The Perfect Mistress (10 page)

“Code Blue!” a nurse shouted as she ran into the room. In
the middle of the chaos the machine her mother was hooked up to emitted a long beep. Several other hospital staff rushed in, their faces filled with alarm.

“Ladies, can the two of you please step outside?” one of the nurses asked Esther and Joyce.

Joyce considered demanding that she be allowed to stay, but she knew that their attention needed to be focused on her mother. Esther took her hand and led her out of the room, both of them trying desperately to keep their panic at bay. Joyce's entire body shook with fear as she peered through the small windows as the doctors and nurses worked madly around her mother. They had to save her. They had to. Her mother was always so good to everyone . . .

Joyce watched until the doctor's posture changed. He stood up, removed the mask from around his face, and shook his head.

Joyce fainted where she stood.

V
ernon didn't come home until four in the morning. He staggered into the living room to find Joyce sitting in the dark on the sofa. She'd been trying to go to sleep, but it refused to pay her a visit.

“Hey, why are you sitting in the dark?” Vernon said, flipping the light on. He seemed shocked that she was out of the bed.

Joyce just glared at him. She was all cried out and anger had shoved aside her tears. Both she and Esther had tried calling Vernon at the office, and even had his answering service page him, but they couldn't get him. Esther had ended up bringing Joyce home and sat with her until the hour had grown embarrassingly late, then left.

“What is wrong with you?” he asked, loosening his tie.

She answered his question with a piercing stare.

“Okay, let me guess, you're mad about me coming in so late. But I've been working and I figured you'd still be in bed—”

Joyce stopped him before he got too far into his lie. “I called your office.”

“I wasn't working in the office.”

She gave him the meanest look she could muster.

“Why are you tripping?” he asked. “All you want to do is stay up in this house and be depressed. You know that's not me, so I was in no hurry to come home.”

“I needed you,” was all she said.

“Needed me for what?” He tossed his keys onto the bar and came closer to her. He finally noticed the puffiness around her eyes and said, “What's wrong?”

“They had to rush Mama to the hospital.”

His mouth fell open. “Oh my God. How is she?”

All this sympathy was coming far too late. “She's dead, Vernon.” Then she got up, walked to the bedroom, and locked the door behind her.

She ignored his banging on the door as she crawled into bed and cried herself to sleep.

I
know she lives around here somewhere,” Joyce said as she gripped the steering wheel and peered through the car's windows into the dark streets.

Lauren released a long sigh of exhaustion. Why did her mother feel compelled to drag her along on this Vernon-hunting expedition? Julian was off at Fort Benning, and right about now, Lauren wished that she was alongside her brother, serving on a secret mission or something. Anything would be better than this mission her mother had her on.

I'm never going to do this,
Lauren vowed as her mother drove at least ten miles an hour below the speed limit, studying the front of every single house.
I'm never going to let a man make me so crazy that I'm acting like this.

It had been months of this madness. Her mother alternated between being so depressed that she couldn't get out of bed, and getting out of bed and doing this craziness. Right now was the
ultimate
in craziness.

Her mother dropped one hand from the steering wheel and glared down at a handheld contraption that looked like a compass. “The tracking device says he's here.” She peered out of the window at the row of apartments. “But I don't know which one.”

Lauren did everything that she could to keep her lips pressed together rather than letting her mouth open wide. Tracking device? Had her mother really resorted to using a tracking device?

“There is his car!” her mother exclaimed as if she'd just discovered the cure for cancer. She tossed the device onto the console and pointed toward Vernon's Cadillac.

Her mother pulled into the space behind her father's car and threw her vehicle into park. Before Lauren could even get herself together, Joyce swung open the door, jumped out, and stomped up the sidewalk with the energy of that Energizer Bunny on TV.

“I'm going in here and beat this trick down,” Joyce grumbled.

Trick? Beat down?
Who was this woman and what had happened to the real Joyce Robinson?

There was just one problem; Lauren watched her mother stomp toward the wrong apartment. The way her father's car was parked, Lauren knew why her mother was marching to the apartment on the left. The only thing—Miss Callie's apartment was the one on the right.

“Mama, don't,” Lauren called out after her after she finally scooted from the car. “Let's just go home, please?”

“No, I'm sick and tired of this!” her mother cried. “He has stripped me of everything and he's still cheating!”

Even as Lauren tried to catch up to her mother, she was torn. Should she just let her mother go to the wrong house? With the way her mother was behaving—talking about beating down tricks—she was sure that her mother would be banging and screaming on that door in just a few seconds. What
would happen then? Just last week, there was a story on the news about a woman being shot dead in a scenario just like this. The woman had confronted the wrong person and ended up with a bullet right between her eyes. What if that happened to her mother?

The memory of the news report made Lauren shout, “Mama, no!”

“Get back in the car.” Her mother's volume matched Lauren's.

When her mother was less than three feet from the door, Lauren pressed her lips together and then spit out the words, “That's not her house.”

Joyce's hand was already in the air, ready to bang on the door, when she spun around, her head turning like she was that girl in
The Exorcist
.

“How do you know that?”

Even from where she stood, she could see that her mother's lips hardly moved. Lauren stood frozen, the moonlight casting a hollow glow on her mother's face. Now she really did look like she was in the middle of some horror movie, and Lauren felt like she was in one, too.

Her mother turned all the way around and took several slow steps toward her. “How do you know that?” she repeated, her voice rising about four octaves.

Lauren's trembling was her only reply.

“Have you been here before?” her mother said.

“I-I . . .” Lauren couldn't help it. The tears began to fall.

Joyce was right in her face when she shouted, “Answer me!”

“Y-Yes,” she mumbled, not being able to look into her mother's eyes. “I—” Before she could finish, her mother reached
back and slapped her. “You've come over here with him and you don't tell me? My own child? You betray me like this?”

Lauren sobbed. The tears wouldn't stop. And the rage from her mother would only get worse. Lauren just knew her mother was about to haul off and hit her again when she heard her father's voice.

“Joyce. What in the hell are you doing?”

Joyce spun around to see her father standing there in a T-shirt and lounging pants. The sight of him wearing the lounging clothes he normally wore at home must've infuriated her because she momentarily forgot about Lauren.

“What am I doing?” she screamed. “You're the one laid up here with some tramp.”

The person in the apartment next to Miss Callie's opened her door and peeped out. A neighbor on the other side stared from her patio. Miss Callie stood on her front porch, her arms folded across her chest in a defiant pose.

Lauren knew her father was humiliated. “Go home, Joyce.”

She looked up the walkway at Callie. “Is that her?” Joyce didn't give anyone time to answer as she started stomping up the walkway. Miss Callie turned and bolted inside, slamming the door behind her. “Oh, no!” Joyce screamed. “Don't run, tramp!” she shouted toward the door. “You're woman enough to be sleeping with my husband, come out here and face me!”

Forget her father being humiliated. This deranged madwoman acting like someone from one of those hood movies made Lauren sick to her stomach.

“Joyce, stop it. You're making a fool of yourself.” Her
father struggled to grab Joyce from the back. Of course she went ballistic at his mere touch.

“It can't be any worse than the fool you've made of me.” She clawed at his face.

“Just stop it,” he said, grabbing her arms and trying to pin them down.

As Joyce screamed, the elderly woman in the apartment across from them said, “I called the police.”

“Ma'am, we have it under control,” her father replied.

“Don't look like you got it under control,” the woman called out. “The police are on their way.”

Vernon released Joyce and she slumped to the ground. “Did you hear that?” he said. “Police. I'm not doing this.” He reached in his pocket, grabbed his car keys, and headed toward the car. Joyce managed to pull herself up and follow him.

“Get back here. We're not done!” she yelled.

“I'm not doing this with you, Joyce,” he said, speed-walking to his car.

Lauren held on to the edge of the porch, weeping as she watched the scene unfold. Her father got in the car and screeched out of the driveway without ever even acknowledging Lauren.

Joyce sat on the ground sobbing and moaning uncontrollably. More people had come outside and were staring. Lauren couldn't take it anymore.

“Come on, Mama,” Lauren said, trying to help her mother off the ground. Her mother cried, but allowed Lauren to guide her back to the car. As Lauren put her in the driver's seat and closed the door, she looked over her shoulder and saw Miss Callie peering out of the living room window.

As a siren wailed in the background, Lauren scurried to the passenger's side. She never wanted to choose sides, but Miss Callie would have to understand that if she was forced to, no matter what they'd been through, Lauren would always choose her mother.

Lauren sat on her bed, feeling nearly catatonic. She knew she shouldn't have allowed Miss Callie to do all those things for her. The last four hours had been brutal. Her parents had fought every moment since they returned home. Now her mother had left—to clear her head.

“You okay, baby girl?” her father said, entering her room.

“Yeah,” she replied to her father, even though she wasn't.

“I'm sorry you have to deal with such adult stuff.”

There were so many things that Lauren could say in this moment, but there was just one question she had. She'd been trying to muster up the nerve for weeks to ask her father this and now, finally, she found the nerve because she just had to know. “Daddy, why don't you just leave?”