Fatal Deduction (8 page)

“Where’s that heirloom sterling silver you had?” Nan ignored Mom’s too-close-to-the-bone barb.

“Where do you think? Sold for the money to pay the lawyers for your husband and your son.”

Nan shot Mom a look that would have scorched another woman, spun, and saw Tori and me trying to sneak upstairs to our bedroom. “Go get my suitcases. Now. Put them in the blue room.”

“But Nan,” Tori began. She and I each had our own rooms, but Mom had put us together in the blue room to open up a room for Nan. We were given that one because it was the larger.

“But Nan nothing. The blue room!”

I was lugging the last suitcase up the stairs, trying to figure out how Tori and I were going to get all our stuff in the yellow room, when Eddie appeared. I dropped the suitcase right where it was and ran to him.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” I was a mass of nerves, and all I could think about was how much worse it was going to be when they found out about the baby.

Eddie and I went to a movie, some martial arts thing he thought
was wonderful and during which I fell asleep. Then we went to our usual parking spot.

“I’ve got some important news,” I said, uncertain how he’d react but hoping he’d say, “Don’t worry, Libby. We’ll work it out. Everything will be all right.” After all, he had been there for me these past months, his love and affection the only things that got me through.

What I got was anything but sympathy.

“I’m not takin’ responsibility for your mess, Lib.” Eddie looked at me like I’d crawled out from under some rotten log. “You’re a big girl. It’s all yours.” Then he laughed. “And I don’t think I need to worry about anyone coming after me, do I?”

Though I saw him at school, I hadn’t spoken with him since that night, and every sighting was a knife in my young heart.

When the burden of my pregnancy became too heavy to bear alone, I finally told Tori. She looked at me with interest, an eyebrow raised. “Eddie Mancini, huh?”

And suddenly she was dating him. A couple of times he even came to the house as if he had no previous history here. I hid in our room and cried the evening away, feigning sleep when Tori finally got home.

Soon everyone at school knew about my predicament, and I was sure they all had a good laugh at my expense. Dumb Libby. Hadn’t she ever heard of the pill? Or a condom? Stupid Libby, whose father and grandfather were in jail. Idiot girl.

Well, they were right; I was dumb. Stupid. Add naive and blind and too trusting.

I was trying to get up the nerve to have an abortion. Mom and Nan sat around all day crying when they weren’t fighting, the blinds closed and the phones off their hooks. No one knew when and if Dad and Pop would be home again; jail was not a healthy place for
cops, corrupt or not. No one knew where the money to live and pay the exorbitant, ongoing legal bills was going to come from. And no one knew what emotional ramifications the shame of everything would have on all of us.

There was no way I could bring a baby into such a mess.

I was sitting on the front porch, thinking about an abortion, when Madge pulled into her drive, her pickup loaded as usual. I watched her lug off a mirror as big as she was, its frame an ornate but ugly brown. Then came several cardboard boxes of what appeared to be crocheted and lacy linens. Even from a distance I could see they were yellowed and, to my eye, worthless. Who wanted old yellow stuff when you could get new, crispy white stuff in almost any store?

I had to wonder about Madge. What in the world made her love broken and ugly stuff?

She and her husband, Bill, had made their garage into a little store with red and white striped awnings over the windows and a red sign with white letters that read Madge’s Collectibles and Antiques. I actually went inside a couple of times when I was about twelve and the store was new, just to see how she got her customers to buy the crummy stuff she pulled off her truck. I was astounded to find that nothing in her shop was crummy.

On the day Madge changed my life, I wandered slowly to the curb so I could see what else she had brought home. When she pulled three wooden Coke crates off the truck, I couldn’t keep quiet anymore.

“Do people actually buy empty wooden boxes, Mrs. Crosson?” I called across to her. I knew Mom and Nan wouldn’t give such things house room. They were both anti-old stuff, one of the few things on which they agreed.

She grinned at me, and I could see a dirt smudge on her cheek.
“Wooden boxes are choice items, Libby, especially vintage Coke ones.”

“They are?” To whom? I always thought it was the stuff
in
the boxes that people wanted, and the Cokes once there were long gone.

“People collect them.”

“I guess people collect most anything, don’t they?”
Stupid people
.

“Would you like to see my workroom?” Madge asked. “I could show you what I do with all these wonderful things.”

I tried to look nonchalant, but inside I was both nervous and bubbling. A mystery was about to be solved, but it meant going into the fanatic’s house.

“She just thinks she’s so holy,” Mom said disparagingly of Madge. “All she wants is to convert us. Make us holy rollers.”

“Don’t get too near her, girls,” Nan warned us when we were younger, “or she’ll make you pray and read the Bible before she lets you go. She’ll drag you into her cult.”

Every time Nan said that, I wondered what was so bad about praying, and even as a kid I knew that Madge would never stay in business if she made people read the Bible in order to get out of the store. Since the arrests, Mom’s and Nan’s attacks on Madge had increased, especially after she stopped at the house with a pan of homemade cinnamon buns and an invitation to go to a women’s Bible study.

“Maybe you’ll find God can help you through hard times,” she’d said with a smile.

They’d taken the food but turned down the invitation with something like horror. Since then I’d heard real meanness and jealousy in Mom’s and Nan’s catty comments.

“She thinks she’s so much better than us.”

“She probably asks God to strike us dead and clean up the neighborhood.”

“Did you see her? She was laughing at me when she waved!”

She was smiling. That was all. I knew because I was with Mom when Madge waved.

But Madge had a husband who came home every night and who stood on the front porch with his arm around her as they waved good-bye to company. She had a husband who had made their garage into a shop for her and who held her hand when they walked around the block for exercise. She had a husband who played with their little boys and who took them all on vacations down the shore.

Mom and Nan had husbands who had gotten fifteen to twenty.

“Come on over,” Madge invited again as I stood on the curb, unaware that I was about to make the most significant decision of my life.

I glanced guiltily toward home but took a step into the street toward Madge. “Sure. I guess.”

“You’re Libby, right?”

I looked at her animated face and warm smile. “How do you know? Most people can’t tell us apart.”

“Ah. You are the one who always watches. You’re the sweet one.”

The sweet one? My stomach rolled. If she only knew.

She took me around back and into their basement by a sliding glass door. Half the large space was filled to the rafters with the junk she brought in her truck every week. The other half was a workshop filled with tools and supplies. A small table stood under the light on a spread of newspapers covered with dark brown stains.

“Look around while I make a phone call,” Madge said, and I began wandering about the room. The stuff might be old and useless,
but there was something about it all that made my pulse beat faster—which was ridiculous. I liked new stuff.

I picked up an old picture of some town and ran my finger over the satiny wood frame.

“That’s a lithograph of Stratford-upon-Avon,” Madge said as she waited for someone to answer her call.

“Like in Shakespeare? In England?”

She nodded.

“It must be really old.”

“Not as old as Shakespeare, but old.”

“Huh.” I wanted to ask if it was worth money, but she held up a finger and began talking into the phone. I continued looking at her other pictures—dried flowers arranged in pretty patterns, two other lithographs, watercolors, and a weird one with the design all in dried beans—now who would ever want something that ugly?—until I heard her mention those Coke boxes. Then my ears perked up.

“I’ve got three of them for you, Sally. Two are in excellent condition; the third is a bit dinged.” Madge listened. “Sorry, I’ll need at least—”

And she named a price that surprised me because I’d have paid maybe a dollar. That much for old and empty wooden boxes? I looked at the jumble of things in the room. How much money did this old stuff represent? I was studying the dolls, all carefully arranged on a shelf, when I saw a funny-looking doll in a box. The figure sort of looked like Barbie, and she was wearing a black-and-white striped, strapless bathing suit, but the face was different from any Barbie I ever saw. And the texture of the hair was different.

“That’s a very old Barbie doll.” Madge came up behind me. “Way back in 1962 or 1963. How do you like the pearl earrings with the bathing suit?”

“That’s Barbie? Her bangs are all curly and weird. And she’s got a ponytail.”

“She’s a collector’s dream.” Madge picked up a plastic bag lying on the shelf. “And here are some uncut vintage Barbie paper dolls.”

“I didn’t even know there were Barbie paper dolls.” I looked at the funny dresses, so like the ones my grandmother wore in old photos.

Madge turned them over and pointed. “See the ‘Whitman’ printed there? They were licensed to make the Barbie paper dolls back in the sixties and seventies.”

“And people want things like this?”

Madge nodded. “People love things like this. See that doll with the porcelain head? She’s very old, in very good condition, and some doll collector will grab her up.”

I stared at the doll. She was certainly pretty, but I had no compulsion to grab her up.

“There’s a world of collectors out there, Libby. It’s my happy job to provide for them. Someone will love this baby doll of no specific heritage.” She lifted down a doll in a long white nightgown trimmed in delicate lace. “Her moderate price will find her a happy home.”

I walked to a table covered with piles of ratty-looking linens. I slid my hand under a discolored piece of needlework. “How about these things? Who wants them?”

“That’s a tatted tablecloth, and I think it’s about one hundred years old.” She gently ran her fingers over it. “Isn’t it lovely?”

“So that’s tatting.” I looked more closely at the intricate workmanship.
Lovely
didn’t seem the right word to me. Maybe stained or ripped or just plain old, but what did I know? I thought all dolls came from Toys “R” Us and Santa Claus. “I’ve read about tatting in books, but I never saw it before.”

“It’s a dying art, I’m afraid. When’s your baby due?”

“August,” I said automatically. “I think.” Then I heard the question and my answer, and I stared at Madge, appalled. How would a religious fanatic like her respond to my being pregnant and unmarried?

“The dad?” Madge busied herself arranging some cut-glass vases that arced little rainbows onto her hands.

I made my fingers loosen on the tatting before I tore it. “He’s gone.”

“As in left town?”

I shook my head. “As in left me. I know where he is. I see him at school all the time.” When I went. I couldn’t make myself say he was now dating my twin.

“Is that why you bagged today and so many other days?”

I looked at the baby doll she still held cradled in her arm. “Yeah.” It came out a whisper. There was no way I could explain the anguish of Eddie, the baby, the trial, and the family. All I knew was that I wanted to stay in bed with the quilt pulled over my head for about ten years. Then maybe I’d come out for something to eat. Maybe. Mom and Nan were so caught up in their own misery they’d never miss me.

Mom and Nan hadn’t asked me a single question when Tori told them I was expecting, just looked at me with disgust, disbelief, and finally resignation. There wasn’t much they could say anyway. They’d both been pregnant when they got married. But at least they got married.

Madge—the neighbor they mocked all the time because she didn’t smoke or drink, went to church, and had a neighborhood Bible study she’d actually had the nerve to invite them to—was the only one who ever asked.

“But I’m okay.” I tried to grin like I didn’t feel absolutely alone
in the world.
Change the topic, Lib! Change the topic before the pain kills you!

I noticed the pin she wore on her collar, and I grabbed on to it. “Did you get that cute pin at an estate sale too?”

She reached up and fingered the little silver replica of a pair of tiny feet. “No. This is a pin that shows the size of a baby’s feet at ten weeks after conception.”

I felt like someone had shoved me hard in the chest, and I could barely draw a breath. My hand went to my stomach. My baby’s feet looked like that? I sort of thought it was just a blob.

“Your baby’s feet are larger by now but just as well formed,” Madge said as if she knew exactly what I was thinking. “To me it’s one of the great God-mysteries, how a baby with a beating heart and a functioning brain and perfectly formed little feet can grow from almost nothing.” She took my cold hands in hers. “I know you are in circumstances you don’t like, Libby, but you are growing a little person in there. I applaud you for sticking it out, for getting up every day and eating and doing things to care for this child.”

I blinked. Was I doing that? I hadn’t even been to a doctor.

“Are you interested in a part-time job, by the way?”

When I’d had my life-changing conversation with Madge, I thought she was so old and mature, but she was only about thirty then, my age now. Little by little she’d taught me everything she knew, taking me along to seminars and workshops at her expense, showing me how to strip an abused piece of furniture, training my eye to recognize the fine from the merely good, the true antiques from the collectibles.