She was a light sleeper. When she was awakened in the middle of the night it better be an emergency or she’s going to be pissed. About six months into our cohabitation, before covid, the sound of my spoon on my early morning cereal bowl sent her into a fury. I also had to sleep in a separate room. I snore.
“You just need to roll me over, nudge me. I’m easy.”
It didn’t matter. She was stuck in some sort of vigilance around her son’s health and well-being. I tried to explain it was unhealthy to still be listening for the baby’s cries at eight and nine and ten. I tried bringing in a white noise machine. I tried nose breathing strips. I tried a retainer that pushed my tongue down while I slept. I was nudged out of bed, depending on our initial reverie and how well we spooned toward oblivion.
It always came. The nudge. Time to go.
I was ashamed early on when I woke to an empty bed. She had moved to the room filled with stars. A baby’s bedroom of some sort. There had been talk of a second surrogate father. The stars were glued across the ceiling, all shapes and sizes, brightest during the first hour after the lights were turned off.
It was sort of a crappy room. A tiny bathroom contained a standalone shower insert. The closet held the stacked washer and dryer. The Gain laundry detergent had to be moved into the back playroom, there was no door and the perfume would make my eyes water and my throat scratchy. My room. My sleeping room. It felt like a punishment. My problem, the snoring. I considered surgery if I could qualify for benefits from my Apple Store job.
It wasn’t like that was the only problem.
Her brother’s kid, Lenny was like Rainman with anger and personal space issues. As two single parents, they often shared Friday and Saturday nights like a married couple with two kids. It was charming. Until it was odd. I brought her flowers one Friday, for a treat. It almost didn’t register. I was disappointed and I mentioned it after her brother and son packed up and went home on Sunday afternoon. I had also provided dinner and dessert that night. I was hoping for a halo of appreciation.
“It was a miss,” I said. “I don’t often bring you flowers, but mine hardly caused a flutter.”
“I get flowers. I got them. They made me happy. I said thank you.”
Often, during a school night, I would get kicked out early. I spent many a night in the room full of stars writing or listening to music. There were a few giddy FaceTime(tm) calls to my best friend in California. Often the Ambien would be kicking in. Ah, joy. Ah, loneliness. Ah, my old friend.
Our evenings were unpredictable and hinged on her son’s ability to self-soothe and drop off to sleep without Mom singing lulabyes and rubbing his back. Often, she fell asleep in the room with him as I waited in the master bedroom. The few times I woke her in her son’s room and invited her back to bed she smouldered with rage and shame. She knew the smothering behavior was not good for any of us.
When she would make it back to the bed on a school night she’d immediately announce, “I’m exhausted.” That was my signal for no sexpectations. We also binged Battlestar Galactica over the first two years. That brought us closer together, a shared experience, a positive connection around bedtime. It would frequently lead to sex and kisses before I was bumped out of bed. It was a happy, sad, lonely place. I was seeking comfort from a woman who was still performing toddler bedtime routines and shunning me with her best friend, landlord, and next-door neighbor, and confidant.
Mostly they spoke about the fuckhead she was married to. He was the real problem between us. He was protective. Paranoid. An unevolved caveman. And he was upset when I entered his harem and stole his concubine and child. They never had kids. That was a good thing.
About nine months into our relationship, the son had a birthday party at a trampoline gymnasium. The neighbors came. I had never spoken with the man. I saw him in a group of people watching the Red Rover game trampoline-style. I walked up and shook his hand. I could sense the fear in him as I held his firm grip. It wasn’t a showdown or anything, I didn’t try and be anything but charming. Well, okay, that’s not true. I was feeling good about myself and certain that I was on the right side of the dumb bastard’s misalignment. He didn’t blush as he pulled his hand away.
“Hey,” he said already starting to walk away.
There was nothing I could do. If you’re already stoned at 10:30 am, I don’t think we’re going to have a meaningful conversation or a relationship of any kind. I suppose he’d already figured that out.
His rage with me started as something silly. I was blogging about my relationship journey back from divorce, and my girlfriend was into sharing my stuff. Apparently, and this is from his wife to my girlfriend to me, he took a brotherly offense to my writing during the first weeks of our relationship. Her brother too shared some concerns about how much I was sharing. It was anonymous, but if you knew us, knew me, you knew who I was writing about.
About a month after his rent threat I got the story.
“About my explorations of love,” I said. It doesn’t mention names, places, nothing. There’s no there there.”
“It’s the sex stuff.”
“Oh, that’s rich! What specifically?”
The conversations never went well after that. Never. There was a secret, a silence, an unspoken agreement between them. Before I arrived the unspoken part was unchallenged. They provided subsidized rent in exchange for instant family with kid. As I said, they did not have kids, meeting in their 50s. I extracted all of the “potentially offensive” articles and put them into a PDF.
“What in all of these writings is offensive to you?” I asked her. There was no reply.
“I’m afraid, he is determined to break us up, so they can have you back, just like it used to be.”
“That’s part of it.”
“What else is there? What can I do to remedy the situation? I took down all the writing. I’ve agreed to keep our story out of publication.”
“He’s paranoid. Afraid you’re going to write about him.”
“What would I write about them for?”
Well, fuck, here we are. I don’t want to write much more about them, but something extraordinary happened that would both catapult us toward the end as well as freeze frame everything that was both good and bad in our lives at that second, her best friend was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
“I’m taking him to the Austin Aquarium for the day,” I said. Everyone was in shock. “You go be with your friend. I’ll take care of this end. We’ll go have an adventure.”
We all went on an adventure into darker places and death and now there was a bigger reason they didn’t want to negotiate a truce with me. “It’s just too much right now,” she said to me. She jumped the back fence each day to share a beer with her dying best friend, while I picked up her kid from 3rd grade. She would come back at that time, but often she would just grab her son and return to the other side of the wall.
“I know they are going to need you a lot more,” I said. “I am not going to be a complication in this. Your friend needs you.”
I collapsed the bridge of communication between us. I gave her space. I let her brother return to his comfortable sidekick role with the boy who really needed a mom, but had my girlfriend, an aunt of sorts, to provide boundaries and common sense. Mostly that revolved arround her protectiveness toward her son when exposed to the brother’s kid.
Oh, I almost left out an interesting wrinkle in the neighbor story.
Apparently, before he was of school age, the neighbor was roughhousing with him, and broke his arm. The kid howled bloody murder for an hour. A friend and phsician recommended they wait a bit and see if the freak out was just an overreaction. “It’s probably not broken,” advised the doctor. “You can take him to the minor emergency anytime if things get worse, but I’d give it until the morning.”
It was broken. He got a bright blue cast on his tiny arm. Everyone cried. The dude, however, never offered to pay the insurance claim for the broken arm. I suppose he was on her shit list for a year or so. But the house, the cheap rent at the top neighborhood elementary school, and the tribal habits of community and bar b que brought them back to a detente.
But now that her best friend was dying, we all agreed, my presence was a problem.
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