Errands
by Amy Monticello
I'm eight years old and we're in the car again, running errands. It's sunny and I'm wound up, a McDonald's cheeseburger wrapper sits crumpled in my lap, and in the console between us is my mother's Diet Coke, which has also somehow got that wonderful, salty fast-food taste. I'm not supposed to have caffeine after noon, but I sip at it anyway and play with my Happy Meal prize, a long jelly hand that sticks to the dashboard if I thwack it hard enough.
"You're cruisin'," my mother says, meaning for a bruisin.
She lights a cigarette, a skinny Misty menthol, and dangles it out the window, letting the wind ash it as she drives. 99.1 The Waal fills the car, our Chevy Chevette, the high volume cracking in the old speakers. My mother likes classic rock, Neil Young and Creedence Clearwater and Rod Stewart. She won't let me change the radio station, just swats my hand at the knob and hums along with a song I don't know. You lured me away from home just to save you from being alone. You stole my heart and that's what really hurt.
I get nervous when my mother ignores me so I say, in my most accusing tone, "How come you divorced Dad?"
I'm young, and have no tact about such things. Years later, when I'm a teenager, my mother will tell me that more than once she worried one of us would not survive my childhood, that every night she asked God to give her the strength not to strangle me in my sleep. And I'll remember how sometimes, when I was being particularly cruel, yelling at her that I loved and wanted my father more, she would lock herself in her bedroom and call him, weeping.
My mother doesn't look over. Not matter how much I goad her, kicking my legs against the underside of the seat, she smokes, stares out the window, and then finally answers, "Because he was lazy and made a mess of the house. And he was a cheat."
"What did he cheat at?" I ask, thinking of Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, the day Susan Clark wrestled the dice out of my hand and flushed them down the toilet, the way I screamed on the floor like someone was stabbing me before getting sent to my room.
"On me," she says. "He cheated on me. With his old girlfriend. Kim."
I like the name Kim. For rest of the ride home, I imagine what she must look like, the prettier, richer, better mother I almost had. Squinting out at the vinyl-sided houses and their porches and their bright toys strewn across green lawns, all the way back to our duplex and our old, incontinent dog, I mouth it, her name.
Amy Monticello is currently an MFA candidate at The Ohio State University, studying nonfiction. "Errands" is part of a suite of nonfiction shorts about courtship, marriage and divorce.