“Sit down, girl, take your coat off. I’ll get you a menu and something hot.”
I swear I wasn’t gone more than thirty seconds. OK, maybe I was gone a whole minute, but no more than that. When I came back, Mountain was draped around that girl like a sausage casing (I
know
how to do sausage casings now), his smile wider than the Grand Canyon, his eyes a color of blue that I hadn’t seen since he and Lawra Svenson did the Booty Call at Millie Tilson’s funeral cabaret.
“Juanita, this meal’s on me,” Mountain said, sounding like the last of the big spenders. How much can a small garden salad, cup of tomato soup, and hot chocolate cost? “You never told me that Mr. High-Up Butt, er, Hayward-Smith, had such an exquisite and erudite executive assistant!” He beamed at Amy.
Both Mary and I forgot our manners and stared for a moment. “Exquisite”? “Erudite”? Mountain?
“Sheriff Peters was telling me about the diner’s history,” Amy said. “It’s
so
romantic. How you took over the cooking, and you and Jess fell in love.”
Who
was
this woman?
I swear to God, Amy, Miss Sophisticated-Midwestern-meatloaf-wouldn’t-touch-my-lips Hsu beamed back at that man as if he was the Apollo of Montana.
“Just call me ‘Frank.’ ” Mountain said in a voice I have never heard him use. And no one, not even his mother, calls him “Frank.” “I’m so glad that, of all places, you decided to walk in here.”
Mary and I exchanged glances. Like there are that many choices in Paper Moon?
“Oh, well, yes, I guess it’s a good story,” I managed to stammer as I dropped off the hot chocolate. Neither of them was paying any attention to me at all. “Amy, your soup and salad will be out in a minute,” I said to no one in particular.
“Thank you,” Amy said. Her eyes never left Mountain.
“Juanita, I think I’ll just escort Miss Hsu over here to my table,” Mountain said as if he was talking about a reserved table at the Ritz-Carlton. “Oh, and could I put in another order?”
When I gave the slip to Jess, he whistled.
“Good God! When did a family of four come in?”
I chuckled.
“Not a family of four, just Mountain’s appetite back from a short leave of absence.”
“The boy finally realized he was starving to death?” Jess pulled out a Texas-sized hamburger patty.
“The boy’s in love again,” I said.
Jess rolled his eyes.
“I’m in love, too, but if I ate like that I’d get too fat for those weird sexual positions that you like.” The hamburger hit the grill with a sizzle.
“You are a silly man,” I told him.
“Just trying to keep you satisfied while you’re back. It’s hard being in love with a rolling stone.”
“Oh, please. Where’s that salad?” I ladled out the tomato soup. While I got Amy’s order ready, Jess sang.
Juanita is a rolling stone,
Wherever she lays her hat is her home . . .
“You’d better pay attention to that hamburger because you won’t make much of a living on the Temptations Reunion Tour.”
By the time I got back to Amy and Mountain, they were ready to order the wedding invitations. I have heard of love at first sight but this is the first time I have seen it with my own eyes.
“I hear that you’re having a ‘Soul Food Night,’ Juanita,” Mountain said to me while keeping his eyes glued to Amy as she sipped her soup with ladylike delicacy. “Grits, sweet potato pies, macaroni and cheese, corn pudding . . .” Mountain’s face lit up. Just mentioning several starchy foods together gives him a high. “Ribs, fried catfish . . .”
“In three weeks,” I told him, wiping my hands on my apron. “No grits, Mountain. I only do them for breakfast mostly.”
But Mountain had already moved on.
“That’s too long to wait. Miss Hsu, may I take you to dinner next Saturday? Say, seven o’clock?” Amy looked like Cinderella who’d just found out that the glass slipper fit her tootsies. “I think you’ll enjoy the meal . . . and are you free tomorrow night, too?”
I didn’t stay for her reply, I could guess what it was anyway. Yes, she would marry him; yes, she would have several ten-pound babies with him and, by the way, yes, she’d be happy to go to dinner with him tomorrow night. I glanced outside: snowing again, wind blowing, probably thirty degrees. Yep, it was definitely the season for love.
When I came back into the kitchen, Jess was prepping for dinner and Mary was helping. I was just in the way so I picked up my lists then realized that there was something that I was supposed to do. The problem was, I couldn’t remember what that
was.
I didn’t have this problem in my old one-dimensional life in Columbus. Of course, I didn’t have as much to remember then, either. Now, I needed lists and a calendar to keep up with everything that I was responsible for. So, I had started forgetting things. I would get up and go into the kitchen, forgetting what I was going in there to get. I started leafing through papers, then forget what I was looking for. Of course, I could just be getting old. Scary. So, now I sat at the far end of the counter, shifting through my lists looking for . . . ah! Looking for . . . mail, office supplies list, recipe for corn pudding, hospitality class syllabus, and letter from attorney.
I came across the file folder that had Millie’s short story in it. Like most other things, I’d forgotten all about it, just stacked other stuff right on top. I smiled. It was a nice story, at least it was from what I’d heard of it. I hadn’t actually read it. I looked up in time to see Mary slicing a piece of pie, Jess and Randolph engrossed in the prep for tonight’s dinner shift. Once again I forgot what it was that I was looking for and started reading.
Millie’s Story, page eight
Just outside Nairobi, Kenya, Shade Gazelle Farm
Owned by David Hayward-Smith
The little boy toddled toward her, first swaying one way, then another. As his fat, stubby legs became surer of themselves, he picked up speed. Giggling, he staggered over to her, like a happy drunk, his round face radiant with the triumph of moving on his own at last. As he got close to her, he raised his arms to be picked up. His mother swept him into her arms and buried her tear-dampened face into the folds of his neck.
“Mummy . . . stop, Mummy!” He squealed and swatted at her as she kissed him everywhere, especially on the tip of his nose. She hugged him tightly as if the imprint of his little body on hers could be stamped on with a permanent ink.
The man stood in the doorway, tall and dark with an ominous expression on his face. He looked like the shadow of death and would have been pleased to know it.
“He’ll ruin your makeup,” he said, simply.
“I don’t care,” she said, her words muffled by the tears and the kisses she planted on the squirming little boy.
The baby giggled.
“MUMMY!” He pushed at his mother with one fat little arm. He was smiling, his blue eyes, her blue eyes, twinkled with merriment. His mother’s heart began to split apart.
“W-what are you going to t-tell him? What will you say when he asks where I am?” she managed to say to the dark presence looming in the doorway.
He took a long drag on his cigarette and blew out the smoke slowly. He made her wait for his answer. Cruelty was a hobby with him.
“I’ll tell him that you left. That you didn’t want to take him with you.”
Her dark-blue eyes blazed as she set the baby down. The little boy toddled away to chase a ball that the cat was batting about.
“But that’s not true! I’d never leave him like that! I wanted to take him with me!”
“And bring him up in a speakeasy? Or in the wings of a theater? I think not.” His voice boomed. It was cold and hard. She shivered. “Besides, we’ve settled all that.”
“I would make him a good home,” she countered even though she wasn’t certain.
“Well, now you won’t have to worry about that, will you? He’ll be perfectly looked after and have a very proper home. Right here.” David inhaled deeply again. “And you haven’t done too badly for yourself.”
The money was enough to keep her in furs, diamonds, and Chanel for a lifetime. It still was not enough for what she had to give up.
She wiped away the tears with one gloved hand.
“I’m going to tell him, you know. Someday. I’ll tell him what you did.” Her words were defiant but her voice cracked.
David Hayward-Smith was not moved.
“If you say anything, if you ever come near him, I will cut him off completely. He’ll be poorer than the poorest rat in London. Do you understand, Rose? I will make him a bastard with the stroke of a pen.” David glanced over at his son, now playing with the ball in the sunroom. “I will turn him out of this house like a dismissed stable boy.”
Rose looks back on that moment and cringes. She chides herself for her cowardice. She should have had the courage to take the baby with her but what would she have done with a baby in prewar Europe, a woman alone with nothing but her voice and her wit to keep her alive? Could she have kept a child fed and warm on wits? Maybe she should have tried. She thinks of the many times that she watched her son from afar from behind school gates, at cricket matches, and sitting in the back of the cathedral when he graduated Oxford. From beneath designer hats, from behind sunglasses, from the shadows, she watched his life unfold. The school photos that she kept, the newspaper articles that she clipped about his career. Even after David died, she kept her distance as if David’s ghost would come back and threaten her again. But by then, of course, there was no point, was there? The son was over sixty years old: He’d lived a lifetime without her. What would he do with an old woman, an eighty-year-old mother whom he’d never met? A mother whom he’d been told had left him behind like last season’s swing coat hanging, forgotten, in the back of a closet?
I kept my end of the bargain but it was the hardest bargain I ever made. David became a hero in Kenya. His public face was unblemished. His private one, the face that I knew, was a horror. I had read the accounts about my son’s mysterious mother, her name unmentioned, and how she just left in the middle of the night, just disappeared, never writing him a letter or trying to see him. And I had been too afraid to correct the lies. David Hayward-Smith left me no choices. I left darling Broderick with his father so that he would receive his rightful inheritance and carry on the Hayward-Smith name. And now, he has.
Millie was a good writer. She’d said that her creative writing instructor’s favorite quote was “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” Well, I had to brush tears away so Millie’s face must have been soaked.
The sweat rolled down my face from her description of the heat of Kenya and my nose itched from the smell of the animals. I was startled by the sounds of unknown creatures rustling around in the night. And, in the distance, sometimes when the insects weren’t too loud, you could hear the lions and the singing and the music, sounding scratchy and falsely high-pitched on the gramophone, instruments that sounded like someone had fashioned them out of tin. I saw the young mother at her dinner party, wiry and vivacious with dark auburn-brown hair, cut and marcelled in the style of the time, a long cigarette holder between her fingers. Her dress was a rich, deep burgundy, “merlot” as Millie had called it, using wine terminology that she’d learned from the Count. In my mind, a sleeveless dress with a dropped waistline trimmed in satin ribbon, fitted over and over again until its wearer was completely satisfied. With the dress, the lady would have worn strapped shoes in leather dyed to match and ropes of perfect pearls around her slender neck. It was a dress designed and stitched by the house of Schiaparelli. I remembered that name. It had taken me several tries before I could pronounce it. It was a beautiful dress and I had seen it myself, carefully preserved, and hanging in a clear garment bag in one of Millie’s closets.
A little boy, chubby and outgoing: Did his mother’s absence turn him into a stick man with a chip on both his shoulders? I felt the wetness of her tears on the baby’s neck and the stonelike heaviness of her chest as she sobbed in the back of the car on the way to the train station. She would not be consoled then. And, from the look on Millie’s face that evening when I saw her stroking the secretive Siamese, I don’t think she ever was.
I closed the file folder and leaned over the counter. Jess, Randolph, and Mary buzzed around me and wonderful smells floated up from the saucepans and pots on the huge stove. But I wasn’t tuned in to that. My mind was far away, over sixty years and a continent-and-a-half away.
Millie had taken a creative writing course but what I’d read wasn’t fiction. The pain that seeped out of her words was real. She had loved her son with everything she had, enough to give him up so that he would have the kind of life that she’d wanted him to have but couldn’t give him herself. And she had lived all of these years, or seemed to, with joy in her heart, a wild sense of adventure and humor. But all the time, Millie had nursed this wound, this hole in her heart, had stitched it up, bandaged it, covered it up, and masked it with every trick of camouflage that she knew.
But it wasn’t enough.
Jess took a sip of the concoction (something French, “cock of” something or other) and winced. I guess the seasoning was off. He grinned at me and waved the spoon around as he looked for the missing ingredient.
I smiled but didn’t really see him.
All I saw was a little boy raising his arms upward to a woman who smiled through her tears.
Chapter Eleven
“
I
wonder what would have happened if . . .”
Is that what life comes down to, a basketful of “what ifs”? What if I had done this instead of that? Would life be better or worse? What if Millie had taken her son with her instead of leaving him with David Hayward-Smith? What if I hadn’t come to Paper Moon or what if the sun just decided not to rise one morning? And what if you don’t have any “what ifs” to choose from?
Sometimes there aren’t any choices; someone takes them right out of your hand and you’re stuck with what
they
want you to have. Other times you have a lot of choices but none of them are good ones. And you have to make the best of it, as Millie did. As I had to do for years and may have to do again. With Bertie.
She has threatened to fly to Missoula, with Teishia along for the ride. Lord knows where she’s going to get the money but Bertie always finds the money to do the things that
she
wants to do. Now she’s decided that if I won’t come to her then she’ll come to me. Bertie is an expert at backing people into corners. She knows that I’ll do the right thing for the simple reason that she won’t. And Teishia is caught in between.
I hadn’t slept well in a string of nights, tossing and turning, twisting this problem around in my head and always coming back to the same answer. Jess and I talked about it until we were both blue in the face. I was anxious and worn down. Jess was easier about this in his mind than I ever would be in mine.
“Aw, don’t worry about it,” he told me. “I helped my sister with Mignon and Cathy. Little girls are a piece of cake. It’s the
boys
that are trouble.”
“I feel so helpless. She’s going to come, I know it. She’ll leave the baby and take off. And I won’t see her again for ten years.” She was backing me into a cage and I didn’t want to go. Bertie was setting me up just like a grifter running a con. I wouldn’t have any way to turn but her way. My chest felt heavy. “Jess . . . I love Teishia but I don’t want to raise another child.”
“What makes you think she’ll do that?” Jess asked.
I snorted.
“That’s her way. ‘See ya later, Ma’ and it will be one thing or another. ‘Hey, Mom, I’ll come and get her in two weeks.’ Or, ‘the plane ticket went up. I have to wait until the price comes down.’ Or, ‘I’m working weekend nights to pay off that last AEP bill, just a couple more weeks . . . ’ ”
“Then tell her
no,
” Jess’s voice was harsh, a contrast to the soft, warm darkness. I felt him stretch out next to me. It was two in the morning. He yawned. Poor Jess, this was the third time this week that I had awakened him with my restlessness.
A two-letter word with such a complicated meaning. Was it only complicated if you said it and didn’t mean it?
“This is not your problem, Jess; it’s mine.”
“It is when it keeps me up at night,” he teased me. He pulled me into his arms. His body was warm and soft and I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else. But Bertie’s voice and Teishia’s face were the only pictures that moved across my mind; a moving comic strip. “You help me out, I help you out. That’s how it works. Now it’s my turn.”
I shook my head and sighed as I laid my head on his shoulder.
“No. It is definitely my turn,” I mumbled.
Jess kissed me.
“Then you’ll owe me one,” he countered.
But I still couldn’t sleep. And then I had a nightmare. I dreamed that I was sitting in a closet-sized room, in a chair wedged between an elephant and a rhinoceros. If I moved, I’d make the elephant mad or spook the rhino. I was stuck.
For the next week, I went through the days with the joy of a person who’s waiting for the other shoe to drop—a really big shoe.
School was getting more and more difficult. I’d been staying up late at night, studying, trying to understand the percentages and conversion charts, trying to figure out how to apply this chemistry to baking a simple loaf of bread (that wasn’t really simple) or making a croissant. I wasn’t doing very well. My croissants were chewy. And my hors d’oeuvres were too big. Chef looked at them then glared at me.
“Madame Louis, I
said
to make them bite-sized. Unless you plan to serve Goliath at your reception, these bowling balls will take the average person four bites to eat.”
I was discouraged. We had a big test coming up. I didn’t think any number of study-group sessions or all-nighters would help me. I made a decision: If I didn’t pass this test, and I mean really pass it with a B or better, I was dropping out of the program. I didn’t tell Jess because I knew that he would try to talk me out of it.
Didn’t have too much to say to anyone that week. Inez was worried that I was coming down with the flu.
“No, I’m OK,” I told her. What is that called when you just want to crawl into bed, pull the covers up over your head, and stay there for a few years? The blues? Well, I had them and I had them bad.
Inez checked my forehead with the back of her hand then shook her head. “You look peaked,” she said with authority. “You better take something, lie down awhile. And
stop
moving the furniture and pictures around. Where did you put Millie’s portrait?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked her, closing the notebook that I had been using to keep up with the reservations.
“The portrait of Millie. You moved it out of the parlor.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, it’s not there.”
Sure enough, Millie’s portrait, the nude one by Taubert, was gone and a landscape was in its place, one that had been hanging over the washbasin in the Violet Room.
“I didn’t move it,” I told Inez.
Inez exhaled loudly and looked upward.
“Then we have Elva problems again. I go call the number for the ghost therapist. I found it yesterday in the back of the kitchen junk drawer.”
But this wasn’t Elva Van Roan’s work. She had promised to behave and, unless you got a wedgie over a few thumps and bumps, she had. This was Mr. Pointy Nose High-Up Butt and I was fed up with him. Until that hearing was held, this was still Millie’s house, damn it. And if she’d hung that portrait there, then, by God, there it stayed until the court decided.
I knocked on the door but no one answered so I just walked on in. I found H-Smith in the middle of a business meeting. Amy was tapping away on the laptop, a male voice droned over a speakerphone, and Williams hovered in the background; I wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing, but he looked busy.
“Mrs. Louis, we’re in the middle of a conference call!” Amy exclaimed.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you said ‘come in.’ ”
“Mrs. Louis.” H-Smith held up one finger. It wasn’t his middle finger so I assumed that he was signaling for me to stay quiet for a moment while he finished his call.
“Amory, we have been around this block before. My offer still stands but if it doesn’t suit you, then I’ll withdraw it. What? I see. Then we have a disagreement in interpretation because I have no interest in adjusting it upward. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have another appointment.” He tapped a button and the phone clicked off. Then he turned his attention to me, giving me the same look he always did—as if he was about to squirt me with bug spray. “Mrs. Louis. To what do I owe this unannounced intrusion?”
I ignored the fancy talk. I was too tired to get into word fencing.
“Mr. Hayward-Smith, we agreed that none of your mother’s furnishings or personal effects were to be disturbed until after the hearing.”
“Yes, that’s right,” he answered. He was as cool as a bottle of Boone’s Farm that had just come out of the refrigerator.
“Then why did you move your mother’s portrait? The one hanging in the back parlor?”
There have been times when I’ve caught H-Smith off guard and, with his dark-blue eyes, blonde-gray hair, and pointed cheekbones, he looked a lot like his mother, even though I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile. There are other times, like this one, when his face hardened like concrete into a mask of meanness. I wondered if this was the face of his father, David. It wasn’t Millie’s face, I can tell you that.
“Yes, I moved it. I won’t have it around,” he said sharply. “It’s disgusting.”
“It is not . . .”
“That portrait is . . . filth,” he interrupted me, his voice getting louder. The way he said the word “filth” made my stomach turn.
“It is a portrait of
your mother,
” I told him. “There’s nothing filthy about it.”
“She was an irresponsible, promiscuous gold digger and my father was well rid of her.”
“You never met the woman. You don’t know jack shit about her. She was kind, funny, smart, and generous—”
“Generous with her favors, you mean,” he interrupted.
“Generous with her time and her money, generous with her spirit,” I told him. “You are a really stupid man, did you know that?”
I thought Mr. High-Up Butt was going to choke. Williams started coughing and quickly left the room with Amy close behind him, her eyebrows raised to her hairline. The door closed with a discreet click.
“You have some . . .”
“Listen here, I have had about enough of this. I love this place, but life is too short to have your head pounding, your stomach churning, and staying up nights wondering what shoe is gonna drop next. The attorney told me to be civil with you but my civility has run out. Your mother, and that’s what she was,
your mother.
She was a lady, I don’t care what you think.”
“I know all that I need to know,” H-Smith snapped back. “My father married the woman, he knew all about it . . .”
“I don’t care what your jackass daddy thought he knew, he was wrong. Worse than that, he was a liar.” If you’re going to jump into something, you might as well jump in up to your thighs. Right?
“She was irresponsible and greedy.” Hayward-Smith’s voice was booming now, a deep baritone that might have sounded good in an opera or something. But now, its tones echoed off the walls of the room and sounded angry, hollow, and cold. “My father paid her off and she took the money like the money-grubbing tart that she was.”
“Millie didn’t leave you because she wanted to. She left you behind because your daddy told her that he would take away your inheritance if she didn’t.”
Of course, I couldn’t prove that. I only had a short story that might or might not be based on truth to go on, but, what the hell, there was a whole lot in those words that had the ring of truth. And I was now pulling the rope and ringing that huge bell.
I had been fanning myself with the file folder even though it was thirty degrees outside. Now, I just threw it in his face.
“Your momma was a writer, too,” I told him. He was too shocked to say anything. “You might want to read one of her stories.”
I slammed the door so hard the chandelier swayed from side to side.
I stormed past Inez, grabbed my coat, and trudged down the hill and around the corner to the diner, where I could get something to calm me down.
I don’t drink but I sure needed a drink now.
Well, I wasn’t going to inherit any bed-and-breakfast. Maybe Hayward-Smith would prove that Millie was nuttier than a fruitcake. I was way past caring. I had just taken care of one of my full plates.
I was so mad that I was practically blind. I was charging along as if it was sixty degrees outside and the walks were clear and dry instead of covered with snow and slush and patches of ice. So, of course, I slipped and fell on my butt. Tried to stand up and slipped again. Good thing I have some extra padding on my backside. By the time I got going again, I was still mad but I was sore, too.
When I walked into the diner, I could tell by the expression on Jess’s face that one of my other full plates was about to spill over.
I stomped the snow off my feet and opened the door of the diner. Jess was standing right in front of me.
Do you remember that shoe that I was waiting on? Well, it dropped on my head and flattened me like a pancake.
“Your daughter just called,” he said with an expression that would stop a train in its tracks. He paused before he went on, as if he was thinking something over. “She says that Teishia is sick.”
Long after I hung up the phone, I just sat there and stared at it.
“Momma, you got to come home . . . 104-degree fever . . . Children’s Hospital ER . . . convulsions . . . Momma, I need you . . .”
I heard the sound of a mug sliding across the counter toward me. Hot chocolate, just the way I liked it with more whipped cream than chocolate. But I couldn’t drink it. Not now.
“Momma, I need you to come home . . .”
It had not been a nice conversation.
I looked up at Jess, who was filling a tray for a table of cross-country skiers.
“I don’t believe her,” he said simply as he walked past me.
I said nothing. I didn’t believe her either.
Just hearing Bertie’s voice, I got a knot in my stomach. Talking with Randy, even with Rashawn, didn’t touch me that way. But the sound of my daughter’s voice, transmitted loud and clear across the digital microwaves of long distance, came in on a high-quality frequency. And it brought with it more than words. Vocabulary was the runner-up to anger and arrogance and blame, especially blame. The boatload of blame came through just fine and left a sticky, ugly residue of guilt behind as if I hadn’t wiped down the counter right. So that when I finished talking (or should I say “listening”?) to Bertie, there was a sharp, sick coldness in my gut as if I’d swallowed Pepto-Bismol laced with sliced razor blades that had just come out of the Deepfreeze.
“She is your granddaughter,” Bertie had said, as if she was telling me that two and two were four.
The fingers of my old life were longer and more patient than I thought. I had figured, after a year or so, they would have given up looking for me, trying to “talk some sense” into me, give up trying to make me come to Jesus and take care of the responsibilities I had to raise my grown children. Like a bank robber from the thirties, I thought I had got away clean.
No way. That old life had tentacles that were long and sticky like a giant squid and they were reaching out to me, grabbing and pulling me back.