Palmer took a step back. He looked like he’d been sucker-punched, which made Blanche grin.
“I can’t believe I’m hearing…After all I’ve done, all…I can’t believe you’d be so…”
“Come on, Davey, you know what kind of position I’m in with my old man! You can handle this. It’ll all blow over if you just don’t panic and…”
“You’d leave me holding the bag for all of it.”
Jason spoke in a softer, more soothing tone. “Davey, Davey, don’t worry so much. It’s just backstairs talk. If there’s really a problem, you can talk to the Sheriff. I’m sure he…”
“I can talk to him? Shouldn’t that be we, Jason?”
“Well, dear boy, why would I talk to him?”
“Seth always said you’ve never cared about anyone but yourself. I thought it was just a jealous-brother thing, or maybe liquor talking. I told him you and I have been friends since…that we’ve always stuck together and you’d never do anything to…”
“All right, Davey, all right. You’ve made your point.”
But Palmer hadn’t, not yet: “But, you know, I got to thinking about what old Seth had to say. After all, he is your brother, your blood. He’s lived with you all his life. So, just in case old Seth knew what he was talking about…” Palmer pulled a small piece of paper from the outside breast pocket of his blue blazer. He unfolded it and held it out to Jason. “This is a copy of a card you wrote and signed and had me stick on a bouquet for your ladylove.”
Jason snatched the paper, read it, and turned the color of good curry powder.
“ ‘Sweet Maybelle, can’t wait to light your fire. Love Jason’ doesn’t sound like she’s my mistress, now does it? But no need to panic, Jason, my boy,” Palmer said, mimicking Jason’s words and tone.
“And just in case you’re thinking of getting me drunk and running me off the road the way you did Bobby, or throwing me down a ravine like Maybelle”—Palmer nodded at the paper in Jason’s hand—“that’s my insurance policy. Anything happens to me, the original will be sent to the Attorney General and…Even if he lacks interest, I’m sure the copies that’ll be sent to your wife and your father will cause at least a minor stir in your domestic and financial life. So you better just hope the Sheriff hasn’t got anything that belongs to me, and you’d better fix it if he does.”
The two men stared at each other as though each believed some way around their stalemate must be written in the other man’s eyes.
Jason spoke first: “I’m sure there’s a dollar amount that would make all things possible in the Sheriff’s Office.”
“That’s not my problem, Jason, old buddy. I’m not interested in the details.”
Blanche noticed the way Palmer had taken on Jason’s buddy-boy way of talking as though it belonged to whoever had the upper hand in the conversation.
Jason dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. “I’ll talk to Harold in the morning. As my granddaddy always said, ‘The function of a good lawyer is to help you break the law as legally as poss…’ ”
By the time Jason looked up, Palmer had already turned and stalked away.
“Don’t take it like that, Davey boy!” Jason called out in a slightly surprised and bewildered tone.
Blanche waited a minute or two after Jason left before she came out from behind the screen and dived for the tape recorder. She was breathing as though she’d just run there from across town. Her hands shook so badly she could hardly rewind the tape. She wondered if that reporter who’d exposed Mumsfield’s family for her some years back was still around. She knew she should get back to the car, but she sank down on the bench and rewound the tape, unwilling to wait another moment to once again hear David Palmer admit to knowing his friend was a killer and not doing a damned thing about it.
All she heard was static. She wound the tape ahead a bit—more static. She wound it until she’d counted to ten, then to thirty. More static. Tears stung her eyes like sweat. She blinked them away, frantically pushing buttons, winding, rewinding, forwarding, hoping the damned thing would speak. She looked over her shoulder when she felt Ardell nearby.
“I saw them leaving. What happened?” Ardell asked in a loud whisper.
Blanche slumped over the tape and moaned as though disappointment was a punch in the gut.
Ardell grabbed Blanche’s shoulders. “Ohmigod! What did they do to you? I knew I should have come with you!” Ardell was all over Blanche, looking for bruises and blood.
Blanche held up the tape machine. “It ain’t me, it’s this goddamn piece of shit! It didn’t work!” She raised her arm to throw the tape player. Ardell snatched it out of her hand. “Let me try.” She repeated all the button-pushing and listening Blanche had already tried, then gave up and sank to the bench beside Blanche. She put her arm around her friend’s shoulders. “Ah, Blanche, I’m so sorry.”
Blanche nodded, and laid her head on Ardell’s shoulder. She was too disgusted to cry.
“So what’re you gonna do now?”
Blanche sat up. “Nothing, I guess. Nothing to do.”
“Well, you could…” Ardell thought for a while, then gave up. She patted Blanche’s shoulder. “Well, you tried.”
Blanche just wished that were enough.
THIRTY-ONE
DISAPPOINTMENT AND UNDERSTANDING
For the next four days, Blanche walked around with a bitter taste in her mouth that couldn’t be killed by saltwater rinses, mouthwash, toothpaste, or the freshening effect of a crisp apple. She knew the cause, of course: Palmer and Jason had said enough for her to know that Palmer hadn’t murdered Maybelle or Bobby, even though she wished he had. Still, accessory to murder was trouble enough. Or it would have been, if the tape had worked. Now she had nothing. Nothing. In two days, the bicentennial celebration would be over. Ardell had been asked to cater a small good-bye party for Jason and his wife, who were off to the Greek islands to rest up from the ordeal of having had to attend so many galas. And murders. Ardell had turned down the job.
Two days ago, Blanche had seen David Palmer and Jason Morris at a cocktail party she’d worked. At earlier events, the pair had seemed to move toward each other from different parts of the room as naturally as petals closing on the same flower. That evening, they’d avoided each other. Blanche had noticed Nancy Morris looking from her husband to David Palmer and back again, as though trying to figure out what was up with them. Blanche had fought hard to keep from telling her. She’d thought back to the other times she’d seen Nancy with Jason and guessed that Nancy had seemed so distant and cold toward Jason because she wasn’t one of those wives who were the last to know. If Nancy had only been watching her husband, she might not have been suspicious. Jason had lost a friend, but, to judge from the way he’d laughed and flirted, he clearly wasn’t letting one monkey in any way interfere with his show. Palmer, on the other hand, really looked as if he’d lost his best friend. Blanche hoped he was truly suffering.
She was still in bed on the morning the man on her radio announced that David Palmer was dead. For a few moments, she seemed to be floating, weightless with joy above her bed. I will never have to see him again, she thought. She rolled out of bed and walked around the Miz Alice while the newscaster went on about the numbers of people who’d died and been injured over the years in taking that particular curve. He was followed by a little speech from the management of the radio station demanding that the highway department do something about the killer curve on Sumter Road. “Never, ever again!” Blanche roared, throwing her arms toward the ceiling and twirling around. Everywhere she looked—the bureau, the bed, the sink—everything seemed brighter, sharper, as though her eyesight were improved by the knowledge that she’d never be forced to look at David Palmer again.
The phone rang.
“I just heard,” Blanche told Ardell. “It’s over.” She was surprised by the tears that followed
those words.
“Yes, Lord! Sometimes bad things do happen to bad people. It’s enough to make a…You want me to come over? I’ve got to run to the…”
“No, no. I’m okay. It’s just…I feel like I just escaped from somewhere. And scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“I don’t know, like I…”
“You didn’t want him dead, remember? It’s like a gift. It didn’t have nothing to do with you.”
Blanche looked over at her Ancestor altar.
“Like you said, Blanche, it’s over. He is out of your life, big-time. I gotta hurry. I’ll call you later. Celebrate, girl!”
Blanche hung up the phone and thought back to how she’d cringed in the Miz Alice the first night she’d seen David Palmer, how afraid she’d been of every sound and movement. She felt the last of that fear dissolve. Whoever was at the door or out there waiting for her in some alley, it was not him. It would never be David Palmer again.
She thought about sitting outside the flower shop, calling Mary at the bank, bugging Miz Minnie for names of people around Palmer, setting up that piece-of-junk tape recorder, all her sad little efforts to find a way to rid herself of the last slick of scum that Palmer had left under her skin. “And all I had to do was wait for today,” she said aloud.
She didn’t know what to make of Palmer’s having died in the very place Bobby had been killed. It was too much coincidence, too much balance—except real balance would have put Jason Morris in the car with Palmer. What had happened? Had Jason decided to get rid of his ex-friend despite Palmer’s warning about the letter Palmer had left with his lawyer? But for all she knew, Jason and Nancy had already left for Greece. Suicide? She liked the idea of Palmer’s putting himself out of his own misery, but why would he? Truly he’d lost his best friend and was a party to murder, but being a rapist hadn’t made him drive his car off a bluff, and he hadn’t sounded like suicide was where he was headed when she’d heard him talking to Jason at the Teahouse. Maybe it really was an accident. However it had happened, he was gone. Dead gone.
She stretched and grinned at the same time, so caught up in her thoughts the knock on the door made her jump.
Damn! Mama was the last person she wanted to see right now, but if she didn’t answer the door, Mama would know she was inside just as surely as Blanche knew that it was her mother knocking.
“I guess you heard,” Miz Cora said instead of “Hello” or “How are you?”
Blanche just stared at her. Miz Cora stepped by her into the house. She set her small plastic shopping bag on the table, took a pint of gin, a lemon, and a liter of tonic water from the bag, and held up the gin. “This still your drink, ain’t it?” Without waiting for Blanche to answer, she went right to the sink and washed and dried the lemon. “You know I ain’t much of a drinkin’ woman, but seemed to me we ought to drink a toast to celebrate that man’s passin’.”
“Mama, what…?”
“Oh, that’s right,” Miz Cora said, “I ain’t s’posed to know what he done to you, is I? It’s all right for other people to know, but I…”
Blanche was too stunned to do more than lean against the table with her mouth hanging open.
“Why you lookin’ like your behind’s draggin’ the ground ’stead of dancin’ in the street? That’s what I’d be doin’ if I didn’t have this here arthyritis. Person don’t often git to see they dream come true. I wished that man dead and now he is. Thank you, Jesus, even though I know it ain’t a Christian thing, wishin’ people dead.”
This wasn’t the first time Blanche had seen her mother step out from behind what she said she believed, to do or say what she thought was right. Miz Cora stopped slicing the lemon, laid the knife down, and looked at Blanche.
“Why you ain’t tole me what that nasty dog did to you, baby? Hurt me to my heart when Miz Minnie…I feel bad gittin’ on you ’bout checkin’ round about him, now I know what he done to you.” She poured gin and tonic in both glasses, topped each of them with an ice cube and a slice of lemon, and handed a glass to Blanche.
“To dreams that come true,” she said. The clink of glass on glass was like a period at the end of a long, sad sentence.
Blanche eased into a chair. “Did my daddy ever…”
Miz Cora shook her head and sat down at the table. “Naw. He kept his pants up when he mistreated me.”
“How’d y’all break up?”
Her mother looked a little surprised by the direct question, but from the way she leaned back and crossed her arms, Blanche knew that for once she was going to get a real answer.
“Don’t know why it is that a person can put up with a thing year in and year out and then one day…one day you just know you got to do somethin’ or…It was usually the drink with him, but not always. That last time, I knew he was comin’ home drunk. One of the neighbors told me they saw him staggerin’ toward home. I hurried up and took you and Rosalie over to Mae’s. You remember her? She was a good friend to me even though she was cousin to your daddy, God rest her sweet soul.” Miz Cora sighed and then went on. “When I got back home he was waitin’ for me. Puke on his shirt and meanness twistin’ him into somebody I didn’t want to know. He was hardly in the door before he grabbed me by my hair and knocked my head against the wall ’cause dinner wasn’t on the table. I knew where he kept his bottle, and I fetched it for him, poured him a big glass, and then another, until he could hardly make his way to bed. When he finally passed out, I gathered up our clothes and left.” She stopped talking for a bit, then: “He didn’t even come looking for us for three days. Too drunk.”
“That’s what Mr. Broadnax gave you money for?”
Miz Cora nodded. “That’s right. He helped me out till I got on my feet. We stayed with Mae for a week or so. You probably don’t remember that. Then I rented Royal’s—Mr. Broadnax’s—mama’s house. She’d died a year before, and the place was empty. He fixed it up and…” Miz Cora stared into her glass.
“It didn’t start out with your daddy just hittin’ me. He was real sweet in the beginning. For a long time. Long time. Before and after you was born. Then he brought us over here when he got work at the sawmill. All my people, my friends, was over Fayetteville way. I didn’t have nobody I could depend on but him. I was never quick to make friends, you know. But things was pretty all right, until he started havin trouble on the job. Bossman talked bad to people, made fun of ’em. Then your daddy start talkin’ bad to me, callin’ me stupid and lazy. He started drinkin’ more, too. Pushin’ me around, laughin’ at my country ways, as he called ’em. Then, one day, he just hauled off and…”
Miz Cora looked at Blanche. “Why’d I let him do that to me? Why? If I’da stood up for myself the first time, maybe…”
“But you didn’t have nobody to…”
“I had my girls, my children to look out for. I shoulda bopped him with a frying pan the first time he…”
And why hadn’t she? Blanche wondered. What had made this woman whose temper could reburn Atlanta let a man mistreat her? “You were young, Mama,” she said, trying to find an answer to her own question.
“Naw. That weren’t the reason.” Miz Cora took another sip of her drink, then leaned across the table toward Blanche. “There I was, s’posed to be some kinda upstandin’, decent woman with a mind of my own, raisin two girls, dressin’ every day in my nurse’s-aide uniform and goin’ to the hospital tryin’ to help people. Then I goes home with my knees tremblin’ and my heart jumpin for fear that man was gon wipe the floor with me, and maybe even in front of my girls next time. But I didn’t want to be run outa my own house! Have to let on I couldn’t handle my own…I was ’shamed. So ’shamed I couldn’t a raised my head if the Lord called me by name.”
Blanche went to her mother, leaned down and put her arms around her. “But you left him, Mama.”
“Yeah, but I waited too long. Just like you tr
yin’ to do somethin’ ’bout that dog that hurt you after all this time. Both of us waited too long.”
Yes, Blanche thought, and for the same reason: the shame of the wounded. What was it that the rapists, batterers, and torturers did to make women they hurt feel ashamed of what was done to them, to suspect, at least for a moment, that they deserved to be raped, maimed, and bruised?
“It’s all right, now, Mama. We both got free. Both of us.”
Miz Cora stood up and patted Blanche’s shoulder. “Thank the Lord, child. Thank the Lord.” She swayed a bit when she moved away from Blanche. She put her glass in the sink and picked up her handbag.
Blanche threw on a skirt and sweater and walked her mother home.
On the way back to the Miz Alice, Blanche thought about all her mother had said and how she’d always wished something would bring her and Mama together. The thought made her laugh with bitterness. She would rather she and Mama never spoke again than that either of them should have suffered in the way they had, no matter how much closer it might bring them. Both of them assaulted, disrespected. Both of them keeping quiet as though it was their fault. But at least they’d healed enough to say their hurt out loud.
THIRTY-TWO
DAISY, DAISY, TELL ME YOUR ANSWER TRUE
Blanche pulled the sheet over her head. She didn’t particularly want to get out of bed. She needed time to rest up, to let her life settle down a bit. But there was still Daisy. Blanche made herself get out of bed, exercise, eat, and go downtown.
“Miz Blanche!” Daisy grinned to see Blanche waiting outside the cleaners when she got off.
“Hey, Daisy, how you been?”
“You just caught me,” Daisy said. “This here’s my last day at the cleaners.”
Blanche fell in beside Daisy. “You got a new job?”
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