Stepping Up to the Plate

Chapter 2-4

Once a week or so, Stacy would take the bus down to the mall to see his momma. She worked the register at Wal-Mart and he’d stand behind her as she rung up the customers, his arms folded over the side of her counter as he waited for her to go on break. “How’re you doing?” she wanted to know, and “Where are you staying?” and “Do you have enough to eat?”

She talked to him while she worked, ignoring the customers and automatically counting back change or bagging the purchases without paying any attention to what she was doing. In the beginning she asked him when he was coming home, but she didn’t like his answer and eventually she stopped asking. “That’s not my home,” he told her, or he’d counter with a question of his own—“When’re you throwing Cal out?”

“I’m not.” she’d say, too quickly because he flustered her, and she’d flash a smile at the customer in her line to gloss over the subject. “He’s my husband—”

Stacy glowered at the register in front of him, angry all over again. “He’s a f*****g prick.”

“Stacy!” He didn’t take it back because it was true.

When his mother took her break, Stacy followed her outside the store to stand with her, hands shoved deep in his pockets, as she hurried through a smoke. Tears glistened in her eyes but she blinked them away. She knew he hated to see her cry. He stared off into the parking lot and pretended he didn’t notice how her mascara threatened to run. “I’m still at Lamar’s,” he told her. “Working at the shop with him and Ange. You met Ange before, remember?”

With a distracted nod, she asked, “The thin boy with soulful eyes? His dad works on the trains, right?”

“That’s him.” Stacy liked that she remembered. A guy like Ange was hard to forget. Soulful, that was a good word to use. “He says I’m pretty good with a lube job,” he joked, but his mom frowned and he hurried to add, “Down at the shop? I’m still just learning though. Mostly doing oil changes, s**t like that, but I should be moving onto transmissions soon. Ange says—”

“You should be in school.” His mom took a long drag on her cigarette that made his own mouth dry with want for a smoke, but she didn’t offer him one. “Work part-time if you want to but don’t just blow off your classes.”

Stacy growled, “I’m not going back. I got a job, what more do I need? Ange says I could run the damn place if I wanted. A few more years and—”

“How’re you going to run a business without a degree?”

Shaking his head, Stacy kicked at the ground, pissed. Why’d she have to be like that? “Mack doesn’t have a degree,” he told her. Mack was the overweight mechanic who owned the auto shop. Stacy’s boss. “He’s running the place just fine. I don’t need to go back to school.”

His mother gave him a long, hard look. He tried to meet it but his gaze kept slipping away, to the ground or the cars around them or the sky. Anywhere but her piercing stare. “Mack graduated the same year as me,” she told Stacy, her voice low. “Maybe he wasn’t top of the class but he has a diploma which is more than you, and he’s taken a course or two at Thomas Caine, down the street.”

That was their local community college—at the high school the kids jokingly referred to it as ‘thirteenth grade,’ since seniors who didn’t know what they wanted to major in or didn’t want to move away to school went to Thomas Caine Community College instead. With no dorms, students at tccc had to live close by, and with Petersburg being as small as it was, most everyone already knew everyone else. Classes at the community college were made up of the same kids who’d been going to school together all their lives, as if it were just an extension of the public school system.

Thirteenth grade. Stacy didn’t know Mack had taken courses there. The man had a beer belly that puffed out from the top of his pants to pull his dingy white t-shirt taut across an expansive gut, and he’d hired Stacy simply because he used to have the hots for Stacy’s momma back in high school. Yet he’d gone to college, even a little dinky one like tc.

“You get back in school, Stace,” his mother told him, dropping her cigarette to the ground. He watched the toe of her sneaker squish out the rest of the butt, then she rattled the pack and tucked her lighter inside. “It’s harder the longer you wait. Go back now else I don’t care what your friend says, you won’t be doing anything but s**t work the rest of your life.”

Like you, he thought, but he bit the inside of his lip and didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to—she said it for him. “Don’t end up like me, or your friends—don’t resign yourself to that, Stacy. Get rich, hear me? Make tons of money so I can come mooch off you when I’m old.”

Stacy forced a humorless laugh. He hated to hear her talk of getting old, or dying. He didn’t want to think of that. “Only if Cal’s gone. I ain’t supporting that bastard. I ain’t even pay for him to go into a home.”

Softly she admonished, “Stace. Stop being hateful.” She touched his arm and turned one heavily rouged cheek towards him. “Give me a kiss.”

A quick peck on her powdery skin and she slipped him a twenty. She wouldn’t let him give it back. “Take care of yourself, honey. Think about what I said.”

His fingers curled around the dollar bill. “I don’t need your money, Mom. I got a job—”

She shook her head, not hearing it. “As long as you draw breath in this world, Stacy Davis, then you aren’t too old or too proud to let your momma spoil you if she wants. I’ve been saving up.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” he sighed, embarrassed. He had money, or enough to get by at least. He didn’t want to take hers. She worked two jobs for it.

As if he hadn’t interrupted, she said again, “I’m saving up for you. Just because you don’t live in my house doesn’t mean you aren’t still my boy. Come around sometime if you get the chance, you hear?”

Stacy scowled. “Not with Cal—”

“You know his hours.” She straightened the flaps of his shirt, a plaid button-down he wore open over a faded tee. “He works days. Come by when he’s not there. And get back in school.”

Then she brushed past him into the store, her fifteen minutes up. Stacy stood on the curb and squinted into the sun, the money hot in his hand. He didn’t have to think about what she had said. He didn’t want to go back.

* * * *

At twenty, Stacy was still very much the same boy he had been when he skipped detention four years earlier. He still worked for Mack, doing basically the same thing he’s been doing day in and day out—despite Ange’s assurance that he could own the place, the truth was he couldn’t tell the difference between a bleeder wrench and a flare nut, and he didn’t much care. He wasn’t hung up on cars like Lamar, or handy under the hood like Ange. “What’s your problem, Stace?” his friend would ask as he leaned into the engine cavity to fix whatever Stacy had f****d up.

Once it was antifreeze in the oil tank, then he put the brake pads on backward, and he used the wrong tool on the spark plugs and stripped the threads. Ange covered for him, coming over when he heard Stacy’s tell-tale curse, pushing him aside to take a look at what he messed up this time. Stacy would lean against the front of the car and watch the sinewy way Ange stretched under the hood, his shirt hitching up to expose the small of his back, his belt puckering his jeans at the base of his spine. “You ain’t stupid, amigo,” Ange would say. Then, catching Stacy’s stare, his friend would elbow him hard in the hip and grin. “I think you know exactly what you’re doing.”

“Not when it comes to cars—”

But Ange gave him a silencing look. “I’m not talking about the car.”

* * * *

Lamar was jealous of Ange and Stacy couldn’t understand why. “Aren’t we all friends here?” Stacy would ask his sullen friend. Lamar usually got pissy whenever he came home and found Ange in the apartment, or when he saw the two of them laughing together at work. None of the four friends were couples, none exclusive. “What the hell do you have against him?” Other than he’s smarter than you, Stacy added silently, and nicer, and f***s better, too. Lamar wouldn’t know. For all the hooking up the four of them did, Lamar and Ange never got it on. That didn’t bother Stacy much—it meant he wasn’t partnered with Colin, and he had to be damn horny to stick it into that kid. Colin was too soft, no muscle, nothing but fat wrapped around Stacy’s d**k when he shoved it in and it made him seasick, watching those fleshy buttocks move against him.

Unfortunately Lamar didn’t want Colin much either, and that meant Stacy ended up with him when the four of them got their freak on. Bad enough he slept with the guy each night. Wasn’t that enough? Did he have to take the time spent with Ange away from Stacy too? “This is Ange we’re talking about, Lamar,” Stacy would press. “What’s your deal with him all of a sudden?”

“Just shut up about him,” Lamar grumbled, narrowing his eyes like he did when he was pissed. After four years of rooming with his friend, Stacy knew the signs of an impending big ass fight, and those papercut-thin eyes meant he was in for a bad night.

Lamar would stay silent, a brooding, anxious silence that made Stacy want to talk just to fill it, but anything he said would be bitten at, chewed up and spat out. So he kept to himself, and waited until Lamar finally trundled off to bed before he lay down on the couch. Long swatches of light drove across the far wall, above the tv, headlights from the passing cars outside. Stacy watched them traverse the room and listened to the silence, filled with things Lamar didn’t say.

What had ever happened to taking up a few weeks with Ange, moving out on his own? I don’t make enough, Stacy told himself. He was a go-for the shop, hadn’t had more than a five cent raise in over six months—what was up with that? A whole goddamn nickel. Woo, stop the press, he was just rolling in dough.

Truth of the matter was, he had nothing. A few bucks left over from his last paycheck balled up and shoved into the front pocket of his jeans, maybe enough for lunch one day. A ten his mom gave him, folded neatly into a paper football and pinned to the inside of his shoe. What a savings fund. Yeah, he’d be getting a townhouse over in Cedar Creek in no time, all the money he’d managed to stow away.

After four years, he thought he’d be much farther along than this.