Mercury

by Amy Jo Burns

Reader, they’ve set a place for you at the table. “You’re welcome,” the mother says. —MAURICE KILWEIN GUEVARA, “Late Supper in Northern Appalachia”

Waylon Joseph crouched behind Mercury’s ballfield bleachers on the south end of town, smoking a cigarette and hiding from his wife.

The air around him felt thick, like honey and longing.

Waylon tapped the edge of his Salem with his finger, and ash fluttered to the dirt. Today, he told himself. Today you have to tell her. He’d said the same thing yesterday. The day before, too. Every day since he’d visited the bank.

In the last eight years, so much of their marriage had become about power—who had it, who gave it away. A slippery, constant leveling of the scales.

Theo was now part of a long tradition in the Joseph family of children who had been disappointed by their fathers. Mick Joseph had never attended any of Waylon’s baseball games. He was too busy slapping a fresh coat of paint no one wanted on every picket fence in town and belting out the wrong lyrics to “Bad Moon Rising.”

But his father had built so many things in his life that he never bothered to take care of. Houses, marriages, sons. He made people laugh. He also took whatever he wanted. Mick was dapper, and devil-stained, and draining as hell. Waylon wondered which neighborhood widow he’d horrified this time after penning her the same tired love note and banging on her door at four o’clock in the morning with a sad bouquet of geraniums he’d filched from his own lawn.

Everyone agreed he needed to be caged. No one but his three sons was expected to do it. Waylon, brutally cursed ever since his mother christened him the “steady” one, knew the task would fall to him.

Baylor—the tallest and oldest by thirteen months, the watchtower and lookout—had no such trinket from their mother. He knew how to signal trouble but never how to avoid it. And Shay Baby, the youngest at nineteen, was still his daddy’s best boy. Much like Theo, Shay held all his father’s wishes, and none of his regret.

Ten minutes later, Waylon met his older brother where he’d requested—at the entrance to the only Presbyterian church in town. Mercury had other denominations to offer—Methodist, Baptist, Catholic—but this was the only house of worship the Joseph family had devoted themselves to since 1970, when Mick returned from Vietnam.

JOSEPH & SONS ROOFING was plastered across the front of it. The company’s title always unsettled Way because of its untruth. The “sons” were the ones who showed up for work, and not Mick Joseph as the name promised. Weak Waylon and Big Baylor. That was how Mick referred to his two oldest children when they worked together on a roof.

The pastor’s name was Lennox, and he looked up at the sound of them. “I know we should have fixed the roof long ago,” he said. “I know.”

Waylon never felt his own mortality more than he did when he sat in these pews.

Earlier that day, the church mothers were teaching summertime Bible lessons in the chapel when cold sludge began to drip from the ceiling. Clumps of plaster fell on the children’s laps with a splat. Rainwater had leaked from the steeple above them, casting a deep bruise across the saintly white ceiling of the sanctuary.

“It’s the flashing,” Way called. “It leaked.” Baylor smirked. “See for yourself,” Way said.

He looked up and found the same purple swirl on the low ceiling, with a hatch. A hatch like that meant an upper room waited beyond it. The opening had been painted shut years ago. Specks of dried paint hit Waylon’s face as he took the crowbar to the edge and pried open the lip.

He spread the light through the space until it illuminated a petrified hunk. A rank odor pulsed from it as it lay on top of a heap of choir robes. Whatever it was, it had been in there a long time. Way began to feel queasy. No other exits existed, as far as he could tell.

“Call Patrick,” Way said of the local rookie cop, who moonlighted with town sanitation because crime in Mercury was scarce. Patrick was Shay Baby’s best friend and not even old enough to drink.

As he said it, the hardened chunk of bat carcass slid off the fabric heap in one disgusting piece. Beneath it hid a large object spooled tightly in plastic. Way squinted. Felt his stomach churn. He pulled at the plastic, and the whole thing rolled off the mound of robes toward the hatch and halted at its edge.

At the attic opening, something sinister appeared inside the plastic. The knob of a wrist, the bend of a shriveled hand.

Waylon knew nothing about the truth of this body above him, only the chronic ruin it reminded him of.

What hung in the air between the brothers wasn’t what had died at their hands, but what still lived.

Before Waylon found the church stairwell, and then the harsh sun, he found a cool floor to press his head against in an empty bathroom. Then, he threw up all over it.

What Shay meant to say, but didn’t, was that his whole boyhood had felt too long, one with too many rules and not enough mercy.

Shay loved best when he said, Show me your worst thing. I promise I won’t look away.

Back in Ohio, when Marley had been old enough to ask her mother why she wasn’t married, Ruth had only replied, “Men do things, and women apologize for them.”

Baylor had the kind of muscle that intimidated; Way’s was the kind that sheltered.

“I want to love someone,” Marley said. “I know it’s not enough—but that’s what I see. Maybe it’s a man, maybe it’s a child. I don’t know.” “Maybe,” Ruth spoke softly, “it’s you.”

“I trust you with my life,” he said. “And I trust you with mine.” They meant it because they were starved for each other and young and the clock was running out on their freedom. They wanted to bottle the feeling of possibility, to capture their own potential before it turned into regret.

If Shay hadn’t been punched, and Patrick hadn’t wanted to make peace, and if Marley hadn’t been so bent on proving to Waylon that Shay deserved his privacy, she might never have left her apartment that night after a heavy rain, looped around the side of the porch, and spied Elise in the wet dark without a jacket, sitting on the roof.

“You don’t need to save everyone, Marley.” Waylon looked stern, and disappointed, and wounded. “You didn’t need to do that for Shay.” It felt like a scolding. He was reminding her that Shay was not hers—as if Waylon had drawn a Joseph family line and she was outside of it, as if that would free up some unoccupied space in her heart.

“Marley,” the voice said. “It’s Elise.” The line crackled. “I need—” Marley had so prepared for this eventuality that her speech dribbled out of her mouth. “Shay is happy and thriving, he—” “This isn’t about Shay. I need—” Marley heard Elise’s voice catch. “I need your help.” Dread tickled the back of Marley’s neck. Never had Elise asked her for anything. “Where are you?” she asked. “I’m at the church.”

She called for Elise again and found her there, seated in the last pew, a spare light from the stained glass window casting her monstrous shadow onto the aisle. Marley crept in beside her and sat down. Waited.

“I used to be like you, you know.” Marley still didn’t understand what those words meant, and she didn’t want to. “Before I knew that my whole world relies on the myth of the good man,” Elise went on, “of which there are none.”

Who could know what to search for in a mother? Children were trained to look at her and see their own needs instead.

A paramedic burst in. He used a suction to free the paste of pills from Elise’s throat. He coursed an electric current through her body. He started to sweat. Then he cursed, too. It was no use. Elise was gone.

The arc of a mother’s life shouldn’t have self-sacrifice as its inevitable pinnacle.

Marley started to hate the sound of her name. It was always a precursor to things she didn’t want to hear. Marley, Elise commanded while baring her secrets. Marley, Jade whispered before asking whether she was safe. Marley, Baylor repeated when he feared he was just like his father.

“Don’t you see?” Ruth’s forehead creased. “I just wanted you to dream for yourself. I wanted you to have a choice, and I’m still not sure that you did.” To that, Marley had no response. She knew she couldn’t choose between what she had now and what might have been. She also knew her mother had never gotten that choice, either.

Marley understood a bit more of what motherhood meant, this continual opening of every door for children to pass through, stay a while, leave, and return.

She’d never spoken to any of them this way before. “I can,” he said. “And Marley’s gonna start getting paid,” Baylor spoke up. “Starting today.” This brought Mick to his feet again. The glasses perched on the top of his head fell to the floor. “Paid? For what?” “For all the shit you and I can’t do,” Baylor said, and he and Mick both waited for Waylon to speak. Way’s jaw rocked back and forth, covered in a fine stubble that Marley once would have liked to feel rough against her shoulder. “Fair’s fair,” he said.

“You’ve got dish duty tonight, old man,” Baylor said. “I’ll take tomorrow.” Mick didn’t argue. He collected the plates and set about washing them in the sink. Before, he would have been playing “Moonlight Serenade” on the piano by now. Before, Elise had done all the dishes herself. Now, everyone knew they had to be better men than they were.

Shay drank and coughed. He was nineteen and hadn’t yet developed the taste for coffee or liquor, which he was still not allowed to drink in a country that counted him old enough to go to war and die.

This was how Marley helped, and how she helped was how she loved—like a tidal wave.

She cared for Shay, who brightened every time Marley walked into the room. And there was more money in his pocket once Marley took hold of the finances, forcing Mick to let go.

“You do have to answer to me. To Waylon. To your wife.” Baylor let the final word hang in the air between them. They’d never spoken about what he’d seen between Mick and Ann, and Baylor hoped his father sensed that he knew about his wandering eye. He knew about so much more, too.

Baylor figured his mother may have better things to do than cut her son’s shaggy mop once a month. One day, not long after Elise had walked through town without her shoes, Baylor stepped into Jade’s salon without an appointment.

“Do you think it’s possible to spend your life loving the wrong people?”

Jade considered it. “I think it’s more likely that we love the right people in the wrong way.”

When Baylor took his mother to her slew of doctor’s appointments that summer, the experts proclaimed she had early-onset dementia. No telling how bad it would get, or when, and there was little they could do.