“So Paul and Connie—that’s his wife—took Dion because Connie couldn’t have children and thought that this was God’s way of providing. In the meantime, they never kept me from Dion if I wanted to visit. They told him all along that I was his real mama and, in return, I never bothered them much.”
“Is that his wife and son?” I asked, pointing to the photo.
“That’s my baby and his baby,” she said and smiled a crooked smile. “Little Dion Bunn Jr. We call him D.J.”
“Has Dion ever asked you about his father?” I shocked myself at the forwardness of my questions, but I figured I had come here for answers, so I might as well ask.
She paused before answering. “No. But I think he knows. I think Connie knows, to tell you the truth, but no one says anything.”
“How could they know?”
“Dion is the spitting image of his daddy.”
“Like Donna is the spitting image of her mother? And Velvet too?”
Again Dee Dee laughed. “Yeah, I guess so. Except my girls are ten times prettier than I ever dreamed of being.” At that she heaved herself up and moved to the sofa, where a pack of cigarettes and a lighter waited for her. She pulled one from its pack and lit it, then said, “Now you know my story.”
I picked up the faded color photo that had been closest to me all along. It was of Donna, taken with Santa the Christmas before Doreen had left town, I imagined. “Not all of it, Dee Dee. What happened with you and—”
“The choir director? Horace Shelly?”
“Yes.”
“Horace and I married after we moved to California and my divorce from Vernon was final.” She drew on her cigarette and blew the smoke upward. “I was so stupid. I actually thought that dog of a man loved me. We’d move to California, get married, get involved with a church, and I’d be the beloved pastor’s wife. But he said he couldn’t work for God after what he’d done. He reminded me every stinking day of what his ‘lust for me,’ as he put it, had cost him. He took a job in a shoe store, I took a job in a restaurant—that’s where I learned how to bartend—and then, after a year or so of pure misery, I met Steven.”
I cocked my head in puzzlement.
“He’s Velvet’s daddy. He was from Alabama.” She took another drag of her cigarette, leaned back against the rough cushions of the sofa, and crossed her legs. “Lord have mercy, but I was hot for that man.” She laughed again. “He was in L.A. on business and just took to me, wham-bam. I ran off with him after knowing him less than forty-eight hours.”
“Goodness.”
“Shock you?” She sat up and thumped ashes into the ashtray on the coffee table.
“Ah . . .”
“Sure it does.” She answered her own question, then leaned back again. “That’s okay. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To learn all my secrets?” She waved her hand at me. “Don’t even bother to answer that.” She took another drag of her cigarette before she leaned up again and ground it out. “Steven and me—our good days lasted about six months. Just long enough for me to get pregnant and realize I’d made a huge mistake . . . or, in this case, another huge mistake. I was drowning my sorrows in the bar where I worked—”
“While you were pregnant?”
“Gosh, no. I’d already had Velvet. She was about a month or so. I’d left her with Steven’s witch of a mother who thought she was God’s answer to motherhood and I was just some cat Steven had brought home from the pound. I went out and got myself plastered while Steven was on one of his ‘business trips.’ Oh yeah. I knew all about those business trips.”
She paused long enough for me to take this in.
“So you divorced Steven?” I asked.
“No. He divorced me, right after he found out that while he was tom-cattin’ around, I was kitty-cattin’ around, if you get my drift.”
I did.
“No doubt his mother told him. Anyway, Velvet and I left, I moved to another town, and that’s when I met Paul. As soon as Steven found out about me being pregnant with Dion, he hauled my rear end into court and took custody of Velvet. Him and his mother, of course.”
I took a deep breath, then blew it out. “Doreen, I am so sorry about all this. I . . . well, why didn’t you just come back here? To Summit View? To your old home and your friends and . . . to Donna?”
“After what I’d done? No way in . . . you-know-where. Even after I heard that Mama died, I stayed as far away as I could.”
“Until now.”
Dee Dee lit another cigarette. “Velvet and her daddy had a fallingout when she was about sixteen, and she came to live with me and Mickey, my fourth husband. We’ve been together ever since—mama and daughter.”
I was afraid to ask what had happened with Mickey. So far I felt like I’d fallen into a Jacqueline Susann novel.
“Velvet was the one who suggested we move back here. She wanted me to come first, to get things set up a bit, to get the lay of the land, so to speak. So I came. What blew my mind was that none of you even recognized me.” She leaned up and took a sip of what I imagined was tepid coffee.
“You don’t look the same, quite honestly.”
“No. Years of smoking and drinking and going from one man to another and having one kid after another. This is what it gets you.” She gave me a hard look as she drew on her cigarette. “Sin’ll age a girl.” She blinked before she said, “You’re lucky, Evangeline.”
I agreed with her there, with one exception. “I never had children, Doreen. And I’ll never have a grandson like your little D.J.”
She seemed to ponder my words before answering. “You got me there.”
No, I thought. You got me. “Do you remember how, when we were kids, we used to play that little game with the folded pieces of paper?”
“To tell our fortune?”
I nodded.
“Good gosh, I haven’t thought of that in years.”
“I dreamed about it last night.”
“You have weird dreams, Evangeline.” She drew on her cigarette again.
I chuckled then. “Maybe. But what I was thinking was . . . how it all turned out . . . and really, how unfortunate your future was. Only we didn’t see that back then. What I remember about the dream is that the game said you would marry a lawyer and have a few kids and live in a wooden house.”
Dee Dee was quiet. She pursed her lips, then said, “Seems like no matter how many times we played that game, we got a differ- ent answer. But life isn’t a game, Evangeline. It’s a gamble, but it’s not a game.”
I looked over to the Bible lying on the table next to me. “Not according to the Good Book.”
“That was Mama’s. Mama believed without question what I have trouble believing even with the answers.”
Maybe, I thought, because certain Christians haven’t made it too easy for you to believe the message of the book. I looked back at her and, for the briefest of moments, saw the little girl who had once been my friend. “Look, Doreen . . . Dee Dee. I know you and I won’t ever be close, and that’s okay. But I would like to work with you as best as possible. We’ve got the catering business going, and you’ve got the bartending thing going—you and Velvet. We can at least keep it civil.” I looked at the photos again. “It’s helped, I think, knowing what you’ve been through.”
Doreen appeared to size up my words before answering. “I want to try to make some kind of amends to my girl. Donna, I mean. And I want to see both my girls come to some sort of relationship. But that’s going to take some doing.”
“It doesn’t have to.” I shifted a bit in the chair.
Doreen snickered. “My Velvet . . . now there’s a girl you’ll have to watch. I take no credit for her nasty side. That was her grandmother’s doings. Old Lady James and her son with his endless stream of women. Not to mention Mickey.”
So much for not asking. “Mickey?”
“I divorced Mickey when I found out that he had a bigger eye for Velvet than he did for me. Not that he ever touched he
r, but a woman can’t stand for a thing like that. My girl came first, and I left as soon as she told me how he’d been looking at her and talking to her.”
Something—I don’t know what it was—told me that Velvet had made it up. I had no reason to think that—plenty of young women today most certainly have been abused, even women in the church—but when it came to Mickey and Velvet, my intuition said different. “Did you ask him about it?”
“He denied it. But what man would admit it, I always say.”
I took a deep breath, then stood. “Doreen, I have to go. Vernon will be home soon. I just . . . I just wanted . . . well, you know.”
She shrugged. “I know. Okay. We’re good here. We can play nice from now on. I won’t bother you, and you won’t bother me, and . . . if you can . . . maybe drop a good word to my daughter about me every now and then.”
I only nodded, then turned and walked out the door without saying good-bye.
When I got in my car, I thought, Poor Donna. Something told me she was up against more than she knew with Velvet James, and I had no way to tell her. Maybe later, I thought, I’d tell Vernon, and he could tell Donna.
I started the car and backed away from the trailer, knowing all too well I’d never admit to anyone what I’d learned that afternoon. Doreen Roberts’s secrets would remain my secrets.
Lizzie
24
Teatime Buzz
Immediately after tea with Michelle, Adam, and Esther Peterson, and while following the happy threesome in Adam’s car to Lisa Leann’s bridal boutique, I placed a call to Lisa Leann from my cell phone and told her, in no uncertain terms, that I was greatly disappointed in her decision to trick me with the bridal gown choice, that I thought she was my friend, and that—as far as I was concerned— her keeping this secret from me was in very low taste.
“Why, Lizzie,” she said from the other end, obviously taken aback. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you speak like this.”
I took in a deep breath and attempted to steady my shaking, ever grateful for the hands-free phone system I’d recently installed in my car. “You most likely have not.” My voice held a bit of staccato. “That said, I cannot imagine that you—Lisa Leann Lambert—having been the mother of a bride yourself, would stoop so low, just to make a buck.”
“Lizzie, I—”
I shook my head as my foot pressed harder on the accelerator. “No, Lisa. I don’t want to hear any excuses. I’m furious and you may as well know it now.”
“My name is Lisa Leann.”
I had to admire her attempt to stay in control of the conversation, but it wasn’t going to work with me. I had raised a house full of children. I was the media specialist for a high school full of obnoxious teenagers. Staying in control of conversations was part of my on-the-job training. “I know your name. And don’t switch the subject, Lisa.”
“Why, Lizzie. I do believe you are upset.”
I felt heat rising in my body. I reached over and turned the heater down in my car. “I will say this to you now so as not to ruin anything for my daughter when I see you in a few minutes. I am disappointed. I am upset. I had plans with my daughter today. Not you and my daughter.” I took another deep breath. “In addition to this, and just so you know, I will not be serving at the shower—”
“I had always assumed you wouldn’t be—”
“Well, good. Because I’m not. I think that, at least on this occasion, I’ll simply enjoy being Michelle’s mother. Thank you for listening. I will see you shortly.”
And with that, I ended the conversation.
Lisa Leann bristled a bit around me at our “bridal gown” meeting, which Adam avoided by heading across the street to Higher Grounds for a chat with Clay, whom he said he had spied sitting at his usual table. “Tradition being what it is,” he said with a wink to me, “I have no intention of seeing my bride in her finery until the day she walks down that aisle.”
Tradition, my eye. Tradition is mother and daughter . . . oh, well. It is what it is, I decided. And what “it is” is mother, daughter, future mother-in-law, and one clucking bridal shop owner.
That evening—when it had been what it had been and when everyone except Samuel and I had gone to bed—I said, “What do you think God thinks about Christians who drink?”
We were sitting on the sofa of the family room, the fire in the fireplace giving off the only light in the rustic setting. Samuel had brought an ottoman over and placed his feet upon it while I curled up nearby.
“Where’d that come from?”
“Do you have to answer every question with a question, Samuel? Can’t you just answer?”
His face twitched a bit. “Well . . . I know Christians who have the occasional drink. Some of the guys from the bank—who I know all love and serve the Lord—will have a beer during a football game or a glass of wine with dinner.”
“But what do you think God thinks? Not what do you think they think.”
He took a few moments to ponder before answering. “Well, God’s Word says nothing about drinking per se, but quite a bit about drunkenness.”
“So then if a Christian—a solid believer—wanted to come home at the end of the day and have a drink, or, let’s say, sit by a fire”—I nodded toward the fireplace—“and have an Irish coffee, or perhaps a nice glass of wine before bedtime to help relax before turning in . . . you think that would be okay with God.”
Again he paused before answering. “I haven’t thought that much about it, Liz. I’ve never been one to drink. Just never cared for the stuff. Even when I was in college and my frat brothers would throw parties, it just wasn’t my thing. With it not being a part of my everyday life, I guess I just haven’t thought much about what God might think. Like I said, I know where he stands on drunkenness. But this is . . . well, I don’t know. I suppose one could argue that it’s being ‘like the world,’ versus apart from it. But, I imagine Jesus is more interested in the heart of the situation than the action. What the motive is and that sort of thing.”
I nodded as though in agreement, but inside my mind I fought to rationalize my own feelings and recent behavior. Not to mention my desire at that moment to have a nice glass of wine and then go to bed.
Then Samuel spoke again. “Now, you know Frank Holmes, right?”
“From the bank? Yes.”
“He was telling me once that his doctor actually advised him to have about four ounces of red wine in the evening after dinner. Frank was having some digestive problems at the time, and he tells me it has cleared right up.”
“So, for medicinal purposes? Like Paul said to Timothy?”
Samuel crossed his arms over his abdomen and scootched down on the sofa, then looked at the fire. “You know, Lizzie, I think we—even we Christians—can justify pretty much anything if we work at it hard enough. Maybe not everything, but just about.” He closed his eyes. “I’m getting sleepy. Fire’s nice and warm. My beautiful wife by my side.”
I leaned over and put my head in his lap, closing my eyes as well. I shivered a little when he began to play with my hair, and—without opening my eyes—I smiled up at him.
“Hey,” he finally said, so whisper soft I might have imagined it.
I opened my eyes and looked up at him.
“I know you were disappointed about Michelle and the dress today, but I think you handled it well.”
I frowned. “I didn’t tell you the part about telling Lisa Leann off.”
He chuckled. “That might have been worth the price of admission.”
The fire crackled and popped. I looked over at it, watched as a burning log shifted, then turned to ash and fell. “I’m not going to work the shower.”
“I would think not.”
We remained silent for a few moments before Samuel asked, “Is that what this is about? Drinking at the shower?”
I felt breath escape my lungs. If I were honest, I would say, “No, this is about the fact that to ease my personal pain and frustration of late
, I have been enjoying a drink and some quiet reading in little out-of-the-way places you know nothing about.” But, the shower was a good “out.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just wondered how you felt about it, that’s all.”
I called my brother the following day. If my timing could have been any worse, I don’t see how. “Lizzie,” he said as soon as I’d identified myself. “I was just about to call you.”
“Really?” With any luck, I thought, it would be to say that he and Mildred were ready to take on Mom’s care again.
“Mildred had another small heart attack last night. Nothing like the last one, but she’s back in the hospital.”
I felt my shoulders droop. I was in the laundry room, sorting stinky socks from damp towels that smelled faintly of mildew and sweat. I dropped my sorting and walked out of the room, then up two flights of stairs toward my bedroom. “Oh, Charles,” I said as I went along. “I’m so sorry. What do the doctors say?”
“Dr. Schnereger is her physician right now. He hasn’t given me a complete report yet, but I’m hopeful for a good one. Mildred’s color was back this morning when I was there. Last night, when the episode happened, she went ash white then a weird shade of blue. I’m telling you, Liz, I’ve never been so scared in my life. Not even the last one prepared me for this. I thought we were home free.”
I felt for my brother; truly I did. How could I possibly tell him about Mom now? I sat on the bed, then laid back and stared at the ceiling.
“How are things there? Michelle getting ready for her big day?”
“The bank is having a very lavish shower. It’s constantly one thing and then the other. Samuel is doing much better. Back at work, praise God.”
“Be thankful, Liz.”
I was. Truly I was.
“How’s Mom?”
I allowed myself the privilege of answering mentally in two ways: She’s fine. Good days and bad days. But mostly good. “That’s good,” Charles would say. “I know you can take care of this.” Or, I could tell him the truth. Not so good, Charles. In fact, the administrator of the assisted living facility says we need to discuss a nursing home. So what do you think? Can you get away any time soon so we can visit a few because, quite honestly, I don’t think I can handle this by myself. “You’ll have to, Liz,” he would say. “I can’t do any more than I’m doing right now.” And then I would say, “Neither can I, Charles. What do you think I’m made of? What, in the name of all that is good, do any of you think I’m made of?”
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