“It sounds like some sort of Morse code,” G-Ma said. “State of the art, my —”
“It’s not Morse code!” Viv narrowed her eyes and said into the rear view mirror. “It’s — it’s actually a new technology, a kind of — of subliminal technique to induce a feeling of calmness and clarity for the driver.”
“A what?” G-Ma’s mouth hung open in disbelief.
“It’s a subliminal signal that aids in driver focus. It’s called a clarity enhancer. It induces a feeling of calm and focus.”
“It induces a feeling of annoyance,” G-Ma said.
“It’s frigging soothing!” Viv said. “It is!”
I looked closely at her. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel and her chin jutted out.
Things became suddenly clear to me. She didn’t know what the noise was, either, and that’s why she was taking the car to Amarillo. She’d made up that calibration tale because she didn’t want to admit there was something wrong with her new toy, not after I’d tried to talk her out of the impulse buy.
A nice person would have had her back.
“Is that right?” I asked, cocking my head and pretending to contemplate the idea. “That’s really interesting.”
“It is,” Viv insisted. “I mean, these Cadillac people have thought of everything. They’ve — ”
Ding ding ding ding ding! Frantic this time.
“That sounded dire,” I said. “Does that mean your mind was wandering off and the machine was roping it back in.”
Viv laughed — through clenched teeth — and hissed, “Silly. How would I know how subliminal programming works? I just know that it works.”
A loud ding this time, and higher pitched. More of a beep.
I leaned over to study the dash, looking for warning lights. Nothing was glaringly wrong, but then, if they were relying on the ding to get the message across, there wouldn’t be.
“I don’t feel soothed or focused,” I said.
“It’s not for you. It’s for the driver. It’s calibrated to every driver’s…you know. Brain waves.”
I gave her the side-eye. I could see that the temperature gage was normal, though, and that made me feel better.
I straighted back up. “I should stay away from that side of the car. It might get my brain waves mixed up with yours and send us into the ditch or something.”
“I don’t see what good it does to have the driver be focused if it makes the passengers want to shoot somebody,” G-Ma groused.
“Are you kidding? That’s when a driver needs to concentrate most!” Viv shot back.
Frantic dings.
Viv’s eyes bulged and she shifted in her seat, gripping the wheel. She barked a high-pitched laugh. “I mean, the driver has to be able to focus through every distraction. It’s — ”
Ding-ding-ding. Dong.
“It’s paramount to safety.”
“So, the dings help the driver concentrate through the distraction of the passengers, who are driven crazy by the dings?” I asked.
She narrowed her eyes at me.
“Just trying to get it clear in my mind.” I pointed to the complex control panel on the sleek dashboard. “What about all these fancy buttons? What else can she do?”
This turned Viv’s mood. She got all excited about the “driver assist” this and the “4G” that.
“Are you recording this?” I asked. “Your driving performance?”
Viv’s smile faltered. “Nah.” She leaned back and flapped a hand. “I didn’t want to mess with it.”
“Couldn’t figure out how to work it, huh?”
She frowned in the general direction of the rear view mirror. “It’s a very sophisticated system. It’s not like you can just sit down and get it all down in an hour.”
She spied a button. “Oh! You know what I’m anxious to try out?”
“Aggressive acceleration?” I guessed.
“Got it in one.”
I tugged at my seatbelt to make sure it was secure, and recalled from the glossy brochure how many airbags were on the passenger side of the car.
But instead of speeding up, Viv slowed down.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She checked the rear view mirror again. “Waiting. There’s one of those new Camaroes coming up behind us. Lime green, good lord. Probably some kid barely old enough to shave,” she said.
I knew the truth, though. The only reason she didn’t have a lime green Camaro was that it hadn’t occurred to her to buy one. If the salesman had shown up at Belle Court with a brochure for a lime green Camaro, G-Ma would be squeezing her grumpy butt in the back seat of it on the way to Amarillo at that very second.
Viv slowed even more, giving the Camaro a chance to catch up.
“We’re already late,” G-Ma said from the back seat. “We don’t have time for games.”
The car dinged again.
“Besides, are you sure this thing is even going to make it there? I’m not sure I feel quite confident — ”
Maybe it was the fact that the Camaro was now even with us, and maybe it was meant to shut G-Ma up, but Viv punched the gas.
G-Ma slammed back against the seat, but her poofy hair cushioned the impact.
I tried to look over at the Camaro, but the g-forces held me pinned to the seat. I swiveled my head to the left.
“Slow doooowwwwn,” G-Ma howled from the back seat. “You’re going to kill us all, you crazy bat.”
Viv hunkered over the steering wheel, cackling like a mad old lady. Which, of course, she clearly was. She leaned forward enough that I could see not one but two guys barely old enough to shave, and another one in the back seat. They were all laughing at Viv.
Between the two front seats, a young, beautiful girl with thick brown hair and flawless skin leaned forward, looked at Viv, and burst out laughing.
I sneered at her. Little punk. She had no idea who she was messing with.
The girl looked at me, then at G-Ma clinging to life in the back seat. She put her hand over her mouth, still laughing, and pointed at us.
“Punch it,” I said.
“No!” G-Ma said. “Stop it! Let me out! I’ll walk home!”
Viv was in her own world anyway. She did something on the dash and then slammed her foot down again. We sprang ahead.
The boy tried to keep up, but couldn’t. I spun around to watch them get farther and farther behind us, both cars flying past the road markers. I didn’t even want to know how fast we were going.
On the other side of the highway, a patrolman passed and swung toward the grassy median.
Viv and I looked at each other, wide-eyed. I thought I had heard somewhere that, if you were going above a certain speed, you could actually get arrested instead of just a speeding ticket. Viv was probably there.
I checked over my shoulder again.
“There are two of us,” Viv said. “He can’t catch us both.” She punched the gas again.
“Stop!” G-Ma screamed. “I’m going to tell him you are holding me against my will!”
But Viv was carried away with her victory, laughing at the thought of that young punk getting a speeding ticket while she got away.
Her euphoria carried her as far as over the next hill, five miles away, where another patrolman waited for us.
“You can outrun the cop, but you can’t outrun that radio,” G-Ma said spitefully from the back seat.
“I don’t even care,” Viv said. “That was worth it.” She began to pull to the side of the road before the patrolman even had his lights on.
She was less philosophical when she found out how much the ticket was going to cost her, and the patrolman started asking questions that hinted that she might be too old to be driving.
“How long has it been since you’ve had your eyes examined?” he asked. “How about your balance? Have you been having any trouble keeping your balance lately?”
I could have told him that Viv was healthier and stronger than he or I wou
ld ever be, she was just a really bad driver. Instead, I suggested that maybe I should drive for the rest of the journey.
Viv gave me a look, but agreed because that seemed the quickest way to get back on the road, and if she put up a fight he might suggest a compulsory retest for her driver’s license.
G-Ma was somewhat pacified by the thought of me driving, too, although she was clearly not having the best day of her life here. She sat in the back seat with her blood orange lips clamped tight, her dark shades on and her arms crossed. She didn’t utter another word for the rest of the trip.
Unfortunately, without the roar of the engine and G-Ma’s screams of terror to drown it out, the dinging sound rose back to the fore.
Which was a shame, because the Cadillac driving experience was, indeed, an experience. Smooth as silk, effortless handling. I felt like I was driving on a cloud. The first thing I did was set the cruise control at the speed limit, because it would have been much too easy to go rocketing along just as Viv had done.
“This handles like a dream,” I said. I briefly wondered if there was any way I could afford a nice used Cadillac to replace my car. But anything I could afford would have to be twenty years old and had maybe been through a fire.
I tried to figure out how I could work the “love never fails” angle to get a car like this. But no matter how I came at it…no. No, there was no legit way I could use “love never fails” to manipulate God into giving me a new Cadillac. Sigh.
But the dinging. I tried to tune it out, but it was at the perfect pitch to cut right through everything. Viv turned on the satellite radio and found a pop radio station, turning it up.
“What are you doing?” G-Ma said from the back seat. “Salem needs to hear that dinging so she can stay focused.”
“Oh yeah,” Viv said with a scowl.
So we listened to the dinging.
Every once in a while, Viv would sigh, as if in contentment, and look out the window. “Isn’t this nice? So relaxing.”
Her left eye had developed a twitch.
So it was that we found the neighborhood for Mom’s brunch. G-Ma puffed up and smoldering in the back seat, Viv with a rictus smile and an eye twitch, and me depressed. It was going to be even harder to drive whatever I could afford after driving this.
We turned down a shady tree-lined road across from the golf course and wound through the narrow curvy streets. The houses were big, the yards were green and impressively landscaped, and the streets were squeaky clean. It was a far cry from the rent houses I’d grown up in around Idalou, Texas.
“Not as nice as Lubbock’s golf course,” G-Ma said with a sniff. “Look at that. Brown spots all over the green.”
I couldn’t see any brown spots, but whatever.
“And who the heck is driving these little hatchback things? Hopefully it’s the hired help. In Lubbock, they make the hired help park around back.” She grumbled some more, then gasped. “Would you look at that?” She leaned forward and squinted. “Good Lord. I can see the Walmart sign from here.” She cackled. “Can you believe that? I’ll bet those snotty old millionaires around here about crapped their britches when they built a Walmart within viewing distance of their mansions.”
I chuckled along and nodded as if this was, indeed, the very height of irony, but I was thinking a few other things. One, that G-Ma’s own view included a parking lot that was mostly pot-holes, a four-lane highway that was mostly abandoned, and a grocery store that advertised (in a sadly unironic way) “cold dranks.” And two, it really was no wonder my mother had turned out the way she had.
Said mother was digging through something in the backseat of her own car as we drove by. “There she is,” G-Ma said as I pulled to the curb.
I wasn’t crazy about the way my heart hammered. She was my mother. Seeing her shouldn’t make me nervous.
But it did.
I covered it up by smoothing my shirt a thousand times and looking around the neighborhood. Yep, we were out of our league.
“Mother,” Mom said, walking toward G-Ma with her arms outstretched. My mom was a cute, petite thing, her hips still as narrow as a teenage boy’s, silver bracelets dangling from her slender wrists, her hair cut in a cute bob and frosted a tasteful, muted blonde.
“You must take after your dad,” Viv said.
I let that pass, because I’d often thought the same thing. I’d never seen the man, though, so I couldn’t say for sure.
I’d never heard her call G-Ma “mother” before, but I guessed in the scheme of things, it wasn’t a big deal. I smiled and raised my arms for her next hug.
She turned to me with a blank smile on her face. Her eyes widened in comprehension — she hadn’t recognized me.
It had been about two years since I’d seen her. In that time I’d quit drinking, and the moment I’d quit drinking I’d started eating. Quite a lot, actually. Even with the thirteen pound loss I’d chalked up, I was still far enough on the plus side that I was unrecognizable.
“What hap – ” She stopped herself before the “What happened to you?!” could complete itself. “You’ve…changed,” she said.
“Tell me about it,” I said. “It’s been a while.”
“Yes, well…” She gave a flat, worried-looking smile and flapped her arms as if to say, Nothing I can do about it now.
I introduced Viv.
Mom greeted her like she’d been taking lessons from the Texas Lady’s Complete Guide to Over-the-Top Etiquette. “Aren’t you such a doll to bring them all the way up here! A living doll! I don’t know how I can ever thank you!” She hugged Viv.
Viv’s eyes met mine over Mom’s shoulder and I shrugged. I kid you not, the woman used to get drunk at my high school football games and never used less than three swear words in a sentence. If you looked up “crass” in the dictionary, you would see her face. She would rather have eaten dirt than thank anyone for anything. But here she was, playing the gracious socialite.
Viv backed away and said, “Yes, well, no big deal. I was coming anyway. Speaking of which, I have to get to the Cadillac place so they can, uh — ”
“Calibrate your software?” I reminded her.
“Yes. That. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
As she drove off, G-Ma said, “I am not riding back with that woman. I’ll walk home first.”
Mom gave her a pained smile. “Of course you’re not, Mother. We’re having a girls weekend and then I’m driving you back tomorrow afternoon. Now, let’s go in so you can meet everybody.”
G-Ma lifted her chin and squared her shoulders, hitching her forty-pound white leather handbag onto her shoulder.
Mom kept casting worried glances at me behind G-Ma’s back, but no matter how hard she looked, I remained fat.
As Mom introduced me and G-Ma to the gaggle of women who awaited us inside, I smiled a stiff smile and wished I had insisted that Viv stay for a while. She had grown up poor ( “we were so broke we couldn’t even pay attention!” she liked to say) but she’d had no trouble acclimating to Easy Street. She wore $800 shoes and carried $1200 handbags like I carried the $20 one I got on sale at Target. Viv was handy to have around when you needed someone to be brave around scary society women.
And they were scary. They smiled huge smiles and drew out their vowels and acted like they hadn’t seen each other in months. They kissed each other’s cheeks and complimented each other’s shoes, new cars, successful children and grandchildren. At least four of them had the exact same hairstyle and frost job that Mom had. They reminded me of older versions of the cheerleaders in high school — girls so terrifyingly perfect that I had little choice but to get drunk and make fun of them.
With getting drunk no longer an option, and Viv not handy to make snide remarks to, I had to make do with Mom and her imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-sucking-up hairstyle, and G-Ma, whose resentment at the well-to-do-ness around us was glaringly obvious. Between the two of them, I decided the best I could do was hold tight to love-never-fail
s and try to make it through. I would smile and nod and give only yes or no answers.
“Now Cappy, I know what you’re waiting for,” said one of the frosted women. It was Neely Bates, I remembered from the article I’d read. The woman herself. She lifted a tray of glasses onto the bar. “You’ve held out until almost one o’clock. That’s a record for you.”
The crowd laughed and Cappy (apparently, from the saucy way she cocked her hip and stood with one elbow out) tilted her chin before she took a glass off the tray.
“What on earth makes you think this is my first drink of the day? You might notice that Brenda and I have taken care of the biggest part of the mimosas already.”
The drinks themselves were beautiful. Golden champagne with a ripe, juicy raspberry lying in the bottom of each glass. Bubbles fizzed charmingly to the top. Neely placed another tray of mimosas — short a few glasses, in fact — beside the first one. So many tall, fluted glasses.
That would work, I thought, my mouth watering as I stared at them. I could have one of those, two of those, maybe, and this awful party would get a whole heck of a lot better. I could relax. I could go with the flow. I could even make a joke or two and contribute something to the event, instead of being the girl with the pained smile frozen to her face.
Instead, I followed the rest of the women out onto the terraced backyard, where the summer heat cooperated by being filtered through the huge trees and the fountain burbled refreshingly in the background. We settled into black wrought iron chairs with fat cushions in red and gold stripes. When a girl came around with a tray bearing drinks, it took everything I had to pick up an iced tea.
I pretended to listen to the conversations around me, and laughed when others laughed. But what I was really doing, I realized after a few minutes, was studying this group of women whose husbands were bankers and CEOs, and who probably appeared in the newspaper for every gala event. I was trying to figure out how, exactly, my mother had infiltrated. It just didn’t make sense.
“So, Salem. That’s an interesting name,” said one of the four frosted women. This one had red glasses, I noted frantically, terrified I would say something to betray the fact that they all looked the same to me. “Is there a story behind it?”
Caught in the Crotchfire (A Trailer Park Princess Cozy Mystery Book 3) Page 10