Past Life

Before my mother, there had been another woman, Britannia, whom my father loved and married when they were both in their twenties. After a brief courthouse ceremony with three friends as witnesses, they moved into a mobile home in a trailer park called Fox Meadows. Right away, they began planning their future. Seated on the floor at their coffee table (their dining table), my father and Britannia laid out their goals in a gnarled Mead notebook: one, my father would get a job within the year; two, they would have a baby; three, while he worked (once he found work), Britannia would take on the responsibility of household chores and child-rearing. The plan amounted to only a few sentences on wide rule, but in short order, all was underway. Within the year, my father started work at Ryan Milk, my half-brother Jared was born, and Britannia, well into her roles as wife and homemaker, assumed the role of mother. She fed everyone, cleaned house, changed diapers, and dealt with both her son’s and her husband’s unruly timetables, since in addition to baby Jared’s tantrums—worst were his colicky nighttime spells, when he couldn’t sleep, which was often—Britannia also had my father’s erratic hours to contend with. My father worked the second shift on the assembly line, three to eleven p.m., but he had mandatory overtime, which meant he had to work an extra four hours, sometimes tacked on before his normal shift, sometimes after. Sometimes he wouldn’t get home until three in the morning. Sometimes he had to work an extra day on weekends. To make matters worse, he didn’t receive notice of the following week’s hours until the current week’s end. The ever-changing schedule contributed to the chaos of family life. Britannia wanted help, needed it in fact, needed my father to bear some of the child-rearing burdens. “All I’m asking,” she said, “is for you to sit with Jared some mornings, give him his bottle, rub his back, change him if he needs changing.”

            “Sounds like you’re trying to change me,” my father said.

            “Bruce.”

            He interpreted Britannia’s plea for help as a breach of contract. “We agreed,” he said. “I work, you do this. Division of labor.”

            One night, he got home and called hello from the front door. Britannia stood at the kitchen sink, her back to him. “Where’s Jared?” he asked.

            “In his pen,” she said.

            He traipsed to the bedroom where in the playpen Jared was asleep on his back, one hand curled into a partial fist. My father bent and stopped. He hovered near the aureole of Jared’s soundless breath. If he kissed his son, he would wake him. From the kitchen, he heard the harsh clank of porcelain. Returning to the living room, he saw Britannia knocking around dishes. “Are we playing games?” he said. She shook her head. “I know it’s not nothing,” he said.

            “You’d be mad.”

            “I’m waiting.”

            Britannia removed the pink rubber dish gloves, popping them off at the middle finger, and finally turned around. “This isn’t fun,” she said.

            “What isn’t?”

            “This,” she said. “Life.”

            “Has it ever been?” he scoffed.

            “Don’t pretend you don’t remember. In high school you were wild, into hotrods—everyone thought you were crazy.”

            “I don’t see what we’re talking about.”

            “Why are you raising your voice? I don’t want to argue.”

            “Am I not fun anymore?”

            “Just I want some of the old life.”

            “Here’s what I know,” he said. “I’m standing in the living room of a house not big enough for a bachelor, let alone a family, my shirt sticking to my back. I work at a milk plant with no windows, no ventilation, my body pouring sweat, day and night—” While speaking, he was unbuttoning his shirt in histrionic show, but the uncooperative buttons impeded his effort to punctuate words with action. By the time he’d pulled the shirt off, its weightless fall felt anticlimactic. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I have to come home to complaints?” She moved to hug him, but he stepped back against the coffee table. “Not now,” he said. The anger tasted too delicious.

            “I love you,” she said. He pressed the coffee table’s edge farther into his calves. She lunged at him with the next hug. He bent his body like a roadside air dancer. She gave up and sat down on the sofa, head in hands, a mask of bent fingers.

            If he remained where he was, legs pressed against the coffee table, feigning stoicism behind a muted face, what kind of person would he be? he thought. He clicked his tongue. She didn’t notice his sitting down beside her, but in his trying to wrap an arm around her, she flinched and sidled away.

            “You don’t get it,” she said to the wall. “I want time to relax. A few free hours some mornings would be a major weight off my shoulders.” She continued talking. He only half-listened.

            Finally, he told her what free time he had had to be used productively. He wouldn’t even call it free time. So-called free mornings away from the plant weren’t all sitting around shooting the bull at the donut shop. No sir. He was trying to get a car-dealing business off the ground with Uncle James. Didn’t she understand? A second job would be extra income. “We don’t want to live in a trailer forever, do we?” He appealed to Britannia’s empathy. He said when he occupied his table at Sammon’s bakery in the morning, talking with his friends and his uncle, their talk was, admittedly, not all about planning for the car-dealing business, not one hundred percent, but he was blowing off some much-needed steam. Every shift, his supervisor rode him, egging him to pick up the line, threatening him with pink slips, so on and so forth. Every night, he went to bed stressed about his job, stressed he would lose it. And to think, they had a child to feed. Worry did a number on his sleep. Or hadn’t she noticed? He needed his mornings to sleep in or else see his friends, most importantly to relax, because he was stressed, and the stress was likely to wear him down. Didn’t she see?

            After his appeal, the two of them began to warm to each other. Britannia sat closer and turned toward him. She eventually laid her head against his chest, wept, apologized. All seemed resolved. My father smiled at the wall’s wood paneling. Then Britannia raised her head and said what about her parents. They could take care of Jared in the mornings. They were retired. They would want to. This got my father angry. With a raised voice, he put on the kibosh. Letting her parents look after Jared sent the wrong message. It would seem like he and Britannia couldn’t raise their own, and anyway her parents already looked down their noses at him. “Remember what your mother said when we started dating? ‘Why don’t you find a man with money to his name? Why take up with some hellion from Dexter?’” Rather than address any of Britannia’s concerns, my father’s strategy was, as it would be with my mother, to browbeat with his own sorrows. However reluctant Britannia may have been to bend to my father’s desire, she nonetheless did, said all right, she agreed with him, he worked hard, she wanted him to keep doing what he was doing and to get the car-dealing business going.

            A Sunday morning. Jared had slept through the night. My father and Britannia had both been able to sleep late. Britannia rolled over, put her arm around my father, exhaled, smeared his chest hair, said things had been going well, hadn’t they? He said yes, very well, they hadn’t been arguing or anything. She said there was a reason. She would tell him if he promised not to get angry. All right, he said, let’s hear it.

            She confessed she had begun having her parents watch Jared some mornings so she could get some rest. Her parents’ house was just off Whiskville, on Catalina—incidentally, the same road my father’s future bride, my mother, grew up on. Catalina was a ten-minute walk at most from my father and Britannia’s mobile home at Fox Meadows. Despite the short walk, Britannia informed my father she always strapped Jared into the car seat and drove over anyway, for safety.

            This news made my father irate. He started shouting and swearing, his head and chest grew hot, his body temperature rising to the point where he couldn’t think or talk sensibly. Instead of tackling the issue directly, he found himself complaining of wasted gas, Jimmy Carter, Aramco, the extra mileage she was putting on their second car. His shouting woke Jared. Outraged by Jared’s crying, he got dressed, packed personal items, got in the Camaro, and drove to his mother’s in Dexter, where he stayed for the next few days. A few days, and he cooled. He and Britannia exchanged calls. She apologized and said, “Come back.” He did.

            Then Britannia’s drinking got bad. Before, she had gotten drunk on special occasions, but this was different. It got to the point where my father would get home from his shift, strip, carry his weary body toward bed, and bend toward Britannia to give her sleepy forehead a peck, and every night, she would reek of beer. My father said nothing for a while, fearing confrontation. He wanted calm. But one morning, after she had woken and struggled to walk down the hallway, he found himself broaching the subject, calling out to her departing back, asking why she was getting drunk every night and getting up hung over. Jared woke, cooed. Britannia waved her arm at air and closed the bathroom door. My father was terrified. She had a private world, and he didn’t belong to it.

            While she showered, he called into work. He said to the secretary he needed to use a sick day because of his boy. The foreman interrupted the line and said my father had every right to use a day, but some advance notice would be nice. My father asked how he ought to know in advance his son would be sick. (My father never let a lie preclude indignation.) He went to Sammon’s bakery and complained to his uncle and friends about work and his wife’s drinking. Everyone nodded at the sermon. When he returned home, flapping back the screen door, Britannia startled and stood from the sofa. “Back so soon? What about work?” A day off, he said. All day, he stayed in the living room and watched a Columbo marathon. Later, she made lunch. They ate tuna sandwiches in silence. She vacuumed the carpet and bathed Jared.

            He staged his intervention in the early evening, when Jared was asleep in his playpen in the middle of the living room, Britannia on the sofa, my father beside her. He gathered gumption for tact but ended up blurting, apropos nothing, regarding the drinking, he wanted to know what was going on and what was going on now. Fine, she admitted, she had been solo drinking when he wasn’t around. He wasn’t around very much, she said. She felt lonely. He said if she weren’t careful, she’d pass out drunk with their son in the bathtub. She might drown their son. Did she think about that at all? She said sorry. He asked about the contraband booze. While she went to the grocery store, he had gone through the cabinets and found a bottle of Ballantine’s someone at work had given him, but no beer, and it was beer he had smelled on her, he was sure of it. He had lifted the trash lid, found nothing. Where were all the spent bottles? Not bottles, she sighed, she didn’t drink from bottles. Cans. There was a system, she said, she had planned it all out long ago. In almost two years, didn’t he realize? There were lots of things he didn’t understand. As soon as he left the house, she had a girlfriend bring her over a six-pack. My father asked what kind of beer she drank. She said Keystone. He asked what girlfriends she had who would bring her beer. She said an old girlfriend from high school, Theresa. He thought about it. He seemed to remember a Theresa. She said before he got home, she’d throw the cans in the communal dumpsters at the trailer park.

            “Do you mean to tell me, if I were to go look in there, I’d find your beer cans?” he asked.

            “Good luck knowing mine from anyone else’s,” she said.

            During this talk, Jared stirred in his playpen, but neither of them worried, he would get back to sleep. He had become a good sleeper.

            “There are lots of things about me you don’t understand,” Britannia said.

            “Like what?” my father said.

            “Like that I used to be a fun girl.”

            He had to smirk at that one.

            Jared said da-da from his playpen.

            Britannia stood up and towered over my father. “I was a wild one, too. I used to go out.”

            “Is that so?”

            She plucked at her T-shirt. “I used to get dressed up. Men liked me.”

            “Oh yeah?”

            “Yeah. Do you think I didn’t have boyfriends before you?”

            He pulled her close. “Tell me about that.” He noticed she had gotten a permanent. He liked it. He had known her since high-school homeroom. Back then, she wore her reading glasses on a string around her neck, but there in the living room, he saw her in a new light, alluring and strong-willed, a wife and mother who had already lived a richer life than most, not twenty-four and married with a child.

            Apprised she had had this past life, he found her more attractive. The revelation of her drinking and the brief exchange that followed helped their relationship, as far as he was concerned. A fire that had simmered, flared. He took to bragging to my great uncle and friends about his “rowdy wife.” He said to Uncle James and co. he had told her that while he didn’t like the drinking, she could drink two or three beers if she wanted, but only a couple times a week, only he had better not catch signs of her neglecting Jared or else the deal was off. My father said she liked his assertiveness. How did she let him know? Uncle James asked. “Let’s put it this way,” my father said. “After I laid down the law, she took to me like flies at a picnic. About every night, we shake the bed off its posts.”

            Another morning at Sammon’s bakery. Uncle James told my father that Britannia had been spotted at Spider’s. My father knew Spider’s—less a bar and more a glorified warehouse, out past the state line, where people drank and rubbed against one another. My father liked to think Britannia’s social life ended at his range of vision and didn’t want to imagine her at a hole like Spider’s.

            Yes, he knew Spider’s, all right. He and Uncle James had gone there once after a car auction. No blacktop outside, only loose gravel, people parked wherever they wanted. Big red door bearing the name in white cursive, a logo of boxy dice beneath. The gilded doorknob rattled. Inside, no standing walls partitioned one section from the next, letting bar flow to billiards flow to sawdust dance floor, where lonely hearts in denim boot-scooted to honky-tonk as bare bulbs cast jaundiced hazes over pale faces and old beer choked the air. That was where Britannia chose to spend her time. Imagination dried out the inside of my father’s mouth.

            Another thing, Uncle James said, holding an oozing jelly donut over wax paper. Under the table, my father nervously twisted one Reebok over the other. There was an eyewitness, Uncle James said, that guy who owns the car lot, Dan Miller, who said he’d last seen Britannia leave with some man. My father turned dead-eyed.

            He went to work that afternoon and did his overtime. As he grouped gallons of milk and pushed the boxes on to Loading, his brain itched. His fantasy had gone bust. He had fantasized his wife as perfect mother, at home suckling Jared at her breast, as dutiful as Mary to baby Jesus. He thought about her home cooking meals. He could trust that part was real.

            For nights he worked into the next morning, she had talked to him about preparing sack dinners, but he had said no, for dinner, no matter how late, he wanted her homecooked meals. If she were asleep when he returned, he could count on finding these meals on four plates, spread out over both rungs of the oven, four courses wrapped in shiny Roswell tinfoil. Finding this food made him happy. He thought making this food made her happy. Now he guessed it made no difference.

            In a fit, my father turned to his line partner and said, “Things are slow, cover my shift—family,” and left.

            Cutting off the headlights and rolling into the gravel drive, he thought he might yet catch Britannia in bed with another man. He stepped in the front door. A chill hit him. The heating was off, and so were the lights. From the bedroom, he heard a wail, Jared’s. He hurried to the back, half-expecting to find the house empty except for the baby, but there was Britannia, in bed, face up, mouth open, in jeans and a sweater, and sneakers, the playpen beside her, Jared bawling in the dark. My father picked him up. The baby needed changing. He carried Jared to the bathroom, removed his diaper, and cleaned him with wet wipes. Next, he ran the bathwater until it turned warm and rose to the height of the baby’s knee. He sat Jared down into the water and scrubbed and shampooed him. This was the first time he had cleaned the baby. After a good towel-drying, he carried him back to the bedroom where he fitted him into a diaper and some thick pajamas. Jared put his head against his father’s shoulder. Britannia remained asleep.

            Even though my father never called Britannia’s parents—despite their reservations toward him before the marriage—he knew they were good people at heart. Though it pained him to think it so. But he had no one else to contact. His own mother in Dexter never answered the phone past seven. Besides, the in-laws lived only a stone’s throw away on Catalina, in the better neighborhood, the suburban sprawl behind the trailer park. So my father called. It was nearly two in the morning. His father-in-law answered. He didn’t ask questions when my father said he and Jared needed to come over.

            His in-laws met him at the door. His mother-in-law took Jared from his arms and got some baby food from the refrigerator and began feeding Jared at the breakfast nook. Of course baby food was on hand, Britannia had been dropping Jared off there some days, probably nights, too. My father sat down at the dining table, and at that same moment, on the corner of Catalina and Ridgewood, in a single-story red brick, my mother, a teenager unfamiliar with a man named Bruce Pritchett, slept soundly in her bedroom. My father ate reheated leftovers.

            The next morning, Britannia got the call from her mother and came over. She sat down beside my father at the dining table. Britannia’s father carried his plate of scrambled eggs from the dining room to the living room. Britannia’s mother carried Jared to the den. My father bounced one caged hand against another. “Jared had diarrhea down his leg,” he said in a low voice. “I smell it on my shirt.”

            “I don’t smell much better,” Britannia said.

            “The smoking’s news to me.”

            “Bruce—”

            “Don’t Bruce me.”

            “Can’t I go out?”

            “And neglect our son?”

            “You’re one to talk. Always at the donut shop.”

            “Don’t turn this around. Last night, where were you?”

            “In bed.”

            “Before.”

            “What do you want to hear? If you know, why ask?”

            They were finished. He was certain. He wouldn’t ask about the men. He only hoped she never left Jared alone while she went out with these men God knows where. But he wouldn’t worry about that. He would have his whole future to think about these things. For now, he needed a new plan. He would move in with his mother. He figured although Britannia would keep the trailer, she wouldn’t keep it for long and would eventually move back in with her parents. Fine. That was her decision. More immediately, he told Britannia, he needed to contact his foreman. Britannia surprised him by telling him the foreman had called and said my father was fired. He couldn’t just walk off a shift like that, was what the foreman said. My father nodded. Britannia removed her Noah’s ark earrings and put them down on the dining table. He told me he recalled the sound of her earrings scraping against lacquer.

            And he recalled taking her hand in his and holding it, the softest he’d ever felt.

            But this, my father said, was all in the past, back before he realized he even wanted to be a father. In divorce court, the judge ruled favorably for Britannia. She got primary custody of Jared. My father kept Jared on weekends—which didn’t amount to much time with his son, especially since my father had begun traveling cross-country from auction to auction selling cars. He had finally really got the car-dealing business going with Uncle James. And by then, he had met a new woman: my mother. She mostly took care of Jared on weekends while my father worked.

            I wouldn’t learn of Jared until five years after I had come into the world. One afternoon, my mother was nesting me in her lap in our living room as we leafed through a photo album when I happened upon a Polaroid of my mother seated on the same floor nesting a different small child. The two of them faced the camera, all smiles. “Who’s that?” I asked. “That’s Jared,” my mother replied, “your daddy’s other boy.” By then, Britannia had prohibited Jared from seeing my mother and father. My father would tell me later the reason was jealousy, but all this was then beyond the ken of my five-year-old head, which struggled to process the words “daddy’s other boy.” I looked down at the carpet and began pouting. My mother’s soft hands swiveled my face toward hers. “Don’t cry,” she begged. I gathered up courage and said through drool, “I’ma gonna get my zizzors and cut his head off.” My mother giggled.

            Three years ago, I got a call. My brother had died, a friend said. Confused, I Skyped my younger brother Jesse after my friend’s call to check on him. His face, wide like our father’s, appeared on my computer screen, the interior of the family home behind him, the wood-paneled walls, the mounted deer head, all there, fine, everything fine. I explained the call. Jesse nodded and said it was our half-brother Jared who had died. He had been out back at the restaurant where he’d worked for twenty years when a food truck backed into him. The driver hadn’t seen him taking garbage to the dumpsters.

            Following my discovery of Jared at five, I didn’t have my first face-to-face encounter with him until I was a high-schooler. My father had sprung the meeting. After several years of never knowing what my grown half-brother looked like, I at sixteen came home one Saturday afternoon from my restaurant shift washing dishes, and as I entered the house, I saw someone seated by the front door, a rale-thin bald man, baseball cap, gaunt pale jaw, smoothly shaven except for the narrow mustache above his lip, who wore eyeglasses like me. “Do you know who that is?” my father said from the sofa. I shook my head. “That’s your brother Jared.” I feigned a smile and shook his dry hand. Then I excused myself, said I had to change out of my damp work clothes. In the shower, I must have had a panic attack. I went to my bedroom and didn’t go into the living room for upward of two hours for fear of seeing my father’s face in a stranger’s.

            Hearing as a younger person of my father’s marriage to and divorce from Britannia and their rearing of their son Jared, I thought it a fine story and my father a fine storyteller. Unlike me, my father never got tongue-tied. But like every storyteller, my father was a fibber. He had had years to craft his victim’s tale, years to practice these words on me in our countryside drives. By age eleven, I had grown familiar with this standard version, only one time he added a detail. He briefly introduced, and just as promptly abandoned the topic of, another woman whom he said he’d loved. He told me about this woman as we crested the bend of Whiskville Road, on the outskirts of our little Kentucky town. We passed the hill upon which sat the Fox Meadows trailer park, my father’s and his former wife’s former mobile home nestled away somewhere up there on cinderblocks. He met this other woman at the milk plant, he said. Her name was Kitana. She wore Dior, and it turned him on, he said. Because of her, he understood the allure of perfume. He turned to me and smirked. Had he been with this woman when he was married to Britannia? I asked. His face lost the smirk, his mind lost the reverie, and he returned to facing the windshield with that familiar, pursed-lipped frown, a dark knot on an old tree.

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Billie Pritchett is an English professor in the Department of Creative Convergence at Kyungnam University in Changwon, Korea. His work has appeared in Delmarva Review, Washington Square Review, and most recently in Arkana.