Lookaway, Lookaway (47 page)

Would she do it? Would she declare herself Shawna’s long-lost mother? But the truth would come out, wouldn’t it? It was Jerene, not Dillard. And resentful of Jerene as she was, that was still her choice to make, to own and include a daughter and her unruly brood into the Johnston family. No, what a foolish whim, the more she thought about it. Maybe that’s what Jerene understood. Maybe that’s why she left before she said anything that would have consequences, consequences of family dynamics, of scandal, of money. The family secret, so close to the surface, visible for anyone outside looking in, slowly began to return to its home below the surface, down to the dark reaches unfathomable, where secrets belonged.

“I’ll show myself out,” Dillard said, tears playing at the edges of her eyes.

It was late and the sun was low, blinding everyone with the gift of sight, reflecting off the rows of white trailers. Dillard nearly stumbled from the small broken wooden porch, making her way to the visitors’ lot, in such a swirl of light and heat. She wondered if she might faint.

Dillard took a few wrong turns between the rows of mobile homes before she found the visitor parking spaces. Dillard’s Toyota was still there, but no Jerene. After wandering back and asking the trailer park host who had first given them directions, it appeared the nicely dressed lady with the dark hair had called a cab and gone on her way.

Dillard fumbled with her car keys, barely able to put them into the lock. She drove home—the merciless sun in her eyes all the way from Matthews, refusing to set, tormenting her from the west. She parked in her driveway; Jerene’s BMW was still there.

She opened her front door.

She turned on the living-room light, but that seemed of a piece with the taunting sun, so she turned it off. Dillard felt light-headed but otherwise intact, but she suddenly was completely exhausted. Not hurting, not in pain. She slumped into a soft living-room chair.

Did all of that just transpire? It had played out so quickly, like a little theater piece, and now here she was back to the normal quiet of her own house. Was she normal? Her heart was beating faster. She heard, as if amplified, the tick of the mantel clock.

The phone rang.

Dillard leaned to the end table and picked up the receiver.

“I’m back in your driveway,” said Jerene. Dillard could hear a taxi drive away.

Jerene said, “Sorry about my disappearance. I couldn’t take another minute of it, not a second.”

Dillard’s heavy breathing must have told Jerene that her sister was exhausted. “It was very awkward to get out of there, Jerene.”

“I deserve your scorn, I don’t deny it. Part of my punishment was paying for that Matthews-to-Charlotte cab ride—there’ll be no Christmas this year.”

Dillard wasn’t amused but then she knew Jerene didn’t say it to be amusing. Neither sister said anything for a while. Dillard sighed a few times, not knowing what to say or how far to push.

“I’m curious about something,” Jerene said at last. “When I said I hired a detective, your immediate thought was that I hired him because of Duke. As if Duke were cheating on me.”

“How should I know, Jerene?”

“On the principle that everyone knows all kinds of things that aren’t their business. Just simply tell me if you know something. I cannot be surprised
anymore
by events this year.”

“Duke’s not the type to cheat,” Dillard said, meaning it. Duke could not be credited with genitalia, far as she was concerned. “I haven’t heard anything like that at all. You told me—you were the only one brave enough to—that Randy was cheating with women all over town. I didn’t want to hear it, but you told me and even proved it to me. I would perform the same service for you, if I ever heard something that could be credited. But this is Duke we’re talking about. Duke who worships you.”

“Thank you,” Jerene said, adding, “For everything.”

Then she hung up.

Dillard set the phone on the cradle, still not quite sure the day that had happened had really happened. How quickly the hurricane had worked itself up—three hours ago, Dillard was waiting for the clothes to come out of the dryer, then Jerene tore through, leaving her usual wreckage, then they were in a trailer park, then there was a long-lost daughter, surveyed, judged and found wanting, no better than the official offspring, tossed back in the pile, then it was back home for Dillard, sorry to trouble you, never mind.

Imagine, Dillard thought, heading instinctively toward the mantel and the picture of Christopher, imagine having another child out there to love, like a spare tire, an extra. Dillard would pay all she owned for such a youthful mistake if there were another child to be a mother to.

The picture of Christopher was a school photo, sixth grade, before he became an impossible adolescent. The usual aquamarine background, the feathered 1980s big hair that boys desired, the polyester blends in sports coat and dress shirt and wide tie. That had been one of his father’s ties and she remembered going to Belk’s to buy that sports coat, with him dragging his feet all the way. She smiled. No young man wants to shop for clothes with his mother.

Duke

Duke’s first conscious thought was to fumble for the alarm clock, but it was not the alarm clock. Nor the phone. Oh God, the cell phone.

Jerene stirred beside him in bed. It was 3:30
A.M.
She rose up on one arm, prepared to receive an emergency.

“Shouldn’t have let the kids talk me into one of these things,” Duke said, going through clothes, trying to find which pocket held the cell phone. Not in the trousers … not in the sports coat … wait, in the breast pocket.

“Hello?”

No one was there.

“Hello?”

“Wrong number,” Jerene mumbled, collapsing back to her previous position.

“It’s three-thirty in the morning,” Duke said to the silent caller with a sigh.

“You know what you did.”

Duke glanced at Jerene and slipped into his bathroom, pulling the door softly behind him.

“You couldn’t resist just one final show of contempt.”

After a bit more of this, Duke interrupted: “Gaston, you’re drunk. You won’t even remember this phone call in the morning. I didn’t give you this number. How did you get it?”

“Norma had it, the old trout. You were supposed to be there with me, Duke. When I wrote it. We were going to write it. You knew I couldn’t do it without you and then you go and name that … name that place in fucking South Carolina…”

“Good night, Gaston.”

“I was like Lee marching off to Gettysburg without Jackson. You—you abandoned me.”

Duke held down the red button and turned off the device. Gaston had left a few drunken messages on his study phone; Duke had erased them, not telling Jerene about them. But now she had better know.

“Tell your new mistress not to call so late,” she said.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, his eyes not accustomed yet to the dark after the bright white bathroom. “Gallant of you, darling. That you can make that joke at this hour.” He paused, a final reprieve of quiet before the talk to come. “It’s your brother. Quite inebriated. And still aggrieved.”

“I’d managed to go a whole three hours—that would be the hours I was asleep—without thinking about him and the house.”

Jerilyn’s wedding, the house renovation, the engine overhaul of the BMW, all of it led to a second mortgage on the Johnston house. For a while their meager income flowed to servicing their mortgages but then it became clear there would never really be enough to pay it down on the schedule planned. An attempt at renegotiating the first mortgage failed, despite Duke’s best charming manner—midway through the interview with the bank officer, who was all of twenty-five, nervous and not making eye contact with his elder, his collar too big for his thin neck, Duke felt he was coming off like some sponging British aristocrat out of P. G. Wodehouse, trying to smile and glide his way to stiffing the bank on his borrowing.

So, Jerene one night asked Gaston if he would loan them a six-figure sum to pay it off, and he surprised them by saying he wouldn’t make it a loan, but rather he’d pay their loans and mortgages off as a gift, that they should again own the Johnston mansion unencumbered. There was an accompanying Gastonian screed, naturally, demanding no cent of his gift should indirectly work its way to the care of their mother Jeannette Jarvis, but Jerene and Duke expediently agreed and they thought the matter was settled. Those were nights they both slept soundly, knowing that they could, if they chose, in their own sweet time, die in their bed, within these very walls. And all was briefly right with the world again: the restored friendship of Gaston Jarvis, Duke and Gaston, back to being pals, old revels and vices rehabilitated, drinking buddies talking late into the night in his Civil War Study, convening for dinner when Jerene had a meeting, the revival of a golden age. What had happened? What had yanked away the promise of Gaston’s bailout? They would lose the house in October 2008, by Duke’s calculations.

Now their landline phone rang.

Jerene erupted from the tangle of sheets and blankets to grab the receiver. “Gaston. Yes, I can hear that you are drunk but it’s no excuse for waking us up so…” She listened. “I will not put him on. And you will not call this house again this late or…” She listened a bit longer then put the phone down quietly, Gaston having hung up first. She unplugged the phone jack that snapped into the base of the phone.

She resumed lying on her back, with a sigh. “Lookaway, Dixieland,” she said after a moment.

“Yes. We can get an unlisted number when we move to our condo in South Carolina.”

“No, Lookaway, Dixieland is what he is furious about.”

Duke now lay down beside her in the bed, also looking up at their ceiling. “Yes. I know. In my own defense, darling, this is a crisis I wandered into rather innocently.”

His fellow investors had been musing aloud for a name of their development on the banks of the Catawba. They had drawn up a list, most having the word “trestle” in it.
Shadows on the Trestle
.
The Trestle ’Cross the River. Trestle Crossing.
Bob Boatwright ruled that he didn’t think “trestle” was a poetic enough word to be in a name of a high-end development. It called up images of hobos; it made people think of the noisy passing freight that would rattle their china cabinets. No, said Bob, it had to be in line spiritually with nearby Tega Cay. Duke, like most Charlotteans, thought calling anything a “cay” on an inland catfish-and-red-clay riverway dammed by a concrete embankment was ludicrous. Tega Cay, South Carolina. It sounded like some lost exotic islet off Turks and Caicos, a nighttime soap setting …
Reginald, I refuse to let you and Topaz steal Mother’s cabana on Tega Cay …

The neighboring development was the Palisades at Lake Wylie. Did the people who named that imagine there was anything palisade-like around? A fence of vertical, spike-ended tree trunks around a fort? Anyway, the Palisades was one of the most glamorous addresses in the Carolinas, five minutes from a Jack Nicklaus golf course, homes from the $800,000s and connected to the Ranch (hm, no poetic ambition in that name) for the one-acre-plus mansion lots. The Palisades Boat Club. The Wilkinson Tennis and Swim Club with Pete Sampras and Mats Wilander as visiting tennis pros. No, said Bob, we need to carve out a niche of exclusivity, gentility, the Old South …
Cannons on the Catawba. Battlefield on the Rivershore. Ramparts on the Catawba
. Maybe just
The Ramparts
. And it was then, freed from some long-unutilized corridor of Duke’s brain, that “Lookaway, Dixieland” sprang out. They didn’t like it at first, then they thought about the lines dropped from the lyrics of “Dixie,” then they liked it, then they liked it a lot. A whole theme took shape. The sign resting upon white neo-classical columns, the plantation house engraved behind the logo, the mini-Tara-like gate and uniformed attendant to keep the riffraff out.
Old times there are not forgotten,
intoned Bob Boatwright, sweeping a hand out as if there were a view in the conference room to behold.
Lookaway, lookaway … Lookaway, Dixieland.
Duke didn’t think about Gaston’s great unrealized literary project of the same name, in mothballs for the last forty years. Gaston surely thought it was some cruel jibe, but Duke had honestly not remembered Gaston’s so-called book, that book that never was, that never will be.

Jerene fished through the covers to find Duke’s hand.

“If we lose the civil suit,” he said, voicing all their fears which needed no voicing, which were always with them, “then Liddibelle will be very surprised, as will Charlotte, to find out we’re completely bust. We’ll have to declare bankruptcy.”

“I’ll take care of Liddibelle,” his wife said. “Don’t worry about that. I just keep thinking how we will miss this house. Somewhere your grandfather is shedding a tear.”

“This house was always a refuge for me,” said Duke.

Grandfather Johnston built his house in 1897, on a bluff that could look back on the uptown of Charlotte, and in the 1920s, developers and city boosters surrounded their farm with the developments of Myers Park and Eastover and Wendover. All those years, his grandfather’s Providence Road estate had sat regally on its hill, watching the elite of Charlotte nestle around it. By the time Duke’s grandmother died, the house was occupied by Duke’s maiden aunt who lived into the 1970s, by which time Duke’s own father was suffering from strokes and dementia and not in a fit state to inherit the property. The estate settled equally on Duke and his brother, Carrington. Carrington was happy in Maryland so Duke bought out his brother’s half. Duke’s work as a lawyer brought in comfortable money to keep the place up; his time on the Charlotte City Council was not unprosperous. But after that, to make ends meet, Duke sold off the parcels of land surrounding the house until their white two-story house with the elegant, columned screened-in side porch appeared to be just another nice home, another half-acre lot in Charlotte’s rich folks’ neighborhood.

Then they took out a mortgage. Then a second one.