1980
After the baby, I decided to find
my new path in life at community college.
What I found was Patrick.
When it comes to Patrick, I should
have paid more attention to Grandma Elsa’s saying, “If they don’t say hello,
then you don’t have to say goodbye.”
That one always bothered me, because I thought it seemed unfriendly. I couldn’t imagine a world where people shied
away from others, just because they were afraid of caring, or rather because
they were afraid they’d have to get hurt by needing to say goodbye. That sounded to me like it would make for a
lonely life. I’d say that to Grandma and
she’d come back with, “Better to be lonesome than sorry.” Grandma had a saying for everything. Like I said, I should have paid more
attention.
Patrick Stevens was a charmer. He wasn’t necessarily handsome, but the
minute he said hello to you, you thought he was the most appealing man
alive. His looks were average, brown
hair, brown eyes, medium build, medium height, and you wouldn’t notice him in a
crowd. Maybe that’s what got him through
life, that you didn’t notice what he was doing until it was too late. By the time you realized what had happened,
he had slipped into a crowd and become anonymous again. But the residual Patrick left behind was
anything but ordinary, anything but innocuous or anonymous.
I met Patrick in my English Lit
class. He fancied himself a poet and the
first time I took notice of him was when he raised his hand in class to read a
poem out loud. He always sat behind me,
so I hadn’t seen him before that day. I
didn’t look at him even then until he started reading the poem. His voice was so smooth, so emotional that I
couldn’t help taking my eyes off of my poetry anthology to look around at the
person who belonged to that voice.
Patrick’s voice said hello to me first in that poetry reading, and I
felt something stir in me that I hadn’t felt since Billy. It scared me, but it enticed me, too.
I stared at him as he read and kept
looking at him after he had spoken the final word. The class was as enchanted as I was. Everyone was quiet for a long moment,
including the instructor, a middle aged woman who seemed to have no passion for
her work or for the literature we were studying. She broke the spell.
“Thank you, Mr. um,” she looked at
her roster.
“Stevens,” he volunteered. “Patrick Stevens.”
“Yes, well, thank you for a most
heartfelt reading, Mr. Stevens,” she said.
Reluctantly, I turned back to face
the instructor as we started discussing the poem Patrick had read to us. I don’t remember a thing about that
discussion. I only remember feeling like
I had to know Patrick Stevens, and I made up my mind to introduce myself after
class.
We became inseparable. We studied together, ate our meals together,
and before too long we were sleeping together.
And yes, I had learned my lesson and was taking the pill. I’d had enough of unplanned pregnancy. But I was giddy in my infatuation with
Patrick, and I was sure I had found my perfect soul mate.
Mary McCarthy, on the other hand,
didn’t care for Patrick, and she made no effort to mask her displeasure
whenever he entered her house or popped in at Mandala. It started to become a sore point between
us. I felt uncomfortable having Patrick
over, and I definitely didn’t feel right having him spend the night. Patrick lived near campus in an apartment
with three other guys, and I found myself spending more and more time
there.
When I’d come back to Mary’s after
having spent the night with Patrick, I would get a look from Mary that clearly
expressed how she felt. But the way I
felt was, what right did she have to question what I did? She wasn’t my mother,
and I wasn’t accountable to her. I paid
her rent for the room and I worked at her store. Sure, she had helped me out when I really
needed help, but there was no blood tie between us. Things got more and more tense.
One Sunday morning we had it
out. I had come in after spending Friday
and Saturday nights with Patrick, and I went into the kitchen to get a bite to
eat. Mary was sitting at the kitchen
table, reading the paper and drinking her coffee. She looked up at me with a smirk on her face,
the one I’d seen often lately, the one that had replaced her usual beautiful
broad smile.
“Well look what the cat dragged
in,” she said.
“Good morning, Mary,” I said,
opening the refrigerator door and staring inside for something to eat. I thought I was being cheerful and nice, but
for some reason she took offense.
“Don’t good morning me, Missy,” she
said.
“I just said good morning. What’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“If you’re not sleepin’ here, ya
don’t have the right to say good morning,” she said.
That didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t recognize this Mary, and I sure
didn’t like her tone. I couldn’t figure
out what I’d done wrong. I felt like I
was back in Colfax and my father was raking me over the coals. It made me squirm to have that flash of
memory.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What did I do wrong?”
“Oh, forget it,” she said, picking
up her coffee cup and her newspaper and going outside to the patio table to
finish reading the paper.
I stood watching her, wondering
where my Mary had gone. I decided to go
out and apologize for whatever it was I’d done, even though I wasn’t sure an
apology was called for. But as I pulled
the sliding screen door behind me and approached the patio table, she beat me
to the punch.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Me, too,” I replied, hoping we’d
just gotten past our differences and could get our relationship back to the way
it had been before Patrick. She gave me
a long searching look.
“What are ya doin’, Cassie?” she
said. She never called me by my
name. She always called me Hon or
Darlin’, and hearing my name from her lips made me nervous.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“What are ya doin’ with that boy?”
she said.
“I love him,” I said. Saying this out loud surprised me a little,
because up until then I’d told myself I was only having fun, the way girls in
their twenties were supposed to have fun, the way they were supposed to explore
life and enjoy the exploration. Mary
looked at me and shook her head.
“Do ya really?” she said. “Or has he cast a spell on ya? Have ya fallen for his blarney because you’re
lonely?”
“We’re good together,” I said.
“What do ya think he wants from
you?” she said.
“Love,” I said. “I think he loves me, too.”
“Are ya sure?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, I hope you’re right,” she
said. “Just be careful. Boys like that can pull the wool over your
eyes.”
“Patrick would never do that to
me,” I said. “Why do you dislike him so
much?”
Mary looked at me intently,
studying my face as if to see if I were capable of understanding the answer she
was going to give me. I must have come
up short, because she just shrugged. I
wasn’t about to let it go, though.
“No, don’t do that,” I said. “You’ve disliked him from the minute I
brought him in here. That’s
uncomfortable for all of us. If you
think he’s bad for me, then you need to tell me why you feel that way.”
She sat silent, her head down. She stared at her hands clasped together in
her lap, wringing each other.
“Please,” I said.
“It’s just that I know boys like
him,” she began. “A boy like that swept
me off my feet when I was your age. And
that boy took advantage of me and left me with a one-year-old baby to take care
of all by myself. And he didn’t even
look back. He didn’t even say
goodbye. That’s not the worst of it,
either. A boy like that put a spell on
my beautiful daughter, Emma, and he took her away from me and brought her here
and got her on drugs and sold her body to other men, then left her to rot in
the gutter. He went on his way with
another poor young girl who couldn’t resist his charms. Both those boys, who were very much like your
precious Patrick, took chunks out of my soul, and I would just die to see that
happen to you.”
She was fighting back tears by
then. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t see Patrick doing any of the
things she warned me about, but I could understand her point of view.
“He’s not like that,” I said.
“So you think,” she said. “Just you be careful.”
Mary and I had cleared the air a
little, but our relationship was still strained, mostly because I didn’t pay
attention to her warning. I continued to
see Patrick, falling more and more in love with him as the months went by. By the time the school year was over, we were
planning a future together. I was afraid
to tell Mary, but when Patrick asked me to move to Costa Mesa with him and I
said yes, there was no choice but to tell Mary.
It was a gloomy Sunday morning in
June when I dropped my bombshell. Not
only was I moving to Costa Mesa with Patrick, but I was giving up my job at
Mandala. I’d found a secretarial
position with a homebuilder in Costa Mesa, and I was scheduled to start work in
two weeks. I couldn’t delay the inevitable. We were having breakfast at the kitchen table
when I finally found the courage to speak.
“I have something to talk to you
about,” I started tentatively.
“Oh?” she said. She looked nervous, and I suspect she had an
idea this wasn’t going to be good news for her.
I decided I had to just spit it all out – all at once, like ripping a
Band-Aid off as fast as you could to lessen the pain.
“Patrick and I are moving in
together in Costa Mesa. I have a new job
that starts in two weeks, so I’ll be moving out next weekend.” I held my breath waiting for the explosion
from Mary.
“Oh. Is that right?” she said.
“Yes,” I said, still anticipating
fireworks. But she surprised me.
“Fine,” she said. “Good luck to ya.” And just like that she
picked up her breakfast dishes, took them to the sink and started washing them
without another word.
I was stunned. I thought she cared about me. I thought she would at least say she would
miss me. I thought she might try to talk
me out of leaving. But she did none of
that. She just wished me luck in an
unemotional tone, like you’d use with someone who meant nothing to you. It was more like a politeness than an actual
expression of good fortune. I couldn’t
believe it.
“Is that all you have to say?” I
asked.
“What else do you want from me?”
she said, her back to me.
I didn’t know. What had I wanted from her? After everything we’d gone through together,
I wanted more than what she was giving.
But maybe she thought she’d already given enough to me. Maybe she thought she had given more than
enough to me and definitely more than I seemed to willing to take.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, then,” she said, still not
looking at me.
I felt like I was leaving home
again and my mother was stirring the soup and drinking her rum and coke and
telling me not to let the door hit me in the ass on the way out. What had I done to make them treat me like
that?
“Okay, then,” I said to her back
and left the kitchen.
* * * * *
Patrick and I found a tiny little
apartment close to Orange Coast College, where I took some classes, still
working toward my AA and trying to find my passion, like Mary had
suggested. Patrick already knew what his
passion was and he was hard at work pursuing it. He had been accepted at University of
California Irvine and was studying creative writing. He was a poet, yes, but mostly he wanted to
be a screenwriter. He already had six
screenplays completed and was shopping them around. He worked at a bookstore near campus and I
had my new job as an escrow secretary for Monterey Homes. We settled into a routine, and for a while it
was good.
Once again I discovered I was good
at my job, something that always seemed to surprise me about myself. I don’t know why I doubted that I could excel
at whatever I tried, but I did. I worked
hard to learn all the ins and outs of escrow, and I found out I was good with
numbers. That was another revelation,
because I had thought I was hopeless with math.
It turns out I just hadn’t tried very hard before. I gained confidence in my abilities and
before long I was a star in the Monterey Homes escrow department. I put in long hours and my paycheck got
fatter because of it.
When Patrick said he needed to
spend more time working on his screenplays and his homework, I suggested he
quit his job. By then I was making a
good salary for someone my age, and I could cover the expenses, if we didn’t go
overboard with the spending. I figured
it would be good for us both in the long run if Patrick could concentrate on
his writing and his college degree. I
didn’t have to twist Patrick’s arm to get him to agree, which in retrospect
should have been a red flag for me. But
it wasn’t. He quit his job the next day
and I became the sole provider for us.
I can’t put my finger on when
exactly it all started to go wrong.
There were little things that started happening, things I’d see as an
annoyance, as petty and wouldn’t think much about – like thinking I had sixty
dollars in my wallet instead of the forty that were there, or like having a
mysterious fifty dollar charge on my credit card from a place I’d never heard
of, like getting phone calls at all hours of the night and having the person
hang up when I answered. I didn’t add it
all up. I wasn’t careful, like Mary had
suggested I be.
And Patrick was becoming less
interested in sex. That alone should
have alerted me that something was wrong.
He’d never been able to get enough of me. I told myself he was under pressure to get
his script completed for his screenwriting class. I made excuses for him that finals were only
a couple of weeks away and he had to spend all his energy on studying. I was so full of excuses for him that he
didn’t ever have to make any for himself.
It all hit at once, just before
Christmas. I wrote a check for one
hundred dollars to pay for Patrick’s Christmas present and it bounced. I had never come up short in my checking
account, so I was beside myself. I hated
to make mistakes, especially with money.
When I called the bank from work, a condescending woman told me that I
never should have written that check when I’d written one for five hundred
fifty dollars the day before that had left me with only ten dollars.
“What?” I said. “I never wrote a check for five hundred fifty
dollars.”
“Well, I have it right here,” she
said. “You wrote it to a Patrick Stevens
and he cashed it here at the bank.”
My heart stopped.
“I wrote a check to Patrick?” I
said.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s your preprinted check and your
signature.”
I felt like I was going to throw
up. My cheeks were hot and people in the
office were staring at me. The world
started spinning.
“I didn’t write that check,” I
said.
“Well, it’s been cashed, so there’s
nothing I can do about it,” she said.
“If you think someone forged your signature, you can file a complaint,
but the money is gone.”
I hung up and sat at my desk,
cheeks and eyes burning, my heart racing, bile in my throat. It was three in the afternoon, but I made an
excuse to my boss that I didn’t feel well and I left the office. When I got home, the apartment was unusually
quiet. I’d gotten used to Patrick’s
noises, the clack of the typewriter and the jazz music he always played, so without
those sounds the place seemed empty. And
it was empty – of Patrick’s belongings.
He’d cleared out everything he owned and half of my things, too, along
with my bank account. The television was
gone, as was the stereo system, the diamond necklace Mary had given me after
the baby was born and every small appliance we owned. I assumed he’d pawned all of that to get cash
for whatever he needed it for. I later
discovered he’d used my credit card to pay for a plane ticket to New York and
dinner at an expensive restaurant two weeks before. He left without any explanation, without even
a goodbye. So, Grandma, I didn’t have to
say goodbye after all.
Mary was right about Patrick. I hadn’t been able to see him through her
eyes, and it had cost me dearly. Not
only had I lost a good deal of money, but I’d lost my heart and I’d lost
Mary. The price of hearing Patrick say
hello had been very high indeed.
