Double Up

by Gretchen Archer

  She couldn’t possibly believe the words coming out of her own mouth.

  “Say. Where’s that little girl’s room?” Her black and white head whipped around.

  I pointed, fell back on the sofa, and buried my face in my hands.

  It was barely a whisper from the doorway. “I’d be much obliged if you could help me out, Davis. If I had anywhere else in the world to go, I’d be there. If you could just put me up for a day or two. Maybe a week.”

  Eight

  We decorated the nursery gender neutral, with beige walls and rugs. Everything static was either mint green toile or mint green solid. The baby beds were ivory-colored Royalty cribs, and between them, on a round cream rug, were two Mayfair slipcovered gliders. After the girls were born, I added pops of pink, and the entire room was enchanting. July, who looked like a Disney Princess anyway, fit right in.

  She was taller than me, which wasn’t hard to do, by at least five inches. She had blonde corkscrew curls that sprang from her head in every direction and spiraled halfway down her back; there was no telling how much hair she actually had if the curls were stretched all the way out, and no product on the market boasting elasticity could contain it. She tried her best to keep it pulled back, but every two seconds another curl popped out. (Boing.) I’d never seen her with her hair completely down, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. She had big doe eyes a color somewhere between gold, green, and gray and a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She wasn’t Baylor’s type at all, this All-American Girl. She turned out to be exactly what he didn’t know he wanted, and the changes in him since he met her were drastic, welcome, and frightening. It wasn’t a stretch at all to think he’d leave his job because she was losing hers.

  I closed the nursery door behind me and fell against it, then slid down to the carpeted floor. Bexy, Quinny, and July looked up from a stack of match-and-build soft blocks and stared at me curiously.

  “They.” I bounced an accusing finger between my own offspring. “Said her.” I pointed an accusing finger outside of the nursery. “Name.”

  “That big woman’s?” July asked.

  I nodded.

  “No no,” she said. “They were just imitating the sound.”

  She was right. I read it in one of my many childhood development books. A ray of hope.

  “Watch this.” July got the girls’ attention and said, “Baa baa.”

  The girls said “baa” back to her.

  My heart leapt.

  July said, “Paa paa.”

  They did it again.

  Then she said, “Bee bee.”

  “NO NO!”

  I shut that right down and my daughters thought it was the funniest thing ever. Which went a long way in pulling me back from the ledge. I took a deep breath, realizing this wasn’t the end of the world and Bea wouldn’t be here forever. Polio had been eradicated and Blockbusters was gone. Bea would be out of here too, then I could wipe this morning from my memory banks like it’d never happened.

  “Who is she?” July asked.

  “My ex-ex-mother-in-law.”

  “I didn’t know you were married before.”

  I got that a lot. “I grew up in a town of four hundred, July. Things happen in small towns. Did you see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Well,” I said, “it was a small town.”

  She nodded, her eyes wide and unblinking.

  “I have to tell you something, July.”

  “Sure sure.”

  She passed me a little warm roly-poly named Bexley who was reaching for me. I automatically popped the trip wires on half of my nursing bra, which caught the attention of my other roly-poly named Quinn.

  “There are more of them than there are of you,” July said.

  “I’m glad you brought that up.”

  “What?”

  I’d planned on easing into the subject, but Bea showing up had thrown me off. “July, you’re losing your job Friday.”

  Her immediate response was, “My Queen of Hearts was cancelled.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “My Valentine’s Day poker tournament,” she explained. “Only three players registered for it.”

  Right.

  “So I’m not surprised I’m getting laid off. Does Baylor know?”

  “He might,” I said. “I’m not sure. Here’s the thing, July. I want to hire you. I’d like you to work for me as the girls’ nanny.”

  She clapped her hands over her mouth and I swear, her hair grew.

  A rap on the door startled us. I must have jerked, because I got bit, which was part of the program. I dreaded that first tooth, and there was no doubt in my mind that Bex would wake up any day now with a full set.

  “Yoo-hoo!”

  We knew who.

  “You in there, Davis? You got my Mountain Dew?”

  “Come on in, Bea.” The words tasted like, “Come on in, Voldemort.”

  “Would you look at this?” Bea stepped to the middle of the room and began turning a slow circle. “This is like a doll house. You are rich rich rich, Davis. You must be richer than ten feet up a bull’s butt.” Her sightseeing led her to July. “Who are you?”

  “July.”

  “What?” Bea stopped short from what would have surely been the rudest words out of her mouth yet, because she spotted me, sitting with my back against the wall with baby girls attached. She clapped a hand over her eyes and stumbled back in horror. “What the fudge are you doing?”

  “I’m nursing the babies, Bea. What do you think I’m doing?”

  “What are you?” she asked. “A Grape Nuts hippie? You think you’re in the Africa? Do they not sell baby formulas here?” She spread her fingers enough to let a little daylight in, and her head whipped around as she located the nearest exit. “I’m going to fix me a Mountain Dew. I’ll see you when you put your clothes back on.” She batted her way out, still gawking at me through her fingers like I had twelve eyeballs. “Disgusting.” She made a quick exit. “Making me lose my appetite.” From the hall, she yelled, “You can bet your bottom dollar I won’t be feeding them that way.” From far away, we heard, “God made bottles for a reason, Davis!”

  “Wow,” July said. “Wow.”

  “Yep.”

  Bex nodded off. July gently took her from me and put my little princess to bed, as if she’d been with me, helping me, loving my girls, since the day they were born. Quinny fell asleep right behind her sister; I tucked her in. July and I, both knowing exactly what was waiting for us outside the nursery with a Mountain Dew, opted for the Mayfair gliders.

  “Were you serious about the nanny job?” she whispered.

  “Very.”

  “I’d love it,” July said. “I promise to take care of the girls every single minute like they were my own.”

  I pressed my lips together, which sometimes kept my misty mommy emotions in check, and nodded.

  “I’d tell my boss,” she whispered, “but I don’t have one anymore.”

  I found a nanny.

  Bradley would be so pleased. Baylor would stay. Now, what to do with Bea.

  Reading my mind, July said, “You could put your ex-mother-in-law on the twenty-fifth floor.”

  “The twenty-fifth floor?”

  “For now,” she said.

  “For now?”

  “In one of the condos.”

  “Condos?” I was a parrot. “We have condos?”

  The ground floor of the Bellissimo was mostly casino, but also had restaurants, retail, and back in the day, wall-to-wall guests. The second floor housed offices, including Bradley’s, plus the spa, more retail, and the convention facilities. Floors three through twenty-four were hotel guest rooms, floors twenty-five through twenty-eight guest suites
. The twenty-ninth floor was split between our home and the celebrity suite next door, which hadn’t seen much action lately—and by hadn’t seen much action, I meant there hadn’t been a celebrity next door in months. Above us, the empty penthouse, the tiptop, was the owner’s suite. So in this building, which I felt like I knew, or certainly used to know every square inch of, the condo news was a shock.

  What else had happened I didn’t know about?

  “We have condos,” July said. “The twenty-fifth floor is all condos. The suites were remodeled and turned into private residences.”

  A brilliant concept. “Whose idea was it?”

  “Mr. Cole’s.”

  Bradley. In addition to everything else, the man was a genius. No one in gaming had private residences. Not even Vegas. “When?” I asked. “When did this happen?”

  Her blonde halo tipped back and she looked up to the pink silk streamers billowing out from the ceiling to the walls in a circus-tent pattern. “Right before I met Baylor?”

  Which was Halloween, October, a month I had missed, my third consecutive month of sleep deprivation. It was exactly when the Sanderses moved and my Super Secret Spy team fell apart. No wonder I’d missed the condos. It could be that Bradley had tried to tell me. There were so many times, especially in the beginning, he’d opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind.

  “What?” I’d ask, bracing myself for fear he was about to tell me something I didn’t want to know, or start another round of the we-need-a-nanny negotiations, or to tell me again the casino going belly up wasn’t my fault when we both knew it was. I loved that he loved me enough to try to take away the burden, but in our hearts, we knew the truth. If I’d been doing my job, we wouldn’t be where we were, contemplating the great unknown. So when he didn’t say whatever it was he started to say, we were both relieved. I knew I was. Sitting here with July and swallowing the condo news, I realized I hadn’t missed him coming home with armloads of rolled blueprints and taking build-out, over-budget, and fixed-loan calls in his office next door to my life sofa, never dreaming the floorplans and financing conversations were about private residences. “We remodeled hotel suites into condominiums.” I almost couldn’t believe it. “Then what?” I asked July. “Sold them?”

  “Yes to the first and no to the second.”

  She snapped a scrunchie from her wrist and, in a very practiced way, rounded up the curls that had escaped since the last time she’d made the same moves, not ten minutes ago. I wondered how many scrunchies she pulled from her head at the end of the day. If she could even find them all.

  “The suites were remodeled.” Her hands fell to her lap. “Walls were knocked down, kitchens and living areas were installed, and terraces with private pools were built. They’re really pretty. But no, we didn’t sell them. At the last minute, our real estate lady left and took the buyers with her.”

  Bradley had to have been devastated. I know I was.

  I didn’t bother to ask where everyone had gone.

  I did ask if the condos were empty.

  “One isn’t. But the other nine are.”

  I thought about how much my husband must have wanted to share this with me, and I hadn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t let him.

  “So we sold one?” I asked.

  She shook her head no. “Baylor moved into one.”

  I guessed so. Baylor was doing four people’s jobs, and that meant he had to stay close. Or it could be he didn’t want to take July to that den of iniquity he called an apartment, and he moved into a condo here to keep from having to explain his bed. (That nut paid the price of a small car to have a custom bed built that sleeps six.) Given the two possibilities, I leaned in the direction of Baylor living here because as the representative of all the security, he couldn’t leave.

  Or maybe it was the bed.

  I didn’t know.

  At the moment, I only knew two things: I’d hired a nanny and Bea Crawford’s junk was on its way out of my foyer. I’d move her into a condo. For a week.

  “You need your sleep, Bea.”

  “You’re telling me your kids cry all night long?”

  “All night.”

  “And you don’t have any ear plugs?”

  “No ear plugs.”

  “Well, I don’t feel like going to the store for ear plugs. I’m worn out.”

  The one bellman I could scare up was forty minutes into transferring Bea’s Hawaiian muumuu dresses from my foyer to a condo four floors down.

  “I don’t trust motels, Davis. Somebody might try and steal my kidneys. Leave me in a tub of ice.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that, Bea.” Because your kidneys are a treasure hunt no respecting organ thief would go on. “The head of security is on the same floor you’ll be on.”

  “Your black girl? Are you back with her?”

  I inhaled sharply.

  “I know your friend is black, Davis. You don’t have to beat around any bushes. Does she know Obama?”

  “Bea.” It was a warning.

  She waved.

  “I gotcha. No bad-mouthing coloreds or homos. I know you’re picky about that, and I’m your company and all.”

  It was the one subject I simply couldn’t discuss. Not backwoods Alabama redneck prejudice and racism, but Fantasy. The last time Fantasy and I were in the same room was the day she walked out. She knocked on my door holding her cardboard box of personal effects. It was the ugliest day of all the ugly days. The shock and hurt hadn’t started to wear off when, a few days later, it took Bradley ten full minutes to ask me if I’d talked to her.

  “Not really.” We’d texted. (Me: Are you okay? Her: I’m okay. Are you okay? Me: I’m okay. When are you coming back? Her: I’m not.) Which said to me she’d found another job. Already. “Why? Has something happened?”

  We were in the study, hiding from House.

  “Happened?” I waited for him to say he’d gotten a call from the Biloxi Police Department, asking for a reference on her, or that she’d gone back to work at Harrison County Detention, which was where Fantasy and I met years ago. But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything for the longest time, and when he did, it was along the lines of if I didn’t bridge the gap with Fantasy, eventually we’d both decide there wasn’t really anything there, that we were just work buddies, and when the work ended, so did the friendship. No, I told him, she knew better. What I didn’t say was she also knew I was the reason we weren’t together. If it weren’t for me, Reggie wouldn’t have been offered the Blitz job she and No Hair got sideways about, and we’d have never missed a beat. Losing Fantasy’s constant companionship had been like losing my phone, right arm, keys, the remote, running water, the internet, and my mind all at once. And I cared very little about explaining it to my ex-ex-mother-in-law.

  “So, when’s the last time you saw your black friend?”

  “Bea.” I slapped my knees. “I don’t want to talk about Fantasy if that’s okay with you.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I looked at my watch.

  What could be taking the bellman so long?

  “Say. This new casino?”

  Another subject I didn’t care to discuss.

  “Have you ever seen anything like it in your life?”

  I had not. No one had. Blitz was forty stories of glass. The hotel and casino were in a circular building constructed entirely of gold glass. At the top of the building was a glass-and-gold Moravian star lit from inside by millions upon millions upon millions of miniature gold lights.

  The star weighed fourteen tons. Fourteen. Tons.

  There was no missing it at night; it lit up the Gulf.

  There was no missing it during the day; the sun shined unmercifully on Blitz.

  The fog was the worst; Blitz turned my world gold.

  The rain was the best; the more rain th
e better.

  “They got the most beautiful gold buses in the world,” Bea said. “Greyhound could take some lessons. Have you been in one?”

  “A Greyhound? Never.”

  “Well, don’t,” she said. “They stink to high heavens.”

  “Good to know,” I said.

  She’d polished off two liters of Mountain Dew.

  “I’m talking about those gold casino buses. Have you been in one of those?”

  Why would I be in a Blitz bus? “No, Bea. Have you?”

  “I tried to ride one down here,” she said. “But I got kicked off before it even got going, because you’re only allowed one bag and it has to fit under your feets. Have you seen my feets? Nothing fits under these feets. And besides, I need my car to take my granddaughters to the play park or the CiCi’s Pizza.”

  As if.

  “Come over here and look at this bus I’m talking about, Davis.”

  “I’ve seen them.”

  Short of having carpenters come in and cover the ceiling-to-floor sheet of hurricane glass that was the exterior wall of my living room, the same sheet of glass Bea was fogging up right now, I’d have to poke my own eyes out to not see the luxury coaches pulling in and out of Blitz. I knew exactly what she was talking about. What I didn’t know was how she knew so much about them. I also knew she’d keep talking, so I didn’t ask. Not that I wanted to know anything more about Blitz’s buses.

  “They run them buses up and down the freeway picking up people and bringing them here.”

  (See? She can’t shut up.)

  “Junkets,” I said.