Backseat Saints Part 20

All at once her eyes go avid. Her blank expression drops away. We have come to the piece of conversation she has been longing to have, while I was wanting to ask her what happened the day she left me. She straightens up and presses one hand to her lips.

"Pawpy's gun?" she says, m.u.f.fled behind her hand. She takes a single step toward me. "Is that the... is that what you used?"

"What I used?" I ask. She's failed to give me the one answer I wanted most, and I hope she's asking something that will let me fail her back. She wants something from me right now, badly. I step in, eager to know, so I can refuse to give it to her.

"What you used instead of taking the railroad. What you used to end things. With your husband. You used Pawpy's old forty-five?"

Now I understand, and I feel a smile coming. I can't damp it down. It's almost an exultation, that I can look her in the eye and say with ringing, happy truthfulness, "Momma, are you insane? I didn't shoot my husband."

She tries to swallow and coughs instead. Her face crumples and her hands fist, and all at once she's furious. "Rose Mae, no! Tell me that man you married is not still walking on this earth."

"It's Ivy now," I say, so sweet now that she is wanting something and I don't have it to give. "I'm Ivy Rose Wheeler. You're the one told me it was him or me. I chose, Momma. I got rid of Rose Mae."

Her eyes snap, and now she is beyond angry. Her skin is wax, and her eyes have a fevered glow. Her nostrils flare, and when she speaks, her voice sounds deliberate and deep, each word dredged up from the diaphragm. "Rose Mae, you stupid child, why did you come here? Dear G.o.d, you should have gone with the railroad. Do you really think fate can be fooled? That it can be that easy? It doesn't matter if you keep my rules or not. Nothing you do will matter. Not as long as you are here, and he is breathing."

She steps back, out of the room, her hand on the k.n.o.b. "Your business with Thom Grandee is not over." Her words are livid prophecy, intoned like she's Elijah calling bears, and then she closes the door. I am left shaking, alone in a pale blue room she's made to mirror mine.

CHAPTER 15.

I AM LIKE AN ANGRY five-year-old, holding my breath until I am blue enough to match her decor. I am giving her the silent treatment, except I am almost thirty, which means I do not crumble after ten minutes and weep into her skirts. Instead I meander around whatever room she's in, touching all her things. AM LIKE AN ANGRY five-year-old, holding my breath until I am blue enough to match her decor. I am giving her the silent treatment, except I am almost thirty, which means I do not crumble after ten minutes and weep into her skirts. Instead I meander around whatever room she's in, touching all her things.

She has appointments all day long, crystal junkies and new age woo-woos coming in for readings. Whenever one rings her wind-chime doorbell, she asks me politely, in formal language, to excuse myself. I've toted a Barbara Kingsolver book to my room, and each time I go up and close my door and read in silent, furious obedience. When I hear the client leave, I mark my place and come back down to steadfastly ignore her where she can see me do it.

She has lots of appointments, and many of her clients are her friends, too. I hear them air kissing at her, the rustle of hugs and cheery greetings as I go up the stairs. None of them are surprised to see my a.s.s disappearing upwards. None of them ask to be introduced. They are waiting, I suppose, to see if I am going to stick. No sense befriending another Lilah. The way my room faces the staircase, sounds travel from the parlor directly up to me. I could leave the door open and eavesdrop, but I am more interested in The Bean Trees The Bean Trees than bulls.h.i.t fates invented by my mother. than bulls.h.i.t fates invented by my mother.

After her eleven-thirty leaves, she turns on the red-palm window sign. Belgria is a busy street. In fifteen minutes, a drive-by supplicant is ringing her bell, wanting a peek at the future. I don't get to see the walk-in. She won't even open the door until I am in my room with the door closed.

Perhaps she is worried that this pa.s.sing chimer will turn out to be my husband, come to kill me. Thom Grandee in the parlor with the wrench. That's ridiculous. Thom is looking for his Ro clear across the country. She is not there, and she is not welcome here. If he did know to look in Berkeley, I strongly doubt that he would stand politely on the porch and ring the bell, bearing murderous intentions like a hostess gift.

During our shared and silent lunch, my mother hooks another true believer with her sign. I am banished back upstairs halfway through my grilled cheese sandwich. I hear her answer the bell, and after a brief exchange, the door closes again, and there is no more conversation. This second potential walk-in must not have pa.s.sed muster in some way.

I open my door and see her coming up the stairs with a basket of fresh laundry. She walks past me without speaking and goes down the hall to her room. She closes her bedroom door decisively, but I follow her and let myself in. She is standing on the far side of her queen-size bed, facing me. She has dumped out a jumble of bright cotton clothing on her wave-covered comforter, and she's folding it. Her lips thin as I enter, but she does not tell me to get out. Her room is done in the same endless blues as the downstairs. It's bigger than mine, but not as bright because her windows are covered with heavy drapes.

I come closer, stand across the bed from her. She has collected a blown-gla.s.s and crystal menagerie, and I sort through it, bored. I find sharks nested with seals, lambs cuddled up to lions, and no people: She's made paradise on the bedside table. I put rough hands on her unicorn, picking him up and flicking his silly garland of blue roses. "You're out of luck, buddy. No virgins here," I tell him.

"Be careful, Rose. That's breakable," she says, stern and maternal.

"I'm Ivy," I say to the unicorn, and set him down dead on his side.

Mirabelle's nostrils flare. She leaves the rest of her blouses in a scatter to wrinkle on her bed and goes back downstairs. I go back downstairs, too.

She sits down at her table, shuffling her cards. I see my father's note still sitting on the bookshelf, neatly folded, but now it is directly in front of Persuasion Persuasion. I'm pretty sure I set it down closer to Sense and Sensibility. Sense and Sensibility. I don't think she's read it, but she must have picked it up and set it back down wrong, or at least pushed at it with one disgruntled finger. Its presence is eating at her edges. Good. I don't think she's read it, but she must have picked it up and set it back down wrong, or at least pushed at it with one disgruntled finger. Its presence is eating at her edges. Good.

I go to the other end of the room to touch things in her small store. A bowl full of polished rose quartz shares a shelf with Saint Christopher's medallions. Crystal b.a.l.l.s are lined up with no irony beside a display of hand-carved wooden rosaries. She sells tarot cards here, too, and books on how to read them. The decks are stacked beside prayer candles with the images of obscure saints frosted onto the tall gla.s.s tubes that hold the scented wax.

I pick up Saint Jude and check the label. Twenty dollars seems excessive, but then again, this is a magic magic candle. It says so, right on the sticker. A b.a.s.t.a.r.dized novena is printed on the gla.s.s opposite Jude, something between a spell and a prayer. I set Jude down and paw through the candles, finding a host of less familiar friends: Expedite, Lucy, the Infant of Atocha. They've left Mother Church and gone voodoo. candle. It says so, right on the sticker. A b.a.s.t.a.r.dized novena is printed on the gla.s.s opposite Jude, something between a spell and a prayer. I set Jude down and paw through the candles, finding a host of less familiar friends: Expedite, Lucy, the Infant of Atocha. They've left Mother Church and gone voodoo.

While my mother sits on her chair and shuffles and watches me, I take up the Saint Lucy candle. The spell on the back is a demand for Lucy to reveal a hidden truth or expose a liar. I hold it up to show my mother, modeling its useful marvels as if I am Vanna White. She stares deliberately away from me. I tuck the candle into the crook of my arm and keep shopping.

I have just picked myself out a beautiful green rosary with hand-carved wooden beads when the doorbell chimes again. Her next supplicant has arrived. She starts to speak, but I know the drill by now. I am already heading upstairs. I put the candle and the rosary in my room, unpaid for. I rummage around my room for matches and find an old hotel pack in the writing desk, stuck way back behind some pale blue stationery and a veritable host of pens. Even the frickin' ink in them is blue.

I follow her rules all day: I don't go back to my husband. I don't use drugs or shoot anyone. I don't poke my nose outside the house. I use the back door in the kitchen to let Gret in and out to play with the other dogs or use the lawnly facilities, piously careful not to let a single toe over the threshold when I open it for her.

Gret spends the afternoon with Buck and Cesar and Miss Moogle, but at her regular dinnertime, I go into the kitchen and hear her single-footed sc.r.a.ping at the back door. When I let her in, I bend down to ruffle her ears; she smells strongly of curry. She must have availed herself of Parker's dog door while he was fixing his own dinner. I squat down and scratch her head in earnest, saying, "That's very naughty." She pants into my face, and she even has curry on her breath. Parker is encouraging her.

I eat my own dinner with my mother. She fried catfish in cornmeal, and she serves it with hush puppies and b.u.t.tered peas. She may have lost her accent, but she still cooks like a southerner. We eat and bristle at each other on either side of the butcher-block table in her blue-and-cream kitchen. We are almost all the way through dinner when I finally realize that she isn't speaking to me, either. The silence I thought was my choice has, in fact, stretched both ways, and she has been as purposeful about it as I have been. I take a sip of sweet tea to clear my throat. I am now perversely ready for conversation.

"What really happened the day you left Fruiton?" I say casually, as if these aren't the first words I've said to someone besides Gretel and a gla.s.s unicorn in over twenty-four hours.

Her lips thin and her eyes narrow. She tilts her head sideways and speaks to her peas in an irritating singsong, like she's saying a catechism. "I went to ma.s.s and then confession. I prayed, and Saint Cecilia answered, telling me-"

I interrupt her with a loud snort, unladylike as I can manage, and say, "Cecilias. Plural. They're activists, Momma, not deities. You're telling me your underground railroad doesn't have kid tickets? You have to be this high to ride that ride?"

She glares at me and drops the singsong. "I was praying. It was an answered prayer. I had to shake the dust from my sandals and go, right then." It sounds rehea.r.s.ed, a thing she has told herself over the years. She hasn't said it enough yet, though. Not even she believes it. But her voice gains conviction when she changes the subject, saying, "He's going to find you. He's going to come here and kill you in my house."

I shrug, unmoved. "It's good that you have hardwood floors, then. Easy cleanup."

She slams her fork down. "Stop it."

Now I understand why she's been mad at me all day. This is about Thom. She told me to do something, and I have blatantly not done it. The last time this happened, I was eight and she ordered me to clean my room. I chose to scrunch up in a blanket and reread Charlotte's Web Charlotte's Web instead, and when she came and saw I'd disobeyed her, I was grounded. I'm grounded now, too, in a way. instead, and when she came and saw I'd disobeyed her, I was grounded. I'm grounded now, too, in a way.

We finish our meal and go off to bed, reenshrouded in our separate, angry silences.

A second day pa.s.ses, much the same, and then a third. Each night at dinner I play Beast to her Beauty, asking my single question, asking why she left me behind. She sticks with her story about being told in a vision to go at once, alone, and my dinners all stick in my craw.

By the morning of the fourth day, I've exhausted all my adrenaline. It's hard to stay angry when the sameness of every minute nibbles away at my resolve. My mother is waiting for a client at her table, and I am back in her store. I've practically memorized her limited inventory. I step to the blinds and stare out into the front yard.

Lilah is back. She's beside the gate, begging hands folded over the top of the fence, looking yearnfully toward my mother's place. I am so desperately bored that I think she might have the better spot.

"Come away from the window, Rose Mae," my mother says.

"Ivy," I toss over my shoulder. I do not move.

Lilah sees me, or at least my shape in the window. She straightens, craning forward. "Mirabelle!" she calls, plaintive and hopeless. "Mirabelle!"

I hear my mother get up from her table and come over. She's moving quickly, and when she comes up even with me, she grabs the cord and jerks her wooden blinds closed with a clack. We stand side by side, no view but the slats, and we both choose to stare at them rather than each other.

"You should go talk to her," I say.

"Why?" she asks, dry-voiced. "Do you no longer require the room?"

I make a slit through two of the blinds with my fingers. I see Parker has come out, trailing his pack of rowdy dogs. Gretel is among them, tripping along on his left heel. He's wearing a crumpled b.u.t.ton-down shirt, extremely faded, with black cotton pants that flap around his ankles like pajama bottoms. The man should clearly not be allowed to dress himself. He's crossing the yard to talk to Lilah in that weird s.h.a.ggy-style walk, slumped down to be shorter, hands where she can see them.

"Come away from the window," my mother repeats.

I ask, "Doesn't he have a job?"

"Who?" my mother says. When I don't answer, she reaches to make a peeping slit between two blinds for herself. "Oh, yes. Parker teaches anthropology over at Berkeley City College. He keeps odd hours," she says. We watch Parker standing a good foot back from the fence, talking to Lilah, who is gesturing wildly and weeping. My mother watches me watching, and then she says, "Why do you ask?" Her voice has sharpened.

"Just curious," I say. "He seems nice."

She laughs, but it is a hard sound, not at all amused. "No, Rose. Just no."

"Ivy," I say.

"When that man you married comes, he will eat Parker alive," she says. "From the feet on up."

"All I said was, he seems like a nice man," I say, and she says, almost running over my words: "Exactly."

Parker leans earnestly toward Lilah. He must be repeating his offer to get her into a shelter because she shakes her head at him, vehement and angry.

"I've never really known one of those," I say in musing tones, mostly because my interest seems to bother her. "A nice man. I wonder what that's like."

"I'll thank you not to experiment on Parker. He lost his wife to breast cancer, and she was so young-still in her twenties. They were crazy about each other, too. It was a complete tragedy. He's had enough hard times without your mess."

Lilah is turning away, trailing disconsolately back up Belgria. Parker stays by the fence, calling after her.

"How long ago did she die?" I ask.

"A while," my mother says, cagey.

"A year?" No answer. "More than two years?" I ask. Nothing. "More than three?"

Parker turns away from the fence and walks back toward me, spine straight, sure-footed and easy. s.h.a.ggy-Doo is a costume, so familiar and well used that he can pull it on and shake it off between heartbeats. I'm intrigued now for real, not only because it bothers her.

"She died six years ago," my mother says, begrudging me the information. "But it could be six months or six decades and it wouldn't change your your situation, Rose Mae." situation, Rose Mae."

"Ivy," I say automatically.

Parker is angling away from the porch stairs. It looks as if he's heading around to the backyard, with the dogs surging around his feet in a cheerful four-pack. He disappears from my line of sight.

"He wouldn't do you much good anyway. He's been celibate since Ginny died," my mother says, changing tacks. I make a piffling noise, frankly disbelieving, and she adds, "It's a euphemism, Rose Mae."

"Celibacy is a euphemism?" I ask, but then I get what she means. "You mean he's impotent?" I take her silence as confirmation. "How interesting, Mother mine, that you would know that."

"He is my good friend," she says, prim-voiced. "And he is not for you."

I turn away from the window and face her. "Who is he for, then, Mirabelle? Mirabelle?" I ask. "Is he for you?"

My mother draws back, affronted. She turns away and stamps back toward her table, saying, "Don't be ridiculous," over her shoulder.

"I'm not. You two clearly get along, and he's not at all bad-looking," I say. "As for what's not working, they have pills for that these days. You could-"

"Rose Mae! Don't be vile," she says, hurling herself into her chair and glaring at me over the cards. "He's young enough to be my-" And then she stops. I feel the word she hasn't said like an X-Acto knife, slim and sharp, opening my gut.

A heated silence stretches in between us. I change the subject. "What happens if I leave? If I break your rule and step outside?"

"Don't test me," she says.

"I could go out in the yard, play fetch with Gretel."

"Do it," she says, the temper she's been low-boiling for days finally roiling and foaming over. "h.e.l.l, go out the front. Run after Lilah and tell her you're allowed outside though she was not. Hit her in the face with it, why don't you? Dance and holler. Call attention. Make it easy for that man who is coming here. Help him find you, so he can snap your neck like an eating chicken's."

She's so angry, she's shaking with it. I'm surprised at how much southern has come out in her speech. We stare at each other, and she's panting. My breath speeds up to match hers, and in this tense and ugly silence, her mellow doorbell chimes.

It's a hugely inappropriate noise. It startles her. We both look automatically to the other window and see the red glow of the sign seeping through the slats. She's left it on, and it has attracted a walk-in.

"Shall I get that for you?" I ask, as sugar-voiced as a flight attendant offering a blankie. I am at the front of the room by the store's display shelves, much closer than she is to the door. I step out and put my hand on the k.n.o.b, mostly to prang her. But she draws herself upwards, setting her shoulders, saying, "No, Rose Mae," in the "thou shalt not" commanding tones of some risen minor prophet.

"For the love of Jesus Christ, Claire," I say, "can you not get that my name is Ivy?"

She takes a long stride toward me, not listening, intent on stopping me. I spin fast and swing open the door. Wide.

A pair of servicemen stand on the porch. They aren't in uniform, but they are young, with whitewalled hair. Navy or maybe marines. One is short and broad with a hard face shaped like a shovel, and when he sees me he whispers, "Hallelujah," through his teeth.

The other one is tall and skinny, and he hardly looks old enough to shave. He has milky skin and chocolate-colored puppy eyes that tilt down. He's swaying, as if his sea legs are telling him the porch is moving. They are sweating, both of them, and the potent smell of hops and tequila rises off their skins.

The shovel-faced one crowds the doorway, saying, "What's your name, honey?"

I lean back and say, "I think you have the wrong house."

The tall one smiles at me, too wide, his mouth shaping a leer that is almost comical. He crams in close behind his friend, filling the doorway. "We want to get our palms read."

I shake my head and say in quelling tones, "You boys do not want to get your palms read."

The one with the hard face thinks I'm being funny. He crowds in even closer and says, "You can tell my my fortune, honey." He speaks directly to my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, as if he believes my nipples know the future. fortune, honey." He speaks directly to my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, as if he believes my nipples know the future.

The tall one smiles even wider, goofy drunk and harmless, but his friend muscles forward again, coming so close to me that I move back. He closes the s.p.a.ce I make between us immediately, like it's a dance step, and now he is across the threshold. His friend follows, but it is not the friend who matters in this room. It is this short, broad fellow with his bull shoulders and thick neck, one hand reaching to cup his own crotch and give himself a squeeze, hot eyes on my waist and hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I step back again, fast, almost stumbling as my heels. .h.i.t the lowest stair. I step up on it to keep from landing on my back in front of him. The tall one pulls the front door shut.

My mother glides quickly across the room, inserting her small body into the s.p.a.ce between me and the sailors. "Rose Mae. Go upstairs."

I back up another step, instantly obedient. I don't even correct her. I want to go. I'm afraid. It would be stupid not to be, but at the same time my fingers are tingling and adrenaline has been dumped into my veins and I am not bored now, oh no. Rose Mae Lolley only needs a little lead time. I keep backing up the stairs, and my eyes feel hot and gritty and alight, as if I have come on with a sudden fever. I keep my gaze and my feral smile on the short fella, promising him things, but maybe not the things he is expecting.

My mother is still between us, blocking the base of the stairs. She is small, like me. He looms over her and around her, but her words hold him more than her small presence. "Not so fast, sailor man. You have to pay to play. Come sit down." She glances over her shoulder to see I am not quite to the landing. "Rose. Go. Up."

I turn and run lightly the rest of the way into my room. Pawpy's gun is in the drawer of my bedside table. I s.n.a.t.c.h it up, the weight of it familiar and sweet in my hand. I slot bullets into the barrel, fast and slick, and then fit the barrel into its cradle with a satisfying snap.

I set the gun down long enough to pull off my boots. My sock feet whisper against the hardwood floor as I slip fast and quiet back to the landing.

I can hear my mother saying, "... two hundred dollars for the full read." It's a lot more than the price she quoted in the airport, but no one at the table is thinking about tarot readings. She is pretending to sell my sweet a.s.s, while truly she is buying time. I know it's only a ploy, but I'm still offended that she doesn't charge more.

As I cross the landing, I hear the shovel-faced one say, "Me first, mama."