Waking Together - Bonnie Smetts

It’s one thing waking up next to somebody you don’t know and can’t remember how you don’t know him. It’s another thing to be remembering that’s exactly what your momma’s done her whole life. Which is what’s kept me from waking up next to too many people I don’t know. Sometimes I wished my momma’d been different, so that I didn’t have so many opportunities to think of her. I’d wished that I’d been able to be reckless, like my momma. But each and every time I’d do that, I’d wake up thinking of her. And the boyfriends. And them laying all over the living room, not that you could call it that but they sure was living in there. What a mess and my momma only straightening up when someone new might be stopping by.

By the time I was 14, I was waiting until after dark, way after dark to be coming home. And it sure’d been easier if I could have been waking up next to somebody myself so that I didn’t have to be going home, tiptoeing over my momma and her boyfriends. But that’s the way it was. And that’s why I got a job at the diner. That was after I’d broken up with Roy for good and before I could bear to be his friend. The diner stayed open until midnight, and then I’d volunteer to be cleaning up for the next morning. And that’s when I started talking to a customer. Not rules about talking to customers, rules I’d have later on in my job.

Not this man, I think he was some kind of star somewhere or famous or something. He’d sit at the end of the counter, drink that godawful coffee left over from the night. And we’d talk. He’d tell me I should come with him to New York. Like I’d leave Nordeen. Now as much as I wanted to leave Nordeen, how in the world was I gonna be leaving with someone I didn’t even know, and I was barely fifteen. I could work at a diner but I knew even then that I needed to figure out a few things before I could go off with this guy. But I liked him and that’s when I decided to go home with, but only to the motel. He was doing research or something, staying in town for business. Now I can’t imagine what kind of business anybody’d have in Nordeen, but I believed him. And there I was in his room and I knew the routine. After all the loving I’d done with Roy. But I loved Roy, funny as that sounds. Me and Roy’d roll around his big bed and moan and scream out and make each other as happy as two people could be in Nordeen. As soon as we got to the room of motor inn, the man, like he’d taken magic pills or something, started ripping at me and coming up behind me and pulling me down toward the bed. Now he’d said he had some nice Bourbon and such. And I’m not exactly naïve but this wasn’t what I was gonna put up with. So I start to fight, I’m as spindly as a broken chair but I got a fire inside when something’s wrong. And no way in the devil’s hell was I gonna be waking up next to this guy. And so I’m pushing him away, and grabbing my clothes back on and then I know what I gotta do. I bite him. I bite hard into his leg and he’s yelling and hopping on one leg and calling me things even I never heard a person called. I had to walk all the way back to my momma’s trailer that night, and then step over her and some stranger.