Scarier still, I learned that Ronald Diego was serving time in a N
evada prison for armed robbery and assault against a police officer.
None of this bode
d well for my meeting. Jace suggested maybe we hold off until we knew more about the situation we were walking into. “You’re famous, Jordi,” he said as he held me close in our bed. “You know better than anyone the kind of people that brings out of the woodwork.”
I thought about Eddie with a shiver. Yes, I did know. I also had Vanni’s horror stories to consider. Once you became a target, everyone else was suspect by default. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…
But I decided to go forward with my plan. With my hero Jace at my side, I knew I was in a much stronger position than I had been in the past. And all my questions about whom I was and where I came from deserved to be answered.
That didn’t stop the nerves from nearly strangling me as we pulled up to a run-down
house near downtown Las Vegas, far beyond the flashing lights of the strip. The exterior of the boxy dwelling was an ugly, dull yellow, indicating the small, one-story house hadn’t been painted in a while. There was a simple, chain-link fence surrounding the property. What passed for a yard was a dull swath of earth, littered with discarded food and drink containers along the sidewalk. Small groups of people congregated near the corner, and graffiti marred the decrepit city street which featured more empty lots than actual buildings. The whole neighborhood resembled a war zone. It was hard to believe that mere miles away, people were reveling as they pissed money away like water, drinking away the worries and monotony of their normal lives back home. I myself had stayed in one of the finest hotels just months before, when I finally broke free of my life as Mrs. Eddie Nix.
And here I was, once again at a crossroads, as I stared at the house that could have very likely been mine had this woman not given me to my father and Marianne.
To say it was a bit of culture shock was an understatement.
The Hemphill house in Oswen had been modest, but tidy and well-kept. There were flowers lining the sidewalk to a fastidious house kept neat and in good repair. It made the creak of the lopsided gate
Jace opened in front of us all the more pronounced.
There were no flower-lined walkways
, just a cracked sidewalk that split the depressing square of land in front of the house into two equal, ugly halves. There wasn’t even a porch. There was a screen door, but in name only. There was no actual screen in the door. In truth it was just a metal frame that I easily reached through to knock, tentatively, on the flat, cheap door beyond.
It didn’t even look like an exterior door, but more one you’d find when you open a closet. It was
as hollow as my spirit when I knocked.
Was Jace right? Were these people out to extort more money from me?
It was obviously they were in desperate need.
I held my breath until the door cracked open an inch. A short, Hispanic woman peered at Jace and me suspiciously. “Yes?”
“Maya?” I asked. “It’s Jordi.”
Her eyes widened as she pulled open the door. She was shorter than me, but just as wide. She wore a thread-bare housecoat that used to be white
, but had long since drowned any of the cheerful daisies on the print with coffee and food stains that would never wash out.
Maya Palermo was hunched over just a bit, but she made the effort to straighten as
she opened the screen. “Jordana!” she said in a breathless whisper as she opened her arms for me to walk into. I managed to suppress my shock at her disheveled state to give her the hug she wanted. She held on tight and long, though the frailty in her body was impossible to ignore. She felt soft and spongy and brittle in my arms, and she smelled of coffee and cigarettes, with a hint of cheap whiskey thrown in just for good measure.
“Jordana?” I asked as I gently disentangled myself from her embrace.
She grinned, and I was even further dismayed that several of her teeth were missing. “Your name,” she answered. “Come in,” she said as she pulled me into the house by one hand.
A generic daytime talk show blared just a little too loud from the ancient
TV on the outer wall. What I could only hope to be secondhand furniture filled the tiny room. There was an ugly brown sofa that was missing one of its three cushions. It had been replaced with a red cushion. Two old recliners faced the TV, and the remnants of what one could only presume was lunch still littered the coffee table.
“I’m sorry for the mess,” she said as she glanced around her own meager surroundings.
“I haven’t been well.” She indicated that Jace and I sit on the sofa, while she eased herself into one of the recliners. She used the remote to put the TV on mute before she turned back to us.
Though terribly poor and obviously in ill health, she smiled warmly at us. I could see the echo of the woman she used to be, someone who looked very similar to me in her youth, and my heart softened immediately. “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten my manners,” she said, chagrinned. “Would you like something to drink?”
Both Jace and I shook our heads, not wanting to put out this woman who struggled with simple tasks like crossing the room or opening the door. I motioned to Jace. “This is Jace Riga. My boyfriend.”
She bobbed her head happily. “I know who you are. I never missed an episode of
Fierce
,” she admitted. “Once I knew that you were a contestant, I was glued to the set. It was like a miracle to see the woman you had grown into.”
My brow furrowed. “You knew who I was?”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“Why didn’t you get in touch with me
before?”
She lowered her head. “What could I offer you, Jordana? You were on the verge of making every single dream you ever had come true. My presence was a complication you didn’t need. Joe and I decided that long ago,
before I moved from Iowa and made my way west. We tried for a while to handle it another way,” she clarified. “Joey would bring you to the park and I was able to hold you and to play with you. But his wife felt that would confuse you as you got older, and I couldn’t disagree. My life was not fit for a baby.”
“Why not?” I asked before I could stop myself.
She laughed as she reached for a coffee mug. “I honestly never thought I’d be a mother. When Joey and I met, it was in a group home in Jersey. We became friends. Closer than friends. We were soul mates.”
I tried not to let my mouth gape open. “You… loved him?”
Years melted from her face as she thought back to my father. “Oh, yes,” she said softly. “Very much.”
“Why did he marry my moth- … someone else?”
She set her cup back down. “Life was hard for us in Jersey,” she confided. We ended up running away from the home by the time we were sixteen. We spent the next two years trying to figure things out. What did we know? We were just kids. We made a lot of mistakes. We fought a lot. We loved a lot. Mostly we just tried to hang onto the one thing in our world that was constant: one another. By the time we were eighteen we ended up in Iowa, when we tracked down some of his relatives. That’s where he met Marianne. She was so far different than the life we knew. She was beautiful,” she said, as if it made Marianne more valuable. “And she’d been turned out by her folks when she was only seventeen. But she wasn’t like me. She was delicate… fragile. And Joey wanted to be her hero. Before long he had fallen head over heels in love. Apparently she was a happily ever after I just couldn’t provide. I was drinking by then,” she offered as she hid her eyes in shame. “And Marianne was so active in the church and in her school. I wouldn’t have chosen me, either.”
I gulped a knot down my throat. Little did she know how duped Joe had been.
Maya pulled herself with difficulty into a standing position. “We stayed friends because that’s what you do. You hold onto the people you belong to, sometimes even after the relationship has ended. We were home to each other, or at least he had been home to me. And he never turned his back on me, even after they married. I tried to stay out of their business as much as possible, especially when they started having trouble conceiving. It was such a strain on Joey, who would come to my house and lean on my shoulder. He was too afraid to show her how disappointed he was. He never wanted her to feel guilty just because nature was working against them. So I offered to carry a baby for them. Well,” she added, “for him.”
I shook my head. “How could… how did…?”
“Well, obviously we didn’t have the money to do it the scientific way. But Marianne wanted to see him as happy as I did. And I got the impression she was relieved that she wouldn’t have to go through the pregnancy in any aspect. I was pregnant within six months.” Her eyes grew dreamy again. “It was the most magical time of my life,” she admitted. “He was so gentle. So loving. So patient. So unlike anyone I had ever known, before or since.”
She lit up when she talked about my Dad, and i
t made me sad for her, sadder still that Marianne had manipulated him into a marriage and ruined their one and only chance to be together.
“The pregnancy was uneventful. I gave up drinking and
cigarettes and Joey always made sure I had the right diet and medical care.” She gave me a gentle smile. “He was taking care of you before you were even born. He loved you so much. He wanted you so much. And when you were born he wept true tears of joy. So even though it was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life, I signed away my parental rights and handed you to your new mother.”
Little did she know… little
had any of us known.
“I thought it would be easy,” she said as she pulled a photo album from the built-in bookshelf. “I never wanted to be a mother because I didn’t know the first thing about it. More than anything I never wanted one of my kids to end up in a home because I was completely incapable of being a parent.” She eased back into her recliner and opened the book, pointing to a photo of a woman who looked like the two of us, holding a tiny baby. The date on the
faded photo read 1971. “This was my mother,” she said. “Gloria Palermo. She got pregnant out of wedlock, forcing her deeply religious family to shun her.”
“Because she got pregnant?” I asked, shocked.
Maya was sad as she shook her head. “She had many demons, Jordana. She had been a problem student and had fallen in with the wrong crowd. Her parents wanted to show her that life has certain consequences.”
I was
heartbroken as I looked in the face of my maternal grandmother. Her dark eyes were so sad, so defeated.
“She tried to take care of me on her own, but she was so young and unprepared. She accidentally scalded me in a hot bath and the authorities stepped in. No one could ever prove it wasn’t intentional, and according to court records she didn’t try that hard. As soon as she wasn’t taking care of a screaming baby full time, her party friends came back in force. Before the case was closed, she died of a drug overdose. I grew up in that Jersey orphanage.”
She flipped a page to show a picture of her and my dad, presumably as they were on the road after leaving New Jersey. Maya was considerably thinner, but still wore about thirty pounds of extra weight.
She was crazy in love w
ith my dad. It was obvious in the way she stared up at him like he hung the moon.
“Joey told me about the summers he would spend with his aunt in Iowa,” she continued.
“Aunt Verna,” I supplied. I remembered spending a few summers with her before my dad died. She had an old tire hanging from the big oak tree in her back yard, which overlooked a creek nearby. Daddy loved to go to that two-story house just twenty miles south of Oswen almost more than anything. He claimed he could smell her home-cooking from ten miles away. He’d help her in her vegetable garden and pluck apples and plums and nuts from the trees growing on her vast property. Aunt Verna was famous for her plum jam and her Dutch apple pie.
I had eaten way more than my share as a kid.
I also chased her chickens around the yard and made friends with the lanky dog who would lounge under the porch of that hundred-year-old farmhouse. It was a picture right out of the Saturday Evening Post. Apparently Daddy thought so too.
“
He told me all about this place with wide open spaces and a clear blue sky, full of honest, hardworking people. Real salt of the earth. It sounded like a fairy tale. We headed west the first chance we got, working our way from place to place, until we saved up enough to buy a car and finish our journey.”
She flipped another page. There were several photos of both Joey and Maya on Aunt Verna’s farm. But Daddy never looked happier than when Marianne was in the photo with him. Aunt Verna had taken Marianne under her wing at the church, which was how they met. That much I knew from my
mother, who had conveniently forgotten to tell me she’d been disowned for having an abortion.
It seemed like far too many members of my family tree were willing to cut off their own limbs whenever it suited them.
No wonder I was a huge mess.
But no doubt Marianne would have left out that part of her history when she was cozying up to Aunt Verna, just like she hid it from my dad.
Yet with all of her faults, she managed to pull herself back onto her feet and carve out a new life for herself. I had newfound respect for that, especially after hearing what happened to my grandmother, Gloria… or seeing what became of my biological mother.