The Shore (19 page)

Three years after Mo and Grant got married, she'd gotten a funny letter from the bank. Their savings account was cleared out, and checking was overdrawn. They'd been squirreling cash away toward a house, one of the really nice ones on Chincoteague, so it wasn't just some pocket change that was missing. She'd stormed into the bank, furious, and they'd had to tell her that Grant had been slowly cleaning out the account. Later she found out that he'd been going up to Atlantic City whenever he was in Maryland overnight for roofing jobs, playing the slots, poker, roulette, anything that could pay off big or clear him out fast. Mostly it was the second one. He'd been covering his
tracks well, expecting to hit it big and put everything back in the account before she found out, so when she came home and started crying and screaming at him, he denied it at first. She threw some clothes in a bag, took his car, and showed up at my apartment, so mad she was shaking.

The first few days she did almost nothing but sleep; when I went to work she was passed out on the couch, and when I got back she was pretty much in the same position. She didn't tell me right off what had happened, and I probably would have gone after him if she had. After a week to sort her head out she started looking through the paper for jobs, and that's when he started calling. The first few times he begged like a wimp, and we just hung up on him. Then he called to say that he'd straightened out the account, gotten their bank balance back to zero even if he couldn't save the apartment they were renting in Onancock, and she decided to listen. He had enrolled in a twelve-step program, had taken on more hours at work, promised to earn back all the money he had lost and never go near a casino again. He didn't deserve her but they had said for richer or poorer and he swore that she wouldn't regret it if she didn't walk out on him. She'd found a job at a greasy spoon by then, and told him to prove it to her. My housemates didn't mind her, since she bought her share of beer, so she'd stayed around for six months, working double shifts and acting like one of the guys again, until she figured Grant had learned his lesson and she was ready to go back and give him a second chance.

I'd been glad when Mo got married, since she was so happy about it, but even from the start I hadn't liked her husband. He'd struck me as a spineless bastard, the sort that was always trying to weasel himself into or out of something, the sort you
really shouldn't trust. He'd been chasing after her for years, and at first I'd thought he'd go the way of her other boyfriends. But he'd started talking kids and a future at some point, and before I knew it she was shopping around for a gown. When she showed up at my door that time I'd halfway hoped she'd just stick around, but even then I'd known that she wouldn't leave him so easily. When she'd told me that she was going back to try again I'd cleaned out my savings, gone up to Belle Haven on my day off, and bought their little shoebox house. I'd been welding ships for about eight years, through the Vietnam War when most of the guys I knew had been drafted, and I'd never gone on a bender or chased after women or even really taken a vacation in all that time. It wasn't like I was saving the money for anything; they'd lost their apartment when she left, and Grant had been sleeping on people's couches. The house and the half-acre it sat on I kept deeded in my name, wrote up a lease with an annual rent of a penny. I was worried that if I gave her the place outright he'd get himself up to the eyeballs in debt again, and it would go toward bailing him out. Going back to him was her choice to make, but even if it turned out to be the wrong choice, I wanted her to still have a place to live.

Mo and Grant's house is just outside of Belle Haven on the bay side, far enough south of Onancock that you think you can walk it but you probably won't be able to; you can see the marshes as a smudge of green and gold from their kitchen window. It's a little house, not much more than a trailer really, but with a poured foundation, and green fake-vinyl shutters to make it look homelike, and I'm relieved to see it still standing. After spending the
drive mulling over the message she gave Pony, I'm about ready for any emergency.

Mo answers before I can knock; she must have been watching from the front window. She looks a hundred years old. Her face is creased up one side from napping, and there's kid spit down the front of her shirt. Charlie is dangling from her arm, giving me that toothless, vacant baby grin that most people go nuts over, and playing with his feet. Mo doesn't say anything when she opens the door; she just leans forward and smacks her face into my chest like she used to do when I came home from school.

“Hey, it's all right now. What's going on?”

Instead of answering she straightens up and goes back inside, and I follow her into the kitchen, where she pops Charlie into a playpen full of chewing toys. It took them nine years together to come up with him, and as far as I know it wasn't from lack of trying. There are some girls who get knocked up from being in the same room as their men, and Mo just isn't one of those girls. Ma wasn't one of them either; Mo and I are four years apart, so she should have guessed that it would take some trying. She told me the doctor had said it was about time to give up and start looking at adopting when they suddenly found out that Charlie was coming. Kid was born skinny and blue, but she didn't care; ask Mo it was the prettiest baby in the world. He's filled out since I last saw him, looks like a bologna loaf with a head on top, and I guess most people would say he's cute.

“I am so fucking glad you're here,” she says flatly, and pours herself a cup of lukewarm coffee from the stained glass pot on the table. “I seriously don't know what to do anymore. Want some?”

“Nah, looks like you need it more than me.” Charlie has pulled himself up and begun flinging his toys out onto the floor, one at a time, and she gathers them and dumps them back in.

“Remember when I was a kid and I said I wanted triplets?” she asks.

“You also wanted to name them after the bunnies in
Peter Rabbit,
” I snort.

“Thank God we don't always get what we want.” She sinks down into one of the wooden kitchen chairs and slings her feet up onto a second. I sit down across from her, gingerly.

The kitchen is a wreck. Every surface within three feet of the ground has a sticky patina to it, dishes litter the tiny counter, and toast crumbs dust the table. Mo was the kind of kid that sorted her blocks by size, shape, and color, and called it playing, so I can only imagine how worn out she has to be to leave things like this.

She takes a slow gulp of coffee. “Can I get you something?”

“No, really, I'm good. Just tell me what's up,” I say. I'm not going to tell her, but her call scared the putty out of me.

“Well, now that you're here, I really don't know where to begin,” she says and sets her cup down so that she can run her finger around its lip.

“You can start by telling me you haven't lost it and killed Grant and now need me to do something about the body.”

She laughs. “No, though sometimes I wish I had. It is about Grant though, mostly. You remember his gambling thing, don't you?”

“He's gone back to it, I'm guessing?” I ask.

“I really wish that was it,” she says. “Sure you don't want some coffee?”

“I'm good, but let me make you another pot. That shit looks rancid. Then tell me what's going on, OK?” I get up and dump the pot before she can answer; the dregs are full of grounds.

“He went back to it a few years ago, only he tried to be smart about it. When he started losing money, he borrowed instead of pulling it out of our account. And when he couldn't pay it back in cash, he started paying it back in work, a bit at a time.”

“Not roofing work, I guess?”

“Nope. He said that they told him everything was all right—he was in good and had an unlimited line of credit. Except last month they decided he'd had enough credit and it was time for him to start paying it back.”

“Back up, Mo, how much did he owe?”

“He wouldn't tell me, but the guys that came by the house looking for him said it was almost a million dollars.”

I'm shuffling through the cupboard for the coffee filters, and nearly pull the shelf down on myself. “How the fuck do you lose a million dollars?”

“That's what I'm wondering. He's been borrowing it from some dealers, he told me, guys that run cocaine up the coast and have money to burn. Every time he lost they just gave him more cash, had him do them a favor or three, and told him that he could pay it off later. Then the coast guard found one of their buddies floating in the bay, a whole bunch of cocaine was missing, and suddenly it was ‘later.' He wasn't going to tell me about it, he thought he could pay them back without me finding out, take care of it all himself, but then guys started showing up here.”

“Where is he now?” I'm still fiddling with the coffee, to avoid turning around.

“In jail in Parksley, only until they can move him to the mainland. Police caught him with marked bills. It's probably a good thing; if he weren't in jail he'd probably be floating in the bay too. I thought it was going to be OK, since they couldn't get to him there, but this morning—well, two of them showed up here looking for him, and now I'm wondering…”

“If they might do something to the two of you,” I finish for her. “Whatcha reckon you should do about it?”

“Really? I don't got the foggiest.” She stares at me for a few minutes, like she's just woken up. Charlie starts up a wail like a siren because his cage is empty, and I scoop toys back in with him. “I haven't got a million dollars,” she says. “And I can't really tell the police anything. If I sell the car and Mom's jewelry, that's not even going to begin to cover it.”

She starts drawing in the puddle of cold coffee that's formed under her cup. We just sit there for a few moments, not talking, looking at the dirty tabletop, marinating in the mess of it all.

“Starting over isn't so hard,” I say. I take her cup, dump it, and refill it with hot coffee. “New name, new address, part-time job, and until we sort that out you'll stay with me again. Before you know it the past won't exist anymore.”

“The past always exists,” she says. “I think I'm really fucked this time.”

“Hear anything from Lester lately?” she asks. I'm not sure if she's completely changing the subject or bringing it around to something important.

“Nope. Last I heard he was going to try his luck in California.”

“One of my old boyfriends, he's a construction foreman round here, works with Bo. Told me that Bo'd gotten a girl what they work with knocked up, married her at the courthouse last month.”

“I'm guessing he didn't invite you either,” I say.

“How'd our family fall apart?” she asks. “And is it bad that I don't want to put it back together, that I don't want to go track his sorry ass down and bring his knocked-up shotgun wife a cake or something?”

“Some families just don't work out, I guess,” I say.

She's quiet for a bit, sipping at her coffee.

“Gone to see Dad lately?” she asks, and my head whips up on its own.

“What kind of question is that?”

“I was just thinking, wondering, if he and Mom had problems like this along the way,” she answers. Charlie's started to fuss, and she pulls him out of his pen so he can bounce on her lap. He laughs as she bounces him, so he sounds like a machine gun with the hiccups.

“You just wonder? Dad wasn't much of a man even before his brain started rotting out,” I answer. “I'm guessing he had a girlfriend or two on the side, at least when I was little. He drank like he was about to go in front of a firing squad, he never came home when he said he was going to, he had tempers and smashed up furniture and shouted, or pulled out that ‘king of my castle' shit whenever she asked him to do anything.”

“And Mom never said or did anything about it.”

“Nope. She didn't have much of a choice, though. It wasn't like she could leave, with a kid, no education, and no job prospects.”

“If she were still here, what do you think she'd say?” Mo asks me.

“Ditch the bastard, pack up, start over somewhere else.”

“No, that's what you'd say. What do you think Mom would say?”

I have to think on that one longer than I would like. “I don't rightly know. It's been too long, I think, since she passed.”

We sit in silence for a second, except for Charlie gurgling as he gums her fingers, then she says, “You stopped talking to me after she died. Don't think I ever forgave you for that.”

“What? You're the one that stopped talking!” My voice comes out louder than I intended.

“Who was I supposed to talk to?” she responds, voice rising to meet mine. “You never came home except to shower and sleep. It was like if you'd stopped working for even a minute the world was going to end.” She's almost shouting now, the kid looking up at her with big, startled eyes, and I try to shush her just so that we won't have to add crying to the mix. “And don't you ‘shush' me, I've had enough of being shushed!”

“I'm sorry, Mo, but for the love of God, please don't start the baby off.”

She pulls a yellow pacifier out of her pocket and crams it in his mouth. “There. He'll stay quiet. Now answer me.”

“What do you want me to say?” I ask.

“Anything! Everything you didn't say. At the funeral, when you were off with Uncle Ben or fishing or any of those places you went while I was stuck at home with Dad and the twins screaming at each other and trying to keep the house in one piece because nobody else was about to.”

“Geeze, Mo. I was just trying to stay busy, to not think about
it. It's not like it would have done any good if I'd said anything to you—you didn't say a goddamned thing for months after she died.”