House Broken (3 page)

“I'll look at it more carefully but I doubt it. Not decent care.
We don't want just anybody in her condo, driving her to therapy and all that.”

“No. Although it'd be tempting to teach her a lesson by getting her someone really cranky.”

“Or maybe a beefy loudmouth who sings opera all day.”

“That's good!” She shoved him playfully. “Seriously, though. Who's going to be willing to put up with her drinking?”

“We could clear the booze out of her condo.”

“Okay. Who'd be willing to deal with her then?”

They stared into the starless night.

She said, “Do you remember how she was when we were little, before she started drinking?”

“I do. She was fun—one of us.”

“Yes, as long as ‘us' didn't include Paris.”

Talia appeared in the doorway. “You guys want anything before I collapse?”

Dublin said, “No, we're good. I've about had enough of this particular day.”

“Ditto,” said Geneva.

The writing was on the wall. Someone would have to take care of Helen. Dublin and Talia had too much to cope with already, and Florence's tiny Manhattan walk-up wouldn't work—and wouldn't be offered. This would be a perfect time for Paris to materialize, call a truce with their mother, and start making up for all the vodka-fueled disasters she'd missed.

Geneva listened to a siren wail in the distance and wished herself away.

HELEN

E
ustace Riley claimed it was Helen's butterscotch pie that did it. But even a Blue Ribbon dessert (two years running) was no match for that figure of hers at sixteen, and they both knew it. Any fool could see the way he looked her up and down. Then he pretended to wave hello to someone behind her, so she'd spin around and he could investigate her calves. As if she hadn't seen that trick coming.

That Fourth of July was hotter than a billy goat in a pepper patch. Eustace invited her to the show barn, where he claimed it was cooler. They leaned over the rails and laughed at the piglets pulling at one another's tails. He bought her a lemonade and wiped the sweat off the glass before he handed it to her. It struck her then what the difference was between a man like Eustace and
the boys who'd been chasing her like bees from a shook hive. Eustace had manners and a confident air, as if he already had what he wanted before he thought to ask for it.

“You seventeen yet, Miss Helen?”

“Near enough.”

And her daddy thought the same, though it surprised her some. Of course back then she wasn't thinking about the same things her daddy was—Eustace's family money and law degree, and getting loose of his daughter before she ended up damaged goods. Helen believed she had found True Love. Certainly her feelings matched up with what she read in those romances her mama hid behind the pickle jars in the pantry. The bare-chested pirate on the cover of one bore a likeness to Eustace, with his strong jaw and hair black as coal, though she'd never seen him with his shirt off and blushed to think of it. When her mama let drop that Eustace was thirty-two, she nearly fainted. Twice her age! But then she came around to look at it from another side. A man of such experience (and breeding) wasn't likely to make a foolish mistake, meaning he loved her and aimed to keep her. That thought made her bold and desirous, not only of Eustace but of leaving her childhood behind. As love goes at sixteen, Helen did love Eustace. And considering what was to transpire, her love was plenty true.

He courted her through the summer swelter. They held hands during the picture show and along the river walk in the evenings. If everyone in town gossiped about them, they gave no notice of caring. Helen held her head high, sure as sure could be that the opinion of the populace of Aliceville, and the entire state of South Carolina, mattered not a penny to her, not next to the attentions of a man of Eustace's stripe. He told her the townspeople had their
jaws pinned to the floor because she was pretty. So pretty, in fact, he might just have to marry her. He let the comment fall real casual, but her heart jumped and her palms went clammy. He owned he wasn't in a particular hurry, but neither did he see any purpose in delaying the full measure of their happiness.

One evening in the middle of August they sat on his porch swing, sipping sweet tea and watching swallows cartwheeling across the sky. Eustace stood up and bent down on one knee. He held her hand light as a baby bird inside both of his. His eyes, dark and knowing, caught the gleam off the porch light. When she said yes, he kissed her like he was dying.

The next day they drove the thirty miles to Wilbur to see his folks. Helen's stomach exchanged positions with her heart the whole way there. Eustace's father came from a long line of tobacco farmers, but not the kind whose boots ever saw dirt. When Eustace and Helen arrived, the Rileys' girl saw them to the parlor, and kept her head bowed the whole time. Mrs. Riley's manners held up well, considering her only son was presenting her with a child as a daughter-in-law—and one from the wrong side of town. The elder Mr. Riley leaned his forearm on his belly as he sucked on a cigar. He eyed Helen over his bifocals. His eyebrows twitched like caterpillars on a hot plate.

“Young and frisky! Didn't know that was your taste, boy!”

She stared at her shoes.

Eustace's mother clucked. Then she barked at the girl to hurry up with the drinks.

• • •

Since she was six years old, Helen'd reckoned she wear her mama's wedding dress when the time came. It hung mysterious in a dark
bag in her parents' closet behind Mama's funeral suit and the Bo Peep outfit she had sewn for a masquerade party twenty years before and worn to every Halloween party since, not that there'd been many. When Eustace asked for her hand, she expected her mama to offer up the dress, but it didn't happen. Helen suspected forces were at work, meaning Eustace. Sure enough, two weeks before the wedding day, Mama waltzed into Helen's room with a dress draped over her arms. “Eustace's folks brought this by. Modern, they called it.” It was finer than any she'd seen. Lace appliqué over satin, with hundreds of tiny pearls stitched in a delicate flower and paisley design. She turned it over and counted thirty-four corset buttons down the back. Later, while her mama hung out the washing, she dug to the rear of the closet and pulled out the old dress. She fingered the dime-store buttons and yellowed fabric—not the Cinderella gown she remembered—and put it away.

Come the wedding day, Helen had dropped so much weight from nervous excitement that her mama had to stuff the bosom of her gown with cotton wool to make it fit proper. She would remember as much of that day as she might of a dream. One picture did stick in her mind: Eustace beside the preacher, taller by a head and easier, it appeared, in the house of the Lord. Satisfaction writ large across his face.

• • •

They celebrated her seventeenth birthday on the honeymoon. She'd never stayed in a hotel before. Never had reason to. Once in a blue moon Daddy'd drive them somewhere—to a lake for a swim, to a fishing hole he'd heard about and, on one occasion, clear into Columbia—but they'd always come home at the end of
the day. He'd drive tired. Coming home from Columbia he'd swerved like a drunk, with only Mama's yelling to keep them out of the ditch. They'd already paid for home, he said, so that's where they'd sleep.

Not Eustace. They stayed a week in the Tower Suite at the Hotel Tybee near Savannah. Every day they walked the boardwalk, hand in hand, and swam in the ocean. Eustace laughed when Helen said if she stood on his shoulders she bet she could see Europe. But in the evening, while they were slow dancing on the lawn under the palms, he whispered that in Europe they would crown her, because that's how beautiful she was. His voice was honey pouring into her head. She was susceptible to such nonsense then.

She hadn't known what to expect when they went to bed, him bringing twenty years' experience under the covers with him. She should've guessed he wanted what he wanted and he got what he saw fit to take. He wasn't particularly gentle and he wasn't particularly mean—at least as far as she could judge. What did she know of such things? Mostly she was glad to fall asleep afterward and gladder still to see the light peeking around the drapes. She looked forward to each new day—piles of sweet, fat shrimp to eat, and the warm sand pushing up between her toes.

• • •

“Honeymoon's over,” Eustace declared as he supervised the bellman stowing their cases in the trunk.

She missed the sea even before it disappeared from sight. He turned on the radio, hung his elbow out the window, and hummed along. She stared out at the houses in the towns they passed, wondering if any of them might contain the sort of life she was about
to have. The fancy neighborhood in Raleigh intrigued her especially, and she wished they could slow down and have a closer look. But naturally she couldn't ask Eustace that.

They drove past the cemetery coming into Aliceville. Helen and all the other town kids always held their breath the whole way past, so as not to invite bad luck, but either she forgot or she decided she was no longer a child and took in air the way she usually did. Aliceville looked the same and it didn't. The drugstore, town hall, liquor store, and the other buildings along Main Street appeared to have shifted over a few feet. Maybe that's what marriage does, she thought. One day you're holding your breath lest a ghost fly up your nose and the next you're coming home as married as your own mother.

Eustace navigated the rutted drive leading to Helen's house and parked next to a shiny red Chevy truck with a dealer sticker in the window. Her daddy's rattletrap was nowhere in evidence.

“Looks like your daddy got himself a present,” he said.

“That's not Daddy's. He wouldn't know where to look for that sort of money.” Eustace raised his eyebrows, and she realized she'd contradicted him.

“Let's get your things, Princess.”

They got out of the car. Helen noticed another layer of paint had peeled off the house. The weeds crowded the path and laid claim to the first step. Shame rose in Helen. She ran her hands down the crisp pleats of her skirt and reminded herself that although this ramshackle cottage might have been her home, it most assuredly wasn't any longer. Eustace had taken care of that.

Her daddy appeared in the doorway. He must've expected them because he'd put on a shirt. He swiped his mouth with the back of his hand, hitched up his trousers, and grinned.

“Welcome back! Look at you, Mrs. Helen Riley. You're brown as a nut.” He gestured toward the truck. “How do you like it?”

“You picked a beauty, you did,” Eustace said.

She said, “But, Daddy, how . . .”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Eustace wink at him. Then her mama came and shooed everyone inside, reeling off a million questions about their trip. Helen would have to be content to riffle through her feelings another day, or forget about the meaning of that truck entirely.

• • •

Eustace's house was close to town. He let her do with it as she pleased, not that she had a firm idea of what ladies with money did with their houses, their gardens, or their husbands. She had help in every other day, which unnerved her some, as she wasn't used to having Negroes around. Louisa was about as old as her mama, and no doubt had children Helen's age. At first Helen busied herself in some part of the house Louisa wasn't, but soon decided it was foolishness. She learned Louisa didn't mind chatting as she shelled peas or scrubbed the floors. Helen asked a lot of questions about running the house, and would have asked more but for fear of appearing ignorant. One day she got up the nerve to ask Louisa what other ladies did all day. She laughed. Helen joined in and pretty soon the two of them were doubled over. They spent the rest of the afternoon making Helen's famous butterscotch pie.

The house was large, with a wide front porch and a shaded backyard. When Helen was alone, she stayed in the kitchen. If Louisa had done all the cooking—or if it was too hot to eat—she brought her sewing in there, or a book. The yellow gingham
curtains and the ticking of the stove clock calmed her. Her mama came to call if she was already in town on other business. She never stayed long. She lit from chair to chair like a butterfly visiting flowers, then proclaimed she was needed at home and blew out the door.

Eustace left early for his law office in town or, if there was a trial, the court in the county seat. More evenings than not, he attended meetings of one sort or another, leaving Helen to her books and the radio. Weekends he took off hunting or fishing, but always returned in time to take her to a party, or the country club. She took great care with her appearance for these outings, knowing Eustace expected her to outshine the other ladies to such a degree that her age would be set aside. A quick study, she discovered which hairdos and styles of dress earned her admiring and envious looks from ladies and gentlemen alike.

She had been married only a month when she woke light-headed and queasy. She put two and two together and was equal parts scared and thrilled. Straight off she knew it was a girl. Eustace didn't realize, but they'd picked out the child's name at Tybee, the last night they sat on the beach. The moon shone like a silver dollar tossed on a velvet spread. Eustace had his arm around her. Same as when she lay against him in their hotel bed, he was the only thing between her and the on-and-on darkness. The salt lifted off the sea, and she breathed it in.

“What cities, do you suppose, would want me for a princess?”

“Paris, for a start.”

What a beautiful word. It drifted lightly, like a promise to a child. “You been there?”

“A long time ago. With my family.”

“Did you eat snails?”

He let out a bark of a laugh. “No. My mother tried to force them on me, but I got my way. Even then.” He lay on the sand and pulled her on top of him. She felt herself blush, though not a soul could see her, not even him. There wasn't even that much moonlight. He put his hand on her breast and squeezed until she gasped. “And now I've got you.”