Taking Back Mary Ellen Black

“I’m sorry, Mary Ellen.” The anger had left Daddy, and he sagged against the truck. His broad shoulders slumped, and his head bowed. “I shouldn’t have made the marriage happen…”

“I could have said no, Daddy. I could have raised Amber alone. I know Mom and Grandma and you were worried about what people would think, about the neighbors…” I glanced toward Mrs. Wieczorek’s house where curtains swished at a back window overlooking the alley.

“You think I care what people think?” He laughed. “I leave your mother and grandma to that craziness. I wanted you to be happy. I wanted you to have what you wanted. I thought you wanted Eddie.”

So had I. I’d loved the man he’d been then. “What are you saying, Daddy?”

“He told you. I’m sure he told you. A man like him—he’d like throwing it in your face—”

My stomach pitched more with dread than from the beer. “What?”

“I threatened him. I told him I was going to grind him up for hamburger, if he didn’t marry you.”

A shiver rippled down my spine. “You threatened Eddie into marrying me?”

Daddy glanced up, meeting my eyes for the first time. “He didn’t tell you?”

“No.” Now it made sense that Eddie hadn’t been able to look at raw hamburger without gagging and why he’d never gone to Daddy’s butcher shop. “But when he left, he said he’d never loved me. That’s probably the only time he told me the truth.” Because he certainly hadn’t told me about the growing debt. I set down the beer can on the hood of the pickup truck.

“I’m sorry, Mary. I never meant to hurt you…”

I flung my arms around my father’s protruding stomach, hugging him close. “You were just trying to get me what you thought I wanted, Daddy. And I did love him then.” As much as I’d like to, I couldn’t lie about that.

He patted my head. “I’ll make this right, Mary Ellen. I can get you the money you need.”

I imagined him, wearing his bloodiest apron and waving a meat cleaver, storming into Eddie’s restaurant. Though I enjoyed the look I imagined on Eddie’s face, I couldn’t risk Daddy winding up in jail for a little payback. “No, Daddy, it’s time I figure out what I want now and get it for myself.”

A small smile played across his broad face. I’d like to think it was pride, but I knew it was pity. He didn’t think I could do it—either figure out what I wanted or get it if I did happen to figure it out. But Daddy was the only one who ever complimented me, so I waited for some words of encouragement. And I waited while he swilled down the rest of his beer and then the rest of the one I’d left on the hood of his truck.

When the engine of a car rumbled in the alley, he still hadn’t said anything. He just passed me a piece of jerky from a bag he carried in his pocket. “Your mother’s back. Eat this, Mary, it covers up anything.”

I bit into the spicy, dried meat. Garlic and cayenne pepper exploded on my tongue, warming it. No wonder Daddy always smelled like garlic.

Mom’s minivan crunched over the gravel driveway as she pulled it next to Grandma’s Bonneville. The side door slid open, and my six-year-old Shelby, vaulted out, blond pigtails flying. “Mommy!”

I caught the little bundle of energy in my arms and pulled her tight. “Hi, baby. Did you have fun with your grandmas?”

She nodded. “We got Happy Meals. Grandma Mary likes the nuggets.”

I looked over Shelby’s head and into the interior of the van. Ten-and-a-half-year-old Amber sat in the back seat, hunched over a book, her glasses slipping to the end of her little nose. My oldest was always buried in a book. Better, I thought than the sand where I’d had my head buried lately.

“Did you eat yet?” my mother asked as she slid out from behind the wheel. My mother’s cure for every ailment: feed it. Her expanding waistline proved she took her own advice. But I couldn’t eat her greasy cooking or listen to her well-meaning advice. She’d been doling out a lot of both since I’d come home, the way she had the first nineteen years of my life. She leaned close to me and sniffed. “Oh, you got into the jerky with your father.”

That wasn’t all I’d gotten into with Dad. More than the beer and the secondhand smoke, I’d gotten perspective. I was better off without Eddie, and I could take care of my daughters and myself. I wouldn’t be trapped in this house another nineteen years.

CHAPTER E

Employment

The biggest part of taking care of the girls and myself would be obtaining gainful employment. Waitressing two nights a week at the VFW was hardly gainful, and the woman I was replacing, Florence, was a fast healer. With her new hip, she’d be back to work soon, and I’d be out of a job.

I’d gone on some interviews, but my résumé for the last decade hadn’t impressed anyone enough to hire me, not when the job market was flooded with more qualified individuals than there were positions to fill.

Bleary-eyed, I stumbled down the steep back stairs to the kitchen. The house showed its age in design as much as decor. The main floor had no bathroom, so I had to climb upstairs from the den anytime I wanted to use it. But with Shelby’s tendency to wait until the last minute, it was better that the girls be in the bedroom across the hall from it. In our house in Cascade, we’d each had our own bathroom. That was a luxury I doubted I’d be able to afford again.

Mom was already up, and she’d brewed the coffee. I needed caffeine and the classifieds. Today I was determined to get another job, no matter what it paid or what I had to do.

In her ratty robe and slippers, Mom was watching TV, sitting at the old, metal table; the one at which she’d sat since she’d been a kid. Even after marrying Dad, she’d never left home; her new groom had just moved in. Grandpa Czerwinski had died by that time, and the house had been too big for Grandma alone. Dad had also taken over the butcher shop where he’d worked since coming home from the navy. But neither Mom nor Dad had ever made their mark on the house or the store.

The kitchen counter was still the same worn yellow Formica it had always been. The walls bore the same lime paint and coordinating wallpaper with yellow and lime teapots. My last visit to the store had revealed the same worn vinyl flooring, the same setup; the only change there had been inflation. But Dad hadn’t gone overboard. His meat prices were still the cheapest around.

Hadn’t either of them ever wanted anything else, a life away from the West Side? I’d worked up the nerve to ask my mother once, when Eddie and I had moved to Cascade despite her protests that seventeen miles was too far away to move her grandchildren. She hadn’t cared that I was moving, in fact she’d called me a snob for being ashamed of where I grew up. I wasn’t ashamed; I’d just wanted more. She’d denied ever wanting anything else, had claimed she was happy, even though she never acted like it.

Back in high school, I had known I hadn’t wanted this life. After graduation I’d enrolled at the local art college, and instead of working at the store, I’d waited tables at a restaurant in the city where I’d fallen for Eddie, the night manager. His dream to buy the restaurant had become mine. He’d painted a bright future for us far from the West Side, a future full of wealth and happiness. Whatever dreams I’d had of my own I’d abandoned for him. And now Eddie had abandoned me.

Time to move on. Time to move out again. But I couldn’t manage that on my quarter tips. “Morning, Mom.”

Mom turned from her fascination with the early-morning news. The years had taken their toll on her hearing as well. “I didn’t see you there, Mary Ellen. Up long? Do you want some coffee?”

I’d already grabbed a mug, sloshed some thick brew into it and settled at the table across from her. Instead of turning on the furnace this early in September (in Michigan late summer was fall) she’d turned on the oven and propped the door open a little…just enough to take off the chill. I edged my chair closer to the heat. A glance at the teapot clock above the sink confirmed I had a little while before I had to wake the girls, so they’d get in the habit of waking up early for school. “Where’s the paper, Mom?”

She lifted last night’s edition from the vinyl chair next to her, but she never turned from the TV set. She had a thing for Matt Lauer.

“Thanks.”

She nodded, her tight curls refusing to bounce. She’d overdone the home perm again, frying her dyed-black hair to frizz. Her purple robe was threadbare, but she refused to give it up for all the new ones my brother and I had given her over the years. She was a creature of habit, of routine, from her extra thirty pounds to her frizzed-out perm. Maybe she’d stayed on the West Side, in the same house, all these years, because she was scared of change.

After all the changes in my life the last six months, I could understand her fear. But then during a commercial break, she began the lecture I’d heard repeatedly since moving home. And I knew we’d never really understand each other.

“It’s just too bad you couldn’t have given Eddie a boy. I’m sure he would have stayed then. A man needs to have a boy.”

I nearly dropped my head to the table. “Mom…”

“If only you would have drunk that tea. I did when I was pregnant with your brother, and look how that turned out…”

Despite the times I’d called Bart a retard while we were growing up, I couldn’t slight him. He’d turned out well, but he and Daddy were not close and had never been. “He lives in another state, Mom. He and Dad never talk, never did.”

“Your brother didn’t want anything to do with the store.” She sighed. “Your dad can’t understand that. He took it over from my father, and carried on the legacy.”

Bart had hated the store, hated the smell of blood, hated being called the butcher’s boy, the taunt that had followed him through every year of school. “Bart had other obligations.” To himself.

Mom nodded. “A wife and baby boy now.” Her smug smile told me that once again, in her personal scorebook, Bart had won.

“And I’m happy for him, Mom. He has everything he’s ever wanted. His dream job in the city, and his dream girl.” Who had actually grown up right next door. Neither of them had wanted to stay on the West Side.

Despite not knowing what my dream had become, I knew it wasn’t a fast-food job, which was all that the classifieds contained.

Even though Matt Lauer had lured Mom’s attention back to the television, she made another remark. “I still think a boy would have saved your marriage.”