Molly Giles: GIFTS • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Molly Giles
GIFTS

Scotty loves her. How does she know? He pays for things. He was working for her neighbor, but when he saw that her gate was coming off its hinges, he came right over and knocked on her door and introduced himself and asked if he could fix it. “You could try,” she said, doubtful, because no man she’d ever known had ever fixed a damn thing—but Scotty got right to it, and the next thing she knew, she had a gate that swung open when opened and latched when closed. Not that she ever used it. She hadn’t left her house in months. Leaning on her cane, she watched him work from behind the curtains. Big tall white boy in blue jeans and cowboy boots. Prettiest thing she’d ever seen.

“Now do I have to pay you for all this?” she teased when he was finished.

“No, Letitia,” he smiled, “it’s a gift.” So she asked him in for a drink and though he only wanted water, he sat right down on the couch beside her and stayed for an hour and looked at her photo album and laughed when she said that the gate wasn’t the only thing coming off its hinges. And when he left, he kissed her cheek and said she was the nicest lady he had ever met. That night she stayed sober until midnight and lay awake thinking about him until dawn.

The next morning, he dropped by to say he’d noticed the broken pane in the living room window. Could he repair it?

“Another gift?” She edged the Hennessy bottle back under the couch with the heel of her slipper. “Because honey, my check doesn’t come until next Wednesday…”

Scotty shook his head (curls!) and said, “Nah, Letitia, it’s on me, my treat.”

Well, why not? She had accepted so much already: the divorces, the disappearances, the deaths, the diagnoses. Why not accept something good for once?

“You’re crazy,” she said, “you know that?”

“It’s been said,” Scotty agreed, smiling.

The day he came to fix the window was a bad day for her, so she doubled the meds and hoped he’d join her on the couch. But it was just one pane and he was in and out in twenty minutes. In. And. Out. Oh god. Wouldn’t that be something! She closed her eyes.

It took a week for her to recover from the sight of his little blue-jeaned butt up on her ladder and his scuffed cowboy boots planted on her old shag rug. She had just begun to talk sense to herself when he dropped by again, without calling, just like her sons used to do, before they took off. He asked to wash his hands in the bathroom and when he came out, he said, “I’ve got something for you.” He went out to his truck and brought back a big tube of grout.

“And here I was,” she said, “expecting roses.”

“Oh, do you like roses?” and he looked so distressed she could have—should have—grabbed him right there and then. Just to see what would happen. Which could not be much.

“Come with me,” Scotty said, and she did—that’s what he does for her! She simply left her cane by the couch and followed him all the way down the hall to the bathroom. There, he showed her how to squeeze the grout out of the tube, and how to apply it to the cracks, but when he saw how useless she was and how tired she got, he did the tiles himself and she sat on the closed toilet seat in her pink robe and her fluffy slippers and kept him company while he worked. He liked that, her company, he said so. And she liked his! Who wouldn’t! Six feet two, shoulders out to here, big brown eyes. Thirty-one years old, he said. Married. One of four little rich boys, all four of them working for their daddy’s construction company: Scotty!

“I can’t visit for a few weeks,” he said as he left. “My brothers and I go up to Wyoming every September to shoot elk.”

“You do what now?”

“We hunt.” He looked straight into her eyes. “Will you be all right? I’ll bring you some elk meat.”

“I don’t want elk meat, Scotty. I told you what I want. I want roses.”

“I’ll bring you roses.” He paused in the doorway. “When is your birthday?”

That’s how she knows he loves her, questions like that. You can talk to this person and that person and how many of them are going to ask, When is your birthday? And then, when you tell them, November, how many are going to say, November what?

It is November now and her birthday’s coming up, and if Scotty forgets the roses, that’s all right. He forgot the elk meat and that’s all right too; every damn thing he does or does not do is all right. She wakes up every morning and thinks Scotty! Beam me up, beam me out, beam me inside out, Scotty. “How did you get so sweet?” she asks, and he laughs.

“I’m not sweet,” he says, but he is. Right from the first, he looked at her as if she was a real person. Someone who mattered. No one looks at her like that anymore. Sometimes she wants to write his mother a note. Thank you for giving the world such a wonderful son. She wants to write his wife a note. Let him go, you fat cow. Let me have him.

Because the thing is: Letitia could have him. It is not one-sided. Her daughter doesn’t believe that. Her daughter comes in every other day, slamming groceries into the refrigerator and the cupboards, cleaning all the places Letitia can’t clean herself, changing the television channels to her own favorite shows, scolding, scolding, scolding. “It’s your meds have wrecked your head,” her daughter says, but Letitia knows better. Scotty sits with her; he holds her hand, he talks about the work he’s doing on his truck and the way he’s teaching his little boy to fish, he asks her advice on who to vote for, he kisses her cheek. When she confesses that she thinks about him all the time, he says he thinks about her too. He even phones her, not often, it’s true, but when she calls him, he doesn’t seem to mind. “Letitia,” he says, “how are you today?” and if she’s up she tells him that she’s doing okay and if the pain’s too bad she lies; no use his knowing too much about something he can’t fix anyway. She turns the TV down low and although she keeps the Hennessy on the floor by the couch, she never reaches down to take a sip; he would hear that and disapprove. He’s a Christian boy. She hasn’t been with a Christian boy since Leroy and Leroy’s gone now, thank God. Scotty’s not like Leroy. He actually wants to help her. Fool that he is though, he thinks he can help her by fixing her house—as if she cares about her house! Forget her house! Everything he says about sheetrock and pressed fiberboard goes in one ear and out the other, because the only thing that helps her is the sound of his voice. It’s soft and bumpy, more a boy’s voice than a man’s. She especially likes the way he says “watah” instead of “water” and she will find ways to trick him into talking about leakage or run-off and then she will giggle and he will stop and say, “Letitia, are you playing with me?”

“Don’t you want me to?” she’ll tease, and once he broke her heart when he quietly said, “I don’t know what I want.”

Well, she knows what she wants. “I want you to have lunch with me on my birthday,” she tells him today when she phones.

“No,” he says. “Not lunch. Breakfast.”

Breakfast? She never eats breakfast; she can’t get out of bed that early and she doesn’t have that kind of food in the house. Lunch she could do—a late lunch, just the two of them, in front of the fireplace…her mind moves to the floor by the fireplace, to lying entwined with him, both of them covered with roses but that’s just her mind. Her mind is as free and young and bad as it’s always been and that’s a good thing because hey, don’t tell anyone, she giggles, but we don’t live very long.

“Are you laughing at me again?” he says. “Look, I’ll come over tomorrow and cook you a good healthy breakfast, bacon and eggs, orange juice, pancakes. What do you like?”

“Oh honey,” Letitia says, still giggling even though her birthday’s not tomorrow but the day after, and even though the pain’s so bad now it’s just twisted her right off the couch and thrown her to the floor. Where she may stay, who knows, forever. She stretches one hand out, reaching for him through the sunlit patch on the old shag rug, watching the dust motes on her palm turn to little gold roses. “That’s the problem, honey, I can’t help it, I like it all.”

Molly Giles has published two novels, five short story collections, and a flash fiction memoir.