Honey by Brenda Brooks

Author:Brenda Brooks [Brooks, Brenda]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781770414976
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

She died in early November. Honey and I were living together at Havenhurst by then, which was just as well because I couldn’t bring myself to go back to Montague Street. I know it’s a pathetic cliché to say, but the ghosts, you know? Not that a cliched horror trope was necessary. The bloodstain on my mother’s bedroom rug was enough to stop me cold. The vase, those feathers; I could set them back on the window ledge, but I couldn’t make things right. I wanted to go back to that last day sitting across from each other. I’d spill the truth about everything and she’d tell me how to handle it, without seeming to. And then I’d play something she loved, something elegant and difficult, like her. And she’d see how I hadn’t let my chops get ruined by that crass casino of mine.

I had agreed to fill in at the Crescendo that night — a half-assed attempt to get my mind off things. They called the condo about 11 in the evening and Honey drove out to the casino to break the news to me.

I had about twenty minutes left and I saw her come in, sit down, order a drink. I tried a Billie Holiday number that night, “You Go to My Head,” but just the piano arrangement. I didn’t have the balls to sing it. Someone had requested “You Send Me” so I made my way through that, preoccupied, and then joined her at the bar.

She handed me a double shot of scotch. I think I’d known my mother was dead all through my last number. Honey never came to see me work, and if she did, she never would have worn an old windbreaker thrown over a T-shirt and pair of washed-out jeans. Ryan, the bartender, poured the drink into a paper cup, and we drove to the care facility, rode the elevator up to room 416, and said goodbye even though she was already gone, because that’s what you do.

You might have thought that I’d be incapable of feeling anything but despair that night, that I would yearn for nothing more than the merciful oblivion of sleep. I think Honey thought so too, because she did everything but brew up some hot chocolate and read me a bedtime recipe.

But that’s not what I wanted. I wanted her, exactly as she’d shown me how to want her every night since that first time, except that now despair blended with desire and I ached to be driven, forcibly if necessary, out of my mind. She understood and took me there.

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