Humble Me (Closed)

[MadMissJ]

Her head finally lulled to its other side, the stiffness in her neck went right on back down to her spine, that’s what sleeping sitting up would get you. The hood was still up in front of her windshield, so she couldn’t see out that way, but out the driver’s side window the sun was just starting its ascent into the sky. She’d have to find her phone, with a blind hand that skirted its way under the soft crumpling of the chip bags that she and Theresa had gotten last night at their latest gas stop, she found it. Buried in between the passenger seat and the center console. It was just a burner, with no credit there wouldn’t be any of the latest iPhone, still, Jolene narrowed her eyes in the semi-darkness to see that it was creeping on to four in the morning. She’d better check on the radiator, see if it had cooled down enough to attempt to put some water in it and start back up again.

She tried to open the door of her broke down car as quietly as possible, tucking her phone and her hands into the pockets of her jacket. It wasn’t snowing now, which meant that the clear early morning wasn’t forgiving and the drifts were all around them. Jolene would have to turn the car over to try and generate a little heat for her baby later, but the kid was piled up with blankets and jackets and clean clothes that all were housed in the back seat. She still peeked to make sure her dark haired girl was still lying there, in her angelic sleep. The sight didn’t make her smile, but it didn’t make her want to cry either. What did make her was the sight of the coolant and water leaking out of her car and onto the shoulder where she’d managed to get the machine. The snow coloring around the spots.

“Shit!” It was hissed and it took all of her restraint not to slam the hood of the car down and hit it. It would have been satisfying, for about a minute, until it woke Theresa. Instead, she kicked the tire which didn’t do much for her mood, but the word ‘Shit!’ caught in her throat this time made the tears start to well up in her eyes. What was she going to do? She’d have to sell something, what did they have, other than the car? Jolene recognized now that she’d made a mistake, realizing that when she’d hit the highway and there had been turn offs to the place that she’d called home for twenty years. She’d blown past them, putting the pedal to the metal. The world wasn’t round back there, people who left the town never, ever went back. It was like the world ended at the very farthest edge of their town, where the “You are leaving” sign was. Where she’d once thought, it was funny to paint the words “Assburn” over “Ashburn”. Life in a small town offered little to no entertainments, and you had to be bad to have a good time. Oh, she’d gotten her ass whopped by her Daddy. But it had been funny, for a long time, and it had been in the town paper. Jolene had saved it way back from her sophomore year in high school, probably would have still been carrying it with her if she hadn’t left it in the dust way back when. Like she’d done with that one-horse town.

It was with shaking hands that she pulled out a cigarette, looking back into the window just to make sure there weren’t little brown eyes to watch the habit. She’d told Teresa she’d quit, but just physically lighting up the white end of the stick was calming. Her hands still shook, tips of her fingers white and blue from the cold and poor circulation, but she sucked down that smoke, along with the frigid air, trying to think.

She just couldn’t call him. That thought ran through her mind and made her look skyward, the tears she had gently fell down her temples and into her dark hair. Her thumbnail caught between her front teeth and the cigarette was waving in front of her face while she contemplated. She couldn’t do it. She’d passed the leaving sign already, she’d never even stopped. She didn’t want to. A sleeve was dragged across her face, to stop the wetness from encouraging the running nose that the cold was already giving her. Another drag of the cigarette calmed the tears, why waste the energy anyway? Why cry? Behind her was just a job that had fallen through. She’d called a friend, a sort of friend and asked her to see if there was something, anything that she could do. What hadn’t she done in the past? Fast food, convenience stores, gas stations, bars. Nothing. She had nothing.

“Shit.” She gasped again, coughing up the word. And she walked around to the back of her small sedan, and looked out, backward down the road, though she couldn’t see them, those exits were miles behind her, and yet, the closest things Jolene was going to hope to find. She opened her phone to look at the names in her contacts, it was a dwindling list. Her momma had gotten away from the town, once her Daddy had suffered a heart attack and died a year or so back, she’d not talked to many people back there in years. The mother threw down her cigarette and stomped it out with the toe of her tennis shoe into the white snow, only to look back to her phone. It helped that she didn’t need to dial the number because her hand was shaking so badly that she didn’t think she could make herself stamp out ten consecutive numbers, but he was in her phone as “Do not answer”. Maybe she should have written a reminder to “Do not call.”

Still, with the call button pressed, Jolene brought the phone to her ear, running her hand under her nose one more time while the phone on the other end rang. Now she was rocking a bit against the trunk, it was the nerves more than the need to warm up that made her do it. But everything, including her voice, paused when the ringing ended and there was a pickup. And for a moment she just strained to listen for a voice that had once been familiar to her. But she didn’t answer back, not right away. It was only when she’d thought he’d hang up that she said anything.

“Hey.” It was quiet, whispered with her free hand curled around the bottom of her cell. “It’s been a while.”

 

[ArcticAvenue]

Snow was coming.. The wet hung in the air to tell you that. Too cold to be rain, which would be a blessing in its own right. No good comes from rain when it only keeps from freezing. Still be miserable. Wet cold just seems to sneak its way into every space it can find. Whether through the gap in the door. Whether through the crack in the window. Whether just around the uninsulated straps at the edges of the wall panelling. The wind was kicking up with it, which you get used to out here. They say if the wind ever stopped all the chickens would fall over. It was starting to pick up now, as the feel of the trailer shifted. On the bad days, the really bad days, the trailer would rattle in order to hold itself together. This may not be one of those bad days, but he could still feel the start of it all. A stark reminder that out here, a trailer is a shitty place to live in winter. Maybe that just makes more sense for him to leave.

Jack thought to get up to make coffee, but he usually doesn’t on his day off. He doesn’t need it to wake up. It’s been a year or two that he needed an alarm to get up at 3:30 anymore. Nowhere to be means no need to be any more awake than he is. He’d just be drinking it to warm up, and he just put on another layer of flannel to do just that.

Besides, coffee costs money. He may need it soon.

Jack’s house is a trailer, stuck at the edge of a failed trailer community now home to just three others spread so far apart that there are more weed patches than neighbors. It’s like the hundreds of others spread across the area. Two bed, one bath, den, kitchen, and shame. The exterior is a greyish silver, a rundown color from years of fading. Inside is wood paneling walls and dull carpet. He sits in the den on a couch made in the 60’s he got on the cheap. The only light in the room, and the whole trailer, a string of white christmas lights hung along the ceiling. In the kitchen, the radio crackled through the morning news. National and international stuff to begin with that don’t really matter to folks around here. Local news ends up to be about road conditions and meth labs. Then the ag business. Then the obituaries. Then the trading post, where people sell off what they can to keep the heat on. Of all of that, the real depressing news to Jack is how the price of oil continues to drop. Each penny down means another step closer to losing his job in the fields.

Through the broken shades, the light of the morning is coming. The sun at the horizon underneath the blanket of clouds already covering the area. Its one of those morning that will just grow darker as the weather starts to come in. Soon enough he will need to get up, head into town. Stop off at church, see if there is something he could do to help out around there. Maybe stop at the library and see if there is a book he would read. Or maybe see if they could use some help. Only reason why he takes a day off is that they don’t let him work seven days a week. It used to be he’d take as many days off as he could. Now, he doesn’t know what to do with his time.

At least Connie kept him company on his days off.

Now … she doesn’t.

Jack’s phone buzzed. Not unexpected since he took this job a few years back to get a call this early, but it was his day off. He couldn’t expect bill collectors. They left him alone these days, and it was too early. He expected it to be Connie, she would probably be getting home about now, drunk enough to see if he forgave her.

Looking at the phone - he didn’t expect that.

She doesn’t call. She never calls. In the end, that’s what made him accept it. As soon as he hit the button, his mouth went dry, his air tightened.

“Hey. It’s been a while.” She whispered, keeping her voice low. No immediate cry for help. No anger. No accusation. Just a whisper.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Hi Jo,” he says.

After a breath, he says as well, “Snow’s comin’.”

 

[MadMissJ]

“Hi, Jo”

There had been days that she’d been excited to hear that on his lips. The times when they’d not been able to go driving around town because her daddy didn’t want her seeing that ‘good for nothing boy.’ But she’d always had school, some days that was the only reason she came at all. The bus ride had always been hellacious, but some of her good friends were on the same wide route to get to all the kids on the outskirts of town, so an hour or two listening to whatever country station would come in, chatting in the back about boys, music, rumors around town and of course trouble. She’d been a coltish kid with a stubbornness and an unshakable need to piss someone off. Her Daddy, her momma, her teachers, the sheriff, the principal, but not Jack. She’d been as sweet as honey and twice as stuck on him. She’d flagged him down once, when she’d been about fourteen, had hopped into his truck and Jolene had been done for. He'd been older than her by a few years, but she didn’t care, she’d lived for his pickup making its way down her dusty driveway. She loved him.

Or had. She’d not loved him that way in a long time.

“Snow’s comin’.”

His reminder yanked her brain back from the past and reminded her that she was standing out in it, half frozen already for all the time that she’d been out in the weather. Avoiding returning inside her car while Theresa was sleeping. The girl could sleep through anything, but Jolene wasn’t sure she was up to explaining her baby yet again that they were going to have to move on.

Theresa was lonely, she needed other children, someone other than her to prop up her second-hand Barbie dolls and barely pay attention to what the little girl’s imagination dreamed up. She always responded in the same ways. The ‘yeah.’, ‘really?’, ‘is that so?’, Jolene was too busy getting home from a shift or trying to get some sleep before the next one, that even with her laying on the couch, trying to make the doll walk with her flopping hand that was hanging toward the floor, she wasn’t much of a playmate. And her baby asked so little of her.

She didn’t want to tell her that they were stuck, again. That they were going to buy a ticket for the bus, so pack up what she needed, what she wanted, and leave the rest behind. What kind of mother did that?

The kind that was doing her damndest and who God kept smacking down. A desperate one.

“Yeah, I know.” Her black sneakers dug themselves into the little drift of snow, reaching the black top as she ground the toe of them as hard as she could. Willing that to distract her from what she was going to have to beg for. Beg for from him no less. Jolene had thought that she’d begged him for something for the last time years ago. It had been for mercy, and here she was asking it again.

“Thing is…the baby and I are out in it.” The tears at the futility of the situation made the syllables she tried to get out, choked up and brittle. She sniffed and ran her sleeve under her nose once more, trying to pull back the angry tears. “It’s my car, the radiator’s shot, I think. I thought that I could just let it cool and put some more fluids in it, but it’s not taking. I don’t know what to do.” She unburdened herself over the phone. Almost forgetting who she was on with, as she let the unchecked tears freeze against her face with the wind.

“I know it’s not your problem, I know. But I don’t have anyone else to call.” She finally confessed, chin falling toward her chest with defeat. “The baby and I can’t walk it, can you help me, Jack?” The question was one of the sorrier things that had come out of her mouth, miserable but urgent.

 

[ArcticAvenue]

The truck’s name was Bear.

The first flakes of snow melted on the windshield, then was just pushed along by the thin blade of the wiper. If it gets heavy, those wipers won’t do much more than create a pattern to the mess that Jack won’t be able to see through. Just a reminder of what his next fix is on the old beast. Worth the price though, anything to keep Bear working is worth it typically. Jack got Bear for next to nothing from his pa before he even graduated high school. He damn near owned it by then with the work he did to keep the brown & tan 1985 Chevy Silverado crew cab alive. Since then, he sunk a new engine and transmission into the thing. But when he looks down at that odometer that only goes up to 99,999 and knows there is another 2 that should be in front of it, he knows Bear is that investment worth the money.

In a way, Bear was doing what it had for years. Chugging across town to pick up Jo. Jack met her when was just a kid, but when they started going he would drive over to her place in Bear. His pa used to say that it was the perfect truck for a school boy. ‘Wide enough that you can fit a bunch of girls in it, bench seats when you only wanted to have one in there with you, and shitty enough that when it ‘broke down’ by the lake late at night she may actually believe you.’

Of course in this weather, Bear won’t be much good broken down. For him, for Jo, for the baby.

He tried not to make it seem like he had to think about coming to help her. She asked. He gave it a moment, then just asked where she was at.

He wanted to ask what she was doing out there this time of morning.

He wanted to ask what happened to all the other ones she could have called.

He wanted to be that fucking asshole that she always described him as.

Jack just slid on his overalls, his flannel, his heavy Carheart coat, his oil stained ball cap, then walked out to Bear - and was on his way.

Now at the edge of town, he could see the car in the distance, pulled up along side of the road. In the growing grey light of the gloomy morn, he could see she was forever from anything. The flat plains of barren farmland waiting to be sowed surround the car to make it look as lonely of a spec as his trailer might on the other side of town. There weren’t another car in view, and probably won’t be one for a while. Too early for anyone to be driving too quiet of a road. So it were easy to make a turn on the pavement, pulling Bear head first up towards her car so he can use the headlights to see.

He stepped out, left Bear running just to keep the cabin warm. As he slammed the door shut he realized, he didn’t know what he was going to say to her. What the hell was he going to say.

Jesus what the hell do you say to her now.

 

[MadMissJ]

Jack was much more prepared to stand out on the road in silence and in snow than Jolene was. She watched him wheel around with the heavy truck, pushing open her door once more, and getting out of the car that was starting to acclimate to the temperatures outside and seemed to have taken on a negligible difference. She was clad in her black hoodie, jeans and her sneakers. Not what she would have wanted to be wearing when she saw Jack again. But with the way she’d been avoiding this moment over the last few years, she really hadn’t thought much about it. She looked back at her broken-down piece of crap, and over to Jack’s. But the truck did dredge up a lot of memories, a lot of memories that had been put down by their marriage.

Fighting in Bear had eventually overtaken the times they’d gone joyriding. The time that she’d opened the door and walked along the side of the road, while he’d told her to get back inside, had erased their laying in the bed of his truck with her dark hair spread out on his chest and the smile on her face when the warm air caressed her skin. Bringing home Theresa in it, was forgotten for all the times that she’d watched the tail lights leaving their trailer with a crying baby on her hip and her own yells to keep her company. Her mouth was a thin line of nerves when she rounded the front of her car and walked toward him, highlighted by the lights that were now shining on her, and stretched his shadow far out in front of him.

She drew in a deep breath and sighed it out, the cloud of condensation made it seem like she’d taken another cancer stick out of its pack. But instead, Jolene shoved her fists deeply into her jacket, physically fidgeting for all the dread she was feeling. Jolene didn’t know what to say, not that she’d done so well on the phone, but it had been enough for him to come out here. The last time she’d seen him hadn’t been so traumatic, more of their day to day really. She’d made breakfast, she’d been feeding the baby when he’d left for work, then she took the bag she’d already packed and hopped into the car she’d traded in more than a year back for the p.o.s that was stuck here now, and had driven off. Not even a note on the fridge. He didn’t need a note, he knew why she’d left.

But what she didn’t know was why he was here. Or maybe she did, Jolene supposed it was because of the baby. She was going to have to figure out how to tell him that Theresa had no idea who he was. Jolene had never bothered to talk bad about her husband to her daughter, to avoid that she never talked of him at all. Theresa had asked only a few times, but the circles they kept, the friends they’d made along the way, mother’s raising children by themselves was par for the course. Daddies just left or had to be left.

She waited until she was fully in Jack’s shadow and she could look up at his face without the brights blinding her. Shivering in the snow, she clamped down her jaw to prevent her teeth from chattering.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” Jolene told him honestly, hating the burn of tears that made her eyes hurt and her throat tighten once more. She had to take another minute to shift, looking down at her shoes before bringing her pale eyes back upward, brushing her dyed black hair away from her face. “It’s shit that I called you, I know. We don’t have much to bring with us. Does, Jeffy Davis’ dad still own the auto shop? He used to play poker with our Dad’s, maybe he knows of a deal that I can trade it in for.” The sound of her voice was tight, and the way it wavered it was obvious that she was trying to keep it all under wraps before she fell apart. “Theresa’s in the car, still sleeping. Like you used to, nothing bothers her so much that she can’t get a full eight hours.”

 

[ArcticAvenue]

Shut up, he wanted to shout. Shut the fuck up, Jo. You just don’t know when to shut up do you. You just talk and talk but you don’t shut up.

That’s what he wanted to shout.

But he couldn’t.

He wanted to shout that for years. He used to tell Connie that every conversation with Jo included him yelling, ‘Shut the fuck up, Jo.’ He’d loved to say that the conversation ended with that, but that’s the last thing Jo would want was to end a conversation. Jo could make him so angry in ways that no one else could. His mama told him so when they’d got married, that she would be nothing but something to scream at when he is old and grey. Jo sure did have a way of making him so mad in so many ways with so little work. God as his witness, he never did lay a hand on her in anger; God as his witness, never did he threaten to do so. But that woman sure did bring the devil into his heart. Hearing her voice live and in person for the first time in years made that same hate build up, as if that spigot never shut off. As if those words he wanted to say when she walked out the door had been waiting on the tip of his tongue until she came along.

At least, that is what he wanted to have happen. All the times he wanted to say something to her. All that internal anger.

“It’s shit that I called you, I know. We don’t have much to bring with us. Does, Jeffy Davis’ dad still own the auto shop? He used to play poker with our Dad’s, maybe he knows of a deal that I can trade it in for.”

“Right,” is all he said back.

He stuck his head under the hood and tried to take a look. There were remnants of steam rising up from the radiator, but in the morning light it was too dark to see. He reached into his pocked, and pulled his phone to use as a flashlight.

“Theresa’s in the car, still sleeping. Like you used to, nothing bothers her so much that she can’t get a full eight hours.”

Jack stopped moving, held still, and closed his eyes. Theresa’s in the car. Baby Theresa. She’d be five, six now. He hadn’t seen his own daughter in so long that he wouldn’t know what she would look like. Yeah, Jo mentioned she had the baby on the phone, but now … now it’s real. Maybe for this Jo would let him see her. Maybe not wake her but see her.

His hand started to shake. Like it did after he quit drinking. It made the light of the camera flicker as he tired to make it look like he was actually focused on her problems.

Jack sucked in a long breath, tried to think, tried to stay focused, then remembered a question she asked. “Jeffy’s don’t open until 10.” If she was heading to work that would be too late, not that he knows where she works anymore, not his problem. But in his head, it didn’t make sense she was out here anyway, not this early, and not with the baby.

That’s when he spotted it.

“There’s a hole in your radiator. Rock stickin’ out of it too. Gonna need a new one.” Naturally, it gave him a means to pry, to dig at what lay beneath that. “Could give it a patch. How far ya planning to get?”

 

[MadMissJ]

He said nothing. Jolene was telling him that she had his little girl in the car and he didn’t say a word. Jack hadn’t always been cold, but near the end they’d both been. Seems as if he hadn’t changed, he didn’t ask any questions about their daughter, and her mouth was pressed into a thin line. He didn’t even ask to see her. So, when he told her Jeffy’s wouldn’t be open for another five hours or so, she spun on her toe and pushed her fingers through her dark hair. with frustration. Holding her tongue, but only because she couldn’t be out here any longer. She stood with her back to Jack, and looked out over the flats that were snow covered for as far as the eye could see. Dropping her arms to fold them back in front of her.

She shouldn’t have called, but Jolene swallowed down her anger and stepped closer.

“There’s a hole in your radiator. Rock stickin’ out of it too. Gonna need a new one.”

She sighed, walking over to look where Jack was placing the light from his phone. She knew about cars. Her Daddy and Jack had taught her a little something, she couldn’t rebuild one, but over the years she’d managed to keep her own going. Her head was next to his, her hands braced, she felt like the circulation was being cut off her in fingers for as hard as she was gripping the lip of the hood of her car.

“Shit.” It seemed that she was going to be using that word a lot today. “Might as well look for another car, I don’t have six hundred dollars to spend on getting a new one put in.” She pushed herself back away from Jack and car. What was she going to do? She’d have to look for something cheap to get Theresa and she on down the line a little farther.

“Could give it a patch. How far ya planning to get?”

“I don’t know, Jack. Far? But I went so far that I started to come back again.” She wanted to stomp her foot, to kick at her tires again, but she didn’t. “I don’t have anywhere to go. I missed work, a lot. Theresa got this…chest cold. And I had to take her to a doctor and that isn’t cheap.” She felt defensive now. She'd had a little dream that if and when she ever saw Jack again, she’d wanted it to be able to show him that she could do well on her own, that she was something without him. But here he was and there she was, and what was she showing him? Not a damn thing. “I went to stay with some friends, but there was nothing that was hiring…except the spots…” Of course, there were always “spots” to hire girls. But Jolene wasn’t so down that she’d be taking off her clothing for money.

“If I patch it, how far do you think I’d get?” She asked him honestly, but she looked up toward the sky, like she was asking a higher power, but she gave up on that a while ago.

“Look, can you drop Theresa and I off at Jeffy’s then? We’ll wait there, see what he has to say.”

But as she asked, her child opened the back door, and Jolene looked over her shoulder with a sigh.

“Momma?” The girl was in her clothing from the night before, rumpled with sleep and still in her sparkling, red slippers that had seen better days. Magic shoes only stayed magic until they were taken out of the box and worn.

“Here, Baby. Come here.” Jolene walked back toward her daughter, lifting her out of the cold and the snow, perching her on her hip so the girl could wrap her legs around her waist and her lanky arms around Jolene’s neck and buried her face against her shoulder, only peeking out with one blue eye.

“I just need a little more help, Jack. I’ve got nothing.”

 

[ArcticAvenue]

Helping his ex would be the right Christian thing to do. With a day off, he didn’t have anything better to do anyway. It ain’t that he can’t help, and it ain’t that he didn’t have the means to either. In all it’s simpleness, those things alone would be reason enough to lend a hand.

But when his daughter stepped out of the car, none of those reasons carried half the water than doing whatever it takes to keep the little girl from any trouble. Jack had tried over the years to remain hard when asked about Baby Theresa, but being hard is easy when her sweet little cheeks weren’t glowing in front of his eyes.

He had a twinge of anger at Jo though, when she asked for a little more help with the baby on her hip, it was like she was trying to get him to bend for the baby’s sake. Maybe she was even testing him, seeing if he cared at all about the child that took some of his paycheck for support. That would be like Jo. But if that was Jo’s intention, it worked.

“Nah, ain’t taking you to Jeffy’s,” he started. “You’re coming home with me. Jeffy’s a good guy, but he got his business to run. He’d charge ya for the radiator and the labor. He’d charge ya for the tow too. And your right, ya could get a beater for a better price.”

He thumbed back to his truck, “I got a tow strap back there, won’t take me more than a couple minutes to get you hooked up with Bear, and I can pull ya back to the trailer. I got a welder in the shed, probably some copper wire. If the weather clears, I can plug that hole in an hour or two.” The plan was all in his head, and pretty clear. He wasn’t telling her that the weather weren’t likely to clear, and he weren’t gonna run that welder in the rain or snow - don’t need a 200v shock from standing in a mud puddle making an arc. The point is that it gets her out of this weather.

The point is it gets Baby Theresa out of it.

“I got the heater fixed at the place. You and the baby can get your sleep in if ya want. I ain’t got any of that kids cereal, but pick some up for her if ya want.”

Then he looked at the girl clutching her mama. “I can get ya cereal, little darlin’. If ya want that is.” As he asked her, it was like a warmth grew on his cheeks. The kind of feeling he used to get when picking up Jolene for their dates when they were just kids. That simple feeling that no matter what, if she said he it would make him happy.