Page 1 of The Heart That Breaks
Ann-Elizabeth
MAMA’S BOYFRIEND calls him Idiot.
I’m seventeen years old, but if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that the only idiot living in our house is Lance, my mama’s boyfriend.
His real name is Henry. At least that’s what we called him before Mama let Lance move in, and he decided that my dog could no longer live inside or be referred to as Henry.
“That’s a damn stupid name for a dog bred to be a killer,” he had declared with his usual air of pseudo-authority. “A grandpa-name like that’s not gonna change what he is down deep.”
So, just like that, he now lives at the end of a chain in our backyard. Lance put a big padlock on his collar, and the chain is looped around a tree. From my bedroom window, I can see the worn dirt path that now forms the outer perimeter of Henry’s world.
While I’m at school, Henry walks the farthest edge of the circle, waiting for me to come home. I know this because our neighbor, also known in the trailer park as Crazy Sadie, screamed the information to me from her front porch one day as I was getting off the bus. I don’t know if she’s actually crazy or not, but her appearance doesn’t do a lot to make you conclude otherwise. Her hair stands out in frizzy strands of electricity. Her eyes are shock-wide behind thick, round glasses with dark brown frames, and she has this constant look of having seen something no one should ever have to see.
“Hey, Ann-Elizabeth! That dog of yours is going to walk his legs off one of these days. From the time you leave in the morning until the minute you get back in the afternoon, he never stops except to take a drink of water out of his bucket. I think you might need to have his head checked.”
It would have been easy to make the obvious comparison between the pot calling the kettle black and all that, but I decided I needed to be a bigger person than that and didn’t.
You’re probably wondering by now why a girl like me living in a trailer park outside Nashville, Tennessee with a neighbor named Crazy Sadie would have a fancy name like Ann-Elizabeth. As a matter of fact, I once asked Mama about this, and she said, “You’re old enough to know by now, hon, that you didn’t exactly win the lottery where mothers are concerned. I figured a good respectable name was the one thing I could give you to let the rest of the world know what kind of girl you’re going to be when you grow up.”
Just so you know, I don’t see my mama as a loser, even though that’s how she sees herself. I don’t really even remember the first time I realized that. It’s like something I’ve always known, way before memory ever got a foothold in my brain.
I do know that her daddy, my grandpa, saw her as the worst thing that ever happened to him. Her mama, my grandma, got pregnant at sixteen. Grandpa, out of some sense of duty, or who knows what, married her. He then spent their whole life together yelling at her for the burden she had saddled him with in the form of my mother.
Other than that, I don’t know a lot about Mama’s growing up years. I do have a clear picture of why she never imagined herself getting anywhere in this world. Grades didn’t come easy to her, but beatings apparently did. Every time she brought home a report card that contained mostly C’s or worse, she had to stay home from school while the bruises on her face faded enough that she could go back without any questions being asked by the teacher.
When I was seven, I found an old diary of hers in a box of stuff we were moving from a house we’d been renting and had to leave because we could no longer afford the rent. The journal fell out, and instead of putting it back like I should have, I stuffed it under my shirt and read it late that night in my new bedroom.
The thing is it was like I was reading about someone I had never met. I was able to get through most of it by pretending that was true. At least until the last few pages. Then the image of my mama who worked twelve hour days just to keep a roof over our heads began to merge with the child who had poured her heart into an old yellowed journal. A little girl who never remembered being told anything other than that she was too stupid to ever amount to anything. And that the government was just wasting its money on her public school education.
I don’t guess there’s any wonder why she dropped out at fifteen and ran away from home.
I used to question how a father could tear down his own child the way my grandpa did my mama. Somewhere along the way, I decided he must have really hated himself and that making her seem less probably made him feel like more. I know. Twisted, right? But then no one ever called human beings simple, did they?
My mama repeated her own mama’s history in me, although she’s never told me I was a mistake. In fact, she calls me the only real blessing she’s ever had in her life. I know she believes that to be true.
We’ve never been anything but poor. But if you don’t count the times we’ve been evicted from places where we’ve lived, I loved our life until Mama started dating Lance.
One thing Mama is and always has been is beautiful. At the convenience store where she works, it’s shocking to walk in and see her standing behind the counter of such an otherwise grimy place. My guess is Lance recognized the pearl that appeared in that worn out old oyster the day she started working there. That’s the kind of guy he is. He sees things worth taking advantage of, recognizes when he actually has a shot at doing so. Then he uses every morsel of charm God gave him to snake his way into his target’s heart.
He has this way of figuring out what someone needs, and then he becomes exactly that. Like a human chameleon. Until he gets what he wants, anyway, and then you get to see the real Lance.
At this point, you’re probably thinking I’m sounding a little melodramatic. But not really. I just think there are some people among us who have no desire to use whatever gifts they have for anything other than their own self.
The first couple of months that he lived in our house, he would come home after work, clean up fast and have supper waiting on the table when Mama got home. He even let Henry stay in the house. Although I guess in hindsight I should have figured out what was coming. He started to complain about Henry sitting on the couch, Henry shedding hair on the floor, Henry looking like one of those dogs people use to fight.
“You know they turn on their people out of the blue and attack them for no reason?” he had said one night at the supper table, his accusation followed by a loud burp no doubt prompted by the last can in a six-pack.
When he first started saying these things, he said them with a kind of lightness that made you think he was kidding. Unless, that is, you happened to catch the look in his eyes, which I had a number of times.
When he began to suggest that it would be better if Henry lived outside, I pleaded with Mama to make him stop saying it because it was unthinkable to me that he would sleep any place other than in my bed beside me at night. Since the day we’d found him almost four years ago, he’d never slept anywhere else.
The Saturday afternoon we brought him home, Mama and I had gone in to town for groceries. There’s this long stretch before you get to our trailer park that dips down and rises back up again. Henry had been sitting in the dip smack dab in the middle of the road, barely six weeks old, like he was waiting for whoever had dropped him there to come back, the expression on his face not yet one of fear, but expectation that surely, they would.
As soon as we got close enough to see the condition he was in, I wondered how he could ever have thought they would come back for him. But then, like my mama, I guess if you’ve never been treated better, you don’t know to expect better.
At first, Mama kept her foot on the accelerator. “Ann-Elizabeth, you know we can’t afford a puppy,” she’d said with a sigh. “I can barely feed the two of us.”
“He’s in the road!” I yelled. “Somebody’s going to hit him!”
