NaNoWriMo: Day 24

She had to tell Buckley – but how could she get a hold of Buckley while he was at his mama’s house? Was she going to go over there? They weren’t supposed to see each other again until they met at the mall.

            “Montgomery, Buckley knows about the baby.”

            “What do you mean Buckley knows about the baby?”

            “It’s a long story, but I’ve seen Buckley and he knows everything.”

            “Mom and Dad are going to flip when they find out.”

            “You mean if they find out because you aren’t going to tell them are you?”

            "You won’t hear a word out of me.”

            “That a good girl. Can I borrow your car? I’ve got to go find him.”

            “Who?”

“Buckley!”

“Oh dear Lord, is that who you came down here with? My God! You’ve been shacking

him up there, haven’t you?”

            “It’s not what you think, Montgomery. It’s never what you think. Give me your keys.”

            Montgomery tossed her sister the keys to her car and raised and eyebrow. “Where am I supposed to tell mom and dad you went?”

            “You know what? Why don’t you just come with me? That way you can see for yourself

How things are.

“Fine, let’s go.”

Stella drove Montgomery’s Camaro as fast as she deemed safe to Buckley’s mama’s house. She knew the way by heart, having driven the way so many times before. When they arrived she saw the truck in the yard that had grown more crowded with a random assortment of refuse and junk since the last time she had been there. Buckley’s mama’s collecting problem had truly gotten out of control. There were washers and dryers strewn about the place – used refrigerators and freezers in various stages of disrepair – presumably so in an effort to strip them for metal and copper which could be traded in for scrap money.

  There were piles of squashed cans everywhere waiting to be taken to the depository yet they had not quite made it out of the yard. Cats, dogs, and errant chickens roamed the property wild – looking like they belonged somewhere else entirely. There were cages for some of the animals so the ones that roamed looked as though they had escaped. There were broken cages strewn about waiting to be repaired. The cages were for the cats, dogs, and chickens, but there were also bird cages and the squawking from inside the house signified their presence therein.

Derelict cars rusted along the periphery of the property up on blocks. These vehicles had been purchased with the intention to resell at a higher rate after Buckley fixed them up, but the problem was that Buckley did not care for automobile repair or maintenance at all. Buckley, for the most part was uninterested in things. There were a precious few items he held dear to him. He was keenly aware of the ephemeral nature of most things and therefore saw little point in forming attachments to items. People and relationships were far more precious. Sadly, his mother preferred things to people.

  When Montgomery and Stella approached the house they could smell the birds as much as they could hear them. They could also hear Buckley and his mother yelling at one another.
           “Mama! You can’t keep living like this! It isn’t healthy!”

Montgomery looked at Stella. “You think now is a good time?”

“Well, we’re here.”

  Stella knocked on the door and waited.

Before long Buckley answered the door. When he opened it, Stella cold see that there was barely any room to walk around inside the house behind him for all the junk that was piled up.

“Stella,” Buckley said, quickly stepping out and closing the door. “What are you doing here?”

“I just learned some very interesting things that concern you and I from Montgomery here and I wanted to let you know as soon as possible. I didn’t know how else to get ahold of you, so I came over.”

“What is it?”

“Tell him, Montgomery.”
           Montgomery sighed. “I know who has y’all’s kid.”

Buckley’s eyes grew wide. “How?”

“My mama and daddy told me who adopted her. I know their names and where they live.”

  Stella smiled at him. “Isn’t that great news? Now maybe we can contact them and get to see her?”

“Do you think they’ll let us?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It’s worth a shot though, isn’t it?”

“Stella, I don’t think it’s going to be that simple,” he said, reaching for her hand. “We might have to get a lawyer.

“Why? They’re nice church people. They’ll cooperate.”

“You really think so.”

  “What do you think Montgomery?” Stella asked.

“I have no idea. I have a feeling that when Mama and Daddy figure out what the two of you are up to they are going to lose their damn minds.”
           Buckley’s face clouded. He had had about all he could stand of Stella’s Mama and Daddy interfering with the family he hadn’t even known he’d had.

At that moment, Buckley’s mama called from inside the house.

“Buckley! Who is it?”

“It’s Stella and her sister! You remember Stella?”

“Oh yes! You want to invite her in?”

Buckley looked pained at this suggestion. “No mama, they were just going.”

He turned to Stella. “Look, find out everything you can while you’re here and we’ll talk about this when we meet up at the end of the week. There’s not a lot we’re going to be able to accomplish right now. I have other things that have to be dealt with first.” He then kissed her forehead before sending her away.

Stella was confused. She thought he would have been more excited about the prospect of finally seeing their daughter. What she hadn’t counted on was the state of utter chaos inside Buckley’s mama’s house. He couldn’t give the concept of his daughter his full attention when his mother’s life was very realistically in danger by virtue of the state of her living conditions. She had nothing left inside her house but little pathways to walk in. Every bit of the house was overwhelmed with other people’s things that she had brought home from the yard sales, flea markets, and estate sales. She was sleeping on one quarter of her king sized bed and the very infrastructure of the house was in jeopardy from the sheer volume of stuff that it was containing.

Yet the old woman did not see a problem with any of this. She wanted to hang on to every last bit of it. To get rid of any of it would be to waste something and she couldn’t abide waste. She could bear to think of any of it being thrown away or otherwise not used. She believed if given enough time she could find a home or a use for each and every thing she brought on to the property. Her intentions were good, but as the cliché goes, the road to hell is paved in good intentions. In the meantime, she had no problem living on top of and in amongst the her hoard.

Buckley on the other hand, was appalled. The situation was completely out of control and he didn’t know what he was going to do. He didn’t know what he could do. He wanted to grab a trash bag and start chucking everything in sight but the task was so momentous even he didn’t know where to begin. He suspected this might be her problem as well. She intended to clean it out but it was easier to add to it than to subtract from it.

And now he had this news about his daughter to consider on top of not knowing what to do about his mother. He had not told her that he was a father. She was so out of touch with reality at this point, he doubted that she would even be able to adequately process the news.

Before Stella got there he and his mother had been arguing about cleaning out her bedroom. He felt she should at least have a clean place to sleep. He felt that if she at least had a clean bed to sleep on he would call his week there a victory. Meanwhile, he had no idea where he was going to sleep. His room was so full of things that he could barely get the door open.

Stella decided to give Buckley some grace given that things looked rather dire at his mama’s house and to do as he’d requested and to find out everything she could about their daughter while she was in town. She decided that she would have to tell Montgomery everything about her and Buckley and she was surprised at how supportive her sister was.

  “I always liked Buckley,” Montgomery said. “I always thought he was real nice. He was always real good to you. I thought it was a real shitty thing what mama and daddy did to you when you got pregnant by him. They shoulda done that to me instead, but they don’t make a whole lotta sense, do they?”

“But you like having Jefferson, don’t you?”
           “We both know that I ain’t mama of the year. You and Buckley coulda probably made something work. He’d’a made sure you still went to college. That boy loved you. An’ he ain’t done bad for hisself has he?”

“No, he hasn’t.”

“I think you oughta just marry him already and let mama an’ daddy disown you if they want. I’ll still love you.”

Stella smiled. It heartened her to know that at least one person in her family was on her side.

“So, what do we know about Mr. and Mrs. Campbell?” Stella asked.

“I don’t know a whole lot – I usually just see them at church. Mom and dad don’t really talk to them.”

“And we’re not going to be going to church because I’m not going to be here on Sunday.”

“Well, it’s Vacation Bible School this week.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. You could always see if you could volunteer or something. Maybe you’ll run into Mrs. Campbell or Hope.”

“They kept her name?”

“I think they did.”

Stella and Montgomery did volunteer at Vacation Bible School at the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church starting the next day and lo and behold Hope and her adoptive mother Rebecca Campbell were there. It was everything Stella could do to not run up to the little girl and fling her arms around her neck and run with her all the way back to Buckley. But she was able to restrain herself. Now was not the time.

  The little girl still looked like Buckley, with his black hair, his nose, and his brown eyes. Still there was some of her in the child as well – the angle of her eyes, the shape of her face. This was what she and Buckley had created, and perfect little being with a snaggletooth smile that lit up her entire face. Looking at her, Stella was overwhelmed with love not only for the daughter she hadn’t seen in over four years but also for Buckley. She loved him now in new ways she didn’t know she could love him. She wished he were there with her.
           Rebecca Campbell was an older woman who had never been able to have children. She was a good and attentive mother and as Stella watched her with Hope over the course of the week at VBS, she was met with the realization that she could not in all good consciousness separate this woman from the child that she had come to know as her daughter, no matter how much she wanted to have the child back in her own life.

           

            Meanwhile, Buckley was dealing with the ever daunting task of trying to make his mother’s bedroom habitable all the while thinking about the fact that he could very soon find himself a father. He wondered if Stella would want to be with him after all this. He wondered if his mother would be able to keep her bedroom clean after he cleared it out.

            He moved load after load of junk out of the room over the course of the week in the back of the pickup truck. She insisted on buying a storage unit in town and having him relocate all of the things to it, and he knew in his heart that she would never look at them again. He thought that he might go and clear it all out in a few months when she had had enough time to have forgotten about what was in there.

            He tried to keep the things that were essential to her life in the house for her – clothes, shoes, pills, makeup, lotions, books, but there was so much of all of it that the task was overwhelming for him. He eventually chose to pick one of each item and toss the rest into the back of the pickup and hope he picked the thing that she would like the most. When it came to shoes alone she must have had 300 pairs. He spent the better part of a morning just trying to sort through them all.

            As he worked on getting her room habitable, he wondered when things had gotten this bad. He didn’t remember things being like this when his father was alive. Sure, the old man had kept ashtrays full of screws and parts laying around the house, but the sheer amount of things – unnecessary things – was nothing compared to this.

            He knew that if his father were still alive that he wouldn’t stand for what his mother was doing. It wasn’t right. These things weren’t even hers. Sure, she had bought them, but these things belonged to other people. That was the sick and obscene part of it – she was slowly burying herself in the cast off remnants of other people’s lives.

            Part of Buckley wanted to force her to come back to Putnam County with him so he could keep an eye on her and another part of him knew that was a futile wish. She was going to do exactly as she pleased and no one was going to be able to stop her. He knew in his heart that even his efforts at making her bedroom livable were most likely in vain. But he had to try. He wanted to be a good son, after all. He wasn’t heartless. He did love her. The problem seemed to be that she didn’t love herself.

           

            When Buckley and Stella reconvened at the end of the week, he had very little to say. He was shell shocked from the time he spent with his mother. The things he uncovered in her room once he got to the bottom of the mess in her room were just a little horrifying. While he hadn’t thought her mess was a dirty mess to begin with, his discovery left him to stand corrected as he had found the corpses of several of her birds that had escaped from their cages and died under collapsed piles of debris. They lay there, dessicated from the insects.

            Buckley’s mother didn’t seem to see much of a problem with this discovery.

            “Oh, so that’s what happened to Petey and Pablo!” she had said.

            “That’s what happened to Petey and Pablo . . . ?” Buckley asked, appalled. “You don’t think this is a little bit of a problem?”

            “Well, they were such good birds.”

            Buckley’s hard work did ultimately pay off though. By the time he kissed his mother goodbye, her bedroom was as clean and bright as a page from Better Homes and Gardens. Although he had done an admirable job, he was anxious to be away from the entire situation and to hear what Stella had learned about their daughter.

            As soon as they were on the highway, Buckley asked her to tell him what she knew.

            “She’s gorgeous, Buckley. She looks just like you.”

            “Is she happy.”

            “I think she is.”

            “Do you think that her caregivers –“

            “They’re her parents Buckley.”

            “We are her parents.”
            “Anyway, Do I think her parents will?”

            “Let us be a part of her life?”

            “I like that you phrased it that way.”

            “Well if she’s happy, I can’t see taking her away. But I’d like to be a part of her life somehow. Do you think they’d let us?”

            “I don’t know. When her mother realized who I was she turned as white as a sheet.”

            “Well, you are pretty formidable.”

            “Oh yeah. I’m the terror of the swampland.”

            Buckley smiled.

            “I got a picture of her for you.”

            “Well I can’t look at it now.”

            “I know. I’ll show you when we get home.”

            “I like the sound of that.”

            Stella reached over and put her hand on his. “I missed you, Buckley. There was a huge part of me that hoped you’d come crawling in my window like old times this week.”

            “There was a huge part of me that wanted to. I had to sleep in the bed of the truck.”

            “I’m so sorry about your mama.”

            “It’s alright.” He lied. “Did you enjoy your time with your family?”

            “Not really. It just left me more angry than I was before. Montgomery says I should just marry you and let mama and daddy disown me.”

            Buckley looked at her sideways. “Is that an offer?”

            She smiled at him. Well, we wouldn’t want to overshadow Rhodes’ nuptials, now would we?

            When Buckley and Stella got back to Putnam County, things were different between them. They were no longer roommates. They were lovers with everything that entailed.

            Stella finally let herself get lost in Buckley’s arms and it felt like heaven. She was adrift on a wave of his love and his bed was the only place she wanted to be. It was all she could do to drag herself out of it to make her shifts at Angels. She dreaded the start of school and the knowledge that two jobs would take her from her love for that much longer. But there was also the sweet knowledge that he would be there waiting for her when she got home.

            He was everything she wanted.

            It wasn’t about the sex.
            It was about the way he touched her – with his hands and with his eyes. It was the way he kissed her so gently and the way he treated her like she was made of glass. The way he kissed her in places no one ever thought to kiss – between her shoulderblades, her hips and thighs. He loved and worshipped every bit of her and she did him.

            She loved his hard body, his full, soft lips, and his hands in hers. She loved going to sleep and waking up curled in his arms. She was his. She had always been his. She would always be his. There had never really been any question about it. It was all a matter of her finding the courage to defy her parents which thanks to her sister, she had.