Five Fortunes (44 page)

Carter unlocked the door, and led her visitors into the living room.

Julia had been there that day, thank god, and the place was immacu-late.

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350 / Beth Gutcheon

“Can I get you anything?” Carter asked, praying they would say no. Her heart was pounding so hard she wanted to sit down before it exploded.

Fortunately they all murmured that they wanted no refreshments.

They made their way into the living room and chose places to sit.

Aunt Sallie and Reverend Campbell sat on either side of the fireplace in her two good armchairs. Carter sat on one end of the couch, facing them, and Flora crawled up and snuggled beside her. The third one, the girl, sat down at the other end of the couch. Carter couldn’t look at her. She didn’t want to know.

“Carter,” said Reverend Campbell, “we came to introduce you to Delia Amos.”

Blood roared in Carter’s ears. She thought she really might faint, though she had never fainted in her life. She stopped being able to see.

This must have lasted a much shorter time than it felt like. When she could, Carter turned to the girl, and saw Shanti’s eyes. The rest of this girl was younger, less healthy. She had much lighter skin.

Flora was looking at her, curious.

“Delia,” said Carter.

“Yes,” said the girl.

“They found you?”

“She appeared,” said Aunt Sallie. “She’s been home a few weeks, staying with me. We thought it was time she met the baby.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Carter. “Flora, this is your Aunt Delia. This is your mommy’s sister. She was away, but she’s come home.”

Flora looked up at Carter. She was interested, but wary.

“Can you shake hands?” Carter asked her.

Flora looked at Delia. She looked back up at Carter.

“Can you give her five?”

Delia held her palm facing out, across from Flora. Flora turned to her, and solemnly slapped the upraised hand.

There was a silence. Carter was waiting for them to say, “So hand her over, we’re taking her home.” What would she do? Run for it?

Her car was blocking theirs, she could scoop the baby up and pound off on foot. Beat them up? Call a lawyer?

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“So, you just…or did somebody?”

“I just…” said Delia.

“She appeared,” said Aunt Sallie at the same time. “She came to my door.”

“Did you know we’d been looking for you?” Carter managed to ask. What was this? When were they going to get to it? She couldn’t think. Her brain felt full of sand; she could feel the grinding as the cells tried to move. She could only smell Flora’s skin.

“Tell her your story,” said the minister. Delia looked from him to Aunt Sallie. She looked at Carter. She looked back at the minister.

“Should the baby stay?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think so.”

Then they all waited. Delia was wearing a long-sleeved cotton sweater over a summer dress. The dress was yellow. Her hair was cut close to her head, neat and dark. Her nails were short and clean.

She wore no jewelry.

“I was in New York,” she began. “I’d been there about a year.”

“I’d been looking for you in San Francisco.”

“I know. Shanti came up there once, looking for me. I left with a man…he had a car. He said he had friends in the movie business.”

That you would move from L.A. to San Francisco and then New York to get into the movie business did not strike Carter as logical, but this girl was young. We all need euphemisms.

“I was working there. I was doing what I knew how to do. I made pretty good money, I lived uptown. I kept thinking at first that this was the Big Apple, where nobody knew me. Wasn’t any reason things shouldn’t start to go my way, you know what I’m saying? I was waiting for a break. Meanwhile, some things broke the wrong way. The man I traveled with—he didn’t turn out to know much about the movie business, but he did meet Spike Lee once. Spike wasn’t in town though. He had friends here and there he’d introduce me to, but…we were using, you probably guessed. I was working, he wasn’t. I was supporting us. Soon I realized he was seeing other girls…you know what I’m saying? He wasn’t in the movie business, he was in the pimp busi-352 / Beth Gutcheon

ness. Same old business. That was what I left Ess Eff to get away from. I mean, maybe I didn’t really think I was going to wake up and be Whitney Houston, but I didn’t plan on spending my life supporting some pimp when it wasn’t even exclusive.”

Carter could understand that. Perfectly, in fact.

“So I went out on my own. I had to move—I met another guy—you don’t need to hear this whole thing. I tried to get into a program, but there was a two-year wait for a bed—I don’t want to make excuses. It was dawning on me that this was my life. I was in The Life, and it wasn’t going to get better. It was almost surely going to get worse. I began to know people who were dying. Dirty needles, johns who won’t wear…” She glanced at Flora and stopped. “It doesn’t matter how you get it, it’s not a good way to go.”

“No,” said Carter.

“I have to have you understand that I was not completely in my own mind, you know what I’m saying? I didn’t like where I was, or who I was, and aside from the junk, getting high with the johns was part of the job most times. I did all kinds of stuff. It does very strange things to your head.”

Carter was watching Aunt Sallie and Reverend Campbell. They were listening to this calmly.

“Didn’t you think of asking Shanti for help?” Carter asked.

Delia shook her head, hard. “That was the last thing. The only thing I was grateful for, the only thing in my whole life, was that no one who knew me would ever see me like that. No one I used to smart off to in high school, no one who heard my big talk, would ever see me or know. Until things broke my way, you know? Until Spike Lee cast me in his movie and I came home in a Cadillac. You know?

“Then one night I got into a taxi, and I looked into the driver’s mirror, and God was staring back at me.”

There was a long silence. Carter looked at the two older people.

They were quiet. It was Delia’s story to tell. Flora was listening.

Carter could feel her breathing.

“You understand—I knew that it was Sidney James. I knew it was old Sidney from high school. I didn’t know how scared I’d been of that

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very thing, it was like, what I was doing…like I wasn’t really doing it if no one who knew me or knew my family knew I was doing it….

So there it was. It had followed me, three thousand miles, down all those dark streets. I climbed into a cab with it. I was really doing what I was doing, and there was Sidney James looking at me and seeing the truth. The eyes of God, you know what I’m saying? And I thought, This is it, this is as bad as it gets. I looked at him. He looked at me. And then he opened his mouth.”

There was another silence. Carter wanted to speak, but couldn’t.

Finally she said, “What happened after you left the cab?”

Delia took a deep breath. “A lot of things. I tried to run, a couple of different ways. I tried to make it pass, you know, like some stone that had gotten into my system, but it was in there, hard and real. I was so scared I thought the fear might kill me if nothing else did.

You don’t need to know all of it.

“I went back to San Francisco. I knew someone there who’d gotten clean by herself somehow. I used to know her when I was using; she helped people like me and I knew she would look at me like I wasn’t a worthless dirt sack. I thought, If she did it, I could do it, if she’d tell me how.”

Carter took a deep breath.

“So…you did it.”

“Yes.”

“What’d you do for money?”

“I worked.” She caught Carter’s look. “I mean, I worked. They helped me get a job. First I worked in some garden, some little farm thing that hires ex-cons. Later I waited tables.”

“How long have you been clean?”

Delia rubbed her mouth with the palm of her hand. As if it scared her to even say it out loud.

“Five months.”

Carter nodded. She’d been off cigarettes longer than that, and she could still feel them calling to her, singing to her, four or five times a day. She’d read that there were people who still felt the craving after years.

Delia was looking at her hands. No one knew what to say next.

“I wish Shanti were here,” said Carter.

A
ll through the summer, Laurie’s numbers were creeping up. EMILY’s List was behind her now, and there was a Republican Women for Laura Lopez Committee. They were running steady radio and print ads and preparing for the blitz that would begin in September. Laurie traveled to fund-raisers in Texas, Iowa, Colorado, Washington again…anywhere people could be made to believe that Jimbo Turnbull’s long run in the Senate could be broken.

The party began to take an interest. They began to urge Laurie to attack. They wanted to capture another seat in the Senate, and they especially wanted to tip Jimbo out of the important committee seats he sat in. They wanted Laurie to campaign as The Widow; they wanted her to accuse Jimbo of killing Roberto.

“I won’t do that,” she said. “This isn’t personal. Leave it alone.”

“Cronyism! Special Interests! Business as Usual!” they insisted.

“All of that,” she said. “But I don’t want to win that way. There’s enough at stake as it is.”

She campaigned at the Firebird Raceway, she campaigned at meetings of Grandparents Acting as Parents. She campaigned hard for the Hispanic vote, which no one else in the state seemed to know was there. She delivered her message. Character. Choice. No Nuclear Waste in Idaho. She rode a bucking horse at the Western Idaho Fair in August. “Let Jimbo do
that
,” she said.

“We need a vacation,” said Walter.

“Let’s go somewhere where nobody knows us.”

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“Where there are no tourists.”

“Where the phone won’t ring.”

“What do we want to do?”

“Sleep,” said Laurie.

“Sleep,” said Amy. She and Walter practically had their backs to each other, they were trying so hard to avoid their eyes’ meeting.

“If we sleep long enough, at the end I might read a book,” said Laurie.

“Mother has a friend who owns a hotel near Cabo San Lucas,”

said Walter. “I’ll call her.”

“Tell her to come with us!” Laurie and Amy said.

Rae arranged for them to use the Directors’ House of the Baja Real hotel in Cabo.

“But she won’t come with us,” Walter said.

“Why not?”

“She’s too busy.”

Amy and Laurie both looked surprised.

“You know James, my Chinese brother-in-law?”

They did.

“He’s got her building her own village. She can’t take a vacation, she’s got meetings with fourteen architects and sixteen specialists in low-income housing.”

“But isn’t her birthday next week? Can’t she come for that?”

“On her birthday, they’re knocking down the warehouses she bought to make room for her project. There’s going to be dynamite.

She’s got her own hard hat.”

They knew it was hopeless. The three of them went off for five days, leaving Lynn in charge. For that period, not even Ajax knew where to find them.

A
ll summer, Delia lived with Aunt Sallie Spear, and worked in the church office. She learned how to use WordPerfect and how to do spreadsheets. In the evenings, she stayed in the office and took a speed-typing course on the computer.

Sometimes she helped Aunt Sallie baby-sit her grandnephew, Titus.

Several times a week, she would borrow the minister’s car and go visit Flora.

“I like her,” said Romie, in August. Delia started coming up to the office on her lunch hour. At first Romie had been suspicious.

Mae Ruth and Leesa said they liked her too.

“She’s a junkie,” said Carter.

“I know. I know,” the others said. “She’s staying clean though.

She isn’t running with her old crowd. She’s doing everything she said she would.”

“I know,” said Carter. Her heart was breaking. The right thing was happening, but it was breaking her heart.

“She needs a real job,” said DeeAnne. “The church is paying her pin money. She needs to get out and prove she can stand up even after you take the props away.”

“That could take years, you know,” said Carter. “To be sure of that.” By years from now, Flora would be in school. Carter would win by default; time would make the child hers.

“She must be made of some of the same stuff as her sister,” said Mae Ruth. “They didn’t find her under a cabbage leaf, did they?”

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“Yeah, but what’s her résumé going to look like? ‘Ages sixteen to twenty, employed as freelance telephone operator’?”

“She could work for us,” DeeAnne said.

There was a long silence. Once it was said, it was obvious to everyone that this was exactly the right solution. Delia wouldn’t have to lie to them to get a job. If she started to go sour, they would know. If she succeeded, she’d have an employment record and ref-erences.

“We need a real office manager,” Mae Ruth put in. “Candy can’t work the computer system for shit.”

On August twentieth, Delia started her new job, and that weekend the ops helped her move back into the house where she’d grown up. Jerry had sent a flunky to check the probate. Shanti had not made a will, but her father had left the house to his descendants. That meant Delia and Flora.

They mopped the floors and washed the curtains. They vacuumed, they washed the sheets, they made the beds. Delia moved into the room that had been her parents’, and then Shanti’s. The room that she had shared with Shanti when they were little girls was now Flora’s.

Flora kept coming to work with Carter. She spent more and more time with her aunt, as Carter worked out of the office. Romie taught Delia all she knew about Flora and taking care of babies.

I
n September, the party began running ads targeting Jimbo Turnbull. The first one showed a picture of the wreckage of the plane in which Roberto Lopez had died.

The narrator read: “Clyde Culbertson donated thousands of dollars to Senator Turnbull’s war chests.