Concrete Angel

by Patricia Abbott

  Nobody said anything. The apartment we stood in was curiously empty. Mother had pretty much destroyed the things she’d had in the house with Mickey. Our home was Spartan, for once: no fish, no glitter, no African violets, no hula dancers on the wall.

  “You’d think you’d have some interest in finding out what your problem is and solving it.” He whipped around. “Or that you’d want to know what’s wrong with her, Adele. You must be up to your eyeballs in her crap.”

  “I…” my grandmother started to say, but Mother interrupted.

  “I’m done with it, Hank. Give me a break.” Mother paced the floor, a cigarette hanging from her lips. “What do you care? It’s not on your head anymore. Last time I was in trouble, my one call wasn’t to you.”

  “Look, it’s none of my damned business what job you take on, but if you go to jail again—even for a night—I’ll ask for, and get, custody of Christine. She can spend her final year at home in my house. It’d probably be the best year of her life—free of you and your shenanigans. My tolerance is running out.” He laughed. “That’s not true. It ran out years ago. But…”

  This was a startling statement. Never once had I heard him express the slightest interest in taking me in. Was it really me who’d stood in the way of his complete desertion of Eve Moran? I’d always wondered if I reminded him too much of my mother. Did he see me as her willing accomplice in crime?

  He confirmed my idea at once. “Christine’s out of it soon enough, but I don’t know what will happen to Ryan. Poor little fellow.”

  I looked at my brother, vowing nothing bad would happen to him. And Daddy couldn’t have him. I might not be sure about who his father was, but his mother was definitively mine. Ryan was ours until he declared otherwise himself.

  “Don’t you think I know all this?” Mother stubbed out her cigarette. “What kind a job did you think I’d get with my experience? Model, actress, editor of Cosmo.” I waved the smoke away, wondering why she’d taken to smoking again when the rest of the world had quit. “I’ve no real employment record and several smirches needing explaining. You couldn’t erase all of it apparently.”

  “You think you can control the thieving?” Daddy sounded weary but almost ready to believe her. This was their pattern after all. Pretend it’s okay and maybe it will be. “You never have yet.”

  “I know I can. I managed to stop completely—this last year or two.” Her eyelids fluttered.

  I could tell when she was lying about seventy-five percent of the time. Mostly when it wasn’t my eyes she was looking into. At those times, a sort of hypnosis took place.

  “With Mickey,” she unnecessarily explained. “I tried.”

  Was she counting the return to the return business? Was that what was lurking in her eyes?

  Daddy sighed. “I’ve half-a-mind to call The Philadelphia House and tell them about you. Stop it before it starts—before you wind up in jail. Disgracing us all yet again.”

  “Then bump up the little bit of money you send us. If you do, I’ll call the hotel and quit. I’d certainly prefer to stay home with my children. Be a mother—”

  Daddy waved his hand. “Please, Eve. Have a little pride. I’ll increase your support somewhat if you promise you won’t take anything out of those hotel rooms. Not even a discarded magazine. If you get the urge to steal something, quit immediately and get the hell out of Dodge. Right? Promise? Isn’t Mickey kicking in some support for Ryan?” Mother shrugged.

  Daddy didn’t have to do this. Perhaps custody of me was such a turnoff he was willing to put some dough on the line to head it off. “Deal?”

  “I’ll quit the first time I’m tempted.”

  She said it too quickly, and we all avoided looking at one another. But there were only so many places to look.

  She kept her word though. Five days a week for the next two months, she dropped Ryan off at Grandmother’s house at five-thirty a.m. and took the train downtown. I got myself off to school an hour later. When I got home from school, she and Ryan were already back home— takeout, or something my grandmother made, on the table. It might work out—despite her daily litany of complaints.

  “The nicest couples you can imagine, Christine, community pillars, elders at the church, presidents of the ladies circle—all of them check into a respectable hotel like The Philadelphia House, and proceed to do strange, sometimes unspeakable, things,” she’d say, and start out with mild stories about bodily and other fluids she found every day: “urine, mucus, saliva, semen, coffee, blood, breast milk, booze— stuff I can’t identify.”

  I’d grit my teeth as she continued. “An elderly couple from the Midwest, I think, ripped their sheets to shreds last night.” Or, “I found toenail clippings in the bed sheets this morning, nearly cut my hand on them.” Or, “I walked in on two naked boys passed out on the bathroom floor. A gagged girl was in their bathtub. When I helped her out, she laughed and said this would teach her not to drink tequila.” Another time. “There were four of them, crammed into the one bed with another bed not two feet away. They’d torn the curtains from the rod for some reason, had the air set at fifty-five degrees. I thought they were dead for a minute. A mass-suicide pact. Can you imagine calling it in to the front desk?” She giggled. ‘“Only on my floor,’ the damned man I work for would say. He’s convinced I’m a bad luck charm.”

  “And oddest of all,” she began, making me shiver, “are the couples who leave no signs of their occupancy. They remake the bed, clean the bathroom, polish every surface. What’re they hiding beneath the cleanliness?” She shrugged. “I get one every week or two, and I turn on the TV and take a good rest when I walk into the room. Sometimes they even leave a big tip. Probably they’re harmless neurotics, but you never know.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  I could easily imagine a finicky guest not trusting the cleaning techniques of the average hotel maid, who’d been taught speed was most important. Mistrust of hotel cleanliness must be especially common since the Legionnaire’s Disease.

  “Oh, yeah, real interesting. The job is like a college education. Last week, I did fourteen rooms in one day. Including two suites. At least, I’m catching up on the soaps. That’s how most of them learn English, you know.”

  “Them?”

  “The chambermaids I work with. I’m the only native English speaker on the staff. So patrons always look for me in the hallway to tell me their light bulb needs changing or their pillow isn’t fluffy enough. I’m thinking of saying, ‘Hola’ to conceal it. Some of them are from the islands. Poorer countries. Speaking English is probably what gave me a leg up on getting this job. Oh, I’m talented all right.”

  We were in her bed with Ryan between us, watching Mike Douglas on TV. She fluffed her pillow, saying, “I’d think twice before staying in a hotel after this job. Especially the cheaper chains. You should hear the stories the girls tell. Lots of ‘em have worked at place like the Bates Motel.”

  “But you get good tips, right?” I stroked Ryan’s cheek, and he turned his head as if to find a breast waiting. Mother noticed and laughed. “That’s one thing he still has to come to me for, Christine.” Ryan was over a year old and I wondered why she still breastfed.

  If she pumped though, he didn’t know the difference. He liked me to feed him. I eyed the two enviously as they snuggled. She held a certain allure for him, I couldn’t quite match. “And the tips?” I repeated.

  Mother generally didn’t discuss money with me, but her ire at this injustice opened her mouth. “I’m lucky to get twenty dollars a night and I do twelve rooms most days. Sometimes more.”

  I wasn’t sure what her salary was. “Still, with your salary and what Daddy gives us we can make it, right? It’s not so bad. I’ve been filling out college applications…”

  “I can’t do it forever, Christine. My back aches and my shoulders are nearly paralyzed by the end of the shift from holding up the mattress to get those sheets tucked tight.” To prove her point, she lifted her ar
m as if a twenty-pound weight rested on it. “We have a protocol on bed making and square corners are a must. They actually do sporadic checks. There’s gotta be some easier way to make a living.” My heart sank. I could think of some easier ways and knew she could too.

  Mother never went long without male companionship. She met Bud Pelgrave in the Philadelphia House’s hotel bar a few weeks later.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked, minutes after she slid onto the red leatherette stool two seats away. He was tall, skinny, and had thinning salt and pepper hair worn in a pony tail. No exactly her usual type, but he had a way about him. Cocky, glib. He’d do in a pinch. He was wearing blue scrubs, but they didn’t look like a doctor’s. Lab tech?

  She’d decided to get a drink at the bar after an unusually hard day. The hotel was shorthanded and didn’t maintain much of a list of backup help. Adele wouldn’t mind watching Ryan a little longer. Half the time, Eve arrived at her mother’s house in the middle of his nap and was made to cool her heels while Ryan finished sleeping. Déjà vu from the days when Christine’d been in her care. And now Christine was trying to horn in too. Her kid didn’t fool her.

  Eve thought she deserved a drink, and the first drink for hotel employees was often free if the right bartender was working. He was.

  “Got it covered,” Tom, the barkeep, told her skinny companion when he saw him pulling out a billfold. His voice was brusque. It was obvious Tom didn’t like the fellow. Eve wondered whether there was a reason for it.

  “Know each other?” she asked, her eyes sweeping back and forth.

  Each man had the same clenched-jawed look, the same twitchy eyes. Both shook their head. Perhaps Tom had a crush on her. She hadn’t considered this before. He had to be under thirty, and his shoes were scuffed when he walked over to a table to clear it.

  When Tom went to attend to another customer, she took a careful sip of the gin and tonic, looking the new guy over more openly. She winced; Tom had apparently decided to impress her with the strongest drink he could make. She set it down carefully, pacing herself but remembering, somewhat fondly, when she drank like this all the time. Lesson learned. The smell of the lime was the nicest thing about it.

  The guy with the ponytail noticed her sniffing. “Best smell in the world, isn’t it?”

  “The booze or the lime?”

  “Well, what’s one without the other?” They both laughed. Click.

  “Second best smell anyway,” she said.

  “And the first?”

  “Cut grass.”

  “Gasoline. But grass isn’t bad either. And if you cut it with a power motor, well, you get both. Like a gin and tonic.” He took a swig of his beer. “Bud Pelgrave.” He didn’t smile or hold out a hand, and she didn’t offer hers.

  “Eve… Moran.” She’d used Mickey’s name for more than two years despite having no legal claim to it, but returning to Moran was easier than she’d expected.

  “You don’t act too sure of your moniker. Have a purse full of fake IDs there?” His eyes shot to her lap where her handbag nestled. “Hey, you’re not trouble, are you?” He said it like he was hoping she was.

  “Not lately,” she said sadly. Recently all she did was clean hotel rooms and dream about her yesterdays. No need to tell him this though. Not yet, at least. She carried herself like a hotel patron and would act like one. She put on her best smile.

  And so it began. Bud Pelgrave entered her life.

  “I can get you a job as a personal housekeeper, secretary. Something cushy,” Bud Pelgrave told her a few weeks later. “It’d be lot easier than this gig. This job’s for wetbacks.” He was lying on a guest bed on the 10th floor of The Philadelphia House, watching her go through her routine. “You already dusted the phone, honey.”

  “It’s grimy. And you’re distracting me, Bud. I told you to come over at four and it’s not three-thirty. You shouldn’t be here…”

  She looked around warily, wondering if the room might be bugged. Examples of her inadequacies as a chambermaid kept coming up when she ran into her boss punching out. Maybe there was a video device somewhere. On her cart? Or, more likely, inside the TV. It’d be like Mr. Duggan to install expensive surveillance equipment at the same time he claimed poverty if anyone asked for a fifty-cent an hour raise.

  Bud glanced at his watch. “Place is deserted, Babe. Let up a little. The room is clean.” He struggled to sit, putting another pillow behind him. “Look, here’s the thing I came early to tell you—just occurred to me today. I run into old guys who need help all the time at work. They’re completely lost once their wives go—one way or the other. I can introduce you to one of ‘em. They’ll probably pay you more than you earn here if only to listen to their life story, flash a pretty smile.” He paused. “Mostly that’s what I do—just listen. Lots of ‘em seem more lonely than sick.” He closed his eyes and settled back into the pillows. “This mattress stinks. Sleep on this bed a few nights and I’ll be needing my own services. Maybe I can make a deal with the hotel. Or stick a card under the doors.”

  “This room’s scheduled for refurbishing so a new mattress is on the way. Whole floor is. They’ll bump the rates to pay for it. Same rooms on Floors 1-5 are ten dollars more a night.” She stopped what she was doing. “Don’t you do exercises to prevent back pain? Leaning over a massage table all day long must be murder.” She knew because she did this herself—leaned over beds half the day. “Isn’t there some reciprocal arrangement with one of your pals?”

  Bud was an acupuncturist and ran a practice touting the benefits of vitamin therapy, acupuncture, relaxation tapes, massage—all the stuff beginning to flood the market. Lots of stressed-out people turned up at his practice once they’d exhausted everything else, or when their medical plan wouldn’t cough up the dough for a legitimate orthopedist. Bud didn’t have a degree in anything requiring state licensing, but it didn’t stop him from hanging a vaguely worded sign above his office on a side street in Manayunk. A mail-order degree in one of the new-age procedures from a non-disclosed school permitted him to call himself Doctor. His greatest talent was in the art of persuasion.

  Sometimes his clients or patients did get better, mostly due to either the passage of time or the placebo effect. He was careful not to fool with someone genuinely ill. Careful not to charge too much or make too many promises. His disposition could be quite pleasing when he set his mind to it. He was a good listener—or knew how to appear so.

  Sometimes he fooled her until he was forced by some circumstance or other to admit he hadn’t heard a word she’d said.

  “Learned how to listen as a kid. My mother never stopped talking. She was a hairdresser, and I used to clean the place after she closed. Sweep the floor, clean the combs, untangle cords. And all the time, gab, gab, gab as she sat in her chair and drank a six-pack.”

  Eve saw through the snake oil pitch immediately but liked Bud for other reasons. Most of the men she knew were like Bud. Even Hank, to some extent. Had Hank not had access to his parents’ money, he’d probably been forced into something dicey. Certainly Mickey DiSantis was similar to Bud, selling used cars where the speedometers were turned back and the damage carefully masked. Mickey’s boss had a process to temporarily hide rust, for instance. It bled through within weeks, especially in wet weather, but the legal papers the customer blindly signed took care of things. She pushed thoughts of Mickey out of her head.

  “Gonna smooth that out before we go?” she asked, emptying the wastepaper basket and shooting him a look. “The bedspread, I mean.” He sighed. “And watch out for your shoes, Buddy. It’s hard to get scuff marks off the fabric.” She shook her head. “The world’s still bonkers for polyester. They haven’t caught on yet. You should see how nasty cigarette burns look on that sheen. I bet the place goes up like a torch some night.”

  “You sound like a regular little hausfrau, Eve. Dispensing housekeeping information like Erma Bombeck.” Bud jumped up and gave the spread a swipe. “See, no wrinkles at all. I
t’s magic.”

  He sang it like the old Sinatra song. Most of the men in her life were Sinatra fans. Maybe she was attracted to this one type of guy and would choose him over and over again until one of them murdered her. Or she killed him. Whoops, no, she’d done that already. What had his name been?

  “That’s its one asset. Polyester,” she said when he looked blankly at her.

  “You could drive a car over it and not make a crease.”

  “So why you buggin’ me?”

  “I don’t know. It makes me tense having you in here. Like it or not, I need this damned job. The doofus, Duggan, shows and finds you here, I’m toast.”

  “Duggan’s probably nailin’ one of the Latinas in a room down the hall.”

  “Hardly. His wife has him on a six-inch leash.”

  “You’d be surprised how much wiggle room six inches gives you.”

  “Very funny.”

  Bud stalked around the room, picking things, examining them, and putting them back in the wrong spot. “Come on, old girl. This room was clean ten minutes ago.” He raised and lowered his shoulders impatiently. “I’m getting the idea you’re trying to avoid me.”

  She wiped the wastepaper basket off, placing it under the desk. If it were up to her, they’d put plastic bags in those trash baskets. There was always a coating of dust or grime or sticky stuff inside from the crap people pitched. God, she was beginning to think like her mother. Spend too much time on wifely duties and shit happened.

  “Looks tacky,” Mr. Duggan told her when she mentioned her idea about bag inserts. “Plus an added cost. Just wipe ‘em down.” He demonstrated the proper method on a trashcan already pristine, his eyes narrowing with attention. “Hotel’s already paying you, right?” He shook his head like she’d suggested something crazy.