Motherhood Is Murder

by Carolyn Hart

  Renie told herself she was obsessing for no particular reason.

  But she couldn’t help being curious. It was, among several others, a trait she shared with Judith.

  “You look a little dazed, coz,” Judith remarked as Renie finally managed to wrench herself away from Martin Forte, who had been telling her far more than she wanted to know about sheep raising.

  “We’ll talk later,” Renie murmured, helping Judith scrape off dirty plates before putting them in the dishwasher.

  “Of course,” Judith replied, looking compassionate. “I can’t believe Tom is going to move to Acoma.”

  “I didn’t know he and Heather had found a place there,” Renie replied with a curious look at her cousin. “I knew they were talking about the suburbs, but…”

  “Not Tacoma,” Judith interrupted. “Acoma, New Mexico. Heather is working on a lawsuit involving the Pueblo Indians there. Didn’t you know?”

  “No!” Renie reeled against the stove. “I mean, I know she sometimes works with other tribes besides her own, but New Mexico?”

  Judith grimaced. “Her mother was just telling me about it. It sounds very complicated and they expect to be gone for at least a year.”

  Renie clung to the fridge’s stainless steel doors. “I don’t believe it!”

  Judith put a comforting hand on her cousin’s arm. “I’m sorry. Marilyn Twobucks said Heather just found out a day or so ago. I assumed Tom had told you. Tom’s going to manage a roadside souvenir stand.”

  Renie regained her balance. “Good Lord.” She shot Judith a dark look. “You and your sympathetic face, inviting people to pour out their life stories. I should have guessed you’d be the first to know. Damn!”

  “Maybe it won’t be as long as they think,” Judith said.

  “It better not be,” Renie asserted. “Tom may have his graduate degree in anthropology, but I don’t think his field of study covered the evolution of cheap roadside souvenirs.” She started to say something else, but shut up as Father Jim wandered into the kitchen.

  “You ladies are working too hard,” he declared with a kindly smile. “Before I forget—and I tend to at my age—Tony is a fine young man. I know he’ll enjoy living in Guam.”

  Judith stared at the priest, then looked at Renie. “Guam?”

  A vague expression crossed Father Jim’s face. “’Nam? Tony served in ‘Nam? He seems much too young.”

  Renie noticed the hearing aids in both of Father Jim’s ears. “Guam!” she shouted. “Guam. You just said so yourself.”

  “Oh.” The priest chuckled, then adjusted his hearing aids which emitted a shrill squawk. “Of course. Sometimes I get confused. It was that other young man I talked to who had served in Vietnam. He arrived there shortly before the pull-out in ‘seventy-three. The Lord looked after him. He was only eighteen at the time.” Father Jim paused. “May I have a glass of water?”

  “Of course,” Judith said, reaching into the cupboard. “Ice?”

  Father Jim shook his head, somehow causing his hearing aids to shriek again. “I need it to take my medication. Old age can be a trial. I look at it as passing the last test before getting to heaven.”

  Judith filled three-quarters of the glass and handed it to the priest. “That’s a good way of putting it. I’m already taking my share of medicine since I had my hip replaced.”

  Father Jim gulped down the tablet. “I take various pills, I’m afraid,” he said, handing the glass back to Judith. “This one is Persantine, for angina. Thank you very much.”

  Renie had only half-listened to the medical exchange. It was the remark about the Vietnam veteran that had caught her attention. To her knowledge, none of the males in the bridal party were of the right age to have served in the war. Odo’s brother, Philo, couldn’t be more than thirty; his sister, Clotilde, was unmarried. Heather had two sisters, also single, and a younger brother still in his teens. The husband of Cathleen’s sister, Margaret, was no more than thirty-five, and her brother, Andrew, was in his late twenties. Maybe Father Jim hadn’t heard correctly. Another squawk from his hearing aids underscored the thought.

  When the priest had left the kitchen, Renie asked Judith if she’d picked up on the reference to a Vietnam vet. She had.

  “I was puzzled, too,” Judith said, putting detergent into the dishwasher. “Maybe he met someone else on the trip. I gather he’s forgetful, not to mention deaf.”

  “Could be.” Renie gazed down the hallway that led to the back porch. The window in the door reminded her of the man Bill had seen on their own porch earlier in the day. She mentioned the sighting to Judith.

  “You didn’t see him?” Judith asked.

  “No. But he was wearing a sports coat, like the guy in the Polaroids. Bill couldn’t see his face.”

  “Weird.” Judith gnawed on her forefinger, a habit she’d fought since childhood. “Honest, none of the other guests look like him. I searched all the rooms, just to make sure nobody was acting like a recluse.”

  “Recluses don’t wander around in back yards,” Renie noted. “I haven’t met all of the visitors and I won’t until tonight, but from what I’ve been told, none of the men fit the description.”

  “I asked Carl and Arlene Rankers,” Judith said, referring to their next-door neighbors. “They were gone from after lunch until around eight o’clock last night. Arlene says she didn’t notice anybody who resembled our mystery man.”

  “If Arlene didn’t notice,” Renie declared, “the guy doesn’t exist. Arlene notices everything. Thus we’re hallucinating and should be sent away to a quiet place with padded walls. Which,” she added with a sigh, “sounds good about now.”

  “Coz.” Judith tipped her head to one side. “In thirty-six hours, it’ll all be over. You can hang on that long. Good grief, you’re lots tougher than I am.”

  Renie was tight lipped. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Unfortunately, when Renie and Bill got home before two there wasn’t time to ask Tony about saving souls in Guam or Tom about peddling dream-catchers in Pueblo country. Both brothers had waited until the last minute to choose their rings, and if their mother hadn’t nagged them, they wouldn’t have made the sizing and shipping deadline. Thus their rings would be ready at two-thirty, and they had pulled away from the house just as their parents had arrived.

  Anne, meanwhile, was talking on the phone to Odo when Bill and Renie arrived. Bill headed straight for the kitchen. Brunch or no brunch, he was going to prepare his lunch. There was, he informed Renie, no telling what time they’d actually get fed at the rehearsal dinner. Bill’s ulcer required him to eat at regular intervals.

  “You think your stomach is bad,” Renie griped. “Mine’s been upset for the last week.”

  “Why don’t you take some of that new German medicine Dr. Quince prescribed for me?” Bill suggested. “It’s on the middle shelf of the medicine cabinet in a white and green box. It’s called GasStoppo.”

  “I know where it is,” Renie replied, circling around the gifts in the entry hall that had arrived during their absence. “I think I’ll just suffer.”

  “But not in silence,” Bill murmured as he opened the fridge.

  Anne, as was her habit, roamed around the house with the cordless phone. She almost collided with her mother between the hall and the living room.

  “You can’t be serious,” Anne was saying into the phone as she brushed past Renie. “There is no way that Uncle Pio and his wife and five kids can come to the wedding. They didn’t RSVP, you haven’t seen them since you were a kid, and it’s impossible. Tell them to turn around at the state line and go right back to Idaho.”

  Renie, who had to use the bathroom, couldn’t avoid following Anne and the phone upstairs.

  “What do you mean?” Anne demanded. “It’s not my fault Uncle Bub has ten kids and twenty-three grandchildren. At least I know them. You wouldn’t recognize Uncle Pio’s gang if they fell in the kitchen sink.”

  Anne proceeded into the bathroom.
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br />   “Hey!” Renie cried. “I have to get in there!”

  “I’m on the phone,” Anne shouted through the door. “No, I’m not being selfish and thoughtless,” she went on.

  “Yes, you are!” Renie called out.

  “I’m not talking to you,” Anne called to her mother before speaking again to Odo. “If you feel that way, maybe you’d better do some hard—and fast—thinking. And I’m certainly not spoiled!”

  “Yes, you are!” Renie repeated, banging on the door.

  “Oh?” The word dripped with sarcasm. “Well, Odo, I wish you’d said that sooner. Like a year ago, when we first met. It’s a little late now, isn’t it?”

  Leaning against the door, Renie heard the toilet flush.

  “You do that,” Anne shouted. “You can go sit on a rock in the middle of the sound, for all I care! Meditate until your butt falls off! We’re through!”

  Renie heard water running in the sink. “Anne! Open up! Now!”

  Agrim and red-faced Anne finally opened the bathroom door. “The wedding’s off,” she announced and stomped off toward her room, phone still in hand.

  When Renie had finished in the bathroom, she knocked on Anne’s door. From inside, she could hear her daughter crying her eyes out.

  The door wasn’t locked. Renie went into the bedroom where Anne was lying on the bed, pounding the pillows and sobbing away.

  “What happened?” Renie asked in a shaken voice.

  “I…hate…him!” Anne declared between sobs and gulps. “How…could…he?”

  “How could he what?” Renie inquired, sitting on the edge of the bed and rubbing Anne’s back as she had done a thousand times over the years.

  Anne tried to control her tears. “Odo…is…odious. He thinks I’m selfish and self-centered. I can’t marry a man who feels like that!”

  “Yes, you can,” Renie said calmly. “You are selfish and you are self-centered. All of you kids are, and it’s my fault. Furthermore, you know it.”

  Anne lifted her head and stared at her mother. “I know we’re all kind of spoiled,” she admitted. “But if Odo felt that way about me, why did he wait to say so now?”

  “Because,” Renie said reasonably, “his nerves are raw, just like yours. You’re both taking a huge step. Couples often fight just before the wedding. They get overwrought and overwhelmed. And who do they take it out on? The person who has put them in that position—the future spouse. Not to mention that we often lash out at those we love most because we know we’ll be forgiven. Real love is unconditional.”

  Anne had stopped crying, but her face was red and her eyes were puffy. “Odo sounded as if he thought I was a terrible person. How am I supposed to feel about that?”

  “Mad,” Renie replied as Anne grabbed some tissues out of a box next to her bed. “That’s a surface feeling. Deep down, do you still love him?”

  Anne hesitated, a tissue to her nose. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  Renie lifted both hands. “That’s the most important feeling as opposed to how you feel at this moment. Odo has his own faults. He’s a bit rigid, he’s obstinate, and no doubt he’ll eventually acquire a doctor’s sense of being a demigod, which seems to go with the profession. But none of that makes him a bad person.”

  “That’s true,” Anne allowed. “He has a good heart. But,” she added in a dismal voice, “I can’t apologize to him. He started it.”

  “Maybe he did,” Renie said, “or maybe you set him off. You know what your Nana always says—having worked as a legal secretary, she insists she never encountered a divorce where there weren’t two sides to the story.”

  “It started with Uncle Pio,” Anne responded. “Odo says he and his family are coming to the wedding even though they never…”

  Renie held up a hand. “I know, I heard you on the phone. Uncle Pio sounds like a jackass, but you have to assume that Odo is getting pressured from his parents. Don’t worry about it. There’ll be enough no-shows—there always are at weddings and receptions—to accommodate this beastly bunch.”

  Anne considered her mother’s words. “I suppose they’ll give us a present.”

  Renie sighed. Anne and her brothers tended to be far more materialistic than their parents. “Possibly.”

  “It may be something awful,” Anne remarked.

  “If it’s awful, it’ll be funny and we’ll get a good laugh out of it,” Renie said. “It can’t be any worse than Aunt Polly’s present to us. It was a weather predictor with Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. If the day was going to be nice, Churchill came out of the little house. If it was going to be crummy, Hitler emerged. Except it never worked, and finally they both came out at once, and Churchill’s girth knocked the Führer off his pedestal.”

  Anne couldn’t help laughing. “I wish you and Pop had saved it. We only got to hear about it.”

  “It went into the garbage before our first-month anniversary,” Renie said, feeling relieved. She knew that once her kids could laugh, the worst of any crisis was over. “Okay. So what now?”

  Anne gazed at the phone which was lying on the floor. “I’ll call Odo. But not quite yet.”

  “Good.” Renie kissed Anne’s red cheek. “I’m going to sort through the packages that arrived while we were gone.”

  “Tom and Tony and I already did,” Anne said as her mother got up from the bed. “We just haven’t put them away yet. The biggest pile is mine.”

  “Wonderful,” Renie said dryly. “Who’s in the lead now?”

  “Tom,” Anne replied. “But not by much. I still think the winner should be determined not by numbers of gifts, but by the estimated amounts spent on them.”

  “Define the word ‘crass,’” Renie said. Shaking her head, she went out into the hall and wondered how she had gone so wrong as a mother.

  “What’s with the Surprise Box?” Tom inquired after he and Tony had returned from picking up their wedding rings. “It’s in its usual place on the chair next to the buffet, but there aren’t any jokes on it. The only thing it says is ‘WOW.’”

  Renie looked up from the guest list she’d been studying in the dinette. “Pop says that gold foil is impossible to write on. It’s bumpy. If you’ll look closely, you can see that the writing is a bit wobbly.”

  Tom seemed disappointed. “That’s a real downer. Nothing about Boris and his latest scam? No caustic comments about our personality flaws? No message from Oscar?”

  Renie looked out into the living room. Despite over thirty years as the family mascot, Oscar looked good—and smug. Whenever the carpet and upholstery cleaners came, they always gave the stuffed ape a thorough going-over at no extra charge. “Oscar has no experience with marriage,” Renie said. “You’ll have to wait for his witticisms on your birthdays.” Her gaze narrowed at Tom. “Assuming you’ll be here for them. What’s this about moving to New Mexico?”

  Tom winced. “I didn’t want to tell you until after the wedding.”

  “And Tony felt the same way about Guam?” Renie was on her feet, staring up at her firstborn. “I can hardly believe any of it.”

  Tom shrugged. “It’s only for a year, maybe less. Besides, it’s a great place for me to get some hands-on experience at the Pueblo sites. I’m pretty stoked about it.”

  “I suppose you are,” Renie allowed. Over the years, Tom’s research projects had included trips to Australia, Italy, and the upper Midwest. The South-west would be new territory. She could see his point. “I just wish New Mexico wasn’t so far away.”

  Tom grinned, showing lots of teeth, just like his mother’s—except that he had had the advantage of a very expensive orthodontist. “We could ask them to move the state, but I don’t think they’d oblige.”

  “Probably not,” Renie agreed as Tony entered the house carrying a large cardboard carton. “What’s that?”

  “The plastic silverware for the reception,” Tony replied putting the carton down in the middle of the kitchen floor. “You forgot to pick it up from the caterer’s yesterday
. They called while you were at Aunt Judith and Uncle Joe’s.”

  Renie clapped a hand to her head. “Drat! I knew I’d forgotten something. But why is it here and not at the church hall?”

  Tony frowned. “I was supposed to take it there?”

  “Of course,” Renie replied. “All of the other rental stuff is there. Can you run it up to SOTS right now?”

  Tony looked pained. Unlike Tom, whose dark coloring and other features favored his mother, Tony was fair and square-jawed like his father. “Gosh—I really can’t. I promised Cathy I’d help her start packing.”

  Renie took three menacing steps toward her youngest child. “For Guam?”

  “Ouch.” Tony’s expression was sheepish. “Who told you?”

  “Cathy’s mother, Tess the Unworthy,” Renie replied. “When do you leave?”

  Tony heaved a deep sigh. “As soon as we get back from our honeymoon at Bugler,” he said, referring to the Canadian mountain resort where the couple had booked themselves into the most expensive hotel west of Ontario. “Now I’ll have to find another job. Maybe I’ll become a farmer. Cathy knows something about agriculture from growing up with sheep. I hear they raise a lot of eggplant and yams on Guam. Or maybe I’ll write a book.”

  With a withering look for Tony, Renie turned to Tom. “Well?”

  “Well what?” Tom asked, brown eyes innocent.

  “Can you haul this stuff up to the church?”

  “Why can’t we take it when we go to the rehearsal?” Tom inquired.

  Renie hadn’t thought of that. She realized that her brain was indeed fatigued, fried, and frazzled. “Sure.”

  As both sons started down the hall, Bill appeared from the basement.

  “It won’t work,” he declared. “We’ll have to take Oscar instead.”

  Tom and Tony gazed at their father, who was holding a cellophane-wrapped package.

  “You mean,” Tony said in shock, “Clarence can’t go to the weddings?”

  “It’s a bad idea,” Bill asserted. “Taking a rabbit—no matter how much loved—won’t work. You know how Clarence hates to stay in his cage. Besides,” he continued, waving the package, “I can’t get him into the tuxedo. I’m sure it’ll fit Oscar just fine.”