The Imprint of a Hand

Maureen was a waitress at Donna’s Donuts. She served coffee and donuts and worried about her three sons. For seventeen years, she would arrive each morning at 5:30 am, and hang her coat up on the hook by the back door. She would smile to herself knowing her boys were still in bed, their hair tussled, their long limbs thrown about the mattresses. She wondered about them as she steadied the pot against the lip of each customer’s white ceramic mug, she thought about them when she cleaned the tables, wiping the crumbs into her open hand. She would run to the register when Butch was in the back, and check out the customers she just waited on, but mostly she moved about the floor, laughing and brushing away the flirtatious comments from some of the regulars. Lefty, Big Tim and Clark were three such customers.

Maureen was 47 years old and had striking blue eyes that sometimes looked green and sparkled against her pale skin and dark brown hair. She still turned the head of the local supermarket stock boy named Devin, who noticed her curves and her easy smile. She also caught the eye of the manager, Bob Wilkens, as he stacked and arranged the fruit into oblong pyramids. When she stopped for gas, the man who owned Philly’s Gas always took extra care to make sure he counted her change correctly. She would make a lighthearted comment about the weather or she wondered if business had picked up. He would bend his neck downward and smile. He wished he could have an insightful comment to return but he would find himself stuck in the eighth grade, unable to say just what he wanted to. He could only blush and thank her for her business. She would then put on her sunglasses and head back outside to her car.

Her husband Joe worked at the plant, where he had attached doors on Chevrolet sedans for over twenty-three years. He would come home each night, and run his hand through his thinning hair, now more salt than pepper, and he would grimace when he talked about his supervisor, the noise in the factory that penetrated his ears, the pain in his lower back. By his own admission, Joe didn’t like to complain, but he liked to be home and sit on the couch and think that he made a difference, at least in the lives of this his kids. He sometimes felt lost, though — many times, so acute that he was often on the verge of tears — as he walked into the bowels of the factory before his shift. However, he never told Maureen this. He did not want her to worry.

Maureen carried a secret within her too. When she was sixteen years old, three years before married Joe, she had become pregnant by her boyfriend at the time, one Doyle Mattingham. Doyle was tall and lanky and was so frightened by the thought of being a father — and a husband — that he enlisted in the Army the very next day, telling Maureen that it was all a mistake. When Maureen asked, What? What was a mistake? He looked at her as if she had swallowed her own head. He raised both hands and screamed, Everything!!

Maureen could not have an abortion but she knew that she would have to give the baby up for adoption. She was too young, and did not have a husband. She wanted her baby to be happy, to have a stable life with two parents, like she had. Life was hard enough, she reasoned to herself. They took the baby from her immediately in the birthing room and that is when the crying began. She cried that night and every night since then, always feeling the heavy bright lights in that room, trying to ease the pain of being a childless mother. She overheard the nurses mention “he,” so she knew she had had a baby boy but she was not allowed to hold him. The pain never ceased, though she was able to give birth to three more sons, whom she was able to cradle and love. She loved being a mother. After the third, she smiled at Joe and said, We are very lucky.

Doyle Mattingham never did make it back to town, by the way. The second year of his four year enlistment found him stationed in Mobile, Alabama, and it was there he met a small blonde-haired woman named Carol who found men in uniform irresistible. They had four children within the first five years, but were never married.

One day, in the fall following a very hot summer, Maureen paid for her gas and walked out into the sunshine. Instead of climbing into her car, she turned and walked back into the gas station office. The owner of Philly’s Gas, Tommy Jankowski, had been watching her the entire time, just as he always did.

She took off her sunglasses and blew the strands of hair from in front of her eyes. “Are you busy?” she asked.

Tommy stood straight and rubbed his hands on his thighs. “Uh no,” he muttered looking slightly in each direction.

“When I was sixteen years old, I became pregnant and ended up giving my baby up for adoption.” Maureen looked to Tommy to gauge his reaction. His eyes shown and he did not blink. She felt safe to continue. She proceeded to tell Tommy about being sixteen years old, Doyle Mattingham and the baby boy that she yearned for these last thirty-one years. She cried, but only softly. When she finished, she wiped at her tears and then she eased herself around the corner and hugged a surprised but grateful Tommy. She put on her sunglasses and drove away.

At that same time, a little over 148 miles away, thirty-one year old Clee Bishop swallowed the pills from three containers — different colors and shapes and medicinal qualities. Discontentment and depression had hung at his heels for many years now, even after he found the courage, at age seventeen, to stand before his parents and tell them he was gay. It was the hardest thing imaginable, he told his sister — to fight the whole world for the permission “just to be me.” Unfortunately, that declaration did not stop the hollow feeling he continued to feel. There was still a void he could not understand, the insides of his heart held a tempest of faceless emotions that ran in on him like rolling thunder. He had been estranged from his parents since his admission, and yet they had never found the courage to tell him the truth — that he was not their blood child. The pills went down his throat with incredible ease. As they settled deep inside him, his body offered no resistance. For once, he thought, something was easy for him.

That night, as Joe had curled his back to his wife in bed, Maureen cried deeper than she ever had. The tears had come from places she did not know existed, the sounds from her throat like that from a wounded dog.