Orchids and Stone

by Lisa Preston

  “All this stuff came from my house,” Thea said. “I was home, working. Got your message and started grabbing stuff out of the fridge and my cupboards while it was playing. And I had to listen to the message twice. Thought about bringing wine but I know it’s verboten at that facility—”

  “Facility!”

  “I stopped at a couple of ATMs to get enough cash. If you’d stuck with journalism and me, if you’d graduated and got on at my paper and suffered through doing the crime beat like I did, well then you’d know they don’t take VISA at the jail.”

  Daphne nodded as they walked around the house, through the side gate and into the backyard together. “I’ll pay you back,” Daphne said as she crawled through the dog door.

  Grazie stood, wagging and chortling. Enchanted, Daphne stayed on her knees and hugged the warm, golden fur while reaching with the other hand to let Thea inside.

  “Hi, good girl.” Thea pulled a soda can from her bag and popped it open. “You want a beef broth drinkie?”

  In the kitchen, Thea poured the can of special canine soda into Grazie’s bowl.

  Daphne winced as she leaned in the doorway and watched the dog sample the offering. “That’s your surprise?”

  “The last treat,” Thea confirmed.

  “I hope people in Afghanistan and Somalia and wherever else don’t know that you’re buying flavored drinks for my dog.”

  “Why?” Thea thrust a hip sideways with attitude.

  It needed an explanation? Daphne thought of jail and desperate people. She shook her head, realizing she’d been about to go down the road of offending a friend who’d done nothing wrong. How unreasonable was it for her to pick apart what Thea gave a beloved dog? Look at the choices she’d made today, the accident she’d caused. She’d butted into something she didn’t understand and she’d gotten grabbed, chased.

  “They have my ID, Thee. They have my mother’s address.”

  “They could be just a misunderstanding. The whole thing. Other people have other things going on in their lives. And to us, in a glimpse, it looks bad or wrong, but if we knew the whole deal, we might know that there was no actual problem. And it’s someone else’s business. What you’ve done today, if you’ll just stop and think—”

  Daphne raised her palms. “She called her lady and then when she saw me, she called her Mother.”

  “You are making no sense at all.”

  Swallowing, Daphne tried again. “Two women. One is the older lady, Minerva Watts. She’s the one I saw first in the Peace Park Wednesday afternoon—”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Right. And the other one …” Daphne thought about her encounters with the police and her inadequacy at description. She could do better. “The other one was wearing a big black coat yesterday, jeans and a fleece sweater today, and she’s younger. She’s our age, maybe a few years older. That one called Minerva Watts lady but then, two seconds later, when she saw me looking at them, she called Minerva Mother.”

  “So maybe she just speaks that way, the other woman. Lady, mother, whatever. Haven’t you ever done that?”

  Daphne folded her arms across her chest. “I have never addressed my mother that way. Lady.”

  “I have never gotten arrested. I can’t believe you did.”

  “Me neither, but believe it.”

  “Why didn’t he cite and release you?”

  Daphne rubbed her face, worn to the marrow. “I don’t even know what you’re saying, Thee.”

  “It’s Thea. Thhhee-uh. And I’m saying the cop could have given you a criminal ticket. You have to screw up pretty bad to get physically arrested for reckless driving. You have to be racing in the streets or having sex while driving or hurt somebody, plus basically be an uncooperative crazy person.”

  “The last two.” Daphne’s grimace and shudder came with a flood of memories, the blond woman with the cut face, the young man and his bloody knuckles. The wreck could have been so much worse. “I’ve wrecked everything, haven’t I?”

  She pulled the paperwork from her pockets and threw it on the counter, then noticed the answering machine blinking in a consistent pattern of four blasts. Four messages.

  Thea flipped through Daphne’s paperwork, reading aloud. “Operating a motor vehicle with willful or wanton disregard of persons or property. A gross misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail and a fine of five thousand dollars.” She looked up. “Wrecked things? That’s a—”

  “That’s a yes,” Daphne finished. Motion out the window caught her eye. Her truck was pulling in. “Vic!”

  Jed and Vic stepped out of her Toyota pickup in the driveway. Vic turned to eye Thea’s car as he came to the door. Daphne rushed from the kitchen, ignoring Thea on her heels and Grazie struggling to stay with both women. She threw the door open just as Vic’s hand reached for the knob, wrenching it from his grasp. His glance wavered to Thea and back again.

  “Hello, you’re here. You missed Josie’s game,” he said. He sounded worn and disappointed. Jed adjusted his glasses and slouched past them toward the living room.

  Daphne rolled her eyes, indicating the hallway where Jed had gone, mindful of hearing the TV turn on in the living room. She spoke through clenched teeth. “I got arrested. Why didn’t you come bail me out?”

  “I’m staying,” Thea announced with gusto. “This is going to be good.”

  While Thea tried to interest Grazie in the remaining special canine soda, Daphne gave Vic the short version of her afternoon. He rubbed his jaw and pursed his lips.

  “My,” he said, reaching for Daphne while shooting quick looks in Thea’s and Jed’s directions. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, kissed her hair, pulled a bit of leaf from a tangle, and said, “Do you perhaps want to get a shower and some clean clothes?”

  Daphne nodded and twisted out of his embrace. Upstairs she startled at her reflection. Hair loose, a scrap of dried rhododendron bloom stuck on her scalp. Again the image of her sister entered her mind, even as she was able to deny that she looked like Suzanne. Suzanne was never dirty, just wild.

  Daphne shed her clothes and stepped into the shower, soaping up and shaving to pare the sensation of grime from her body. She thought of being younger, at home, watching Suzanne shave her legs at the old house on Mapleview Drive.

  “Mom,” she said aloud, shutting off the water. Her mother might not be safe at home. Speed drying herself, she hurried back to the bedroom with the towel around her naked body.

  Oh, no. Jed’s here.

  She was always uncomfortable being scantily clad when Vic’s kids were in the house. She booted the bedroom door ’til it latched and phoned her mother.

  Rising panic burbled in her chest as the telephone rang. The hum of adult voices downstairs, indecipherable through the closed bedroom door, made a background murmur of white noise she wanted to click off. In her ear, the ringing droned.

  “Thursday night bridge.” The answer came as she thought about the time and day and she nodded at her spoken thought. Her mother played with another widow and a sweet older couple once a week.

  Her mother’s answering machine came on.

  Imagining that guy, Guff, would go to the Mapleview house was paranoid, worst-case-thinking, wasn’t it?

  Not trusting her voice and warning herself not to blurt about the mess she’d made of the day, Daphne mumbled a hello and was telling her mom’s machine she’d call later when a voice picked up.

  “Daphne? Is that you?” The croak of a dedicated smoker always sounded pleading.

  “Yeah, it’s me, Mom.”

  “Oh, Daphne, I’m late. Out the door this minute. I called you earlier. And yesterday, you know. I’m going to bridge now, but when I heard your voice on the machine, I came right back.”

  Daphne closed her eyes. Vic, too, couldn’t ignore the phone when his kids weren’t with him, thought no parent could. What if it’s them calling? What if they need me?

  “Well, when are you coming over?” her mother ras
ped. The request would soon turn into a wounded whine.

  Frances Mayfield sounded like such a happy name, Daphne thought. She’d thought so as a child, back when she discovered her parents had first names, back when she was happy and believed everyone got along like her, a mid-pack girl, neither popular nor scorned.

  Her mother baked cookies and had dinner on the table at six o’clock and cleaned the house and got frustrated with Suzanne, and that’s how it was. There was no yelling, no swearing, and dad came home every night to hug his girls. They all kissed each other good night, every night, and they all said and meant good morning.

  The kitchen stove and fridge were harvest gold. The telephone was the old-fashioned kind with a long, curly cord. Suzanne would have long phone conversations, swinging the cord for young Daphne—coming in for a glass of milk—to jump like a skip rope.

  “I don’t know, Mom.”

  Her mother’s voice became begging. “But you’re coming to see me, aren’t you?”

  As though they didn’t live in the same city, less than ten miles apart. Daphne pressed the telephone’s earpiece to her forehead and offered, “Maybe next week?”

  “Well, you know what weekend this is. And Blanche says, she said to me—”

  “Vic has the kids this weekend. Saturday and Sunday.”

  “Bring the kids.”

  “And you know he takes them to visit his dad on his Saturdays.”

  “I know. So come after you see him. Then after you all get here, we can all go lay flowers and then I’ll make dinner for everyone. The kids can watch TV or play in the yard. What do they like to do?”

  “Aw, Mom.” Daphne closed her eyes. Above all, Jed and Josie wouldn’t want to go to graves of people they’d never known.

  “They’ll be my grandchildren if you two ever get married instead of just playing house, you know. Are you ever going to get married?”

  Choosing which question to answer made all the difference.

  “They like to text their friends,” Daphne said, knowing her mother wanted a different answer, knowing the woman wanted what she could not have—a family. The idea of her mother living as a family of one—a twosome only when Daphne came for a visit—wrenched her. But there are things I want that I don’t get to have either, she thought, even as shame washed over her at the childishness of her reaction.

  “I don’t understand that whole texting business,” her mother said and launched into a minor rant about kids these days and their cell phones.

  Stifling a snort, Daphne thought about how Vic couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for smartphones for the kids or even for himself. She heard her mother’s screen door creak and knew her mother was stepping outside onto the old porch. She knew why, too.

  “There’s stuff I don’t understand, too,” Daphne said, thinking that they would never talk about those big issues. They never had. She cleared her throat. “Like, why do you still smoke outside?”

  “Don’t get after me, Daphne girl. I do not need my daughter telling me whether or not I can smoke.”

  “I’m not telling you not to smoke. I’m asking why you still do it outside.”

  The screen door banged shut in the background and Daphne heard the flint scrape of her mom’s cigarette lighter, knew why there was a pause before her mother spoke. The first big drag of poison from a Virginia Slim and the exhaling puff changed her mother’s tone to something more hollow. Her mother’s cat yowled.

  “Nobody knows why anybody does anything, my girl. Don’t you know that by now?”

  Daphne sucked in a breath of her own, too many unutterable responses competing in her mind. She kept it all in and her mother filled the silence with a demand. “Come by tomorrow. I have a surprise. It’s about this weekend.”

  “I have to work,” Daphne lied, telling herself she was a lousy daughter.

  “Off to be a carpenter again?”

  Daphne kept her voice dull, expressionless. “I’m a roofer, Mom.”

  “He wouldn’t have wanted you up on rooftops.”

  Daphne said nothing, concentrating on getting dressed one-handed while she held the phone to her ear.

  “It’s dangerous,” her mother went on. “It’s not for a girl either. When you started, I thought, well, our Savior was a carpenter, so maybe my girl is praying for—”

  “Mom, I need to get off the phone. Thea’s here visiting and Vic’s got dinner going.” The lies were close to true. After her mom had gone out for the evening, after she’d had a chance to think about that man having her ID, her old address, she could decide then whether to badger her mom into leaving the house for a few nights.

  Frances said, “Well, I’ve got bridge so I’ll let you go.” And Daphne suppressed the urge to correct her, to point out the truth, that they would never let each other go.

  CHAPTER 11

  Leaving the bedroom with wet hair and fresh clothes, Daphne heard voices bickering in the kitchen below and sank to the floor in defeat. Vic and Thea were at it again. The hum of voices rose and fell. Daphne leaned against the doorjamb.

  Thea’s tone never diminished. “When her dad died—”

  “Killed himself.”

  “Yes, I know. We all know what he did. This is America. Guns in vending machines, free when you buy a Happy Meal. Kids see a million acts of violence and death every morning with their cereal—”

  “Oh, stop it.” Vic’s disgust brooked no lectures. “He didn’t use a gun. I meant that he didn’t just die, it was worse, but don’t try to make it worse still. Stop it.”

  “You started it.”

  “I didn’t start anything. I just pointed out that you didn’t acknowledge how it was worse for the family because he … offed himself.”

  Daphne drew her knees to her chest and wrapped one arm around her shins, extending the other hand to pet Grazie without thinking. But the comforting touch of the dog’s warm coat was absent. Grazie lay downstairs in the midst of Vic and Thea. She opened and closed her empty hand, pushed her body up the wall and swung the door open, telling herself to go downstairs.

  The background noise of Jed watching TV became an added annoyance as he turned it up louder.

  “Because it’s such a lovely way you put it,” Thea said.

  “Offed himself?” Vic’s voice rose to Thea’s challenge now.

  “Yes.”

  “Well …”

  “I’m just saying her father’s death still affects her,” Thea told Vic.

  “Her sister’s death more.” Vic’s response was immediate, on top of Thea’s.

  “You think?” Thea’s rebuttal showed cynicism. “But she was just a kid when that happened. Suzanne was twenty years ago.”

  “It was exactly twenty years ago the end of this year. December. Her dad was ten years ago this Saturday.”

  “Ever wonder why he did it when he did?” Thea asked, her tone different, making the inquiry of a journalist, an outsider. Someone who did not understand but wanted to, for all the wrong reasons.

  Private pain wasn’t to be explained to satisfy onlookers’ curiosity, Daphne decided. Her mother had learned this, too, and whittled her exposure to friends down to a once-a-week bridge group. Not every prying question from a well-meaning friend or a stranger deserved an answer. Daphne rubbed her forehead. Frances Mayfield realized this truth and built walls after Suzanne’s death, then again after her husband’s.

  “There aren’t … answers for everything.” Daphne’s whispered words left her considering, wondering where they came from and if they were true. How had her mother known? How had she accepted unfinished facts?

  Downstairs, Vic’s voice became more modulated than usual. “It was the day before Suzanne’s birthday.”

  The day before.

  I think I even know why he did it.

  Vic’s comment yesterday hadn’t seemed anything but plaintive, an attempt to say he understood what was not understandable. People did that, claimed to understand when there was no way they could begin to fathom. Daphne
decided now she should have challenged him, not let him get away with thinking he understood.

  “So,” Thea went on to Vic as though this were an average conversation, “do you think that’s what has her so worked up?”

  So worked up? God, Thea painted an image of Daphne in a complete tizzy.

  “Yes,” Vic said. The whoosh of the gas stove shutting off and the flame extinguishing fit with Vic sighing his agreement, making him sound surrendering and sympathetic.

  “What actually happened at her sister’s funeral? Some guy wasn’t supposed to be there, right? He got thrown out? What did he do?”

  “I guess he was … out of sync.”

  “The boyfriend?” Thea’s persistence in Daphne’s absence raised goose bumps on Daphne’s arms. And although she strained to hear a response from Vic, there was none. Perhaps he nodded, because Thea continued with, “Out of sync how?”

  “Um, he acted suspiciously or out of turn or something. Got escorted out. Bad scene.”

  Unbidden memories of Ross Bouchard walking the church aisle—guitar clutched to his belly while he nodded at the cross and coffin—flashed in Daphne’s mind. Gasps from her parents and other congregants created a chorus as her sister’s boyfriend sang in a broken voice about Suzanne and knowing she was half-crazy.

  “I know she thinks about it,” Vic said. “I know he didn’t pass his polygraph. After he came to her funeral and …”

  “And … ?”

  “And you should—”

  “Don’t tell me what I should,” Thea told him.

  Vic snapped. “Why don’t you tell me what you know about what happened to Daph today?”

  Thea snorted back. “Why don’t you talk to Daph your own self?”

  “I can hear you up here,” Daphne hollered, much louder than she intended. Her voice pealed off the walls. She heaved herself up and stomped down the stairs, grabbing the end post to stagger for balance at the bottom. Vic and Thea leaned out of the kitchen, Vic shifting from foot to foot, Thea’s fingers striking the doorjamb in a repeating drumbeat.

  At the left of the landing, Jed stood openmouthed, looking from Daphne to his father.

  “Sorry I was upstairs so long, everybody,” Daphne said. “I had to call my mom.”