A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (2 page)

I knew better than any person breathing how much he’d given up for his own little boys; I was one of the things he’d given up.

I imagined his low-set rumble of a whisper in my ear, tried to hear him tel ing me that I could fight for Mosey, now, because he knew how hard I’d fought for Liza. But I knew better. He hadn’t been around when I fetched up pregnant. I never said boo. I was so scared I didn’t even tel my folks I was knocked up until I was almost through my fourth month. One night my mother gave me the fish eye after dinner and told me to skip dessert. She said I’d been eating like a trucker recently and I had a new thickness round my middle that she found unbecoming in a girl. That’s when my secret came blurting out.

The very next day, they carted me to a strange doctor a town away. They picked one with a Jewish name, thinking he would be pro-choice. After he examined me, with Momma in the room, Daddy joined us. They started asking him about “discreet options,” and al four of us knew what that meant. I sat there, naked under my cotton gown, my arms wrapped tight around Liza inside me. I looked at my own bare feet, and I let them ask. I didn’t say a word.

Lordy, but they had picked the wrong doctor. He asked them, in a deep, judgmental voice, if they had any idea just how far along I was. He showed them a picture of a five-month fetus, its kicky little feet, eyes squinched tight against the watery black around it. He added, in dark tones like a sorrowing Christ, “We’re way past routing out a blastula here, you know. If she real y wants to terminate, you’l have to take her to Louisiana. They do that sort of thing in New Orleans.” His tone made it clear he thought New Orleans was a den of godless, baby-kil ing vipers. My folks must have felt spanked up one side of their thin Baptist skins and down the other.

So they took me back home, and I never had to fight. If I’d been in my first trimester, I’d have had the abortion with no idea whether I wanted it or not. But I was halfway through, and I’d fal en in love with her.

Liza had quickened, which was the perfect word for what she felt like, popping back and forth inside me like a sea monkey. That’s how I pictured her, too. Not like the actual ones. I ordered the actual ones once, and they were only white, specky-size brine shrimp. One of mine got huge, like head-of-a-pin size. Then he ate al his brothers and swam around so swol en up and hateful that I final y flushed that fat old cannibal down the toilet. I pictured Liza more like the sea monkeys they showed in the ads, little smiley merpeople with crowns and friendly, waving hands. If I’d known her better then, I’d have pictured a sea monkey wielding a flaming sword.

But today my Liza wasn’t in any physical shape to take on anyone. She was stil trying like hel to fight her way back to using language and crossing the room without a walker. I was on my own.

The cool-eyed woman sitting in the center looked up and saw me through the glass wal . She was dressed in white and had a man on either side of her, both in sleek, dark suits. The three of them looked to me like an evil ice-cream sandwich, corpse-cold, waiting for me to walk in and begin.

There was a cut-crystal pitcher of water on their side of the table and three matching tumblers sweating from the ice, each one set neat on a coaster to protect the dark cherry gloss on the table. My own cup was waxed paper, and it was sitting in my purse, bone-dry.

The woman’s jacket was spotless. I can never wear white. I drip coffee down my boobs, first thing. She was older than me, but she looked my age, maybe younger. It wasn’t like I was going gently into that good night either. I hid my strands of gray in highlights, moisturized like it was my religion, and I could stil fit into my favorite Levi’s. But she’d had a little work done, as they say. Good work. Not the obvious things like those actresses whose lips look like inflamed cat intestines, just her jawline was crepe-free and her eyes had that wide, lifted look. She had a couple of smile lines, but they were almost too shal ow to mention; that may have been from a lifetime’s underuse. The men on either side of her had set their foreheads into stern rumples, but hers looked like an egg. Nobody past fifty has a brow that smooth without Botox, especial y not while saddling up to rough-ride and rule the law as if it were her own nasty-tempered pony.

I’d come here today to beg, to plead for them not to take Mosey. Fifteen was a hard year, and they’d be sending her to a place where no one knew she stil woke up scared in thunderstorms. That she worried at her lower lip with her fingers when she was lying. That you couldn’t make her talk by asking questions, but if you left her be and got real busy in the kitchen, she’d come boost herself up onto the counter and swing her feet and spil her guts. That her old one-eyed boo-bunny was hidden under her pil ow and she slept with one hand stuffed under, clutching him.

If they took her from me, I didn’t even know where she’d be going. I’d seen the worst-case scenario, though, and it was an apple gone whol y bad.

There was no place to put your teeth where you wouldn’t get a mouthful of a foul, grainy mash with worms in it. Pure poison. I wanted to ask them to leave Mosey be for her own sake, not mine, but I looked into those six cold eyes, now al staring me down through the glass wal , and I knew that it was fruitless. She was a pawn, here, not a person.

So the question was, would I let these corpse-cold bastards come after my granddaughter without a fight, without every bit of fight I ever had? I didn’t see a way to win, so what did it matter if I kicked and flailed? You want the ocean? Have the ocean. You want my Mosey, this girl I helped Liza raise? Hel , I’d done most of the raising, truth be told and Liza being Liza. I’d taught Mosey the ABC song, tied her shoes a mil ion times, been her Brownie troop leader. Last year I’d gotten up an hour early every day to try and figure out algebra with her. It was the worst grade she ever got, but we were both so proud of that C-plus we’d held hands and danced around the kitchen hooting and cheering when her report card came.

Standing outside that glass wal , I believed I had come to the awful end of everything. My family has long been familiar with that territory. Liza came across it at the Calvary High End-of-School Luau. Mosey, the day I hired Tyler Baines to take down the wil ow tree in our backyard.

But for me? It was standing at that window. I tried to preload my mouth with some fruitless begging, and the words stuck in my throat. I had this vision of Mosey in her best dress, the one with a thousand little flowers making up the print, standing on our front porch with al her things packed up in Liza’s battered duffel. I saw it as she turned to me, felt it as she wrapped her skinny monkey arms around me, heard it as she whispered, “Bye, Big.”

That’s when I understood that what I did today was a message. Even if I lost, if Mosey was being driven away from the only home she remembered in a sleek official car, it would absolutely matter. She’d be alone, afraid, and with good reason; she had to know, know down to the bone, that I had fought like hel . That I would always stand with her and fight like hel . That the second after the sleek car pul ed away, I’d be in my Malibu, seeing where she landed, sitting outside. Law or no law, she was mine.

I took a deep breath in, as painful and surprising as a baby’s first. I straightened my spine and swal owed, though my mouth was paper-dry. I got the Dixie cup out of my bag, and I shoved my way through that door. I banged it down directly in front of them, like a flimsy barrier dividing the table.

It made a scuffing noise against the wood, too soft to count as my first gunshot, but it was al I had.

I set it down between me and them, and I went to war.

CHAPTER ONE

Mosey

I NEVER WOULD have known about the other Mosey Slocumb if Tyler Baines hadn’t brought his mulet head and a chain saw over to murder my mom’s wil ow tree. I wouldn’t have bet someone else’s dol ar that Tyler Baines, of al people, would be the one to discover her. Tyler Baines was not the discovery type. He was more the patchy-chin-pubes, tats, dirty-white-truck type. He was total y hooked on Red Man, too, so he spewed brown juice like a cricket everyplace he went. Last year my mom nicknamed him the Mighty Un–Butt Crack, because she said he was a single flash of ass plumage away from being the walking definition of redneck.

“It’s like he wears mom jeans,” she’d said, and I’d reached for a pencil. I’d been supposed to write down three examples of irony for freshman English, and Liza was barefoot in low-rise thrift-store Calvins that showed her silver bel y ring, talking about Tyler Baines’s mom jeans while he mowed our lawn. But I’d given it up before I dug out paper; I’d been exiled to Baptist school for more than half a year by then, long enough to know that Mrs. Rickett wouldn’t like any irony example that involved thong underpants.

Tyler Baines was the last person on the planet my mom would have wanted laying hairy hands on her sacred wil ow. Before my mom had her brain event, I never even saw him have a conversation with her face. He talked lower, like he thought her boobs had microphones in them and if he aimed right he could order up a chili-dog combo.

For a couple of weeks after the brain event, my mom didn’t talk at al . Now if she said one of her slurry words made mostly out of vowels when Tyler was around, he’d goggle at a spot past her good shoulder with his egg-size eyes, whites showing al the way around, and ask me or Big, “Liza says what, now?”

The morning he came to murder the wil ow seemed like any stupid Tuesday, with me at the breakfast table trying to eat civics facts and toast at the same time and Big scrambling eggs and stirring them into grits for my mom. Liza sat at our old butcher-block table staring at the faded pomegranates on the kitchen wal paper like her mind was far, far away. So far that she couldn’t quite get to it.

These days I liked to sit in Big’s old chair, beside the half of Liza that looked like her, even though she sat too stil . I felt guilty for picking to sit by the good half, like a magic monkey paw had read my wish for a more mommishy mom and it had broken Liza and left me this. Stil , it was better than sitting by her right side, where her bottom lip hung a little slack and sometimes drooled and she kept her bad arm cuddled against her side like a hurt bird tucks his wing.

Big set the bowl of eggs and grits on the table, then picked up a spoon and wrapped my mom’s good hand around it.

“Liza. Liza-Little? You see your breakfast?” Big said, and waited until Liza blinked and looked down, making her “yes” noise.

Big had fixed herself a plate, too, and she sat down stil wearing Big-style flannel pj’s that practical y bil owed around her teeny body. The clock said she ought to cram a slice of toast in her mouth and run to shimmy into her tweed skirt and bank blouse, which was the color of old mustard and had this vile, floppy bow at the neck.

I said, “You’re not going in to work?”

“I took a half day off,” Big said, not meeting my eyes, and I felt a nervous little serpent uncurling in my bel y.

“Is this about the pool again?” Big’d had a pool guy out to the house last week, but he said that to fit a pool inside the backyard fence we had to take out Liza’s wil ow. That should have ended it right there; the wil ow was sacred. Al my mom’s yearly pins from Narcotics Anonymous were pressed deep into its bark. She hung that tree with twinkle lights every year when she got a new one. Those pins were like a love carving that read

“Liza + Sobriety” inside a puffy heart. Big should have been laughing at the very idea of taking it out, but instead her lips pursed up and she shushed at me, fast and quiet, darting a glance at Liza.

“Big, you can’t—”

“Toast!” Big interrupted. “Put it in your gobhole, please.”

Big took Mom’s spoon and helped her eat another bite of grits and eggs, then wheeled her away into the den. That was wrong, too. Big always made Liza get in the walker after breakfast. I heard the TV go on, and then Big came back to get Liza’s morning meds.

She talked soft while she opened each bottle and dropped the pil s into a coffee cup. “Your mom didn’t get any better until they started working with her in the water. That’s when she started saying ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ and now she’s got at least eight words I can make out. She hasn’t added a word except for ‘Mosey-baby’ since she got home.”

Math’s my weakest subject, but even I could figure that Big plus a pool and WebMD didn’t equal the team of physical therapists who worked with Liza while she was stil in that aftercare place.

“It’s almost fal . She’l hardly get to use it, even.”

Big was heading into the den, but she paused long enough to grab Liza’s juice cup and say, “We get a discount if we do it now. No one else is thinking about pools, and we’l get a good couple of weeks in before it’s too cold. Don’t fret. I got her NA pins out, and I put them in my jewelry box.”

Then she turned her back and left. Before the swinging doors had swooshed closed behind her, I’d whipped my cel phone out of my back pocket and was texting Roger.

911! Pool v/s wil ow. Big 4 pool.

I could hear the TV fel ow with the poofy girl hair talking about weather, every word clear as the day he was promising. Big had the TV on twice as loud as normal. Almost immediately my phone vibrated in my hands.