A Mother Always Knows

By Jack Swenson


Buck and I are both members of the Juice Church. Buck’s been sober thirty-five years; I’ ve been around for seventeen. One day this week we were down at Starbucks drinking coffee and shooting the breeze.

“You never know about people, do ya?” Buck said.

“Whatdya mean?” I asked.

“You know Roy?”

“Yeah.”

“Tall guy. Biker wannabe like you. I met him down here once. Nice fella. You ever see his daughter?”

I shook my head.

“He came in here one day, and she was with him. She’s goin’ to Kennedy high school.  Dresses like a whore. Got heels this high. Wears her jeans so low you can see the crack of  her ass. Roy’s on disability, so he drives her back and forth to school. It turns out he’s been schtupping her the past five years. She’s his step-daughter actually.”

Buck then told me about Roy’s wife Ruby. A year or so ago she weighed about four-hundred pounds, he said. She had her stomach stapled, and after that she got down to about a hundred and twenty. She looked pretty good, if you didn’t get up too close, Buck said. And she started running around. Pretty soon she had two boyfriends, and she was out with one or the other every night.

About this time two other guys walked in, got a cup of coffee, and sat down at the table next to ours. Buck nodded. I didn’t know either one of them, but Buck did. One of them piped up and asked Buck if he had heard about Roy. “Yeah,” Buck said.

“Poor Ruby,” the guy said. “It’s got to be hard on her.”

Buck gave the guy a look, and then he got in the guy’s face. I could tell he was hot. “Let  me tell you something, asshole,” Buck said. “She knew about it. Bet on it. You can take  that to the bank.”

The other guy wasn’t happy, but he’s about half the size of Buck, so I knew there  wouldn’t be any trouble.

“Oh, yeah?” the little guy said. “And what makes you so smart?"

“Because my wife’s step-father molested her, and she said her mother knew about it but never said nothin’,” Buck said. “Let me tell you something. A mother always knows when something bad happens to her kid. Her flesh and blood. She knows. It don’t make no difference if she’s here and her kid’s in China.”

The two guys at the next table looked at each other, but they didn’t say anything.

Buck gave me a look, too, but I didn’t have anything to say either. Buck’s like everybody else; he’s wrong about as often as he is right, but I figured he was right about this one.



Published April 2007