by Amber Foxx
No one expected Mae to bake cookies. She let him think she had. Saying Sallie had made them, organic whole wheat with natural peanut butter, wouldn’t make them taste better. They’d be hippie cookies. “Glad you like ’em. Where’s Mama?”
“Working late.” He returned his gaze to the TV. The game show Wheel of Fortune was on. “I’m betting that chubby gal on the left wins.”
“Is she good at it?”
“I don’t know. Game just started. I try to pick the winners. Bet with myself.”
Unable to take much interest in solving the puzzles or caring who won, Mae looked around the room. Arnie’s old desktop computer hummed away far too loudly on a desk near the window, and Gigi slept on top of the modem, apparently enjoying its heat or even its purring.
“What are you doing on the computer?”
“I need to check my spin ID. Log in if I get picked. Might win a trip somewhere.”
“Mama would like that.”
He sighed, reached for another cookie. “Hope so. I sure hope so.”
Something about the way he’d expressed that hope didn’t sound very hopeful. Maybe desperate.
“You doing all right?” she asked.
Arnie started to speak, but just then tires crunched in the driveway and lights pushed through into the dim room, followed by silence as the engine cut off. Rhoda-Rae’s shoes clipped up the steps. Not soft nurse shoe treads, but dress shoes clicking. Arnie fixed his eyes on the TV.
“What in the world are y’all doing sitting here in the dark like a bunch of bats?” Rhoda-Rae breezed in and flipped on the overhead light as she closed the door. “Arnie, I do wish you’d get those Christmas lights down, it makes us look like lazy rednecks to leave those up like that.” She unbuttoned her winter coat, a stylish woolen coat that flared along her slim figure. She wasn’t in scrubs, but a crisp bright green dress that flattered her fair skin and green eyes. Rich people’s rejects from the consignment shop, probably. Her big purse bulged, as if she might have rolled up her uniform and jammed it in there. As she strode through and hung her coat in the hall closet, she called, “Why don’t you come talk to me in the kitchen, Rhoda-Mae?”
“Hope your number wins,” Mae said to Arnie, and rose to join her mother. Arnie reached up and let Mae’s hand pass over his in a friendly tap as she passed. She followed her mother out to the kitchen. “Where’ve you been, all dressed up?” she asked.
“I had a meeting. Well, several meetings. I’m the head of a very important committee. And then we had dinner.” Rhoda-Rae looked at her reflected face in the small window over the sink, straightened out an earring that didn’t seem to need adjusting, then turned to Mae. “I wish you wouldn’t bring Arnie cookies. What were you thinking?”
“They’re for both of you. To thank you for getting me started in this course.”
“Well thank me then, don’t give him cookies. Goodness, the man’s gained sixty pounds, sugar, sixty pounds, since I married him. If he doesn’t get himself in shape, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Quietly, so as not to be heard by Arnie over his game show, Mae said, “I think he’s depressed. I’ve told you that before. You should know that. Hasn’t he ever seen a doctor for it?”
“Can’t even get him off his fat backside to see a doctor. Anyway, all Arnie needs is a little get-up and gumption. Look at you. You had a hard time getting work, and you didn’t give up and get all fat and miserable.” Rhoda-Rae sat at the table, and Mae joined her, swallowing her irritation at the rant against Arnie. “So, tell me about your course. Are you gonna be good at this?”
“I think so. I really like the class so far. Studied for it most of the day while the girls were in school.”
From the living room came the sound of the recliner folding in and a grunt of effort as Arnie got up and walked to the computer. Must be checking to see if he won a trip. Mae hoped he would.
“Patsy didn’t waste your time talking about her peculiar classes, did she?”
“She didn’t waste my time, no.” Mae gave in to the urge to flout her mother’s restrictions. “It was pretty interesting.”
Rhoda-Rae picked up an Avon catalog and slapped the table with it, her eyes blazing. “I told that woman not to raise that topic with you.”
As commercials came on the TV, Arnie shuffled into the kitchen in his worn bedroom slippers. Mae noticed that his sweatshirt didn’t quite cover the last inch of belly hanging over his pants. He looked unhealthy, for sure. But having Rhoda-Rae snap and nag wasn’t going to make him get any better. He set the cookies in front of his wife.
“Mae made these for us. You should try one. They’re good.” He opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk, filled a glass, and drank. Rhoda-Rae rolled her eyes to heaven, as if asking for patience with some intolerable suffering. Arnie set the milk glass in the sink. “My gal’s winning so far.”
“Whoop-ti-do.” Rhoda-Rae lifted a cookie, examined it as if it might have bugs in it, and took a cautious nibble. “This tastes funny, sugar. What’d you put in it?”
Mae couldn’t resist. “Arsenic.” Arnie laughed, Rhoda-Rae glared. “They’re whole wheat. Arnie, are you usually right when you bet with yourself?”
“Don’t get him started on that.”
Arnie nodded. “Right about half the time.”
“Half the time,” said Rhoda-Rae with the exaggerated patience of an adult talking to a child, “is no better than chance. It’s like flipping a coin. Chances are you’ll come up heads half the time.”
“I don’t know. After all, there’re three contestants. That makes it more than half. I think I’m a pretty good guesser.” Arnie took another cookie and returned to the living room.
Mae giggled. “That’d be pretty funny if Arnie was psychic.”
“Don’t go there.” Her mother didn’t appreciate the joke. “Patsy’s gone and got you started on thinking about that spooky stuff, and I wish to God I’d never set you up to ride with that woman.”
“Nothing evil’s coming of it.”
“Yet. If you go nosing around and spying, you still might get a look at things you have no business knowing. I won’t have it.”
“Mama, first you got rid of all of Daddy’s stuff, so I couldn’t look for him using the sight, and second he still could have found me if he really wanted to. So that makes all your rules ridiculous. That’s really what this is all about, isn’t it? About Daddy.”
Rhoda-Rae’s lips pressed into a thin, hard, painted line. “No,” she said, “it’s not. There’s plenty more in this world that's none of your business.” She rose and swept out, clicking down the hallway to her bedroom, and closed the door calling out, “And if you get to studying that spooky business, you can just stay out of this house. I never should have sent you to Norfolk.”
So much for saying thank you for that favor.
Mae put the lid on the box of cookies and walked back to the living room, where Arnie sat gazing at the TV.
“Sorry I got her riled up,” Mae said. “I hope she doesn’t take it out on you.”
Arnie shrugged one thick shoulder, leaning forward to peer more closely at the screen. He probably needed his eyes checked, too, along with his depression and his weight. Mae wished she could flip a switch on Arnie the way her mother had flipped the lights on. If that inner light went on in this man, he'd probably leave her mother in a heartbeat—if he could afford to. Even if he was as used to those dramas and demands as Mae was, he couldn’t find it easy to live with.
Maybe her father had left for some good reason, like being married to Rhoda-Rae. Not for some crime or perversion like she made it sound. Maybe he’d been fed up, like Arnie should be if he wasn’t too depressed to move, and simply left her. Sitting on the couch again, Mae said, “Arnie?”
“Hm?” Reabsorbed in the game, he didn’t even look at her.
Somehow, his lack of attention made it feel safer to talk to him. “Mama said Daddy’d done something awful. So bad she couldn’t tell
me or even talk about it. She ever tell you what it was?”
“No. Same story.”
“I used to think he must have gone to prison or something, or be running from the police. But he could have just sinned ... whatever’s a sin according to Mama.”
“A sin is according to God and the Bible.” Arnie frowned. He and Rhoda-Rae had met at a Christian singles retreat. Even if their marriage was rocky lately, the Bible seemed to be one thing they still agreed on. “You should know that.”
Mae suspected her mother had defined a few extra sins, like being psychic, gaining weight, or leaving the decorations up past January sixth. “But some sins, you don’t go to prison for. He could have been looking for me.”
“He could have. Could have repented.” Arnie nodded solemnly, then smiled and clasped his hands together over his belly as the chubby woman on the show won a huge prize.
“You do Facebook? Any of those things?” Arnie asked.
“No.” Mae wondered what this had to do with Arnie’s game show. Did you have to have a Facebook page to win the trip? “I don’t have time to mess around on that stuff. Anyway, everyone I went to high school with is pretty much still around, except for two or three.”
As his chosen contestant moved on to the final bonus round, Arnie left the TV on and heaved himself forward in the recliner. “I win again.” He rose and shuffled over to his computer, eased himself onto the wooden chair at the desk. It creaked as he sat. “You’d be hard to Google.”
“Probably. I’m not exactly famous. Why are you looking me up?”
“I just heard you tell your mother your father would have found you if he’d tried.”
“We didn’t move for six months. He could have.”
“But if he changed his mind later?”
“He still could have found me.” As it dawned on Mae what Arnie was doing, she felt a jolt of alarm tangled with an old shred of hope. “You trying to find my Daddy?”
“No. Just checking to see if it’d be easy for him to find you. Or your mother.” He typed in another search, scanned his results, and Mae watched. All sorts of Rhoda Martins came up, but none were her, and no Mae Martins except for May spelled with a y. No Martin-Ridleys—not that her father would know her married name. The Rhoda Gaskins search brought up one person, but of course Mae’s father wouldn’t even know that name, and the search result wasn’t Rhoda-Rae. “I don’t think it would,” Arnie concluded.
The effort, little though it was, showed more energy than Mae had seen Arnie put into much of anything in a while. A subtle rebellion against Rhoda-Rae in support of Mae. Then the result sank in.
“He could have tried.” Mae glanced at the computer, which showed the Google home page ready for another search. The idea had crossed her mind often enough, but always a shadow trailed it: finding her father meant finding out what unspeakable thing he had done. Her image of a sweet, gentle, quiet man, her father and coach, was so precious she had been afraid to destroy it with the truth. And she’d always believed he would have found her if he cared. But maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he’d tried and failed.
But if she found him, would he want to be found? Had he tried to put his old life behind him? “If I looked him up, I’d probably find him, if he’s still coaching.”
“Might find news about what he did, too, if it was bad enough.” Arnie scratched his eyebrows, pursed his lips, and then rested his hands on the keyboard without typing.
“I’m always scared of that. But then I think, it might’ve been nothing worse than cheating on Mama.”
Arnie leaned his elbows on the desk and closed his eyes. In the silence and the slump of his fleshy back, Mae sensed a deep sadness. She rose to her feet, walked over beside her stepfather and waited for him to emerge from his funk. When he didn’t, she asked, “You okay?”
“That’s a serious sin. Thou shalt not commit adultery.” He straightened up. “My first wife ...” With the one-shoulder shrug, he seemed to push the memory aside. “Sometimes it’s better not to know.”
Mae looked at Arnie. “Not knowing wouldn’t have changed the truth.”
“Well, then ... if you think you’re ready to know the worst ... What’s his name?”
“James Robert Martin—Jim Bob to some folks, Marty to most.”
No articles about crimes came up. Mae’s father wasn’t in prison. Instead, Arnie’s search brought up the exact thing Mae should have expected if she’d trusted her heart instead of her mother. Articles about successful softball seasons for a little college she’d never heard of, and about sending several runners to a regional meet. In a rush of relief, guilt, and surprise, Mae read as fast as she could.
Jim Bob “Marty” Martin was head women’s softball coach and assistant track coach at College of the Rio Grande, a small school in southern New Mexico, still coaching those same two sports he’d taught her to love. She could see him in her memory, patiently coaching her hitting at home in the backyard.
“Oh my God, Arnie.” Tears in her eyes, Mae sat on the floor next to Arnie's chair. As her stepfather rested a hand on her shoulder, lightly, as if he didn’t quite know how to be affectionate, something inside her came close to breaking. “What could he have done that was so bad? They wouldn’t hire some pervert. Some felon.”
“I don’t know. Maybe they would. Lady I work with has a prison record.”
But that was a dollar store. “Surely a college wouldn’t hire someone with a bad history to work with its students.”
Arnie withdrew his hand and typed in a new search, for the college’s home page. It showed a set of brick buildings backed by spectacular sculpted mountains. These weren’t soft and greenish blue like her old home’s mountains, but high and red and bare. So this was where he lived now.
Suddenly eager, Mae said, “See if we can find his picture.”
Arnie opened a link to athletics.
Mae held her breath. Thirteen years. What would her father look like now? As Arnie clicked through to the home page for softball, her vision blurred. Daddy. He’d changed a lot and yet somehow not at all. More wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, a little gray in his tawny hair, and he’d shaved off his mustache. Still lean and fit, and looking shy for the camera, like he’d been caught halfway into a smile.
“Well, there you go. He’s easier to find than you are.” Arnie glanced down at Mae. “I guess you still want to know what he did before you call him up or anything.”
“You think I should really ask Mama?”
He pushed himself to his feet, stood, and walked back to his recliner, picked up the remote. “I don’t know. Worst thing she can say is no.”
Through the bedroom door Mae could hear Rhoda-Rae talking on the telephone, her voice rising and falling in crescendos and descents of emotion, ringing out a brittle but melodic laugh.
Mae walked through the hallway and knocked on her mother’s door.
“What do you want?” Rhoda-Rae snapped. “I’m on the phone.”
“I want to talk to you.”
After an exasperated sigh and a sign-off to the person she’d been talking to, Rhoda-Rae opened the door. She now wore an emerald green velour bathrobe with gold trim. It reminded Mae of a Christmas present. “What do you want?”
Mae spoke softly, trying not to escalate her mother’s irritability any further. “I want you to come out in the living room and look at this web site.”
“What in the world is that important?”
“I found Daddy.”
“How dare you?” Rhoda-Rae’s eyes widened and flashed, and she strode down the hall, pushing past Mae, and stood frozen in front of the screen that still showed Marty’s picture. Then, with a frantic grab, Rhoda-Rae lunged for the computer mouse and accidentally knocked it onto to the floor. Gigi leaped off the modem and scrambled onto Arnie’s lap. Rhoda-Rae, dropping to her knees, pressed the button on the modem and shut the machine off. “How dare you show his face to me?” She stood, grabbing the desk for balance, her face contorted and redd
ening. “After all I’ve done for you, how dare you make me look at him? How can you bring that man’s name and face into this house? Do you think I deserve to have to live through that again?” Rhoda-Rae tugged on the belt of her robe, as if girding herself for battle, and spoke through gritted teeth. “Arnie Gaskins, I can’t believe you let her do that in this house. Don’t you pay attention to anything?” She glared at Mae. “I cannot believe you have so little respect for my feelings.”
“Look, this college hired him. How bad could he be? Please, Mama, just tell me—what did he do?”
“The worst thing a man can do to his wife. Now get out of here. I can still stop the payment on that check for your class.” Rhoda-Rae marched to the door and opened it, gesturing for Mae to exit. Cold air blew in, rustling the pages of the TV section of the newspaper that lay on the coffee table in front of Arnie.
“I have a right to know the truth about my father.”
“Then ask him, if he’s so all-fired important to you. And let him pay for your job training. Now get out.”
Mae glanced back at Arnie, his worried eyes briefly meeting hers, then walked out the door. Stopping on the top step, she put out an arm to keep her mother from slamming the door in her face. “Fine. I don’t want you hanging that money over my head. Stop the payment. I’m sick of you trying to run my life. You don’t own me.”
“I certainly don’t. I dis-own you.”
Mae let go of the door, and Rhoda-Rae slammed it. As Mae walked to her car, she heard her mother let out a sobbing wail over the electronic mumble of the television.
Going for an Oscar as the martyred mother, Mae thought. She unlocked her car, climbed in, and yanked the door shut. Her whole body shook and shivered as the adrenaline surge of the fight combined with winter night air.
Mae started the car and began the drive past the houses and trailers on their blank treeless lots. She never loved me. She never loved anyone. Look at how she treats Arnie. We’re all just props for her ego. Rhoda-Rae, Queen of the World. Acts like we should be so grateful for little crumbs of her attention, wants to buy us into needing her so she can make herself think she’s so wonderful and brag to people, “Look what I did for my daughter. That girl would have wasted her life if not for me.” “I stood by Arnie through thick and thin, though it’s certainly been thick lately, bless his heart. I’ve had a time of it with that man.” Arrogant, stuck-up, self-centered bitch. Her whole life is a show.