On the Sunday afternoon, Tim was lounging in front of the television again and Jason was back in the garage, cleaning up the place. Bill from five doors down had returned for his pride and joy, more than happy with Jason’s work. He showed his gratitude with the hundred in cash plus an extra fifty, which went straight into Jason’s pocket.
Now that the garage was empty again he didn’t know what to do with himself. He didn’t want to go back into the house, not with the old fart casting his judgement on the soaps. It wouldn’t be long before he was polishing off the whiskey and turning to smite someone non-fictional instead.
He was lowering the garage door, casting the empty concrete space into darkness when suddenly the light came on. Sara stood smiling at him proudly once more, dressed practically in a flowing peach-coloured summer dress and snug grey leggings. Instantly he went to her and dug his hand into his pocket where he took out his earnings and offered her two thirds.
‘No, you put that away. You deserve it,’ she assured. ‘Just give your mother a kiss and a cuddle or I won’t make it through the day without breaking all the plates over his head.’
She didn’t have to ask twice. Jason leaned in and took his mother into his strong arms by the waist, propping her on the edge of the worktop so that despite her small stature they could meet face to face. She wrapped her arms around his neck and him into her where they breathed each other in closely and became lost in their embrace.
And then when he pulled back to meet her eye to eye, her lips planted firmly against his before she pulled away too and beckoned him to plant a kiss on her lips next. Back and forth they were behaving like a pair of chimpanzees, laughing at each other.
‘You love your mom, don’t you,’ she sighed with contentment.
‘Yes I do,’ he said.
They barely heard the footsteps coming before the house door to the garage flipped wide open and his dad flipped out like a Jack-in the-Box!
The manner in which the balding old head-case appeared suggested that he suspected something, like he was trying to catch either of them in the act of hiding something from him. And the glassy stare in his cold grey eyes, set deep in his hawkish, deep-lined and soured face, as he stood there dead still with his eyes trained on Jason.
Jason felt his heart speed up only in that moment, because he knew by Tim’s look that the old man was either going to challenge him or insult him somehow.
‘Tim, what?’ Sara asked, exasperated by his standoffish appearance.
Never mind that the garage was now empty, clean and spotless. ‘Oh is the neighbour’s car gone? Do I finally have my own property back now?’
‘Yes,’ Jason said slowly and without blinking. He was a picture of calm but inside he was brimming and his mother could feel it.
‘Then you can clean up after yourself and get that piece of junk car of yours off my driveway,’ Tim demanded…
‘Can’t you?!!’
Then finally, Jason blinked. With that, Tim turned around and walked away with his shoulders hunched, leaving the door wide open behind him.
5
It was past midnight. Sara was lying at the edge of the bed and staring up at the ceiling where the streetlights streaked across the room like spectral sunburst. The snoring beside her was deafening. Nobody could be this tired, to make such noise that could keep a whole street awake and yet never to be woken by it themselves.
In all their twenty years of marriage Tim had been stubborn to some degree. Once Jason was born, he upped the ante. She didn’t know of his past affair but she wouldn’t have been surprised had she found out, but now she worried that she was married to a Neanderthal in a necktie.
If he weren’t so stubborn, or standoffish, or ignorant of her existence, maybe – she pained – there could have been a way back from the lives they lived now. If it wasn’t for Jason, she’d have been so utterly miserable. But then maybe she’d be elsewhere instead.
His heavy lump of a useless body took up most of the bed, one knee pressing her further and further over the edge. In his sleep he mumbled, ‘we’re gonna drown unless you go, you fat bitch…’
That was all she could stand there and then. Easing herself off the edge of the mattress and into her slippers, Sara didn’t even bother to look for her housecoat in the dark. She was wearing a blue satin nightgown, which was good enough for her to go wandering in. Jason hadn’t come out of that garage all evening.
He was still there, and she didn’t blame him, because he was so tense at one point that he could have taken his dad’s head off with one punch, and she might not have stopped him.
She found him sat behind the wheel of his grey Oldsmobile Cutlass, which J. T. was generous enough to let him have if he could get her working in his own time. Of course, the parts weren’t free. That was part of the challenge, which he aced.
‘Can I come in?’ she asked through the window. He nodded and she got in the passenger seat beside him, resting her head with a weary, frustrated groan. ‘I’m sleeping on the couch. I’m done.’
‘Why don’t you use my bed,’ Jason suggested, paying little attention. ‘I don’t think I’ll be sleeping tonight.’
‘Because of the way he was this afternoon?’
‘Because of the way he’s always been. And not just to me. I’m going to end up killing him if he gets any worse. Unless I leave, which is what he wants, isn’t it?’
Sara couldn’t deny that dreadful little truth. She never wanted Jason to leave, ever, but she knew that he would one day. That was just a fact of life. Everybody flew the nest sooner or later. Otherwise they were spoilt and might never be truly happy.
‘I remember when I left home,’ she recalled dreamily in her fatigued state. Jason turned to watch intently as he listened to her soothing tone. When he did, unable to look her in the eyes just yet, he found his attention centred on his mother’s barely restrained bust; her nipples poking through the blue satin in the chill of the night.
‘Thinking about it, my father was a lot like Tim is now. And I flew the nest pretty early to be with him because I thought that it was the best for everyone. He was there at just the right time. Things at home were unbearable. And now it’s like I ran away from him only to end up running straight into his crosshairs.’
‘What are you saying?’ Jason asked.
‘Well… I guess I’m saying not to run off too soon and end up suffering all the same. But if I can be honest, I just don’t want you to leave me with that…’
‘Troll!’ Jason finished.
‘Ogre,’ Sara countered and offered a dry chuckle, then, ‘why can’t things just be like they used to be?’
‘I don’t get what you mean,’ Jason stressed, his knuckles tightening around the steering wheel.
‘When it used to feel like it was just you and me,’ she explained with such longing. ‘When I could hold you and help you forget the world around you and just feel good on a sort of intuitive, or instinctual way?!’
‘I wish it was just you and me,’ Jason admitted. Then he finally looked at her, so dark and intense in his jittery burnt out state and concluded, ‘always!’
Their mutual longing was so strong. When Sara met his gaze and realised that he understood her, it was like a live connection now crackled and buzzed between them with electrical impulse. He looked away, pondering further what would come tomorrow and the next day after that.
Sara thought long and hard herself then, but not of the same things as he. The garage doors were shut tight, the night was so silent far away from that troll cave where her husband slept, and next to her was the one man in the world she loved more than anything.
When she hooked her thumbs beneath the shoulder straps of her nightie and let them fall loose, it wasn’t a declaration of self-destruction or of wanting to be unfaithful. Tim had spent the past nineteen years destroying her faith in that respect.
And when she stealthily shimmied the smooth satin down over her still generous breasts, with their darkened nipples and aerola, letting it fall down to her waist and feeling the liberating chill of abandon, it was with a mother’s instinct that she reclined her seat, leant back and said his name.
6
He was greeted with a kind smile and a reaching hand when he turned to see his mother lying in waiting, having bared the breasts that nursed him as a child. His heart stammered and then leapt into action. The rest of him was slow to catch up. Time, it seemed, had slowed to a grind.
‘It’s okay, Jason,’ she assured, ‘come to mom and forget everything. Nothing else matters!’
‘Mom, I’m not the same anymore,’ Jason said. It was only the slightest hint of a warning, without a hint of rejection. ‘Where does this go?’
‘Nowhere,’ she assured. ‘It stays between you and me.’
He moved to her, accepting her offering of nurture. Jason climbed over, uncertainly at first, so that he was kneeling between her feet. As if it wasn’t cramped enough in there. He had to be careful not to crush her or to find himself in a position so not to strain himself with nowhere to rest. Nothing worked for them.
Eventually, Sara suggested that Jason recline his own seat, so returning to it with some clumsiness, he did and laid back, whereupon she climbed over into his lap. Immediately she noticed the solid bulge growing in the crotch of his jeans. She neither flinched nor said a word.