Deep Fried and Pickled (Book One - The Rachael O'Brien Chronicles)

by Paisley Ray

  Early Wednesday morning, I was still in bed when there was a knock on our door. Katie Lee asked, “Who is it?”

  “It’s Macy. Come out here, quick.”

  Katie Lee looked at me. I threw off the covers and followed her into the hallway. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Macy nodded her head toward Francine’s door, and Katie Lee gasped, “Holy shit.”

  Spray-painted letters that spelled DAN dripped down her doorway. “Who’s Dan?” I asked

  Macy rolled her eyes. “It’s no ex-boyfriend.”

  Before Katie Lee knocked on Francine’s door, she whispered, “It’s an abbreviation. Dumb-ass-nigger.”

  The only thing mixed in Canton, Ohio, was the bi-color corn that grew in the fields. I almost didn’t believe what Katie Lee told me until Francine opened her door. Her hand flew to her mouth, and the corners of her eyes became glossy.

  Macy put an arm around Francine’s shoulder, guiding her back into her room.

  “Do you have any paper towels?” I asked. “I think we can wipe it off.”

  “No,” Macy said, “don’t touch it. Call campus security.”

  Across the hall, our phone rang, and Katie Lee jogged to answer it.

  I sat on Francine’s unmade bed while she fumbled to find the number for campus security. Like Macy, Francine had a single room, smaller than Katie Lee’s and mine. She chose lavender for her bedding, desk cushion and rug and had installed a shelf above her bed for framed photos. I gazed at the faces. Big smiles and equally big hugs at an outdoor picnic, an older man in a boat holding a grouper and the photo of Francine and her great memaw in the frame that I’d rescued from the hallway pileup.

  Francine’s voice rasped as she spoke into the phone. “Racial graffiti has been spray painted on my dorm door. This is Francine Battle, Grogan Hall, 7th floor.”

  As Francine hung up, Katie Lee shouted, “Rachael, it’s your daddy on the phone.”

  Mom and Dad had arranged to check on me on Sunday afternoons. They referred to it as a weekly social call, but I knew better. It was a make-sure-you’re-not-partying-too-hard call since you’ll be hearing from us every Sunday. I’d been away for less than a week, and had already spoken to them on Sunday. Getting an additional call midweek irritated me. A once a week check up was plenty, and I almost asked Katie Lee to tell Dad that I’d dashed off to class, but reconsidered.

  “Are you alright?” he asked.

  “Of course I am,” I said, keeping my voice sharp so I’d pass his sneaky surprise inspection. I watched Katie Lee leave the room with a towel and shampoo caddy. She said something about showering before campus security showed up.

  The words Dad spoke into my ear hit me like a winter white out, and my head went blank. “Your mother has walked out after twenty years of marriage.” I’d heard his voice, but couldn’t digest the news.

  My mother would never leave my dad. He must have done something. I wondered if he’d had an affair and asked, “Why would she do that?”

  Dad cleared his throat. “She scribbled a note on a piece of planetary stationery. Your mother left to be with a group of healing psychics. Says she’s gone to find her inner-channel.”

  My ears tuned out the hallway chatter and an icy chill froze my insides. I went into lockdown. “Mother. Psychic? Since when?” She never knew I borrowed that twenty out of her purse or that I forged her name, so I didn’t have to dissect a frog in biology. Did she?

  “Rachael, I didn’t phone until I was certain that this wasn’t a hoax. I hired an investigator. Your mom is staying at a private residence in Sedona, Arizona.”

  “Arizona? We’ve never been to Arizona. Does this P.I. have a license? Why did she go there? What if she was kidnapped or drugged?”

  The phone went silent. “Dad, are you okay?”

  “Bear with me,” he said, his tone sounding small and distant. “What I’m about to tell you falls under the category of mumbo jumbo. I’ve done some research. The red rock that surrounds the town is known in certain circles for its vortex, ancient mystical frequencies, and healing power. There, I said it.”

  “This is ridiculous. Have you called her? When are you going to bring her back?”

  “Rachael, there are no phones and the property is surrounded by high walls and a guarded gate.”

  “Are you sure the Moonies or the Mormons don’t have her?”

  Dad sighed, and I heard ice cubes clank. To deliver this news, I guessed he’d upgraded from beer to something over ice. “I’m sure. I thought about marching out there to bring her back until I consulted a lawyer. He said, if I did, I’d probably be arrested. She has to come home on her own. Hopefully this craziness will wear off, and she’ll call one of us.”

  After exhausting every explanation we could think of, our conversation dead-ended over Mom’s newfound calling. When I hung up the phone, my core rattled with an emptiness I’d never felt. Manic emotions floated inside me, and I didn’t know which to pick: Anger, guilt, fear. Disbelief of her abandonment fermented. It seemed so bizarre; my parents were diehard Sunday Mass patrons and we never even owned a Ouija Board.

  Lying on my bed, I heard voices in the hallway. Someone from campus security named Tuke introduced himself to Francine. My mind was busy digesting the words Dad had spoken and I didn’t have an ounce of extra capacity to delve into the vandalism.

  Quietly, I shut my door and pondered my mom. Why did she leave? Did I miss the signs? Obviously. Mom and Dad didn’t seem unhappy. Freakin’ Psychic? The only thing psychic about my mom was her ability to read my moods. But that was Mom 101 stuff. She’d started meditating. I thought that was just a stress relief thing. Except for the van, bible-burst moment, I couldn’t even remember them fighting. Was that it? They didn’t care enough to fight.

  My mind drifted back to last week. I never dreamed the day she and Dad moved me into the dorm would be the last time I’d see her. The hug she gave me in the van, how it lingered. The gift. I’d completely forgotten to open it. I ran to my closet and dug around for the present. I untied the bow and peeled off the silver paper. It was a journal. A pen rested against the binding. I slid it out and tipped it upside down, gold moons and silver stars bobbed in a sea of glitter. My back crept down a wall as I sank to the floor. Mindlessly I flipped through blank pages. The second to last had a note in Mom’s handwriting. “Be true to yourself.”

  What did that mean? How long had she been planning to go? I had lots of questions, but no answers. I wished I’d said how much I was going to miss her and all the nice things she did for me. Clean sheet Mondays, homemade mac ‘n’ cheese, buying me the ninety-dollar Gloria Vanderbilt jeans on the condition I didn’t tell Dad. I loved those jeans but would’ve traded them for Mom in a heartbeat. It was too late. She’d left, and I didn’t know how to get her back.

  LEANING AGAINST MY OPEN DOOR, I batted my eyelids as fast as hummingbird wings to keep the stinging tears from forming. Francine held her arms crossed as she watched a man from the campus police take Polaroid photos of her door. The red stitched name embroidered on his shirt read, Tuke Walson. Tuke looked older than a graduate student but younger than my dad. He wore the kind of uniform that you see on security guards, dental assistants and electricians. His was navy blue and snug. “Looks like Dan has left his mark. How long you been datin’ this boy?”

  “Ah, Tuke,” Macy said. “Dan’s not a guy. It’s a racial abbreviation.”

  Tuke stiffened and processed the letters like a crossword.

  Exasperated, Francine asked, “You southern?”

  “Born and raised,” he said, and the meaning registered. A tsk slid off his tongue as he shook his head. He touched the paint with a finger. Still wet, it smeared. “Any you ladies hear noises last night?”

  Macy, Katie Lee, and I shook our heads.

  Tuke walked the halls of the dorm, checked the staircases, and questioned everyone on our hall about last night. Time ticked still as the morning drama unfolded. Francine’s door distracted Katie
Lee and Macy from noticing the turmoil I kept to myself. Like Francine, I’d had a morning jolt, but unlike her, I knew the face of the person who’d rejected me, whereas her nemesis hid behind a can of spray paint.

  A replacement door arrived late morning, and Tuke left after he installed it. Macy, Katie Lee, and Francine had classes, but I stayed behind. Keeping the blinds shut, I buried my head in my pillow. Maybe the news about Mom was wrong. There could have been an emergency, a miscommunication. Maybe she was being blackmailed.

  The phone rang again, and I wondered if my mother had received a cosmic signal to call me with an explanation or just to tell me, she was okay.

  “O’Brien,” Katie Lee said. “Get over here. We saved you a spot.”

  My head hovered in a sticky emotional-web. “Where are you?”

  “The nastyteria, waiting for you.”

  I TRUDGED ACROSS CAMPUS Drive feeling emotionally strung out, unable to remember or care if I’d brushed my hair and locked the dorm door. I couldn’t be bothered. This was all wrong. I was the one who was supposed to go away to find myself, not Mom.

  Somewhere in the kitchen, someone was having a lousy day, and I could relate. The acrid smell of deep-fried-charred-oil wafted in the air. The burnt stink suffocated the entire cafeteria, even the table in the back, where Katie Lee and Macy had saved me a seat. I didn’t know why I’d agreed to meet them. Curled under the covers in my dark room, brooding about Mom was where I wanted to be. Why couldn’t she be normal and just have an affair?

  The numbness that lingered inside my chest overpowered my appetite. I did little more than pick at the edges of the meat and cheese layers in my Italian sub. I wondered if I should go home to be with Dad, but staring at him wouldn’t bring Mom back. Besides, what if she tried to call me at school?

  Rubbing her thumb across her blood red nail polish, Macy randomly clicked the underside of her nails. “There isn’t shit going on. This place sucks.”

  Katie Lee dipped a hush puppy into soft butter. “Y’all, I know where we could go Friday. I hear a decent crowd turns up at the Holiday Inn bar.”

  Macy huffed a throaty guffaw. “You have to be kidding. Partying at the Holiday Inn?”

  “This sounds made up,” I said. “Where did you hear about the Holiday Inn?”

  Katie Lee ripped open three sugar packets and tapped them into her sweet tea. “I overheard two cute guys talking by the elevator.”

  Arranging fries in a puddle of ketchup, I scoffed. “Holiday Inn? As in cheap hotel? With a bathtub-sized swimming pool and vending machines as meal service?”

  Katie Lee’s eyes roamed the cafeteria. “It’s week two,” she reminded us, “and I’m tired of staring at our dorm walls.”

  “We’ve got one problem,” Macy said “The drinking age. It’s twenty-one.”

  Considering consequences, I ranked the humiliation of being arrested and thrown in the clinker for underage drinking at the Holiday Inn a worse offense than flunking out. “We can’t get in,” I told the girls. “They’ll card us.”

  Chewing on her bottom lip roused Katie Lee’s inner magic fairy. She zipped her index finger in the air and sparked extra twinkle from her lagoon eyes. “We can go to the registration office. Tell them we’ve lost our school I.D.’s.”

  I pushed my tray aside. “What good will that do? Unless we get our birth date changed.”

  Katie Lee winked while Macy stopped her annoying nail clicking long enough to ask, “Who’s going first?”

  My mom, it seemed, had pretended to love my dad and me. Raw emotion grappled from inside. “I hate fakes and scams. Besides, what bar would let us in with doctored student I.D.’s?”

  As much as I thought I wanted to party and meet ‘the guy,’ I didn’t want to get busted in the process. I did my best to squash the idea, hoping we’d discover some place less illegal to drink, and some other way to do it.

  Something with apples and cinnamon was baking in the ovens, gradually overpowering the charred smell. “Come on, Rach,” Katie Lee said. “No one will check.”

  I tried to reason with the two. “If we get caught forging an official document, chances are we’ll get kicked out of school.”

  Ignoring my commentary, Katie Lee stood and walked toward the kitchen. Moments later, she returned with three warm apple-strudel tarts. She sank a fork into one. “Y’all, I’ll go first.”

  NOTE TO SELF

  Fake I.D.: the ultimate ticket to a more meaningful university experience? TBD.

  3

  Blood, Drugs And Forgery

  The afternoon heat sweltered and everything but the humming cicadas stood still. Like the locked heat index, my mind lingered on Mom. I’d been away at school four days before my parents relationship collapsed. Dad had gone on crisis mode for two days before he called me with news that Mom had left. He didn’t say it, but he had to have been freaking out. I was, and knew it had to be ten times worse for him. When I returned from my afternoon classes, I called to make sure he was eating, sleeping and not doing anything stupid.

  “I’ve had a haircut, and I’m staying busy,” he assured me. “I’ve accepted a commission to refurbish six Clementine Hunter paintings for her hundredth birthday celebration.”

  “That’s cool. Museum or private collector?”

  His voice filled with pride. “New Orleans Museum of Art.”

  “Who do you know in the south that recommended you?”

  I thought I detected gloating when he said, “One of the curators noticed the van in Greensboro. Once we talked, they checked my references and awarded me the commission.”

  Pride inside of me swelled. Although Dad’s personal life hung in chaotic uncertainty, professionally he’d worked hard to attain a reputation for his meticulous attention to detail. This was a big deal and my chest weighed heavy knowing neither Mom nor I was home to help him celebrate. I still couldn’t believe she’d bolted. Mindlessly, I twirled the phone cord around my finger and stared out the window at Campus Drive, waiting for someone to say, ‘April Fools!’ or ‘Gotcha.’ Something to make the reality of Mom’s unexpected departure—different. Before I found heartfelt words, Katie Lee distracted me. In full peacock strut, she parade-marched the length of our nine-by-twelve cell while waving her rectangular card in the air. Making an excuse, I hung up.

  I snatched her prized possession.

  “Let me see that.”

  Katie Lee’s two by three-and-a-half inch university photo I.D. card was still warm from the laminate machine. Under the university seal, she was a twenty-one-year-old freshman. She’d secured her golden ticket to a night of drunken bliss.

  A milkshake of emotional anxiety and boredom can warp one’s perspective of fun. I handed Katie Lee my I.D. and said, “Hide this.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can get a new one with a clear conscience.”

  THE REGISTRAR’S OFFICE WAS in the windowless basement of the Humanities and Science building. There was an overlying scent of formaldehyde. The woman behind the flip-top wooden counter styled her Clairol medium-blonde locks in a bouffant and wore a shift dress with billowy sleeves. I told her I’d lost my I.D.. Curling her lips in a glum frown, she handed me a form to fill out. After a ten-minute wait, I paid a twenty dollar replacement I.D. fee and left with my new card.

  I wasn’t proud that I’d lied about my birth date on an official form. You weren’t supposed to do that until you turned thirty. I’d probably broken a state law. Knowing my Mom had hit the road with a group of traveling head cases, and spending my free time in the company of books while living in mock prison quarters was a recipe for emotional turmoil. If I got busted, I figured I could plead insanity.

  Finally, I had plans. I’d be spending Friday night at the Holiday Inn. Since I hadn’t found any cute, witty men on campus, I hoped that this was where they were hiding. Drinking and dating weren’t approved activities under Mom and Dad’s roof. But Mom had left Dad, and I wasn’t living with either one anymore. I planned to make up fo
r lost time.

  KATIE LEE’S HOMETOWN BOYFRIEND, Nash, was nocturnal and always called after eleven. They’d dated for two years in high school, and she professed to anyone who’d listen that she’d found her soul mate. Trying to pace myself on the personal information intake, I often ended up across the hall, in Macy’s beanbag, and hoped Katie Lee and Nash’s phone conversation would be brief so I could get some sleep.

  Being a Greek, New Yorker, Macy embodied more oompa than the average eighteen-year old. At least more than any I’d ever met. I unpeeled my late night snack and offered her half of my Slim Jim.

  Fluttering her hand in front of her crinkled nose, she squeaked, “Eugh,” which I took as a ‘no thanks.’

  “Rach,” she reminded me, “I’m a strict vegetarian.”

  Despite her meat abstinence, she surrendered animal magnetism when she danced with her laundry to the B52’s. She folded a towel or T-shirt during the pauses and slow parts of the songs. Every piece of clothing she pulled from the basket was black, gray or blue, except her underwear. Those were bright colors constructed from lacey fabrics. Macy’s physique resembled a roller coaster, and her bras, easily two-cup sizes larger than mine, gave me feelings of inadequacy. When she opened her underwear drawer, I was transfixed by the discovery of what could only be a tunnel into Candyland. The neatly folded stacks of intimate apparel provided a wealth of information that I was uncomfortable knowing.

  When the late night news ended, Macy’s door swayed open, and it clunked against the gray plastic wall-bumper. Her TV provided the only illumination in the room and cast a luminescent glow around Katie Lee’s shadowy figure. Her shoulders slumped, and her slipper sock feet were making a whisk-whisk noise. Macy clicked on her study light, and we both watched Katie Lee’s curled fists window-wash mascara and tears into raccoon rings around her eyes. Macy turned the TV off and wrapped her arm around Katie Lee’s shoulders. “You’re a mess.”