writer and muse

“I don’t think he should be talking to you that way,” he said to her, as he departed for the bathroom. “I think he should only say sweet things, with a girl that looks about like you needs to have sweet things said to her. Otherwise, you gonna run and run far away.”
To Pen he seemed like the sweetest specimen of man that she had ever come across. In this place of alkali dryness, rain a few weeks of the year. Cacti grew up out of the barren soil and took root in something much deeper. She was once told that a cactus’ root could extend for miles just to find ample water. She believed it. Her mother lived in Santa Fe and her father in Phoenix, and her kids were now scattered across the country because of the multiple divorces. The one departing for college, and then work in NYC, and she hoped he would be the one that could help keep her up in these “waning years”, as she liked to call them. Her nourishment came in the occasional phone call, a week per summer in Destin, the occasional mariage in the family in which they all, miraculously, managed to return, or to be together. It was a strange phenomenon and it left her satisfied, but feeling a prisoner.
Truth is Ricky was a shit. Had been since the day he had caused the great chasm between his mother’s left and right pelvic bones. She believed that he must’ve spit fire upon being extracted. His first word must’ve been “motherfucker.” And as a mother she took offense to it all. He welded and drank and sucked from the government nipple when times were tough. He had once gone six months without having to work a day, gaining full pay. A point which he proudly proclaimed to her the same night that he had first asked her out.
He had said, “Awh Pen, I’ve seen you in here every night for 2 years and this place ain’t changing, Hell the whole country ain’t changing. I’ve bought you a beer or two and you’ve given me a ride home and more than that. We danced in the cemetery that one night, and what I didn’t tell you was that it was over Ma’s grave, and that she would be happy. Our hearts are one-of-a-kind. We can make these mistakes, but it is okay. I think we’ve got something here, girl. Whaddya say.” Next week he was moving in from a rented truck into the house that she had got out of the last marriage. Only good thing she had ever done in her life. Or so she felt tonight.
During the day she made quilts out of fabric that she gleaned from local thrift stores and sold them to the kids outside of the club on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. They thought she was a bag lady in a way. Most of them secretly admired. It was only the suburban ones that thought she was bonkers and that the quilts would make them sterile or infertile, depending on sex.
Gwen was her oldest and she had moved to Texas when she was 18 to be with a “sweet” boy who was in the Army that she had met while he was on leave and that she immediately fell for some kind of bad. She moved out there, and a quick wedding occurred which she was never invited to, and three years and one child later they were split and he was stationed in Okinawa, or something like that. Gwen called home at least once a week and sometimes Pen just let the phone ring, and it made her feel guilty.
Pen had Thursdays and Sundays off and Ricky, would always call on those days. To the diner, or the law office and request a dinner that would end up in his drinking and her watching it all go down and sometimes sex and sometimes a fight. She’d accepted the savior long before and none of it really mattered, whether it turned into a fight or turned into sex, she knew all was okay, in the big scheme.
Rick’s brother was Hick and that was a whole different story. He came around too often and wanted booze and drugs and sex and a place to lay his head. Pen was still not sure where Hick laid his head most nights, but at least three nights a week he hoped that it would be with her and Ricky.
It didn’t really matter to her as on those nights it would at least mean that Rick would leave her alone. It all seemed so romantic when it had all began. When she had let him into her life. Somehow it had all soured a bit over the ensuing months and she knew that it would end at some poing. But how? Ricky was a mean son of a bitch, and she was not sure how to deal with him anymore.
One night he had tied her hands to the headboard with bailing twine and made her go down on him until he came. Except he didn’t come. Only if he had come she could have been done with it. His inability had only brought wrath, and from that wrath a day off of work, and it was a Thursday and she was off too.
In the morning, he packed a picnic and woke her up and they went to the lake and played rollerbat by the water, and he told her that one day he would kill her or himself, and for a while she believed that the options were about 50-50, but soon that all changed.
Pen was named by her parents, of course. Her father who thought not of names, but of ideas. Who fancied himself a man of letters and thought that his daughter was, or should be, mightier than a sword. Her mother, preferring something more traditional, and a compromise, chose Penelope and all was good in the O’ Shea house. Pen had never thought as much as her parents about her name. A point which she felt was a true attribute.
But oh reader, this is not a sad story. Sure theer is death and found remains. There is heartbreak and bad decisions. But there is redemption, and strange happiness, and baseball, and flowers in the spring. Remind me to tell it all to you if I seem to be getting lost in my own thoughts.