Follow the Dotted Line

by Nancy Hersage

He leaned down, lit her cigar, and then took the chair next to hers.

  “Is he as much of a dweeb as he appears to be?”

  “Funny. Another underused, highly applicable word. And I’m not sure.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Even that’s still pending,” she ruminated. “I’m trying.”

  “He seems pretty naïve.” Mitch adjusted the chair so that he reclined slightly. “What about sex?”

  Andy grimaced. “Excuse me?”

  “Has he had much experience?”

  She took a drag on her pencil of a cigar and, like Mitch, leaned back into the plush lounge cushion behind her. “I can say, with some degree of confidence, that he knows it when he sees it. And that’s about all he knows.”

  “He actually told you this?” Mitch asked in disbelief.

  “In so many words.”

  The adult son eyed his mother with renewed respect. “I see you haven’t lost any of your interrogation techniques.”

  “Some things you never forget, Mitchell. Does this conversation have an intention?”

  He contemplated the question, which she found refreshing. As a consequence, his answer was exceptionally tactful. “I just don’t want him getting hurt. That’s all.”

  “Hurt?”

  “This crush. On Melissa. Should we do something about it before she has to?” he asked.

  Andy puffed again and let the biting sweetness of the smoke wash around her mouth. Harley was so different from her own children; after only two months, she’d already reached her level of incompetence. “I don’t know,” she mused. “At the moment, Melissa appears to be one of the few things that make him happy. And he’s unbearable to live with when he’s unhappy. So I say we leave it up to her. At least for the time being.” Andy took Mitch’s silence as tacit agreement with her strategy. “Is that why you asked me to dinner? To talk about Harley?”

  “No,” he said, flatly.

  “But you did have a reason?”

  “I did. I do.” He snuggled deeper into the plush cushion, stogie dangling from his lips and eyelids in repose.

  “Are you going to tell me what it is?”

  Deliberately, he wagged his head from side to side.

  Andy knew her children enjoyed being obtuse in exactly the same way she did, and it drove her crazy.

  “Spit it out,” she groused. “Come on.”

  “I invited you here to make a point. Part of my point is that you should be able to guess my purpose.”

  “Is that a joke, Mitchell?”

  He opened his eyes and cocked them acerbically in her direction. “This is important, Mom.”

  She sat up. “Something I’ve done?”

  “A crime of omission.”

  She could tell he wasn’t teasing; something significant was bothering him.

  “Okay, then tell me the point, and maybe I can guess the purpose.”

  “The point is your tendency to give your attention to the worst behaved person in the room.”

  She’d heard this charge before. It was known in the family as Mom’s Prodigal Son Syndrome; take care of the bad actors, and the good actors will take care of themselves.

  “The worst behaved person in the room was most often you, Mitch, if memory serves,” she said, sounding unnecessarily prickly.

  “Touché. And while I was getting that attention, you were neglecting your other children.”

  This time she nearly rose to her feet. “I can’t believe you just said that!”

  “Don’t over dramatize this, Mom. Please.”

  “But you just accused me of being negligent.”

  “Okay, maybe not negligent. Let’s just say you were distracted.”

  “Where are you going with this? I’m starting to bleed a little on the inside.”

  He waved away her maternal insecurity with his Cuban. “Take it easy. Hear me out. I was a pain in the ass as a kid. I admit it. Everybody in the family knows it. But that doesn’t mean that you and I can forget the fact that the other three got the shaft.”

  “The shaft? Did you just say I gave the girls and Ian the shaft?”

  “What I mean to say is, they probably didn’t get as much of you as they deserved. Because of me. I’m responsible, too. That I turned out so well,” he added with another wave of the cigar, “only shows that your time was not wasted. Still, the others probably didn’t get what they needed.”

  Andy was neither amused nor mollified. “You are still a piece of work, Mitch,” she said. “And this conversation is a perfect illustration.”

  “Will you let me finish?”

  She restrained herself from diving into the family arsenal of cheap shots.

  Mitch nodded his appreciation and continued. “I’m just saying that over the past few years I’ve tried to make up for sucking so much oxygen out of the room as a kid. And a big part of that effort has been keeping in touch with Ian.”

  “Oh,” Andy said, surprised at his newfound sibling sensitivity. Then embarrassed that she hadn’t noticed.

  “You know how he is,” Mitch told her. “He doesn’t upset the apple cart. He doesn’t complain. He just plays music. The way he did growing up.”

  Admittedly, Ian was the sole, underappreciated introvert in a family of extroverts. She couldn’t argue with Mitch’s contention that Ian’s personal drama inevitably took a backseat to everyone else’s.

  “And because he doesn’t ask your advice, the way the girls do. Or talk your ear off about work, the way I do. Well, you don’t talk to him, Mom. In fact, you rarely call.”

  Her teetering jaw dropped. Nothing came out. She picked it up again without a word.

  Mitch took her total silence as surrender and marched onward. “That’s why I thought I should have you over tonight. Because—and I know you’re not doing this intentionally—but because you’ve been completely ignoring the avocados.”

  “The avocados?” she mumbled.

  “The avocados,” he repeated.

  She looked up through the hovering tobacco haze toward the star-speckled sky and tried to figure out what in the hell he was talking about.

  “Remember what happened with the avocados, Mom?”

  “I do remember them,” she managed, lamely. “Kind of—not precisely,” she admitted.

  “And there you have it!” Mitch observed, this time circling his cigar to demonstrate her all-around cluelessness. “Ian is suffering, I mean, really suffering over this IRS audit, and you haven’t even called him about it.”

  “Oh, my god, I haven’t!” she gulped. “I haven’t! When is it?”

  “Next week.”

  “How serious do you think it is?”

  “Once again, you’re missing the point. Ian’s never even had a parking ticket, so naturally he would find any brush with the law terrifying. I’ve told him it’s not a big deal, but he calls me every day for reassurance. I just think it’s time he had a few words of encouragement from, you know, his mother.”

  If this reprimand had come from one of the girls, Andy thought, it would be hurtful. But from the prodigal himself, it was downright humiliating.

  “Right. You’re right, Mitch. Absolutely right. I’ll call him. First thing tomorrow.”

  “That’s all I wanted to hear,” he said, extinguishing the fire between his fingers and getting to his feet. “And now I think we should go into the kitchen and tear that teenager away from my girlfriend.”

  Andy followed suit. She felt a little wobbly emotionally as she stood up. Mitch took her hand and squeezed it.

  “I may not have deserved all that attention,” he said, with artful wickedness, “but I enjoyed it immensely. And we all love you, you know that.”

  “Thanks, Mitch. And just so you know, I intend to ignore you completely from now on . . . so that I have enough time for the others.”

  It was nearly eleven by the time they finished eating Mitch’s burning fruit sensation and nearly midnight by the time Andy and Harley got back to Valencia. A lit
tle battle scarred, Andy picked up the phone the moment Harley went to bed and dialed her youngest. Despite the hour, she knew Ian would be up, probably rehearsing. She was relieved when he didn’t answer.

  “Ian, it’s Mom,” she said to the recorder. “I know your audit is coming up soon, and I wanted to ask you how things were going. You know, see if you want me to come to Nashville. Or . . . anyway, give me a call.”

  The offer to come to Nashville was probably as transparent as it was disingenuous. She knew her son was beyond wanting or needing his mother holding his hand, even for a federal government cross-examination. Still, Andy had convinced herself that it might draw attention away from the fact that she had completely forgotten to call Ian and see how things were going.

  By the next morning, the-writer-formerly-known-as-Andy-Bravos had decided to put her parental failings and functions behind her and see if she could spec out an outline for the Emma Linde story that might provide the bones for a treatment. As she did, Andy tried valiantly to ignore the obvious: Harley had, once again, neglected to get up and go to school. She managed to pass his door several times without knocking, reminding herself that he was an adult, that she was not his mother, and that being anybody’s mother right now was a big pain in the ass.

  She was deep into a computer search of British Intelligence activities during World War II, when the doorbell rang. Pulling herself out of the previous century and about to descend the staircase to see who was at the door, Andy nearly collided with her unshaven, semi-unconscious nephew, who was trundling down the steps in front of her.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “It’s UPS,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard the truck outside my window.”

  “Are you expecting something?” she called, as she let him take the lead.

  “No, but I figure you must be,” he called back.

  She stopped mid-flight and shouted, “You can’t answer the door looking so slovenly.”

  “What?”

  But she gave up because he had already rounded the corner to the entry and was opening the door.

  “It’s from your P.I.,” he announced, climbing back up the stairs and clutching an envelope with the anticipation of an addict awaiting his next fix. “This is the stuff about Uncle Mark, right?”

  “About his wife,” Andy said.

  “Can I open it?”

  “No. Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  “I’m taking the day off.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you. Because I’m deeply disappointed.”

  “I don’t think that qualifies as an excuse.”

  “This is college. I don’t need to bring an excuse. Can I see what he found, Aunt Andy?”

  “You’re still in your boxers.”

  “Promise you won’t open it until I get back.”

  “I don’t make those kinds of promises.”

  “Please.”

  “You are pissing me off, Harley.”

  “I’ll be right back. Just try to wait. Please!”

  He tore up the steps to his room. She followed him, headed for her office, determined to open the package without him. There was a principle involved here, even if she couldn’t think what it was. She plopped down into her desk chair and prepared to rip open the mailer. The phone rang. She grabbed the receiver with one hand and the package tab with the other.

  “Hello?”

  “Mom?”

  She stopped mid-pull.

  “Hi, Ian! I’m so glad you got my message.”

  “Yeah. I was kind of surprised. You don’t call much.”

  “Right. Sorry, honey. I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

  “I’m doing fine, Mom.”

  “With the IRS audit, I mean. It’s when?”

  “Next Monday. Downtown on Broadway.”

  “Are you going alone?”

  “Alone?”

  “I mean, is your CPA going with you?”

  “Nah. He’s already talked to the IRS agent. We definitely made a mistake about that avocado orchard investment. I have to go myself. To find out about the fine and to draw up a payment schedule.”

  “Are you okay with that?”

  “Well, I guess. I mean, I don’t really have much choice.”

  “Okay, but you don’t mind going in alone? Do you want me to come?”

  “No. Really. I don’t want you to come, Mom.”

  She waited for a ridiculous moment, hoping he might thank her for her offer to fly out and stand by him, all the time knowing full well she had never intended to do it. God, she really needed therapy.

  When he said nothing, she dove back into the utter silence. “Okay. I was just checking in, you know.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I’m fine.”

  Andy searched for what to say next. With Mitch and the girls, the conversations were always bursting at the seams. With Ian, they often just dried up for lack of content.

  “Well, maybe you could call me when it’s over,” she suggested. “Just to let me know how it went.”

  “Okay. Sure,” he said. “Was that all? Because we’re rehearsing . . .”

  “No. That’s it, Ian. Just checking in.”

  “Well, thanks, Mom.”

  “Love you, honey.”

  “You, too, Mom.”

  She hung up, feeling as if she had just compounded her initial failure.

  “Holy shit!” Harley shouted.

  Andy jumped and swiveled her chair around. She wasn’t sure whether she was more surprised he had sneaked into the room or that he’d just uttered his first ‘shit.’

  Harley was sitting on the floor directly behind her, looking like a puddle of flesh that had been poured into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, his bare feet protruding from the denim. The papers from the envelope he had appropriated without her noticing were scattered across the carpet around him.

  Eyelids pulled straight up and pupils open for business, he stared at her. “You should see this, Aunt Andy. That woman, Tilda, she’s just like Uncle Mark.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “She’s been married four times, too.”

  That hardly seemed possible. “I thought she was only thirty-five.”

  “Thirty-eight. But here’s the weird thing. In this report, your guy, Larry O’Dowd, says there’s no record she was ever divorced.”

  “From her last husband?”

  “No. From any of them.”

  Chapter 15

  An Obvious Observation

  When you put the marriages together, Harley calculated as he shuffled through the papers, she could have called herself Tilda Trivette Levin Pacheco Andropoulos Kornacky.

  “It’s like one of those all-you-can-eat places,” he said.

  “A matrimonial smorgasbord,” Andy agreed. “Who in the hell is this woman?”

  Larry O’Dowd’s research showed that the apparently polygamous Tilda Trivette had been born in Oklahoma and married there twice before the age of thirty. Then she moved to Texas, where she married twice more. Each marriage certificate contained only her maiden name, Trivette, as well as an identical social security number. Andy wondered why neither state had noticed the double marriages. Larry surmised there were no children from these marriages because he had run checks on live births in the two states using Tilda’s singular SSN. Besides the marriages, there were records of Tilda’s driver’s licenses and a speeding ticket in Texas. More interesting were the results of title searches Larry O’Dowd made in each state. Evidently, Tilda owned both property and automobiles with her three previous husbands, and all of these had been sold—in chronological order.

  Andy sat on the floor beside Harley, sorting through the papers and oddly grateful to have someone with whom to share the P.I.’s pile of incongruities.

  “Did you notice the age thing, Andy?”

  Her nephew had suddenly dropped the customary ‘aunt’, with the same ease he had added the u
ncustomary ‘shit.’ Were these omens that she and Harley were reaching a new frontier in their relationship? Andy wasn’t all that sure she wanted to go there.

  “The age thing?”

  “On the marriage certificates. All of these guys are over sixty. See?”

  “Hmm.” Andy hadn’t noticed. Score one for the doughboy.

  “She definitely has a type,” he said.

  Her ex-husband fit Tilda’s type to a T.

  “Okay. If they were all over sixty, maybe they died, and that would explain why she never got divorced,” Andy posited. “Maybe Larry didn’t look at death certificates.”

  “But he did! He mentions it in the summary. There are no death certificates in either state for any of these guys.”

  “Let me see the summary,” she said.

  He reached for a piece of paper he was holding in place with his big toe.

  Unheralded, the word ‘fungus’ suddenly crossed her cranial landscape. Andy suppressed the accompanying image and grabbed the paper. “And you either get yourself a pedicure or put on a pair of shoes. Now!”

  Reluctantly, Harley pulled himself off the floor and went to do something about his naked feet.

  The P.I.’s summary was succinct and a little depressing: Tilda, not unlike Mark, was a serial spouse. The palm reader had made it her habit to marry older men, jointly hold their property, and avoid having children or at least any record of them. But, unlike Mark, Tilda Trivette had never bothered with divorce before making her next trip down the aisle. It was, as they say in Siam, a puzzlement.

  When Harley returned in a pair of Converse—no socks—he cut right to the conundrum. “This makes no sense, Andy,” he said with irksome collegiality. “What would it take to get Larry to follow up on some of this stuff?”

  “Either another set of Pings or a trip to Augusta National,” she speculated. “In either case, I can’t afford it.”

  “I guess he didn’t find any record of where Tilda and Mark are now, huh?”

  He had decided to drop the ‘uncle’, as well, she noted. “I guess not. He said he was going to try to get a friend to run her credit card statements, but maybe he couldn’t make that happen. Anyway, he doesn’t mention it in his report.”

  “Well, maybe I can find something.”

  “What do you mean?” Andy asked.