"My mother said to me as we pulled into the driveway of the old place, 'Listen now, Brent, you've got to be very quiet and not yell or run around. Aunt Sarah isn't well.'
"When the car stopped, my grandmother went inside to visit, I guess, while my mother walked me around the farm to see the animals. There were puddles all over I wanted to jump in. The grass sparkled, it was so wet. We watched the pigs for a while. They were enjoying the new mud. My mother said, 'It's time to go visit Great-aunt Sarah in the big house now.'
"The house was very quiet and dry, I remember. We went upstairs and walked into a large room. Far across the floor a big bed was nestled against the wall. Women in white rushed around. Aunt Sarah was in the bed.
"We walked across the floor to the bed. I hung onto my mother's dress. I peeked from behind my mother as we stood by the bed and saw my great-aunt's hands fluttering all over the blanket like little birds or something. It looked like if she smiled, the skin around her mouth would crack.
"'Oh, my little Brent,' she said, 'come here to me.' She stretched out one hand to me. It was all shiny and I could see the veins standing out. I pulled back behind my mother, but she pushed me forward. I could feel my great-aunt Sarah's hands shaking on my shoulder.
"'Give Aunt Sarah a kiss,' my mother said. Aunt Sarah pulled me closer. I couldn't seem to move or breathe. She tried to kiss me, but I jerked away from her and ran out of the room and down the steps and out the front door. I waited outside by the car and I was shaking all over. I don't know why she turned me off like that, but I just couldn't stand to feel her hands all over me.
"Well, my mother came down and I was really scared. I knew I had done something wrong and I was sure that she was going to whale the daylights out of me. I could feel it already. But she didn't. When she and Grandmother came downstairs, she just said, 'We're going home now, Brent.' She never scolded me or anything. She must have known how I felt."
"You're lucky," Kirk said. "My mother would have thrown me to the pigs and left me behind."
"I remember something like that, kind of," Amy said, "only it was the opposite. It was a place I didn't want to leave and my mother almost had to drag me away."
"Where was it?" Brent asked.
"Old friends of my folks that owned a greenhouse."
"What is this, an afternoon down Memory Lane?" Kirk said.
"Sure, why not?" Brent said. He was really interested in what Amy had to say. "There's nothing else to do. No more party to plan for or anything. Anyway, I think it's interesting to hear about you guys."
"So do I," Amy said. "Maybe we can figure out what makes you tick, Kirk."
"That's tough. I don't even know myself."
"So what happened at the greenhouse, Amy?" Brent asked.
"Oh, that. Well, you know how I feel about plants. I was just a little girl and we were visiting friends. They had a greenhouse, as I said. It seemed huge to me at the time, although if I saw it now, it would probably seem just regular size. The old folks were all in talking and I was standing at the door of the greenhouse looking at all the beautiful flowers. I mean, there were flowers everywhere, hanging from the ceiling and in rows of tables and planters and boxes. It smelled wonderful. The lady said, 'Amy, dear, you may go in. I'm sure you're bored by all the grown-up talk.' So I started in. My mother yelled after me, 'Now don't touch anything, Amy.' She always did that when we were visiting people.
"So off I went skipping into the jungle. And it was great. I just wandered around, sniffing and, heaven forbid, touching everything. Some of the leaves were shiny and some were fuzzy, and I had a great time. I climbed in under the tables and played in the dirt and picked up fallen blossoms and put them in my hair. I was a regular plant freak even then, I guess, and I had never been in a real live greenhouse before.
"Maybe you can guess what happened. It came time to go and I hid in the back of the greenhouse. I didn't want to leave all those flowers. So I scrunched back there knowing that my folks would be angry, but I didn't care. When they finally got tired of calling for me to come out, my mother stomped in and barreled her way down the aisle and found me hiding in the back. She smacked my bottom and grabbed my hand and I threw a real beauty of a temper tantrum, screaming and yelling and clutching the leg of the table. My mother was furious. I was supposed to be such a cute, bright, gentle little lady, you see. And there I was all covered with dirt and moldy flowers and screaming my head off."
"How'd they finally get you out of there?" Kirk asked.
"The lady that we were visiting came in and chuckled and clucked and said would I like a plant to take with me. I said I sure would and the tears stopped immediately. My mother protested, seeing as how it would spoil me, she said, but I got a plant anyway. It was an African violet with pink flowers on it. It was the first plant that I ever had and I took good care of it for years. In fact, I've still got some violets that were made from cuttings from that original plant."
"What a freaky little kid you must have been. Just like Sally from next door, I bet," Kirk laughed.
"I sure remember that well. I bet my mother does too. She was probably never so embarassed before or since."
"If you want to talk about parents," Kirk said, "I'll tell you about my tenth birthday, which had to have been the classic nightmare of all time. Whenever it was my birthday, we always had a birthday dinner and I opened my presents after I blew out the candles of the cake. It was one of the few times when my parents would make a big deal over me. I always got incredible presents like they were trying to buy me off for the rest of the year. So when I was ten I was flying around somewhere like ten feet off the ground all day because I expected that I would get a new bike, see. It was really agony after I got home from school knowing that I would have to wait through cocktail hour, when my parents had their usual one too many, and then all the way through some fancy dinner before I'd have a chance to get that bike I was counting on.
"Six o'clock rolled around and no father. I paced around the kitchen for a while and then I paced around the living room until I bugged my mother so much that she told me to go upstairs and play in my room and she would call me when my father got home.
"Well, he got home all right. Like at about seven thirty and stewed to the gills. I was sitting at the top of the stairs. He stumbles in and heads for the bar and mixes another just to keep himself rolling along. By that time my mother had a few under the old belt as well. She was pissed. I mean really pissed. She'd been working on a slow burn for hours. The first thing she says is, 'And where were you, or need I ask?' Man, her voice could have formed icicles.
"I yell, 'Hi, Dad.' He grunts at me and flops down in his favorite chair. My mother is going to get an answer whether he likes it or not, so she says again, 'And just exactly where have you been until this hour? And on you son's tenth birthday as well.' She always was quick on the guilt bit.
"'Business,' my father says and takes a healthy swig. No wonder I got stoned when I was six." Kirk laughed.
"'Business, my eye,' my mother says. 'Who was she?'
"Now I may not have been an unsoiled ten, I'd heard talk like that through the walls plenty of times before, but it was the first time that they'd ever gotten into this area of their marital bliss right in front of me.
"So my father says, 'Look, we'll talk about it later, just relax. It's nothing important,' or something like that.
"'Nothing important, you say. Relax, nothing.' My mother says, 'I don't care if Kirk does hear. It's about time he learned what his father was really like. It wasn't business you were up to this afternoon. I called your office hours ago to remind you to get home at a decent hour for Kirk's birthday dinner.'
"I almost felt like saying, 'Listen, I know, I know. So what's new?' but I just sat there on the stairs with my mouth shut.
"So my father says, 'Dear, this isn't something to talk about now. It was just a business meeting, nothing else.'
"'Like how many other business meetings over the years?' my mother shouts. She's getting all riled up and they're both swigging away at the booze as fast as they can, which is their answer to the communications gap. 'A little business conference with another of those secretaries, I suppose?' It wasn't very pleasant to hear, I can tell you that.
"'Well, I don't know what you're complaining about,' my father says. 'I'm home in the evenings. I provide for you and the kid. I don't see you lacking good clothes or your weekly hair appointments. You've got a damn good deal going for you here, if you ask me. Just don't push.'
"'I'm not asking you, I'm telling you,' my mother shouts. 'You stop this fooling around. I've put up with it long enough. And if you don't, one of these days you'll come staggering in here and you won't find me or Kirk around to hold your hand.'
"'Don't make promises you aren't going to keep,' my father says, and my mother starts crying.
"I could see my big birthday dinner going right down the drain with all the other crap that was flying through the air. I'm just giving you the high points, you understand, and guessing at what they said. If I remember correctly, this particular battle lasted for several hours and ended up with somebody hitting somebody else, I think. I finally sat down and read a magazine for a while, surrounded by all that yelling and crying. I felt all squeezed up inside. I tried to close the whole thing out just waiting for one of them to look up and say, 'Hey, it's Kirk's birthday. Let's eat dinner and have a good time.'
"Needless to say, I never got my birthday dinner. I felt pretty lousy about it, but they never knew. I had long since stopped showing them how I felt about anything. So it was one beautiful birthday. I don't know what my father finally did, passed out in his chair probably. I got myself a bowl of cereal and went on up to bed."
"What happened to the bike?" Amy asked.
"When I came down to breakfast in the morning, my mother was all smiles and brushed away the argument of the night before as if it had never happened. The bike was propped up against the table. I said, 'Thank you,' although I didn't much care at that point. My father brought me home a new tennis racket from work that evening."
"That's really sad," Amy said.
Brent didn't know what to say right then. Anything I say will sound stupid, he thought.
"Who gives a shit? I don't let things like that bother me anymore. Maybe they did when I was little, but I guess I'm used to them now," Kirk said.
"What's the nicest memory you have?" Amy asked.
"Yeah, make it a happy one," Kirk said. "I can tell my last little story really cheered everybody up a lot."
"I don't know," Brent said. "There've been a lot of great times."
"Think," said Amy. "I'd really like to hear."