Perfect Little World(18)
“What kind of meeting?” Izzy asked. She thought about the offer of money, which, even with the pain of Hal’s death still settling upon her, she could not ignore.
“A possible research project that would help pay for the care of your child and offer the possibility of training and a career for you, if I understand correctly, though I don’t have the full details. It would be a wonderful opportunity.”
“What if I say no?” Izzy said.
“Very little would change,” Mrs. Jackson admitted. “You would be a single mother with very few resources trying to raise a child in inhospitable circumstances. You would only cause unnecessary emotional pain to people that Hal cared about very deeply.”
“And if I say yes?” Izzy asked.
“You will find that things would be easier for you and your child. I would imagine, especially now that my son is no longer with us, that he would have hoped that you would take care of yourself and this baby.”
“Hal didn’t want me to have the baby,” Izzy said.
“That was not up to him, frankly. It was not his position to demand that. I love my son, but he did not behave honorably. If you want to have the baby, I would not dream of trying to dissuade you. I’m only trying to find a way that everyone benefits from these awful circumstances.”
“I can’t think about this right now.”
“Not right this minute, I understand. I want you to take my number and we can talk about this in the coming weeks.”
Izzy took the slip of paper from Mrs. Jackson and put it in her pocket. She realized how long she’d been away from the smoker, from her work. She stood up to leave and Mrs. Jackson, for the first time, reached for Izzy’s hand.
“I’m so sorry, Isabel,” Mrs. Jackson said. “I know that you loved him, and so, since I loved him, too, I know this is very difficult to deal with.”
“It’s awful,” Izzy admitted. Mrs. Jackson’s face was blank, with the slightest hint of exasperation, which suggested to Izzy that she did not entirely understand or believe in her son’s love for Izzy.
“There will be a funeral, dear,” Mrs. Jackson continued, “but I hope you might give our family the space to grieve in our own way.”
“I have to go,” Izzy said, pulling her hand away from Mrs. Jackson. She thought Mrs. Jackson said something else, but she was already out of earshot. Jessica, the waitress who had been watching them, came over to Izzy.
“You okay, sweetie?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” Izzy said.
“Who was that?”
“Nobody. Friend of the family. Somebody we know died.”
“She looks familiar.”
“She’s nobody,” Izzy said, and Jessica shrugged her shoulders as if giving up the matter, and then patted Izzy on the shoulder.
Izzy kept moving, back through the kitchen, to the smokehouse, where Mr. Tannehill was standing over the opened Dr. Sears book, biting his thumbnail, nodding his head in agreement with whatever he had just read. He still had not noticed her, and Izzy composed herself in that moment. When he finally looked up, he gestured to the book and said, “How can something be so simple and so complicated at the same time?” She shook her head. She had absolutely no idea, no concept of how anything in this world truly worked.
The next night, after she had returned home from work, she took a small washbasin from under her bed and filled it with warm water from the bathroom sink. She tipped a few drops of peppermint oil, seven dollars at the health food store in Chattanooga, into the tub and carefully carried it back into her bedroom. She took off her shoes and socks, her feet slightly swollen and aching from standing all day long, and soaked them in the tub. She leaned over to open her nightstand drawer and produced a notebook, the front of which simply read Baby in black Magic Marker. She had seen a pregnancy journal at Walmart, but it was eighteen dollars, and so she found a reasonably similar template online and copied it into this blank notebook, saving herself more than sixteen dollars. She flipped through the pages until she found today’s date at the top and then listed all the food she had eaten that day, her weight and waist size, and then looked at the question that she had written in the middle of the page: What were the best things about your parents as parents? Her pen hovered over the page, unsure of how to proceed.
Izzy’s mother had been a beauty queen, Miss Tennessee in 1985; her talent, though she had a beautiful singing voice, was a ventriloquist act featuring her dummy, Miss Tenny C, who told beauty pageant jokes. Her mother was so beautiful in her youth that people would stop her on the street to tell her this fact, but she was also slightly weird, spending a good portion of her free time in high school reading UFO journals and seeking to debunk questionable sightings. She was studying veterinary medicine at Middle Tennessee State University when she and Izzy’s dad, who had been a high school baseball star and was now playing Single-A ball in Tampa, Florida, found out that she was pregnant with Izzy. Catherine, Izzy’s mom, dropped out of college and, as if ordained by god, Izzy’s father tore up his pitching arm and was forced to give up baseball and move back to Coalfield, where they took out a loan to open the market where her father still worked. And in the months leading up to Izzy’s birth, her mother rarely left the house, and started smoking even more, weighed down by a kind of pre-partum depression. After Izzy was born, though, it seemed to rejuvenate her mother, finding a child who might be able to fulfill the dreams she had missed out on in her own life. Izzy’s mother taught her how to read at age three, had her writing complete sentences the year after that. While her father was at work, Izzy and her mother spent the days engaged in a strenuous, though unstructured, lesson plan. Whenever Izzy complained, her mother would kiss her, pull Izzy into her considerable bulk, as if trying to smother her child, and say, “You are special, Izzy. That means life will be harder for you than other people. It’s even worse because we’re your parents and we don’t have much to give you.” Izzy would tell her mother that she didn’t mind, didn’t need to be special, which would make Izzy’s mother grind her teeth and shake her head. “You do need to be special, sweetie,” she would say. “Being special is what’s going to save you.”