The Cotton Queen

by Pamela Morsi

  “I don’t know what I was thinking of,” she said. “I should have at least brought some of the china and crystal. Robert will get nothing for it at the pawn broker’s. And there were pictures and books, so much I should have gathered up.”

  “Well, you did the best you could and at least you are safe.”

  I was struck by how much my words sounded like something I would have expressed at the Center.

  “I even left my SoupKids salt and pepper,” Laney said. “And I’ve had them since we first moved in with Aunt Maxine. They are the only thing that’s been with me all this time. Well, except for you.”

  Except for me.

  “Maybe it was time to let them go,” I told her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe so. Have you ever been back by there?”

  “Where?”

  “The duplex.”

  “No, never.”

  And at the time I told her that, I never would have imagined doing so. But as the weeks passed I began to be intrigued with the idea of revisiting the scene of the crime. I imagined myself stealing back the power that the place had robbed from me.

  LANEY

  LANEY RACHEL MAXINE JERROD was born on January 8, 1988, in McKinney Medical Center. I made some comment about having three eights in her birthday so Doris brought me a paperback from the drugstore on numerology.

  “Eight means new life, new beginnings,” she said.

  I smiled at her, pretending to be pleased, but it was hard to feel that way. I’d failed at marriage, failed at a career, failed at my life outside McKinney. And now I was back here, living off my mother and bringing a child into the world to live with me in my girlhood bedroom.

  My relationship with Babs was better than it had been in years and I was grateful for that. I needed her and she stepped up to help without a word of complaint. But that wasn’t enough to make me content.

  I wanted my old life back. I wanted my stressful, thankless job, my distracted addicted husband. I wanted my foreclosed house in West University. But that was all gone.

  Acee handled the divorce for me. He handled it way too efficiently from my perspective. Somehow I’d imagined that there would be lots of face-to-face confrontations and disputes, that opportunities for long discussions and an airing of my grievances would occur. And then finally, at long last, we would face each other across a courtroom.

  None of that happened.

  I asked Acee to file my petition. The next time we discussed it, the divorce was final.

  I remember the moment with almost inhuman clarity. It was midmorning in Babs’s living room. Acee was spreading the papers out on the coffee table. Rachel was contentedly rocking back and forth in her little swing. The tinny strains of “The Farmer in the Dell” were playing as a background score. Hi-ho, the derry-o, you are now divorced.

  “How can it happen so fast?” I asked him.

  “Both of you were agreeable to it,” he said. “And there was nothing to contend. No remaining assets and Robert’s biggest concern was that he was not going to owe you big child-support payments. I told him basically what you told me. That you weren’t as interested in his money as much as his relationship with his child. And that he needs to be free of drugs for any visitation.”

  I nodded. “What did Robert say about that?”

  Acee hesitated a moment and my heart sank.

  “He says he’ll pay the minimum,” Acee answered. “He’s not interested in having contact with the baby at this time.”

  Acee spoke the words in a brusque, businesslike manner as if getting through them quickly would hurt a lot less.

  So that was it. My marriage was over. My dream was gone. But there was Rachel and she needed me, so I had no option for quitting or hiding. I had a child to raise. I may not have felt like getting up in the morning, but breast-feeding every four hours certainly limits one’s ability to wallow in a grand funk.

  “Thanks, Acee,” I said to him. “It’s a good thing that you still think you’re my stepfather, ’cause I sure can’t afford to pay you for your services.”

  “You just gave me my first granddaughter,” he said. “That’s more riches than any bank could ever hold.”

  I knew he meant it. He was a real schmaltz, baby-talking, goo-goo, ga-ga kind of guy. He was Rachel’s number one fan.

  “There is one thing that you could do for me,” he said.

  “Anything,” I responded.

  “Dorrie’s not been well,” he said. “She’s so tired, she doesn’t really have the energy to get about town or come visit you. If you’d visit her occasionally, it would mean a lot to me.”

  “Sure,” I told him.

  I was surprised. I hadn’t realized that Doris was sick. But it became clear to me over the next few months that she was more than just tired. Her lethargy was virtually debilitating and she ran mysterious low-grade fevers two, sometimes three times a week. This went on for months and months. The doctors were stumped. They ran tests for everything from meningitis to dengue fever. Finally they settled on her liver.

  “It’s some new kind of hepatitis,” she explained to me as I drove her home from the doctor. Rachel was hungry and shrieking in her car seat. “It’s not Hepatitis A or Hepatitis B. So they’re calling it Hepatitis, non-A, non-B. Isn’t that funny?”

  I didn’t know if it was funny, but Doris was so upbeat I was encouraged.

  “So they can treat this non-A, non-B stuff,” I said.

  She shrugged. “They don’t know much about it, truly,” she said. “But it’s definitely not cancer, so that’s a big relief. I was really afraid that it was cancer.”

  The fevers were from peritonitis, a result of decreased liver function. Once that was treated, Doris began to feel significantly better. But she continued to have lots of weird, unanticipated symptoms and Rachel and I spent more and more time over at her house.

  That was just as well. Because Babs was never home.

  I understood that my mother worked for a living. I’d had a career myself, I knew that it took a lot of hours. The events firm that she worked for had decided at long last to open its second store. The original idea was to locate it in Plano. But as suburban growth crept ever northward, Babs convinced them that McKinney was the best place.

  This should have meant she was home more. Certainly she was putting in a lot of time getting the business off the ground, but at least she shouldn’t be commuting back and forth to Dallas.

  Unfortunately she still was.

  Babs refused to give up her part-time job with the Rape Crisis Center. She was putting in long hours in McKinney and then commuting downtown to put in more time at the Center. It was crazy and I told her so.

  “I know the Center is important to you, Babs. But you have a granddaughter,” I said, stating the obvious. “Any other woman your age would want to spend some time with her.”

  “I do want to spend time with her,” Babs said. “And I hate missing anything she does. But I have other priorities, as well. Rachel has her mommy with her. And I’m pretty certain that this is one of those circumstances when I’m not going to come out well either way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I saw her more you’d accuse me of hovering,” she said. “So I see her less and you accuse me of being neglectful. This is just one of these times when I’m not going to be able to do the right thing, no matter what.”

  “You always manage to make it about you, don’t you, Babs,” I said.

  She chuckled derisively and shook her head. “I’m paying the bills around here, Ms. Mom-Of-The-Year,” she said. “I’m making it possible for you to be a full-time mother and I’m not interfering in your life. You should thank your lucky stars and not try to change a thing.”

  She did have a point. I was feeling annoyed at our role reversal. I loved motherhood. I loved Rachel. I wanted to be with my baby. But I was also feeling a little cheated. Babs was supposed to be the Betty Crocker housewife, the 1950s mom who stayed home and baked. I wa
s the hard-bitten career woman. I was supposed to be a mover and shaker. I was going to make CEO before I was forty. Now she was off to work in her power suits and I was stuck at home scraping oatmeal off the ceiling.

  I talked to Aunt Maxine about it.

  “You can’t have everything,” she told me. “Lots of young women these days think they can. But I always worked. I had to. You don’t have to work all the time to keep your hand in.”

  In the spring after Rachel turned two, I approached Pete about a job.

  “I could use you,” he admitted. “We’re under phenomenal growth pressure. And a person with your qualifications as a part-time employee would be a great asset to the company.”

  I’d get no benefits, no insurance, no stock options, no bonuses. But I could limit my work schedule to two mornings a week while Rachel attended the Mother’s Day Out at the Presbyterian church.

  It was sort of like leaving her with family. Nicie was the childcare supervisor. Brian had walked out on her and she had three kids to support. Still optimistic and upbeat, she doted on Rachel as much as her own little ones. And Rachel was one of the few toddlers who waved goodbye to her mom without any fuss at all.

  I loved being back at work, even if it was only ten hours a week. It forced me to slim down enough to fit into my business wardrobe and encouraged me to be consistent with Rachel on potty training. Both of us profited from the effort.

  Pete’s company had grown into a huge campus of modern glassy buildings that abutted the expressway. Their innovative software had made commercial applications on the Internet quick and easy. They were now into dot-com merchandising programs in a big way. I was not all that familiar with the Internet or computers generally. But I was able and willing to learn. And, as always, I found my forte in the company’s crumby cleanup. I was always able to find work that was unglamorous enough not to tempt anyone else.

  Pete seemed pleased with my efforts.

  I’d only been working there a few months when I was in the main building one morning, waiting for the elevator to come down from the executive level. When the doors opened, I stepped inside and did a double take at the occupant already there. The face was familiar, but the expensive suit and good haircut were not.

  “Laney,” he said, his voice deeper than I remembered.

  “Stanley? Is that you?”

  He chuckled. “Only you and my mother would still call me Stanley,” he said. “You look good.”

  “Thanks, so do you,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was upstairs talking to your cousin Pete,” he said. “Trying to sell him some computers.”

  “Oh, you’re a computer salesman,” I said. “I guess that explains the great suit.”

  There was a flash of something in his expression and then it disappeared. And he gifted me with that wonderful grin that I remembered from the day of the Cotton Days Parade.

  “You like the suit,” he said. “I guess it is a great improvement over the blue jeans and plaid shirts of high school.”

  I nodded, but the smile had caught me up short. A flood of memories had assailed me, centering around that kiss, that one fabulous kiss that the two of us had shared that day. The thought of it had sent a jolt of sexual energy through my body and had me staring at the man’s lips and feeling like my panty hose were way too tight.

  Jeez, Laney, get a grip! I admonished myself. It had obviously been way too long since I’d had sex, if the confines of an elevator could suddenly give me the hots for some guy I hadn’t seen for well over a decade.

  “So, are you married, Stanley?”

  I wished I could have cut my tongue out for asking the question.

  “Divorced,” he answered.

  “Me, too.”

  “I know,” he said.

  There was an uncomfortable moment of silence between us.

  “Maybe we could grab a cup of coffee sometime,” I said.

  “Or dinner,” he suggested. “Would you like that? I could take you to dinner.”

  “Yeah, yeah, that would be great,” I said. The elevator stopped and the door opened. “Let me give you my number.” I began scrambling through the folders in my arms, trying to come up with a scrap to write a note. I managed to drop a whole sheaf of papers. When I bent down to grab them, I lost my Day-Timer and my pager. Stanley squatted down to pick up everything. I hurried to help and managed to hit him in the head with my purse.

  I felt like an idiot and I was acting like one. We were in the middle of a very busy office building. The building where I worked. Our heads just inches apart I realized I was easily just one brain cell away from jumping his bones right there in the elevator.

  “You’re living with your mother, right?” he said.

  “Right.”

  He handed me the last of my fallen valuables.

  “I’m sure her number is in the phone book,” he said. “I’ll give you a call.”

  I replayed the entire encounter a dozen times in my brain as I drove over to pick up Rachel. I was a complete moron, plus being a sex-crazed maniac. What kind of desperate divorcée had I become that I had the hots for the biggest nerd in McKinney High School?

  I related the encounter to Nicie with most of the relevant detail.

  “I’m so sex starved,” I admitted with self-deprecation, “that I practically attack the first single man I see, even if he is the local dweeb.”

  “Stan Kuhl is not a dweeb,” she said. “He’s the most eligible guy in town.”

  “Stanley?” I was incredulous.

  “My God! Don’t tell me you don’t know,” Nicie said, clearly astounded.

  “I don’t know what?”

  “Come here,” she said and had me follow her into the church office. “Look.” She pointed to the desk. There was nothing there but a mess of papers and a computer.

  “What?” I asked her.

  She tapped on the metallic logo pressed onto the front of the monitor. My attention focused on it for the first time. It read: Kuhl Computers.

  BABS

  THE YEAR AFTER Laney moved home and Rachel was born I took off with a wish of good luck and a shoestring budget to open the McKinney branch of Ardith Eden Events. Expecting nothing less than hard work and long hours, I started scrounging up local business. Amazingly I was good at it. All those friends and acquaintances I’d made during my years as a local social climber and celebrated hostess had evolved into an impressive contact list. I knew everyone and everything, including who needed parties and programs and a planner to put them together.

  Mostly it was small gatherings with few expectations and not much budget. But from time to time, a really good job would come my way.

  It wasn’t she-crab soup at the country club, but I did manage to put together a corporate retreat for the city, where they had managers from big companies in town for a weekend to be wined and dined and shown the advantages of locating or relocating part of their business on the McKinney corridor. It was a lot of hard work and the city’s outlay for it barely covered my expenses, but it was my own operation and, at the worst, I got to show off for the people I might work for if they did choose McKinney.

  Over the years I expended much of my energy building a business and a reputation. And I was enjoying it. I tried not to neglect my home life. It felt good to have Laney home. We were closer than we’d been for decades, even if our mother/daughter relationship continued to have its challenges.

  And my Rachel, she was a delight. It’s amazing how, when you have your own baby, you think that it is impossible to love any other child in the world that much. But when you become a grandparent, you find out differently. There is all that tremendous wash of love and devotion you felt for your own baby. But with none of the worry, anxiety and responsibility that weighs so heavily upon parents.

  I loved little Rachel as I had Laney. But when I got up and got ready to leave in the morning, I could kiss her goodbye without so much as a thought as to what her day would be like. Her mother w
ould keep her safe and warm and fed. She’d see that she learned her colors and her numbers and how to navigate across the back lawn without falling in the fishpond.

  Laney consistently said that she wanted me to spend more time at home, that she wanted me to do more babysitting, that she wanted me to stop working so much.

  She may have actually believed that was what she wanted. But I thought differently. From my perspective, the only way that the two of us could ever manage to share that house without killing each other, was for one of us to have someplace else to go.

  At first, it was just me running off and leaving the house and all its operations in her care. Once she started part-timing for Pete, we shared more responsibility. But I wouldn’t cut back on my schedule. The McKinney branch of Events was just beginning to really pay off. And I was certainly not willing to give up my work at Rape Crisis. I continued to spend countless hours coordinating promotions and doing events planning for them. Most of these efforts were off the clock. I spent far more time and effort than anything they actually had budgeted. I saw this organization as my mission. It was a way that I could turn all the negative energy that surrounded my rape into a positive force to help someone else. I was completely unwilling to give that up.

  I was there at the Crisis Center office one cold, drizzly winter day working out the details on a huge golf event for which we were one of the recipient charities. Analisse was helping me.

  “We’re going to need to switch caterers,” I told her. “These guys are not going to be able to bring this in on bid. I think we should go with Grimaldi.”

  “You’re the one who knows about this stuff,” she said.

  I nodded. “I need him to commit now,” I said. “And, naturally, his shop doesn’t answer. It sure would be nice if everybody had cellular phones and not just me.”

  “It’ll never happen,” she said. “People like their privacy too much. Why don’t you see if you can find his home number. At worst you can leave a message on his answering machine.”