Love Me Tender (10 page)

Chapter 18

WHEN MEL came downstairs, I said, “I think Mr. Singer likes the grandmother.”

“I think so too,” Mel said, and watched them through the screen door for a minute. She liked what she saw.

Kerrie and I got the backseat. Mel drove. The grandmother said she didn't really care to. She watched out the window, saying, “Turn left here, right here,” and talked about whatever she thought would be of interest to Mel. Who was married or divorced. Which of her school friends had come back to Memphis. Even which one of them had gone missing while rock climbing in Alaska.

On one corner, a fenced-in yard was chock-full of junk on tables.

“Let's stop here at this yard sale,” the grandmother said.

Mel slowed down. “Anything special you want to look for?”

“I need an iron.”

Mel stopped right smack in the middle of the street. “Oh, Momma, you don't want a secondhand iron. Let's go to the mall and buy you a brand-new one.”

“These new irons aren't heavy enough. I want an old iron, nice and heavy, so I don't have to push down so hard.”

“Well, that's a consideration,” Mel said, craning her neck as if she would be able to lay her eyes on the iron if it was there.

Someone came up behind us and laid on the horn. Mel moved along, deciding not to do the yard sale after all. The grandmother didn't argue with this, but said, “I like to shop in the old part of town. I find everything I need, and the shops know me. Nobody knows their customers in the mall.”

“I'll go anywhere you want,” Mel said. “The main thing is, the iron should be new.”

“You've been talking to Clare.”

“Yes, well, she's worried about you. We both are.”

“You both have worries enough without worrying about me,” the grandmother said. “I think I'm going to sell the house.”

Mel looked shocked. “Why would you do that, Momma?”

“I'm getting too old to manage it. You see how I live. Ignoring most of the upstairs. Even the rooms I spend my time in haven't seen a dust cloth in a month or more.”

“There are times when I can say the same about mine,” Mel said, “and I have child labor to fall back on. You just have other priorities right now, Momma.”

“She has a boyfriend,” I said, making the grandmother gasp.

Mel shot me a look through the rearview mirror—a twinkling of her eyes—but she had seen the hole in the washing pantry wall, and while she said nothing, she must have been thinking about it.

We drove through an older part of town, kind of funky, like the whole place had been found at a flea market. I spotted a pizza place offering an Elvis karaoke night. Another few blocks and the neighborhood started to improve.

Mel remembered a few places that used to be there, and the grandmother acted like she was giving a guided tour. “Now this area got a little run-down for a time,” she said, “but lately it's been gussied up. I do like meandering through here of an afternoon.”

I was glad the hardware store turned out to be only a couple of blocks away. We drove around the block twice, looking for a parking space nearby. A shop caught my eye, Pandora's Tattoo and Piercing Parlor. The window was hung with beads of all colors and there were little pictures of the tattoos people could get, I guess.

I didn't point the place out to anyone. I wasn't even sure why it interested me. Just around the corner, the hardware store looked old beyond belief. Like it was part of a movie set or something.

We parked, and the four of us filed into the hardware store. It was everything the look of it promised to be. Bare wood floors needing the attention of a broom and then some varnish. Shelves full of cardboard boxes of nails and screws, garden gloves hung from pegboard. Rows of wooden drawers filled with all types and sizes of drawer knobs and hinges and I don't know what all.

Nobody told us not to touch anything. In fact, there didn't look to be anybody in the place but a few other shoppers. The cash register was way in the back of the store, like the owner had never heard of shoplifters.

But the rows of appliances, also found in back, rivaled the ones in any department store. We picked through the irons, weighing the boxes in our hands. Nothing suited the grandmother.

“You know, we might get some solder and stick some lead weights onto the sides of an iron,” Mel said.

“Do you mean welding?” the grandmother said, like a lightbulb went on over her head.

“Yes, but nothing fancy,” Mel said. “Your iron won't look so pretty when we're done.”

“Who needs an iron to be pretty?” The grandmother picked one out.

The paints were in another aisle. Mel and the grandmother started to go through the different little booklets of color chips, showing each other white. Always white.

Kerrie looked bored too. “How many whites are there?”

“Pearls, snowflakes, roses,” the grandmother said. “Salt, the bottoms of my feet, drowned earthworms.”

“Euww,” Kerrie said, but she laughed.

“I'm going down the street for a bottle of Coke,” I said.

“Take Kerrie with you.”

“Aw, Mel.”

“My mind can't be in two places at once, Elvira. You're right here, you can look after your sister. Then I can concentrate on paint.”

I didn't bother to argue. Some battles are lost before they're begun.

“Can we have enough money for candy?” Kerrie said.

“Ease up on the sugar,” the grandmother said. “You'll rot your teeth.”

“I'm not worried,” Mel said, handing me a five-dollar bill. “They have Tony's teeth. He's never had a cavity.”

“They're buying white paint, how much concentration does that take?” I muttered as we left the store.

“You heard Aunt Clare,” Kerrie said. “Mel is an older mother.”

“Practically senile,” I said with a laugh.

We walked to the first little grocery I could find. An old couple were running it, and there were a few shoppers who didn't look at all scary. “Look, you can buy Coke and candy in here. I'm going to give you the money and you can pick whatever you want.”

Kerrie, for all of her faults, is not a dimwit. “And while I'm rotting my teeth, where are you going to be?” she asked, tucking the bill into her ruffled shoulder bag.

“I just want ten minutes alone, that's all,” I said. “I'm going to the end of the block. I'll look into a couple of stores and then I'll come back for you. Don't go back to the hardware store without me. And buy yourself a Baby Ruth or something with peanuts. A little protein never hurt.”

“Okay, but don't be too long. I'm not old enough to want ten minutes alone.”

“You will be,” I said.

“When?”

“In about two months, after the baby comes.”

Chapter 19

I COULDN'T say exactly when curiosity turned into determination. I only know I didn't waste time studying the pictures of tattoos taped to the windows. I went right in.

There was a blackboard menu on the wall; all the prices were up there. The money I brought from home would cover it. The trip to Blue Moody's would have to wait another couple of weeks, that's all.

A guy with several tattoos perched against a stool, reading a newspaper spread over a glass showcase. He wore a bandanna that hid his hair, but he looked clean. In a firm, businesslike voice, I said, “Is Pandora here?”

“That would be me, hon,” he said with a quirky little grin. I waited to see if he was going to raise the parental consent issue. If he did, Kerrie wasn't going to have to worry about ten minutes alone.

But when he got off the stool, I was half a head taller than he was, and that seemed to tip the balance in my favor. I leaned over the counter and looked at his fingernails. Clean.

“I'd like to wear three little hoop earrings on this ear,” I told him. I pointed out the hoops in the case.

“You have any other sites in mind?” he asked.

“Other sites?”

“Other ear?”

“Oh. No.”

“Nose, lip, belly button?” I wasn't sure whether he was asking or suggesting.

“No, no, and no.”

“I have a client with webbed toes. She had studs put between her toes,” he said. But he didn't seem to be trying to sell me on the idea.

“Like a duck, webbed toes?”

“Right, like a duck.”

I felt my stomach turn right over, the way Mel was always talking about. “I'm sure it's an interesting subject, but that's already more than I want to know.”

“Okay, so where do you want the first hole?” He picked up a pen to mark my ear.

“Here, here, and here. You think that's the right distance apart?”

“Yeah, that's good. But I don't recommend multiple piercings in the same general area in a single appointment.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “Swelling. If you had other sites in mind, we could work on those in the same appointment.”

I considered letting him in on the fact I'd likely be locked in a dungeon for the next year, but that would be telling.

“Swelling, but not infection?” I didn't, after all, care to have my ear amputated later in the week.

“Nobody gets infected from my work,” he said in an offended tone. “I'm a professional.”

“See, the thing is, I don't live in Memphis. And I can't get this done, you know, professionally, where I do live. So this is pretty much my only shot.”

“Uh
-huh,”
he said, as if I'd handed him his first algebra problem.

“If you could tell me what to do to reduce the swelling, if I should take aspirin, like that. I can take the temporary discomfort.”

“Temporary discomfort.” I liked that.

“Well, ice for swelling, of course. Aspirin, that's okay. You got to clean the holes with alcohol, and you can put it in the fridge, that will help kill the pain. Don't shampoo for a few days either.”

Pain? “Pain? Or temporary discomfort?”

“Minor pain,” he said confidently. “You can take it.”

I pushed away the thought of pain and novocaine.

“Are there any health issues around this? You use clean needles, right?”

“I don't use an ear punch, don't worry. Disposable needles. No problem. There isn't usually any blood.”

“What about acupuncture meridians?” I remembered reading that the ear had a site for every organ in the body. What if I punched a kidney or something? My spleen. My heart?

“I haven't had any complaints.”

“So. Really. How much is this going to hurt?”

It wasn't so bad, really. He numbed the skin, and except for a pinprick and then a feeling like he kept pressing on that spot, the ear felt nothing.

By the time I was paying for the piercing and the earrings, I had this horrible sense of having made a really big mistake. I started to worry that I had left Kerrie for too long. What if she had tried to go back to Mel on her own and got lost?

No, that was stupid, we'd only turned a corner. But what if she'd made it back and told them I'd gone off and left her? Mel would kill me, that's what.

Who was I kidding? Mel was going to kill me anyway. Which might not be an entirely bad thing. The numbness had begun to wear off by the time I was shutting one shop door, and the whole left side of my head was throbbing like a drum by the time I opened the next one.

“Kerrie?” I sounded like I was dying. I tried again, speaking from deep in my belly. “Kerrie?” I still sounded like I was dying, but this time I sounded like I could deal with it.

“Right here,” she said from behind a rack of comics. “Have you got any more money?”

“For what?”

She went right into whiny mode. “I found a whole bunch of great comics and I forgot to bring any from ho-ome. I don't have anything to ree-ead.”

I dug my last few dollars out of my pocket and handed them to her. “Here you go. Knock yourself out.”

She gave me an odd look. “What's the matter with you?”

“I have a headache. No, an earache.”

But once the words were out, I realized I did have a headache. A real monster of a headache. By then Kerrie'd gotten a better look at my ear and figured things out for herself.

I leaned my forehead on the glass pane of the door and waited while Kerrie bought her comic books. It was not actually cooling, but it helped me hold my head up.

“Here, I got you some aspirin,” she said, handing me a little flat tin box. “And the guy says you can get some water in the back, so we don't have to buy a drink. Which is good, because I used up every last penny we had. Actually, I still owe him three cents.”

“Water's fine,” I said. “Thanks for the aspirin.”

“Come on, take one. Then let's get back there before they decide to paint another room.”

I took three aspirin.

While I did, Kerrie tapped a fingernail against her front teeth, thinking. I hoped she was thinking of something else that would help.

When I put the paper cup in the garbage can, she said, “Mel's gonna kill you for getting your ears pierced, and the whole paint job's going to fall on me.”

That about summed up her thinking.