Now the others seated around the conference table reached a consensus that traffic was to blame for Thalia’s tardiness. Where do people learn to drive these days? From a correspondence course?
Annie nodded, gnawing her lip, unable to take her eyes off the door. Any second, Thalia could waltz in, gushing apologies and excuses.
Lars snagged Annie’s hand, their skin equally cold and damp. Roberta reported that the machine had picked up her call to Thalia’s house. Lars confirmed that no, his mother didn’t have a cell phone.
The baby stretched and turned in utero somersaults. Annie flinched, sat up straighter, aware her escalating heart rate was the cause. Free hand splayed, the heel braced on the table edge, she studied the fingernails she’d clipped to their quicks yesterday afternoon. Not very attractive, all blunt and unpolished, but they’d grow back again in a few weeks.
Citric acid from the lemons she’d scrubbed her fingers with, then her hands, advancing up her arms to her elbows, like a surgeon prepping for a appendectomy, had inflamed the cuticles and left her skin paper dry.
Lars hadn’t noticed. Neither did anyone else, that day.
Not the EMTs or the patrol officer responding to the 911 call Lars placed from Thalia’s kitchen phone. Nor did the police detective who fingerprinted her and Lars. Routine procedure, he said. Just a formality.
The medical examiner’s attention was riveted on the deceased sprawled on the breakfast nook’s floor. By law, an autopsy would be performed, but the M.E. was all but certain Thalia DeArmond had died of anaphylactic shock. The medical history Lars provided, her distended throat, and the hives welting her skin were indicative of it.
The probable culprits were the dead yellow jackets found in a potted fern on a knickknack shelf and the Oriental-patterned area rug under the table. It appeared the wasps attacked while Thalia was reading the newspaper and drinking her morning coffee—lightened with her customary dollop of milk and three heaping spoonfuls of artificial sweetener.
“If your mother hadn’t been on a beta blocker for her high blood pressure,” the M.E. told Lars, “the allergic reaction to the wasp venom probably wouldn’t have been as severe. The medicine suppresses the body’s natural defense mechanism.”
“Then it’s my fault,” Lars said. “She must’ve asked me a hundred times to mend that hole in the patio door’s screen.”
“Sorry for your loss, but there’s no sense at all in blaming yourself. Accidents happen. That’s all there is to it. From what I see here, that’s all this was, Mr. DeArmond. Just a tragic accident.”
The wasps duly sealed in an evidence bag, their cause of death assumed to be natural and recent. There was no reason to suspect they’d expired yesterday afternoon from a pesticide sprayed on Barb Amos’s shrubbery. It was simplicity personified planting their stiff, harmless corpses here and there after dinner while Thalia, Lars, and Tyler were glued to a cartoon video on TV.
Given the circumstances, it wouldn’t occur to the detectives to analyze the leftovers from the meal Thalia prepared herself last night, much less the sugar bowl on the breakfast table, half-full of artificial sweetener. Both were laced with oven-dried, pulverized bits of clam meat. Mixing the powder into the food had apparently diminished its effect. The amount stirred into her coffee was proportionately much higher.
Absent evidence of foul play, there was no probable cause to confiscate Annie’s computer. A thorough examination of the hard drive might reveal electronic footprints from a Google search date-stamped in the wee hours of the morning after the younger DeArmonds’ wedding anniversary.
Astonishing, how much information it yielded about beta-blockers, anaphylactic shock, anaphylaxis, and their causes, including an allergic reaction to shellfish and bee and yellow-jacket stings.
Soon, after the postponed closing was rescheduled, Annie would truly have it all and all to herself. The husband she’d loved from the moment they’d met, their little boy, his new baby brother, or sister, a beautiful house, and a home-based business headquartered in that tailor-made bonus room off the kitchen.
And no jury in the world would convict her.
Vanquishing the Infidel
Eileen Dreyer
I only heard the good parts secondhand. The parts that made my mother a legend in our neighborhood. I was part of the story, though. I was the catalyst. I’m the one who always gets to tell the story, especially on the anniversary of her death, when we’re pulling out all her best stories like curled-up black-and-whites in a photo album.
I’m the one who measures with a yardstick of words and the memories of a six-year-old how deadly my mother was.
Deadly is such a relative word. Now that I’m in my sixteenth year as a trauma nurse, of course, I’ve seen the very worst that word can mean. Violence against man, woman, child, and beast. Self-destructive tendencies that can suck the light from a room like a psychic black hole. Idiocy and avarice and plain, bone-deep laziness that fail to prevent disaster.
And if I hadn’t seen it in the halls, I sure see it on CNN. So I know what deadly is.
But you have to understand that back then my life was much smaller, much more intimate. My world was the size of my neighborhood, the great lessons taught in the voices of my parents, Sister Mary Alice, and, if I happened to be good and got to stay up late, Jack Buck on KMOX when the Cardinals played. So it makes perfect sense that deadly came in a five-foot-one-inch package on a soft spring morning, and that the story ended up becoming legend, not just in my family, but in the neighborhood, the city where I grew up, the parish.
It was just that kind of story.
My mother was just that kind of woman.
In fact, she was such a force in our lives that when we buried her a meager twenty-five years later, her funeral looked more like a movie premiere, with people spilling out of the doors and trying their best to hear the sermon from the street. Toasts were drunk on three continents, Khoury-league softball fields went dark for a day, and more than one bishop was heard to tell this story to whoever would listen.
To put everything into perspective, let me tell you a bit about our lives back then. We were nothing special. We were, in fact, small people. Not in size, although a good case can be made for that, too. We were simply not important in the greater scheme of things. No kingmakers or lawbreakers or trendsetters, not even anything more interesting than the odd horse thief lurking among the branches of the family tree. Yes, we made a certain splash within our own neighborhood, even before the incident, but not really beyond its bounds. There was simply nothing that set us apart from any other family on the block.
We lived in a blue-collar neighborhood that was neatly tucked into St. Louis County, where everybody seemed to know everybody else, and everybody else’s mother would report back to your mother if you misbehaved anywhere within the city perimeter. Where we actually did play kick the can as dusk settled in the trees, and fireflies and black-and-white TVs flickered in the sultry summer evenings. Where arguments and laughter drifted out the open windows that let the tepid breezes in.
We were a block of working fathers and stay-at-home moms, although nobody knew the term then. The women were a sorority, more often than not found sitting on one of the front porches sharing a beer as they waited for their kids to finally give up on their games before bath time forced everybody inside. They shared recipes and frustrations and childen, until we all obeyed whichever voice barked out a command and wandered into neighboring homes with impunity. Especially if that mother was a better cook than ours…which, considering the fact that she was Irish, was a good bet.
As for us, we were ten people living in a two-bedroom house with no air-conditioning and one bathroom. Seven kids, one grandfather, two parents, and a dog. It was Leave It to Beaver meets EST.
God, how my father hates it when I say that.
“It sounds like we’re white trash,” he always complains. “I had a good job.”
“We still lived in a two-bedroom house,” I have to r
emind him. “It was an oversize doll house. We were crammed inside like clowns in a Volkswagen.”
That house was so small that I had to literally crawl under the yellow Formica kitchen table to get to my seat. Not that I minded. I sat in front of the window and got all the breezes.
But, in truth, he was right. He had a good job. In fact, he had the only college degree on the block. He was a CPA who could have played minor-league baseball or been a big-band singer. He chose responsibility instead, and gifted it to my mother along with her engagement ring after the war ended.
My mother lost her engagement ring that same night. She held on to the responsibility and her beloved husband until the day she died. He still holds her, deep, where we can only briefly glimpse the chasm that is his loss.
But in spite of his good job, we never had any money. We all attended the best Catholic schools in the city instead.
“You must do very well,” people would say to him when they heard about his business.
“Not really,” he’d answer very equably. “But the Jesuits are very happy.”
So, really, were we. I know fifty-eight ways to extend hamburger, and as God is my witness, if I ever have to eat Jell-O again, I will commit violence, but we laughed a lot, and I don’t remember any want gone unmet except for brand-new store-bought clothes. My mother sewed, and my aunt offered hand-me-downs, so that it wasn’t until my junior year of high school before I got my first real new dress—a bright red and blue paisley suit with the shortest skirt I’ve ever worn. I have nothing but anecdotal proof, but I swear you can’t look nearly as sexy in a hand-me-down as you do in a store-bought dress.
Oh, and just once, I wished I could have seen The Wizard of Oz on a color TV. I was thirty before I found out the Wicked Witch was green. Okay, I’d heard she was green, but good God, she was green.
Still, considering the need I’ve seen since I’ve stepped out into the real world, I think we did okay. Which is why it hit me so hard the day I first walked onto that ER hallway at nineteen. I had never met people like that. I had no concept of what it meant to know that someone could batter a helpless woman or try to slash their way into oblivion. I couldn’t comprehend that those people who looked and acted so much like me could bear such a load of trauma and pain without it showing like jagged glass and barbed wire.
We, none of us, have anything hidden. To this day, no one is in rehab, no one on parole, no one in disgrace—well, except for my one brother who keeps forgetting that we always get together for the Labor Day barbecue so we can pick names for Christmas. But then, I think he forgets so the rest of us have something to talk about until the Christmas presents are exchanged and we can complain.
In fact, we’re so unnatural that just a few years ago, long after we all reached adulthood, we earned a tag that we’re trying to turn into a coat of arms.
There we were on vacation at the cottage my cousins have always let us use on the beach of Lake Michigan, all thirty-six of us ranging from forty to two, now crammed into two cabins with two bathrooms. Old habits just die hard, I guess. We’re also less tolerant than the Volkswagen years. We last for exactly one week together before we reach critical mass and everybody has to go home before we kill one another. And then we talk about it the rest of the year (with time out for the aforementioned ranting about my forgetful brother).
Anyway, one morning there we were, every one of the thirty-six of us playing football down on the sand with all the requisite noise and mayhem, when this woman comes teetering toward us on heeled sandals, a Bloody Mary in her hands and her optimistically platinum-blond wig a bit askew.
“Hey!” she yelled, even slurring that, one magenta finger-nail shaking in our general direction. “You…you be quiet! I…I’m sleeping!”
To which we politely responded, “Get off our beach.”
Well, something to that effect.
Politely.
She blinked a couple of times, so that we couldn’t miss the lovely garage-door blue of her eyelids, and then she did. Leave. Just turned around, teetering so precariously for such a long moment that at least eight of us started a pool on how soon the laws of gravity would win out, and then she quite simply minced back the way she’d come.
You’d think we would have talked about that for a while, but she got no more than a few shrugs before the football once again went aloft (never let it be said that we let problems prey on us). And to be frank, we thought no more of it until later that afternoon as we celebrated happy hour by mixing mostaccioli for dinner and drinks for the cooks, a sacred tradition in the family, especially in Michigan.
And suddenly there she was again, pounding on the screen door and listing to the left. She had another Bloody Mary in her hand and a different wig—red this time. It still listed at the same angle as its owner. She didn’t even wait for us to get the door open before she started up.
“I hope you don’t…ah, mind,” she managed, clutching that Bloody Mary like a microphone. “I need to a…a…apolo…gize.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” my brother said, trying to quickly usher her back out. “We understand.”
But she held her ground. “No. No, you don’t. I was…I was rude to you all…today. But you…you see, I, uh, I just didn’t know how to take you people. You see, I’ve never met a functional family before.”
So we’ve dubbed ourselves the Last Functional Family in America.
And at the helm, that deadly mother of mine.
A tiny Irish nurse with a passion for baseball, a critical lack of patience for fools, and a passion for children. Of course, anybody who knew her would be hard-pressed to remember she was tiny. She had a big personality. Expansive and welcoming. Big ideas and a bigger heart.
Every relative ended up in our kitchen at one time or another. Every friend one of her kids had was welcome in her house at any time. Every pet they owned usually ended up in our washroom being mended. After all, my mom was the neighborhood nurse. And on our block that meant attending every living creature.
She almost treated a Clydesdale once. As in the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales. Our neighbor was one of the first drivers. A massive man with hands like hams, he was even more gentle than his animals. Until they misbehaved, anyway. One kicked him in the head as he was shoeing her. So he clocked her, just like in Blazing Saddles. He came to show my mother the hoofprint on his forehead. She almost left him right there to make sure the horse was all right. (She was. He assured us that at her size, his fist had been a negligible irritant.)
And when my mother ran out of kids and pets to spoil, she adopted priests. We had at least one over to dinner every week, usually the brand-new guys, who hadn’t even broken in their collars yet. And if not them, relatives, friends, parishioners, and sundry workpeople. Mom lived by the rule that there was always room for one more.
There wasn’t, really. At least not unless the priest wanted to crawl under the table to get to his seat. But somehow we all squeezed in. Because Mom said so.
She was notorious, but not in the way that should equate with a story connected with violent acts. In fact, the only times my mom heard from the police were when her dog—the legendary Gizmo—was caught on the wrong side of the fence after siring yet another litter of puppies (I think half the puppies within a twelve-block radius bore a startling resemblance to my dog) and on St. Patrick’s Day.
Every St. Patrick’s Day.
My mother wasn’t just Irish. She was über-Irish. John Ford and Maureen O’Hara Irish. The kind of Irish who yearned to go home, and placed the blame for any and all indignities suffered by Ireland in the last millennium squarely where it belonged. On British shoulders.
My siblings and I were raised in St. Louis, a southern city with a large, active Jewish population. My parents were scrupulous about raising us without prejudice. Except for one. The words British or English were never said in our house without the adjectives damn, goddamn, or stupid goddamn. And lest you think this was because my mother actually remembered the a
uld sod, whence she came, don’t get emotional. Our family’s been here for at least a hundred fifty years. The only sod my mother has seen was on The Quiet Man.
My mother used up every Irish name in the States to christen her children. (And yes. The girls were named Mary. I hate that. The only people who still call me Mary are old nuns and the U.S. government.) She sang weepy Irish tunes in an off-key voice about going home. (She had a magnificently bad voice, but she always said, “God gave me this voice. He can just darn well listen to it.” Which meant that she also delighted in throwing everybody else off key at mass every week.) She wept at “Kathleen Mavourneen” and considered John Kennedy a saint.
But St. Patrick’s Day was the pinnacle of her Irishopathy. The High Holy Day, we call it, and still gather to raise a toast in her honor. On that day, as far back as I can remember, my mother and our cross-the-street neighbor Pa Quinn would hold a competition to see who could celebrate better.
It began with paper shamrocks in the trees. Then kelly-green bunting across the porches. Life-size cutouts of the patron saint himself on the front lawn, with rubber snakes at his feet. Green Christmas lights strung over every bush in the yard and cars decorated with carnations we crafted out of Kleenex and dyed green with Easter-egg dye.
And then came the pièce de résistance.
Sound systems.
Four-speaker, blow-your-hair-back, woofer-and-tweeter specials the likes of which I swear could outdecibel an AC/DC concert.
Mom was the first to rent one, from the man who provided the music for the school picnic and Boy Scout jamborees. Pa got a bigger one from the VFW. Then the two of them would crank up the volume and blare John McCormick back and forth as if they were trying to drive Prince Philip screaming out into the street. There was just nothing like “McNamara’s Band” at ear-bleed volume to get you out of bed for school in the morning.
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