly two weeks prior, and the numbing shock of his death had worn off and left debilitating grief.
She’d felt her head bobble as she stared into the cameras. She thought of her daddy, cold in the Georgia dirt, and Finley, who would likely be on this very news channel for his latest drug-related crime—smashing car windows and stealing valuables from a mall parking lot.
But she continued. Viewers had admired Josie’s strength in crisis, her measured grace, and genuine concern during other people’s tragedies. They loved her down-to-earth style and how at the end of every broadcast she’d share a story highlighting her fashion finds or disasters. Like the time she’d visited a cosmetics counter and the makeup artist had taught her how to “draw” eyebrows with just the right arch. She’d swept her bangs to the side and the camera zoomed in on not two, but four eyebrows adorning her forehead. Viewers had loved it when she said, “This is what happens when you forget to take one set off and you find yourself at the Dollar General buying Metamucil and cat food and the checkout girl says, ‘Did you know you have four eyebrows?’”
Josie had ventured off script and ad-libbed successfully for more than twenty years. Until that day, the day she broke. Right there, right then. On air, as she tried to report the death of yet another victim of drugs. Drugs which turned good into hideous and sons into savages.
“I knew this girl,” she said, still ignoring her producers’ cues. “Never in my life would I have thought her capable of using anything stronger than a Bayer aspirin. But as with the others, it probably started with a little drinking, then on to pot, maybe a sports injury, oral surgery, and a careless doctor prescribing Percocet. Next thing you know these newly addicted kids are begging for refills, and when that well dries up, they score street Percs laced with God-knows-what for exorbitant amounts of money. Pills poisoned with deadly fentanyl. When they run out of money, where do they go? I’ll tell you where. The Heroin Highway beams its headlights.”
Cameras still rolling, she’d paused before flinging herself down more avenues of uncensored commentary. The producers had given up by then, figuring this was another of Josie’s brilliant moves, foraying into the unknown designed to skyrocket the station’s ratings.
“It all started in the 1980s.” She leaned closer to the camera as if she wanted to lunge from her desk. “Doctors were told by the drug makers that opiates weren’t addictive. Then comes the cartel, producing black-tar heroin…and their aim was the mighty dollar and to fill in the gap when an addict couldn’t get his highs from a pill.”
She’d cleared her throat and tasted the chili powder from the fajita salad at lunch and the rot of tequila. She rolled her head twice as if warming up for Pilates. She held up a hand and gave the camera a one moment, please. And that’s when she’d felt the seams pop, allowing images of the son she couldn’t reach, her precious father stiff and lifeless in his coffin, her beloved Dottie, a child her own daddy had never wanted.
Josie couldn’t watch another second of the video. She knew that in a matter of seconds the awful climax would roll: those eighty-four seconds that ruined her forever. She ejected the DVD and crawled into bed, seeking the kind of deep sleep where everything is forgotten or forgiven.
When sleep eluded her, thoughts of Finley pushed up like flowers before the final frost. She traced those old memories to a time when she was the Good Mother, the one who’d taken him to zoos, held his hand on roller coasters, taught him how to swim at the local country club and how to ride a bike. That mother had climbed into his bunk bed each night and smelled the soft curls at the nape of his bath-dampened neck as they read books together, sometimes the same one until the pages softened.
Josie flicked on the lamp and reached for a small heart-shaped picture frame. Inside was a photo of Finley, around age nineteen, during a brief stint of sobriety. His hair was long, his face and eyes clear. He smiled with tenderness and held his newborn sister. He’d nuzzled Dottie’s cheek and cut his eyes to the camera as if to ask, Am I doing this right?
Every night Josie kissed that photo seven times for good luck, believing her rituals kept her son’s heart beating.
14
Josie swore off alcohol and planned to ante up her good-mother status. She’d already spent the past twelve days of not working as if she were the newest recruit in the Mother Scouts of America, trying to earn a dozen badges in as many days.
Badge One—The Tenacity Badge: She’d called Finley four times this week from various phones.
Badge Two—The Handles Disappointment Badge: Every call had gone to voice mail.
