Excerpted from:
TAKE CARE
by Ryan Lewis Merritt
Charlie Morgan looked over the dining room table, his back pressed to the wall. The two place settings – full silverware and glassware – were surrounded by the menu’s three courses, carefully placed in order of intended consumption. There was the salad – a bright jumble of mixed greens – a large pot of soup flanked by thickly sliced bread, and the meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans, which lay in wait at the head of the table.
The doorbell rang, and Charlie closed his eyes. He placed his hands flat against the wall, feeling its immobile strength, and drew a long, slow breath before pushing off and away toward the living room and the front door.
Holly Thorn was a legal secretary with dark red hair and large, questioning blue eyes. She wore a pink crocheted sweater, a chalk gray pencil skirt, and low white pumps. She had a reluctant smile and eyed Charlie’s broad frame carefully at the door, taking several moments to step into the small living room.
Charlie took her coat, which was barely necessary on that late spring evening. Darkness was just starting to settle softly into the quiet residential street, prompting the flare-up of the tall sodium lights amid the rows of eternal oaks. Charlie took a final look outside at the newborn dusk before closing the door and sealing them both within the small, silent cottage house.
“Wow,” Holly said as they entered the dining room, whose air was thick with the warm, competing smells of the meal’s constituents. Her eyes jumped around to the items arrayed across the table. “This is quite elaborate.”
Charlie smiled slightly.
“For a first date,” she added.
“Well.”
“Hmmph,” Holly said. She continued to scan the table, eyes narrowing into confusion.
“We don’t have to…eat it all at once,” Charlie said.
“I see.” She smiled her slow-blooming smile and arched her eyebrows. “Where do we start?”
“How about with a drink?”
“Sounds great,” she said, widening her eyes, as if it were the first thing she had fully understood.
Charlie was thankful for the respite as he broke for the liquor chest in the living room. He looked quickly over the ancient, unmarked bottles, trying to remember what they each contained. He turned back toward the dining room and edged his head around the corner.
Holly was looking around the windowless dining room, taking in the aged décor, the fusty chestnut furniture and the flowered wallpaper, whose irises and daisies had long since reached their peak.
“What would you like?” he asked.
She jumped and looked over at him.
“Jeez. Um, wine, if you have it?”
“Red or white?”
“White, please.”
“Um, I only have red.”
She looked at him, confused.
“Okay,” she said.
During the salad course, the silence between them deepened, and Charlie began to grow anxious. Holly kept her eyes mostly on her plate, and each time Charlie thought of a worthwhile question to ask, she seemed to have food in her mouth, and he would forget the question and she would look up and find him staring blankly at her.
After the third time, Charlie excused himself and quickly retreated to the living room. He was glad there were no mirrors around – he was sure he looked ridiculous, red-faced and foolish. He stood silent, kneading his hands together, then remembered something and looked across the room at the record player. He searched through the neighboring box of LPs and extracted the Beatles and Bob Dylan from the leaning stacks of easy listening, heavy crooners, and Spanish language tutorial 45s.
When he sat back down at the table, he realized that the music was much too loud, almost belligerently so. Looking across the table at silent Holly staring baffled in his direction, he decided against leaving the table again just then. Besides, he was quite hungry, and was well behind her on the salad course. While John and Paul shouted like girls and Ringo rattled the china and glassware, Charlie kept his head down and attended to his bowl of wilting greens.
As he finished his salad and the song reached its midpoint, he looked up and saw Holly’s mouth working feverishly, opening and closing in a strained, furious attempt at speech, but he could not hear a word above the music. She seemed to nod and gesture toward her mouth, opening it. He nodded as well, then stood and served her more salad. She stared at him, motionless. He served himself more salad and went back to eating.
At the song’s fadeout, Charlie looked up and was startled to see Holly standing at the head of the table, three feet to his right.
“I think I’m going to go,” she said as the music stopped.
Charlie looked down at the table, nodded, and went into the other room to retrieve her jacket.
Outside his bedroom window, the night was dark and nearly silent. He looked without purpose at the oak trees in the back yard, their buds, their quiet green youth in the darkness. About every fifteen minutes the hot blinking lights of an airplane would cut through the blue-black sky and the broken map of branches on its way out of town.
His door opened and the yellow light of the hallway ran like a passing searchlight through the dark room before retreating behind the bulky frame in the doorway.
His mother moved slowly into the room and joined him on the bed, the far corner of the mattress bending under the press of her broad backside. The hallway light played pale off her round face and twitchy frown, wrinkles releasing out in rays from her full lips and glinting eyes.
“What happened?” she asked.
He shook his head. She let several seconds pass.
“Want to talk about it?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“I saw all the food out,” she said. “That’s good.”
He looked out the window.
“Looked good,” his mother said. He heard her stomach groan. “Let’s go try it.”
He shook his head.
“Come on, babe. Don’t be a bee.”
He turned back toward her and took a deep breath.
His mother asked his father if he wanted any mashed potatoes before lumping a large hill of them on her plate. They sat across from him, sharing the space where Holly had been.
“So start at the beginning,” his mother said.
“Ma,” Charlie began.
She looked up at him as she passed the green beans on to his father.
“What?” she said sharply, swatting at the air with the potato-capped serving spoon, grave and impatient, as if she couldn’t eat until Charlie spoke up. “How are you going to do any better next time if you don’t talk about it?”
His father began picking individual beans, very carefully, out of the serving bowl. He nodded slowly, at what Charlie wasn’t sure.
“They’re all different,” Charlie said.
“What was wrong with this one?” his mother asked.
Charlie exhaled.
“I don’t know,” he said. “She wasn’t saying anything.”
“So you turn the music on,” his mother said.
“I did. It might have been too loud.”
“What’d you play?”
“Beatles.”
His father looked up at his mother, an arch smile widening. She didn’t smile back.
“So she doesn’t like the Beatles,” his mother said, eyes lifting briefly heavenward. “It’s been known to happen.”
“But she left!” his father cried out, frustrated, gesturing to someone, it seemed, other than Charlie or his mother.
His mother stopped eating and brought her thick hands together in a prayerful pose. She stared at her son.
“You’re not perfect, you know,” she said over her fingertips.
His father snorted. She looked quickly at him as if to shush him. He lapsed back into silence and considered his plate.
“You’ve got your faults like anybody else,” she continued. “You’ve got to accept their mess-ups and miss-steps and so on like they’ve got to accept yours.” She looked over at his father, who was shaping his mashed potatoes into what looked like a UFO. “You know what this one likes? This one likes to take the garbage out when it’s an eighth of the way full. You put an apple core and a twisty tie in there and he’s taking it out to the curb.” She laid her hand over her husband’s. “He likes to stand in front of the cart at the supermarket, giving the third degree to everything on the shelf while I’m trying to move it along. Drives…me…nuts.” She leaned over to kiss his father’s forehead but didn’t quite reach, smooching the air above his right ear instead.
His father nodded, looked up at Charlie.
“This one likes to leave my shirts for hours in the washer until they smell like wet hay, watching her Spanish language soap operas. Hours. Sometimes overnight she forgets about them. She puts them in the dryer and then the closet like I’m not going to notice. I walk into the bedroom and it smells like a farm. I know what she’s been doing because I’ve caught her.”
“Hon,” his mother said, fighting a giggle, cheeks flushing.
“Caught her watching those muchachos and mamacitas bearing their teeth at each other, working themselves up about this and that and why don’t they just do it off screen already like you know they’re going to. That’s what I always say to your mother – you know what they’re going to do! What are you watching for?”
“I’m going to go to my room,” Charlie said.
He took down the calendar from the corkboard above his desk and found that day’s date – Tuesday, May 16 – under the soft amber light of the lamp. He took a red marker from the clay mug and drew a small X next to Holly’s name. He briefly scanned the days ahead, the unfamiliar and vaguely familiar names of girls with whom he would repeat that night’s events. He closed his eyes and saw their names floating and colliding in the flushed red sea behind his eyelids – Marcy, Belinda, Heather, Carol, Natasha, Sandra. He felt surrounded, gazed upon by strange eyes, even in the solitude of his small room. He wheeled over to the window and opened it, breathing in the dampness of the wild night air.