Gun Love by Jennifer Clement

Author:Jennifer Clement
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

18

Monday morning, the day after my mother played the piano at church, we talked in the car for a while before getting up.

Inside the Mercury, the sound of crickets and birds mixed with the sound of trucks and cars moving down the highway.

My mother said, I always used to protect my hands. I’d forgotten. I used to avoid hammers and nails and opening jars. I was fearful of getting my fingers caught in a door or being cut by a knife in the kitchen.

Do you think we can go back to the church later today, after school? I asked. I want to hear you play the piano again.

Now I use my hands as if they had no value, my mother said.

We’ll go to the church in the afternoon. When I get back from school.

Yes. Before nightfall.

But nightfall never came because that day never had a night. The sun never stopped burning that day up.

It was Noelle who told me what had happened.

Noelle had stepped out for a moment to hang some clothes on the short laundry line tied between a tree and her trailer.

She’d heard and seen it all.

The truth is you never know when it’s your last day, Noelle said. You never know.

She told me that, after I’d left for school, my mother had stepped out of the Mercury and walked out of the visitors’ parking area, through the main gate, and into the trailer park.

A young man had been sitting on the cracked plastic swing in the recreation area gently rocking back and forth. He had curly hair, blue eyes, and was wearing a thick black wool sweater. He had a gun in his right hand. Eli was standing beside the man and they were talking. Noelle could not hear what they were saying.

As my mother walked barefoot toward the park’s bathroom, the young man pulled himself out of the swing and moved toward her in a few quick strides.

Noelle said that Eli called out my mother’s name.

My mother stopped walking when she saw the gun in the young man’s hand.

Noelle said the young man and my mother had moved close enough for her to overhear everything that was said.

Lady, why are you wearing a nightgown? the young man asked.

I just woke up.

You run around in your pajamas?

I live here, my mother said.

Why aren’t you wearing shoes?

It’s warm.

Then he held up the gun and pointed it at my mother.

You’re going to shoot me, she said.

Yes.

I understand this is what’s going to happen, my mother said.

Yes, he answered. Now I declare new things.

I knew my mother’s caring was set on fire when he started to shoot.

My mother knew he had hitchhiked across the United States, from California to Florida, in order to see if love existed in America.

Inside his body my mother could see electric trains, toy trucks, Halloween candy, and toy guns, and even a BB gun for killing birds.

She felt the sunburn on his shoulders.

My mother knew all this young man needed was love. He needed a girl to take his hand and pull him into her bed.

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