“Take care of yourself, Jesse,” she said. “Next time I’ll take you with me.”
Coco showed her to the door.
She said good-bye to Jesse as she left, but she didn’t even go through the motions of thanking Coco or asking her to continue to look after her son for her. She just turned and left with angry eyes and a furrowed brow. That made it all the more clear to Coco that her visit had just been an excuse to see Rick and had nothing to do with Jesse at all.
As she watched her walk away, Coco felt as though all the energy had been drained from her body. She was frightened to go back into the apartment because she knew that the atmosphere of hatred she detested so much would be lingering there. The air would be thick with it, stifling and cloying, and it would be hard to get the stench out of her nostrils.
That night Rick went out. He didn’t tell Coco where he was going and, even after it got late, he did not return. As he had been putting his jacket on, she had wanted to ask him not to go, but she knew that he couldn’t bear the poisonous atmosphere in the apartment and she knew he was the type of man who ran away from situations like this.
One reason she didn’t want him to leave was that she didn’t want to be left on her own with Jesse. She wanted to ask the boy why he had lied about her to his mother, but without Rick she didn’t have the courage to face him.
After his mother left, Jesse had gone to his room and hadn’t come out. Coco sat alone in the living room with a bottle of gin in her hand, feeling very lonely. Why was it that a man and a woman could be so happy together, but when someone else got involved it could all go so horribly wrong? It wasn’t as though she had hated Jesse from the beginning. She had wanted to accept him as a part of Rick’s life.
Coco remembered how hard she had tried to look after Jesse. Before she met him, she had only to smile and she would be rewarded by a thousand compliments from adoring admirers. But she had thrown all that away to work like a slave, and she received nothing in return before, she had been happy because Rick had kept her warm and had made her feel loved; she could just close her eyes and ears and ignore everything else. But things were different now. And Rick’s hugs and kisses didn’t make up for what she was going through. It was a bit like eating a delicious meal in a high-class restaurant—once you had finished what was on the table, there wasn’t any more. And after the initial pleasure of eating had passed, she found it was quickly replaced by much darker thoughts and feelings. Those feelings frightened her because they began to pull together, gradually solidifying and taking shape, slowly turning into Jesse.
Since he was very small, Jesse had been brought up in an atmosphere of pure hatred and he had been powerless to object. That hatred had formed layers around him, enveloping his whole body, but it wasn’t his hatred. It was his parents’ hatred for each other. Coco wondered if she could strip off those layers. Or maybe she could smash them with a single blow, crack them open like the rock-salt shell around salt-baked chicken, and suck the tasty chicken gravy from the broken lumps of salt.
Right now, Coco wanted a man. She knew it wouldn’t solve her problems, but she felt she needed a taste of paradise, however brief. But Rick wasn’t there for her.
The gin hadn’t lit a fire in her heart yet either, and although all the things she wanted to say to Jesse were whirling around in her mind, she still was not able to spit them all out and tell him what she thought.
Coco sat alone in the living room, not knowing what to do with her emotions, when Jesse suddenly came out of his room and sat down on the sofa opposite her as though it were the most natural thing in the world. She was amazed. She didn’t understand how his attitude could change so easily.
He calmly opened a magazine and began to read. Coco was thoroughly confused. The way he was behaving was so seemingly nonchalant that she could no longer understand what his true intentions were.
And though she had so many things she wanted to tell him, she didn’t know where to start.
“Daddy’s late,” said Jesse without looking up from his magazine.
He was right. Coco’s concern immediately shifted to Rick. Where was he?
“If Daddy was with someone else, would you be upset?” he asked.
Someone else? Another woman? Now Coco really began to worry.
“Would you hate him if he was?”
She looked deep into his eyes, but Jesse wasn’t wearing his usual know-it-all expression. He just stared back at her, the look in his eyes imploring her to say she could never hate his father.
“If he was with someone else? I’ve never thought about it,” she replied falteringly, almost in tears.
“Hey, no point worrying about it. He was off with other women all the time when he was with my mama!”
Coco’s heart began to pound. Jesse seemed sure that Rick was with another woman, but she found it difficult to believe that Rick would ever leave her at home and go off with someone else. Especially since he had always shown her so much love and affection and had seemed so sincere.
She tried hard to dismiss the idea, but now that the seed of doubt was in her mind, it began to grow.
What if he really was? What would I do? she wondered.
“Whiskey and women,” said Jesse, imitating Rick, “the best medicine! Ain’t that right?”
Coco’s eyes filled with tears, and one by one they began to fall. She was overwhelmed by all the emotions she had been trying so hard to control, and, unleashed, they took the form of a river of tears* flowing down her cheeks. She felt as though she were deflating, shriveling up inside.
Jesse just stared at her in surprise.
With her head in her hands, Coco’s face was covered, but through th gaps between her fingers she could see Jesse’s feet. He wore dirty basket ball shoes and she noticed for the first time that his feet were bigger than hers now. He shuffled closer and she felt his hand gently patting her trembling back. Then Jesse was sitting next to her, quietly stroking her back as she sobbed.
It felt so good; Coco didn’t want to stop crying. Her feelings of anxiety had already dissipated but in spite of that she continued to cry. It was almost as though it was easier to keep crying than to stop. But it was too sweet a feeling to blame simply on inertia.
Jesse snatched his hand away from her back as he heard the sound of Rick’s key in the lock, sending a sudden, nervous twitch through Coco’s body.
Rick seemed a little surprised to see them together, but he calmly walked into the room and sat down.
“Can you get me some gin, too?” he asked.
He was drunk, but not so drunk that he couldn’t talk. Coco poured him a gin and lime, turning away to hide her tear-streaked face.
Without a word, Jesse got up to go back to his room, but Rick told him to sit down again.
“Do you have something to say for yourself?”
Jesse shrugged his shoulders as if to say he didn’t know what Rick was talking about.
“Don’t you like Coco?” he asked.
There was no reply.
“Answer me!” he demanded.
It was one of the few times Coco had seen Rick command any respect from Jesse, and she waited to see what would happen.
“It’s not that I don’t like her,” said Jesse hesitantly.
“Well, it certainly doesn’t seem like it. Why don’t you try showing it sometime? Listen, I know you love your mama and that you’d like it if we got back together, but you know that ain’t gonna happen. Me and your mama have never been able to get along with each other and we always end up fighting. You know that.”