Suburbia (Book Clubs and Meth)

Trigger warning for book clubs and meth.

This was a weird one and a really short one. I couldn't think of much for this week's prompts! But I'm proud to have made something at least.

Suburbia (Book Clubs and Meth)

I stared at the women in our parlor and told them the biggest lie of my life.

“That’s not my son, that’s not my son, that isn’t my son.”

I repeated it over and over. I thought that if I said it enough, it might come true. If I just kept saying it until I died I wouldn’t have to hear anything else ever again. But really, it just made me look crazy in front of my closest friends. I cried on the ground and held my face in my hands. They surrounded me and comforted me, collecting, analyzing, dramatizing already.

I could hear it. The conversations at dinner.

Jen over Sunday steak dinner with her husband Trent: “My God, you wouldn’t believe book club today! Trent! Really– don’t roll your eyes at me! It was nuts. We were at Kim Barker’s, right? And her son, remember that kiddo- always with the longer hair- he came busting through the window like it was nothing! Crazy!”

Bobbie with her bratty teenage daughter, going through the McDonald’s drive through: “Jamie came right through the fuckin’ window, all bleeding and covered in glass, and he slapped his mama right in the face. Stole some shit from her too and told us all not to call the cops or he’d kill us.”

Lynn with her new husband on the back porch, tanning on a lounge chair and drinking red wine for dinner: “Well, I just about laughed my ass off when he said that- skinny little tweaker- he had a gun but I wasn’t scared. I changed that boy’s diapers.”

And Terry, probably all alone, walking her shitty white dog, Munchkin. “Good potties, Munchie. I think Kim Barker is batshit.”

That’s all I could think about when they were sitting there holding me and my son was in the bedroom sifting through my jewelry again. There wasn’t anything left anyways. He took my dignity too.

When my voice got tired and I stopped shouting, I cried. I thought about the things they would say about me, about my parenting, and I wished that he had died. Jamie had been evading death since he was born too soon- 3.9 pounds of agony wrapped in translucent skin. From that impossibly tiny baby to that parasuicidal (I learned that one in one of those books I read, trying to understand him) adolescent to that meth-addled adult. I wished he died- in the maternity ward, in the car crashes, the fights, the overdoses.

Anywhere.

As long as he was gone.

Jamie ran out of the broken window with a painting under his arm. It was a Thomas Kinkade print and worth nothing but he didn’t know that.

Jen wanted to see what I wanted to do. Bobbie wanted to go give him a piece of her mind. Lynn just wanted to keep discussing The Road, our (and Oprah’s) book club pick. Terry was already calling the cops on her Motorola because she never cared to discuss what anybody else wanted to do. And I wanted my only son to die.

The policemen came and thoroughly enjoyed coming to the rescue for a bunch of housewives.

“Ladies, you’re safe now.”

Go fuck yourself, Bobbie’s face said.

You can fuck me, Jen’s expression suggested.

Cormac McCarthy is my favorite author and I’m going to make everybody else feel bad about it. Lynn.

Oh my God in heaven, you saved our lives! Terry.

I wish my son, James Ray Barker was dead. Me.

It wasn’t the last time I’d see the police that evening.

We talked to the cops and went to Lynn’s to drink and decompress. I got blasted in my friend’s living room, went into my empty home, and vomited into the toilet and all over my hair. It was like the good old days at Texas A&M. College- I was always puking. If I wasn’t drunk I was sticking two fingers down my throat to make it happen.

I could barely hear the phone over the sound of my own gagging.

I figured they’d caught him again and he was in jail. Or maybe he was calling from a payphone somewhere, feeling guilty and weepy. Or maybe it was Mel- she probably heard something from Bobbie’s daughter and wanted to make sure I was alright and that her stupid big brother was alright. Or maybe it was Carl, my ex-husband, ready to get his shotgun and shoot him in the head…

But it was THE CALL.

Every parent of an addict expects THE CALL someday. We dread it but hope for it. And sometimes we pray for it to just come now. Rip the bandaid off.

I looked at his yearbook photos and his mugshots and his drawings of dragons. I read his stories in the highschool literary magazine and his mother’s day cards. I closed my eyes and tried to remember reading him Harry Potter. I couldn’t find the love.

“We caught him, he was driving northbound. He turned the gun on himself. We’re so sorry, Miss Barker.”

Puke in my hair. The receiver to my ear.

“That’s not my son, that’s not my son, that isn’t my son.”

The next day.

Jen and Trent stopped by with flowers and oatmeal cookies. They talked to me like I was a baby or a china vase.

I stuffed their gifts in the garbage can with my vomit.

Bobbie offered a ferocious hug.

I slammed the door in her face when she started asking about it.

Lynn. P90x body, two piece Lululemon workout set, I didn’t even open the door for that smarmy bitch.

Terry didn’t come by at all. She sent a text message and I blocked her number.

There was one more person I wished would die.