“Well, Mother, if this doesn’t work, you can take your case to the president.”
Her eyes glazed over and the biggest smile swept across her face . To see a grown, married woman with a crush,well, it border-lined on just plain sad.“Oh, I just love him, don’t you?”
“Well, I have some amazing news for you,” I said shamelessly.
Her brown eyes danced, as she clasped her bound hands together.“Bigger than Rita Cosby?”
I let my eyes get as big as her own and spoke as if to a five-year-old.“Yes, ma’am, bigger than Rita Cosby . You,my sweet lady, are going to get to see the president on Friday. He’s coming here.”
My mother screamed in sheer delight. “Bushie is going to be here on Friday?” She started to run her hands through her hair and over her wrinkled pants. It was a woeful attempt to fix herself up.
“No,” I responded. “The president of the United States of America is going to be here on Friday. Bushie is the pet name of a wife for her husband.”
Then she grabbed her chest.“Savannah, don’t play with me. If you’re playing a joke, I’ll whip you from here to South Carolina.”
“I’m not.” I laughed, though the thought of her whipping me was not attractive . This woman used a flyswatter, the most disgusting thing imaginable to discipline a child with . You wouldn’t think this antibacterial champion would want children with fly innards attached to their tails going around town . Thomas was still scarred from his last encounter with it. He was thirteen and in the shower and showing a bad attitude, banging his fists on the wall, and the petite little fireball snatched open the shower door and unloaded on his pubescent body with reckless abandon.
But that was a distant memory. The woman was downright full of glee, clapping her hands together like a three-year-old being exonerated of bath time.“Bushie is coming? You have got to be kidding me.” She slapped me on the arm.I had moved too close.“I can’t believe this! This is unbelievable!” She reached up, threw her arms around my neck, and cameras could be heard clicking all around.
I whispered into her well-adorned ear. “If this is on the front page of any paper, I will not be happy.”
“Oh, get a grip, Savannah.” She pushed me away . The woman might be bipolar. “The president’s coming. Oh Lord, what will I wear?”
I looked at her in astonishment. “It won’t matter what you wear if you’re still in the middle of this square, chained to a monument, now, will it? You won’t even get to see him.”
“Oh, yes I will. I’ll see him . We’ll just make sure he has to come by here if this matter isn’t resolved before then.” Of course “we” would . The woman ran this city . Who was I to think she wouldn’t dictate the president of the United States’ very itinerary?
But I needed to bring her back to more critical matters. “I know you are not staying out here an entire week.”
She retained a significantly steady resolve in her eyes. “I’ll stay out here as long as it is necessary, Savannah . You do those kind of things when you believe in something.”
She couldn’t be well . We needed a doctor that made house— I mean, sidewalk—calls. She needed to be medicated. Or maybe she was medicated. Maybe this was like the time we flew to L. A. and hit severe turbulence, and she took enough Xanax for a three-hundred-pound man . They were drugs her friend Theresa gave her when Mother mentioned she had panic attacks when she flew. Not that drug-swapping is a crime or anything.
By the time we landed, she was so out of it she needed Dad to carry her to the car. But he refused . Well, it wasn’t his fault. He had warned her clearly as she popped three of the things into her perfectly painted mouth.“If you take those things and don’t wake up, I will leave you right here on this plane.”
And he did. But when faced with the choice of leaving her on the plane and letting her fly to Kalamazoo, or planting her behind on top of a luggage cart,Thomas and I saw a delightful opportunity. We just smiled at the flight attendant as we carried her off the plane. Thomas had her upper body and I toted her feet. Had she not just recently cut her hair all flippy, then it could have covered her face and salvaged a minute amount of her reputation. But those red lips were in clear view.
We threw her dead weight over the basket of a luggage cart and pushed her right through the terminal, arms and feet dangling like a Charlie McCarthy doll. I made Thomas take pictures so we could blackmail her later . We took pictures of her in the men’s bathroom . We took pictures of her picking her nose . We took pictures of her sitting in the race-car machine in the arcade. We took pictures of her sprawled out on a terminal bench with a GQ magazine spread across her chest . We didn’t stop until Dad called us from his cell phone in the car, where he was waiting at the curb.
By the time she woke up, about three days later, the pictures had been printed in duplicate, one set strewn across her bed. She never told us where she put them . We never asked . We both just always knew that there were duplicates at our immediate disposal.
“Are you doing drugs?” I asked.
“Savannah Grace Phillips, I should just as soon slap you as look at you for that comment.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I’m fixing to answer your question with my hand upside your head.”
“Why is it you can ask me if I do drugs, but I can’t ask you?”
“Because I’m your mother. I can ask you anything I pretty well please.”
“Well, whatever you’re on, I hope you come off of it soon and come home, where you should be.”
“Where are you going?”
“I said I would come by and say hey. So hey. Love ya . Talk to you soon. I’ve got to figure out what we’re going to have for dinner for the next week.”And with that I left Vicky to figure out what to do with her “matter.” But she wouldn’t miss me now. Bushie was coming . Who was I compared to him?
“I need a lawyer.”
My new friend Gregory’s voice came on over the other end, calm as always.Gregory is a law clerk from Jackson, Mississippi,who helped me out on my last article about rigged beauty pageants. “You have one. Bought and paid for with a buck, remember?”
“Do you have craziness in Jackson?”
“Not until you came here and brought your craziness with you over a rigged beauty pageant.”
“I think you just called me crazy.”
“Maybe. Judge Tucker has talked to Judge Hoddicks. I hear what’s going on over there,” he said, sounding as if he was chewing something.
“What are you eating?”
“Lunch.”
“Oh, that was clever. Anyway,why don’t you come down here and do some lawyering stuff, get my mother unchained from this granite, and make my life less eventful before Monday.”
I was certain his chocolate legs were propped up on a desk or sofa or ottoman somewhere as he snacked on whatever it was he was snacking and a beautiful white grin emerged across his face.
“Girl, you couldn’t find less eventful if you were a contestant on The Amazing Race and searched the world over . You don’t know anything but eventful.”
I continued walking up Bull toward Forsythe Park with my book tucked safely under my arm.“I do. And I love that show, by the way. Actually tried to be a contestant. Me and Thomas sent in a video. Didn’t even get a call back.”
“Did you speak on the video?”
“Of course.”
“Then that might be why you didn’t get a callback.”
“Do you hate me?”
He laughed.“No, silly, I don’t hate you. But say what you will, you’re weird. And you talk too much. But I will tell you that, knowing the law and the previous cases and their decisions, this monument case will probably be remedied sooner than later.”
“By Monday?”
He laughed.
“Don’t laugh. I’m serious.”
“No, Sherlock, this won’t be finished by Monday.”
“Why? Why do you judicial types take so long to do anythin
g?
Just so you can bill people?”
“Honey, if I billed you for all the needless energy you drain from me, you wouldn’t see your own apartment until you had private quarters six feet under.”
“Aren’t you full of yourself today. But I need you. My mother is chained to a monument, harassing a sophisticated lady from Atlanta. Really, this needs to come to a close quickly.”
“Well, I might see you this week. Judge Tucker is thinking about coming down to help Judge Hoddicks.”
“Oh good. So, be thinking then.”
“About what?”
“About how to speed this thing up.”
“Okay, Savannah, I’ll be doing just that.”
“Call me if you think of something good.”
“You just wait by your little phone.”
“I will, smarty butt. I will.”With that I hung up, thankful that I had been able to say butt without it being recorded for the evening news.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said to the blur that careened into my shoulder as I turned the corner onto Drayton Street.
The blur didn’t respond. But it looked vaguely familiar. It can’t be. She doesn’t have food hanging from her shirt. There’s no way . You think? Maybe it is. It was. Emma Riley. She and I had experienced another run-in of sorts last week. Actually, I had taken it upon myself to tell her wretched story to the entire city without bothering to care whether she wanted it told. She cared. Oh, did she ever care . The extent of her care reminded me now that it would not be in my best interests to reintroduce myself. No need to make an otherwise miserable day more miserable. She continued up the street, and I headed in the direction of the park, thinking maybe a pinch would prove whether I was just having a nightmare of a day.
“Ow!” I hollered . Yep. Sure enough. I was wide awake.
CHAPTER TEN
Saturday and parks go hand in hand for most of us in Savannah. Not so much today. Maybe it was the growing stickiness and encroaching summer temperatures . Walks would be done in the relative cool of the morning or the doable steaminess of the evening. But the action up the street played a greater role in keeping people away today, I was certain.
An empty bench on the front pathway of the park gave me a perfect view of the fountain in the middle, as well as the Oglethorpe Club on Bull Street and the Armstrong Building, which houses the law offices of Bouham,Williams, & Levy, directly across the street from it.
The Oglethorpe Club is the oldest gentleman’s club in Georgia. They have two prohibitions. One: No female members. Two: A woman can come with her husband, but she has to wear a dress. And an unwritten law:Your money must be old. Old money looks down on new money. For some reason, if you weren’t born with it, it’s not legitimate .Never quite made sense to me, because somewhere down the line it was new to somebody. Famed Savannian Jim Williams couldn’t get into the club, so he just bought the monstrous Armstrong Building right across the street.
This city and its money have always intrigued me. Most complain about what they don’t have while the minority can’t seem to get enough. Either way, everybody’s trying to get more, causing one to wonder if there ever really is such thing as enough.
The lady who sat down on the park bench beside me forced me back into the present. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” she said, wiping her black brow with a yellowed hanky. She hummed softly. A familiar melody, but one I couldn’t place.
“Yes, yes it is.”
She reached into her well-worn straw bag and pulled out an apple.“Would you like a bite?” she asked, extending her snack.
I giggled, wondering if she would want it back after I had taken a bite.“No, thank you. I just ate actually.”Well, had attempted to anyway.
“Okay.”
I watched as she stared off into the blue sky that could be seen through the row of houses that lined Drayton Street. She looked intently at the large house on the corner of Drayton and East Gaston, which Charlize Theron used as her residence in The Legend of Bagger Vance. The newcomer took up a large portion of the bench. Her worn dress, with a large floral print pattern and faded yellow background, had seen happier days . While perusing her petals, I realized that this was the lady that I had almost hit yesterday in the street. Her straw bag looked as if it had carried apples to park benches for years, but I had never seen her before yesterday.
She took her plump hand with its dirty fingernails and tried to smooth the wiry gray hair poking out from her strained attempt at a ponytail. Her haunting dark eyes seemed older,mysterious, and strange. But friendly. And peaceful.
“Ever wonder what goes on inside these houses?” She gave a nod to the million-dollar homes. Her enunciation was precise and her dialect truly Southern.
I studied her dark face and watched the movement of her lips as she took a huge chunk out of the front side of her apple. I turned back to my book, hoping to make it clear I really didn’t want conversation.
“No, ma’am. I really haven’t.”
“It’s a shame. I would bet you, if I were a betting lady, that is, and not a churchgoing woman”—she gave a determined nod— “that most of the people inside of these homes are in need of something.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. Her eyes stared so intently down the street that I might have believed she could see straight through the walls.
“Yes ma’am, people in need of something, I’m certain.”
She didn’t care that I was reading. She hadn’t even noticed I was reading. And I was so overcome by curiosity, I had about forgotten I was reading too. I closed the book on my lap.
“Why do you think that?”
“Oh, sweet child, you can see it on their faces.” Her ebony hand brought the apple to her lips again. A small dirt smudge on the top of her right cheek marred her otherwise flawless complexion.“ They’re tired. Just look around their eyes . You can see it.
Exhaustion is everywhere. They even walk around like they’re tired. And they drive like maniacs trying to get nowhere fast.” I felt the sudden urge to cough.
“You all right, child?”
I nodded.
She continued.“This generation is either in a whirlwind rush or a state of utter fatigue. Most of them with sad stories to tell.”
I couldn’t recall seeing too many whirlwinds in Savannah since moving here years ago.“Hmm . . . hadn’t really seen all that.” My slight laugh caused her to look at me.
“Even you, little one . You’re so young and cute, yet you’re tired too . You try too hard . You think too much . You need to enjoy an apple, smell a flower, read a book.” She pointed down to the book I would have been reading had we not been having this conversation.“ I loved that Mr. Reagan. See what you can learn from him.” She stood up to leave. “I’ll see you again. Hope you’re wearing a bigger smile next time.”
Her plump cheeks rose with a smile, causing them to look like the apple she had just finished off. Yet her dark eyes pierced me one more time, causing me to stop and pause. But her smile was infectious. I returned it . Then I watched as she walked up the street and took another apple out of her bag, humming once again.
A tiny little man came rushing past her with his briefcase in his hand and cell phone plastered to his ear. I watched him as he approached my bench, jabbering as if the world was surely collapsing today, right here, in the middle of Forsythe Park around us both.
“What do you mean, you might lose this deal?!” he screamed into the phone.“You lose a sixty-million-dollar deal and you may as well close down the office!”
He sat down on my park bench, totally ignoring me and my book. He flung open his briefcase to find some piece of paper that was either clinging for dear life to another or was wadded up somewhere in the bottomless pit.
“You don’t lose deals . You only make deals,Ken . You aren’t playing with the little boys anymore; you’re playing with the big dogs.”
The voice on the other end made futile attempts to secure vindication. “I don’t want
to hear it. Do you want to keep your nice car and your private jet? Do you want to keep your fancy suits and your big house? Huh? Well, then don’t screw up. Jesus, man, don’t think for a minute there aren’t a thousand men and women ready to take you down and get their name on your office . You better get it together and fast.”
His hand finally pulled out a paper, and just about everything in his briefcase came with it. In frustration he threw the mess across the park bench, causing some of it to hit my leg. I pushed it back, which was the first time he even noticed me. He gave me an angry look as if somehow I had invaded his space. My raised right eyebrow made it clear who arrived first.
He grabbed all of the scattered papers and crammed them back into the abyss. It could be years before he ever found what he was actually looking for. He marched onward, still yelling at some lamentable creature all the way. He ascended the stairs of the Oglethorpe Club and disappeared.
I spent the walk home peeking in windows and looking down alleys expecting some precious Allen Funt wannabe to scream at me, “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!”
I smiled bigger than I had in years. Looked over every corner of that park, even stood up and held out my arms in case they didn’t know I was ready to hear the truth. But no one came. No Allen Funt appeared. No nothing. Reaching the top step of home, I looked back one more time just in case. The only thing that appeared was my shadow.
Either I’m losing my mind, or either . . . well, I’m losing my mind. There really was no other option.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Amirror can be a cruel thing. It can mock you. Even laugh at you . Today the thing was plumb near hysterical. I scowled at it in return. Looking back was a stranger. My tired, worn, twenty-four-year-old face mocked me. The lines on my forehead must have crept into place in an afternoon. Because they certainly weren’t there this morning.
Who did this to me? Who stole my youth? I crinkled my brow up and down. Pulled the side of my eyes back only to discover I would make a woeful-looking Asian. And the process did nothing to remove the deeply embedded crow’s-feet. My green eyes drooped and the corners of my lips turned downward. I need BOTOX. I might need a facelift before I’m thirty. I need to find out who Mother’s miracle worker is and stop this madness.
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