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Rain

by Holly Patton

“I am sick of you being so mean to me! You are so God caring, damned engaging, so passionate with everybody but me. And I am damn sick of it!”

I listened to him rant and thought, well, finally he can cuss properly.

He used to try to tell me that it wasn’t necessary for me to use two different cuss words in a sentence or certainly not to break them up. But I did. I do. And now, he had learned it. Split infinitives, mixed tenses be damned.

His voice got louder and louder as he stepped away from the black Bosch dishwasher where he threw the pink fiesta plates into the organized box.
He stepped towards me, his brown eyes filled with rage and for a second I thought he was really going to do it. I never have been afraid of Hunter Perkins, but for one short scary second, I thought he was going to hit me.

I could feel rage and frustration seeping from his pores just like the plastic smell that always stuck to him. Those damn plastic gloves he had to stretch out and place over his big hairy hands multiple times, each day, patient after patient, taking those plastic covered fingers, prodding open the next smelly mouth, probing and poking. All the while, greeting everyone, young or old, scared or relaxed with “How’re you doing today, Miss Walker?” “ Hey, Fred, how’s your back feeling today?” Jovial, kind, patient.

But here, tonight with the rain outside this river house falling with an intense, new fury, he looks at me with dark hate in those kind dentist eyes.

It isn’t true hatred. No, not the kind of hate that capriciously explodes; I know that kind of hate. My shoulder still bears its scars.

This is a milder, simmering, smoldering kind of hate — born of years of frustration of thinking you had everything you wanted but then watching it just slip out of your hands, like the sand at the beach. No matter how tightly he grips his fist, it still slips out. Back to the beach. Back to its natural home.

I am the reason for this gentle, mild-mannered man’s pseudo hatred.

Me, like the sand. I can’t be caught or held for long. I escape by whatever means necessary or available to my home. The sand has the beach. I have me. I don’t know where my home is any longer.

Physically, I still reside at 895 Edgewater Drive, but I’m not sure if I really feel like I’m at home there anymore. It is empty now — at least today while I am here in New Hampshire. Well, no, it isn’t completely empty; Catty is there, but it is empty of me and Raney and Patton, my sons, my center. It doesn’t feel like home without them, my boys, and their noise and their sweat. I miss red Georgia clay being tracked in by their Timberland boots.

I am adrift now, my sons grown, and I abide now in this in-between relationship. In-between friends, in-between marriage. No mad passion, no abuse.

I know he doesn’t hate me. I know he is as weary as I am with this rollercoaster relationship. Up down, still scary. I love those adrenaline filled rides at Six Flags but to live on one all the time, it is too much.

He doesn’t expect my reaction. Still, after eight years, I think he thinks one day I will turn into another woman. A woman who is calm and content. A woman who does not split up her cuss words or chaff at the mere mention of marriage.

His words. His tone. His half menacing manner. I don’t respond with kindness or gentleness. I don’t walk over to him and wrap my arms around him, reassuring him of my love for him, and my desire to spend the rest of this crazy life with him.

I don’t do that. Because I can’t. I don’t know how it feels to be normal after twenty years of being divorced. I need to lean into normal, I know I should, but how?

So, instead, I pick up the phone and call a cab.

I sit in the red leather chair and ask, “How much is it to come out to pick me up at the Chattahoochee Hill Country Park and take me home?”

“Ma’am, where is home?”

“Ma’am, are you there?”

“Oh! Yess, I’m sorry,” and I tell them the numbers on the street in the city where I have lived for 15 years.

“Addy, please. Hang up the phone, baby.”

I look at him and say with all the caustic sarcasm I can muster at 10 p.m., “Baby? Did you call me 'baby', really, because I just saw you hate me and now, you call me baby?”

It is my time to be angry and mean. I am tired. And, yes, yes you can be bone-tired. It is not just some simple Southern expression. I put down the phone and stare at him as he reaches for me.

copyright © 2012 by Holly Patton

Holly Patton is a writer, speaker and minister who has written for most of her life. She writes and presents sermons every week as an ordained minister and is now working on two books, a book of essays for the non-churched and a novel about love, loss and God. She is the mother of two sons, Raney and Patton, and proud grandmother of Addison Cain, a redheaded joy. Presently, she lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her website is under construction but you can reach her by email at Hollypatton(at)comcast.net.