Born Under a Lucky Moon (8 page)

“Jeannie, one last thing. She said you missed your nephew's tenth birthday party last week. That's why she was originally calling—to invite you.”

“Um, okay. Thanks, Caitlin.” I slowly pressed
END
on my cell phone. Oh no. I hadn't missed yet another family event, had I? It appeared I had. Worse, I had let down my nephew. Months ago I had promised him I would be there. I'd have to call Sammie and my nephew, apologize, and face the music. But I sure wasn't going to do that now, just when Aidan had walked in the door. I looked over at him where he stood by the chopping block.

He was still dicing tomatoes with his phone pressed between his ear and shoulder. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm, you too. Okay, bye.”

He bent to take out a saucepan. “That was Montana.”

Montana was Aidan's business partner. She had been a much more intimate partner of his years ago. They had broken up but remained civil and eventually teamed up to form a production company. Aidan insisted it was only business and I believed him. He had an innate ability to remain friendly with his past girlfriends.

Since they were generally friendly to me, I didn't bother mustering up any jealousy. Not that I would have anyhow. Jealousy is a useless emotion. If you get jealous of your boyfriend when he's just innocently talking to a woman at a party, you're ruining both of your good times. And if he's actively trying to make you jealous, he's not
worth
your time. Not that I didn't mind getting in a good dig once in a while. When I heard that Aidan's partner's name was Montana, I had mused, “If parents are going to name their kid after a state, why don't they ever pick states like Wisconsin? They could call her Connie for short. Or Whisky. And you never hear of anyone named Idaho. Of course, it's probably because when they would introduce themselves, the response would be ‘Idaho? No,
you
da 'ho!' ”

“So what's up?” I now asked. It wasn't like Montana to call him at night.

“One of us has to go to Australia to deal with a problem film. She said she would go since I just got back from London.” Aidan and Montana never went to a film set together since that would have defeated the purpose of having a partner. They could get more work done if they split it up.

“Why did you do that ‘Mm-hmm, you too' thing?”

“What are you talking about?” Aidan turned from the stove.

“Men say, ‘Mm-hmm, you too' when someone has just said they love them but they can't say it back right then.” I said I wasn't jealous. I didn't say I was stupid.

“Jeannie, that's ridiculous. I don't even remember what Montana and I were talking about right then, but she certainly wasn't telling me that she loves me.” Seeing Aidan's wounded look, I relaxed.

“So who called you while I was talking to Montana?” Aidan said, switching the subject.

“Caitlin. Just a work thing.” I looked down and fiddled with my dinner.

We finished the night the way we always do: dinner, coffee,
Law and Order
on TV, then bed. Our wonderfully predictable routine. Except this time Aidan turned to face me in bed. “I want to hear more.”

“More what?” I yawned.

“More of your story.”

“It's late,” I said as I pulled the pillow over my head.

“Then think of it as a bedtime story.” Aidan pulled the pillow back off my head and smiled.

Chapter Eight
Friday, June 27, 1986, 5:43 p.m.

W
ith Chuck bleeding profusely, Mom went into nurse mode. She pulled Chuck into the kitchen, pushed him into a chair, forced his head back, and gently pried his fingers away from his face. Blood was flowing down his chin onto his T-shirt.

“I brought these along.” Jeff held out his dirty hand, in which lay two teeth.

“Omigod, Chuck, honey!” Lucy was rubbing the top of Chuck's head frantically. I could've bet that wasn't making him feel a lot better. Mom first stanched the blood flow with the hem of Chuck's shirt. Then she grabbed her first aid kit from under the sink and pushed white gauze up into his mouth.

I ran to the phone and called Dr. Jones, our dentist. After I quickly explained the situation he agreed to go back in to work and open up his office.

“What did you do to him?” Lucy turned on Jeff.

“I didn't do anything,” Jeff said. He was looking for something to do with his hands. After sliding them up and down his jeans he settled for putting them in his pockets. “Chuck stiff-armed Greg in the throat when Greg was about to get his flag. So Greg tackled him, and Chuck fell on a sprinkler head.”

The blood was starting to slow down when Elizabeth walked in. “Okay, everyone! Two-minute warning.” Then she stopped and analyzed the situation. “Doctor's office?” She looked at Mom, who nodded. “Lucy, you take the car to—” She turned to Mom. “What kind of doctor?”

“A dentist. Dr. Jones.”

“Jeannie, call Dr. Jones,” Elizabeth barked.

“Already done,” I said.

Elizabeth nodded and continued. “So, white Caddie to Dr. Jones's office. Or Jeff, can you take them?”

Jeff shuffled his feet.

“Okay, that's a no. So. White Caddie goes with Lucy and Chuck. When you're stitched up or whatever, meet us at the Century Club. I'll call Evan and have him pick up Mom and Dad. Sammie and Jeannie, we'll go in the Oldsmobile. If we all leave now, there's a chance we might be on time.” Elizabeth whisked out of the room. She was nothing if not efficient. We followed her orders. She was a TV commercial producer in L.A., and man, she knew how to produce. She was used to problems on set like, “The props have been misrouted to Taiwan and we shoot in an hour. The props person is crying in the corner and downing Vicodin. Unless we find a fifteenth-century coat of armor for a horse we'll lose the shoot day and three hundred thousand dollars.” Our family had probably prepared her pretty well for her job, too, come to think of it.

Everyone hustled out the door with the exception of Mom and Dad, who were waiting for Evan and Ron. We drove the six minutes across the Causeway Bridge and arrived at the Century Club. Predictably, we got Doris Day parking at the curb, right in front of the oversized doors.

The Century Club had been a formidable men's club in its day. The lumber barons of Muskegon, and later the auto parts barons, would gather in the drawing rooms to smoke cigars and sip scotch and sodas. The club began to decline in the seventies and most of the older men blamed it on the admittance of women.

Elizabeth strode in as though she were storming the citadel, with Sammie and me meekly following. I split off from them to go check the place cards. Elizabeth called over her shoulder, “Jeannie, go check the place cards.” Before I could tell her I was already doing just that, she disappeared with the social director to go over the menu my mom had already gone over.

Sammie gave a cursory glance at the cards, moving her own from next to Anna to next to Evan. I went through them more carefully, comparing the cards to the seating chart Mom and I had worked out earlier in the day. Sammie stopped at Lucy's and Chuck's place cards. They were not at the head table but at a table next to Mom and Dad. Mom, after much thought, had decided not to torment Evan and Anna more than necessary and had made sure they had the place of honor to themselves.

“This just doesn't seem right. Did anybody consult with Elizabeth on the protocol for this?” Sammie asked.

“There is no protocol for two weddings in the same family on the same weekend when one of them is a surprise. Mom had to go without a safety net on this one.”

Elizabeth motioned to me from the doorway. I walked over. “They say they need a check right now for the caterer.”

“Tell them to wait until Mom gets here.”

“They can't. The caterer needs to leave and he won't leave the food without a check.”

“Where's your checkbook? If I write a check it'll bounce.”

“I don't have one.”

“You don't have one?” I have a bad habit of repeating people when I'm sure they can't be saying what they're saying.

“I'm not a signatory on our checking account,” she hissed. “Ron just gives me cash when I ask.” I stared at my sister, the one who wore her hair in a French chignon, who hobnobbed with celebrities, who had started her own company just a few years out of college.

“You'll have to ask Sammie.”

“Will you ask her? And please don't tell her that I don't have a checkbook.”

I went back over to Sammie. “Got a check? Caterer needs it. Mom'll pay you back.” Sammie rummaged in her purse and wrote out the check, which I ran back and gave to Elizabeth.

“You didn't tell her?” Elizabeth asked anxiously.

I shook my head as Elizabeth took a deep breath, then calmly took the check to the back. The big doors opened and Anna, her parents, and her two brothers stepped in. Since I was standing directly in front of them I couldn't do anything else but play hostess in my mother's absence.

“Welcome. Hi. How are you?” I grasped each of their hands and did the European air kiss on both sides thing. Evan had taught me that the year before when he saw that I would become confused and pull away from them as they were still in mid-head-bob mode, their lips searching uselessly in the air.

“Where is everybody?” Anna asked a bit too brightly. She'd been with Evan long enough to know his family.

“There was a little accident.”

Her eyes narrowed, waiting.

“But everything is fine and they'll be here soon.” I deftly pawned the family off on Sammie and made an excuse to go get a waiter. Instead, I went to the powder room and waited it out on a chaise lounge with my Laura Ashley floral skirt folded under me, until I heard new voices. My parents had arrived and were introducing my grandmother to Anna's family. I had completely forgotten about her in all of the commotion. I went out.

“Hi, Grandma, how was your trip?” I bent down to give her a hug. I was only five feet four, but Grandma was about three feet tall. At least she seemed that way. I watched her lips move soundlessly. “It was good, huh?” Her lips moved again. None of us ever had a clue what she was saying. She had lived alone for so many years that she seemed to have lost her voice. She said everything in an inaudible whisper. It made me want to turn up her volume control. Usually, after a few days with us, her projection got better, probably in sheer self-defense against the noise that surrounded her. I took a shot at what she had just said. “So you didn't get lost in the United terminal this time?” She shook her head vigorously.

We smiled at each other in that way grandkids and grandparents do when they haven't seen each other in two years and have no idea of what to say.

Grandma had lived in the same house in Houston for more than forty-five years. It was about four hundred square feet with a chain-link fence around it. She waged a continuous if losing battle against the cockroaches, and that was the central topic of conversation with her. I myself have a morbid fear of cockroaches. While they may be a fact of life in Houston, they weren't something I wanted to know too much about. Over the years, Grandma's neighborhood had declined, and her neighbors were now mostly crack dealers mixed in with the few elderly people who, like Grandma, were still there. Last time I visited, my rental car was stolen.

My grandmother was the seventh out of seven kids. She grew up in West Texas, about six miles outside of Leuders, population 182, about an hour's drive from Abilene. They lived in a small farmhouse on 161 acres of farmland on which they raised cotton. Her family had a bit of money until her father fell ill. He cut himself shaving one day in 1915. He ignored it and went out to tend to the mules and check the crops. The cut became infected, and bright red streaks traveled up the side of his face. His wife cleaned it but it didn't check the infection. A week later, he collapsed in the kitchen. His wife and his youngest son, Fred, dragged his two-hundred-pound body across the floor and lifted him into bed. It was the only time in his life he had been in bed at 7 a.m. He struggled to breathe the white-hot Texan air. His wife lay a cool cloth across his head and spoke quietly to Fred, who was eight years old. The rest of the kids were far out on the farm with the two mules bringing in the cotton.

“Fred, you are going to have to run as fast as you can into town. You have to catch the train and take it into Stamford and bring the doctor back. Hurry!” She hugged him and sent him out. She stood on the porch and watched him running across the cotton fields. The one dirt road to town wound circuitously through several other farms and would have taken three times as long to travel.

She watched the smoke from the train on the horizon. The train, known as the Doodlebug, came through twice a week. Fred saw it, too. He and the train were both converging on the town from different directions. Fred tried to leap over the cotton rows but he wasn't tall enough. The stiff cotton boles scratched and slapped at his face as he pushed through them. A shoe came off but Fred did not stop. He would later mourn the loss of that shoe when he had to wear a mismatched pair for two years. He ran, afraid to stop, afraid of not accomplishing his task, afraid of letting his family down, afraid for his father. The father who lifted huge bales of cotton with ease and played the fiddle at night. The heat hovered at a hundred degrees and sweat poured off his small body. At times, the cotton was so high he couldn't see anything but the endless rows in front of him, the faultless blue sky above him, and the smoke of a train that was moving too fast. He sprinted four miles over cotton fields, ditches, and cattle guards; he squirmed under the barbed-wire fences, cutting his shirt in long strips down his back. About a mile from the depot he realized he wouldn't catch the train. It was almost in town, and it waited for only ten minutes before leaving. He tripped and fell and picked himself back up and kept going. Tears were streaming down his face as he willed the train to wait. He shouted, “Stop! Don't go!” His small voice barely pierced the heat that hung in waves across the fields. Fred saw the train begin to pull away and changed his course, trying to get ahead of it. But he could not move that fast. He scrabbled up the gravel incline to the tracks and watched the train move away from him. “Stop, please, please, stop!” he screamed as the whistle blew. Then he sat down in the middle of the tracks and cried.

His father died that night. The doctor told them later that it was a simple case of blood poisoning. If he had gotten help in time he would have been all right. He didn't think to tell the family that “in time” meant several days before Fred's journey into town to catch the train.

I met my great-uncle Fred more than seventy years later, sitting on the front porch of the VFW hall in Leuders. He told me that after his father died, my great-grandmother hung on for a few more years through sheer determination. Not too many men wanted to do business with a woman, and those who did cheated her. Eventually the family scattered. Some, like Fred, married young and became migrant workers traveling between Leuders, Texas, and Roswell, New Mexico, picking cotton. Another sister, Velma, married a Southern Baptist preacher named Billy Bozman and traveled the South doing tent revivals. A few others took to drink and catfish hunting on the East Fork of the Brazos River. My own grandmother tenant-farmed cotton for years until she got her big break and was hired as a waitress at the Rice Hotel in Houston.

I am named after my great-grandmother. My mother constantly reminds me, “We are from a long line of strong woman,” and I am proud of that.

I regarded my grandma. She wore the gray dress my mother had bought for her. I knew she was only wearing it to shut my mother up. She and Mom didn't see eye to eye about much. “So, nice trip, huh?” I said again needlessly. Being a Southern Baptist, she didn't drink, so I brought her a glass of water. Her lips moved again and I bent down close. “What? Can you repeat that, Grandma?”

“Pearl?” she asked.

I realized she was asking where my other grandmother was. I said, “She's fine; she just couldn't make the trip.” That was true enough. Dad's mother was currently taking a little trip in her own head. Her senility had gotten worse over the past couple of years and finally, much to Dad's chagrin, she had to be placed in a nursing home. Dad had wanted her to be in a home nearby, but his brother had insisted she stay in Michigan City, Indiana, near him. I didn't explain all this to Grandma.

Anna walked up and pointedly asked me where Walker, my boyfriend, was. I gave my stock answer that Walker had something important to do with his parents. This wasn't true and most people in the room knew it. Walker avoided contact with my family. He thought it was like walking under a ladder. Something bad was bound to happen. For a while he tried to have me meet him outside my house on the sidewalk so he wouldn't have to come in. But I would wind up waiting for him on the curb for fifteen minutes at a time so I put a stop to that.