Hissy Fit (16 page)

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I can’t find any death certificate.”

“What did you find?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me.

“Mostly dead ends,” he said, his voice full of regret.

I jounced the car
back onto the tarmac and turned a sharp left, toward town.

“I don’t want to hear another word,” I said, my teeth clenched. “You had no right to do this. Did you?”

Austin’s face fell. “I just thought you needed to know. For closure.”

“You don’t get to decide what I need to know,” I said.

The ride back to town was less than five miles, but it seemed to take hours. Austin turned the radio on again, and turned his back to me.

Traffic around the square was heavier than normal. I pulled up to a parking space at the courthouse, across the street from Fleur. “This is the best I can do,” I said.

“It’s fine,” he said, stony-faced. He opened the car door, started to get out, then thought better of it and got back into the front seat.

“You can stay mad at me if you want,” he said. “But I care about you, Keeley. I know you think you’re over your mama’s leaving you. But you’re not. You can’t be. Nobody could be over something like that. Just think about what I’ve told you. Okay? I searched the vital records data bases for all those states in, like, two hours on the computer. All that stuff is online now. If I had more information I could really get some answers.”

“No,” I said. “Look. It’s not like I’m some motherless waif. I had Daddy and Aunt Gloria, and they did just fine by me, thank you very much.”

“I need the name of the man your mama ran off with,” Austin kept up, pretending he hadn’t heard what I said. “And there are a bunch of other questions I want to ask you too.”

“Goodbye,” I said pointedly.

After he’d gotten out of the car, it took a few minutes before I could back out into traffic. I circled the square three times, looking for a parking spot, but it was hopeless. Without thinking about it, I headed the car toward my daddy’s house.

The driveway was empty. Monday. It was Daddy’s golf day. Before my hissy fit, before I’d gotten him kicked out of Oconee Hills Country Club, Daddy usually played eighteen holes with his cronies on Monday afternoons. He hadn’t said anything about it, but I knew he’d switched over to playing the public course over at the state park. This was something else for me to feel guilty about. The state course has more rocks and red clay than greens or fairways, and there was no posh clubhouse, locker room, or grill to repair to with his buddies after a punishing round in the blazing sun. He probably sat on the trunk of his car to change out of his cleats, and stopped at the Starvin’ Marvin on 441 for a cold Budweiser on the way back home.

Which would be several hours from now.

I let myself into the kitchen. It was neat and tidy, as always. For a bachelor, Daddy was a bit of a biddy. He never left dirty dishes in the sink, never failed to sweep the kitchen floor, which he mopped every Saturday morning.

The kitchen still smelled like Pine-Sol. When had he gotten into these habits, I wondered. Was that something his mama had done, mopped on Saturdays? Or had it been the practice of my own mother? I’d been such a little kid when she left, I had no idea how things got done around the house back then. I knew Daddy worked at the car lot, and Mama stayed home and did lady things, like cooking and cleaning and making sure I got to school and dance lessons and spend-the-night parties at my friends’ houses.

I opened the refrigerator door and reached automatically for the green Depression glass refrigerator jug full of cold water. The refrigerators had changed over the years, but the jug had not. We always had a pitcher of cold water in that green glass jug. Even though
Daddy’s refrigerator had an ice and cold water dispenser on the door now, he’d kept that jug refilled, year after year.

In the cupboard over the sink I found a juice glass and poured myself some water. On the bottom shelf of the pantry I found the Porky Pig cookie jar, and helped myself to a package of Nabs. Daddy bought cases of Nabs to keep at the car lot for his customers and salesmen. I think they fed them to me as a baby instead of teething biscuits.

Chewing and sipping, I walked aimlessly around the house. In the living room I toyed with the gold-framed photos Daddy kept displayed on Mama’s piano. I had never actually heard anybody play that piano. Now I plinked some of the keys, surprised to find that it sounded as though it was in tune. There was my high school graduation photo, with me wearing the off-the shoulder drape the studio had supplied all us girls. I’d felt self-conscious about the amount of cleavage that drape revealed, but never said anything about it to anybody. Next to the graduation photo was one of Daddy with his arms around me and Gloria, on his fiftieth birthday, taken a few years ago at the surprise party Gloria had organized at the country club. There was an awful baby picture of me too, in a frilly pink and white dress, with a pink bow Scotch-taped to my nearly bald head.

I plinked the piano some more and wondered about what wasn’t there. No photo of my mama. Had there ever been any? I tried to remember. Once maybe, a wedding picture of the two of them. It seemed to me Mama had been feeding Daddy a piece of wedding cake in that picture. Or had I just made that up?

The bookcases that flanked the fireplace were full of old Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, my red leather-bound
Encyclopedia Britannica
set, and some tired-looking twenty-year-old hardbacks. I pulled each out by the spine and looked them over. Daddy’s reading mostly consisted of the
Morgan County Citizen,
the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Car and Driver, Sports Illustrated,
and the occasional paperback spy novel.

So these would be my mama’s books. The titles seemed to run to romances—
Forever Amber, The Flame and the Flower,
like that.

I leafed absentmindedly through the pages. A yellowed slip of paper fell out of the pages of
The Flame and the Flower
. Despite all the years that had passed, I recognized her printing, instantly. She always printed my name on the brown bag lunch I toted to school. Keeley Murdock. As though there were another Keeley in my class. We’d had two Jennifers, two Stephanies, a Kirsten and a Kelly. But I was the only Keeley.

The paper was a grocery list, written in pencil on a scrap of lined notebook paper. Nothing exciting, nothing that gave a hint of what my mother’s daily life was like back then, or why she’d up and left.

Coffee. Sugar. Haf-’n-Haf
(she was a terrible speller),
Clorox, baloney, tin foil, eggs, shaving cream, aspirin, strawberry Jello, pineapple tidbits, cream cheese.

The baloney would have been for my lunch. I had a baloney sandwich on Sunbeam bread, with French’s mustard, every day. Mama cut my sandwich in half on the diagonal, and I always threw the crusts away, because Daddy said eating crust gave you curly hair—and mine was already way curlier than I wanted. The pineapple and cream cheese and Jell-O would have been for one of the congealed salads she liked to make. I never could figure out how something with Jell-O and pineapple qualified as a salad, but in Madison, Georgia, it did.

I smoothed the grocery list with my fingertips. She would have borrowed the paper out of my Blue Horse school notebook, I thought. Driven her red Chevy Malibu over to the Piggly Wiggly, probably while I was at school. After I got too big to ride in the shopping cart, she didn’t like to take me with her to the grocery store, because I drove her crazy begging for sugary cereals, candy, ice cream, and potato chips. Maybe she’d stopped off at Madison Drugs after the grocery store, for a Coke over crushed ice, and to hear the latest gossip at the soda fountain.

And then home to unpack the groceries and do whatever else she
did all day. What did she do with her time? I wondered. I didn’t know if she watched soap operas, like my grandmother. I’d never known her to play bridge, like some of my friends’ mothers. She talked on the phone, saw her friends, went to Myrtle Beach for a week with them every summer—no kids, no husbands.

I ran my fingers over the spines of the other books on the shelves, and feeling slightly guilty, shook each one out. What was I hoping to find? An airline ticket? Love letter? I thought about all those birthdays that had passed. Each year, for the week up to and after the big day, I’d raced home from school, hoping to find a card from her. I never got one. After I came home from college, before I moved into the apartment, I’d surreptitiously gone all through the boxes and trunks up in the attic, hoping to find some stash of cards and letters from her that Daddy had hidden. I never found anything.

On the top shelf of the bookcase I pulled out four different volumes of
Echoes
, my parents’ yearbooks from Morgan County High. I took the latest one, 1970, picked up my package of Nabs and my juice glass, and climbed the stairs to my old bedroom.

I put the glass down on my nightstand and opened the top drawer of my bureau. The bottle of Joy was hidden under some half slips. I uncapped it, closed my eyes, and inhaled.

The pages of the
Echoes
stuck together slightly, so I used my fingertips to pry them apart. How many times had I gone through this yearbook with her? As a child I’d been fascinated with the idea that she’d been a teenager once. At bedtime I’d beg her to show me the yearbook, point out her friends, her enemies, her favorite teachers. I’d looked in vain for Daddy’s picture, until she’d pointed out that he was four years older, and had graduated before she ever set foot inside Morgan County High.

Here was the page of faculty pictures. I smiled at the one of her geometry teacher, Mr. Osier. Somebody (not me! Mama had protested in mock horror) had drawn a mustache and pointy horns on his head. She’d never been any good at math either.

I’d loved the club pictures. Mama had been so popular. Spanish Club, Drama Club, Pen & Palette, Student Council secretary. She’d worn a different outfit in each picture, cute little miniskirts or bell-bottom hip-huggers. In my favorite one, she’d worn an Indian headband and fringed leather skirt.

“Were you in a play?” I’d asked.

“That was just the latest style, that year,” she’d said. “I saw Cher wearing an outfit like that on television, and saved up my allowance and bought one just like it at Rich’s at Lenox Square Plaza in Atlanta. I was the first girl in school to go native!” And she’d laughed and laughed about that.

I flipped through the pages of senior portraits until I got to hers. Jeanine Marie Murry. Her chin was tilted up in the picture, and her eyes, with their dramatic sweep of black eyeliner, frosted eyeshadow, and goopy mascara, seemed focused on something far away. Beneath the picture was listed a list of her activities and accomplishments, and then, as with every senior, her favorite quote. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by.” Robert Frost.

Sure did, I thought, slapping the book closed.

I started to put the perfume bottle back in the dresser drawer, but thought better of it. Instead I took it, and the yearbook. Downstairs, I washed out the juice glass, dried it and put it back in the cupboard. Everything was as it was when I’d come in. And Wednesday night, salmon loaf night, I would come back here, sit across the table from Daddy, and talk about the things we always talked about. How, I wondered, could I get to the place where I could talk to him about the thing we never, ever, talked about? Jeanine Murry Murdock and the road less traveled.

Wednesday morning
I got up and brewed a pot of coffee. I poured two mugs, tucked the yearbook under my arm, went downstairs, and pounded on the back door of the florist’s shop.

It was early, not yet seven, and I knew Austin’s feet never hit the floor until just after nine, but I had no pity on him, just kept banging away on the heavy metal fire door until he opened up.

He wore a pair of unlovely gray gym shorts, with the satin kimono thrown hastily on, still unbelted. I was surprised to see how trim his bare torso was, even more surprised to see his chest hair was nearly all white, while what hair Austin still had was a sunny blond.

Austin saw where I was looking and quickly belted the robe. He yawned hugely. “So now you know my secret. I touch up my hair, and I’m a religious Abz-Er-Cizer. To what do I owe the pleasure of a visit at such an ungodly hour?”

I handed him the mug of coffee and followed him into the shop and up the stairs to his own apartment.

“It’s all your fault,” I said, blowing on the coffee to cool it down. “You opened up this can of worms.”

He shuddered. “Do we have to talk about worms before I’ve had breakfast?”

“His name was Darvis Kane,” I said, wanting the words out quickly, before I could take them back.

“Who?”

“The man. The one my mother ran away with. His name was Darvis Kane. He was the sales manager at Murdock Motors.”

“Ow,” Austin said. He took a sip of the coffee. “Okay. This is a start. What else do you know?”

“Not a lot,” I said. “Gloria told me some of it. After one of the
girls at school spilled the beans. Darvis Kane was her uncle. We were playing dodgeball one day, and I hit her, and she got really mad. And she screamed at me: ‘My Uncle Darvis run off with your mama! My mama says your mama’s nothing but a little runaround! So don’t you be thinking you’re better than me.’ ”

“Nice,” Austin said.

“I hit her really hard. It left a mark on the back of her knees.”

“Should have knocked the little bitch out cold.”

“Yeah, well, that’s one of my lasting regrets. It was Paige. All the other kids heard too. Even the teacher. Mrs. Goggins. She made Paige apologize, but she didn’t make her take it back.”

“
Quel scandale!
But you really had no clue she’d taken off with a man?”

“No. She’d been gone maybe ten days? I really can’t remember too clearly. And up until then, I thought she’d gone to the beach with her girlfriends, like she used to do in the summertime. Only this was wintertime. After Christmas, I know. After Valentine’s Day too, because I remember Mama bought me Barbie valentines to give away. So it was March, maybe. I didn’t believe Paige, of course. But somehow I knew better than to ask Daddy about it. Back then the elementary school was still right downtown. After Mama left I’d walk over here to Glorious Interiors and sit at the table by the window, and color and cut out pictures from
House Beautiful
and do my homework until Daddy came by to pick me up. So I asked her about it.”

“What did she say?”

“Just that Mama was having trouble thinking clearly, and she needed some time away from us to feel better about things.”

“Did you ask her about this Darvis Kane person?”

“I did. I can still remember the look on her face when I asked her about it. Her lips went all white. ‘Who told you about that?’ she asked me. ‘Who would tell a child such a thing?’ After I told her, she took me over to Madison Drugs and bought me a chocolate malted. That was a huge treat. Usually you only got a chocolate malted if you’d
made an A on a spelling test. We sat at one of those vinyl booths, and her hands were shaking, she was so upset, but she talked to me. She told me that it was true Darvis Kane had left town. And my mama had gone too. But there was no proof they’d gone off together. And she felt sure Mama would call when she got herself settled someplace. Because she loved me very much.”

Austin set his mug down carefully on the marble-topped end table. “She never called, did she?”

“No.”

He got to his feet and went over to a table in the corner of the room. A paisley fringed throw had been tossed over the table, and when he lifted the throw, I could see that there was a computer terminal there.

Austin started tapping away at the keyboard. In a minute I heard the modem dialing the phone line.

“Okay,” he said, turning around to face me. “First, more coffee. Stat. Second, I need more information about this Darvis Cole.”

“Kane. Darvis Kane. I’ll bring the pot of coffee back with me. But I don’t know anything else about him. Just that he worked for Daddy at the car lot, and he was Paige’s uncle.”

He kept on tapping, and I walked over to my place and got the coffee, and after a moment’s hesitation, a bag of mini Snickers I’d bought half price after Easter, and hidden from myself in case of an emergency that required chocolate. Austin was still working away on the computer when I got back over there.

I poured him a cup of coffee, and he took the bag of candy and gave me a look. “No peanut M&M’s?”

I shrugged. “Sorry.”

He chewed and thought about things. “Was Darvis Kane an uncle on Paige’s mother’s or father’s side?”

I had to think about that. “On her mother’s side. I never knew Paige’s daddy. Anyway, Darvis Kane was married to Lorna’s sister Lisa.”

More tapping. “I need his vitals,” Austin said. “Was he from Madison? Any chance he went to school here, something like that? Any family still living here?”

I shook my head slowly. “I just don’t know. Lisa and Lorna’s maiden name was Franklin. Their family didn’t live right in Madison. They lived way over in Rutledge, in a trailer back off the highway. Lorna was the only one who stayed around here.

“Wait,” I said, helping myself to another mini Snickers. “Where’s your phone book?”

He reached under the table and brought out the Morgan-Madison-Buckhead-Rutledge phone directory. I took it and paged over to the K listings.

“One Kane listed, but it’s a LaTasha Kane, and she lives over there on Jeeter Way. She’s black. Our Darvis Kane was white.”

Austin raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure?”

“This was 1979, Austin. My daddy wasn’t a racist or anything, but the only black man who worked at Murdock Motors back then was Eddie, the detail man. Anyway, it was a scandal, not a racial incident. I’m positive.”

“Who
would
know something?” Austin asked, impatient now.

“Paige, I guess. But there’s no way I’m asking her.”

“Who else, then? What happened to the jilted sister, after her husband ran away with Jeanine?”

“Lisa? I think she took her kids and moved to Athens, moved in with another one of the sisters. Paige was mad because her girl cousins moved off.”

“That’s something we’ll have to take a look at,” Austin said, writing on a yellow legal pad beside the computer. “See if Lisa Franklin and Darvis Kane ever got a divorce. And maybe we can track down the ex. Somebody has to know something about these two. Who else can you think of? Think now, Keeley.”

“Maybe Gloria,” I said reluctantly. “And Daddy. But I couldn’t talk to him about this. Not yet.”

“You’ll have to eventually,” he said.

“Maybe. Once I have some answers,” I conceded.

“Oh, you’ll have answers,” he promised, patting the computer terminal. “All right,” he said. “Tell me some more about your mama.”

“Like what?”

“Who were her people?” Austin asked, exasperated at my denseness. “I mean, the woman walked off and never came back. How about her family? Did any of them ever hear from her over the years?”

I chewed and thought. “Her only family besides us was her cousin, Sonya Wyrick. She was my mama’s maid of honor at her wedding. But I think she and Daddy didn’t get along, because the only time she and Mama got together was when Daddy wasn’t around.”

Austin pounced on this little family tidbit. “She was your mother’s only living relative? Why didn’t she and Wade get along?”

“Nobody ever came out and said Daddy didn’t like her. She just didn’t come around that often. She was married and had a couple kids too.”

“Sonya. Wyrick.” Austin wrote it down on his yellow legal pad.

“She worked as a stitcher at Loving Cup. When she got laid off, she moved away. I haven’t heard from her in a long time.”

“All right, I’ll try and track that down later,” he said. He stood up from the computer, stretched, yawned again, and looked at his watch. “Good Lord. It’s not even nine o’clock yet. I can’t believe my brain is functioning at this high a level this early.”

“Coffee and Snickers,” I said. “The breakfast of champions. I’ve gotta go pretty soon. I’m supposed to take some paint samples over to Will, and Gloria and I have a ton of paperwork to catch up on.”

“You still haven’t told me what your mother was like,” Will complained. “I’m just not getting any sense of her. Who was Jeanine Murry Murdock? What was she like before she got married and had you?”

I shook my head in frustration. “She was like any other small-town Southern girl, I guess. She got married when she was eighteen years old, for Pete’s sake.”

“Before she married your daddy, did she work? Did she go to college?”

“She went to the community college for about a year,” I said. “And she worked in a dress shop, right here on the square. The Charm Shop, it was called. A woman named Chrys Graham owned it. It’s gone now, but it used to be right over there on Washington Street, where Kathleen Harbin’s antiques shop is now. It had a pink awning out front. Mama always loved pretty clothes, and Chrys Graham let her go to Atlanta to the mart with her and do some of the buying. And Mama always did all the window dressing too. In fact, she did the window dressing after she quit working there. I remember she made a Halloween window once, and I helped her make a scarecrow with hay, and we dressed her in the cutest outfit. People came from all over to see Mama’s windows.”

Austin smiled. “Well, at least we know where you get your sense of style.”

That made me laugh. “Yeah, definitely not from Daddy. He’s doing good if he remembers to wear brown shoes with green pants.”

“Tell me more about the dress shop, about the woman who owned it,” Austin ordered.

“I’ve really gotta scoot in a minute now,” I said. But I was enjoying myself, thinking about how happy it had made Mama, all those years ago, fixing those windows. She’d spend hours working on them, bringing props from home, painting backdrops, setting up lights. Then we’d get in her Malibu and cruise past, over and over again, because she wanted to make sure people driving by got the full effect.

“The owner, Miss Graham, let her buy her clothes at a discount, some samples too, because she was a perfect size eight, a sample size. I remember she used to put clothes aside for Mama, even after she
quit and got married and had me. One time she got us matching mother-daughter outfits.”

“What happened to her, after the shop closed?” Austin asked anxiously. “And please don’t tell me she died or moved to North Carolina.”

“No,” I said. “She’s right here in Madison. She works for Kathleen Harbin in the antiques shop, as a matter of fact. Kathleen is her niece.”