by Nancy Rue
“He doesn’t act like he needs a pack of motorcycles,” Owen said. “Just some straight talk would do it.”
“And evidently you’re just the person to give it to him, Owen.” I sat up straight in the chair. “Look, I’m really sorry about the bike noise and the traffic and all that. You don’t need to bring the police in anymore. I’ll take care of it.”
“It’s not just me you need to tell that to.” He pointed east and lowered his voice to a whisper that couldn’t be heard on Aviles Street, let alone on Miz Vernell’s screen porch where she was undoubtedly listening. “She won’t be satisfied until every Honda, Harley, and Yamaha is confiscated by the sheriff. I’m just trying to keep you out of court, Ally.”
“I’ll talk to her,” I said.
His eyes went to the door where Desmond was emerging with a spiral notebook, part of one of Chief’s recent deliveries.
“All right, let’s see what you got, kid.”
“I don’t show this to most people, Mr. Shotzie. Only people I know got a eye for art.”
“I’m no expert, but I know what I like.”
Desmond nodded as if that were the qualifying answer and sat on the swing next to Owen. He opened the notebook to the page he had his finger in and gave a brief nod.
“This isn’t my best,” he said. “But itta give you a idea.”
The idea was plain on Owen’s face. The isn’t-this-a-cute-kid look faded from his eyes as they scanned the page and looked up at me.
“Have you seen this?” he said.
I shook my head. Oh, man, had he drawn something obscene? Was Liz Doyle going to be hearing from Owen, too?
“I ain’t showed her yet,” Desmond said. “Now this one here, I was experimenting with a different technique.”
“I see. Something along the lines of Picasso.”
Desmond’s eyebrows lowered. “You think it look like some kinda spaghetti?”
“You haven’t studied the artist? Picasso?”
“I ain’t studied nobody. I just draw.”
Owen glared at me as if I alone were responsible for Desmond’s lack of cultural education.
“We’re going to have to remedy that,” he said. “Let me see what else you’ve got.”
The exchange of artistic ideas went on for another thirty minutes, during which I was allowed a brief peek at what had Owen’s eyes gleaming and his mind forgetting what he’d come over for. The drawing depicted a Harley, mine but with the fenders and engine enlarged and enflamed, and the front wheel bowing the windshield gracefully to the ground. I knew without question this was our Classic—because Desmond had drawn her soul.
Owen went home whistling and Desmond sequestered himself in his den, announcing that he needed space to create. I simply sat in wonder on the side porch and waited for Geneveve to come home. Sylvia would like where this was going. My mother, on the other hand, would be way ahead of Miz Vernell and have me locked up by now.
I was foraging for lunch when Leighanne returned with Geneveve, who looked as if her emotions had been drained from her veins and she was, even now, being filled with a trickle of a new one. Eyes puffy from what had apparently been hours of weeping, she looked at me from a different place: a tentative, perhaps unfamiliar place, but a different one than she’d lived in before. Different was good at this point.
“They say I got a long ways to go,” she said. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
I looked quizzically at Leighanne. She nodded at Geneveve.
“Maybe you should tell her the rest.”
“I can only do it for today,” Geneveve said. “Tomorrow, that’s a whole other thing. I’ma think about that when it gets here. Right now I got to go lie down.”
When she’d gone upstairs, I turned back to Leighanne, who was smiling a secret smile.
“What is that, the Scarlett O’Hara approach to recovery?” I said.
“It works. For today.”
“And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow is its own today.”
I sat on the bottom step and tightened my ponytail. “Okay, so what does she need from me?”
Leighanne looked around. “Just make this the safest place you possibly can while she’s taking these critical first steps. The rest is up to her.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
I, too, looked around—at the polished floor and the chairs cozied up to the dining-room table and the red chair-and-a-half waiting for the next person who needed to weep or wail or decide there. “Okay,” I said. “I can do safe here.”
Geneveve went to another meeting with Leighanne and Nita the next morning.
“The goal is ninety meetings in ninety days,” Nita told me. “She can’t do this alone, not even for twenty-four hours.”
I had a small pity party for myself after they left because Geneveve had a group to go to on Sunday morning, and I no longer felt like I did. The bells ringing from the Episcopal church rang out taunts, telling me I was a loser for not being able to make my own people understand me or themselves or the God who was Nudging his way into my life. I was stark lonely, and I soon ran out of chocolate.
There was nothing to do then but beef up my safety plan for Geneveve. I started with a call to Lonnie’s cell phone to leave a message that I was going to have to cut back my work hours for a while. Even though I’d worked all week, I’d managed to avoid him since the day I left Bernard and the carriage for him to clean up. I knew he wouldn’t answer this early—
“Hey,” he said after the second ring.
“Oh,” I said, “it’s you.”
“Yeah, that’s would make sense since you dialed my number. I’m surprised you remembered it.”
“That’s why I called.” I tried to grab the upper hand by imagining him pulling his first toothpick of the day out of its box and sticking it between as yet unbrushed teeth. The hair was definitely sticking out in all directions like a sea urchin—
“I was gonna call you today anyways,” he said. “Basically to tell you I won’t be calling you. At all.”
“Oh,” I said. “So I’m finally being terminated.”
I snickered and waited for our usual conversation to take place—the one where he hemmed and hawed and gnawed and ended up telling me I was his best guide and he’d keep me on even though I drove him nuts.
But he sighed into the phone. “Listen. I like you, Allison, but I have to cut back because of the economy, and lately, you’ve kinda made yourself the logical choice.”
There was something odd in his voice, something not-Lonnie, as if he were reading from a card. I could no longer imagine the toothpick.
“That’s it?” I said. “Seriously?”
“You can come by and say good-bye to Bernard. That horse works better for you than he has for anybody. I don’t know who I’m gonna get to replace you who can—”
He stopped, caught in his own lie. I could imagine his face going red.
“You tell him for me, Lonnie,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”
When I hung up, I had one of those rare moments when I was tempted to wish I’d kowtowed to my parents just a smidge so I’d have a little cash to fall back on. But that passed with the sudden relief that shimmered through me. I had no clue how I was going to pay the utilities a few weeks from now, but I had a Nudge. Not a Nudge toward, but a Nudge away. I figured I’d know what it was I was leaving behind soon enough. The sacred foolishness of it made me laugh.
“Hey, Desmond,” I said. “You wanna go for a ride or what?”
“We goin’ in the rain?”
He joined me in the kitchen, where we both looked out the window at a deluge I hadn’t seen coming. Even as we stood there a clap of thunder made him jump and very nearly push himself under my arm. Prepubescen
t pride saved him.
“Yeah, I guess we won’t be going out in this.” A flash lit up the window, and I covered my ears. “The next one’s going to be huge, trust me.”
“I ain’t scared a that.”
“Uh-huh.”
The crash rattled the glass, sending us both howling across the room.
“Jackal!” he hollered.
“What?”
“You won’t let me say my own cuss words, so I gotta say yours.”
I covered my mouth so I wouldn’t guffaw in the poor kid’s face. His eyes suddenly widened, and he cocked his head.
“What?” I asked again.
“Somebody’s at the door.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“It’s probably your mom….” Although as I passed through the living room. I wondered why she wouldn’t just come in. It wasn’t locked. This was Desmond diverting me from seeing that he was freaked out over the thunder. I opened the front door anyway, just to have something to give him grief over.
The gutter was overflowed onto the front steps, shutting two forlorn female figures behind a curtain of rainwater, yet I knew immediately who they were. The savagely skimpy clothes, the last brittle attempts to hold their heads up. Away from West King Street, even the tall one looked diminished and terrified.
Although there was no way it could be, I said, “Are you ladies here to see Geneveve?”
“No,” said the prostitute. “We here to see you.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Their names were Jasmine Woods and Mercedes Phillips. I didn’t inquire whether those were their real names. I just brought them in out of the storm and went to find towels. When I returned to they foyer, they stood huddled together, eyes wild and terrified as they looked down at the puddle they made on the wood floor. They seemed more frightened in my entrance way than I’d ever seen them on West King Street.
“It’s okay,” I said. “That’s why God made mops.”
I watched them pat themselves haphazardly as if they’d never operated a bath towel before. They made little headway anyway, since their clothes were soaked through and stuck to their skin like shrink-wrap.
“Bathrobes,” I said. “Would that work?”
They stared at me.
“You can put them on while I pop your clothes in the dryer. No sense sitting around feeling like a wet sponge. You can put your own stuff back on when you leave.”
That seemed to mystify them even more. The tall one—Mercedes—ran her tongue over her very full lips like she was dragging it across sandpaper. All of her features were large and would have been voluptuous, even sensuous, if her life hadn’t dissipated her into downright unloveliness.
“Geneveve,” she said. “She gon’ leave?”
“I hope not. She’s just at a meeting right now.”
Jasmine turned her head, as if she could only look at me through one eye. I was relieved to see that the man in the alley didn’t seem to have found her. The emaciated face was still intact.
“What kinda meeting?” she said.
Mercedes knocked at her with the heel of her hand. “Don’t matter. Is she stayin’ here?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly.
“Then we wanna stay here. She said you would help us like you done her.”
As my dear Sylvia would have said, holy mackerel.
Jasmine was watching me in that sideways manner, large liquid eyes overpowering her other features, which had lost all definition.
“You don’t want us?” she said.
“I didn’t say that. Just give me a minute here. How ’bout I fix you something to eat?”
They both shook their heads, but I brought out two bathrobes that were in Chief’s last delivery and had them change into them while I threw together grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. They didn’t eat much, but the robes seemed to comfort them. Whatever worked.
By then I had my first few paragraphs ready. They’d been Nudged into me, and since the women had initially left me with my tongue tied around my tonsils, I had to go with it.
“Whether I can help you depends on what kind of help you want,” I told them when they’d curled themselves as tightly as was humanly possible into the corners of the couch. I sat facing them on the trunk table, trying not to look like I was making this up as I went along. “If you just want a place to crash until you’re ready for your next fix, it’s not happening here. Here you start by getting on a schedule: you eat, bathe, sleep, and wear clean clothes on a regular basis.”
“Ain’t got no clean clothes,” Jasmine said.
Mercedes gave her a heavy glare. If she’d been close enough I knew by now she’d have bruised her with her fist.
Jasmine’s voice dropped into timidity as if she had. “We don’t. All I got’s what I was wearin’ when I come in here. I was runnin’ for my life.”
“I’ve got plenty of clothes,” I said. “Okay—second thing—if you’re going to stay here, you can’t go back and forth to whatever you were running from. No drugs in my house. Matter of fact, you’ll be encouraged to go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings.”
It was coming out of me faster than I could grasp it. If even half of it was sinking into the women in front of me, we were doing good.
“How we gon’ get there?” Mercedes said.
Jasmine was the one to glare this time, tentatively, as if it were a new thing. “Why you askin’ so many questions? If Miss Angel gon’ help us, then we gon’ do it her way.”
“To a point,” I said. “You won’t be prisoners here. You can leave anytime you want, but once you do, there’s no coming back until I have reason to believe you really want to change. And that decision is entirely up to you.”
Jasmine shook her head with a vehemence I wouldn’t have given her credit for. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere, and that’s it.” Then she crumpled herself into a ball and silently wept.
Mercedes barely glanced at her.
“What about you?” I said. “You told me the other night Geneveve didn’t need my kind of help, that it was going to go down bad for her if I didn’t leave her alone. Now here you are.”
She tried to level her eyes at me, but she couldn’t quite get them to focus. Everything about her was almost there. She was almost keeping up her proud front. She was almost maintaining her lead ahead of Jasmine. She was almost convincing herself that she was indeed making a choice. But the evidence that she was out of options—that was the one thing that was whole. She had something breathing down her neck and it had blown her straight to me.
“Jasmine told me what happen to Geneveve,” she said finally, “and I seen there ain’t no other way outta that happening to us.”
“You mean getting beaten up.”
She swatted that away. “I mean getting so loaded you can’t even take care of yourself no more. That ain’t no life. She tol’ Jasmine she got a life here, and I want that. That’s what I want.”
I could almost believe her. Or maybe it was only that I wanted to. I waited for clarity but the words had stopped, and I didn’t feel even the faintest of Nudges.
“Mer-say-deez!”
I swiveled on the trunk to see Desmond, who had apparently gone into hiding under something in the den because his hair had reached new heights of wildness. I really did need to put a haircut for him at the top of my list.
“Whatchoo doin’ here, girlfriend?” he said.
He loped across the room to Mercedes and put his puppy-paw hand up for her to slap it. She gave it a weak try, and then she smiled at him. Wan and cracked, it obviously took everything she had. Her effort broke my heart in half.
“You behavin’, boy?” she said.
“You serious?” Desmond’s voice pitched up into the strato
sphere. “You got to act right if you gon’ live in Big Al’s house.” He turned suddenly to me. “They gon’ move in with us, her and the Jazz-Man?”
I looked at Mercedes, whose long-lost beauty wobbled faintly in that smile she fought to keep for Desmond.
“Yes, they are,” I said. “I think you better go run a bath for somebody.”
“Who goin’ first?” he said. “Jazz-Man, I think it better be you, ’cause I can smell you—wooh. These some sorry-lookin’ women right here.”
“You watch your mouth, boy,” Mercedes said.
She was still smiling.
Over the next four days I felt as if I’d stepped into a different dimension, and all I knew to do was to try to make it a normal one. Not an easy task, seeing as how Jasmine and Mercedes were even less acquainted with normal than Geneveve had been. I was amazed to see how far she’d come as she modeled the simplest things, like putting oneself to sleep.
Mercedes was up every hour, churning around the house until she dropped again onto the nearest horizontal plane.
“I’m used to takin’ me some power naps,” she told me. “On the street you got to keep awake if you want to score, you know what I’m sayin’?”
I didn’t, which was why I made going to NA meetings less a suggestion and more part of the routine. Jasmine took to it best and attached herself to Nita like a joey in a pouch.
“Is this okay with you?” I asked Nita one night when she dropped them off after a meeting. “She’s got to be draining you.”
“It’s what we do,” she said. “It won’t be like this forever for her—you watch. She’ll start to gain confidence, then I’ll be trying to catch up with her.”
I couldn’t imagine it.
Nor could I picture Mercedes letting anyone tell her what her next step should be. But evidently Leighanne was the person for the job, because they spent hours on the phone and side-by-side in the canvas chairs on the side porch talking, sometimes until the sun crept up over the bay. Mercedes acted like she knew a lot when she knew a little, but Leighanne seemed to know how to handle it. From the kitchen I’d hear Mercedes’s voice go shrill, and I’d wait for Leighanne to finally have it up to her helmet and take off on her Sportster. But phrases like one day at a time and powerless over my addiction and words like unmanageable and surrender would waft from the porch and I’d hear Mercedes’s acquiescent silence. In my opinion Leighanne glowed in the dark.