The Spring of My Comeuppance by Patricia Wellingham-Jones

I blew into town after a long time gone, three years this time around. Almost the first person I ran into was my old friend, old lover, Hank. We fell on each other with hugs, howls of delight. The reunion lasted over a couple of beers and an hour of playing catch-up: his broken marriage, my newest career. He drank lite beer, I had the real thing.

What’s this, Hank? All of a sudden you’re watching calories?” I was amused that the king of beer drinkers was going faddish.

“Gotta stay thin, Kate,” he said.

We sat in the town’s public park, hiding our brew in paper cups and taking up one of the picnic tables in the barbecue pit area. Kids ran around screaming, their high-pitched voices sawing the bones of my skull. Parents yelled after them. No improvement. Balls flashed in the air, a gawky dog leaped for an orange frisbee, azaleas rioted among the pine trees.

Hank perched on the bench, long legs wrapped in long arms. I flopped on the grass, making sure a dog hadn’t readied the place first. Sure felt good after driving four days on interstates to get there. One lost job and one graduating niece added up to one more trip back east.

He looked down with the same earnestly adoring brown eyes I remembered from seventh grade. Bent over and drew his finger slowly along the seam of my mint green shorts. I shivered.

“Well, look at that, will you, Kate? Same color pants.”

“Yeah, both in green. What’s that make us, Siamese twins?” I wasn’t impressed by the momentous occasion. Sure didn’t plan to react to his sliding finger.
His face lit with the sweet smile that always did make my heart lift, even when his mind bored me to death.

“No,” he said, “but it’s a sign we’re still in sync.”

“Come off it, Hankie.” I used the schoolyard name flung at him when we were kids. “I’ve been in town for 72 minutes and you’re making us a cosmic event?”

Don’t tell me we’re going round that maypole again. In our thirties and still doing the annual falling in love bit? For seven years in a row, through high school and beyond, the minute the birds started twittering and tulips pushed their red heads out of the mud, Hank crashed into love. With me. I’d suddenly see beyond the permanent black outlines of his fingernails and concentrate on how tall he was and how pleasant it felt to be worshipped. Until mid June. With the summer solstice, the sun and I both changed direction. I took off, to somebody or someplace new. Hank spent the rest of the summer betrayed and outraged, cursing all women and me in particular. Even now, lots of years and experiences later, the cycle’s been known to repeat if we’re both in town in the spring. Doesn’t this guy remember how the story ends?

“Gotta go,” I rose stiffly to my feet. Those days behind the wheel and the passage of time took the gazelle out of me.

“OK,” Hank said. “But promise to come with me tomorrow night. Got something to show you. You’ll be real interested, I think. Surprised, maybe.”

“You got a date, chum. Nothing serious, though, agreed? I’m out of here next week, no heart strings twanging, no attachments anywhere.”

“You’re heartless,” he said. “Just the same diplomatic old Kathryn.”

“True. Don’t you go off the deep end being the same dumb old Hankie,” I punched his shoulder as he grabbed me around the middle for a parting squeeze.
“Oh, you won’t think I’m the same dumb old Hankie after tomorrow,” he promised, brown eyes sparking the laugh that shaped his mouth.
So I visited my sister, elbows propped on her sticky kitchen table and enough coffee to keep me wired for a month. I learned way too much about her kids and the relatives and their kids. God, does everybody in the world have kids but me? Then I inserted a few subtle questions about Hank.

Lynn snickered. “You always ask first thing about what’s happened to Hank, though why you don’t look him up and ask him yourself I’ll never understand.”
I refused to play her little game, so she relented and treated me to tidbits from the local gossips.

“We don’t really know what he’s doing these days since his wife took off with the barber and got her divorce. Your pal Sandy says the cutter’s really sexy and has money spilling out his pockets. And he’s five years younger than she is.” Lynn looked at me out of the corner of her eye and waited a beat.

Hank had already told me, but I pretended it was news and covered a big yawn.

“She did? About time she got fed up with him and his machines. He still just as crazy about car engines and racing?”

“Oh sure. His agency is going great, so well he’s got a manager now and only has to drop in every other day to see things are going OK. The cars are selling and the guys aren’t dipping their fingers too deep in the pot. We don’t really know what he’s doing with his time now, though. Seems to have enough money, even with the divorce settlement, and does what he wants, but he isn’t doing it in this town.” Lynn’s lips fell into the pout that since babyhood means she isn’t getting her way and feels frustrated. It kills her not to know everything about everybody.

Reunions and reminiscences filled the next day. Had lunch with two old friends, a tad bit dowdy now as busy mothers; visited the cousins, then Uncle Ed in the nursing home. Dull, but time consuming. I hated the eagerness I felt as I waited for Hank. Did him the honor of painting my toenails and changing into fresh jeans with a silk shirt. Surprising what an improvement losing his beer belly made. I’d forgotten how good-looking he was after high school.

Hank picked me up at seven in a fire-engine red Jaguar XKE, top down. He does love those classics. I remembered fast how good it feels to race along a country road with the wind tearing out my hair. We ate a quick light meal at one of the yuppie places a few miles down the road. He drank raspberry flavored mineral water, I had chardonnay.

“Playing it to the hilt, aren’t we, Hank, my boy?” I jeered as I clinked my glass against his. “Here’s to both our futures.”

“To the future,” he agreed, looking solemn for a minute, a smile sneaking under the surface. “My future’s a lot different from my past,” he said. “How’s yours shaping up?”

“Aah, I don’t know. It just sort of happens.” Wish he hadn’t gotten onto that. Don’t like thinking about how aimless my life seems when I get right down to it.

“C’mon,” he stuffed the extra bills in his pocket as he left the tip and shrugged on his jacket. “Somebody you have to meet.”

We drove twenty miles or so to the southeast. “Didn’t think there was anything in Hamilton but a basketball team,” I commented, my head tucked into the leather upholstery that still smelled rich thirty years after the car was made.

“Well, times have changed and a few things have happened.” With that, Hank pulled into an alley downtown, parked us neatly between overflowing garbage bins and a dingy brown door. I wrinkled my nose at the aromas rising in the warm evening air and dragged a comb through my wind-mangled hair. Hank covered the convertible with its black plastic drape as tenderly as a father tucks the blanket around his firstborn. We traipsed up the outside stairs of a building that was, I trusted, tackier on the outside than on the in.

“Started wondering about you,” a big voice boomed through the dimness as Hank let us in with a key.

“Not to worry,” my friend called back. “Brought someone to visit, Jack. Meet my old pal, Kate. We go back to grade school together.”

Warm greetings everywhere, a few more introductions. I looked around. The walls were far away, nearly lost in a haze of cigarette smoke, the space enormous. We were in an apartment over a stage or club of some kind. The furniture was sparse but the quality better than I could afford. People wandered in and out, apparently involved in preparations and not simply strolling at random, but I couldn’t tell why.

Jack matched the size of his voice and the room, big and loud. We chatted about nothing while Hank kept things going, pleased that his friends were getting along. He told Jack of our encounter in the park and emphasized the, to me, trivial coincidence of our matching pale green shorts. Jack snorted his version of a laugh. He shot me a look I didn’t understand and told Hank it was time to get a move on. Hank took himself off, leaving Jack and me sipping our wine over small talk, fading fast.

Ten minutes later, Hank whizzed in, relaxed host and buddy gone. His face was intent, eyes alight, head wrapped in a cheesecloth cap and he was different. Man, was he different.

In place of the slim trousers and expensive jacket, he wore a long flowing divided skirt, a whirl of mint green, teal blue and black. Above that was a matching green bodysuit - no artificial padding, though - and a lacy pale shawl. He carried his hair in his hand, long auburn tresses that writhed and bounced like curly red snakes.

I just gaped.

He grinned at me through his subtle makeup, expertly applied. “Like it?” he asked.

I gawped some more. “My god, what is this? Have you flipped out?”

“Nope. Just decided to take my future into my own hands, as the gurus say, and here I am. You tell her, Jack. I’ve got to finish dressing.”

Jack, watching me with a smirk, said, “Hank, here, came to me a few months back and wanted to buy into a partnership. I was down, trade slipping, being hounded by the bank. I thought, what can I lose? The business was almost broke, the club close to shutting down.”

By now I’d gotten my jaw back in place so my teeth could meet again. A woman isn’t at her best with her mouth hanging open.

I sputtered, “You mean Hank is a partner in a nightclub? He owns this joint?”

I could have phrased it more elegantly, I suppose, but Jack let it go.

“He sure is. Not only that,” he watched for my reaction, “He’s the star of the show. You just met Miss Tessa, the hit of Paris and London, who happens to be free for a few weeks and furthers her illustrious career by performing in this dive.”

I’d gotten myself together. Leaned back casually, one silken arm slung along the back of the chair so I didn’t fall off in my shock.

“You mean Hank, my Hank, is a female impersonator?” If the squeak in my voice hadn’t betrayed me, I’d have made it.

Jack grinned, nodded in Hank’s general direction. The man was back, in full regalia: makeup perfect, a gorgeous willowy, though flat-chested, female creature.

He said, in a sultry husky voice, “Honey, I told you there’d be a surprise waiting tonight. You’re the only one who knows this but hey! You’re probably the only one who’ll figure out why, too.”

I just looked puzzled. That seemed to be my look of the day.

“I needed a change. Lots of things just didn’t seem so important anymore, so I decided to take a lesson from big brother Bob,” Hank’s eyes narrowed at me. I caught it. Bob left town in a cloud of innuendo with his male roommate when Hank and I were teenagers.
“I don’t believe this. You can’t be gay!” I blurted the first thing that popped up, hoped he couldn’t see my heart flop down into my sandals.

“Oh, no,” he hurried on. “I love girls, not boys. But he had so much fun with this, I thought I’d try it. It won’t last because it takes too much effort. Staying thin and cultivating the act and all. But it sure is fun. I like owning a nightclub.”

He looked at me with his hungry man’s eyes through that lovely woman’s face and I was blown away. For the first time in all these years, I fell in love, really in love. And with him, by god, in the spring.

“So, what does your future look like now, Miss Kate?” he inquired softly, as he swept out of the room toward the music.

(Header Photo Credit: Lorissa Sheptone)

Patricia Wellingham-Jones, a former psychology researcher and writer/editor, is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work is published in numerous anthologies, journals, and Internet magazines, including HazMat Review, Red River Review, Rattlesnake Review, Phoebe, A Room of Her Own, Centrifugal Eye, Ibbetson Street Press and Wicked Alice. Chapbooks include Don’t Turn Away: Poems About Breast Cancer (PWJ Publishing), Apple Blossoms at Eye Level (Poets Corner Press), Voices on the Land (Rattlesnake Press), and Hormone Stew (Snark Publishing). End-Cycle: poems about caregiving is her most recent chapbook. She has a 26-article series called “Getting Published” archived on Long Story Short ( http://www.longstoryshort.us/ ), has a monthly poetry column in East Valley Times and has been featured poet in several journals. Her website is www.wellinghamjones.com.