Old Flames

I was six years old when my mother’s ex-boyfriend moved in next to us. My family was living in a tiny stucco house with a view of our next-door neighbor’s garden shed, and this was where Kenneth P. took up residence. He renovated the shed himself, nailing on a tin roof, installing a functional toilet, and paying our neighbor, Hal, something like three hundred bucks a month in rent—an especially cheap deal for Pomona, California. Then he painted the exterior a neon variant of mustard, which lovingly beamed through our kitchen window and into Mama’s eyes. As she scrubbed pots at the sink, she often spoke of burning Ken’s quarters—and Ken—to the ground.

“All I need’s lighter fluid,” she told me once, “and a roll of duct tape.” “You’ll go to jail,” I said. But the prospect of my mother getting carted away to some high-security institution was reassuring: it suggested mood-subduing meds and regular visitation. Better than her up and leaving, as she sometimes threatened to do.

Above the sink, her blue eyes widened. She fished a knife from the suds and mimed cutting her own throat.

Through much of my childhood, I didn’t know who Ken was—his identity as her former lover was kept secret, like so much of my mother’s past. But his proximity agitated my mother enough to make him interesting, and I spied through the holes in our rotted fence, recruiting my cousin Amelia and my brother, Gordon, to do the same. The three of us took turns hoisting each other up to peer at this slumped, mulleted man, perpetually shirtless and smoking pot in somebody else’s hot tub.

The first time we officially met, I was alone in the kitchen, balancing on a step stool and spreading margarine over a flour tortilla. My parents were off on a roof job; my brother was digging for worms. When the tortilla was buttered, I dipped my fingers into the margarine directly, then was thrilled and alarmed by footsteps on the porch. There was Ken, peering in through the screen door. It’s hard to say which of us was more taken aback.

“Jule around?” he asked, and I shook my head. Up close, his mouth was full of silver fillings, and he stank, sweetly, of marijuana. “I’ll just wait inside, then,” he said, and I unlatched the door. Like I said: I didn’t know who he was.

Inside, Ken ran his fingers over our dinner table, which was built of screwed-together pieces of maple. “I remember sanding this thing,” he said. “It’s held up.” The table had a wobbly leg and my name carved into its underbelly, but I didn’t point out these features. Instead, I gave him the grand tour of all five rooms: two ripped couches mapped with coffee/lipstick/cigarette stains, a busted VCR from 1989, the double bed I shared with Gordon—a bed I now believe my mother once shared with Ken. The natural finale was my parents’ bedroom. I was banned from going in alone, but I figured the company of an adult offered an exception. Venturing inside was like crossing the ocean floor, an alien space with a sea-green comforter and dim, slatted light. I opened the closet for Ken’s inspection, but he turned and patted Mama’s side of the mattress, sending out ripples.

“Wow,” he said. “When did she get a waterbed?”

With hindsight, this whole Kenneth P. situation makes a lot more sense.

My parents had, unsurprisingly, lied about the origin of their relationship. A thousand times I’d heard the story of Daddy pedaling across the country and meeting Mama, but never with any mention of her boyfriend-of-a-decade. Now, my father tells it differently: The night he met my mother in Pomona’s New York–style pizza parlor, she invited him back and he slept over (platonically!). My father was too weary to find my mother beautiful and crashed on an air mattress in her living room. At dawn he woke to a screaming match, the middle of a breakup that had been dragging on for months. My mother was throwing Ken’s shirts into the yard, and Ken was saying, “You want kids? I don’t love you enough.” The woman Ken did love enough was a dark-haired girl he’d dated for several months in high school. He’d enshrined photographs of her in my mother’s garage, photographs he reclaimed later when Mama and Daddy were together.

“One afternoon your mom was wearing these cutoff shorts,” my father told me, not too long ago. I was home from grad school for the summer, and as he regaled me with the usual stories, I noticed he was supplying new information about their romance. Either he had become more forthcoming, or I had grown more insistent.

“And then?” I said.

“Then she leaned over to water the rose bushes.” He shrugged. “What was a guy to do?”

Apparently, cuckold Ken. None of this kept Ken from begging for my mother to come back, in Daddy’s presence and out of it. He remained friendly with my uncles and continued to attend family functions, where he seated himself beside my mother and cast her imploring looks. When I was born, Ken built me a rocking cradle. After Mama refused it, he gave it to my grandmother, who planted it beside my parents’ waterbed anyway.

Why my father not only permitted Ken’s visitation but befriended him is a mystery. Perhaps, far from perceiving Ken as a threat, Daddy liked having him around as a counterexample. My mother would watch an alternate future, a shabbier, childless one, unfold through the kitchen window.

Mama’s romantic timeline unsettled me in a deep, inexplicable way. I was mystified that she’d ditched her ten-year relationship with Ken for a stranger, but more than that, I was bothered by how much she concealed. My mother was a glacier, with her cold moods and hidden depths, and I would spend my life trying to know her. As I grew older, I uncovered history that made Ken seem insignificant. For example: her ex-husband.

I was ten when, by accident, I learned about Gerald L.: Mama answered her bedroom telephone and said, “Son of a bitch,” over and over, with increasing gusto, until I freed the kitchen phone from its cradle. Sometimes Gordon and I eavesdropped recreationally, whispering Julius Maximus, Julius Maximus into our end of the line, but this seemed like serious business. I pictured her hunched over the IKEA desk that served as the offices of Under Construction, LLC, winding the phone cord around her finger.

The credit bureau had called, and a woman was asking Mama to authorize the purchase of a brand-new Ford Ranger in Nashville, Tennessee. Someone had used my mother’s Social Security number to list her as a cosigner.

“Gerald L——,” said the phone woman. “Is that your husband?”

My mother was silent. Finally she said, “He must’ve got out of prison.”

I was floored. This explained all the mail addressed to Julia L——, a phenomenon she’d dismissed as a recurring typo. This explained why when she drank too much or yelled at us, it was with a southern accent. (“I swear to y’all,” she’d say, brandishing a pair of garden shears, “act right or I’ll pitch a serious fit.”)

After she hung up, she emerged from the offices of Under Construction, LLC, with all the warning signs—gritted teeth, bloodshot eyes—but I couldn’t contain myself. “What happened?” I asked. “Who’s Gerald?”

She shook her head and dry-swallowed three aspirin. “Why do you care so much?”

It was a good question. My preoccupation with my mother’s past exceeded the limits of ordinary nosiness. But I wanted her to know that I understood her, better than anyone else.

Years later we visited Mama and Gerald’s old house in Ripley, Tennessee. I was sixteen that summer, and we were on one of our cross-country road trips, in a Toyota kicking up white dust. Gordon and I rode in the back seat, and Mama was at the wheel, so all I could see of her were glassy eyes in the rearview. My father was, as usual, elsewhere. I cranked down the window to better hear the cicadas, and my mouth filled with dirt as my mother pulled short of a flaky gray shack. Before she could stop me, I slid out into the knee-high grass.

“Now she is a fixer-upper,” I said, impersonating my father. Mama ignored me, wading through the yard like a sleepwalker. Grasshoppers flicked away in hordes, railroad tracks zipped by through the chinquapin oaks. The shack’s long blue shadow stretched out at her feet.

“This was a bad place,” she said.

Only then did she fill in the story. Her account was full of holes, but I’d learned by then not to pry.

When my mother was sixteen, she had agreed to a blind date with Gerald, a man “considerably older” than her. (I don’t know the exact age gap, or even what he looks like—I’ve never seen a photograph.) That night he bought her an In-N-Out milkshake. Two years later she graduated from high school early and they eloped to his Tennessee hometown.

“Before the wedding, I cried in the bathroom,” she told me, out in the high, hot grass. “Staring at my white shoes. But it seemed like my only option.”

Out there in Ripley, she grew marijuana in every dark corner of the shack and scrambled squirrel brains with eggs. One time while she and Gerald were out shooting blue jays, she came upon a half-buried body. First she unearthed the tip of a boot, then a human skull. When the sheriff arrived, he told her that if all the bodies buried around there stood up, it would look like a forest.

That was her first and last positive encounter with the law. The sheriff despised Gerald and parked across the street at night, watching the mysterious pattern of men who stopped by and made transactions of doubtful legality. One afternoon a friend rushed in and told my mother to flush everything—the deputies were on their way with a pot-related warrant. Gerry and Mama gathered up their secret stashes and rushed to the toilet while officials pounded on the door and, eventually, kicked it in. They had grown suspicious of all that flushing and shoved by my skinny mother to upend the drawers and crawl around the bathroom. In the kitchen, a man wearing white gloves systematically emptied china from her cabinet. Mama’s heart froze. She’d forgotten a baggie in the stack of coffee mugs, and she imagined jail from the inside as he lifted first the top cup, then the second, before replacing them both.

Soon after that four-year marriage collapsed, Gerald L. was arrested for reasons unknown, and Kenneth P. entered stage left.

Ken seldom spoke to me, but I decided he was my enemy. For one, I needed to nullify his relationship with my mother, who belonged to me, not him. The other, more urgent reason was that I dimly suspected he was my real father. This rumor Daddy himself propagated, not long after my house tour with Ken.

For the duration of that strange visit, Ken had propped up his feet on the table he’d built, smoking inside, saying nothing. In an effort at hospitality, my six-year-old self apologized for the state of the place and gave him a glass of milk. Wind chimes clanked through the screen; our ceiling fan stirred the hot air. When I asked for a hit of his cigarette, he handed it over, wordlessly, and we sat like that until my mother came home. They had a Grown-Up Chat behind the frosted glass of the kitchen’s folding door, the house’s only semblance of privacy, and as he saw himself out, Mama gave me the evil eye, like I’d invited him.

Later, Daddy was unfazed by news of this visit, or by the fact I refused to divulge any details, even when my mother threatened to burn Ken’s shed and my tree house.

“In a weird way,” he said, “Ken is responsible for the birth of our daughter.” Probably he meant Ken had been the catalyst that brought my parents together. But I imagined Ken wanted to reclaim me as a consolation prize. For now, he skulked around keeping tabs on my mother, but secretly he was waiting for her to give me up, at which point he and I would rattle away in his truck to an old trailer in the Mojave.

When I consulted my cousin Amelia, she looked at me like I’d swallowed a gallon of lead paint. “He’s too old to be your dad,” she said, pressing her eye back to the fence hole. “But you do have his nose.”

The theory was short-lived. Gordon and I looked nearly identical; it seemed impossible Ken had reignited enough passion for Mama to have fucked him twice.

Still, Ken tapped into deep stores of anxiety I had about my mother, which, as far as I was concerned, gave me a lifelong pass to torture him. I riled up a family German shepherd until she bit Ken, the nearest available stranger, on the ass. I offered him a chair with a broken leg so he toppled over and couldn’t get up because of his bad knees. I slingshot a water balloon with a pebble floating at its center into Ken’s freshly painted truck, spraying red varnish across the grass.

The truth is, I indulged this resentment to stave off a worse reality: there was just no telling what my mother might do. One moment she would hold our dog’s big paws and dance him across the linoleum, the next she would fling my scattered plastic dinosaurs into a garbage bag. She shut herself in the bedroom for whole days. When she emerged, she would accuse my father of sleeping with his real-estate agent or shake down my brother and me for our birthday money. Then she would mix up lemon cake and let us lick the batter. I found it entirely possible she might run off with the man next door.

One afternoon from my reading perch on the garage roof, I saw Ken strip naked. I did not intend to witness such an event. He was wearing jean shorts and glasses, then he was bare to God. He tested the hot-tub water with his toes, slid in, lit a blunt. As I squatted in the shade of the palm tree, plotting, Gordon came up beside me. One look kept him quiet. He crawled around, gathering palm seeds, and handed me a hard green fistful—but I hesitated, seized even by an underdeveloped conscience, and I reconsidered our lumpy target.

I knew by then that Ken wasn’t really the problem. If he was guilty, it was only of hopelessly loving my mother. He and I shared this affliction, and no amount of punishment could undo it. But unlike him, I had the advantage of belonging to her permanently. What I was beginning to feel toward this unhappy man who had lost her was recognition.

Had I not been so hostile, Ken and I might even have built a friendship around our mutual knowledge. Crouching there on the roof, I pictured myself dropping the seeds and leaving him to soak in peace. I imagined Ken and myself at the next family function, side by side on my uncle’s patio furniture, swapping war stories, exchanging counsel, commiserating over the endless endeavor of securing her approval. “You too, huh?” he would say. Then we would shake our heads in wonder and smoke a joint.

Ken was not my competition; he never had been. Still, as the first palm seed flew from my hand and sailed across the yard and struck him on the chest with a loud, resonant thwock, I felt, unmistakably, that I had won.

Read more from Issue 21.1.