Chapter Nine – The Debt of Dutch Doors

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Chapter Nine – The Debt of Dutch Doors

273

The Baker’s and Hingle’s had Thanksgiving at Ashley’s parent’s undamaged home.  Ashley and I remained the magnetic core.  X cradled the boom.  Others cooked turkey, oyster dressing, yams, and venison; I made the prayer.

Thanksgiving– 2006, Platitudes of thanks skip on the surface of the flood, the hands we hold purge the water and give substance to our gratitude to feel the wrinkled skin grasp back pruned.  We find solace in the softness of the palms of our family and the patience of God.  The clarity of clouds parts with time to soak in the treasures staring back in our circle.  We give thanks.  Amen

The storm perpetually lurked in me.  Maybe for others, it was preferable to not discuss.  It was hard to pray as a family and not have Katrina on the tablecloth.  Sometimes I fell into the belly of asking God why.  Why am I here in this country-purgatory waiting on something as trivial as the sale of a house? 

The shell was fixed.  The realtor garnered zero offers in a year.  Ashley never wanted to talk about the house.  The realtor, the repairs, the whole cluster elephant hill; was on me.

One of my cousins asked my mother, “Is that Ethan’s new Ram Hemi pickup truck outside?”  My mother spontaneously laughed as if I was a Nottoway pickup-truck man.  Haulers of carcasses, mud riding, lumber, hydraulic pumps: I was an IBM man.

When we were praying in our circle, on her turn to say what she was thankful for, my Aunt Audrey came out of the closet.  The silent family already knew.  For typical reasons the ease of comfort to let air escape such potential-Hindenburgs was never afforded the veiled-walrus.  I was happy we could quit hearing the words, “this is my friend,” at family gatherings spoken with such emphasis like a line of demarcation about women with Brilo-pad-mullet haircuts who drove Ram pick-up trucks. 

I gave Audrey a genuine hug.  I related to a homosexual construct.  My heterosexuality was never a mathematical proofed compulsion, bent on a mandate.  I was always into women.  My best friend in high school was into men.  I have known a few bisexual people.  I never prayed to be straight.  Mid 70’s gay AIDS holocaust, seeing the world through a queer lens, no different than being left handed, there is an evolutionary reason homosexuality exists, it betters our humanity; human love has to persevere many filters. 

For whatever we are, I bless all willing and age of consent romances and lusts.  As Andre Williams said at the Vera Club, “If I had gone into Afghanistan everybody would have been having sex, there would not be, no guns, I am dead serious. I am a firm believer of sex.”  NOFX sang, “There is no fun in fundamentalism.”

I am nothing but a man laughing at all of us bent over in bedrooms, penises, anuses and clitorises gyrating for whatever this is.  Afraid to say what we do everyday; alone or with a friend or a couple we met at bible study, behind a hijab or at hookah bar.  Rub, suck, fuck, lick, hold embrace and make this world bearable and rational, sustainable and chaotic in the touch of not being stranded with nothing to do with these robotic bones and skulls.  Connect with these frail, mutinous bodies we borrow in the immediate and the eternal.

I could see what was going through Hilton’s head from across the room.  Some of Ashley’s relatives did not know what to make of it.  Hilton flipped at the gall that this was happening in his home.  The consternation and condemnation focused its scope on me.  This lesbian fashion show was my fault, my being here within his urine-painted border.  Hilton never addressed it with me, but he gave me this “I would punch your teeth out if you still had them son” look. 

274

For Christmas I got Ashley a diamond pendant.  Ashley has only worn the necklace twice.  Ashley wore her daddy’s hanging diamond cross every hour of everyday.  Hilton gave the constant to Ashley for her first communion.  The perpendicular lines were a permanent image.  Even when we were lying naked in bed, post-coital, the cross encircled Ashley’s nape.  The cross was like Hilton’s fingerprint over Ashley’s breathing.  No matter how close we came, her father’s golden-rope of a faith Hilton did not even follow was present.

Penelope had Santa Claus and twenty wrapped gifts from Hilton and Lacey.  There was no sequestered space.  There was no window for Penelope to see which gifts were from her parents.  Divisions blurred. 

Oma picked Penelope up from school and held court each afternoon.  I brought Penelope in the mornings.  Every ride we sang, “Here we go to school today, school today, school today.  Here we go to school today.  We’re going to laugh and play.”  I went to work for nine hours.  We all returned to the same house.

275

My job was an arena of Sage Francis’ small-town mentality types.  In my office I felt like I had no generation.  The walls were coated in burnt-orange wood-paneling and rotary club gavels from the 1980’s.  The Nottoway dairy festival must have been epic in 1983.  The poster hung above the commode.  The conference room was a trophy-case of stuffed deer heads with bragging antler-racks.  Voice mail was a seventy-two year old receptionist or a never-ending story of a ring. 

I was fearful of the NASCAR of it all.  In time I might petrify to a desire to head to Talladega like the rest of this flavor of the American South.  I could hypnotize on tin-wheeled Nabisco-Pfizer-Burger King adorned metal carcasses bickering in circles. 

I worked in a world of people twenty-years older.  The few twenty-five years younger in my supposed age, I did not speak their language either.  I was in a worm hole; an Indian town transport into a land of the lost.  I bartered with Pakuni and dodged the Sleestak disguised as LSU-fan redneck taxidermy enthusiasts. 

One afternoon the gray-haired receptionist locked the front door and warned me there was a drunken nigger in the parking lot.  Another, she eyed the window, “Oh look at the jungle people,” as a high school bus was parked by the Wendy’s.  Where the fuck was I?  Does she wear a matching rebel flag bra and panty set under that gray-haired granny Caucasian afro?  How many relatives has she had in the KKK?  Rick Marshall, Richard Alpert, Mohandas, Linus, Daniel Faraday, Sawyer, Malcolm, Sayid, Jack, Locke, Hurley, where are you to help get me out of here?  Get on that donkey wheel!

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I worked on audits and compilations of towns and utility districts.  This was taxpayer money pocket-change in the full wallet of “who needs cash, we can swipe” America.  My boss was an absentee landlord sort of auditor.  Henry Huckabee was more a tax CPA.  He grew up with green ledger pads and was now estranged by software.  Henry did know IRS negotiation tactics and codes like whitetail deer rut rituals, just don’t give him a keyboard.

I had Derrick a two-and-a-half decade older Coke-bottle spectacled manager, but we were really on our own.  Derrick was slow-tempered, methodical and diligent in the idiosyncratic bureaucracies of our clients.  Even though we agreed many governmental assurances were bullshit, we still had to shovel the manure. 

Derrick frequently went off on standard medical appointments.  Derrick was nearing sixty in America: eye doctor for blurred vision, ear doctor for equilibrium issues, and the occasional virus.  Derrick was like a midlife Aborigine always going walk-about to Walgreens for a drug fix, McDonalds or some general store supplier.  Sometimes the guy just had to take a break, stare off into the distance and hum a Woody Guthrie tune.  Derrick had no hope of being able to afford retirement.  Derrick had no out-of-office healthcare bridge, a retired no-insurance wife and a subsidized son’s law school debt to pay down.

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Derrick helped me learn the ways of rural utility systems and rural housing assistance programs.  It was like being back at Stam and Jenkins again except this time I had at least one competent compatriot.  All this ancillary knowledge kept switching back and forth.  Public companies to public entities; stock equity to taxpayer-funded compensated absences; it was a rich-man, poor-man’s seesaw of counting somebody else’s mess. 

Water systems are a microcosm of our pay-for-service sector of our government.  The more efficiently and effectively the water districts operate the less money the U.S.D.A. provides.  Inverse logic reprimands the efficacies of the sage and prudent stewards and rewards the inefficacy of the destitute.  Government is mutated backwards in de-evolution of our progress when we abandon measures of reasonable expectation. 

We fail because no one wants to analyze common governmental entities and take out the bullshit political games or to determine measures of best practice and reward those that conserve rather than waste taxpayer resources.  This very element would have to change for a universal healthcare system to work effectively as well.

Right now budgets incentivize maximum spending.  Budgets demand every available morsel is consumed.  Yes, the fat-whale-looking fuck eats ten hamburgers and 3,000 French fries.  Let’s give him the extra filet instead of the salad-girl.  The girl who only ate one rib must clearly be full.  Help me Chris Rock!

I started to see the varicose veins of our federal debt.  How many bonds can we underwrite, consultants, projects?  How much debt is enough?  Who are we borrowing from?  How many citizens of Generation X are paying for the generosity of the future to the present?  How long before our culpability?  How many retirees figure they’ll be dead by the time the bill comes due financing the bullets to gamble playing Russian roulette? 

I only understand a fraction of the issues, but I understand enough that three-decade old me and six-decade old Derrick, both thought things needed to change based on what we saw cycle through the washing machine.  I typed in my American Manifesto blog.  I guess George Bush was at church putting I.O.U.’s in the collection basket and too busy to find the URL.

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Derrick and I saw the same patterns over and over.  Derrick was older and more complacent working for Mr. Huckabee for over twenty-five years.  I felt like my government basically could not build a fucking wall to block water properly.  My city was in ruins with a school system my mother could no longer work at.  I could not sell my house in part because the housing market was all fucked up.  I may end up working into my eighties like Derrick because retirement was logistically impossible.  I had no idea what my future was going to be working in this one-firm town.  I love my country and fuck throwing my hands up and letting her die, I was at least going to try to save her with what I had to offer: accounting and a heart.

Everyday I went to work and saw my clients having three people doing one eight-hour day’s worth of work at jobs with tons of vacation, guaranteed retirement and health insurance.  I was living with my God-damn in-laws.  But who am I to complain?  I could have moved.  I could have done something else.  I was blessed to have options.  I was born into first-world America.  I could afford to evacuate a hurricane, to rebuild, to eat.  I had serviceable limbs and time.  That is the number one thing that I thank God for when I pray; my options.

279

We did not rent a house in Nottoway because of the totality of what Ashley wanted.  The storm, moving; the journey back from Dallas was more emergency management remediation.  Ashley wanted home.  Lacey sling-shot my ass in front of Mr. Huckabee.  Ashley wanted to be by her parents.  I wanted Ashley to be happy.  Ashley never even asked if I was ok with moving in; it was assumed in the Willie Wonka fine print.

We were not living in some matchstick-constructed skeleton frame of a flooded-out home battling with the city for permits.  Our house was like the guy waiting in the emergency room with the broken arm that would heal in a sling.  So many others were the slugs in the chest immediate to the gurney gun-shot victims: Chalmette, Lakeview, the East, and Gulfport.  These were the people with the right to say shit. 

Not us, we would be fine.  We were lucky.  I do not have a right to bitch about a God-damn thing.  I was not in a tin-can microwave apartment or Formaldehyde-FEMA trailer.  I was building this house more fortunate than most with sound health and a family who loved me.  I was not in Haitian squalor or a Chinese Foxconn factory.  I was not better, just better off.  I had in-laws and an income and a work ethic to make due.  Thank God. 

280

Ashley sketched plans.  The price tag was not small nor finished tabulating.  The price of the house did not seem to correlate with the sacrifices necessary to achieve the home’s construction inside of Ashley’s head.  I made this assumption that because Ashley was a CPA, because Ashley handled our marital finances that she understood the connection.

The house was going to be on an acre lot in the nicest neighborhood in the parish with four-thousand square foot onlookers.  My life was an all-in poker game.  Money was not mine anymore.  My hypocritical views of mortgage debt were about to start cackling in my face and kicking at the rest of my real teeth.  One bank held my Katrina house hostage.  I was in Hilton’s house starting an affair with a new financial institution to fund the construction of Ashley’s white-planked porch and two-story Antebellum-Barbie castle.  Our Tulane debts were riding shotgun.

Time was going long.  By early 2007, Ashley got in touch with a local house plan drawer, which is what you call a Nottoway “architect,” who operated out of her kitchen.  Friends help friends.  I remember Ashley looked at the drawings.  Ashley thought the porch was not big enough.  Ashley motioned over the blueprints like an iPad.  Ashley stretched out the whole house with her thumb and index finger.  The porch was supersized to 1,400 square feet of raised “run all the way around in the rain without getting wet” Southern-charm.  Inside was another 5,000; some how in the matter of minutes the train had left.  I was becoming one of those Americans.  Fuck!

That is why we were in Nottoway.  My wife did not want a Mercedes or Versace wardrobe.  Ashley did not drink or gamble.  Ashley was otherwise frugal and universally kind.  The Fed kept lowering interest rates.  Ashley wanted this porch to be the wooden arms to hug the house our children would grow up in.  I wanted to help give her that.  We would grow gray-haired sipping sweet tea, clenching hands in rocking chairs watching our grandchildren play.

I only had a ballpark on the price. I knew being out of Dallas, living with Ashley’s parents in the interim while we were building was a more financially conservative path.  The house seemed to make Ashley happy.  The girl had the town, why not the porch?

281

In January of 2007, I fired our realtor and interviewed fresh candidates.  We got one offer on the Katrina house and took it in March.  Driving back to Nottoway from the closing in April, Ashley and I laughed hysterically that the house, the wicked once-a-dream, claw from the grave, spore-faced zombie of a house was ding-dong gone! 

We guffawed at our ability to trade our misfortune of beans.  That house haunted me so many nights.  I was liberated by shedding that mortgage stitched into our skin.  We went out to dinner at O’Malley’s, the only white-tablecloth restaurant in town.  We drank wine and fucked like Brazilian monkeys discovering a hidden passion fruit tree.

282

Building plans were in full swing.  Ashley had found this guy Scott Wixson she grew up with, who built custom homes.  Scott was a six-foot-four buzz-cut Bradley Cooper look a like, married with a newborn son.  Nottoway was not the kind of place you found service providers on the internet.  Hell, Ashley worked for a homebuilder and we could not even use them because of the custom porch. 

Nottoway was the kind of place you flipped through your rolodex of six-degrees of Kevin Bacon-style of who you or your daddy knows and hope you come up with the Footloose Kevin Bacon and not the Woodsman version.  Scott came in stiff-jawed with five o’clock shadow-country and an “I can swing a hammer grip.”  Scott gave Ms. Lacey a big hug and an “I remember your daughter from high school” kiss on the cheek.  Lacey gave him back an “if I was twenty years younger I would fuck your brains out and then marry you off to my daughter instead of this schlep” swoon of a look.  Scott was GQ-country pickup-truck enough.  I was a city-mouse accountant with a writing addiction.

Scott, Lacey, Ashley, and I sat at Hilton’s kitchen table and went over papers.  We had a loose-leaf cost outline based on the plans we bought.  The list of categories included foundation, concrete, lumber, windows, closets, cabinets, countertops, plumbing, air conditioning, electrical, insulation, roofing, bricks, siding, sheetrock, painting, flooring, wood, tile, carpentry and framing, and finally sixty grand of Scott’s supervision.  The circus was finally in town and poured a four-foot slab center ring to raise the house with a second ring ground-level slab to raise Ashley’s triumvirate of a porch. 

283

Several weeks in, two and half year old Penelope, Ashley and I walked up on the upper slab, with plumbing sticking skyward.  Ashley marveled at how small the slab looked.  My head almost flipped as if the structural reality of this space was lost on just how big this house actually was going to be compared to Ashley’s perceptions. 

Were the realities of this world so warped in this Nottoway land?  Was there a red sun shining on this Superman-spot in the universe?  Was the woman I married forced to revert to her younger weaker self incapable of accountancy of such computations? 

I laughed the disparity off.  I played with Penelope blocking out the glare of the yellow orb in the sky with my left hand to shield Penelope’s vision.  I crouched down and pointed with my right hand to a spot in the sky that would be Penelope’s second floor bedroom floating above her mother and father.  I lurched while Ashley and Penelope skipped back the block-and-a-half distance.  We exited where our future backyard ended, past the little league baseball field and into the front door of Hilton Hingle’s manor.

284

Ashley was not happy in her job at the homebuilder company.  Her boss’ alcoholism was affecting the business.  Ashley wanted to close her eyes and maintain that tango.  The builder’s finite number of lots to sell had yet to be depleted.  I encouraged Ashley to explore alternative positions.  Ashley was better than some unreliable asshole taking advantage of her talents.  Ashley encouraged me to leave Stam and Jenkins.  I was returning the favor. 

I helped Ashley with her resume, but in true Nottoway fashion an old friend was there to provide.  Pierce Townes Winfield was the son of Mr. Logan Townes Winfield.  Pierce was two years older than Ashley.  Ashley knew Pierce from the years her college-self tried to number-two-pencil-erase over her high school Sharpie-marks.

The Winfield’s were Nottoway royalty on the economic side of the campfire pit.  Mr. Winfield was a self-made man specializing in selling commercial janitorial services for a national franchiser.  Logan spent his adult youth strung across the country with a cigar and Glenlivet wit meeting and then un-meeting Pierce and his sister Barb’s mother on the altar and in the courtroom.  Mr. Winfield was now remarried and running the Southeast United States headquarters of this national franchiser out of his hometown.  Nottoway was preferable to New Orleans.  Logan headquartered operations at the corner of Main Street and the railroad.  This prime real estate was the Nottoway equivalent of Time’s Square, right across from the town alligator.

Ashley and I prepped for her interview for the controller spot.  Ashley shot straight, asked for the number she wanted and told Mr. Winfield she was worth every penny.  Logan laughed at Ashley’s lipstick camouflage and then gave Ashley the job the next day.  Ashley showed balls.  Mr. Winfield respected habitas testicas.  Logan operated with a fraternity row slap on the back, shot in the glass, and cigar in the mouth. 

Ashley was the most intelligent and highly qualified corporate-voice Logan’s company had ever had access.  With in weeks Ashley was turning the company around.  I helped Ashley compile financial statements.  Ashley cleaned up the junk left over from Ricky Brico the City of Nottoway’s old controller who went to work there based on the six-degrees principle of hiring.   

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We were living with Ashley’s parents.  The finish line was being built down the street.  Ashley was becoming more involved in the Nottoway community.  Ashley joined the Nottoway chapter of Rotary International.  Tracer Robertson sponsored her.  Her childhood triad of Tracer Robertson, Ben Bastion and now Ashley Baker were back together.  Ben worked across the street from Ashley’s office selling insurance. 

In the summer of 2007, there was an election to fill the empty seat of the police chief.  The chief died of a heart attack at forty-two.  The old chief was driving with his window down and veered off the road into a pine tree. 

Tracer Robertson’s brother Clay was an officer for the Nottoway police department and put his Robertson name on the ballot.  Clay and Tracer were the two little-piggy’s piggy-backing off their lineage.  Clay was running for police chief.  Tracer was getting his feet wet with his public law practice.  The Robertson’s were good honest people; folks is folks kind of folks.  Hell, Huckabee did the Robertson’s taxes.

I remember Jeffery telling me how much of an ass Clay was from growing up, but that name was a powerful and dangerous heavy bat to swing in Nottoway.  Officer Clay pulled Jeffrey over one time on Jeffery’s Smoking Joe Camel motorcycle his parents bought him.  Jeffery could smell abuses of authority like unsold Roman fish.

Tracer, Ashley and Ben went on to run Clay’s campaign.  Ashley crunched the numbers.  Tracer got out the vote.  I guess Ben was the gopher.

286

Penelope had a Thomas the Train third birthday party with a rented drive-in-the-street train on inflatable wheels.  We rode around the block during the summer.  Clay took office in the fall.  Our house was framed.  The porch puzzle pieces were being sorted. 

Ashley and I selected fixtures and fittings, floor boards and marble. The house was beautiful, far too big for my tastes, but Ashley was making more money than I was now.  What else were we going to spend the money on?  We lived in this little “might as well be a state away from New Orleans and a continent away from New York” town.  We had each other, country air and our Spanish pipedream.

Ashley and I went to St. Mark’s church together every week.  The church finished building its new chapel just a bit bigger than our house, three blocks away.  The church knocked down the old town mansion to make room for the new building. 

Pamela the singer from Mater de la Rosa from our wedding relocated to Nottoway as well.  So every week we got to hear Pamela sing in her operatic-style.  Pamela saved the Latin for Holy Week and Christmas.  Every Sunday morning we went hand in hand, side by side with Penelope as the peanut butter between us.  As Penelope was a bit older, I tried to transition Penelope to sit next to us instead of between us, but Ashley would always pick Penelope up to the point of prompting unrequested elevations. 

287

I prayed for God to grant me the patience to get through the building and construction.  The house was going into year two of post Katrina.  I yearned to lay my head on my own pillow under my own roof, paid for with our money to fluff away the chaos.  I felt castrated staying with Ashley’s father as if my nuts were in the storage unit down the road with my mattress.  I had to wait for the house to be finished like a dog heeled in position of ignominy obedient to my master. 

On my own mattress I could fuck as loud as I wanted.  In my own walls I could play music on my own stereo.  I could blare the Clash, Andre Williams; or sit down to dinner with Miles Davis.  I could cook something other than pork chops and mashed potatoes.  Cilantro, feta cheese, and spinach vinaigrettes could have an emulsion reunion.  I could park my car and not be in some Hingle’s spot.  Penelope could bath somewhere other than Oma’s bathtub.  House rules could be housed.

Until then I had to pretend to be as Republican and as Hingle as possible to blend.  How do you tell a man like Hilton you voted for Al Gore, when he has Fox news on every night for two hours after Limbaugh work-radio airplay?  I guess by voting for W the second time and getting Hilton a picture of Bush on a can of Whoop Ass for Christmas.  Repression was futile.  Maybe I should have shot something and stuffed it.

I would give the moments to God.  Many people were not as fortunate to even rebuild a home, let alone this monstrosity of gables and dormers.  All I had to do was wait it out.  We had not even been able to entertain the notion of getting our own place, because we were always on this mezzanine. 

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In the late summer Ashley and I took a little trip to San Antonio.  It was the first time Ashley and I had done anything for just us in so long.  Ashley and I had margaritas and a bed out of squeaking distance.  Ashley insisted on going to the wax museum and took a picture next to the George W. Bush’s figure.  I was looking for Charles Bukowski, but his figure must have been posed passed out next to the toilet.  We got drunk and spent the afternoons in bed with the sun-tilted rays glaring through the third story window. 

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In the fall Penelope started back at the Montessori school.  Ashley volunteered for everything.  Ashley darted over from her new job whether it was for story time or to bring a gift to the teachers.  Ashley helped organize a school fund raiser with the parent’s association.  We won dance lessons at one of the other parent’s dance studio in a raffle.

We had three lessons in the basics of the foxtrot, the two-step, and the waltz.  Our instructor was patient and watchful.  Ashley was focused on being a pupil.  Her old habitual pursuits for approval surfaced.  Our instructor would point and scoot and remind Ashley to allow me to lead.  The woman had a functional disability to acknowledge the lack of eyes in the back of her head and trust in my gaze across the dance floor. 

On the third lesson, Ashley yelled at me, frustrated and angry that I was not presenting the impression or attitude of a graceful Nottoway gentlemen escorting a fair debutante across the parquet.  The reality was we got in an argument before we rushed off and left to go with a million house and Penelope strings left untied. 

Ashley did not want to talk.  Ashley wanted to mascara on a happy face and get a groove in-step.  My functions do not work on a segregated basis between external and internal surfaces.  I am mono-surface.  We drove back to Ashley’s parent’s house with Ashley not saying a word.  I guess I should be glad Ashley at least stayed in the vehicle.

When we got in arguments like that Ashley focused on my happiness.  “Are you happy?  I need you to be happy.”  Her doubts were carrion feeders frothing rabid even in spring.  These computational logistics to get Nottoway life to a roofed-fruition were problematic to Ashley if my outsides did not validate the investment with the correct angled smile.  Ashley could pull out a retinal protractor and pin-prick the apex of my grin with her iris and swing the gape down to the nadir of my lowest lip to calculate the degree of my publically advertised joy as a billboard justification for her own married existence. 

I was me, a man of insides, a cactus.  Most of my forays in lobbying as someone else went to tolerate cohabitation with Ashley’s gene donors.  At least I could be myself with Ashley in our little cubbyhole black and white upstairs bedroom.  Fuck appearances.

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Thanksgiving came.  I was out training with Henry Huckabee in Lafayette for the state Governmental Auditing Conference.  Yes, it was as kickass as you can imagine.  Yes, Henry did request we ride together.  He blindsided me by booking us to share a room to save his money.  Henry said it was like staying at the hunting lodge.  At least Huckabee did not try to stuff me, pop in glass eyeballs and serve me as venison sausage.  The thoughts of homosexual on-job sexual harassment do not even register in this dominion as a fathomable concern in a Nottoway universe.  While Henry was driving us back to Nottoway in his giant F350 tax–deduction diesel, I wrote a prayer to read at the Hingle’s Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving prayer – 2007 (written on a Holiday Inn travel pad) –

Thank you God for each of our gifts, choices and determents.  May we see what we can do as an opportunity to help others in what they can not.  Thank you for your presence, staring at us in our family’s faces, laughter, and our secret sadness.

Thank you for those we see today and for those across a distance of a map, a word, a hand, a reach from Earth to heaven.  Thank you for our soldiers fighting for our freedom and defense of those who are unable to defend themselves

Thank you for the nourishment of your word, this food and the hands that helped prepare it, In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen

291

Before Christmas, Ashley and I took Penelope to Disney world.  Penelope was aware of Cinderella, Ariel and the stereotype umbrellas of poof-haired hourglass dress-wearing princesses.  When we got to the Magic Kingdom Penelope slept in her stroller.  Penelope woke up to cookies and fireworks in the sky over a castle ten-thousand stories high.  We were in a small world of Winnie the Pooh, Neverland and pirate hats.  I waited with Penelope on the ride to fly with Dumbo for about thirty minutes.  Penelope had to go pee.  We defected and returned another half-hour in my arms.  We floated in the pachyderm. 

Penelope and I swirled the teacups.  I planned the whole trip from my computer at work, registering Disney meal plan reservations to guide our stay.  We dined at the Lady and Tramp Tony’s Restaurant.  Penelope and I stretched a strand of spaghetti between our lips for a picture pose. 

We all stayed in the same room.  After Penelope went to sleep we had our approximate parental playtime.  I was so happy to have my girls.  There was a Christmas light spectacular with soap-bubble snow.  Penelope rode on my shoulders scarfing chocolate chip cookies.  We danced in the street.  Christmas trees were everywhere, fifty-foot ones in the hotel lobbies that gave Ashley big dreams. 

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For Christmas at Ashley’s request we bought ourselves this fifteen-foot realistic artificial Christmas tree on mail order from Balsam Hill.  Ashley wanted her faux-fir.  Ashley made me promise we could still get a real tree to decorate.  Our lobby we were building had a ceiling up to the second floor for the stairwell and the balcony to the makeshift boreal behemoth.  The spruce moose came in three boxes and sat in Hilton’s foyer next to Penelope’s toys, Jeffery’s old weightlifting bench and our home office boxes.  After a week we brought the-we-three tree over to the storage unit with our other no-room-for on-hold possessions.

Ashley had a vision of the house perpetually set to what our first Christmas there would be like.  The porch would have a white arm-rail draped in undulating green stretched-out pine cone wreaths strung from banister to banister lit-up all the way around the house in twinkling white.  A giant wreath on the door would open to this towering tree that could be seen through the second floor window from the street.  Inside the den would be the second natural tree, stockings, a place to bake sugar lace cookies like her Granny Darling made.  The smell would waft through the house.  Penelope could come running. 

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In the spring of 2008 the house was in the final stages.  Ashley’s must-have country Dutch-door just like Lacey’s was installed as the side porch entrance.  Ashley grew up and apparently we lived in a house where the side and back doors were perpetually left unlocked.  As if any Nottoway person that knew you or your mom or your cousin was welcome to stroll in at any hour.  Hilton reprimanded me for locking the door when I left last in the morning a few times, because he had to use his key to get into his own house.  I caved in to Ashley having this custom door for her air condition-cannibalizing fantasy-land of leaving the top open with the bottom closed to view so she could wave to all her friends in from over yonder driveway. 

We could finally start to think about Ashley’s grass.  Ashley dreamed of mowing St. Augustine blades in her country house since the age of fourteen.  Cutting grass for Ashley was like a trip to the spa or Saks Fifth Avenue for some women.  God forbid I even ask to cut it.  Hilton mowed his lawn with fetishism.  It was only Nottoway-normal that this peculiar penchant for buzzing grass blades passed on to his eldest daughter.

Ashley wanted this Rainbird sprinkler system.  She explained if we ever wanted one, we had to install it now.  The sprinkler was another gas-tank to fill for the mortgage and an environmental waste.  I did not want a system of tubes to water my grass.  Watering grass to me is typically an exercise in selfish and narcissistic behavior. 

I felt so hypocritical.  Caring about grass like it is vagina is ridiculous.  Look honey the automatic douche sprayers are on again!  Let’s make sure it smells nice for the neighbors.  I think flooding water on a lawn is utter arrogance, a piss-here perimeter of the world’s water which exists in totality, incapable of expansion.  Here this little wife of mine wanted a plumb-to-it grid-work installed to keep it all fresh for appearances.  So we got one.  My balls were scheduled out of storage before summer.

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In May of 2008, we finally moved in.  Tax season was over.  Blue jays flew around mating and hatching.  Tree rodents were only bushy-tailed.  Ants paraded in second-line chants of “Who Na Nay” and “Hey Pocky A-Way.”  Ashley, Penelope and I marched down the street past the baseball field through our backyard and high-stepped up to that immaculate porch.  Cayenne-pepper-leaf ceiling fans spun.  Azaleas bloomed.  Smack catfish was in the kitchen.  Gumbo rolled.  We had Jazz Fest tunes and new bedrooms. 

My dad, Tim, and Jeffery helped us move our salvaged Katrina-remnants.  They finally had a permanent unrented home, paid for with our dollars, from our earnings, the dominion of a meat-providing man.

The kitchen was a big U with a center island with two dish washers and a side-by-side stainless steel refrigerator and freezer.  The bathroom was bigger than the bedroom I grew up in with cherry-speckled white and black granite.  The bathroom had cherry-wood cabinets, a full tiled big enough shower to fuck standing up in, and a jet-tub with dimming chandelier to lie down and do the same.  Ashley had a closet with two-story sets of rods in eleven different sections.  I got two.  I could actually hang my pants up instead of stuffing them into a single borrowed drawer.

We had separate sinks.  I decorated the hallway from the den to our bedroom with framed pictures of both sides of our family.  Everyone from Holland to New Orleans, to Nottoway mixed together in faces from Ashley’s side and mine entwined.  We had wedding pictures, Halloweens, Thanksgivings, grandparents and when we were children. 

The first night I put my skull to my pillow.  The release was soft and blended behind the shade of a mother willow tree.  Nothing could hurt me here.  This was ours: our bedroom furniture, our painted walls with a painting of Paris hung with the Notre Dame on our bedroom wall.  Ashley, Penelope and I could breathe.

Upstairs consisted of three bedrooms and two baths with one current kid to fill the allotment.  Penelope had a purple room.  I hung Van Gogh posters of Sunflowers and Irises in white frames.  There was no more trekking over to Lacey’s kingdom.  No more having to traverse Hilton’s pubic-rubbed briefs on the floor to see my daughter frolicking in a bubble bath.  No more squeezed out of a three-ring Hingle-circus.  Speeds of engines could finally slow.  Maybe we could even hear the cicadas chirp. 

When I was packing things up into our new attic, I found this old brown box that I kept memories of junior high and high school of my few other women.  I looked at the cache of notes from Sidney in purple loopy ink, Laura’s talk to people command, Marie’s correspondence over dark-green memories.  I looked the stash over and realized I did not need to hold on to this anymore.  I had made it past all these insecurities and contemplations to be this man squatting alone in the attic of this beautiful home. 

I had Ashley and Penelope.  We finally had room and time to have our second child.  We had postponed our sequel progeny long enough.  Ashley was insistent of not ever being pregnant while living in her parent’s home.  There would be too many stereotypes violated to count.  Maybe that is why Ashley was so Gestapo with condom use.  I took the pack of papers and stuffed the former rations into a trash bag full of packing peanuts.  It was all over.  The road was done. 

Continue to Chapter 10