By Jana’ D. Busby

“What can I say? She was my mother and my best friend. I can no longer call to hear her smiling voice, to have the security of knowing she’s there. I can no longer unload my heaping laundry bag of problems onto her kitchen table.”

The air is warm and the humidity hugs my exhausted body like a homemade quilt. I brace myself on the grey weathered railing of the pier and look out upon an audience of solemn faces hanging on my every word. I have their undivided attention. I’m swarmed by salty gusts from the gulf and I can’t help but to think that Mom would be happy with this intimate service. “No depressing churches!” she’d protested in regards to her looming funeral, her unaccepted yet unavoidable too-­near future. She loved the outdoors, and she loved to fish on warm summer nights under these omniscient flood lights.

“But because I was lucky enough to know her as well as I did, I will forever know what she’d say, the advice she’d give. And that’s something that can’t be taken away. Therefore, I won’t be entirely lost without her. A part of her will always be right here with me. Thank you all for being here.”

I wipe my tears with an overused tissue and clench my crinkled notes. Part of me is relieved the past six months of agony has ended. This ceremony brings the comfort of closure. I look up, my eyes sorting through familiar faces. My grandparents, father, sister-­in-­law, and fiancé sit in a front row of industrial folding chairs, sending supportive vibes through wet and loving eyes. Crowded closely behind them stands rows of my cousins, my mother’s friends, a few former classmates, and Eugene Whitney.

#

I was twelve when I met Eugene. We have a long history that’s a secret to most. He’s the untamed animal that roams my dreams, always frozen in the distance, magically unattainable. We both grew up here, the same rural gulf coast town where we mourn my mother. He was only a grade ahead of me, but we didn’t meet until the hormone takeover of middle school. Surely we’d been to dozens of the same events, but I’d never noticed, and neither had he.

We were out for summer break, and my best friend and I were boy-­hungry. Brandy Pollack and I were inseparable. She practically lived at my house during that summer, mostly because my parents weren’t crazy about me staying at hers. They didn’t allow it. Her single mother worked long hours at the nuclear plant and the kids were left unsupervised. I remember one time searching her kitchen for food and was surprised to only find a lonely package of ground beef in the freezer and half a loaf of stale bread. With the temperature near one hundred and a window unit on the fritz, we took our ground beef and miracle whip sandwiches to the solitary shade tree in the back of her house. We washed them down with a flat two liter of diet coke. It didn’t bother me much at the time, but looking back, I understand my parents’ concerns. But Brandy was fun. God, did we have fun together in those days.

I grew up in the same historical home on Shoreline Drive that my parents still live in today. I guess I should say the house my father still lives in. That’s going to take some getting used to. My parents refurbished it in the years before I was born, adding a twentieth layer of white paint to the trim around the screened-­in porch. My parents didn’t allow us to walk the neighborhood like other “hood­rat” kids, as my father called them, but I was allowed one block down to the playground by the water.

This is where I met Eugene. One of our mutual friends had decided that we would make a cute pair and introduced us with anticipatory awkwardness. “Cora, this is Eugene. Eugene, this is Cora.” Then again, maybe it was more like, “Cora, that’s Eugene over there. Go talk to him.” I was so nervous that I didn’t say much, but neither did he. I assumed he wasn’t interested. I made my way to the swings and lost myself in the comforting squeak of the chains grinding back and forth, back and forth.

I was prettier than Brandy but didn’t know it. I wore nicer clothes, was smarter and had just made cheerleader, a badge of social status. Brandy didn’t have the grades to try out, so she pretended that she was too rebellious to be so “involved.” But Brandy had won the genetic lottery. By age eleven, she was sporting double D’s, and nothing else mattered. That day at the playground, she had the confidence I’d lacked, and Eugene’s raging hormones chose Brandy over me. I pretended I didn’t care.

Eugene was only thirteen, but his parents let him drive. He could pick Brandy up from my house as long as he didn’t leave the three square miles of town. He drove his parents’ red 1970 Plymouth Fury with the top down and Sublime blaring through busted speakers. He had thick, tightly wound mousy hair and the nose of a grown man. His young skin was pink and freckled with constellations. There was a perpetual glow about him; maybe it was the heat or maybe it was his personality. Probably both. He was eternally energetic, upbeat, and funny, and as a result he was the most popular kid in all twelve grades. He was tall, lean, and his buddies on the track team joked that he ran like a deer. “Deer Boy” became his ridiculous nickname, which he never lived down.

Brandy told me every last detail of their relationship. “We had sex in the back seat of the Plymouth last night,” she’d confessed to me over a cordless phone as if it weren’t a big deal. She’d lost her virginity to a boy in a neighboring town a year earlier. Over the passing months, she told me of all the places they’d had sex. Of every new position they’d tried. I remember not being jealous of her maturity, but envious of the fact it was all with Eugene.

When Brandy wasn’t with me, she was with Eugene, and in the meantime she tried to keep her two significant others as far apart as possible. Maybe she sensed our chemistry. Maybe she knew that it was me he should’ve chosen.

Eugene was fourteen when Brandy told him she was pregnant. At age fifteen, they both were parents. I was involved in school, played sports, and was voted most likely to succeed. Brandy was a teenage mother who’d become a loner. We drifted apart. My world annoyed her, and I didn’t understand hers. The last time I saw her was in home economics class a couple months before her due date. I later heard that she’d dropped out. She was destined for a GED.

I believe Brandy and Eugene broke up before the baby was born, but their lives were forever intertwined. I can’t say for sure what happened; I wasn’t getting the details from Brandy like I used to. I remember that he tried to support her, to do the right things, and sometimes she let him.

He retained a sense of normalcy for the remainder of his high school years, as far as I could tell. I remember him playing sports and being social, which in this small Texas town, are one and the same. Because of this, he and I ran in the same circles. I can’t tell you how many times we gravitated to one another as if we were the last two people on Earth. There was an undeniable chemistry between us. I still remember the first time we kissed. On the tailgate of a friend’s truck, under a dark sea of stars and fireflies, we were completely enthralled with one another. I dreamed of being his girlfriend, but he never asked. I don’t remember him dating anyone in high school after Brandy, though. He probably wanted to stay as far away from getting another girl pregnant as possible.

We had so much in common that we could’ve been mistaken for siblings if not soulmates. My mother took a picture of him and me at his graduation the year before mine. She always loved him. She held onto that picture for years, but now I don’t know what happened to it. The fall of the next year, I moved off to Austin for school. I later learned that during this time, Eugene had rented an apartment near our home town in an attempt to make a proper home for Brandy, himself, and their baby. It lasted six months.

Over the years, Eugene and I’ve stayed friends. It’s always been on his terms, though. I’ve known him to disappear for a year, then come knocking at my door in Austin at two in the morning. He might stay with me, for a week or two, before vanishing again. All I’d know was that he was between construction jobs and had some time off. I’d drop all the obligations I could; he’d go with me if I couldn’t. He never spoke of his personal affairs and I never pried. His son was his number one priority, and I supported that. I think he wanted to pretend he could exist in my world, but he was tied to another place by a steel cable. Maybe he’s always known that I loved him, that I’d never turn him away. I like to think that he’s always loved me too, even if he could never stay.

He spent a month with me one summer. Every day, we’d drink too much, smoke too much, and laugh not enough. It was never enough. I think he wanted to absorb every ounce of me, stockpiling my essence for the cold months ahead.

One evening after a day of swimming in Barton Springs and canoeing in Town Lake, we returned “home” to my apartment. From my third floor balcony, we watched a fading sun sink into a sky of orange sorbet. We compared strawberry tan lines as he poured his gatorade into a dried up potted plant. “Take care of our love fern, will ya?” he’d said. “Give it water once a day, or gatorade once a week.”

“Where do you think you’re going, Deer Boy?” I smiled. He’s always hated it when I call him that, but it makes him laugh.

“I have to go, Cora. I won’t see you for a while.” He was serious. I remember the uneasy feeling that consumed me.

“What are you talking about? Where?” I knew he couldn’t stay forever, but he’d never sounded so dramatic.

“I’m moving to Houston.”

“Why?”

There was a pause and I think we were both holding our breath. He couldn’t look at me.

“I’m marrying Brandy.”

There it was. I remember thinking I hadn’t spoken up for myself in the past, but that this time I would. I laid it all out there. I cried and asked him to stay. He said, “I’m sorry,” before walking out. He looked like he wanted to cry, or throw up; I don’t remember.

That was five years ago. Through it all, we’ve kept in touch. Seemingly once a year, our stars align, and we spend an entire night talking on the phone. About the past, the future, our dreams, briefly about his son, never about current relationships. I never ask if Brandy is just inside his house peacefully sleeping in their bed. He never speaks her name.

It wasn’t until three months ago that I saw him again. When he caught word that my mother didn’t have long to live and that I was taking care of her, he appeared out of nowhere. He’s the only friend that I allowed to visit. “What did Brandy say about you coming?” I asked.

“I don’t care what she says,” he said. And that was that.

For three nights, he slept on my couch as my fiancé looked the other way. In the moments Mom was sleeping, Eugene and I would drink beer outside her door. We’d reminisce about all the times as teenagers we’d stayed up talking on the front porch, and Mom would come out in her nightgown to tell us, “It’s too late, y’all come in the house!” I’d vent about the hardest time of my life, the struggles of taking care of a parent like a mother nurtures her own child. We’ve talked every day since.

#

All that’s left of my mother is in front of me. We all watch as my brother delicately pulls a black plastic bag of her ashes from an undignified cardboard box and slowly pours her remains over the rail into the water. I regret not spending the extra money for a fancy urn. A strong gust catches some ashes and spreads them more than anyone anticipated.

I hang around for some time, giving and receiving condolences, hating the finality of it all. I embrace my father, my grandparents, my brother. My fiancé shows his silent support. I’m greeted by cousins, aunts, uncles, my mother’s colleagues whom I’ve only met once. As I escape the crowd and head back to shore, I see Eugene, alone on the same rusty swing set where we first met. He looks good in a suit. He looks good as a grown man. I sit on the faded rubber seat of the swing next to his, push myself back and pick up my feet. The weightlessness is liberating.

“You okay?” He says.

“Yeah, I guess. As okay as I can be.” I say, feeling numb.

“There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Okay,” I say, guessing.

“Maybe now isn’t the time.”

“Never been a better time. What is it?” I say, fearlessly, thinking to myself that, after your mother’s funeral, nothing can faze you.

“I messed up. I really messed up.”

We are no longer swinging, but twisting our chains to face one another. I wait for him to continue.

“I’m not happy. I should’ve never married Brandy. I should’ve never left you that summer in Austin. I should’ve never dated Brandy in the first place. I should have picked you. Right here on this playground, fifteen years ago.”

“You’re just saying that because I’m engaged now. For the first time, you can’t have me. And you’ve just realized it.”

“No, that’s not true. We’re soul mates, and you know it. We should’ve been together this whole time. I see the woman you’ve become, and I wish you were mine. I wish I would have made you mine a long time ago.”

“Well, what are you going to do about it?”

He grabs the chains of my swing and pulls me closer to him. He looks quickly to each side, making sure no one’s watching, then kisses me with more emotion than I knew he had. I don’t dare consider stopping him, too dazed to care who sees.

“I mean, what are you really going to do about it,” I say, almost whispering. “Are you going to leave Brandy?”

He releases me and stares out across the choppy bay; white caps foam on the waves in front of us. I notice how the humidity exaggerates his curls like when we were kids. The bright sunshine makes his blue eyes squint and his ivory skin turn a soft pink. A two minute eternity passes. “You know I can’t do that,” he says, and I’m not surprised.

“That’s what I thought,” I say.

“But I will always love you, and I want you to know that.”

Just when I thought that maybe, just maybe I could tame him, that he’d let me reach out a hand to touch him, he retreats back into his world and I’m left captivated from a distance. I inhale deeply, cleansing my tired spirit with familiar salty air. “I love you, too, Deer Boy. I love you, too.” The rust-­covered swings squeal louder and louder, as we go higher and higher in unison, back and forth, back and forth.

 

Jana’ D. Busby received her BS from Texas State University and is currently a graduate student at St. Edward’s, earning a Master of Liberal Arts with emphasis in creative writing. “Deer Boy” is a piece from her book of short stories, her final project which she hopes to have published in 2016. Jana’ lives in Dripping Springs with her singer/songwriter husband and their two kids.