Half-Price Homicide (8 page)

“Smart girl,” Joe said. “You’re young. You’ve got some good times left. Cigarettes can’t hurt us old coots. They’re one of the few pleasures we have left. Oh, I see you brought me flowers. You shouldn’t have.” He batted his eyelashes flirtatiously.

“They’re for my mother,” Helen said.

“Don’t listen to this old fool,” Rita interrupted. “How is your mother, dear?” Rita wore red lipstick and a matching bow probably filched from a flower arrangement. Rita’s thin hair was the same color as her swirling cigarette smoke.

“That’s what I’m hoping to find out this morning when I talk with her doctor,” Helen said. “He ordered a CT scan. He’ll tell me the results today. Thanks for asking.”

Joe and Rita were two of the smokers who gathered in the palm-shaded Sunset Rest courtyard. They lit up at dawn and puffed happily until the doors were locked at night.

“Have fun with old Filthy,” Joe said.

Rita elbowed him with a chubby arm. “Quiet,” she said. “If Dr. Lucre takes a dislike to you, your bony ass will be out on the street.”

“Such language from a lady,” Joe mocked. Rita giggled.

“Filthy can’t afford to throw me out,” Joe said. “I have too much money. I’ll leave here feet-first.”

Helen wished her mother had been well enough to enjoy her neighbors. Dolores, determined to stop Helen’s wedding, had taken a long, hot bus ride from St. Louis to Fort Lauderdale. She achieved her goal, but at great cost. Helen’s mother had a minor heart attack and hit her head on the Coronado’s concrete sidewalk. At the hospital, when the doctors treated her heart, they also found a brain bleed from the fall.

A neurosurgeon operated to relieve the pressure. After a month, the doctors said they could do nothing more at the hospital and suggested a nursing home. Helen visited four recommended nursing homes. She’d walked out of the first two because they smelled like urine and stale soup. The third home had lines of older people tied into wheelchairs and parked in the aisles. Her mother wasn’t going to a human warehouse.

Sunset Rest’s lobby was painted a pretty pastel blue and had a tropical fish tank. The halls had photos of Florida beaches. Helen had eaten two meals in the dining room and thought the food was fairly good. She hoped her mother would get well enough to play bridge, go to the weekly music nights, then go home to her grandchildren.

It never happened. Helen’s mother never woke up after her surgery. The neurosurgeon said the bleed had damaged her brain stem. Even after the pressure was relieved, he said it did not look hopeful that Dolores would recover.

Helen’s sister, Kathy, and her brother-in-law, Tom, stayed another week after Helen’s interrupted wedding, but both had to return to their jobs in St. Louis. Helen promised to look after Dolores and call if there was any news, good or bad.

The surgeon had explained, “Your mother is in a shadow world of partial consciousness. She may answer a few simple yes or no questions. She may sometimes open her eyes and look at you. She may be agitated if she’s roused. But she probably won’t come back.” He assured the family Dolores was in no pain, but she had little hope of recovery.

Helen arranged for Catholic sisters to come by once a week and pray in her mother’s room. A priest gave Dolores the sacrament of the sick (which her traditional mother would have called extreme unction). Helen asked parish priests in Florida and in St. Louis to say masses for her mother’s recovery.

Arranging these small comforts for her religious mother had given Helen a sense of peace and some hope of reconciliation. Her late father had called Helen “my little firecracker” and enjoyed her spirit. Dolores saw her daughter as dangerously rebellious. Helen tried hard, but she could never please her mother. Taking care of her mother in her final illness was Helen’s last chance to be the daughter Dolores wanted.

Helen visited her mother every two or three days in the nursing home. She would sit in the tall turquoise chair by her mother’s bedside and talk as if Dolores could really listen. Helen had read somewhere that some patients in comas could hear what people around them were saying. Helen told Dolores only news that she would want to hear.

Dolores’s nursing home roommate was Ruth, a seventy-five-year-old who’d had a stroke. She, too, was unconscious. Ruth’s daughter, Muriel, looked like a hen with a perm. Muriel fussed around the room each visit, then turned up the television so loud it should have awakened the residents of the nearby Lauderdale cemetery.

“Mama loves her television,” Muriel insisted as she ramped up the volume. Helen flinched at the blasting soap opera. Ruth didn’t move. Neither did Dolores.

Helen turned off the set as soon as Muriel left. It stayed off until Muriel’s next visit. Neither woman mentioned this silent battle over loud noise. Muriel must have visited her mother this morning. Helen could hear the TV blaring from the courtyard.

She stopped by the nurses’ station and checked in with Maria, the brown-skinned Jamaican nurse. “How’s Mom?”

“The same, Miss Hawthorne.” Maria’s island accent made Helen think of vacation beaches and rum drinks with paper umbrellas. “The doctor is making his rounds. Would you like to speak to him?”

“Yes, please,” Helen said. “I’ll wait for him.”

“It shouldn’t be long,” Maria said. “Dr. Lucre is only three rooms away from your mother’s. I’ll tell him you are here.”

Dolores had the bed with the view, though she’d never seen it. Her window overlooked the courtyard with the palm trees, pots of red impatiens and jolly smokers. The room’s walls were painted pink, Dolores’s favorite color. The corkboard on her side was covered with homemade cards from her grandchildren, Allison and Tommy Junior.

Helen clicked off the blaring television and studied her mother.

She could hardly find Dolores’s frail body in the tangle of lines, tubes and plastic bags. Dolores’s skin was yellow and her eyes were ringed with dark circles. Her chest barely moved under the hospital gown.

She had only a few feathery wisps of white hair. Dolores had worn a brown wig for nearly twenty years. Helen had had the wig washed and styled. It waited on a stand in the closet.

Dolores’s hands were crossed on her chest, as if she were already dead.

“Hi, Mom,” Helen said, and kissed her mother. No movement.

Helen tossed out the dying flowers she’d brought last week, and filled the vase with fresh water and pink carnations. She sat down and took Dolores’s small, bruised hand in hers, carefully avoiding the IV line.

“I hope you’ve had a good week, Mom. I’ve been working. I like my job. Kathy and Tom send their love. Your grandchildren miss you. Allison asks for Grandma all the time. Kathy is shopping for Tommy Junior’s school supplies. I can’t believe school will be starting soon.”

Silence.

“We didn’t always get along, Mom, but I love you and want you to get well.”

Helen’s mother didn’t answer.

Dolores had loved Rob. She saw all of Helen’s faults, and none of Rob’s. Dolores had stayed in touch with her former son-in-law, giving Rob information he used against her own daughter.

Kathy had supported Helen’s decision to divorce Rob. When Helen was on the run, her sister was the only person who knew how to reach her.

During her divorce, Helen endured her mother’s harsh lectures.

When the judge decreed Helen would lose half her home and her future earnings, she fled St. Louis. She called her mother occasionally. When the lectures started, Helen would break off the calls, claiming she couldn’t hear her mother through the cell phone static.

Dolores pursued her daughter with hateful letters. “You have broken your promise and you will die,” she wrote. Her religious mania grew worse after her unhappy second marriage to Larry. Her parish priest rebuked her for lack of charity.

As Dolores deteriorated mentally, Tom and Kathy considered placing her in a home. Dolores sneaked away, took a bus to Fort Lauderdale and showed up at Helen’s wedding at the Coronado. Her visit was an unwelcome surprise. Dolores told Helen—and the assembled guests—”I’d rather see you dead than burning in hell for divorcing your husband.” Those were her last words to her daughter.

Helen used these one-sided conversations with Dolores to ease her pain. She repeated her mother’s arguments, trying to escape the stinging criticism.

“I know you disapproved of my divorce, Mom,” she said. “You told me a wife had a duty to stay with her husband, no matter how unfaithful he was. But I’m not strong like you. I couldn’t stand living with a lie. I couldn’t forgive Rob.”

More silence. To Helen, it seemed accusing.

“You said it was my fault that Rob strayed, Mom, because I didn’t stay home and keep house like a proper wife. But we both had to work. We couldn’t afford to have me stay home.”

Not if we wanted that cracker-box mansion your son-in-law loved so much, she thought. Helen bit back those bitter words.

“I wouldn’t have been a good homemaker like you were, Mom. I was happier in an office.”

She clamped down her lips so the next thoughts would not escape: You stayed home and Daddy cheated on you anyway, and the whole parish knew it. Especially after he had a heart attack in a no-tell motel during an illicit encounter with the head of the altar society.

“You forgave Dad many times for his failings,” she said. “I hope you can forgive me. I’m sorry our last words together were—”

Helen was relieved to hear a man clearing his throat. She turned to see Dr. Justin Lucre in the doorway, holding a chart. He was a fit forty, graying at the temples. Helen thought he could be in one of those old commercials that said, “Nine out of ten doctors recommend …”

Dr. Lucre pulled out a stethoscope and began examining Dolores.

“How is Mom?” Helen asked. “What were the results of the CT scan?”

“Not good. Your mother’s brain is bleeding again, Helen. You and your mother’s husband decided that ‘comfort care only’ was the best course. The bleeding is growing. She may go quickly.”

“Is she hurting?”

“She’s not in pain,” Dr. Lucre said. “She’ll drift away. It’s good that you visit her, though I doubt if she knows you’re here.”

“How much time does she have left?” Helen asked.

“It’s difficult to predict. Maybe a day, maybe two or more.”

“Is there any chance she’ll come to?” Helen asked.

“I doubt it. Miracles have happened, but they’re unlikely. That’s why we call them miracles.”

“Oh,” Helen said. She thought she’d been prepared for this, but the news felt like a blow.

“You’ve gone out of your way to give her the best care,” Dr. Lucre said. “You’ve been a good daughter.”

“A good daughter,” Helen echoed.

But the doctor’s words were no comfort. She knew the truth.

Helen drifted out of her mother’s room like a sleepwalker. She wiped away a tear, then realized she had walked all the way through the Sunset Rest Home to the lobby. An old man snored softly on a fat sofa, a newspaper on his lap. Only the tropical fish saw Helen crying, and they were used to water.

She picked up the dozing man’s paper and hid her face until she quit weeping. Helen didn’t like to cry, especially in public. She wouldn’t take the bus home until the tear storm stopped. Bus riders had their own troubles.

Then she realized she didn’t need the bus. She was engaged. Phil, her fiancé, had begged Helen to let him drive her to the nursing home. She was too used to handling everything on her own. Helen stopped sniffling, opened her cell and called Phil.

“I’ve been waiting to hear from you,” he said. “How’s your mom?”

“Not good,” Helen said. “The doctor says she maybe has a few days left. She’s not in any pain, but that’s the only good news.”

“I’m sorry she won’t recover,” Phil said. “Can I pick you up and take you to lunch?”

“I definitely need a ride. But I’m not hungry,” Helen said.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Phil said.

While Helen waited, she called her sister, Kathy, in St. Louis and told her the news. Kathy was silent for a moment, then said, “This isn’t a surprise. Why do I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut?”

“Me, too,” Helen said. “And Mom and I didn’t get along.” “I wish I could be there with you,” Kathy said. “But Tom can’t get more time off work and we can’t afford more plane tickets.” “I’ll send you the money,” Helen said. “You aren’t rich, either.”

“No, but Phil and I can come up with enough for two plane tickets.”

“Helen, if Mom were conscious, I’d be there,” Kathy said. “But she never woke up.”

“No, she didn’t. Sometimes Mom opens her eyes, but it’s obvious nobody is home,” Helen said. “The doctor said it would be a miracle if she regained consciousness. She won’t be alone when she goes. I’ll be with her. Stay home with your family.”

“Tommy Junior will take his grandmother’s death hard,” Kathy said. “Mom loves our kids and enjoys doing grandma things with them—making cookies, taking them to the park, letting them sleep over at her house.

“The holidays were so much fun, until she married Lawn Boy Larry. That Grinch stole our Christmas. He didn’t like the kids making noise. He didn’t want a real tree because it would shed needles. Larry complained when Allison got cookie crumbs on the kitchen floor. He wouldn’t let Tommy play with his soccer ball in Mom’s backyard. Larry said my boy might break a window. He’s a mean man. I miss Mom. I didn’t always agree with her, but I miss her.”