Love Mercy

by Earlene Fowler

“Enjoy it while you can.”

  After Garth left, Love made up a tray of ice water, toast, a glass of ginger ale and two Tylenol. She carried it carefully into the bedroom where Rett lay on her side, her back to the door.

  “Rett, are you awake?”

  Rett turned over slowly to look at her. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The doctor said Tylenol would make you feel better. I wasn’t sure if you were hungry, but I made you some toast.”

  “Just the Tylenol,” Rett said, sitting up.

  “I’ll leave the tray here.” She set it down on the maple desk across from the bed. “I’ll put the water on the nightstand next to you. Why don’t you try to rest, let the Tylenol go to work?”

  “Okay.” Rett swallowed the pills with a sip of water and lay back against the down pillows, her face relaxing.

  Just as Love closed the bedroom door, she heard a faint. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” she answered softly.

  She went into the kitchen, fed Ace, then made herself some cocoa and toast with peanut butter. She carried them into the sunroom and sat down in her easy chair, staring out at the darkness. She knew she should try to find Karla Rae’s phone number and call her, let her know that Rett was here. The thought of talking to her daughter-in-law filled her with dread. Though it was cruel, she decided to collect her bearings before she spoke to Karla Rae.

  So, her next photograph would have to have something to do with gifts. But what? It was such a loaded subject. Gifts represented so many things to people. People spent their whole lives trying to give the perfect gift or longing to be given the perfect gift. What was it about gifts that held such power? Something that should be easy and fun was fraught with a vast array of frightening, confusing and complex emotions. No doubt how people felt about gifts—giving and receiving—could likely be traced back to their earliest years, to those first gifts they both gave and received.

  The question was, of course, how would she say all that in a photograph? That was always the dilemma. Something would come to her. She sipped her cocoa, wishing she could just sit here forever and never make that phone call. Ace settled at her feet and gave a wide yawn.

  “Well, flyboy,” she said, leaning over and massaging his neck, “we have to let Rett’s mama know that she is safe, even if my granddaughter hates me forever. I’m just going to take it on faith that by doing the right thing, it will eventually come back to reward me.”

  She stood up and turned on her computer. This was definitely one time that the efficiency and downright convenience of the Internet would come in handy. She Googled Karla Rae’s maiden name and came up with fifteen people, none of whom lived in Florida or Tennessee. She found an old address book and looked for Karla Rae’s name. Next to it she’d, thank goodness, written her second husband’s last name, Ryan. She Googled that. It gave an even a longer list: forty-two names. She could pay forty bucks to find out more, but she was afraid she’d just pay good money to get the address she already had. Then she dialed information in Pensacola, Florida, and quietly asked for Karla Rae or Pete Ryan. There was no listing. Did they move? She knew from Magnolia that Rett hitchhiked from Tennessee. Wait, Garth had said Knoxville. She called Knoxville information and asked for Karla or Pete Ryan. No listing. They probably had a private number if they had a landline at all. So many people were getting rid of theirs these days.

  Then it hit her. Rett’s cell phone. Surely she had her mother’s number listed in her phone’s address book. Love quietly opened the guest room door. Rett was sound asleep. Within minutes she had Karla Rae’s phone number and was back in the living room, proud of her sleuthing.

  She stared at the ten digits for a long five minutes before she screwed up the courage to dial them. On the third ring, a woman answered.

  “Karla Rae?” Love asked.

  “No, this is her friend, Ann. May I tell her who’s calling?”

  She swallowed and said, “This is her mother-in-law, Love Johnson. In California.”

  “Is Rett there?” Ann said, her voice excited.

  “Yes, she is. She’s—” But before Love could finish her sentence, she heard the phone drop.

  Ann’s voice yelled, “Karla! It’s your mother-in-law.” Then Ann came back on the line and asked, “Which one, ma’am?”

  For pity’s sake, Love thought, how many has she had? “I was the first.” She heard her own voice turn to steel. “I am Rett’s real grandmother.”

  “No, not Roy’s mom,” Ann called to a voice in the background. “Not Pete’s either. Honey, it’s your first husband’s mama.”

  Love gritted her back teeth at the woman’s words.

  Seconds later, a husky, familiar voice came on the line.

  “What have you done with my daughter?” Karla Rae demanded.

  TEN

  Mel

  We’re the original Irish cliché,” Sean O’Reilly told Mel on their first date, a pastrami sandwich at the New York-New York Hotel & Casino. He was the last-born of a large Irish Catholic family that went back a hundred years in Boston. “My blessed mother spends all her time saying rosaries for her wayward sons and daughters, though most of us are pretty much on the up-and-up.”

  He’d held up his fingers and counted off his siblings. “In birth order, Patrick is a police sergeant, Kathleen is a housewife and married to a police captain, Michael sells insurance, Moira is a singing nun, Brian is a fireman, Kelly Marie is a teacher, Timothy is an accountant, Mary Margaret is a parole officer—something every Irish family needs—and then there’s me, the black sheep of the family.”

  “You have a sister who is a singing nun?” Mel asked, thinking that perhaps Sean wouldn’t find her parents so odd after all.

  He gave his wonderful, deep laugh, a sound that filled her with a crazy desire that she’d never known existed until she met him. “Well, she’s a nun and she does occasionally sing. She gets annoyed when I call her that, but I told her that I had to do something to punch up her image. Being a plain old nun is just too boring.”

  She’d stared at him, fascinated by a life she couldn’t even imagine. A household filled with people who looked like you, who shared your life from the time you were born, people who would understand when one of your parents did something weird or exasperating. She’d seen it before with people she’d worked with, kids she’d known in school; they could just look at their siblings and with a flicker of an eye, communicate everything that needed to be said. She’d always longed for that kind of bond.

  “You became a cop, just like your dad and Patrick,” she said. “Why are you the black sheep?”

  The irony of her question haunted her to this day. Was he taking bribes even when she asked that innocent question?

  He laughed. “I left Boston and moved to Sin City.”

  The memories tumbled back as she dialed the number Sean’s brother left on her answering machine.

  “O’Reilly,” he answered in a voice that was an older, more gravelly version of Sean’s.

  “Hello, Patrick,” she said, forcing her voice to be calm. “This is Melina LeBlanc.”

  “It’s about time you called.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your mother,” she answered, ignoring his tone. How had he found her? She answered herself in a flash. He was a cop. Of course he could find her.

  “Yeah, yeah, well, she’s up in heaven or wherever probably still saying her rosaries for us sinners down here. We have to talk.”

  “Was it her heart?” Sean had told her his mother had heart problems. Mel felt a perverse need to force Patrick to tell her the details. It wasn’t so much that she cared. She’d only met Sean’s mother once, at his funeral. She shook the sobbing woman’s hand and gave her condolences without his mother even realizing that Mel was not only her son’s lover but also part of his downfall. Patrick bustled his mother away, shooting Mel a hard look. Only Patrick knew about Mel and, apparently, had not told anyone else in his family. No doubt one of Sean’s so-called friends on
the force had informed Patrick about her. When Internal Affairs came to her and asked if she had ever seen anything unusual with Sean, she didn’t lie and told them about the money she’d found in the pantry. And that was that. With one statement, she ended her career as a cop. No one would ever really trust her again. Though she was cleared of being involved with his kickbacks, IA would always look at her with suspicion, and her fellow officers would always see her as someone they couldn’t trust.

  “What do you care how she died?” Patrick snapped.

  The details of Mrs. O’Reilly’s death didn’t actually matter to Mel, but she was avoiding what she knew Patrick wanted to discuss. She’d dodged it for almost three years, hoping the words he’d said at Sean’s funeral were just the ranting of a grieving brother. “I was just being polite.”

  “It was a heart attack. She was always saying that we’d give her one, and I guess we finally did.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She didn’t suffer,” he said bluntly. “One pain and she was gone. Truth was, she was never the same after Sean died.”

  Neither was I, she thought.

  “She’s gone now, so like I promised at Sean’s funeral, I’m going to pursue this now. Where’s the rest of the money?”

  She took a deep breath before answering. “Like I told you then, I don’t know.”

  An angry puff of breath echoed through the phone. Mel could almost smell the whiskey scent of it, recalling Patrick’s same question when he pulled her aside at Patrick’s funeral in Las Vegas. “Look, I don’t want to have to come out there, but I’m telling you, I’m not about to let this go. My baby brother died for that money, and it belongs to his family.”

  Mel let herself grow cold and indifferent inside, channeling the persona she’d developed as a street cop. “Your baby brother killed himself because he was on the take, was going to get caught and sent to prison. That’s dirty money, Patrick. I would think that you wouldn’t want anything to do with it.”

  “Money is money,” Patrick said. “It’s all dirty. But it’s still ours.”

  “And I still don’t know where it is. Or even if it exists.”

  “My brother wouldn’t risk his career for ten grand. I know that he had to have more.”

  “Because he was likely on the take for years?”

  Patrick let out a stream of curse words. “My brother had a problem. He was sick.”

  “He was a drunk and a drug addict,” she said, hating herself even as she said the words. And because of him, she thought, I’ll have to wonder for the next ten years whether I contracted HIV.

  “Where’s the money?”

  “I—don’t—know.”

  “This isn’t over.” He slammed the phone down, cutting off their connection. She stood with the phone to her ear for thirty seconds, listening to the dial tone.

  She set the receiver carefully back in place, trying to will away the trembling in her hand. She’d known this day was coming.

  She sat down hard on the sofa, staring at the floor. It still bothered her that Sean had somehow hidden his drug addiction from her. Or more likely, she just hadn’t wanted to see it. He’d always been a cheerful, upbeat guy, the life of any party they attended. And there were a lot of parties, something that she still sometimes missed, that camaraderie, that being a part of a brotherhood, knowing—or at least believing—that these people would have your back if need be.

  “I love being the center of attention,” he said when they first dated. “Psychologists say that’s because I’m the baby of the family. Hope it doesn’t bother you.”

  “Not at all,” she’d said, and it was true. She was happy to be the quiet one, the girl who nursed a single drink all night long, then drove Sean home, often passed out in the seat next to her. It was easy to be with him, to absorb his vitality, to be part of his “posse,” as he liked to call it. Everyone loved Sean. He was generous, always buying drinks for people or lending them twenty or fifty bucks. She’d occasionally wondered how he could afford it. Now she knew.

  She had no idea what Patrick would do. She wouldn’t put it past him to come out here and confront her directly. The thought of her old life encroaching on this fragile, new existence she’d built made her feel desperate. She knew—hoped—that her new friends here would believe her, that they’d not assume the worst, but she didn’t want to put their loyalty to the test. Though Love and Magnolia and Rocky and the Johnsons and the rest of the people she’d come to call friends knew she’d been a cop in Las Vegas, that was the extent of it. Thankfully, no one ever asked her why she left the force.

  She’d told only one person the whole story: Cy. It all spilled out the day before he died when he was lying in bed, groggy from pain medication and, she hoped, uncomprehending. He’d finally conceded to Love’s pleading to allow an increase in his pain meds. She couldn’t bear to see him suffer. He agreed, he’d told Mel, only for Love. So she wouldn’t fret.

  Telling him about her past at that moment was, Mel felt, a horrible thing to do, something she was ashamed of to this day. But she couldn’t let Cy die without him knowing about her. He’d saved her life. He deserved to know the truth about her. Had he heard anything she said that day?

  Mel waited until he dozed off and Magnolia had convinced Love to go for a walk. As Mel held his dry hand, the words tumbled over themselves like stones in a fast river. It took twenty minutes, and by the end, she could barely breathe.

  “Thank you, Cy,” she whispered. “Thank you for my life.”

  Then—and to this day she didn’t know if it was real or just her longing—she thought she felt a small squeeze from his hand. He never opened his eyes, never spoke another word to anyone. He died the next day.

  She glanced around her small house, a two-bedroom, one-bath beach cottage she’d grown to love. She rented it from an older woman who lived in Cambria, a woman whose husband made his fortune with computer stocks. The owner, Mrs. Melville, was a friend of Love and Cy’s and had rented Mel this house as a favor to them. Slowly, over the last three years, Mel had made it her home; she even had an herb garden in the kitchen window, though she never cooked and did nothing except use the mint leaves in her iced tea. Her small collection of ceramic chickens, bought mostly by Cy and Love, sat on a bookshelf she’d found in a secondhand store and refinished herself, following instructions in a book she’d borrowed from Morro Bay’s tiny library. On the walls were photos Love had taken of the ocean, of Cy’s boat, of Morro Rock, of the feed store. Above her sofa she hung an acrylic painting of the Buttercream Café done by a local artist, Stewart Allison. Everything she owned was secondhand or bought for her by Love, who would tell her, when Mel tried to refuse her gifts, that she was doing Love a favor accepting the towels, sheets, red plaid kitchen curtains and cheery matching drinking glasses that she found at Target or Wal-Mart or the outlet mall in Pismo Beach.

  “I have no one to buy for but you and Magnolia,” Love always told her. “Polly just wants gift certificates so she can pick things out herself.”

  And now she might lose it all. Before she’d let Patrick ruin her life here, she’d leave. Go somewhere else and start over. It would be easy enough; she knew how to invent a new identity, though she doubted she’d have to go that far. But she’d leave no trace, so that Patrick couldn’t hurt any of the people in Morro Bay who’d been so kind to her. When he asked them where she was, they wouldn’t have to lie, because she’d make sure they didn’t know.

  The phone call from Patrick had agitated her enough that she knew she wouldn’t be able to settle down. She wondered how Love was faring with her new granddaughter. She pictured them sitting at the pine kitchen table, like Mel had with Love and Cy so many times, sharing a meal and laughing. Was that what was happening? Mel suspected it wasn’t quite that simple. That young girl looked like she brought with her a boatload of trouble. That would be another reason Mel would leave if Patrick followed through on his threat to come out here. Love would have her hands full with her
granddaughter. She didn’t need to worry about Mel.

  She glanced over at the sunburst clock hanging next to the potbellied stove sitting in the corner of the living room. It was nine fifteen p.m. Too late for a piece of pie at the Buttercream. But she was restless, wanting to be on the move yet not knowing where to go. She grabbed her keys and left her house, driving her truck out of Morro Bay toward San Celina. She wanted a drink but didn’t want to go where anyone knew her. She had a lot to think about. If she was going to leave, she’d better start thinking about what she’d take, because it would happen fast, the minute that Patrick showed up on her doorstep.

  In downtown San Celina, Mel parked in one of the new parking structures and walked down to Lopez Street, the town’s main drag. The old-fashioned streetlamps were decorated for Christmas with artificial pine boughs, giant red bows and gold trumpets. There were twinkling lights in the trees, giving the entire downtown a festive, Disney-like aura. They were cleaning up from the town’s famous Thursday night farmers’ market. The bars at the south end of the street were just starting to liven up, rowdy groups of Cal Poly students pouring out on the streets, loud, laughing and obnoxious. At least they seemed obnoxious to Mel, who not only had never lived that carefree college life but had spent a lot of her early years as a patrol officer hauling these overly privileged, drunk, puke-covered kids into the police station.

  She walked down to the end of the street with her hands in the pockets of her flannel-lined barn jacket, trying to decide if she wanted to push through the crowds and find a quiet corner. She finally gave up and walked back up the street toward Blind Harry’s Bookstore, where she’d make do with a chai latte, even though what she craved was a double Irish coffee, a drink she’d grown to love when she was with Sean.

  The bookstore was crowded with Christmas shoppers, and she realized that Blind Harry’s was having a special “open until midnight” sale. That worked for her. She hadn’t bought a Christmas gift for Love yet, and though she wasn’t sure if she’d even be around in a few weeks, she’d try to find something that she could leave with Polly to give to Love on Christmas Day.