Taking Back Mary Ellen Black

I crinkled the newspaper in my fist, but couldn’t contain my temper. “Mom, if Eddie had wanted a boy after having Shelby, he wouldn’t have gotten a vasectomy. He didn’t want a boy. That’s not why he left. He left because he didn’t want me anymore.”

Maybe he never had. If Daddy hadn’t threatened to grind him into hamburger, would he have married me? Back then, he’d assured me that he wasn’t proposing just because I’d been pregnant. Back then, he’d told me that he loved me. But that was a lifetime ago.

Mom’s gaze stayed steady on Matt Lauer’s smiling face. “Maybe if you’d kept yourself up more.”

My hand relaxed on the paper. I was too tired and too scared about my future to fight with her. Even though Eddie had gained weight and lost hair, I was expected to maintain the face and figure of a supermodel? I’d never had one to begin with. “Mom…”

“Instead of working at the VFW, you should have gone back to work with Eddie,” she went on. “When you two worked together, you were close.”

That was the one thing she’d said that I couldn’t argue with. Even after Amber had come, I’d still found time to hostess at the restaurant and to help with the menu and redecorating. But after Shelby had come along, I’d wanted to spend more time with my children, and then we’d bought the new house.

“While Jesus is out of town helping his brother on their family farm, I’m going to be working with your dad,” she said. But for Daddy that would be more of a punishment than a privilege. He wouldn’t be able to sneak as many smokes.

Despite how much I’d hated working there as a kid—the blood and garlic seeped into your pores, bled into your hands until it stained. I found myself volunteering, “Mom, let me do it.”

“But Mary Ellen, it’s already been decided…”

I owed my father for putting a roof over our heads. “Come on, Mom, let me. I need to pay you back for everything you’re doing for me and the girls.”

She waved a hand in dismissal. “You’re our daughter. You’ve fallen on hard times…”

Obligation and charity. I fought the urge to cringe and gulped coffee instead. The back stairs creaked, and from the scent of garlic, blood and tobacco, I knew it was my father.

“I’d pay you to work with me, Mary Ellen,” Dad said, not even bothering to hide the fact he’d eavesdropped.

“But—” Mom began her protest.

“Come on, Louie.” My mother’s name was Louise, but Dad always called her Louie. “You could only spare me a few hours a day in between carting your mother around town. And I’m short-staffed right now. Jesus—” Dad pronounced his helper’s name the biblical way instead of the Spanish way “—is gonna be gone at least a couple of weeks. I need the help.”

Mom nodded, accepting what my father said as she always did, as I’d accepted all Eddie’s lies. But Daddy didn’t lie about anything other than beer and cigarettes.

From the earnest, pitying expressions on both their faces, I heard what had been left unsaid. And Mary Ellen needs the money. I couldn’t argue with that even though I really didn’t want to take his money. I’d only intended to help him out. “If you’re sure…”

Dad nodded, his gray, sleep-rumpled hair standing straight up. “I don’t expect anyone to work for free.”

But I wish I could. I hated taking money from my parents, hated relying on their generosity to put a roof over my family’s head. But it was either Grandma’s outdated house with the oven heating the kitchen, or a box on the street.

My first week on the job I thought Dad was running a special. But the business didn’t let up during the couple of weeks following that. Then it occurred to me that all the neighbors weren’t patronizing the store for the kielbasa and kishka. I was the fresh meat, the fodder for their gossip mill. Everybody wanted to know how badly little Mary Ellen Black had failed. Standing behind the meat counter in a bloodstained apron, I didn’t have to say a word. They tsked. They commiserated. They told me how I was better off without the SOB. And most of all, they rubbed it in. Maybe they didn’t mean to. Or maybe they did. Maybe it was just human nature to feel better about oneself when someone else was doing badly.

For instance, after her commiserations, Mrs. Klansky flashed pictures of her grandchildren, who are enrolled in private schools because her son-in-law is such a good provider. She also pointed out that her daughter wouldn’t have to work, but reminded me of how ambitious Natalie, the prominent lawyer, has always been. Now, maybe I should have been happy that Natalie has done so well, that Natalie doesn’t have to move back home with her mother even if her old man was screwing a twenty-year-old cocktail waitress. But my humiliation was still too fresh. And I felt a little bit like Mrs. Klansky had kicked me while I was down. So I wished that Natalie would leave her prestigious job and her perfect family and run off to live in poverty with her pool boy.

But I figured Natalie and her family were pretty safe. None of my wishes had been coming true lately, or Eddie would have been written up in medical journals for a part of his body inexplicably shriveling up and falling off. And that hadn’t happened. Where was the justice? Not that I’d actually seen Eddie lately to know my wish hadn’t come true. Despite his inability to support them, I had agreed that he could see his children. I couldn’t deprive the girls of a father, although he could.

But as Amber had pointed out, in one of her rare moments of openness, Eddie had never been around much, at least not the last few years. The restaurant had been his child much more than his flesh-and-blood daughters. Once, I’d admired his dedication to support us. Like my father, Eddie had called me his princess and had wanted me to live in a castle. That had been his excuse for working so hard to provide his wife and daughters with everything we deserved. The truth was, the restaurant had been his whole existence. Despite his twenty-year-old waitress, it probably still was. The risk of losing it had to be killing him. Like my marriage, this was another thing I had to thank my father for. For our wedding he’d given Eddie the money for the down payment to buy the restaurant from his employers. But I couldn’t be mad at Daddy. Unlike Eddie, he’d been involved in his daughter’s life. Granted, too involved, but he’d had the best of intentions.

As polka music filled the store, vibrating around the scent of raw pork and garlic, I reminded myself of that. “Daddy, when is Jesus coming back?” I pronounced it the correct way.

“Jesus?” Daddy asked, in the biblical way. With a sigh, I swallowed a Spanish lesson. If after years of working with Jesus, Daddy hadn’t learned, I wasn’t going to be able to teach him. Jesus had inspired other additions to the store, though. Chorizo and farmer’s cheese and fresh tortillas. Daddy’s store met the needs of a blending neighborhood, and his business thrived. Probably even when I wasn’t around for the neighborhood to wallow in my humiliation. Too bad my presence hadn’t attracted this kind of business to the VFW. I might have made more than a handful of quarters a night.

“His cousin Enrico just stopped by. I was talking to him out back.” And here I’d thought he’d just been sneaking a smoke. “Jesus should be back in three days.”

Sounded a lot like the homily I’d just heard the Sunday before. Going to mass was a requirement when living at home. To add to my humiliation, the girls had told Mom how rarely we’d gone before, only on Easter and Christmas. But the restaurant had been closed on Sundays, and between sleeping late and watching football, it was the only time that Eddie had actually been with his family. My time would have been better spent lighting candles to secure my future, as Grandma said. Figuring that at her age the end was near, she lit a lot of candles. Good thing Saint Adalbert’s didn’t have a sprinkler system, just a leaky roof.

“Don’t worry, Mary Ellen.”

I pulled myself from my maudlin thoughts. “What?”

“Don’t worry. As you can see, business is good. I’ll have enough work for you and Jesus.” Knowing Jesus worked circles around me, I doubted it. And I didn’t want it. The apron, the false sympathy of neighbors, the polka music, the raw meat and garlic smell of fresh kielbasa. I enjoyed the VFW more. Too bad Florence was coming back this weekend.

“Dad…” I was tempted. A job I disliked was better than no job at all.

“It’s fine, Mary Ellen. You’ll earn enough money here for your girls’ clothes and lessons and stuff. You don’t need any more than that.”

“What?”

“You’ve got a roof over your heads—”

As all the neighbors had chortled, little Mary Ellen Black was living with her parents. Yeah, it was better than a box. But it wasn’t my home. Heck, it wasn’t even Dad’s home, not when he had to smoke and drink in the garage. “I want my own house, Dad.”

“You said you couldn’t afford it, honey.”

“Not that house.” That house had never been mine, either. It had been Eddie’s. I had decorated it. I had filled it with the smells of home cooking and fresh potpourri, but it hadn’t been my dream house. Like the restaurant, that new multilevel house in the suburbs had been Eddie’s dream. I’d always preferred the character of older houses. But would I ever be able to afford one?

“Then what? You want another house?”

“I don’t know.” Maybe I didn’t need a house; a condo, an apartment, anything away from the West Side and my mother.

“Mary Ellen…” The bell dinged above the door, announcing the arrival of another customer. And so my employment from hell continued.

I hadn’t told Dad or Mom yet, but I intended the day before Jesus came back to be my last. I was passing over working at the butcher shop in favor of something, anything else. Not that I’d figured out my dreams…

They say a girl can dream? Not this girl. I can bake cookies, drive daughters to gymnastics and Girl Scouts and decorate a house like nobody else. Now that I had current experience waiting tables and providing customer service in a shop, I’d find another job. I had an interview down at Charlie’s Tavern, and if they didn’t hire me, I could always make Eddie give me back my old job at the restaurant. That was the least support he could provide; I’d certainly make better tips than at the VFW.

Mrs. Klansky returned for more pork chops and to kick me again. She brought photos of Natalie’s six-bedroom contemporary to flaunt in my face. The stark white color scheme inspired nothing in me but a need to grab up a paintbrush.

“So she doesn’t have time to decorate, huh?” I asked as I wrapped the chops, purposely picking out the fattiest ones.

“Well, she’s really busy…” Mrs. Klansky peered at her own photos.

“Can’t afford a decorator then?” What about a pool boy?

Dad snorted beside me, but amusement, not reproach, glittered in his green eyes. He might like the extra sales, but he didn’t like people kicking his little girl.

“All that white is the thing, you know,” she argued, all bluster.

I snorted now. “Ten years ago, maybe.”

“Well, at least she has a—” She stopped herself, not out of sensitivity, but because Dad had lifted his cleaver and sliced neatly through a rack of a lamb. He was the best butcher in town.