by Jack Parker
Clarissa laughed. "Of course they are! She's their mother."
"From what Mrs. Rodgers says it's more like they're hoping there's some leftover for them when she dies," Gracie said.
"What a perfectly horrible family," her mother commented. "I can understand why Mrs. Rodgers wants a little moral support in a situation like that. I guess I don't have to tell you to keep your mouth shut and your eyes and ears open. I take it you won't be home for dinner?"
"No, we'll go out for pizza when we're done," Gracie said. "Has Kelly called there?"
"No, wouldn't he call your cell?"
"Maybe he's busy. See you later tonight Mom; love you, 'bye."
Gracie ended the call and started the car. She was at the mall on this cool autumn day, having met her friends Shawna and Cheryl there; she'd expected to leave early to meet her boyfriend Kelly, but he must've gotten tied up with something. She'd thought it was a little strange that Mrs. Rodgers had called, as she didn't know the woman very well. Meredith Rodgers taught mathematics and, though Gracie got by all right in the class, she was hardly a star pupil. She was a little afraid the teacher had heard too many rumors about her successes with solving murders – and this was a whole different situation, or at least she hoped so. On the other hand it was really nice to be told she was smart and that she might be able to pick up on some detail that could make a difference.
As she drove to Mrs. Rodgers' house she thought over what little she knew about the woman. She was one of those teachers who couldn't seem to understand why a student wasn't thrilled to learn about mathematics, and made every effort to make the subject fun while giving real-life examples of its applications. A physical description would be a woman in her mid 50s who'd kept her figure reasonably well, shoulder-length black hair with a scattering of gray coming in, a round face and blue eyes.
She was divorced and had grandkids; there were pictures of them on her desk at school. Gracie remembered that the woman's brother had passed away last spring only because they'd had a really boring sub for a couple of days.
The house was an average-looking one in a middle-class suburb. But when Mrs. Rodgers invited her inside there was nothing average about the interior of the home. At first glance furniture and décor had a very sharp modern appearance, but when Gracie looked closer she saw lots of graceful curves, fanciful embellishments, and stylized art that spoke of an earlier age.
"Wow, Mrs. Rodgers, your house is gorgeous," Gracie gushed. "It looks like a page from some old magazine." She peered through an archway into the dining room. "What do you call this stuff?"
"Thanks, " Mrs. Rodgers replied. "It's Art Deco, which is from the 1920s and 30s. I did the décor myself."
"Oh, I'm sorry," Gracie said, blushing a little. "I didn't mean that about the magazine to sound that way."
Mrs. Rodgers laughed gently. "But, Gracie, it is a compliment! You're saying that I got the look right, that I've successfully replicated the old style."
Gracie stepped over to inspect a large cabinet, running her fingers over the curved edges of a tri-part bas-relief on the doors. "At first it reminded me of my step-mother's house. She's got it all done in square edges with lots of chrome and glass, and everything's in shades of yellow or orange."
"That's a modern style. There are similarities; both embrace clean lines and modern materials, but Art Deco includes a lot of curves and ornamentation and, to me at least, looks less cold." She laughed again, but with an edge this time. "So you've got a step-mother, too. I'm sorry to hear that."
Gracie shook her head. "Jennifer's not that bad. In fact she's changed a lot since Dad died."
"I'll bet!" Mrs. Rodgers said darkly. "She got his money and now she can afford to be nice to you while she finds another mark – uh, man." The correction had been deliberately done in order to emphasize the negative connotation.
"Woman, actually," Gracie responded casually. She was so used to her step-mother's sexual orientation that it never occurred to her that someone else might find it shocking. "She admits she'd been using Dad, but she realized she hadn't liked doing it and now she's going to school for fashion design so she can start her own clothing store. We're sort of friends."
"Oh, well you're lucky then," the teacher said. "In my case it's a step-aunt – why don't you sit down and I'll get you something to drink." She indicated Gracie should go into the dining room. "We've got a little time before we need to be there and I can fill you in on the situation. I've got soda, tea, water of course, and coffee."
"Water would be fine," Gracie said as she took a seat at the table. "Or, wait a minute – it's a cool day, a cup of coffee would be nice, please."
"Sure thing. I'll have to nuke it, but I promise I just made it this morning." She disappeared into kitchen and returned in a couple of minutes with a tray containing two cups of coffee, sugar and flavored creamer.
"Thank you, Mrs. Rodgers," Gracie said as she began doctoring her coffee.
"Gracie, you don't have to be so formal. Please call me Meredith, at least outside of school. I, uh, well, I admit that I wanted to introduce you to the other side as a friend – and to make a point of telling them how clever you are at seeing details that are out of place. I am sorry, I know it sounds like I'm using you, but hopefully after you hear how that witch has treated both my brother and myself you'll understand how important your help could be. There's something going on here I can't quite figure out, and I need to so that I can protect my interests."
"Okay, Meredith," Gracie stumbled over the unfamiliar given name. "I'm not really sure what I can do to help, but I'm intrigued. But you have to promise me one thing: this has nothing to do with my grade. Oh, and you can say 'bitch', I've heard the word before."
Meredith laughed happily. "Deal. Your grade is based solely on your classwork and now I'll tell you all about the gold-digging, self-centered bitch who likes to stir up shit." She raised her eyebrows to make a question of the statement, "I presume you don't object to that word, either."
"Nope," Gracie answered glibly. "But what exactly do you mean by 'stir up shit'? She'd certainly heard enough profanity from her Aunt Jeanine and didn't really like to use it herself, but after all she'd started it.
"Let me start at the beginning," Meredith said. "My parents died when I was just six years old. The house caught on fire while we were asleep, faulty wiring was what the fire marshal said. My father woke up and told my mother to get out while he went to get me, but for some reason she didn't. He carried me out to the front yard and I can remember hearing the sirens and the neighbors telling him not to go back in the house because the firemen would be there in a minute, but he went back in after mother. They both died in the fire."
"I am so very sorry, Meredith," Gracie said, her eyes misty.
"Thank you," the teacher said. "My brother, John Redmond, was much older than me. He was 22 at the time, and a newly-wed. He and Aunt Sally took me in and raised me."
"Of course they did," Gracie replied. "They could hardly let strangers adopt you!"
"John meant well, but he didn't know how to deal with children. He and Sally never did have children of their own. When I was a child he expected me to act like an adult and know things I couldn't possibly know and refused to talk to me when I did something wrong, as if I didn't deserve his love.
Gracie frowned a little. "That doesn't seem very fair, a child has to learn."
"I did learn," Meredith said. "I had to so I wouldn't constantly be in trouble."
Gracie grinned wryly. "Something tells me it didn't make any difference, so why did you keep trying?"
"He was my brother – and father in a way - and I loved him," Meredith said, with both love and pain in her voice. "I wanted his approval, so I kept on trying. He may have been proud of me, but he never told me so, not even once. It got worse when I grew up. He insisted a new hobby should be dropped because it wasn't 'uplifting', said I'd wasted money buying a washer and dryer because Laundromats were cheaper, and refused to ride in my ca
r because he thought VW bugs were death traps."
"You have children, don't you?" Gracie asked.
Meredith looked confused. "Yes, a son Jonathan and a daughter Marianne."
Gracie laughed and then took a deep breath to control it. "I'm sorry, it's not funny. Did he really expect you to drag a couple of babies to the Laundromat while you washed tons of baby clothes?"
"It was worse than that," Meredith said with a grin that said the punch line was coming. "I used real diapers, the cloth kind. The paper ones were way too expensive to use."
"I can sure see that it was a lot easier to have your own washer and dryer," Gracie allowed. "In fact, whenever I have kids I'm going to use cloth diapers, too. The paper ones are piling up in the landfills and the waste leaks out into the ground, making for a really nasty mess."
"They're not as much trouble as you might think," Meredith said. "But, yes, it never occurred to John that sometimes convenience was worth paying for. After all, he had a wife to take care of all the cooking and cleaning."
Gracie took a moment to think about ages and thus the social norms of the times in which Meredith and her brother had grown up. "That was the 60's thing when the man worked and the wife stayed home, right?"
"My brother didn't quite live to see his 70th birthday," she replied. "He grew up poor so he probably thought every housewife pinched pennies. That didn't quite answer your question, did it? Yes, he was a product of his times. But he ran his own business and made good money and he bought whatever toys he wanted for himself. I think he knew we didn't have a lot of money at that time and felt I should be willing to make the sacrifice because that's what he would've done regardless of what Sally thought about it."
"No skin off his nose if his wife had to spend hours at the Laundromat, as long as she had a hot meal on the table when he got home," Gracie said sarcastically.
"Exactly," Meredith replied. "The point is that I felt like I never did anything right. No matter what I did he could find something wrong with it, and told me so. The one time I got straight A's he glanced at my report card and said 'I knew you could do it.' No 'well done', much less 'I'm proud of you'. I felt like he wanted me to be a little carbon copy of him and couldn't understand that I was a unique individual with my own likes and interests, an adult capable of making my own decisions and living with the consequences."
"Yet you kept trying to gain his acceptance," Gracie mused.
"I did," Meredith said. "But it was increasingly difficult. I knew he thought he was only trying to help me but nobody wants to be forced into anything, even if it is the best thing to do. Sometimes you have to learn your lessons the hard way. To make matters worse, the man wasn't emotionally demonstrative."
"You mean he never told you he loved you?" Gracie asked in surprise.
"Oh, he did know how to say the words, and I'm sure he meant them. But he couldn't praise or spend time with my family or do any us any favors. The only way he knew how to show his affection was to give me money."
"I guess that's better than nothing," Gracie ventured a reply.
"It is, and it's not," Meredith said. "It certainly helped get us through some rough times, but after a while you begin to count on it. You know that your brother will buy you an expensive watch if you just ask for it. You begin to feel like you're using him, and yet it's the only way you feel assured of his love because that's all you've ever known from him. You know it's wrong, but you don't know how to break the cycle. And when you finally do break it neither of you knows how to respond to the other."
Gracie added more sugar to her coffee, using the process to think about that last. "My father bought me lots of things, too," she finally said. "He did it to show off his money, although I knew he also really wanted to please me. I think I can understand how you feel, a little. As an adult you wanted to be independent, prove to him that you could take care of yourself."
"That's as good an explanation as I can think of," the teacher replied. "It was funny, though. John always acted so sure of himself, but I don't think he really was."
"Why do you say that?" Gracie asked.
"I was at his office one day helping out. His wife did the bookkeeping and she'd been ill, and since it was summer break I did what I could. So I was happily filing papers when John walks in with another man. 'Meredith,' John says, 'I'd like you to meet Dale Robertson.'"
Though the teacher was clearly talking about someone important, the name didn't ring any bells with Gracie. At her blank look Meredith continued.
"John said, 'He starred in that TV show 'The Tales of Wells Fargo', back when I was just a kid.' I'd thought the man looked familiar somehow. John loved the old Westerns; he bought all the DVDs and loaned them to us. For some reason Marianne liked 'em too so I sat and watched with her."
"But that sounded kind of rude, didn't it?" Gracie inquired. "I mean, it emphasized that the actor was old."
"Exactly," Meredith agreed. "In fact, Mr. Robertson passed away recently, may he rest in peace. But it really wasn't a very nice way to put it. I said something polite like, 'Of course I recognize you, sir.' and reached out to shake hands. In the meantime John had developed a case of verbal diarrhea, babbling things like, 'You remember him, I gave you the DVDs.' and, 'It's not every day you get to meet a big Hollywood actor.'"
Gracie smiled. "I'm not so sure but what I'd make a fool out of myself if I ever met someone famous. I'd be so nervous I'd probably forget my own name."
Meredith chuckled. "For once in my life I actually managed to say the right thing. I told Mr. Robertson that it was a pleasure to meet him and that I had indeed enjoyed watching the show, but I didn't make a fuss. Maybe I'm making it up, but I swear he gave me a look that said, 'Thank you for trying to make this less embarrassing.'"
"I think I see what you're getting at," Gracie ventured. "While your brother might have been comfortable and in control in his business, he wasn't always sure how to handle other situations. I think that just makes him human. But I'd bet he felt embarrassed himself, especially since you handled the meeting with aplomb."
"It's just that this was the first time I'd actually seen John out of his element and acting like it," Meredith said. She glanced at the clock on the wall and said, "We need to leave soon, so I'd better tell you the story of the three wives."
CHAPTER 58
Thursday
"Three wives!" Gracie said.
"First of course was my Aunt Sally," Meredith held up a finger. "She died when I was 19, while I was in college. I know you've lost your father, so you know how that feels."
Gracie nodded, feeling a sudden lump in her throat. It had only been a year and a half ago, and sometimes she still couldn't believe he was gone.
"But apparently he needed to be married because less than a year later he'd married Sally's best friend." Meredith held up a second finger. "It was her 4th marriage, and I can't imagine there was any real love between them. He was lonely and she wanted financial security. I'd liked her – until she moved in. Apparently she considered me 'competition' and tried to get rid of me. Eventually she told me she thought I should be paying rent, since I had a part-time job."
"Pay rent to your own brother?" Gracie was aghast at the very idea.
Meredith nodded. "I told her if I paid rent it would be on my own apartment. I kid you not, she told me not to let the door hit me in the ass when I left. I didn't."
"Did you tell your brother what she'd said?"
Meredith's face took on a look of regret. "No, I didn't. I suppose I should have but I thought it would hurt him, or cause trouble in the marriage." She gave a short, sharp laugh. "I was too young to understand that people might marry for reasons other than love."
"So you moved out, and eventually got married and had a couple of babies and had a life. What happened to the second wife?"
"She had a son from her first marriage; a little hoodlum, really. The kid was always in trouble of some kind, though I don't think any of it was really serious. Petty theft
and drunk and disorderly, mostly. He couldn't hold a job and always claimed the boss had it out for him. She was always asking John to bail him out of something – if it wasn't jail it was financial jams."
"I can see that a man like your brother wouldn't like that," Gracie said.
"Oh, it was worse than that!" Meredith said. "She had some money of her own. I think she'd gotten a small inheritance from her grandmother and had added in the alimony from her three previous divorces, so she had enough to take care of this kid herself. John would've complained if she'd used her own money, but he positively hated the fact that she wanted him to spend his own."
"So he divorced her?" Gracie inquired.
"No, she divorced him," Meredith replied.
"And got even more alimony!" Gracie laughed. "So is this where the current wife comes into the picture?"
"He re-married six months after the second wife divorced him," Meredith said, though she neglected to add the last counting finger. "I asked him how he could possibly know anyone well enough to marry them after such a short time, but his response was that he was going to marry her and that was that."
"So it was okay for him to tell you what you should do, but you didn't have the same privilege."
"Apparently not," she replied acerbically. "He was 59 years old, reeling from the divorce – and he had a fair amount of money. As an accomplished gold-digger Robbie (her name's Roberta but she hates to be called that) must've seen him coming a mile away. Probably hoped he'd kick the bucket on their honeymoon and she'd inherit all that lovely money. She made his life miserable for 10 years."
Gracie winced a bit at the teacher's caustic tone. "What makes you so sure she was a gold-digger?"
"Three weeks into the relationship she asked him to buy her a whole new wardrobe, and he did," was the reply. "She quit her job the day he proposed to her. He bought her a house."