Jody Hobbs Hesler
That catbird with his shrieky shrieking. Lenny, I call him. He lives in the vitex out the living room window, so I see him every day. See him more than anyone else I know, except the Meals on Wheels lady, who’s friendly enough but checks her watch if I answer more than ‘fine’ to her how do you do.
Lenny makes a racket, and every morning I have to stop myself from checking out the back window, the sound so like that old metal playset creaking under the weight of a child swinging. If I think hard enough, he sounds like a cat, like the bird name suggests, but left to my own, it’s the swingset. A swingset bird.
I used to clap against the window by the vitex to scare him off his perch. Or chase outside, rattle the bush’s twiggy branches, and jounce him so he’d wing off into the air and away. Lately, though, it’s like we both know he’s my steadiest visitor, and I’m trying to be nicer.
This morning I’m already at the back window when Lenny gets started, so I glance at the swingset, the reflex as rusted as the playset itself. Wild grape vines tangle up its legs, and the grass is tall enough to poke the worn-out swing saddles. Jess pays for a couple of guys to lug their mowers around my yard, but they skip hard spots, like under there. The set’s got two regular swings, one double-seater with metal bench seats facing each other, and a trapeze bar.
Now washed out and colorless but for orange streaks of rust, it was light blue with dark blue joints when I helped Dwayne install it. Cool drizzle kicked up halfway through, but Jess was at my mom’s for the day and the swingset was a surprise. We winched every bolt tight, double and triple checked them, working until drizzle turned to downpour, and, when we were finished, we tested it out. My sodden hair dripped into my eyes. I leaned back in that swing and let rain run into my mouth. How we laughed that day, and my back entirely forgot to hurt until much, much later.
In those days, it was only sore some of the time, and I don’t recall so much anger. If I could, I’d hold open for Jess the sense of how our lives felt then, like a photo album of feelings, so she might remember how it was before he left us. But she would only turn bitter and remind me, as she has so many times, “You say it like he meant to go. The man died, Ma. My father died.”
Like that left me any less alone.
Lenny half-tricks me nearly every day now, even though it’s been decades since anyone swung there. Jess is long grown. Her babies, 12 and 14, too old for the set by now, but she never brought them by when they were small anyway. Back when I could still drive, I’d go see them. When she’d let me. Other times she’d block me at the door.
Nowadays Jess sends the mowers, signs me up for Meals on Wheels a few days a week, hires a service to drop some groceries, pays a neighbor kid to haul my trash barrels to the curb, but she doesn’t stop by for as much as a hello, and her, only 30 miles away, the other side of Afton Mountain. She can’t blame me for not visiting since she’s the one who made me turn in my license and sold my car out from under me.
Blind, my ass. I can see enough. Not enough for that vision test up at the DMV, though. Jess was right about that much.
Another screech from Lenny. “Quit teasing me,” I chide through the window and circle back to the kitchen to pour another cup of coffee.
Outside, besides Lenny, I hear a car door slam. The new neighbors across the street must have six of their own cars and dozens of other people coming and going at all hours. I suspect they’re up to no good, and every now and then I think of calling police, but they’re busier than they are loud. If they’re in there dealing drugs, they’re being neighborly about it at least.
The next noise sounds like a rap on the door. It hasn’t been windy, but I re-check the trees outside to see if a gust has blown up. The leaves are motionless, not as much as a flash of their whiter undersides, so the air must be still.
Another sound, and there’s no mistaking. It’s not time for the Meals on Wheels lady, and she usually calls with schedule changes. Not like I’m going anywhere with no license and a back that aches like hellfire so I can’t make it as far as the bus stop without needing a rest. Which is why Jess signs me up for all these services to begin with. Sure as shit not because she likes me.
Another rap. “I’m coming!” Whatever anybody wants, they want it now, now, now, but that doesn’t make my back work any better. The pain crimps me into a permanent slouch and I walk slow.
If Dwayne had lived, we might’ve added on, but it’s a small house, one story, about 800 square feet. Even the short laps I’ve taken this morning, front to back, window to window, have begun to wear on me, though. I shuffle slower than usual toward the door, one hand on my low back, the other holding the coffee. I concentrate against the pain.
When I heave the door open and lean into the jamb for relief, there’s Jess, standing at my front porch out of no place at all. I page my mind backwards for the last time she visited. A Christmas or two ago. She stayed five minutes and got pissed at something I said. Uproared her way back out the door. Left a hole of silence behind her that’s never quite closed up.
“Well look at you.”
“Hey, Ma.”
Her hair is different. Frosted or highlighted, whatever they call it these days. A little of the gray painted away. Her face is bright. Healthy. The word ‘clean’ comes to mind, but not soap clean. Clean of worry, maybe. Untroubled. I can’t say I’ve seen her untroubled before.
“You gonna let me in?”
I set my coffee down on a side table and ease out of the doorway, making way. She brings in a cedary scent and a rush of outdoor air making me realize I haven’t opened windows for a long time, and spring is busy out there, springing away. Plenty of good breezes and fresh air. The vitex just beginning to bloom.
Crossing into the house clouds Jess’s untroubledness. She doesn’t step farther than the inside doormat. Looks like we’ll conduct this visit in my entryway.
“I have something I want to say.”
I want to joke about having somewhere to be so she better get right to it, but my jokes never land with her. It’s hard, because there’s nobody else to joke with and hasn’t been since Dwayne. Which is why I talk with Lenny and give him a hard time for sounding like a swingset every morning.
“I’m standing right here,” I say. “Ears still work anyway.”
“You know why I don’t usually visit, right?”
Some people can’t tell you enough times how you’ve failed them, and I brace for a litany of reminders. How hard I was on her. How cruel I could be. How I should’ve taken anger management instead of taking my pain out on her. She doesn’t want to hear what it takes to get out of bed with this back, how it’s only gotten worse but it was bad enough when I was working two jobs putting her through school, scrubbing dishes at the elementary school and cleaning sorority houses at the university, and she doesn’t want to hear that she cried about twelve times more than the average kid, flinched at a raised hand. Flinched when I was gesturing, mind you. Like every time my voice notched up, I hit her? I didn’t. Not every time.
“Yeah, I know,” I say, sparing us both.
“Thing is, I want to give you a chance.”
“For what?”
“To make things right between us. To make amends.”
“Me, to you?” I say. “You’ve got what you want figured out maybe, but what’s that got to do with me?”
Jess arranges her face in an expression I call “freeze face.” Every muscle rigid. Not showing as much as a shadow of a nameable feeling. She picked up this habit in her tween years, along with a manner of speaking to me in slow emotionless chops, giving the impression she’s training me like a disagreeable dog.
“I just want to give you a chance,” each word a chop. If her face spared even a twinkle of hope or affection I might’ve felt something other than the familiar simmer inside rolling to a boil.
“You think you were easy?” I square myself in front of her as if I mean to back her out the storm door. Lenny squawks from the vitex, reminding me I don’t want that, but it’s too late. “Every day I was alone and in pain, and you weren’t easy, and you come here, asking for apologies? Not, ‘Hey, Ma! How ya doing? Want to go out to the bakery for a nice treat? Can I drive you to the hairdresser this time instead of just sending some Uber-driving stranger to fetch you?’ When I worked myself into agony providing for you. Never let you go to bed hungry. Not once. The lights never cut off. You think that was easy?”
Jess draws in a large breath then blows it out her mouth, like she’s aiming at birthday candles. “I’m not speaking for what was easy or not. I’m speaking for what’s gone bad between us, and giving you a chance to step up.”
“Or what? You won’t come see me anymore?” I fake a look to a watch I’m not wearing. “Hell of a long time’s gone by since I last saw your face. You come around here, out of nothing, asking for apologies? And I’m just getting older. One day you’ll knock on this door, I’ll be dead on the floor. Like you’d even notice.”
Jess backwards steps, nudging into the storm door. “I don’t know why I bother.” She closes her eyes, and her lips pulse, as if she’s counting to herself. “You can’t hurt me anymore,” she says, when her eyes flick open again.
We always come back to this. The ways I hurt her, without a thought to the ways I hurt. I’m always hurting. I cast my eyes about. Land on a broom handle, leaning against the wall nearby. My fingers are nothing but sticks, but I can grasp. Haul off and whack if I need to. What does she know about hurting?
“You can’t hurt me now,” she says, “but you could apologize for what’s gone before. You could take comfort in knowing you did before you die.”
“Counting down my last days, are you? You’re the one who won’t talk to me. Won’t bring my grandkids around. You’re the one leaving me to die alone.”
“Your grandkids are grown enough to make up their own minds about not coming here. You’ve got no one to blame for that but yourself.”
I wasn’t angry before she showed up, but it bubbles up like it never left me, less like a boil now, more prolific, like soap suds about to overflow. An image that comes with five-year-old Jess, cherub cheeked and naked, standing in the bathtub cupping handfuls of bubbles from the froth at her knees and tossing them up, up, up. Her laugh echoing against the pink bathroom tiles. The cleanest, brightest sound. The memory so close and real I tumble backwards onto my ass. Sit there, stunned, on the floor.
Jess kneels beside me, her freeze face so advanced her jaw clamps too tight for her mouth to open naturally when she talks. “You made the choice to be alone,” she says, grasping my arm at the elbow, leaning herself forward to help propel us both back to standing. “I gave you chances. You know I did. You blew every one.”
“Chances? You gave me limits. Things I couldn’t talk about. Questions I couldn’t ask. Never as much as allowed me to help your precious babies pronounce a word. Nothing I said was right.” Jess waits until I’m steady on my feet before releasing her grip, then quicksteps away.
“You’re mean,” she says, arms crossed, matter of fact, over her chest. “I didn’t want you to correct my kids because you’re mean. You were mean to me every breathing minute of my life. I gave you a chance to know my family anyway, but I was not going to, still am not going to, give you license to perform your meanness in my house.”
I clap my hands in exaggerated slow-mo. “Nice speech. You practice that in your mirror before coming over here after all this time? Picking out the best words for reminding me how terrible I am. I haven’t checked the calendar today, but it must be Mother’s Day.”
A muscle behind my ear throbs from clenching. When I focus on Jess again, expecting more freeze face, she’s crying instead. Wiping tears away with her fists. Deep inside me somewhere, I fall to my knees. Reach to pull my daughter toward me, and she doesn’t flinch at my outstretched hand. How I’d love to be a person who could soften that way, but I hunch, brick still, stuck in a shape that won’t let me go.
“I tried, Ma. I swear I tried. I hate leaving you by yourself this way, but you won’t make room for anything but this—” she gestures in the air “—this spite of yours, or whatever it is. I’ll provide for anything you need as long as I can, but I won’t do this again.” She backs all the way out of the house, pausing to catch her breath, to wipe the tears so she can see.
I stand mute and useless at the doorway. Her feet slap down the sidewalk. Her car beeps unlocked. The door slams. I can’t see that far, but I imagine she braces the steering wheel to collect herself because it’s a while before the engine guns and the wheels peel into the street.
Then she’s gone.
Lenny squawks yet again, and I can’t even tease him. I return to the back window and gaze out there, picturing little Jess in her navy blue Keds and lace ankle socks. Her favorite flowered dress, faded from too many washings. Satiny hair ribbons dangling half untied from her hair, trailing out behind her as she pumped her legs in the swing.
Higher, higher. That screeching sound that shot straight through me like a warning she was about to go so high the whole thing would flip and crush her. The fear that drew me to the window every time, still draws me, just so I could see those little Keds striking up toward the sky again and again.
How my breath caught at the top of every arc. Letting her go.
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Jody Hobbs Hesler is the author of the novel, Without You Here (Flexible Press, September 2024), and the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better (Cornerstone Press, October 2023). Her words also appear in Necessary Fiction, Gargoyle, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Atticus Review, Writer’s Digest, Electric Literature, CRAFT, Arts & Letters, and many other journals. She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville and for The Writer’s Room out of Chicago, writes and copy edits for Charlottesville Family Magazine, and serves as assistant fiction editor for the Los Angeles Review.