Let Michael Come

A mother knows her children and Momma MacKay knew Larry. Though it wasn’t his night to do dishes, Larry traded with his brother, so she knew he wanted some time alone with her. Of all her boys, Larry was the one that most needed to talk, but the one that was the least forthcoming. A closed boy, Larry would wait until she pressed him before he’d reveal anything. Like oil, his father used to say, you have to drill to find Larry. Momma made the effort. She picked and poked until she got him to say he’d asked a friend to stay for the weekend.

“I’ve got a friend at school, Momma. His name’s Mike — Michael. I asked him to come this weekend, and he said yes.”

“That’s fine,” Momma said. She tore off a length of wax paper to cover the leftover casserole. “Tell me all about Michael.”

“He’s a nice person. The nicest you’ll ever meet. And he’s polite.”

“I’m sure he is. That’s good. He’s in your grade?”

“Yeah. We have most all the same classes.” Larry kept his eyes down, looking only at the pan he diligently scrubbed with a frayed S.O.S pad. “He’s smart. The smartest kid I ever knew.”

“So you’re good friends?”

“Very good. From the first day.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Momma. Nothing’s wrong.”

“I can hear you not saying something, Larry. What is it? He picks his nose? He eats paste?”

“Nothing’s wrong with him, Momma. He’s good people,” Larry said. “Besides, they don’t give us paste in high school.”

“Ahh, then — a nose-picker.”

“No. It’s just that there’s trouble at his house.” Larry retired the steel wool to its jar-lid cradle.

“What sort of trouble?”

“His parents, Momma. Mike thinks they’re breaking up.” Rinsing the pan and turning it upside down to dry, Larry said “There, I guess that’s it.”

“Breaking up? A divorce?”

“Maybe,” Larry said, drying his hands on a dish-towel. “Anyway, Momma, it’s not his fault.”

“I know, son. I wouldn’t think it was.”

“When Mike’s here,” he paused, “you won’t ask him about it, will you?”

“No, Larry, I won’t bring it up. If he’s talking to you, that’s good enough. Mind you, he needs his friend right now.”

“I kinda thought so, but I don’t know what to say to him.”

“Then just listen. Good idea you asked him here. Maybe take his mind off it.”

Esmeralda Flynn — Momma to her sons, Essie to a small circle of church ladies — remained Mrs. MacKay to the world at large. Although Robert had been dead five years, Essie still styled herself as a married woman. She and Robert genuinely liked each other; they’d been good friends. Theirs had been a rock-solid union until ripped asunder by a runaway log-truck ramming into Robert’s Ford at a Lufkin intersection.

Passion mated most people. Essie understood that, but she didn’t think passion alone made a steady marriage. She likened it to a brushfire: intense heat in the short-term but, by consuming the very tinder on which it thrived, it soon burnt out. Once passion is sated, she wondered, what remains? Say you crave ice cream and have a sundae. The craving’s gone, it’s over with. A steady diet of ice cream morning, noon, and night, and you’d soon founder on the stuff. You’d set ice cream aside then, wouldn’t you? Divorce it, so to speak.

As Essie saw it, that’s about as far as passion alone would carry a couple — just till the ice cream melts. Which is not to say she and Robert didn’t enjoy passion. The hours they’d spent locked together in passion were glowing embers in her memory. But sexual relations alone couldn’t have made their marriage dear. They’d also had a spiritual closeness — shared laughter, shared hopes, a foundation of friendship. There, she thought, a rock-solid friendship lasts forever.

“Just remember this:” she told Larry, “friendship transcends all.” She reached into the cupboard and took out a saucer with a half-dozen Congo Squares she’d squirreled away. “Get some milk, would you,” she said on her way to the table.

“Not a good hiding place, Momma. They look there too.”

“How well I know. Marauding horde, your brothers.”

“We know all your hiding places.”

“That’s why I can’t count on these being there tomorrow. Let’s have ‘em now.”

For their impromptu discussion of divorce, Essie invoked her late Aunt Belle — Clarabelle — the first divorcee Essie had ever known of. She said “My mother’s sister — your great aunt — tried on three hats before she found one that suited her.”

Twice divorced, Belle had started life as Miss Mundy, became Mrs. Southwick, then Mrs. Arthur, finally finishing life as Mrs. Franklin. Momma said “Aunt Belle tossed away two husbands, before settling on your Uncle Ben.”

“Ben Franklin,” Larry smiled.

Momma said “I suppose his parents just couldn’t resist the temptation.”

Ben’s name was a running joke. The MacKay boys had fun boasting that Ben Franklin was their great uncle. People rarely believed them, but not for the obvious reason: Ben Franklin, the one with the kite, would have to be about two hundred years old to be anybody’s great uncle in the 20th Century.

Uncle Ben — Benjamin Omar Franklin — died long before Larry was born, but Larry’s father liked the name Omar, so perpetuated it as Larry’s middle name. Omar had its advantages, being easy to say and easy to spell. Also, it put a vowel in Larry’s initials — an issue of importance to his father. Every MacKay boy had a vowel in the middle.

On the downside, whenever Larry’s brothers chose to bedevil him, they’d use his initials, LOM, pointedly calling him Lum — of Lum and Abner fame — which was way too countrified for Larry. He hated it. That’s the whole point, Lum, his brother Donny — Donald Everett — would say.

Momma said “Back then people didn’t talk about divorce. Whispered, a bit. It didn’t happen in “good” families. Aunt Belle was a scandal — the notorious Black Sheep of the Mundys. My mother said nothing, of course; Clarabelle was her big sister, after all.”

“Grandma?”

“Yes. My mother. Oh, she objected to it, but that was when she had to buy a new Bible twice. She wrote all the marriages and births in our big Bible, but didn’t want anyone to see all Belle’s scratched out husbands with new names written in. Daddy pointed out that she could have used a pencil for Belle.”

Picking at a splinter from the steel wool pad, Larry asked his mother “It’s against the Bible, isn’t it?”

Essie sat back. She thought. Presently. she said “Maybe. I don’t know that I’ve read enough to say for sure. I’d imagine divorce has been around as long as marriage. Maybe some people have to fall back and regroup, you know.”

“Maybe it’s not always bad?” Larry wondered.

“Maybe. Divorce isn’t ideal, but it’s the best thing for some folks. Take little Howie, for instance. His dad dumped him and his mother on the church steps like a litter of kittens and drove away. You can’t say Howie and his momma would have been better off with a man like that.”

•••

Thursday evening the Methodist choir rehearsed with full musical accompaniment. Essie played organ. During a break, she saw Reverend Hayes and posed questions about divorce. He gave her the standard issue pamphlets, jotted down some scriptural references and, as an afterthought, loaned her his copy of Vincent’s 1957 Readings in Marriage Counseling.

“When the boys were younger,” she commented, “teaching them to be honest seemed to be enough. Things weren’t so… grown up.”

Reverend Hayes smiled. “Fortify yourself, Mrs. MacKay. You’ve still got… what? another decade of teenage years ahead of you?.”

“Well, aren’t you a ray of light.”

“Believe you me, the ’60s may see a whole new dimension added to the term ‘flaming youth’.”

She sighed. “I guess it was just as difficult for our parents, Reverend.”

“Not difficult at all. I was an angelic child, as were you, Mrs. MacKay. Our folks simply had to wish away a few small imperfections.”

“I take it then, Reverend Hayes, you never sparked a girl?”

“I did, Mrs. MacKay. Lisall Prescott, whom I took riding in a Model T that I liberated without my father’s permission. It wasn’t funny at the time, but he had a good laugh some years later — when I told him I wanted to go into the ministry.”