by Beth Moore
Jade pitching her own daughter into the backseat usually meant one thing: she was having man problems. Jillian had never known her mother to simply like a man. Moderation didn’t appear to be a category Jade understood. She was either cold to a man or consumed with him. Nothing in between. Jillian had tried to muster up a little compassion toward her, but sometimes she got tired of being the one in the mother role.
As she started up the stairs to Stella’s apartment, she thought about the first time they met and how something about Stella early on had reminded her of Jade. The one glaring contrast was that Stella hadn’t spoken of a single issue with a man in the months they’d known each other. But Stella’s shock at seeing Jillian at her door, and her reluctance to invite her in, made Jillian wonder if she had male company.
“I’ve caught you at a bad time, haven’t I? Is someone here?”
Stella seemed a little anxious as she looked over her shoulder toward the bedroom door. “No, no. No one’s here. I was just . . . doing some cleaning.”
Jillian had never seen Stella’s bedroom. The door was always shut and the one time Jillian had tried to open it, it had been locked. Now it was open, and Jillian could see that the room was in disarray. A black trash bag, partially filled, was sitting on the bed.
“Listen, I can go to a motel tonight. In fact, I have enough money to stay in one several nights. There’s that one just a few blocks from here.” Jillian shifted the weight of her bag to her other hand. “I’m sorry I just showed up on your doorstep.”
“I was expecting you at some point, Jillian. I just didn’t think it would be today. It’s okay. Come on in. Everything’s just kind of a mess.” As she spoke, Stella crossed the living room and shut the bedroom door. “You look like you’ve been crying. Tell me what happened.”
At first Stella still seemed uneasy and distracted, but the farther Jillian got into the story, the more focused she became. She said most of the things Jillian needed a compassionate listener to say until she came up with this question: “So did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Did you take the money?”
Jillian could hardly fathom what she was hearing. “No, I didn’t take the money! I’ve never set a foot in that woman’s room by myself. I can’t believe you asked me that.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have blamed you if you did. It’s a pittance compared to what she owes you.”
“I don’t get what you’re saying.” Jillian had no intention of taking up for Olivia, but she was struggling to follow Stella’s reasoning.
“Come on, Jillian. Think what you should have inherited when her son kicked the bucket. You haven’t stolen from her. That witch has stolen from you.”
Jillian’s head was still throbbing. “I never looked at it that way.”
“You’re kidding me. Why on earth have you been staying over there all this time?”
The answer to that question had gotten more and more complicated and less and less clear even to Jillian, but she well remembered what had landed her back in New Orleans. “To hide!”
“Okay, okay. Settle down, girl. I’ve told you over and over, I’m on your side. I think they’re jerks. That’s all. I mean, at this point, they’re probably nuts enough to think you’ve pulled all the stunts.”
“They couldn’t think that.”
“With the money missing? Oh, I bet they do. Think about it from their angle. None of it started until after the first time you came to town.”
“But none of it was me!”
“I know that. You don’t have to convince me. That’s just the kind of people they are. They don’t really care about you.”
“The man at Mrs. Winsee’s window. How could I have had anything to do with that?”
“I’m sure the police think by now that was a Halloween prank. A coincidence. Don’t you think?”
“But the pocketknife!”
“Be reasonable, Jillian. There is only one place for that knife to come from—somewhere in that house. I’d bet a thousand bucks that Olivia suspects you found it and put it there at the back door. I know you didn’t. But that’s how people like her think.”
Jillian held the top of her head with both hands. What Stella was saying made horrifying sense.
Stella sat down on the couch next to her, put her hands on Jillian’s knee, and leaned in toward her. “Jillian, look at me. You did the right thing. You’re out of there.”
Jillian nodded tentatively, feeling like her best-case scenario was finding the least-threatening spot in an unstoppable nightmare.
“You’re welcome here, and we’ll make the best of it. I know it’s painful to face the facts, but the sooner you do, the faster you’ll get on your feet.”
The shift of tenderness in her voice would have brought Jillian to tears had Stella not hugged her. She stiffened instead, unaccustomed to a lingering embrace of comfort. After a few uncomfortable seconds, Jillian patted Stella on the back to prompt some closure. She pulled away from her and said, “Thank you.”
And she meant it. She knew that nothing about her showing up that evening on Stella’s doorstep was convenient to the woman. It was just that after what had transpired earlier at Saint Sans, she considered Stella the only friend she had in the world, even though Stella was old enough to be her mother.
Jillian’s thoughts drifted to Allie in San Francisco. She’d been her best friend in the way most often woven between peers. They’d shopped at the same places for clothes and used the same figures of speech. They knew one another’s stories and quirks and phobias. Jillian could use Allie’s lip gloss right after her without feeling all freaky about germs. Regret ached in Jillian’s chest. She wished she hadn’t let Vince come between them. If she hadn’t, maybe Allie would have come looking for her.
Given time, Caryn might have become a friend like Allie, but that possibility had just gone up in a puff of smoke. Stella was right. By now, everybody at Saint Sans probably saw her as a crook, if not a total psychopath.
“Here you go, Jillian.” Stella handed her a pillow and a blanket and a fitted sheet. “You might try putting together a makeshift mattress from the cushions. You’d at least be able to stretch out on the floor. Here, let me have that and I’ll do it for you.” Stella reached for the sheet.
Making a bed on the floor wasn’t the worst idea. Jillian still remembered the crick in her neck from the time she’d somehow managed to pass out on that couch. The flashback to that odd sleepover with the card reading made her think of Bully, and how he and Sanchez had beaten at the door the next morning. If someone had told her that day she’d be at his next birthday party, she’d have called them crazy. She wished now she’d never gone to the party. Those moments with Cal on Bully’s front porch had made today’s events at Saint Sans immeasurably more painful and humiliating. A wave of nausea came over her.
“You okay?” Stella asked.
“Yeah. Just spent.”
“Hungry? You’re welcome to whatever you can find in the kitchen. I’ll grab some things from the market tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Stella. No worries about tonight. I couldn’t eat anything if I had to. I’ll chip in on the groceries tomorrow, though.”
“Deal. Glass of wine?”
“No. I’m good.”
Stella poured herself a glass, said good night, and disappeared behind the bedroom door. At least there was a tiny powder room off the kitchen that Jillian could use. She’d never seen a one-bedroom with an extra bathroom before and she was thankful for it.
In the three-minute interval between feeling accused of robbing Olivia and storming out the door of Saint Sans, Jillian had managed to pack every personal belonging she had. She unzipped the bulging suitcase and pulled out the contents until she found Adella’s pajama top and then the pants. As she put them on, the feeling of betrayal nearly swallowed her whole. How could Adella have done that? Or even thought that?
But Jillian felt more than a sense of betrayal. She felt sad, a kind of sadness t
hat soaked through to her bones and drained her of strength. A sadness she’d not even felt over Vince. She turned on her side and curled up into a ball, trying not to separate the cushions beneath her. Squeezing her eyes shut, Jillian attempted to force every emotion out of her heart but anger. It felt best. Hurt the least. But it refused to abide in there alone.
Those five people had been like aliens the first few weeks she stayed at Saint Sans. But at least they were there, always stirring around and coming in and out. Someone was always cooking something. The dryer was always running. Clementine always whining. The smell of dark coffee wafted through the vents at least twice a day. Adella was forever in a twit about this or that, and her stories about her boys could have been water-colored into a comic strip. Of course, Jillian tried not to laugh or show any other signs of warming up around there. Olivia was too cold for much warming up. Jillian had known all along the arrangement was temporary.
But during that short two-month stay, every square inch of the house under the steep metal roof was taken up with life and astir with dust that refused to settle. Jillian had been raised as the only child of a mom who worked hard and long to make decent money. She knew what it was like to be alone and lonely or, maybe worse, in bad company. The way some of them at Saint Sans had gotten into her business annoyed her profusely, but on the flip side, they’d also roped her into theirs. There were the replayed antics of David’s students and Caryn’s constant fears over flunking out of medical school. Jillian knew more about Mrs. Winsee’s honeymoon than anybody under seventy ought to hear.
Olivia abbreviated virtually every good conversation just by walking into the kitchen, but at least she was around. And if she wasn’t, signs of her presence were everywhere. Her pruning shears and gardening gloves were always on the back porch and the flowers in the vase on the dining table were usually clipped from her own garden. If, God forbid, the flowers were store-bought, they’d all have to endure hearing what Olivia found wrong with them. Every now and then she’d be in a less contrary mood and freer of speech and they’d all find the rare glimpse mesmerizing.
“There’s no telling what treasure is in that vault,” David would say. “If we could spike her coffee, think what all we could find out.” The whole place was like a padded cell of eccentrics. Almost everything about it was in some way absurd, but the absurdities had not been wholly absent of amusement. There was all the yelling Adella had done over the mouse that scampered behind the refrigerator. She’d made David pull Clementine out from under the Snapdragon by the tail, which he’d done wearing a pair of long yellow dish-washing gloves he’d found under the kitchen sink. Once Clementine was apprehended, Adella threw on Olivia’s soiled garden gloves, got down on her knees, and tried to force the cat’s wide girth into the narrow space between the fridge and the wall. The combined elation of the residents was immeasurable when the mouse darted out and tried to head up her skirt. A mouse had never ended up deader.
And Caryn had bought them matching sweaters.
Somewhere along the way, Jillian had let her guard down, and this was what had come of it. Pain. The penetrating kind. The kind that bruised a person from the inside out.
She would not let it happen again.
CHAPTER 35
BY MORNING, the cushions had come completely apart under the fitted sheet. Jillian’s head was propped on one and her legs were on another, and her entire midsection had sunk to the floor in between. She’d tossed and turned and rearranged the bedding most of the night but finally dozed off out of pure exhaustion just before dawn. Now the incessant beeping and grinding of a garbage truck at the curb below Stella’s apartment forced her swollen eyes open.
“Coffee,” she whispered. She knew there was a coffeemaker on the kitchen counter, but she didn’t feel at home enough to rummage through the cabinets for a filter and something to put in it. Stella might have terrible taste in coffee. What if she liked that chicory? Or what if she made her coffee so weak, a person could see the grounds in the bottom of the cup? The irony wasn’t wasted on Jillian that she wished she had a cup of Olivia’s coffee to muster the courage never to see her again.
By the time Stella emerged from her bedroom, Jillian had put the cushions back on the couch and chairs and folded the sheet as much as a fitted sheet would agree to fold. The extra pillow from Stella’s bed was in Jillian’s lap and her hands were folded properly on top of it. She knew that most of the awkwardness she felt was unnecessary. After all, Stella had welcomed her. Still, she felt like a schoolkid waiting to see the principal after getting caught skipping class.
“Hey there. Get any sleep?” From the look of her, Stella wasn’t much of a morning person either. Jillian’s reluctant host ran her fingers through her tangled hair. She pulled back the curtain to peer at the pouring rain.
“Some,” Jillian answered. “You?”
“Some.” Stella smiled as she said it but Jillian felt a twinge of guilt. “Sky’s falling out there.”
“Yeah, it is,” Jillian responded, walking over to the window. Thunder clapped in the distance.
“Welcome to winter in New Orleans. If you want snow instead, you’re out of luck. I hate the cold, though. I even hate it this cold.”
“I like some cold weather if the skies are blue,” Jillian added. “To me, it’s the rain that makes it miserable.” They were talking about the weather. This was liable to be a long day. Jillian would be relieved to go to work later that afternoon.
“I bet you could use some coffee.”
“Yes!” It was the best news Jillian had heard since she’d arrived on Stella’s doorstep. “I would have made us some, but I didn’t know where you kept everything.” She followed Stella into the kitchen.
“I told you to make yourself at home.”
“I know. I just felt a little weird about it.”
Stella opened the cabinet and pulled out a box of filters and a can of coffee. “You’ll need to get over that.”
The can wasn’t the best sign about the coffee to come. A bag would have boded better. But whatever was inside that can was infinitely better than what was in the empty mug waiting on the counter. The coffee turned out to be surprisingly decent, and what it lacked in quality, Jillian made up for in quantity. The pot was empty in half an hour.
“Going to work today?” Stella asked.
“Planning to. The manager insisted last night that I had the flu, so I could probably get away with not going in. But too much time on my hands would give me too much time to think. I wish I could just switch off my brain. This is so embarrassing, but I’ve got to get one of those prepaid cell phones.”
“What happened to the phone the witch gave you?”
“I threw it on the bed when I left. Are you kidding? I wasn’t about to keep it. I don’t want anything of hers.”
“You’ll need to get over that, too.” When Stella winked at Jillian, she squirmed in her chair trying to decide how to respond. Stella obviously found it unthinkable for Jillian not to push for some of the Fontaine money.
Jillian wanted Stella’s approval, but she wanted contact with Olivia even less. The merest hint that Jillian was after money would cause Olivia to claim that she’d been right all along about why the girl had shown up.
“Is she just going to let you become homeless, too?”
The question caught Jillian off guard. She remembered telling Stella about Rafe when they first met, but they’d hardly talked about it since then. In her current situation, the prospect hit so close to home that it terrified Jillian. She already felt like a vagabond. All she needed was for someone to give voice to her fear.
“Isn’t that how it happens?” Stella didn’t let up.
“What do you mean?”
“The family turns their back on you and leaves you to the streets, while they sleep tucked in their pretty beds?”
The urge to take up for Olivia was an odd twist of emotions that left Jillian rattled. Olivia had certainly not taken up for her the day before. And
Jillian was starkly aware that she was at Stella’s mercy. She rose to her feet, walked over to the sink, and rinsed out her empty coffee mug. “I don’t think it was quite that simple.”
“Oh, really?”
“Really.”
Both women went dead silent. Jillian was the first to break it. “Man, it’s raining cats and dogs out there.”
A few minutes later, Jillian worked up the nerve to ask a question she’d dreaded since the moment she’d opened her eyes that morning. “Stella, may I use your shower? I can do everything else in the little bathroom.” It had a sink and toilet, but if she didn’t have access to a tub, she would have no choice but to check into a motel. At that point her stack of cash would circle the drain faster than her bathwater. She’d started to accept that a call to Jade was coming, but she couldn’t handle it yet.
Stella looked surprised, as if the thought of Jillian needing access to her shower had never occurred to her. How on earth Stella had entertained the idea of her moving in a couple weeks ago without considering they’d need to share that bathroom was a mystery.
“Of course.” Stella’s mouth said yes but her eyes wore an unmistakable no. “It’s just a mess in there. I was in the middle of clearing a bunch of stuff out and cleaning everything up when you came last night. You’re going to have to give me a little while to straighten things up.” She picked up her phone and looked at the time as if she had somewhere she needed to be.
“I don’t care if your room’s messy. All I need is the shower. Well, and some shampoo. I grabbed my makeup and a few other toiletries when I left Saint Sans, but I didn’t think to grab the shampoo. I wasn’t thinking very clearly.”