The Sunday List of Dreams (12 page)

“Mom, you sound crazy,” she mumbles, turning towards the window and trying desperately to be tough, brave, and everything she is not at that exact moment.

“Jessica, just listen to this,” Connie insists. “Remember when I used to hide out in the bathroom?”

Connie explains, remembering the sound of padded pajama feet in the hall, the tapping of tiny fingers on the bathroom door; a terrific paragraph; rising to leave and then sitting back down again abruptly because she cannot bear to leave the women in her book; hoping all three girls will just lie down where they are so she can finish the chapter, and hoping deep in her heart as she hides in the bathroom to read that her girls, her babies, will love books and the world books bring to doorsteps, bathrooms, and tired lives as much as she does.

But Jessica cannot be bribed by her mother’s sweet attempt at conversation and when Connie stops talking, Jessica plunges back to her immediate problem, something more dangerous, more imminent than the surgical process of stitching back together her relationship with her mother.

She has talked to the lawyers, she’s rechecked her files, she knows she has every permit and ordinance and signature that she needs to knock Jenko County back on its ass but what she doesn’t have is the experience of bullshitting, playing the game until you are ahead and standing in just the perfect spot so that you can piss first when the duel starts. Jessica has the looks and the brains but the singular battles have eluded her. The confidence that comes from many battles has not yet forged a smile of satisfaction on her face and her business sword is short—so far, everything has been pretty damn easy.

They skid to a halt. The southbound plane. Mother and daughter. The Franklin Nixon women and their baggage. It’s a wonder the plane can perform a controlled landing with the heaviness of it all, but land it does, and Jessica and Connie do not so much walk as race to the terminal, pulling their luggage and the threads of their last conversation. Neither of them is ready for the late spring heat of a city that makes even frigid men and women hot. A city that really never dozes. A city that makes New York look like a mere training ground for 24-7 people. A city that leaps into your arms and expects you to carry it because there is no way in hell it is going to carry you—unless of course you are a big tipper, have access to an exotic float builder, can go without sleep for three days in a row, and understand the importance of the word “fun.”

Fun—if Connie can just manage to hold her tongue firmly in check and use her once lively mouth only for breathing and not for speaking.

The taxi ride starts out with a bump that seems insurmountable for as long as it takes Nurse Connie to clear her throat, put back on her “I’m-not-backing-down-and-I’m-here-to-stay” hat and forget for five seconds that her daughter would like to slit her throat.

“Where
are
we going, Mother?” Jessica doesn’t so much say as spray.

“It’s not the Motel 6, sweetheart,” Connie spews back with a hint of anger. “It’s called Sally Rutherford’s. It’s a bed-and-breakfast place. Upscale and in the French Quarter, untouched by the disaster, and it’s an early birthday present for you, and part of it’s for me too.”

“How the hell am I going to get to the meeting at 3
P.M
. out at the factory?” Jessica snarls, pushing herself against the side of the taxi and speaking loud enough to make the driver shift in his seat and adjust his mirror.

Connie pauses. She’s itching to reach over and try her magical touch on Jessica’s hand but she is too angry to move.

“You should get out more, Ms. CEO,” Connie seethes. “I rented a car. I have a map. I have lots more than that if you can give it up for three lousy seconds and take off that shitty mask you put on last night. I get that I’m from Indiana and a hick and your damn mother, but there are a few things
you
don’t get.”

It’s hot. Connie is exhausted from trying, from lack of sleep, from the river of her own self-doubt that cascades through her every single time she brushes her hands against her pocket and feels the small ridges from the slips of paper she is carrying—today’s list numbers, which seem to be crashing into each other constantly.

Before Jessica can respond, the driver begins speaking in clipped English, hardly a Creole or a Frenchman, more like a transplant from the West Indies, and says something about the cemeteries, the heat, and three other things that fail to register with either woman, and then, just as Jessica is about to let go of her temper, they are parked in front of Sally’s. She lets out a huge ball of air, climbs out of the cab and walks into the lobby as her mother pays the driver.

“Holy shit,” she says before Connie gets there. “This place is like a museum. It’s absolutely…beautiful.”

“Holy shit,” Connie echoes behind her as she walks into a lobby that is almost beyond a step back in time.

Before either of them can move, or say another word, a concierge steps in between them, takes them both by the elbow, and says, “Everyone is stunned by the magnificence here. My name is Salvatore. Are we lucky enough to have you two beautiful women—sisters, I presume—staying with us tonight?”

“We are staying here as mother and daughter,” Connie tells Salvatore shyly, sort of flirting but not even realizing it, and Jessica decides that if the suddenly constant presence of her mother in her life gets any more constant, she is going to run upstairs and jump off the balcony. “What an absolutely astonishing building.”

“Just wait,” Salvatore cautions as he ushers them past a room filled with antique chairs, under several huge chandeliers, across carpeting that feels like a spring meadow, and towards a low, dark oak desk that sits in front of an open window that is backed by a garden seemingly transplanted from the center of Costa Rica. It is the Garden of Eden. Springtime in the Rockies. A slice of heaven in the middle of a city.

Both women are temporarily speechless and both women decide this is a very good thing.

Salvatore shows them to their room and departs with a broad smile. The balcony of their small suite looks out at the same lobby garden and they discover that the garden also contains a tiny swimming pool and an outdoor bar. Connie pushes open the street-side window and immediately exposes the room to a swirl of noises—honking horns, horses’ hooves, people yelling, laughter pealing up and pausing on the windowsill from every direction—and she can barely bring herself to turn around and face her daughter.

Her daughter. Connie Franklin Nixon freezes for a second, trying to pull a moment of past grace from the combined life of a mother and daughter.

“Jessica,” Connie finally says, turning to face her daughter, who is still slamming her personal objects as hard as she was in her own apartment before they left New York four hours ago. “It’s no more than a 60-minute ride from here to your factory. No rush hour traffic this time of day. Let’s call a temporary truce. Gather up your books and we’ll go down into the courtyard for lunch. We have two hours. What do you think?”

“Fine, if we can eat and you can let me focus,” Jessica responds. “I have to figure this out. I have no idea what in the hell will happen.”

Connie almost bites a hole in her tongue. She thinks of something hard, something hellish. She thinks of the months when Jessica was a baby and Connie was in nursing school and she had no idea how she was going to make it through a day without sleep and then the doctor called to tell her another baby was already boring a hole into her heart from the inside out. “You’re pregnant, Connie,” he said, as she sank to the floor. She thinks of the night Sabrina’s appendix almost ruptured and she sat with her fingers resting on her daughter’s forehead and trying to imagine what one second of her life would be like without this child in her life, her arms, her heart. She thinks of the way her stomach twisted when she took her girls, one at a time, into the bedroom and told them their daddy was no longer going to live with them. Connie thinks of all this and then she lets it go. She lets it go because she knows Jessica has her own version and form of hell, her own ideas of what the word “hard” means, and her own way of surviving life’s blows and surprises.

Jessica’s cell phone bleats halfway through the jambalaya and it does not sound good to Connie, who keeps eating, sips on some iced tea that she knows would taste much better if it had at least one shot of vodka, and wonders if Jessica will ever reach the “maybe Mother can help me” point in her Southern adventure.

“I did not, let me repeat that,
not
invite that commissioner to meet us today!” Jessica shouts into the phone.

“No, Justin,” she fires back as Connie pops a biscuit into her mouth to keep herself from grabbing the phone. “What do you mean you can’t do anything? This contract is worth thousands of dollars to you. Think of something, for crissakes.” She frowns. “I’m the boss, you say?”

Jessica gets to her feet. Her face is now the color of the small tomatoes that are sitting in her Cajun salad.

“This is your turf, Justin. You have the rulebook down here. You had better think of something. I’ll try and get there early. Yes. Justin, can you tell I am pissed?”

Jessica hangs up, throws down the lovely off-white cloth napkin that she has been clutching in her left hand, not so much places as flings her cell phone on the table, then turns to her mother.

“I have to go, like,
now
and I also have to make about a thousand phone calls,” she explains. Then she groans, and covers her eyes with both hands. “You know I hate to do this but will you drive me, please, so that I can handle the calls and
focus
before I meet these jackasses?”

“Yes,” Connie says without blinking but raising a silent “yes” fist into the air in her mind as she gets up, hands her credit card to the waiter, ushers her daughter up to the room and asks for the rental car to be pulled around to the front of the hotel in 15 minutes.

During those 15 minutes, Connie braces for a continued storm of emotions and, as Jessica scrambles to get her papers together, Connie slips into the bathroom, barely has time to throw on fresh makeup, and then flips through the pages of her list of dreams book that she has tucked into her carry-on bag as if she is an addict who needs a hit before she can go out in public.

19.
Moments with my daughters that are real and open and where all four of us
can be who we really are.

J
esus,” Connie breathes as she drives, during that one second when Jessica is not on the phone to Geneva, or her attorney, or some other legal expert on the West Coast, or hopefully some burly wide-ass man she knows who likes to beat up people who get in his or his friends’ way. “Are you sure
Deliverance
wasn’t filmed someplace around here?”

“Mom, it’s rural Louisiana,” Jessica explains. “It’s no different than rural anywhere.”

“Not,” Connie responds firmly as Jessica punches in yet another number and turns to glare at the blurry skyline and what she seems to think might be impending doom, the demise of her dildo dynasty, and possibly a set of broken fingers once the commissioner shows up.

Connie has taken them south of New Orleans, along the edge of Lake Pontchartrain and towards what she assumes will be a long-deserted field where men in pickup trucks sit and whittle while they wait for unsuspecting women from the East to try and tell them how to do things. While she drives, Connie tries hard to let go of the wild notion that perhaps she can be more than a chauffeur. She is instead possessed with the idea of visiting a bayou, of snaking her hand into the first few inches of its murky and very warm water, water that cradles crocodiles or alligators or whatever large scaly things live in these mysterious backwaters of a part of the country that is so alive with history and ethnicity that the entire state smells like hot sauce.

There is not the imagined long-lonely field when they finally turn off of the interstate and wind through a tight residential area until the road curves around what Connie can only guess is a misguided and extremely weedy tributary of the Mississippi. This part of Louisiana, ravaged in so many places by the hurricane disaster, has sprung alive with rebuilt businesses, new housing developments carved in and around huge piles of debris, masses of tangled trees, and water marks on the buildings that remain standing. A curving stand of industrial buildings that look abandoned greets them as they turn into Chasse Industrial Park. Three weed-filled vacant lots, a line of battered buses, and a heap of scrap metal stand like sentries as Jessica directs Connie to a back parking lot.

“How in the living hell did you ever find this place?” Connie asks, just slightly astounded by the location.

Jessica smiles and feels just a tinge of pride. “It’s a long story about a woman searching for a not-so-timid American manufacturer who does quality work, cheaply and on time.”

“I’m impressed, and just a little frightened, honey.” Connie gets out of the compact car and gasps just as a blue convertible shoots into the parking lot about three inches from where she is standing.

“Jessica, who the hell is this?” Connie wants to know, bending over to lean into the car so Jessica will hear.

Jessica is suddenly pale. She groans and says, “Shit, it must be the commissioner and he’s looking at your ass, Mother.” She grabs her notebooks, places her phone in her hip holster as if she is strapping on a gun, and gets out of the car.

Connie takes a step forward just as the man swings around the side of his car and walks directly towards her. The man leans into Connie, who decides that she is about to meet Burt Reynolds’s twin brother—a gorgeous, dark-haired man with Burt’s moustache, gray hair at the temples, teeth that look as if they glow in the dark, and shoulders that could not be wedged into a space smaller than four feet if his life depended on it.

“Michael Dennis, Jenko County Commissioner,” he says, pushing up his sunglasses and stretching out his hand to clasp Connie’s.

“Connie Nixon,” Connie manages to say.

“I’m Jessica and I think you came here to see me.” Jessica moves to stand protectively beside her mother.

The studly commissioner turns for just a second to acknowledge Jessica with a smile and a hello. Then he turns back to Connie so fast it’s a wonder his neck stays in place.

“And you are?” he asks, leaning so close Connie can smell his cologne, see how close he shaves, and that the lines in his eyes curl up from smiling and not from frowning.

“I’m Jessica’s mom and the driver,” Connie tells him. “I’ll just hang out here while you two go inside and take care of your business.”

“Nonsense,” he declares, boldly putting his arm around Connie’s shoulder. “Come in. Justin, the CEO, has a nice room we can sit in and maybe you will want to see the plant. It’s actually kind of interesting. Some day this plant is going to be on the map for more than these Diva products. Justin’s scientists are doing some remarkable things with plastics.”

Jessica’s eyes have never been this large in her entire life. “Jesus Christ,” she whispers as she follows the happy couple in through the side door of the plant. “This guy is flirting with my mother. Holy hell, my
mother
.”

Connie works to get Jessica’s attention as they move through a long corridor and into an office that has a couch, some chairs, and a very narrow window that offers an interior view of the plastics-manufacturing plant. Desperate for some kind of an exchange with Jessica, and obviously emboldened by the commissioner’s attention, Connie swings into action. She whispers, “Watch this,” into Jessica’s ear as the commissioner picks up a phone on the desk to call Justin out of the factory. She plants herself directly in front of him. She’s flirting too, big-time. Jessica is just an inch from being paralyzed and, before she can say anything, Connie takes over as if she just inherited the entire Watkins’s plastic manufacturing business, half of Louisiana, and every four-star chef in the French Quarter.

In the back of her mind, in a place that never really grows totally weary, a place that is filled with flying daggers to protect the weak, rows of fresh flowers, and arms as wide as the world—a place cultivated by every mother on the earth, a place that can never be erased—Connie Nixon Franklin also feels her armor fall into place.

She cannot help herself. Warrior mother, charge nurse, and also, rising like a splash of heat from a warm spot, almost dead, almost forgotten just a bit south of her pubic bone, Connie feels a wave of sensual
heat
.

“Michael,” she begins, busting right past the formality of the word “commissioner” and reaching out to put her hand on his arm, “what is this confusing meeting all about anyway? Jessica has her permits, this is a private business, and last time I checked the absolutely gorgeous state of Louisiana
is
part of the United States of America.”

Michael, clearly taken aback and captivated at the same time, tells Connie he agrees, which makes Jessica want to weep with joy. And then she gets mad.

“Why did you tell Justin he had to shut down then?” she asks, unable to control her obvious anger. “Why are we here? I am totally confused.”

“Sit,” Michael tells them as Justin walks in, introduces himself, and perches on one end of the couch. “Let me talk to you two about the politics of Jenko County for a second and then you can ask some questions. Please don’t be angry. You might think, Connie, that Louisiana is part of the United States, but Jenko County is often its own entity. I’ve been trying to bring the place into this century for the past five years. It’s no easy chore. I had to make a big deal out of what Justin is manufacturing for you,” he said.

Connie stops him by putting the famous handhold on his arm and says, “Sex toys, Michael. You can say it and your lips won’t fall off. They are sex toys and don’t worry, it took me a while to work up the courage myself. Don’t be scared. I’m not even sure what half of them are for. Some of them look like things the kids used to play with, or car parts, for crying out loud.”

“Okay,” Commissioner Michael Dennis says, smiling with relief. “The sex toys you are manufacturing are not the usual product of this part of Louisiana, Jessica, but Justin hired new people for this job, it’s terrific business for him and, in the long run, as a businessman I can see what this will do for the people in this county who need jobs, and an economy that needs all the damn help it can get. Even so, when word got out about the sex toy products, I had to make a scene. Do you understand this?”

Connie understands it like she understood how one doctor always had to pull rank, and why even though she ran half the hospital someone else always took the credit, and why she often teetered on the edge of a very thin line that could be called insubordination, survival, or prostitution, depending on how you looked at it.

“I think so,” Jessica says doubtfully. “So we really don’t have anything to discuss and I have been freaking out for nothing and the sex toys are about ready to be shipped to New York?”

“Yes,” Justin assures her. “It’s just part of the game, Jessica. I’m sorry but I couldn’t tell you. Down here people still tap phone lines, eat without silverware, and sleep in pajamas instead of in nothing or boxers.”

“So we’re done already?”

“Not really,” Justin adds. “People know we are having this meeting. You have to hang out here for a while so they think we are arguing. So let’s take a tour of the plant, mostly so your mother can see what we do here, if she doesn’t mind, have a cup of coffee, and then we will release you.”

By the time that happens, Connie has cemented a morning date for a swamp tour with Commissioner Michael Dennis that does not include her fine, beautiful, and extremely dazed daughter, who will, instead, spend the morning in product development meetings with Justin’s design staff who have come up with an idea for a new toy that they know from personal experience and experimentation could make lots and lots of women very happy.

Three hours later, drifting back towards New Orleans, Jessica, who has been fairly speechless since they peeled out of the factory parking lot, turns to her mother and asks her if she has lost her mind.

“I thought you’d be happy that you can still make your toys, honey,” Connie replies, turning to look at Jessica, who is leaning up against the car door as if she is trying to escape.

“Mom, you are going to a swamp or bayou or whatever in the hell you call it with a man who has been married at least twice and who just tricked us into a trip here to save his own political ass,” Jessica says, accelerating her voice along with the engine. “I ask you again: Are you out of your mind?”

Connie’s throat seizes up. She can actually feel something moving up from the base of her heart and towards her mouth. It is something old. Something she has never spoken out loud before. Something she now decides could change everything and—no matter what—it’s something she has to share with her daughter. A daughter she has lost, a daughter she so wants to reclaim, a daughter who needs to know where her mother has been.

Right now.

Connie pulls off less than a mile from the freeway and parks the car at the edge of a dirt road facing a stand of tangled bushes. Jessica looks frightened but Connie lets her have it anyway. And
it
is nothing Jessica expects.

“You told me your story, your sexual encounter with Romney, why you have launched into this business, why you pulled away, how my seemingly rash judgments of you and your sexuality made you distant, made you leave my life,” Connie explains, at first looking right at Jessica, and then looking away as she begins her own story, a story she has never before shared with anyone. “Now it’s my turn. Can you listen to this?”

Jessica nods with the slow movement of someone who is terrified and compelled at the same time.

And Connie begins.

The man she was dating said he was ready to try.

Connie was way past ready. Nurse Connie was so far past ready that she was afraid if John McCorde simply rubbed up against her she’d experience such a great swell of sexual pleasure she could just send him home and call it a night.

It was so far past time to have a physical encounter with the man she had been dating for almost nine months that Nurse Nixon was on the verge of begging. She was ready to crawl, to cry, to assist in any way physically, medically, socially, and spiritually possible.

“Your kids would even tell you that you need to get laid,” her friend and co-worker Kim Ratton told her about 23 times. “I know you think you are from the old school, honey, but this is all about
you
now. It’s time to get on with a bit of pleasure.”

“Pleasure?” Connie had said at first. “It’s been so damn long since I’ve had
that
kind of pleasure, I’ll be lucky if I know where to put everything.”

“Everything?” Kim, a saucy little redhead who apparently could co-author a sex manual, had asked her, laughing. “What do you think he’s going to bring along?”

“Jesus, Kim,” Connie had admitted while they gulped their tea during a shift changeover, “it’s been ages since I’ve been intimate with a man and I’m scared to death. You know that. I launched into babies when the rest of the women my age were out running naked on the streets, smoking dope, and sleeping with 12 men in one night.”

Kim took her hand and smiled.

“You can’t even say the word ‘sex,’ honey,” she tells Connie, her smile growing larger. “Think of what you do here, what you’ve seen, the conversations you’ve had. Your kids are teenagers and then some, for crissakes, Connie. I know you and it’s pretty damn hard for me to imagine that you’re so…virginal. That’s it, so
virginal
.”