The Jewel Box Read Free

the
Jack of Clubs
card front and center, picked up Delilah’s abandoned pack of cinnamon gum, and ran my fingers across the bar’s surface, touching every little groove. I slid a stick of gum into my mouth while sliding onto one of four barstools I’d moved alongside the bar earlier. Delilah’s curiosity about my working for Beau left me with wide ranging emotions. Vexation. My friend knows too much of my personal business and teases about dragging skeletons from my closet for entertainment purposes. Details. In a few decades my grandchildren will be asking that same question, and unlike Delilah they deserve an answer. Truth. Nothing sets the heart free like revealing secrets that can haunt your soul and govern your life.

2
    I glanced out my window into the skies over the Gulf, recalling my trajectory toward Beau. In 1968, I divorced my husband who reciprocated by vanishing to a foreign country and leaving our toddler without child support. Trying to put cornflakes on the table for my daughter Nikki propelled me into survival mode. I couldn’t travel back in time, otherwise I would’ve heeded Mother’s “Look before you leap!” adage, instead of rushing into marriage with Jethro Bodine’s mirror image. Kent Novak never had anything original to say, but I fell for his light blue eyes, dark wavy hair, and muscular butt. The guy was eager to take me away from Lake Jackson—so what if we didn’t know squat about each other? And thanks to my “Gracious ladies sit with legs crossed at the ankles while knees are kindly kept together
”
mother, I wed as a virgin. An awful awakening for me when the mind-blowing passion I’d read about in romance novels failed to visit our bridal suite. At least our wedding night served as my introduction to liquor.
    We moved to the big city of Houston, but life with Kent remained D.U.L.L. Especially in the bedroom. Sex proved perfunctorily uneventful, although occasionally if I knocked back enough vodka to accommodate adequate visual delusions, I could somewhat imagine Kent bumping and grinding. A rock-hard ass does not a great lover make.
    Mr. Boring insisted I be a housewife, so when Ellen and her husband Charles started a lathe business, I jumped at the chance to tend my four-year-old nephew, Jimmy. With bright, smiling eyes, blond curly hair,mischievous sense of humor and brains beyond his age, this preschooler brightened my dull life. Hell, he was ten times more interesting than Kent.
    Still, after a year of humdrum living, about once a week I contemplated sticking my head inside our gas oven. Until the morning I awoke with nausea accompanied by vomiting. I stayed on my knees so often, Jimmy and Kent thought I had converted to Catholicism. Hail Mary and
inanimate
conception, I was pregnant!
    Jacy Nicole’s birth was the most exciting day of my life, and our instant bond gave me reason to exist. Nikki brought such happiness, I wrote elaborate notes about her every move, visualizing its evolution into a great children’s book. Then my little princess got colic. Hello cranky baby, goodbye journalism fantasy. Jimmy helped me through baby blues and other rough toddler times before splitting for Pre-K, but his departure left me facing reality. Reading nursery rhymes and playing kid games had become the highlight of my existence. Naturally, I pondered said existence.
    “Never marry a stranger,” I advised my sixteen-month-old as we crafted macaroni art.
    “Go bye-bye.” Nikki swept elbow pieces and glue into her painted box.
    It was kismet. I packed our bags.
    Leaving behind almost everything, I waved goodbye to Kent as we passed in the doorway when he came home from work. He looked so sad and bewildered, for a minute I felt like a real jerk for my inconsiderate exit from the black and white dullness of our life. Sixty-one seconds later, I’d hopped in my Corvair Coupe, turned the radio full blast and was singing along with Steppenwolf’s
Born to Be Wild
while driving Nikki away