by Rene Steinke
“Well, I’ll sure ask him.” He nearly felt a cord tightening his connection to Taft, as he sat there, more confident in that leather seat, blessings coming down from every angle of the room. “I sure will.”
“Have him come see me then, and we’ll set it all up,” said Avery.
“Alright, then.”
“Let me see what I can do.” Hal stood up, and it felt good to be the one ending the visit. Avery had been lucky, but Hal might be blessed. He’d been praying well every morning at the breakfasts at church, he’d been keeping his thoughts clean, his liver sober—and as he bounded down the stairs toward the ornate door with the Mexican filigree, he could feel it coming to him, all that money, all that light.
LEE
WHEN LEE FIRST GOT THE LETTER in the mail, even though it was certified, she didn’t read it because she thought it was a bill. She put it on the phone table and continued to cook her baked chicken. She ate dinner, drank a bourbon, listened to a record that Jack had liked of old-time country, the crooners with their high warbly voices, the silliness of the lyrics. “Oh, Lord I made a mountain out of you.” He’d said he liked it because they didn’t take their feelings so seriously, they just made them into songs.
After she finished her bourbon, she poured another, looked out the back window at the dusk, where the neighbor was packing away the cushions on her patio furniture, and Lee wondered if it was supposed to rain again. She watched a little bit of the news, the fighting in Afghanistan, the photograph of the turbaned terrorist subject, and then, abruptly, young girls wearing blue eye shadow and cowboy hats, high-kicking across a stage. Finally, she forced herself to open the envelope. It was printed on thick stationery, the letterhead of some lawyer.
This is to advise you that Avery Taft, of Taft Properties, charges that you committed fraud when you submitted false photographs of his property to The Friendswood Dispatch. This is an order to cease and desist with all communication having to do with properties belonging to Avery Taft. Unless you agree to comply . . .
She couldn’t afford a lawsuit. If it were anyone else, she’d think the threat was toothless, but Taft was litigious—he’d sued one of his daughter’s teachers, and his wife’s cosmetic business partner. Taft’s brother-in-law was a lawyer, she’d heard, so he got a deal on representation.
She felt tired, as if the flu had suddenly come over her. She folded up the letter, put it back in the envelope, and laid it on top of her electric bill. She could not spend the anniversary as she had before, first hysterical on bourbon, then catatonic. She always did whatever she could not to be locked inside the fact of her daughter’s death, and the days still crept nearer, closing in. And she didn’t yet have a plan.
THE NEXT MORNING, she woke up to birdsong. She waited a few hours, vacuumed the floors, and because it had not rained after all, watered her plants. Finally, when it was after ten o’clock, she called Jack. She wanted to tell him about Avery Taft’s threat.
“I was thinking the other day,” he said, “about how Jess liked those ring pops. Remember? Like big little girl rings that she wore, but made with candy? Turned her mouth purple? Genius, whoever invented those.”
It was risky and against everything in the manual, but if she told him, he’d understand that she was taking action, that her grief had a new shape.
“I broke into the old Banes site again, where that Taft is building.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
She couldn’t tell if he was angry or amused. “No, I’m sure not. I messed up his bulldozer.”
“You what?”
“You heard me. I learned all about how to do it. It’s going to cost them, and they’ll lose at least three days of work.”
“Lee, do you know what they’re liable to do to you?”
“Me? A lady? Hell, they’re after me for the pictures I sent to the paper. Taft got his lawyer to threaten me. No one’s going to suspect the other thing. I only wish there was some way to find out if it worked.”
“Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I bet you never thought I was capable of mechanics at that level.”
He sighed. “Jesus, Lee.”
That day when he’d left her, he was packing his things in suitcases, and within her everything froze except this tiny, hot ball of hope that she’d been protecting. As small as a marble or a penny. He said, “I just can’t abide being with someone who’s so far away, even when I’m in the same room with them.” He locked up one of the suitcases. “Goddamn, I’ve got my own sorrow. And I have to go it alone?” She’d sat in that chair and watched him as if he were someone on TV, someone she couldn’t ask for anything.
“You know why I did it,” she said now.
“Of course I do, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s dumb. You’d better not tell another soul, hear me?” She heard in his voice that he was afraid for her.
“Promise me you’ll stop it,” he said. “Hell, you need to get out more. Or something. You need to let go of this thing.”
She said it, not meaning it. “Okay.” But then she did mean it. “I will.” The relief streamed through her, as if she’d been swimming away from a shipwreck for a long time and had now come to the end, washed up on shore. Okay, she was done.
IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, she took care of tasks she’d been ignoring. She scrubbed all the floors on her hands and knees until she had bruises, she dusted the baseboards with a torn old towel. She threw out threadbare or stained linens, cracked saucers, a clock that she would never get fixed. She hid most of the research documents in the black file cabinet, lugged boxes of correspondence up to the attic.
When she was finished, Jess’s old room—the desk bare except for a lamp; the rippled rag rug emptied of her piles of papers; the bed made—looked ready for a guest.
RUSH THREW A CHRISTMAS PARTY one night, and Lee went. Tom was playing classic rock on the stereo, and he’d built a bonfire in the back, where he and his buddies kept vigil over the keg. A ball of mistletoe dangled above the sliding glass door, and the tree in the living room was strung with silver tinsel and red and white lights. The house smelled of peppermint and vodka.
Lee waved to Esmeralda, homecoming queen of the class and still darkly beautiful, who, with a huge, guilty smile, poured herself a glass of eggnog at the bar. Lee stood near a table set with guacamole and chips on a Mexican platter, and a big man in a short-sleeved button-down shirt walked up to her. “Rush said I should introduce myself. The name’s David.”
He had an appealing, bearded face, and the dark facial hair underlined his kind, green eyes.
“I met Tom over at my shop. I sell boats over in Galveston, but Rush says you like to dance.”
“I used to anyway.”
“Why used to?”
“Well, there just stopped being opportunities, I guess.”
He nodded and smiled, as if he’d just noticed something he liked in her face. “What do you think the chances are for dancing here?” A large birthmark—the shape of a walnut—flashed from the back of his hand.
“Not great. Tom likes to keep the bar area clear for the serious drinkers.” There wasn’t any reason why she shouldn’t like him, why she shouldn’t flirt a little, and she couldn’t quite identify her lack of interest. She wasn’t dead yet, as Rush liked to say.
“Oh well.”
David sipped at his drink, leaned against the kitchen cabinets.
He smiled at her sideways. “I like to dance.” There might be something good in him. But his beefiness and beard reminded her of one of Jack’s old buddies at the beach, and then that made her wonder if Jack would come back to see her after all.
Mavis Leman joined them, and it seemed she would flirt, with her blond-streaked hair, her large breasts pressed into a white blouse. She taught the seventh grade and told a story about the man wearing a bathrobe, who’d tried to lure one of h
er students into his house. “He told her he was sick, that he needed someone to come in and call the hospital. He was sick, alright.” Her round, blue eyes and tan, plump features moved so quickly as she spoke, it was hard to listen. “I looked up his address when she told me where he lived. He’s a registered sex offender. Do you believe that? Lives near all these kids. When the girl refused to go inside, the man ordered fifty magazines in the girl’s mother’s name, and months later, when she got the bills, her mother tracked him down. He just wanted to get caught at something, I swear.” David leaned toward Mavis, asking more questions, and Lee went to the other side of the room to look for Rush.
There was throaty-voiced Olivia. “Lee!” Tall, pale faced, black hair—she had a voice that creaked pleasantly like wood.
“I moved back from Austin!” She came over to Lee, and she smelled of almonds. She had a kind of practical happiness in her, a Catholic kind—Lee remembered her saying her rosary one night in high school, after they’d snuck into a dive bar and lied about their ages.
“Welcome back.” Lee wanted to be cheerful for her, for the sake of old times, but she was already straining her smile, already feeling her shoulders slump forward. “Where are you living?”
“For now, back at my folks.” Her mouth pulled down on the side. Olivia’s older sister had died suddenly last year, when, just after she ran to her car in the rain, a blood clot got to her lung. Lee had helped arrange the photos for the wake—Olivia’s sister’s curly dark hair and toothy smile; the baby pictures; the snapshots with ill-chosen boyfriends. Lee had written down the names of people who sent flower arrangements to the family, and she’d sat with Olivia and her friends at the funeral, had wept. People saw Lee as one acquainted with grief, someone who had special knowledge—she needed to take her part. “How are they doing?”
“My dad lost all this weight, and my mom doesn’t joke around anymore. Will they ever be the same? I don’t know.” Then she changed the subject, told a funny story about getting up on a chair to grab the sugar and falling on her butt—described the black and blue cellulite on the backs of her thighs.
A woman in a silver minidress swayed to the music, her giraffelike husband with his tiny head, leaning down to hear her talk. Beyond the sliding glass doors, around the bonfire in the back, Tom and other men hunched over their plastic cups of beer. One of them smoked a cigar.
Lee saw Char over by the glass door with her daughter, Willa, taller and skinnier than Lee remembered, heavy black eye makeup that made her appear by turns angry and Cleopatra beautiful. She wore jeans and a silk old-fashioned blouse, and there was Char in her Christmas sweater, red with a green cat woven just under her chest.
Lee and Char had been good friends after all, years ago—they’d written one another notes on paper they folded into triangles and swans; they’d lain around for hours in each other’s bedrooms, gossiping. What had happened to the friendship was nothing but years, really, and Lee saying no to invitations to church. Lee went over to her, held up her drink. “Merry Christmas!” Lee leaned to hug Char, but her shoulders went stiff.
“Well, hi there, Lee. Honey, you know Lee.” She nudged her daughter, whose wide, smooth face seemed to awaken.
“I hear you’ve been quite busy again over there at city hall.”
“I was. Done with all that now.”
Char studied her, as if waiting for Lee to deny it. “Goodness. Well, what have you been doing with yourself, then?”
Lee shrugged. “Working out in the yard.”
Olivia was there then, pulling Char away, to introduce her to someone involved with the school, and Willa turned toward the picture window and sipped at her drink. She looked alone standing there, the only kid at the party.
Lee called to her, “Hey, why don’t we go sit on the couch.”
The girl looked relieved.
They were next to the Christmas tree, bells ringing in the music coming over the speakers, small gold snowmen delicately swaying on the branches whenever someone passed. “Now tell me, you’re a junior now, is that right?”
“No, a sophomore.”
Lee wondered if Char had ever told her daughters about Jess. She had to navigate this territory carefully, not wanting to weep or frighten the girl, not wanting to draw attention.
“Is Ms. Marlowe still teaching tenth-grade English?”
Willa lifted her face and nodded energetically. “She just sent me a book of poems by Emily Dickinson.”
But Lee also didn’t want to begrudge Jess, who’d had a whole life after all, who’d once held down the center of everything. “Oh, she was a good teacher, I remember. My daughter liked her.” Ms. Marlowe had sent a condolence card after Jess died that quoted Shakespeare and said in loopy handwriting at the bottom, She was a gem. I will miss her.
Willa turned her head away, hair swinging, and that signaled that Willa did know.
“I’m writing a paper on Dickinson now.”
She said she was doing it on her own, and Lee could see the intensity of her feeling for the homework, maybe because she didn’t have to worry about what the other kids thought of her ideas.
“She was a recluse and wore white dresses all the time—every single day. Then after she died, her little sister discovered a box with all the poems tied up in packets, thousands of them. Dickinson had been sending them all along to this man, this former minister, and he kept saying they were good, but not really poems, and in the end, he changed them up and published them.” The girl seemed desperate to talk.
“Unbelievable.”
“It makes me sad for her, but also not.”
“I know what you mean. She must have got something from it. Storing it all up like that. She must have known they were worth something.”
“I think so.” In her wide-eyed intensity, the way she pulled in her bottom lip, there was something Lee recognized. A flash of Jess, then gone.
“What else do you like?”
Willa shrugged. “Hanging out with my best friend, I guess.” She had an awkward beauty, falsely bold in the eyes, mouth shy and small in a way that made youth spill from her. Lee had almost forgotten what it was like to talk to a teenager, to feel the neediness.
Willa reached for her drink, and Lee noticed a dark red rash on her forearm—like an amulet just above her wrist. “You okay there?”
Willa covered her forearm with her hand.
“Listen, I work at a dermatologist’s office. You should get that checked out.”
Willa’s lip trembled. “I know what it is. I just need to keep face lotion on it. I was writing too much there.”
Lee nodded, not wanting to make the girl squirm. Writing phone numbers? Did kids still do that?
“In my sleep.”
“Huh. Interesting.”
Willa adjusted herself in her seat, then flung out her hand. “In regular life, I like to write poetry too.”
What was it about teenage girls and poetry? Practically all of them wrote it, and it was mostly bad, but at least they tried to make something out of their cyclones of feeling, tried to tame it instead of letting it blow them away.
“Well, what do you write in your sleep? How do you even do that?”
She shook her head and shyly smiled. She probably thought she’d said too much. Lee wanted to prolong the time away from the other adults, to catch that radiant expression again that felt so familiar. The girl had something. Willa talked about Ms. Marlowe’s new husband, how everyone knew he’d made a lot of money on stocks and he’d donated money for a garden. She went on talking, and in her eyes, she looked hurt—the pupils seemed slightly cracked, the whites bloodshot.
Lee caught another echo of Jess, this time in Willa’s voice. “I don’t know. I guess I’m just weird that way.” She sat up straight, pulled her hair over one shoulder, and gulped her drink. Lee tried to form a reply, to ignore the longing for her
own girl.
Then Char was at the couch with them, tugging on the bottom of her sweater. “What have you two been up to?” Over by the keg, a man was singing “White Christmas” in a campy voice, and the smell of the bonfire blew through the sliding glass door.
“Willa’s telling me all about poetry.”
Char screwed up her face as if she hadn’t understood. “Oh, yeah. She’s into that English, alright.” Then her white teeth glared up in her smile. “Willa, come meet Mr. Mitchell over here.” She crooked her finger, winked at Lee. “Thanks for taking care of her.”
Olivia came to the couch with a bourbon for Lee, lowered her voice. “You know it’s real sad what happened to Char’s daughter. I’m surprised in a way that she brought her here. I guess because there’s no other kids around. It was nice of you to take an interest.”
“What?”
“You didn’t hear? It’s real sad. She drank too much at a party a while back. You know these boys, they were all over her. I guess she’s not pregnant, but Char won’t talk about it.”
“My God. What did they do to her?”
Olivia shrugged, rolled her eyes. “I don’t know exactly. Enough. It was bad. These kids shouldn’t drink.”
“She’s just a girl.”
“Not much parents can do now, I guess,” Olivia said, swallowing the last of her clear cocktail. “You know it doesn’t change. It’s one of the tragedies of life. High school doesn’t change.” Olivia touched the necklace at her throat, and looked behind her at the rest of the party.
Lee stood up from the couch, with her gaze at the level of a blank-faced, silver-winged angel. Her stomach turned. She remembered how protective Jack had been, how he’d made fun of every guy who tried to date his daughter—ruthlessly imitating them, pointing out their most obvious physical flaw. If something like that had happened to Jess, if she had been raped, it would have destroyed him.