Faithful Unto Death

by Stephanie Jaye Evans

  Just like that, my heart went from helium to lead and sank down to somewhere in my left heel.

  I’m thinking, Oh God, pleeease don’t let her be pregnant, pleeease.

  I got my coffee in my bathtub-sized mug that nobody else is supposed to use even though I still sometimes see it on the floor, half-filled with Rice Krispies or Frosted Flakes for Baby Bear.

  “Aren’t you due at school in, what? Ten minutes?” I said. I did not want to have this conversation. Two percent milk, three sugars, a teaspoon for stirring, skip the toast, please, please don’t let my little girl be pregnant. I sat down at the table, not looking anyone in the eye, and stirred my coffee overvigorously.

  Jo’s eyes were glistening with tears. She rubbed at Baby Bear’s neck until he shook her hands off. Her hands were trembling. She had to be pregnant. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart …

  “Daddy …”

  Oh, I was dead. I was so dead. Jo never ever calls me “Daddy.” She hasn’t since she turned ten.

  “Last Saturday Alex took me downtown—”

  Oh, pleeease God, not an abortion. Oh, please, oh please …

  “—to the Ben Stevenson— ”

  I’m going to kill the doctor who …

  “—Academy, to audition for the American School of Ballet for—”

  Half my coffee sloshed onto the table. I stood. Coffee stains khaki. Annie Laurie leaned over and grabbed a stack of paper napkins to catch the spill before it rolled off onto the floor.

  Annie said, “Bear?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said and now my own hands were shaking. I sat down and Baby Bear laid his head on my shoe. Tethering me.

  “—their summer program, and Tuesday I got a call, and Daddy, I’m in!”

  So what were the serious faces for? It still wasn’t clear what was so great about yet another ballet class, but no pregnancy, no abortion, no Graham Garcia. Jubilation! Thank you, God.

  I got out of my chair and gave Jo a hug. Her shoulders felt like bird bones.

  “That’s great, Jo, that’s terrific.” I gave her another big hug and put her back on her feet. My heart was sick with relief. All this adrenaline up and downing couldn’t be good for my system.

  Annie didn’t seem to be joining in the celebratory mood.

  She dropped the sodden napkins in the trash in an emphatic sort of way and stood next to my chair.

  “Bear, what do you know about the American School of Ballet?” Annie asked. She put her hand on my shoulder. That meant something. I don’t know what it meant, but something.

  I said, “It’s downtown? Ben Stevenson runs it?”

  Jo said, “Dad!”

  “It is downtown, Bear,” Annie said, giving my shoulder a final squeeze. She sat down again and looked like she had a headache. “In downtown Manhattan.”

  Jo said, “Daddy! It’s only the very best in the world, Daddy, and I got in, and almost nobody gets in and they have dorms and everything and it’s chaperoned and all and there will be girls from Russia there, Dad, girls from all the world over because this is the best in the world, and I got in and—”

  “And it’s six thousand dollars for five weeks. If you include the airfare.” Annie said this with her face in her coffee mug.

  I drank some of the coffee still left in my cup.

  Jo was up, Doc Martens planted, ready to do battle. She said, “Grandmother says she’ll pay half, and Nana says she and Poppy will pay for the airline ticket, so it would only cost, maybe, twenty-six hundred, and I have almost three hundred in my bank account.”

  “Wait a minute, you told Nana and Poppy before you told me? You told Grandmother?” I turned on Annie Laurie. “When did you find out?”

  “Half an hour ago.”

  I sat there. Now I understood why Jo’s hands were trembling. I was grateful that she wasn’t pregnant, but six thousand dollars for summer camp?

  “Jo, before we go any further,” I said, “Nana and Poppy aren’t paying for any plane ticket. And we are not going to allow Grandmother and Grandpa to shell out three thousand dollars, either. And if I ever find out that you’ve asked your grandparents for money again, you’re looking at serious trouble.”

  That was a rebuke. Jo took it like a benediction.

  “Oh, Daddy! Then you’ll pay for it?”

  Great.

  I said, “Jo, this isn’t a two-minute decision. When do you have to let them know?”

  “Today! I have to let them know by four o’clock today!”

  “Jo, why did you wait so late to tell us?”

  “I tried to tell you Tuesday night after youth group, but you got all over me about why I left the house, and then I tried to tell you Wednesday night, but you got all over me about seeing Alex, and then last night over noodles, I brought my progress report so you could see how good I’m doing and then I was going to tell you and all you could say was”—and here she did her “Bear” imitation, hands on her hips, her head thrown back, her voice a cartoon villain’s—“‘Josephine, why can’t you be just like Merrie? Josephine, why don’t you take calculus so no one will think you’re retarded?’”

  Annie looked up at me.

  “I did not call her retarded. And I don’t sound like that,” I said. “The thing is, Jo, six thousand dollars! Baby, that’s a lot of money …”

  She came back like a whippet.

  “How much did you spend on Merrie this year?”

  “Merrie’s in college; that money comes out of her college fund. You have a college fund, too, and—”

  “Then take the six thousand dollars out of my college fund!” She threw her hands up. Funny how I could be so simpleminded when the solution was perfectly clear. All she wanted me to do was rob her college fund for a fancy-pants dance camp.

  “A little help?” I looked at Annie Laurie, but she decided that now was the time to get more coffee.

  I tried to get things a little calmer.

  “Jo, I can’t take the money out of your college fund. If I do, it won’t be there for college.”

  Her hands went to her hair and she gripped it at the roots.

  “Oh, Daddy, I’m not going to college! I am not going to college! I’m going to the American School of Ballet Summer Program, and they’re going to see how good I am, and at the end of the five weeks they’re going to invite me to stay on for their winter term. The website says a ‘select few’ will be invited to stay on for the winter term. And almost every single dancer in the New York City Ballet is drawn from the American School of Ballet! So that’s what I’ll be doing instead of college!”

  My poor baby girl.

  I said, as gently as I could, “And what if you aren’t among the ‘select few’ who are invited to stay for the winter term?”

  “I will be! Oh, Daddy, please, please, Daddy, it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted and this is my only chance ever.”

  And she was in my arms, crying her heart into shreds, her tears dripping down the back of my shirt. I smoothed her hair out of her face and rocked her in my lap.

  There was no way this was a good investment. The way to be successful was to study hard and work hard and get as much education as you could, at least up to a point. Jo was nowhere near that point, and I didn’t have six thousand dollars to throw after a dream that didn’t have a chance and probably wasn’t worth pursuing.

  I looked down at my child’s raven hair, the nape of her white neck showing through the dark.

  “Jo, Jo, we’ll work it out, Jo. I promise.”

  The face Jo lifted to mine was worth the six thousand dollars.

  This is what we decided. I would send my fourteen-year-old daughter to the American School of Ballet this summer. In New York. City. Four thousand dollars of the expense would come from her college fund. I would pay two thousand—that’s how much we’d paid to send Merrie on that Summer-in-Europe program she’d done at nearly the same age as Jo.

  If Jo didn’t get invited to stay on for the w
inter term, she would buckle down to her academics and plan on going to college. Because her college fund would be reduced, she might be looking at a year or two of junior college.

  Does this sound harsh? Let me tell you something. Do you know how many ballet dancers can support themselves on what they make dancing? Four. Okay, not four, but not many. I looked it up.

  If you go all the way through the American School of Ballet, that’s a twenty-thousand-dollars-a-year proposition if you need the room and board program. Then, if you are accepted into the New York City Ballet Corps de Ballet (those are what I would call the “chorus”—the background dancers), then maybe, only maybe, you can afford to live in a tiny walk-up studio, about the size of my bedroom and bathroom put together, if you waitress on the side, too. You’d probably have to get a roommate.

  And you can do that maybe, maybe ten years. If. If you’re incredibly lucky and you don’t come down on your ankle wrong and sustain a career-ending injury. If your tendons don’t wear out. If you don’t need to eat on a fairly regular basis.

  Being a professional ballet dancer is not a career; it’s a vocation. You’re going to spend your heart, soul, and body down to the last penny, and have nothing to show for it except memories and bad feet. It’s like deciding to be a nun, only the retirement program isn’t as good and the clothes don’t keep you as warm.

  That’s not the life I want for one of my girls.

  Annie Laurie and I agreed that she would call her parents and I would call mine to undo the financial tangle. There is never a good time to call my mother, so as soon as I got into the office, I decided to go ahead and eat the frog and get it over with.

  It went like this:

  “Hey, Mom, it’s Bear.”

  “Yes, I know it is. What’s the problem?”

  Once a week I call my mother, and there is almost never a problem. Maybe three times ever, and two of those times I was in high school, and one of those times it wasn’t me driving and I’d only had one, maybe two, beers. But every time I call her, it’s “What’s the problem?”

  “Uh, there’s no problem, Mom, only I understand Jo asked you for some money and I—”

  There was a tongue-clicking sound that means disapproval even in Namibia.

  “She did not ask me for money,” Mom said.

  “Yeah? Well, Jo said—” I didn’t get to finish my sentence.

  “When I heard she had this incredible opportunity to hone her God-given talents, I offered her the money. I consider it an investment.”

  “Mom, it’s only an investment if you get a return on your money; you don’t get a return on a ballet dancer because they don’t make any money.”

  “Bear, you invest for money. I invest for the future.”

  What that means I don’t have any clue. What I do know is that my mom was staking her claim to a higher moral ground than she thought I had my marker on.

  “Right. Well, in any case, please don’t do it again. It encouraged Jo to call her grandmother Gaither and ask her for money, too, and—” She cut me off again.

  “She most certainly did not. Naturally, when I heard that Jo had been accepted into the most prestigious ballet program in the country, in the world, I knew Gaither would want to help her out—”

  This time I interrupted.

  “Oh, my gosh, Mother! You cannot call people and suggest to them how they should spend their money! I can’t believe you called Gaither.”

  “How much did she say she would contribute?”

  “It doesn’t matter and I am not going to tell you. Jo is not going to accept the money.”

  “Bear! Hold on a minute—let me sit down before I pass out right here on this cold, hard tile floor.”

  The phone clunked onto the counter and then there was the sound of a chair being dragged across the kitchen floor. She was huffing when she got back on the phone.

  “Now, you listen here, Bear, Jo is going to be a prima ballerina, and if you don’t have enough faith in your own child to—”

  This was rich.

  “Mom? Did you have faith in me?”

  “Why, you know I did—”

  “What kind of chance did you think I had to play for the NFL?”

  “Your coach said you weren’t big enough or fast enough to go pro—”

  “The reason I’m asking is, statistically speaking, I had a way, way better chance of playing pro ball than Jo has of being a prima ballerina. See, there are maybe twenty-five prima ballerinas in the world and there are more than three hundred linemen in the NFL. And Mom, if I had made it into the NFL, they would have paid me a truckload of money. Ballerinas make squat. They get paid by the job. I looked it up.”

  There was a brief regrouping silence. When my mother started speaking again, she allowed herself the smallest tremor. It’s been an effective tactic for her in the past. Not with me, of course, but as my mother will tell you, I’m a Philistine.

  “Bear, I know you won’t be able to understand this, but your youngest daughter is an artist.” I could actually hear the dramatic hand-at-her-throat gesture, à la Blanche DuBois.

  I sighed. How had I let myself get derailed? I guess the same way I always let myself get derailed with my mom. No matter what I do, she is never happy with me. I tried to get back on topic.

  “Jo’s going to New York this summer.”

  “She is?! Praise God, Bear, I knew you’d do the right thing!”

  No, she did not, either, or she wouldn’t have been scrambling to get other people to pay for it.

  “And Jo will not be accepting ‘contributions’ from her grandparents or anyone else. Jo and I have worked out the finances.”

  “Well, now, that’s fine, but Gaither and Kenneth have more money than they know what to do with, and it would be a positive blessing to them if you and Annie would—”

  “That’s out,” I said. It took enormous self-control not to whack the telephone on my desk three or four times. I’ve done it before, and the phones never work right after that.

  There was an offended silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Mom?”

  “I understand, Bear, and I won’t offer Jo money anymore. Incidentally, Jo tells me you have taken her locket away from her and won’t give it back. Would you mind explaining why you have taken my gift from my grandchild?”

  That’s right. I get tattled on by my own child.

  “Did Jo tell you she had given the locket to a boy to wear?”

  Now there was a considering silence.

  “That is a valuable locket and chain, Bear, and I don’t just mean sentimental value.”

  “I know it is,” I said.

  My mother sighed.

  “If I get Jo to promise that she won’t let anyone else have it until she’s a grandmother, will you please give it back to her so she can wear it around her lovely neck the way I intended when I gave it to her?”

  I hate being backed into corners.

  “Mom, I’ll think about it.”

  “One more question, Bear, satisfy my curiosity. How much did Gaither say she would give Jo?”

  “Gotta go, Mom.” I disconnected.

  It wasn’t a satisfying conversation for either of us. It never is.

  Twenty-seven

  Scheduling conflicts meant that Annie Laurie and I would meet at Graham Garcia’s funeral instead of riding together. I wanted to get there early. I wanted to see if the woman who I’d seen at the golf course would come.

  No way was I going to call Alex and give him the good news that his father’s mistress was a woman, not a child; I didn’t know for a fact that I was right. All I knew was that I first mistook this woman for Jo, and that she’d been standing right there where Garcia had been killed, and yes, she had been crying. It was suspicious; I was suspicious …

  What I wanted to know was, could a woman that small have dealt the blow that killed Garcia? If what you see on the forensic television shows is true, then you can darn near tell the color of a
person’s eyes by the way a gun was shot or a club was swung. Wanderley had said that even the little girl who found Graham could have killed him, but surely he was joking.

  The St. Laurence foyer was cool and dim and empty except for Detective James Wanderley. Of course he would be here; I should have thought of that.

  Wanderley wore a dark suit—it looked new, not something he had inherited from his grandfather’s closet. Though he had paired the suit with envy-worthy black cherry boots, which, judging by the styling, were older than he was.

  I found the whole boot thing interesting. It’s not all that unusual for a grieving person to wear a piece of jewelry or an article of clothing that belonged to the deceased, but a boot is especially intimate; a well-made boot will mold itself to the owner’s foot. Could be Wanderley was symbolically molding himself after his grandfather. Total psychobabble, of course. I gave a laugh and that eyebrow rose up.

  “You’re here early,” Wanderley said and extended his hand.

  “You are, too. Guess we both wanted to, uh, greet the guests. Nice suit.” I gave exactly the same pressure with my hand.

  Wanderley ignored the suit comment.

  “Greet the guests? You aren’t here early to scope out possible suspects, right? Bear, you do know that I’m the detective and you’re the guy who stands up front on Sundays and asks for money, don’t you?”

  Yeah, Wanderley was going to need to put a little more effort into those “people skills.”

  He went on, “Crime-solving preachers, or rabbis, or housewives—that’s make-believe. You know that, right?”

  “Don’t be a patronizing ass, Wanderley.”

  “Good. I’m reassured. Sometimes playing football can cause severe head injuries—the effects don’t show up for years. I heard that on NPR. The Sugar Land Police Department does not need you running around thinking you’re Father Brown.”

  “Wanderley! You read books?”

  It was gratifying to see him flush.

  “I read—”

  “And Chesterton, at that! For someone of your generation, that’s—”

  “My grandfather read Chesterton to me.”

  Ah. The grandfather again. Where was the father while this boy was growing up?

  There was a soft cough. I turned, and saw Dr. Alejandro Garcia.