Getting Sassy (11 page)

She patted her purse.

I was having some trouble digesting all this, and the questions just kept popping out of me. “Why would he leave you that money?”

“This woman—Mary—told me that Robert had a religious conversion at some point. Turned his life around, he said.”

“Hmph,” I said. “You’d think if he really had, God would have told him to add some interest to that buck fifty.”

She chuckled and then, as I watched, her eyelids grew heavy.

“I wonder why,” I paused, “if he had this conversion that made him pay back his debts, then why didn’t that same conversion make him want to find his daughter?”

I didn’t think she was going to answer me at first. But her eyelids fluttered and she said, “I don’t know. But I suspect child support payments had something to do with it.”

“Yeah,” I said after a moment. “I guess it was easier to send you the sofa money and call it even.”

The combination of wine and being up more than two hours without a nap had nearly put her to sleep. With her eyes still closed, she sighed and said, “He could be very sweet.”

“I thought you said he was a cruel man.”

She looked at me, confusion shadowing her eyes. “Well, yes, that’s true. In a way.” The she sighed again and said, “I’m tired.”

“Do you want to lie down, Mom?”

“Yes, I think I would.”

“I’ll help you to my bedroom.”

“No, that’s all right.” She glanced at Bix at the other end of the couch. “I can lie down here if you can move him and get me a blanket.”

“Sure thing.” I scooped Bix up and deposited him, a bit dazed from his own nap, on the floor, and when I brought an afghan in from my bedroom, my mother had her feet up on the couch and two throw pillows situated beneath her head.

“Robyn,” she said, the sound of sleep in her voice.

“Yeah, Mom?”

“My finances are all right, aren’t they?”

“You’re doing fine.” I tucked the blanket around her.

“I want you to tell me if there’s a problem.”

“I will.”

“Good.”

Soon she began snoring softly.

I watched her sleep for a few minutes. Sometimes it was hard to remember that this fragile, confused, frequently exasperating woman had once been my age, younger. Prettier. I thought of the hundred and fifty dollars nestled in the coffee tin. I remembered that tin— with the farm scene on it: blue sky, white clouds and a red barn. Chickens. It was where she kept her “laundered” money—leftover grocery and household cash that Wyman never knew about. She must have been good at it because she had enough to afford riding lessons for the two of us. That was one thing we shared—a love of all things equine. And now I’d learned that before the riding lessons, she had set aside money for a couch and someone stole it from her. First the hundred and fifty and then, years later, many times that.

And I thought about my own marriage, when I’d been the one to bolt. I’d left with little money and had called my mother to ask if she
could loan me a couple thousand and also asked if I could stay with her until I got back on my feet. While she’d sent me the money, she’d made it clear that there wasn’t room for me in her apartment. This shouldn’t have surprised me. I think we do love each other, but most of the time we don’t like each other very much.

I paid her back every penny and swore I’d never ask her for another thing again. And I haven’t. But now she needed my help, and I was as confused as hell as to why it was so important that I be there for her. Maybe because I felt I needed to atone for my own ineptness as her daughter. I should have known where her money was going. I should not have let it come to this.

In that moment I knew where I’d get the money. Or I would die trying. I wouldn’t take it from Mick, or from anyone else who hadn’t taken anything from my mother. And I knew I could do this, because it wasn’t stealing... it was taking back. And I knew exactly who to take it back from.

While my mother napped, I dug out my files on her finances. When I’d first learned, to my horror, the extent of damage that these “investments” had done to her savings, I was ready to track down each and every scam maggot, and if I couldn’t get the money back, I intended to make them very sorry they cheated someone’s mother. Especially mine. I saw the whole lot of them as this giant, hissing hydra that I— Robyn the Righteously Vengeful—would do battle with. I really hated seeing the bad guys win. But it wasn’t long before I learned how difficult it was to track these people down. How adept they were at tossing snarls of obfuscation behind them, which one needed to fight her way through in order to hack off one of their heads. If I’d had the money and the time, I would have done whatever it took. But I didn’t have either. And, in the past couple of years I’d managed to relegate the knowledge of what they’d done, and my unknowing complicity, to the part of my brain that allowed me to live with it.

But there was one guy whose name I had managed to track down, and I consulted a lawyer concerning any recourse I had. Piddling little. The situation had involved a proposed shopping mall in which, over the course of several months, my mother had invested more than fifty grand before the company had gone under and filed for bankruptcy. The investors were the only ones who lost anything in the deal. The company had been a minor piece of a large conglomerate owned by William “Bull” Severn. Recovering the money would have been difficult, seeing as, for all his wealth, none of this was in his name. His wife’s name was on most of these holdings, with some consigned to a cousin and a half brother.

Maybe I had consulted a spineless lawyer, but he had me convinced there was no way I could win without bankrupting myself. And even then there were no guarantees. I hated that about the system—the people who’d stolen from my mother would never pay for it because they had money and/or sleight of hand on their side. Being right had nothing to do with it.

I thought about writing an exposé. Figured a magazine would love a piece like that. And, while there was some interest, in the end no one would touch it because of the potential for libel suits from wealthy folks with deep pockets.

Now I decided that perhaps my mistake had been in pursuing only legal options.

I peeked in on my mother. Her mouth hung slack and she was snoring. Bix had managed to squeeze his plump little body between her feet and the back of the couch where he slept.

I got on the internet and Googled Mr. Severn. I knew that he lived in the Chicago area, but I didn’t know what he’d been up to lately. And by the time I heard my mother’s groan, which accompanied her rise from the couch, I had the seed of a plan. At least I knew how I might worm my way into Severn’s company. Severn, like any self-respecting mogul with more money than he knew how to spend, had bought himself a racehorse. Once I learned that, I Googled William
Severn and Mick Hughes. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the two of them linked in a number of articles; horseracing was a small, tight world, and I assumed one never got over being a jockey. But when I saw the photo of Severn and Mick in the stable with Severn’s horse, I read the caption and then the article. A plan began to form in my mind. It needed definition—an object to be precise—and I didn’t know exactly how I would pull it off. But I did know where to start.

It was early afternoon, and I sat with my mother as she smoked another cigarette and we chatted about little things—the Cubs’ season, Bix’s snoring and the loud ticking of my cuckoo clock—and then she asked to be taken home. While she was in the bathroom, I peeked in her purse and found a cigarette that had “fallen” in there. I almost checked her wallet, but knew that was a line I didn’t want to cross. So I just removed the smoke and slipped it back into the pack, which I tucked into a kitchen drawer.

After she pulled her sweater on, she opened her purse, shoved her hand down into it and felt around. Then she looked up at me with knowing, angry eyes. “I see you’ve been through my purse.”

Crossing my arms over my chest, I said, “I see you tried to smuggle a cigarette.”

“That hellhole,” she muttered. “What’s the harm in letting us smoke?”

“I’m sure it has to do with safety, Mom.”

“It’s ridiculous.” She spat the word out as she hooked the strap of her purse over her forearm and picked up her cane.

“You know, Mom, if you don’t like where you are, if you need to be someplace where you can smoke and fart to your heart’s content, then we’ll find somewhere else for you to live.”

“Hmph.” She glanced around my apartment, stopping to straighten one of the throw pillows she’d used. “If I lived here I could smoke.”

“No, you couldn’t.”

“Oh, I forgot. Your lily-white lungs.”

“I’ve got asthma, Mother,” I told her for, perhaps, the thousandth time. “Smoke doesn’t help.”

“Well, I didn’t know you had asthma. How long have you had it?” she asked, and I didn’t think I imagined the dubious tone.

“I was diagnosed about seven years ago,” I said, daring her to challenge me. Daring her to give me a reason to thank her for her contribution to my asthma. But she backed down, and I was glad, because I would have been sorry. I always was when I did something like that. Although I doubted she’d remember for more than a minute or two. And the next time I mentioned it, she’d be asking me all over again when I learned I had asthma.

When I got home from dropping my mother off, I debated whether to run over to the Psychic Place again. Not only had I neglected to get a photo, but in light of my mother’s revelations, I had a few more questions for Erika. Even if the money hadn’t been significant, the spirit of Robert—or whoever had been behind him... or it—had been right. And then I remembered when my editor had assigned me the story, he’d told me that Erika had requested me. Seeing as I usually do the “Welcome to Fowler” pieces, it wasn’t an issue. At the time, I’d assumed that she liked my writing. Maybe I should have been more suspicious than flattered.

But when I called Erika, I got a recording and decided not to leave a message. I’d wait until Monday and just drop in on her. If she really was a psychic, there’d be no surprising her.

I spent the remainder of the afternoon attempting to track down Mary Waltner, convinced that my mother would never come clean about the woman’s visit. As open as my mother had seemed, I knew better than to be certain this was the final word on her past. I started with the assumption that Mary Waltner was a lawyer, which made sense. Lawyers were often involved in wills and other after-death
details. But my Google searches turned up little. If she was a lawyer, she was pretty low key. Then I did a white pages search of the entire United States and found there were quite a few—all over the country—from Alabama to California. After a bit more Googling, I determined there was nothing to do but pick up the phone. Damn.

I leaned back in my chair and looked up at the ceiling. When I found no divine inspiration up there, only a wisp of a cobweb, I decided I really did have to start punching numbers. Cold calling is something I detest—I’d make a terrible telemarketer, I fumble on the phone. But, I wrote out a script and got started. The first Mary Waltner, who lived in Ames, Iowa, assured me she hadn’t left town in five years. Sounded like me. The next two didn’t answer—I left messages, asking them to call me collect and briefly explained why I wanted to talk to them, mentioning my mother and her failing memory. The next woman answered, and she required something of an explanation, so I went with the truth—more or less. But most of them didn’t want to know about my mother and her memory problems, and all I had to do was apologize for bothering them. I had a brief but pleasant chat with a Mary Waltner from Freeman, South Dakota. She’d been on her way out the door to her book club when I called, and we exchanged a couple of titles before hanging up. But mostly it was a series of short calls and left messages. When I recited my message into the last Mary Waltner’s voice mail, in Thousand Oaks, California, I conceded that this was a pointless exercise—for all I knew the woman I was trying to reach had an unlisted number, or only used a cell phone. But I had to go through the motions.