“Who?”
“Casino junkets.” (Where was the bellman? How long could it possibly take to move Hawaiian muumuu dresses and a crossbow?) “It’s called a junket when the casino picks up groups of people and brings them to the casino to gamble.”
“Well, their junk gambles on the go.”
I learned the English language not even a mile from where she learned it. “What, Bea?”
“Those buses have slot machine games. Every seat has a game on the back of the seat in front of it.”
No, they did not.
“You know Curly Scruggs?” she asked.
I knew Curly Scruggs. He lived between Pine Apple and the next city over, Camden.
“He catches that bus in Greenville at Bates Turkey and rides it all the way down here and all the way back, then back down here, then back home. He might get out of that thing once in two days. Plays some game he calls Smiling for the Cameras the whole time.”
No, he didn’t.
“When he wins, the bus takes his picture.”
Live gaming on a junket bus? No way.
“He says he won two thousand dollars right outside of Evergreen,” she said. “’Course, no one believes a word of it.”
If Curly Scruggs won two thousand dollars right outside of Evergreen, Alabama, which was indeed between here and there, it meant Blitz did have live gaming on their buses, which violated about a hundred statues, from interstate commerce and crossing state lines for immoral purposes to bi-state gaming regulations and and and…I knew for a fact it was against the law. Bea had no idea what she was talking about, and I didn’t believe a word of it either.
“He’s got one of those skin ulcers on his back. Nasty thing’s the size of a frying pan.”
There’s no such thing as a transit gaming license. And, gross.
“Last time I saw him I told him sitting on that bus all day every day wasn’t helping his ulcer. He says he leans up in the seat.”
They couldn’t possibly be conducting gaming transactions on a moving bus.
“He’s got those webbed duck toes too. Just goes to show, don’t marry your cousin.”
What if they were gambling with vouchers? The passengers played with vouchers instead of cash, and Blitz, in turn, issued vouchers for wins. The vouchers would then be redeemed at the physical casino, which might work around the law, because no cash changed hands outside of their gaming jurisdiction.
A. It was brilliant.
B. It was the first thing—other than the water park, botanical gardens, Little League, fountains in the casino, carriage rides, recording studio, separate pet hotel, and sunshine concierges who told sunbathers when it was time to roll over—they hadn’t stolen straight from us.
“He’s had that ulcer on his back forever and a day. Sucker just won’t heal.”
My phone was in front of me. I reached for it while Bea talked to the window. I tapped out a message to my sweet father in Pine Apple. Does Melvin Crawford have a girlfriend?
Daddy: It’s good to hear from you, Sweet Pea, and please don’t tell me you have Bea.
Me: Okay, I won’t tell you.
Daddy: No, Melvin doesn’t have a girlfriend. But he has a boyfriend. Jed, of Jed’s Meat and Three.
My phone clattered to the floor.
“I tell him every time I run into him to put a shirt on it,” Bea said to the window. “I say, ‘Curly, get some dadgum clothes on. No one wants to look at your nasty ulcer.’”
Me: Daddy, she doesn’t know.
Daddy: No one knew until this morning. Melvin “came out” as soon as Bea left.
“Old Curly says fresh air helps with his ulcer, and I tell him to cover himself up, because I don’t want to look at his red-ass man titties any more than I want to look at his disgusting ulcer.”
Daddy texted more. The story gets worse, if you can imagine. On her way out of town, Bea emptied the cash register and the safe at the diner, then went across the street to the bank and emptied their joint checking account. In one day, Melvin has had a change of lifestyle, is penniless, and I had to arrest him. He’s in a cell right now.
That would be the cell. There was only one jail cell in Pine Apple.
Me: Why are you holding him? Daddy, you can’t arrest him for being gay.
Daddy: I know that, honey, and if she’s all the way in Biloxi, I’ll release him. I only locked him up to keep them from killing each other. She took off with their retirement, and he went through their trailer unloading buckshot into everything she owned.
Me: He couldn’t have. She brought everything she owns here.
“Lookie there.” Bea tapped the window. “They got a Ferris wheel.”
Daddy: I don’t want to involve you in this at all, honey, I know you have your hands full, but I need a little warning when she heads back this way. I’m afraid things might get out of hand.
Nothing happened in Pine Apple, ever, and with my father representing all law and all order, I certainly didn’t want anything to happen. Standing in front of me was the worst thing that could happen. The hottest head. The shortest temper. And Wilcox County’s all-time skeet-shooting champion. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that when Bea got the news about Melvin and his boyfriend, there would be bloodshed, and the last thing I wanted was my father in the crosshairs.
Me: Daddy. If the whole town knows, it’s just a matter of time before she knows.
Daddy: Who do we know brave enough to tell her this?
He was right. Bea would certainly kill the messenger before she took out Jed and Melvin. And that was if Melvin didn’t kill her first for running off with the money. And my daddy in the middle of it all.
“Would you look at that?” Bea asked the window. “They got a putt-putt.”
Daddy: Just give me plenty of warning when you put her on the road.
Me: It might not be a bad idea to pick up Pine Apple and move it. To Wyoming. Or Antarctica. Or maybe you should try to coax Melvin and Jed out of town.
Daddy: That’s a very good idea, Sweet Pea. I’ll get to work on it right away.
“It’s like the Six Flagger over there.”
Me: I love you. Tell Mother and everyone else I love them too, especially my cat.
Him: Kiss my granddaughters.
Me: Kiss my cat.
“Here comes another one of them buses. Curly says they have iced tea and roast beef sandwiches going south and coffee and donuts when they’re headed north.”
BREWING COFFEE! BREWING COFFEE! BREWING COFFEE!
“Well, how do you like that?” Bea’s head rolled. “No wonder you’ve locked yourself up in this place. I wouldn’t go anywhere either. More coffee!”
BREWING COFFEE! BREWING COFFEE! BREWING COFFEE!
Excuse me? Did I hear her right? Surely not. “What’s that supposed to mean, Bea?”
“What do you mean what’s that supposed to mean? Davis, everybody knows you got the baby blues. Don’t go anywhere, don’t talk to anyone, broke up with your colored friend, won’t bring your babies home because you don’t want anybody breathing on them. Everybody knows.”
One of her ludicrous, ill-informed, and downright mean accusations had a spec of truth. I hadn’t been home. I hadn’t been anywhere, much less Pine Apple. But that was only because it was easier for my family to come see us than it was for us to go see them, if for no other reason, the girls didn’t travel light. I needed a U-Haul to go out the front door. Which was one of the reasons I didn’t go out the front door.
“That’s partly why I’m here,” she said. “To help you.”
“Bea.” I cleared my throat. “I don’t have the ‘baby blues’ and I don’t need help, yours or anyone else’s.”
She puffy-eyed me. “Sometimes people who need help don’t even know they need it. You can tell yourself whatever you want to, Davis, f
ine by me, but you need my help. And I need yours. This here is what they call a winner winner chicken dinner.”
“No, Bea.” I couldn’t get my legs crossed the right way, my hands couldn’t find a place to rest, and my face felt hot. “Just because I don’t load up two babies and drive two hundred miles to Pine Apple, then march the girls up and down Banana Street with an ear-to-ear grin on my face doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with me.”
“Yeah?” She puffy-eyed me again. “When’s the last time you went somewhere? Anywhere? Across the street?”
I needed to start this day over and have it be a normal day, just like every other day since the girls were born, without all this intrusion and certainly without this ridiculous small-town gossip.
“There’s a whole world out there, Davis.” She’d turned to the window. “You’re missing it. And so are my granddaughters.” She turned back to me. “You might want to lock yourself up in here so you don’t have to deal with whatever it is you’re too chicken to deal with, but it’s not fair for you to lock them up too.”
My heart stopped.
Then started again, because she had no idea what she was talking about.
I refused to explain my life to Bea Crawford.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to, because she had the attention span of a gnat. She said, “Here comes another one of them buses.”
That was the third since she rang my doorbell.
“I wonder if old naked Curly’s on it.”
I wondered how much money Blitz was making on the junkets. I’d wondered, when I let myself, since the day I’d heard the word Blitz, how they were funding their elaborate venues and endless marketing campaigns. Bea Crawford just might be fogging up my window with the answer. Were they bringing in backdoor money on the junkets? How?
“Say, Davis, why isn’t there a public naked law in Pine Apple? I wonder how Curly’d like it if I walked up and down the street in my birthday suit.”
Could the Bellissimo turn the tables by taking a page from the Blitz playbook?
“Naked is for sleeping,” Bea said. “Not sidewalks.”
I may never sleep again.
Which woke up my brain. A thought popped into it. I should say an unfamiliar thought. A thought along the lines of thoughts I hadn’t had in a long time and didn’t think I’d ever have again. Before I realized what I was doing, I’d dialed Bradley’s office.
“Hey,” I tried to keep the volume down. Not that Bea was paying the least bit of attention to me. “It’s me.”
After a quiet beat, he said, “Is everything okay, Davis?”
I never called Bradley’s office. Our life was on this side of the door. Not that. If I were to make a habit of calling him during the day I’d eventually hear, “Let me call you right back, Davis. I’m busy signing the papers. Start packing.” So I didn’t call.
“Yes,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”
“The girls are good?”
“They’re great.”
“You’re okay?”
(Depends on who you ask, apparently.) “I’m great.”
“Why are you whispering?” he asked.
“House.”
“Right.”
Bea said, “Here comes another one of them buses. Bus bus bus.”
I held my breath for a second, but Bradley must not have heard her from across the room. I rushed out my next question before she spoke up again and I’d be forced to explain her presence to him before I had the chance to explain it to myself. “Does the Bellissimo still own the video game license?”
Dead air.
“You know,” I said, “the one the marketing Lynns brought back from Vegas before No Hair fired them?”
“How do you know about that, Davis?”
“I live here.”
More dead air.
“We do,” he said. “Why?”
“What about the airplanes? Have you sold the airplanes?”
“What, honey?”
“The airplanes,” I said. “Have you sold them?”
“The Gulfstreams, yes,” my husband said. “The Falcons, no. Why? Where are we going?”
Up, up, and away was where we were going.
If Blitz was making money running gaming junkets on the ground, we could make ten times that running gaming junkets in the air.
Baby blues. Pfffft.
Nine
We named the girls after their great-grandfathers, Bexley Cole and Quinton Way.
We knew our babies were identical, but that was all we chose to know before they were born, so the only thing we were sure of going into L&D was that we would leave with two of one or two of the other. If girls, we had every intention of naming the babies after their grandmothers, Caroline and Anne. If boys, their grandfathers, Samuel and William. Baby Girl Cole One was an hour old (she was PERFECT!) and Baby Girl Cole Two was forty minutes old (she was PRECIOUS!), and we couldn’t for the life of us decide which daughter to name Anne and which Caroline. Bradley suggested we take two minutes to consider our grandmother’s names, since neither daughter seemed to be a match for either of our mothers’ name. I don’t even remember how we stumbled onto our grandfather’s names for our daughters—at the time, I’d have agreed to leaving it at Baby Girl One and Baby Girl Two—just like I had no earthly idea what July’s parents were thinking when they named their daughter a month of the year. Before we gave up on cutesy matchy-matchy and went with family names, Bradley and I had our noses in thick books dedicated to naming doubles. What did July’s parents work from? A calendar? (“August or November? Or maybe we should name the baby Thursday.”)
Leave it to Bea Crawford to get to the bottom of things.
“Girl?” Bea asked. “Who named you?”
“Bea,” I warned.
We were stuffed in an elevator—me, Bea, July, and a packed-out double stroller—on our way to the condo unit on the twenty-fifth floor Bea Crawford would occupy until it was safe for me to send her home. She refused to go to “her new apartment” without an escort.
Me.
“Bea, it’s an elevator ride. Four floors down. You can do it.”
“Davis,” she said. “It’s an elevator ride. Four floors down. You can do it.”
“I’m not going, Bea.”
“You mean you’re not leaving your hidey hole.”
“I’m not hiding from anything or anyone, Bea.”
“Prove it.”
“I don’t have to.”
“Chicken! BWAK! BWAK! BWAK!”
Choreographed. All the way around my life sofa.
The worst part was Bex and Quinn loved it.
The more they laughed, the more Banana Nana Bea Bea chicken danced.
July, sweet, soft-spoken July, whispered, “I’ll go with you, Davis. I’ll be with you the whole time. We’ll be back here in ten minutes.”
With that, I understood the changes in Baylor. It was July. Her radar. Her quiet strength. Her support. Although I might have gone out for the first time in forever without July’s encouragement just so Bea would stop flapping her wings and trying to stomp through my floor.
It was the first time I’d been past my own front door in eight months, and the last time I’d ridden in a Bellissimo elevator, they’d had ventilation.
My knees were knocking.
It didn’t smell like home.
I had a death grip on the stroller so my babies wouldn’t get away from me.
The air was thinner. Like Swiss Alps thinner. And I was a little lightheaded from it.
“What’s your last name?” Bea asked July. “Leap Year? Full Moon?”
I said, “Bea, please.”
“It’s okay.” July turned to Bea; she didn’t have to go far. “My mother named me Julie, but she spelled it like the month. So everyone pronounces it li
ke the month.”
“That’s just nuts,” Bea said. “People need to name their kids easy names. Take mine. So easy. Bea. How hard is that? Bea.”
(“Beeeee!” and “Beebee!” from the cheering section in the stroller.)
“And then my one kid,” she went on. (And on. And on.) “Her ex-husband twice over.” Bea stuck her finger in my face. “You’ve heard of Prince Edward in a can?”
July shook her head.
“Well,” Bea said, “it sounded classy to me. Prince Edward. He goes by Eddie. Took him ’til fourth grade to spell it past the first D, but no one hears his name and says, ‘What? Who? Come again?’”
She was right about that. When people heard Eddie’s name they ran. Me, first and fastest.
July smiled. “It’s a nice name.”
“He’s in a boy’s band.”
I slapped the elevator wall.
“Who?” July asked. “What?”
“Eddie. My kid,” Bea said. “He’s in a boy’s band. You know, like Donny Osmonds? A boy’s band. He plays the tambourines.”
I should have stayed home.
“They’re popular,” Bea said. “They play all over. Bug Tussle last week. I think they’re in Smut Eye this week.”
July, wide-eyed, asked, “Are those real places?”
“Girl.” Bea punched July in the arm and she bounced off me. “Have you never heard of Alabama? God bless Dixie?”
“Wow.” July rubbed her arm. “Wow.”
“They have cold-drink koozies with their faces on them,” Bea said. “I’ll see if I can get you one.”
“Thanks?”
July had a petrified look on her suddenly pale face. If Bea Crawford didn’t shut up, my new nanny would quit me instead of me quitting her. Thank goodness the elevator doors finally opened on the twenty-fifth floor. I could get rid of Bea Crawford and go home. I was seriously close to a panic attack.
Bea thundered past the stroller. “Will you look at this?”
I looked. I almost stuck my head out of the elevator looking. I couldn’t believe I was at the Bellissimo. What used to be a small landing with potted palm trees was now a wide-open lobby with a fountain, plush banquettes, and an empty reception desk.
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