Sweet Water

by Anna Jeffrey

  Hands planted at his waistband, he looked at her from beneath an arched brow. Frustration threatened to unhinge her. She didn’t know her mother’s rights or her own rights. As she mentally floundered for more words, an idea came instead. Dammit, he should see who it was that he would soon make homeless. She lifted her chin and gave him a narrow-lidded look. “You want to meet my mother?...Then by all means, Mr. Ledger, let me introduce you.”

  She sailed from his living room, across his deck and down his steps, without once looking to see if he followed. He caught up with her at the back door of her mother’s singlewide. She said nothing as she entered the mobile home and led him up the narrow hall that opened to the kitchen and living room.

  When they reached the kitchen, they saw Mama shuffling backward across the living room in tiny, scuffing steps. Mama’s face was beet red and she was perspiring profusely. An alarm went off in Marisa’s brain. “Mama? What’re you doing, Mama?”

  “It’s these shoes, Marisa. Tanya said they’re backward.”

  Marisa shot a look at her mother’s feet. She was wearing the new pair of mules Tanya had brought from Ruidoso a few days back.

  Mama reached the sofa, turned around and began scuffing backward in the opposite direction. “It’s really hard, Marisa, going backward.”

  Marisa walked over and put an arm around her mother’s shoulders, stopping her movement. “No, Mama, I didn’t mean for you to walk backward. You could hurt yourself.”

  Mama spotted Terry. Her eyes squinted with suspicion. “Clyde?”

  “This is Mr. Ledger. He’s a guest in the RV park.” Marisa led her mother to a chair at the dining table. “Let’s put on different shoes, okay?” Mama sat down obediently, thank God. “Just sit right here, now. Don’t move. I’m going to find your tennis shoes.” She shifted her attention to Terry, piercing him with her eyes and pointing her finger at him. “Don’t say anything, don’t do anything. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  On the way to the bedroom she felt the sharp sting of tears, embarrassed for Mama that a stranger was witnessing her on a bad day and annoyed at herself because she had more or less dared Terry to accompany her to the trailer.

  In the bedroom closet, she found a pair of canvas Keds. When she returned to the dining room, Terry was standing over Mama and she was drinking a glass of water.

  “She looked so hot,” he said. “I, uh, thought she might be thirsty.”

  Perhaps she was. On a sigh, Marisa went to the sink and dampened a sheet of paper towel, then knelt in front of her mother and wiped her overheated face. She smiled up at her, hoping to relieve some of Mama’s agitation. “Feeling better?”

  “It’s hard work. I’m so tired, Marisa.”

  “I know.” Marisa slipped the Keds onto Mama’s feet and tied the laces in neat bows. “It’ll be easier to walk now that you’re wearing your tennis shoes.” Marisa made a forward motion with her hand. “These shoes go forward. Okay?”

  Her mother pushed her hand away. “You shouldn’t treat me this way.”

  Marisa didn’t reply. She had heard such remarks before. The petulance was part of the illness, she assumed. She helped her mother to her feet and walked her to the reclining chair in front of the TV. She eased her down, turned on the set and surfed to the soap she liked to watch. “Just rest. Want some iced tea, some Kool-Aid?”

  Her mother’s head shook. Marisa angled a look at Terry, who stood there, arms dangling as if he didn’t know what to do next. She turned back to her mother. “Okay, then, take a nap, okay?” Marisa smoothed back the disheveled white hair and spoke softly until her mother’s eyelids fluttered closed. When she felt assured that Mama slept, she gestured for Terry to precede her out the front door.

  Once outside, she marched past him, toward the café, but he caught up. “Don’t say a word to me,” she told him, tears of anger threatening. “Don’t say one word.”

  When they reached the café’s back door, his hand reached out and circled her wrist, stopping her.

  She glared at him, tightened her fist and jerked against his grip. “You’ve seen what you wanted to see. You’re in control. Just do whatever it is you’re going to and leave us the hell alone.” She unlocked the door and went inside.

  He followed. “I want to talk to you, Marisa.”

  The café’s back door opened into the apartment’s postage stamp-sized living room. It held an outdated sofa and two chairs and a lamp that had once been someone else’s junk. She stopped in the living room, not wanting to take their conflict out into the café. “I’m trying to get organized so we can move out of here if that’s what’s on your mind. But you’re going to have to have a little patience. Surely you can see I can’t do it overnight.”

  “I’m not saying I want you to move.”

  “Then what’re you saying?”

  He dropped into a nearby armchair and looked up at her, his elbows resting on his thighs. “Let’s settle down for a minute.”

  As her temper cooled, Marisa felt her heartbeat slow. She sank to the sofa, but she couldn’t bear to look her oppressor in the eye.

  “The way she is,” he said, “is this a normal day for her?”

  For Mama, abnormal had been normal in many ways even before the Alzheimer’s disease had taken over, but how could Marisa describe that to Terry Ledger? She crossed her arms over her chest and looked away. The only person with whom she had ever had an eye-to-eye conversation about Mama was Ben. “Sometimes.”

  “Shouldn’t she be in some kind of therapy or under some kind of professional care?”

  Now came the do-gooder questions. She had heard them all more times than she could count, had even asked them herself. She leveled a glare at him. “She has doctors. What are you suggesting, a nursing home?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. It just seems like there should be places where she could be cared for.”

  “You mean a human warehouse. This is my mother, forgodsake.” Did he not know that such places that were decent cost more per month than she made now or had ever made? “Even if I could bear seeing her...there, it isn’t free.”

  “Your family? Do they help you?”

  “Why are you asking me these questions? Mama has two sisters, one older, one younger. My aunt Rosemary shows up once a year whether she’s needed or not. My aunt Radonna’s...well, busy.” Marisa frowned, resenting the third degree from someone who didn’t even know her and Mama. With the flat of her hand, she brushed away the idea of help from her aunts. “They’ve got their own lives. In a different way, both of them are as goofy as Mama. I’m glad they don’t come around.”

  Terry interlocked his fingers, turned his head and stared at the floor. She could see he didn’t know what to say. No one ever did when confronted with Mama’s illness. Marisa had already asked and argued all of the questions she knew were going through his mind. As they sat through beats of silence, she almost felt sorry for him.

  “How much time does she have left?” he finally asked.

  Of course a man like him would want to know the bottom line. “No one knows. She’s been the way she is for a quite a few months. No worse, no better.”

  She saw a muscle clench in his jaw. “I admit,” he said, “I don’t know much about this illness.”

  She let out a great breath and leaned forward, bracing her elbows on her knees. “Terry, listen. You strike me as someone who thinks he can fix things. Trust me, this can’t be fixed. I assume the drugs she takes help, but I don’t know that. Some days she thinks better than others. We talk and actually have fun. She still has some long-term memory, still has a sense of humor sometimes and a sense of who she is. She still knows me and most of the people around here. When all of us go our separate ways, I don’t know for sure, but I think she’ll miss everyone.”

  She felt a stinging rush to her eyes as she thought of how seeing Mama struggling to walk backward had blindsided her. “I have to say, I can usually see a bad day coming. This morning, I missed all the signs. If I had
spotted them, I wouldn’t have allowed you to come into the trailer. If Mama knew what she was doing, she’d be mortified at anyone seeing her acting so foolishly. I try to spare her dignity.”

  “But you’re almost a prisoner here.”

  “Sometimes I think that. But most of the time I don’t. I’m okay with it.” Marisa made a sweeping motion toward the café with her arm. “All of it. There have been rewards. After all, until you came along, I was doing something I love to do. No boss, no pre-set menu prepared by someone else, no teenage manager who knows nothing about food telling me how to cook.”

  “You must have a plan. For the future, I mean.”

  She blurted out a bitter laugh. Every time she thought of her future, all she could see was a blank page. “Plan? That’s a joke.” She rubbed a temple with her fingers. “Sometimes I lay awake all night thinking about just how long forever is. Some mornings I get out of bed telling myself, ‘I cannot do this another day.’ But you know what? Every day, I do do it. And that pretty much covers my plan. In other words, Mr. Ledger, my plan is and always has been to take one day at a time. And try to stay sane.”

  He rose, came to the sofa and sat down beside her. “These people who live here, Nichols, Patel, Seagrave, they put a lot of pressure on you. It looks to me like you end up taking care of them, too.”

  Marisa shrugged, looking down at her neatly trimmed nails. Short, well-kept nails were important in the world of cooking. “That’s what friends are for. I’ve known them all my life. They might be the crazy uncle you lock in the closet when company comes, but they’re my support group. My only support group, I should add.”

  “They’re grown people. They shouldn’t be looking to you to solve their problems.”

  She aimed a long, serious look into his eyes and saw something she hadn’t noticed earlier. The eyes that looked back at her were gentle and caring. The tough businessman image was a façade. Instantly she knew he worked hard at protecting a kind heart. “Don’t you see they can’t do it? They’ve never been able to take on the world and everyday life like most people do. That’s why they live in this isolated place. Having Mama to rely on freed them of the pressure of living. She used to be their wits and their security, but—” She shook her head. “Obviously that’s no longer the case.”

  He picked up her hand and enclosed it in his. She again felt the warmth and reassurance she had experienced that day they danced to the jukebox in the cafe.

  “You take too much responsibility on yourself,” he said.

  She took back her hand and, with her fingertips, wiped away the tear that had almost fallen. “Everyone has responsibility.”

  “But not everyone meets it quite as head-on as you seem to. And not everyone worries about everyone else before he worries about himself.”

  “Head-on Marisa. That’s me. One of my better-known weaknesses.”

  He took her hand again and his thumb moved back and forth on the top of it. This time, she didn’t move it even though a little shiver rippled through her. That was probably exactly what he intended. Men were so dumb. Give them a shock or a crisis and they think of sex.

  She released a deep sigh. “Look, we could whip this dead horse all day, but I need to get the café open. No telling how much business I’ve missed by being closed all morning.”

  He nodded. “Tell you what. I want you to quit worrying. I’ve got to move ahead, but I’ll work around you as long as I can. I’ll try to come up with a solution you can live with. I know a lot of people.”

  “Don’t you dare feel sorry for me. Or send anyone else around to feel sorry for me, either. I’m--we, Mama and me, we aren’t sops for your or anyone’s else’s conscience. It’s always been just her and me. We’ll manage.”

  He straightened, frowning and blinking as if she had insulted him. “I wouldn’t think of feeling sorry for you. It has nothing to do with my conscience. Business. We’re talking a business arrangement. I just have to figure out what it is.”

  For the first time in days she felt safe, which was insane considering the circumstances. What was it about him that threw her off her good sense and gave her that feeling of security?

  “You’re an admirable woman, Marisa.”

  She gave him a phony smile and a humorless chuckle. “Yep, that’s me. Head-on, admirable Marisa.”

  ****

  Terry reached his mobile home after noon, shaken by meeting Raylene Rutherford. He had never known anyone with Alzheimer’s disease. Not since his days in the army and his experiences in Iraq had he seen another human being who had affected him more deeply. than the older woman who had once been smart and alert, but who had now lost her mind. He meant it when he told Marisa he admired her. Who wouldn’t admire the patience and the care she showed for not just her mother but for every loony person in Agua Dulce? He doubted he could contend half as well with all that confronted her every day. How could any man with ethics even consider uprooting her and her mother?

  Unfortunately, the building that housed Pecos Belle’s sat dead-center where he planned to locate Larson’s. He thought of presenting the company with another Agua Dulce site. After all, there were two hundred acres from which to choose.

  But his twelve years of experience in the commercial real estate profession argued that even the thought was a waste of time and he knew he wouldn’t make the suggestion in a face-to-face meeting with Larson’s team. Pecos Belle’s had the prime highway frontage, the number one selling point in his arsenal. To suggest a different site was a certain deal breaker.

  He could get along with moving the mobile home where Marisa and her mother lived to another site in the RV park—the expense would be small—but all that did was assure them a roof over their heads. Relocating their home wouldn’t provide them with an income after the flea market and café were gone.

  As ideas raced through his head, none of which stuck, he perused the disarray of documents and maps scattered over his dining room table and breakfast bar. He had pissed away more than half a day, was nowhere near being prepared for a big customer and he had to leave before eight tomorrow morning to be at the Midland airport by ten o’clock. He had only hours to accomplish what needed to be done. With a million dollars invested, he couldn’t afford to back off now. He called on the discipline he had learned in the army. Just focus on the mission.

  ****

  Marisa and Mama had been given a reprieve. Of sorts.

  As Marisa cooked hamburgers for seventeen—some class returning from a field trip to Carlsbad Caverns—and listened to laughter and thumps and bumps as kids crawled over and through the covered wagon, she fantasized about walking out and asking the teachers if they wanted to buy the damn thing. It would make a great addition to a playground, she would say. Oh, you’re right, the head honcho would reply. Let me get my checkbook.

  “Crap,” she mumbled and lifted a basket full of golden French fries from the oil. She spread them on a parchment-lined cookie sheet and quickly salted them while the hot oil still showed as tiny bubbles on the fries. The secret to great French fries was soaking them in ice water before cooking, then salting them the instant they were out of the hot oil. She added a sprinkling of her own secret “house seasoning,” which was nothing more than a mix of paprika, cayenne pepper, chili powder and a smidgen of brown sugar. And sometimes something else, depending on her mood.

  As soon as her customers left stuffed with hamburgers, French fries and chocolate brownies, she turned on the radio. Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffet sang out “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” which engendered a fantasy about quaffing margaritas and lying on a beach in Cancun. She had done that once. It had been fun until she drank too much tequila and got sick.

  All day she had felt a small lift in her spirits, which she owed to the conversation with Terry Ledger. She even felt as though she had a few moments she could call her own. She walked back to the room that had been Mama’s bedroom when they lived in the apartment—now it served as an office of sorts—and dug her
secret project out of the closet.

  In a cardboard file box she had accumulated hundreds, maybe thousands, of recipes, some of which would end up in the cookbook she would publish someday. “Recipes That Work,” she called it. These days, she believed, folks knew so little about basic cooking, they couldn’t look at a recipe and tell if it resulted in something fit to eat. Her cookbook would solve that problem, would address hundreds of questions typical of wanna-be cooks. And God willing, it would make her a pile of money.

  She sat down at the computer, logged onto her cookbook program and started with the bread pudding recipe she had recently made and burned.

  Chapter 14

  Instead of waking up Tuesday morning with his pitch to Larson’s site development team on his mind, Terry awoke thinking of Marisa and the possibility of bringing her into his camp. If someone asked him why, the explanation would be so complex and confusing he wouldn’t attempt to make it. He wasn’t sure he understood the reason himself. He only knew he felt a need to take her into his confidence and share his vision with her. Would doing that give her a stake in the project and win her over to his side? The question diminished in his thoughts as he drove toward the Midland airport to pick up Larson’s people, but the idea didn’t totally go away.

  The closer he got to Midland, the more excited he became to meet with Larson’s team. The travel center was the linchpin of his project. He wasn’t comfortable moving ahead with the rest of his plans without a firm commitment from Larson’s. Bottom line, he needed the money from the sale of the land.

  The site inspection by the Oklahoma company’s two representatives took less time than the trip to the airport. They listened to Terry’s presentation and looked over his exhibits, but made little comment. They didn’t even ask to be taken to Agua Dulce to see the site for themselves. They filled their briefcases with the documents and maps he supplied and he drove them back to their company plane. They told him they would be in touch and flew off to Oklahoma City uncommitted. Not a brushoff, but not a rip-roaring display of keen interest, either. Even as good as he was at zeroing in on the crux of most issues, this time, he hadn’t a clue about the Larson team’s true opinions.