Dying to Call You

by Elaine Viets

  Next to the printer was a pill box.

  “Wonder what drugs they’re taking?” Margery opened the pill box. “My, my. Fred and Ethel figured out how to turn base metal into gold. These aren’t pills. They’re metal slivers. Ethel probably carried some in her purse and slipped them in her food. And what’s this?”

  She opened a small brown paper bag and pulled out a package.

  “Fake-blood capsules,” Helen said. “The kind kids use on Halloween. See, the package says, ‘Bite me for that vampire look.’”

  “‘Bite me,’” Margery said. “That’s how Ethel had blood running out of her mouth. She used fake Halloween blood.”

  “‘Not harmful to humans or animals,’” Helen read from the package. She slipped one blood capsule into her pocket, and put a pinch of metal slivers in an envelope.

  “Those cheap bastards. That’s really cruel, scamming little restaurants for cash,” Margery said.

  “And free dinners,” Helen said. “This routine could be pretty lucrative. Hit two restaurants a week, and they’d make eight hundred dollars in cash, tax free. They pick mom-and-pop places that are afraid of lawsuits. These little restaurants are happy to pay four hundred cash and avoid big legal bills.”

  “If we can catch those crooks in the act, they’re outta here,” Margery said. “And I know how to do it. Fred brags how often he takes Ethel out to dinner. ‘I don’t want my Ethel slaving over a hot stove,’ he says. ‘I’m retired, so she is, too.’

  “I’ll find out when they’re eating next at one of these little places. We’ll go there and catch them.”

  Helen felt a huge weight lift from her spirit. She was going to get back her tropical nights by the pool.

  Margery was nearly dancing with glee. “I can’t wait to throw out Fred and Ethel. By the way, why did you think there was something wrong in the first place?”

  “I don’t trust a woman who doesn’t like bread pudding,” Helen said.

  Chapter 19

  Mother Nature made a mistake. Helen should have had Margery for a mother.

  Helen admired her landlady’s courage, her candor and the way she held her liquor. She liked Margery’s purple shorts and sexy shoes. She was touched when Margery defended and protected her.

  But Helen already had a mother, and though she tried to deny it, Helen loved her. She thought her mother’s problems started with her name: Dolores. That name would make any woman sorrowful.

  Dolores was small and fearful. She lacked the courage to sin, but lived in terror that she would lose her soul. Helen thought it might slip away, like an escaped mouse.

  Dolores never made it into the twentieth century, much less the twenty-first. She disapproved of Helen’s corporate career. “A woman’s highest calling is a wife and mother,” she said.

  Dolores told Helen she had a duty to take back her unfaithful husband, Rob. “If you hadn’t spent so much time at work, he might not have strayed. Men are different.”

  “Only because we let them get away with it,” Helen said.

  Her mother burst into tears, making the conversation even more dolorous.

  Dolores believed what the old priests told her: Birth control was a sin. Wives should endure their husbands’ faults, from alcoholism to adultery. Catholics who divorced and remarried would burn in hell. Helen was on the path to perdition.

  Each month, when she hung up on her tearful, fearful mother, Helen told herself this was the last call. But thirty days later, she called her mother again.

  Helen had a ritual to help her through it.

  She took her old Samsonite suitcase out of the closet, crammed with rump-sprung cotton panties and circle-stitched Cross Your Heart bras that were gray as grandmothers. Thumbs jumped up on the bed and began playing with a dangling bra strap. Helen tossed her cat off the bed. She was in no mood for frivolity.

  Helen had bought that snake-tangle of old lady lingerie at a yard sale, hoping it would scare away any thief. Underneath it, she hid her remaining money, a little over seven thousand dollars. She also buried a cell phone bought under a fake name in Kansas City. Helen had sent her sister Kathy a thousand dollars to pay the phone bills. She only used the cell phone once a month to call her mother and her sister.

  Each month, Helen hoped her mother would miraculously become a strong, independent woman who believed in her daughter. But in case that didn’t happen, Helen also brought out a piece of pink cellophane from a gift basket.

  Helen always called her mother on the same day at the same time: seven P.M. She dreaded this one call more than a whole day in the boiler room.

  This time, Helen got a recording, one she heard a dozen times a day. “The number you are calling does not accept unidentified calls. If you are a solicitor, please hang up now.”

  My own mother has blocked me out, Helen thought.

  “Helen, is that you?” her mother said. Dolores sounded frailer than the last time.

  Helen could see her: a withered woman wearing a luxuriant brown wig. Helen wanted to rush home and fold her small, faded mother in her arms. But she knew that was hopeless, too. Dolores would turn Helen over to the court and send her back to her cheating ex-husband.

  “Helen, I have good news,” her mother said.

  If the news was good, why did she sound so tentative?

  “I’m seeing Mr. Lawrence Smithson.”

  Lawrence? Helen flashed on a bandy-legged old man in baggy shorts and a flat yellow cap, mowing his lawn at six A.M.

  “You’re dating Lawn Boy Larry?” Helen said. “The guy who trims his lawn with nail scissors? I can’t believe you’re going out with that geezer.”

  “Don’t call Lawrence that,” Dolores said.

  “That’s what Dad called him,” Helen said. “My father was a real man.” A real unfaithful man, but no one ever questioned his virility. “Lawn Boy just wants to get his hands on your dandelions.”

  What’s wrong with me? Helen thought. Why do I care who my mother dates, if he makes her happy? It’s none of my business. My father’s been dead for ten years.

  “I have no one to talk to,” her mother said. “Your sister Kathy has Tom and the children. You’re living God knows where. You won’t even tell your own mother.”

  “It’s better that way.” Rob would charm the information out of Dolores. She still saw him.

  “Lawrence has been so helpful,” Dolores said. “He fixed my toolshed. He mows my lawn every Wednesday. He cleans my gutters.”

  “Does he grease your griddle and haul your ashes?”

  “Don’t be disgusting.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m happy that you have a romance.”

  “It’s not like that,” her mother said. “I’m too old for romance.”

  “You’re only seventy, Mom.”

  “I won’t live much longer,” her mother said. “I want you to come home.”

  All aboard for the guilt trip, Helen thought. “Mom, I can’t go back to Rob, not after what he did.”

  “You didn’t try,” her mother said.

  “I did,” Helen said. “But every time I looked at Rob, I saw her.”

  It was worse than that. Every time Helen looked at Rob, she saw him naked with their neighbor, Sandy.

  Helen had come home early from work and found them on the deck. At first, Helen couldn’t make sense of the tangle of Rob’s hairy legs and Sandy’s waxed ones. Then she understood all too clearly. That’s when Helen picked up the crowbar and—

  “You should have offered it up.”

  Helen had a vision of Rob and Sandy humping away, while she knelt by the teak chaise longue and prayed.

  “Offered what up?” she said.

  “Your suffering. The saints did it. I did it for forty years with your father.”

  “Did you offer it up when Dad died at the Starlite Motel with the head of the St. Philomena Altar Society?”

  There. She’d said the words that had been buried for a decade. She expected Dolores to burst into tears. But h
er mother said with simple dignity, “Yes, I did. It was my duty as his wife and your mother.”

  “Well, I’m no saint,” Helen said. “And I’ve got the police report to prove it.”

  Helen had brought the crowbar down on the chaise with a loud crack! Rob jumped up and ran for his Land Cruiser, locking the doors and abandoning his lover.

  Sandy, naked as a newborn but not nearly as innocent, scuttled toward her cell phone and called 911.

  Helen started swinging. The Land Cruiser’s windshield cracked into glass diamonds. The side mirrors disintegrated. She trashed the taillights and smashed the doors, while Rob cowered on the floor and begged for his life.

  “You tried to kill your own husband,” her mother said.

  “I wasn’t going to kill the SOB. I wanted to wreck his SUV. That was his true love. And I bought it for him.”

  She’d told the cops the same thing when they pried the crowbar from her hands and pulled a buck-naked Rob from the wreckage. She could see the cops fighting back snickers.

  Rob and Sandy didn’t press attempted-assault charges. Sandy was afraid her husband would find out what she’d been doing when Helen started swinging that crowbar. He did anyway.

  “I know you were upset, dear,” Dolores said. “But now you’ve had time to cool off. Rob just made a mistake.”

  “Not a mistake, Mom. A bunch of mistakes. He hopped into bed with women I knew at the tennis club, the health club and our church. He’s an incurable adulterer.”

  “You must hate the sin, but not the sinner,” her mother said. “You promised to love, honor and obey Rob forever.”

  “And what did he promise?” Helen said. “After he lost his job, I supported him for years while he did nothing.”

  “He looked for work, dear. He talked to me about it.”

  “He talked to everyone. He just didn’t do anything.”

  But Rob had worked hard during the divorce, spreading his lies. His lawyer portrayed Rob as a loving househusband married to an angry, erratic woman. When he showed the photos of the smashed SUV, the judge winced.

  Rob got his old girlfriends to testify to the work he did around the house. No one mentioned that Helen paid a contractor to finish his botched handyman jobs.

  Helen wanted her lawyer to ask these women if they’d had a sexual relationship with her husband. But her attorney was too much of a gentleman.

  Helen prepared herself to lose the house she’d paid for. But she didn’t expect the judge’s final pronouncement. She could still see him: hairless, smug and wizened, like E.T. in a black robe.

  “This woman is a successful director of pensions and benefits, making six figures a year,” his honor said. “She earns that money because of her husband’s stabilizing influence, because of his love and support. He made her career possible at the expense of his own livelihood. Therefore, we award this man half of his wife’s future income.”

  A red rocket of rage shot through Helen. She must have stood up, because she could feel her lawyer trying to pull her back down into her seat.

  Helen grabbed a familiar-looking black book with gold lettering. She put her hand on it and said, “I swear on this Bible that my husband, Rob, will not get another nickel of my salary.”

  Later, the black book turned out to be a copy of the Missouri Revised Statutes, but Helen still considered the oath binding. She also believed the judge had been dropped on his head at birth.

  Helen slipped out of St. Louis, packing her clothes and her teddy bear, Chocolate, into her car. She left everything else behind. She didn’t tell anyone goodbye, except her sister, Kathy. Kathy was a traditional wife and mother, but she understood Helen’s anger.

  “I wouldn’t have bashed in his SUV, Sis,” Kathy had told her. “That poor Land Cruiser didn’t do anything. I’d have taken that crowbar to Rob’s thick skull.”

  Kathy was the only person on earth who knew how to find Helen. She had zigzagged across the country for months, trying to evade any pursuers. She didn’t know how far the court would go to track down a deadbeat wife, but she knew that Rob would go to the end of the earth to avoid work. He wanted her money.

  Sometime during her flight, Helen traded her silver Lexus for a hunk of junk. It finally died in Fort Lauderdale, and that’s where she stayed. Now she worked for cash only, to keep out of the computers. Her dead-end jobs brought her a kind of freedom: no memos, no meetings, no pantyhose. She would never go back to corporate America. If Rob did find her, he’d get half of nearly nothing. Her old life and her old ambitions had vanished in easygoing South Florida.

  “Helen, are you listening to me?” her mother said. “I can help you. I can make your problem go away.”

  “I won’t go back to Rob, mother.”

  “You won’t have to, Helen dear, if you’re really determined. Lawrence and I have been talking it over. He has some friends in the archdiocese and I have some money. We want to start the proceedings for an annulment. It would be like your marriage never took place.”

  “But it did,” Helen said. “For seventeen years.”

  “Well, you’d still have a civil divorce. But if you got an annulment, in the eyes of the Church your marriage never happened.”

  “But it did,” Helen said. “I have the pictures to prove it. Mom, an annulment won’t erase my marriage. It renders it sacramentally invalid. It’s nothing but a divorce for rich people, and in my opinion, it’s for hypocrites.”

  “Helen, I’m trying to save your immortal soul.” Her mother started crying. She was terrified her divorced daughter would go to hell.

  “Mom, I was married. You can’t say I wasn’t. I slept with the guy all those years. You can’t save my soul with a lie.”

  “You’re stubborn,” her mother said angrily. “You don’t want to be helped.”

  Helen had to end this hopeless conversation. She brought out the pink cellophane from the gift basket and crackled it near the phone.

  “Hello, Mom? We’re breaking up. I have to go now. I love you.”

  Helen pressed the END button. The last thing she heard was Dolores’ heartbroken weeping.

  Helen found she was clutching the phone and her cat. As she stroked Thumbs’s soft, thick fur, she wondered:

  What if my mother had believed in me more and the Church less? What if she’d said, “Rob is a rat. Pack your bags and come home to your mother, where you belong”?

  Then I would not have had that screaming scene in court. I would never have run from St. Louis.

  I would not be living in South Florida.

  I would not have this dead-end job.

  I would not have heard a woman die.

  Chapter 20

  Someone had sucked all the air out of the room.

  Helen couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t stop thinking about her mother, pulling strings to make Helen’s marriage disappear. Dolores had denied her husband’s infidelity for forty years. Now she was denying her daughter’s failed marriage. Helen felt as if her mother was trying to wipe her out.

  She ran outside. It was only eight o’clock. The winter evening was velvety warm, scented with night-blooming flowers and Phil’s pot smoke. Phil. Now there was a man worth thinking about. Except Helen had a perfect record of picking losers.

  “You going to stand there like a lawn ornament?”

  Helen jumped. Margery had materialized in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Her landlady was in deep purple down to her ankle-strap platforms. Those shoes took guts. Helen would kill herself walking in them.

  “Sarah called,” Margery said. “You want to use my phone to call her back?”

  Once they were inside, Margery said, “Sarah did call, but I wanted to tell you about Fred and Ethel. They’re going to the Happy Cow tomorrow. I’ll pick you up outside your office.”

  “Let’s hope they bite,” Helen said.

  “Is that a pun? And will you stop pacing?”

  Helen realized she’d been marching back and forth across Margery’s kitchen.


  “You’re wearing me out watching you. Sit down. You look like hell. Have some chocolate.” Margery handed Helen a Godiva truffle, like a doctor dispensing a pill.

  “Should I take two and call you in the morning?”

  “Wake me up and you’re a dead woman. Now make your call.”

  Margery tactfully left the room. Helen settled into the puffy purple recliner. Her landlady’s vintage lavender Princess phone was on a metal TV tray. It had been awhile since Helen had used an actual dial. It felt heavy and awkward.

  Sarah answered on the third ring. “Helen, have you seen the paper today?”

  “Not yet.”

  “See if Margery has one.”

  Margery either had powers of divination or she was listening on the extension. She plopped a paper in Helen’s lap.

  “What was the name of that guy you were calling when, uh, everything started?” Sarah asked.

  “Hank Asporth.”

  “There’s a story about some big society party in the feature section. I think his picture is in there.”

  Helen found the party story. “Holy cow. It’s the Mowbry mansion,” she said.

  In the newspaper photos, the place looked like a museum. The furniture was so gold-trimmed and gaudy she knew it was either really cheap or really expensive.

  “Helen,” Sarah said, “did you say Mowbry? I thought his name was Asporth.”

  “The Mowbry mansion is where this party took place. These photos make it look even spookier than when I was there.”

  The guests were pretty frightening, too. The women’s surgically stretched, chemically peeled skin made them look like burn victims. The men were old and dissipated.

  Helen was fascinated to see Parrish Davenport, the jowly old man in the shamrock shorts, identified as a lawyer with a major Lauderdale firm. He was holding a drink. The pouches in his puffy face proved he’d held a lot of them.

  “I’m impressed,” Sarah said. “How do you know what the Mowbry mansion looks like?”

  Helen was still staring at the pictures. Good Lord. The lecher who tried to squeeze her breasts was a prominent plastic surgeon. Maybe he wanted to know if they were real.