“Never heard of it!” Maureen said. “Is it some Yank invention?”
“That I don't know. But it's a wee present for Mammy.”
Maureen shook her head. “Ye see what I'm talking about, wee girl? Showering gifts on her, while she expects ye to hole up here with that rumor spreading around town about ye on yer wedding week!”
While Dymphna pondered that, Maureen rifled through her handbag for the pizza coupons. The phone call from the hospital came a few minutes later.
CHAPTER 11—WISCONSIN
Why wasn't St. Christopher helping her? Ursula Barnett clucked in dismay at the little plastic statue on the dashboard as she passed the Qwik Pik convenience store for the third time. In addition to epilepsy, toothache and bachelors, Christopher was meant to be the patron saint of driving and traveling, helping travelers find their way. She had glued the statue there after she couldn't find her way home from the shopping mall one day and all the frozen food she bought thawed. With St. Christopher guiding her, she always got home with the peas still frozen, but today she was lost.
...though of course, she considered, St. Christopher hadn't even been alive when the Golden Sunsets Trailer Park was built; nobody knew when he was born, but he had died in 251 AD—she had looked it up on the Internet—and he had never visited the United States. So how could he help her find a place that hadn't existed when he was roaming the Earth? She was more kindly disposed towards St. Christopher now. But she was still lost. In an undesirable location on the periphery of town.
How she regretted the day she decided to volunteer for Our Lady Help of Christian's weekly soup kitchen, the day she served Randaleen Jagger lasagne there, the day she hired her to clean her house, and how she now regretted not having brought Jed along for protection. Randaleen was menacing: big-boned and tall, tall enough, she told Ursula once, that people in supermarkets asked her to reach top shelf items, men too, and Ursula wondered if the woman might turn violent when she confronted her. She could've used Jed for backup.
But her husband was with his brother Slim; Slim had called an emergency meeting for the store they co-owned, Shooters, Sinkers and Scorchers (and Beef Jerky). They sold firearms, fish tackle and hot sauce. And now they were selling their own brand of beef jerky, Slim Jed Jerky. Apparently Slim was 'teed off,' his words, with Jed for something to do with the finances. Again. Ursula preferred not to know the details.
It caused her unease enough as it was to know the store was on the verge of failure. It was getting so bad that a few weeks earlier, Jed had forced her, Slim and Louella to film an audition video to see if they could nab a spot on the reality show Attack of the Killer Investors! to get a millionaire to invest in them. They had rejected them, but she didn't much care anymore. Ursula had been poor, then she had married Jed and been a bit rich then they had won the lotto a few years before and then they had been mega-rich, and then they had frittered the money away, and were about to be poor again. It was the way of life.
She passed the condemned roadhouse again, and the CD player clicked. Even in her distress, Ursula smiled at the trumpets of the Triumphal March. She had the Condensed Aida, her favorite opera, on shuffle, and the march was the only upbeat song on it.
“Gloria!” she warbled, momentarily uplifted, tapping her hands, at 10 and 2 PM, on the steering wheel. “Gloria! Gloria!”
She couldn't sing anything else; the rest of the words were strange foreign ones, not only in this song, but in the entire opera, and, in fact, it seemed, all operas, so she just hummed along, though glorious was far from how she felt. Although...she knew she had things to be thankful for. The heat was blazing inside the car for one and, also, a few months earlier, she had thought she was a fugitive for defrauding the churches of her parish out of $100,000. But she was here, now, free, on the right side of a prison wall. Unlike, she thought with a nervous glance out the window, where many of the people slouching through the sleet in this neighborhood were likely to find themselves in the future.
She had never gone back to her old church, such was her shame, and had started to attend Our Lady Help of Christians, 20 miles from her house, instead. And in her renewed vigor to be a better Catholic, she introduced herself to Father Bishop after the first Sunday Mass and explained she wanted to help the community. It was partly for this, and also because of the housekeeping she had let slide, that she had invited Randaleen into her home to clean it once a week. Randaleen had been cleaning for a month now. Ursula paid her of course.
When Jed couldn't find his binoculars one day—he enjoyed the occasional spat of bird watching—she thought he had just misplaced them. And his sunglasses. Then she couldn't locate her Elizabeth Taylor White Diamonds perfume. Or her Chanel No. 5, but that she didn't care about as much because it always made her break out in a rash. And then her jewelry started disappearing, first her smoky topaz ring, then her charm bracelet, then her pearl drop earrings. Then her rosary beads from Lourdes, which she always kept on her nightstand table, vanished as well. And once Ursula had come home from choir practice, and Randaleen claimed one of the ceramic heads from Ursula's beloved collection of people from around the world—the Azerbaijani nomad—had jumped off the wall and shattered into so many pieces that he couldn't be glued together. When Randaleen had gone for the day, Ursula had inspected the garbage cans for the shards, but, of course, Randaleen had emptied them all.
It was only the day before, when Randaleen was taking a break from the vacuuming and sharing a tea and some carrot cake with Ursula at the kitchen table, their conversation stilted as usual, as Ursula was always at a loss as to what to chat with her about, having nothing in common except for their sex, as far as Ursula could tell, and even that was debatable, and Randaleen has asked her if she could smoke right there in the kitchen and Ursula told her no but she could have one on out on the patio later, that Ursula had seen to her shock and disbelief her pearl drop earrings dangling next to the grease of Randaleen's grimy-curtains-type hair. The brass-necked cheek! Taunting her like that!
Ursula had claimed a sudden migraine and shuffled her out of the house, shoving a full day's pay into her hand.
She didn't want Randaleen in the house again. She had talked it over with Jed, then tried to call Randaleen, to say what she really wasn't sure. But a recording in a mechanical voice told her the number was disconnected. How, Ursula couldn't understand, as the jewelry Randaleen had stolen should've earned her a pretty penny at the pawn shop, and she could've paid her phone bill with the ill-gotten gains. That Randaleen had keys to their house weighed heavily on Ursula's mind.
The obvious solution—changing the locks—was out of the questions. If Ursula changed the locks, and Randaleen tried to get in, then she would know Ursula suspected something. And Randaleen would attack her some time in the future.
She had raced to the church and spoken to Father Bishop. She didn't know what she should do. Perhaps the earrings really were Randaleen's, but if not, the woman was either mental or an imbecile to wear them in front of Ursula like that. Should Ursula confront her? She knew only too well the fury that could erupt from people accused of stealing, even the put-upon rage from those who were guilty. She had seen it often enough on Judge Judy.
Father Bishop asked her if she could just let it slide. He placed a hand on hers and told her he was concerned about what might happen if she hurled accusations at Randaleen without a shred of proof. He told her she had to weigh the importance of the missing items against the trials and danger to mind and body that might come into play by calling someone a thief, even a petty one. It was more grand theft, Ursula told him, the price of the ceramic head and the pearl earrings. But she couldn't let it slide, she had told him. She wouldn't go to the police. She had enough sense for that. If she did, there would certainly be some sort of retribution. But she had to confront Randaleen.
Not in Ursula's home, Father Bishop warned her. In some neutral area, or, better, on Randaleen's home turf, so Randaleen didn't feel so threatened and her reacti
on would therefore be less...violent? But Ursula didn't know where she lived. She asked him if he would give her Randaleen's address. Didn't he have it in some list of parishioners somewhere? A mailing list of some sort? He told her he couldn't.
But when he was called out of the rectory for some parochial matter, Ursula flipped through the Rolodex on his desk—yes, he had a Rolodex still—and found Randaleen Jagger's address and phone number. She had scribbled it down. And now she was searching for her trailer park. To say what, she still wasn't sure. But she wanted her things back. And Jed's as well.
There was a young man standing at a bus stop next to an elementary school with paint peeling from its walls. He was facing away from her. A parka was slung around his skinny shoulders and worn across his back like a stole. A stole of polyester blend. The waist of his jeans clung to the bottom of his pelvic bone, defying gravity somehow, and his tatty underwear and the outline of his repugnant young buttocks was all too evident.
She pulled up to ask for directions; she wasn't a man, after all. They never wanted to ask for directions. The window whirred down. Ursula stuck her head into the stinging sleet and yelled over the opera, “Young fella! Young fella!”
He turned to face her.
“C'mere, could ye tell me where's that trailer park round here?”
The toothpick in his mouth twirled like a baton.
“Smoke?”
God bless us and save us! Inwardly, Ursula's eyes rolled, but her face beamed out a smile. A fag in exchange for directions? Cheeky wee upstart!
“Och, I'm terrible sorry. I gave em up, but.”
“Weed?”
Ursula, perplexed but intrigued, continued to smile upward through the pelting icy bits into what she was now realizing were blood-speckled eyes.
“...we'd what?”
“X?”
“...Y?” Ursula countered.
And then it dawned on her. Her face suddenly tight, her lips disappearing as if attached to a string, she pressed the button and the electronic window slowly whirred up. One of them vile drug pushers! She had seen them on Law and Order! Trolling for victims of his sordid trade! Why would yer man ever think I...?
Wondering what she looked like, she sped off. She stared at her eyes in the rear view mirror, and couldn't believe what she was seeing. She reached forward and tugged down the little vanity mirror above her, the leather of the seat squelching under the fullness of her bottom. The light above it flickered to life as her flowered skirt hiked up and the fleshiness of her thighs strained the hem. She saw the haggard look in her eyes, the rattiness of her usually impeccable eggplant-colored bob. One of her eyes had mascara. She was a woman on the wrong side of both fifty and this godforsaken town of malice, and it showed.
She almost missed the sign to the trailer park a fourth time. She flipped up the mirror, shuddering, and turned off the tarmac. The wheels bounced over clumps of dirt and small rocks. And finally the trailer park was in her vision through the sleet. When she saw the state of it, her arteries clenched with fear.
Welcome to Golden Sunsets RV Community! A Happy Home! said the sign, but Ursula wasn't fooled. Shit Dick Balls someone had spray-painted in a happy yellow underneath; to her, that seemed a more apt greeting. She peered through the windshield at the concrete walls which surrounded each side of the gates. Cemented at the top, shards of broken brown and green glass glinted upwards, but whether they were to keep people out or in Ursula wasn't certain. She realized now St. Christopher had been trying to spare her.
Making a quick sign of the cross, Ursula wondered how to inch the front wheels of the car past what looked like the remains of a corpse at the gate. Alarm, fear, and despair vied for attention in her mind and on her face. The car slid forward through the rusty gates, Ursula's palms damp against the steering wheel.
Certainly there were trailer parks around the nation where people led happy, constructive lives, but—and maybe this was nothing more than her feverish imagination unable to stifle itself—these dilapidated, graffiti-defaced homes with the occasional windows boarded with cardboard, and riddled with what she feared were bullet holes, seemed a hive of not only casual violence of all types, including, from the skeletons of burnt trees, teen pyromania, but also wife-beating, and, her mind racing, she added, if the broken beer and gin bottles that lined the path were anything to go by, alcoholism. She also added rampant tooth loss, animal abuse and the occasional child molestation.
She braked hard as a toddler with a filthy face and saggy diaper materialized in the dirt inches from her bumper. He flipped her off, then wobbled into one of the homes. She added incontinence to the list of ails. The park was supposed to be a Happy Home, but it looked like these people were teetering on homelessness.
She tried to conjure up some shred of Christian compassion for these unfortunates and the inhumanity of their pitiful existence, tried to remind herself that they needed kindness, benevolence and help—wasn't that why she had volunteered for the soup kitchen in the first place? why she had hired Randaleen, in fact?—but her fear and sense of self-preservation were too strong. It seemed as if the only reference needed to join this particular community was a police record, and the longer and more salubrious the better. Temperance, virtue and, if Randaleen was anything to go by when she stood next to her, hair conditioner and deodorant seemed to have never paid Golden Sunsets a visit.
She looked, the memory of the bus stop man still fresh, for evidence of illicit drug use. A skeletal man in a faded Ozzy Osbourne t-shirt sprawled on a milk crate on what looked like a homemade porch outside his trailer. He seemed to be wearing only underpants, and in this weather!, but perhaps they were old Speedos. What was that in his hand? Was he injecting illegal drugs into a vein of his left arm even as she looked...?
Och, catch yerself on, Ursula! She had a musical lilt to her voice that most people warmed to, thanks to her Derry accent, even if they struggled to comprehend what she was trying to say. But the charm of her accent hid the steeliness of character that a youth of dodging rubber bullets and crying from tear gas had instilled in her. She was hardened as a matter of course, by an upbringing in the Moorside, Northern Ireland's most notorious Catholic slum, and half of that upbringing had been during a civil war! But after she married Jed, a Yank, she had spent the decades in the abundance and comfort of American life. She had grown as soft as her voice. She tried to will that hardened youth from some forgotten reserve of her character into the present.
Ye're to be confident, so ye are, she told herself. Ye've to walk briskly and with an air of confidence to yer woman's home, Ursula.
But she didn't know in which of the sad trailers Randaleen lived. The address she had taken from Father Bishop was a confusing smattering of numbers and dashes, lot this, route that. She would have to ask for directions. And other than the group of terrifying teens cackling and smoking something next to what looked like a water pump, the man on the porch was the only person in sight. She grabbed her handbag and opened the door. Yer man there doesn't be doing drugs, ye simpleton, she tried to convince herself. Walk with confidence. And a wee bit of grace and all.
She got out of the car, slammed shut the door, and thrust her right foot forward to do just that. Her coat was caught in the door, and she almost splat face down on the gravel. She freed herself, and took that confident and graceful step onto the edge of a discarded toilet seat. It flipped up and smacked her knee. The youths roared with laughter.
Wincing and limping, she staggered forth through the sleet towards the man on the porch. She arranged her lips into a smile.
She didn't see the mother of his three urchins staggering along behind her, one hand clawing at charred twigs for support, the other clutching a bottle of generic vodka that was almost empty.
“Ya goddamn whore!” the man roared. Ursula's smile faltered. She pointed to herself. Me? she mouthed in confusion and fear. Was there something about her that made her seem like a— “Whore! Take another step closer and I'm gonna kill ya!�
��
She scuttled back to the car as he kept yelling things she didn't understand. “Don't know why you're dragging yourself home again after a night out on your back! There ain't no stash left nohow!”
And as Ursula sat scrabbling the key in the ignition, heaving huge pants of terror on the leather, as she revved up and reversed out like a madwoman, she realized she'd have to confront Randaleen in her own home. With Jed a few feet away in the same room. She would arrange it, she thought as she sped out of the gates into the safety of the rest of the world, so that when she pointed the finger at the thief, her husband was serendipitously cleaning some of the shotguns from the store at the same time, some of the more threatening-looking ones.
From the speakers in the warmth of the car, a voice was belting out a heart-wrenching tune from the Judgment scene of Aida, where, as far as Ursula could tell, Ramadès was being sentenced to death for something he did.
Ahime...morir mi sento...!
Had she known the translation, Ursula would've realized she felt the same way.
Alas...I feel death...!
The car roared past the Qwik Pik.
CHAPTER 12
“So wake me up when it's all over...!”
Dymphna wore a sparkly pink and white top with spaghetti straps, a light green mini-skirt and mulch-colored leg-warmers. Silver open-toed stilettos adorned her feet. The battered pub door before her shook with the bass beat of Avicci's country-dance blasting from the pub within. The Swedish DJ had been inviting them all to Wake Him Up since Christmas.
Dymphna blotted her lips on a Kebabalicious napkin she found in her handbag and plumped up her red curls, she offered up a small prayer up to the Lord that her mother would be well, but then forgot all about her mother and the Lord as she entered the dome of sin that was the Craiglooner. She had left Keanu and Beeyonsay at the house and was gagging for a laugh, some gossip, a dance around her handbag, a string of cigarettes in her mouth and copious amounts of alcohol down her throat. Even if it was with girls who belonged to her life before. Before Rory, before her move to the Waterside.
Best Served Frozen (The Irish Lottery Series Book 4) Page 10