Mean Woman Blues (4 page)

“Well, of course, silly.” Lovelace was wriggling around on the sofa like some twelve-year-old sex kitten. She was visibly enjoying his discomfort.

“I mean I like her values.” When you’ve been raised in hell, values get important.

“How so?”

“She’s a hard, hard worker. Nothing’s easy for her, and she works her butt off to keep her life together.”

“A cute butt, I bet. What does she do that’s so hard?”

“She’s also an art student— an undergraduate.”

“Aha. A younger woman.”

He was about to say, “I like younger women,” meaning it as a compliment to Lovelace, but he was afraid it would come off as flirtatious. He let the comment go. “She goes to school and does clerical work for somebody two days a week, and in addition to that she has her own business, Aunt Terri’s Rent-a-Wife.”

Lovelace laughed out loud. “She’s not full service, I hope!”

“Hell, no. She comes from a good Christian family— and believe me, they never let her forget it.”

“So what does a rent-a-wife do?”

“Errands, mostly. She picks up your dry cleaning, does your weekly shopping, takes your elderly mom to the doctor. Her clients are mostly married women who work.”

“Wow. What a great idea. I’ll bet I could do that. I could combine it with cooking.”

“The only trouble is, the work’s a little sporadic, so she never really knows where her next nickel’s coming from.”

“Poor baby, I know that one. Well, I can see what you mean about her values. She sounds like a very plucky person.”

“She’s a
good
person. She really is.”

“An admirable quality in a girlfriend.”

They’d had the talk right after dinner. Then, while Lovelace packed, they talked about their own crazy family, and then Terri arrived and came to the obvious but erroneous conclusion. He’d had a great time with Lovelace, but Isaac missed Terri. He’d thought about her last night in bed, realizing they hadn’t been apart on a Saturday night for a while, and for the first time he began to wonder if this was what people called a “serious” relationship. Whatever that meant. Maybe it just meant missing someone when you weren’t with her.

Lovelace said, “I’d better clean this mess up,” and left to get paper towels and sponges.

Isaac watched her, not offering to help and not even thinking about it, just feeling a little dazed. What had happened here? He couldn’t let Terri run out of his life, just like that, on a misunderstanding.

“Maybe,” said Lovelace, “we should go find her.”

“What?” He wasn’t moving ahead; instead of trying to think what to do next, he was still trying to comprehend what had gone on.

“Look. If we both turn up, it’ll be abundantly obvious I’m no threat to her.
Nobody
would go over to their boyfriend’s girlfriend’s house and claim to be his niece. Think about it.”

Isaac smiled, as he saw the truth of it. “Let’s do it.”

“Let me put on some lipstick and change my T-shirt.”

Isaac waited impatiently, wondering why it took any woman on Earth at least ten minutes to perform any act of grooming, no matter how small.

He drove so fast and was so obviously preoccupied that Lovelace remarked upon it, in that all too straightforward way she’d developed lately. “Hey, Uncle. You seem like a man in love.”

He ignored her, which was probably the worst thing he could have done.

“Methinks,” she said, “thou doth protest too much.”

“I didn’t protest at all. I didn’t say anything.”

“It’s like the curious incident of the dog in the night, in the Sherlock Holmes story. ‘The dog did nothing in the night; that was the curious incident.’”

“Maybe,” he said. “You should give up this cooking thing. You could be a great lawyer.”

“Well, I notice you’re not saying you’re not in love with her.”

He couldn’t have said if he was or he wasn’t; he hadn’t even thought about it. But the sight of Terri’s house ablaze with light cheered him immensely.

Each got out of the car, and they fell into formation, one beside the other, Lovelace a little taller, dressed in jeans and white T-shirt, still a little awkward from adolescence. Lovelace was a beautiful girl, but surely Tori would see that she was a child, young enough to be someone’s niece, though technically only a year or two behind Terri herself.

He pushed the bell and they waited. Terri usually came springing down the hall, but this time he didn’t hear her. Anxiously, he looked around for her car and didn’t see it, either. “Her car’s not here.”

Lovelace peered up and down the street. “You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Maybe she went out for a minute. For cigarettes or something.”

“She doesn’t smoke.”

“Why don’t we wait around a few minutes, just in case?”

They sat down on the steps, but Isaac couldn’t handle it. He was getting more and more depressed with each passing minute. Finally, he said, “I don’t think she’s coming,” and Lovelace nodded. He hated looking at her, knowing her sad face reflected his.

It was freezing cold in the lockup. Terri couldn’t help thinking what an incredible waste it was of the taxpayers’ money— and then thinking,
What a weird thing to think in jail.

Jail. How could this be? But she’d be out soon, at least there was that, and at least they’d taken off the handcuffs. There were two banks of phones, but you could only call collect, because of course they’d taken your money. The phones were in use right now (and most of the time), and from time to time, it appeared, the guards turned them off just to be ornery. Anyway, sometimes they just wouldn’t work, and then all of a sudden they did.

For the moment, that was okay. She was thinking, weighing consequences. Her parents would certainly bail her out, but there’d be a big fat price. Two prices: the problems she’d have dealing with their judgment about it and the problems they’d have with worry and shame. And there was an additionally complicating factor: It was a precarious feeling, not knowing why she was here. She felt unaccountably guilty. Could she have forged checks in her sleep or something?

There was only one person she wanted to see, one person who could make her feel as if she weren’t scum after all, one person who wasn’t going to judge her, and that was Isaac. She was pretty sure she loved him, or could love him if he’d be kind enough to return the sentiment, but the simple fact was, she’d just caught him with another woman.

Everyone else in the place was a career criminal and didn’t care who knew it. Some of the women dozed, but they poked up when someone new came in. When it was Terri, a prisoner hollered at her, a skinny woman who looked drugged-out and tired and used up. “Hey. What you in for? You look like a
good
girl.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“What’d you do?”

She couldn’t say she’d done nothing. Everybody knew there were no innocent people in jail. She didn’t want to listen to a dozen hags laughing at her. She fudged her answer a little bit: “I’m in for forgery.” The word felt so odd on her tongue. Forgery was something that happened in movies; she wasn’t even sure how you did it. With great care, surely. You must have to practice the other person’s signature and maybe steal their driver’s license. Even in her sleep she couldn’t have done that. Maybe she was a multiple personality. Maybe today’s multiples went in for money instead of sex.

“Oh, forgery. That’s nothin’. My sister-in-law did that once.”

“What happened to her?” Terri was avid.

“I don’t remember.” The light went out of the woman’s face, replaced by what looked like a twinge of pain. She was probably coming down from whatever she was on.

Terri had a semi-comforting thought. Once when her bank statement had come, she saw that some other Terri Whittaker’s check was in the package, a check that had been paid from her account.

She took it in and was shocked to be asked to sign an affidavit of forgery. “But I don’t think there’s forgery,” she had said. “I think this check is from someone else’s account— another Terri Whittaker.” She didn’t say, “This is some dim-witted bank error,” but she certainly thought it.

In the end she signed the affidavit because they told her it was the only alternative to paying the check herself, but she’d always felt guilty about it. Had the chickens now come home to roost? Had someone signed an affidavit against her, as the result of a clerical error? At least it was an explanation.

She felt frozen in more ways than one. She thought later that she must have been in shock. She sat immobile and shivering, trying to take in her surroundings, comprehend her situation. She really didn’t want to put her mind to what to do next.

They called her for pre-booking, and she felt a shock of betrayal. How could they hold her without booking her? Forgetting the question prohibition, she blurted it out. The deputy laughed. “We can hold you seventy-two hours without booking you.”

Seventy-two hours!

“You’ve got to be kidding! You can’t do that.”

The woman smiled, not a worry in the world. “Sure can.”

She was so damn smug and superior, like she enjoyed making Terri miserable.

Every cell in Terri’s body protested.
But I’m a good citizen. I pay taxes. I vote. I’m a
good
girl
. She knew better than to say it.

When she came back to the lockup, one of the phones was free, so she grabbed it. But she didn’t do anything, just stood there and dithered some more. Finally, someone said, “You gonna use it or not?”

Timidly, Terri moved away.

There was a toilet of sorts in the holding tank, a toilet partly shielded by a waist-high concrete wall, but from certain angles everyone could see you sitting there doing your business. Someone was sitting there now and hollering for toilet paper.

“Goddammit!” one of the deputies hollered. “You bitches are out of control. Get off the phones. Up against the wall.”

And then he locked them all in the holding tank, where they stayed for the next twenty or thirty minutes.

Terri was terrified. “What’s going on?” she asked no one in particular. Most of the women ignored her, but one of them shrugged. “Never did figure it out. Think they go on break.”

A woman deputy was standing outside the holding tank, in plain view of everyone, eating a small pack of chips. Eating it slowly. Very slowly. One chip at a time.

She was either talking to herself or to someone just out of Terri’s sight. “Ain’t had a minute to myself all day. I’m going to enjoy my snack.” She spoke almost as slowly as she ate.

Terri was becoming increasingly panicked. All bets were off in jail. She might be furious with Isaac, might never be his girlfriend again, but she could worry about that later. Right now, she needed him to bail her out.

Eventually, another guard came along and unlocked the cell. With access to the phones once again (and with the fear of God in her), Terri dialed Isaac’s number, fingers flying, before she talked herself out of it. He came on the line.

A recorded voice said, “This is Orleans Parish Prison…”

Isaac hung up.

That was the last thing Terri expected. He wouldn’t even talk to her. She sat back down, humbled, and shivered some more. Gradually, she realized the hang-up wasn’t personal, Isaac just wasn’t used to getting calls from prisoners, which, when you thought about it, spoke well for him. Finally, she got up the nerve to try again, and this time he heard the recording out “This is Orleans Parish Prison. Will you accept a collect call from…”

“Terri,” she said, almost shouting. “Terri!” She’d nearly missed her cue.

“Terri?” He spoke as if he’d never heard of her, and the phone disconnected itself.

A guard came in again. “Okay, everybody off the phones. Up against the wall.”

It was a long time before Terri got a chance at a phone again, and in the interim she debated once again the wisdom of calling this man who’d betrayed her. But every time, in spite of what she’d seen, Isaac won the argument simply because the thought of him was so comforting. She knew she’d be putting him out in a way that wasn’t right. With great embarrassment she even remembered that her last message to him was a cake thrown against his door. And in a way, that was the thing that tipped the scales. Because deep in her heart she knew that Isaac would leave the other woman— if she hadn’t already caught her plane— to come bail Terri out no matter if he was planning to run away and get married first thing in the morning.

He just wouldn’t be able to stand the thought of Terri in jail. He’d probably do it for any of her current six or eight cellmates without even knowing their names. This was the kind of guy you wanted to see on the other side of the cell door. She might never see him again, she might wear out her welcome sometime in the next two hours, but she couldn’t help it Isaac was the person she needed.

Once out of the cell and back in the holding tank, she tried him again. A woman answered, accepted the charges.

“Terri? Terri, this is Lovelace, Isaac’s niece.”

Niece?
Niece?
Terri was too astonished to answer. He hadn’t cheated on her. But why the hell had he lied about going home to see his mother?

“I guess you saw me through the window tonight. Listen, Isaac said to tell you he’s on his way.”

“On his way where?”

“To bail you out. You poor thing. Did you get stopped for traffic tickets?”

“Brake tag,” she said, nearly swooning with relief.

“Oh, you poor, poor thing. I’m so sorry.”

Terri barely heard her. She was getting out within the hour.

After their wild goose chase, Isaac and Lovelace had gone home and had a glass of wine. She was flying first thing in the morning and felt the need of a soporific; he was upset.

He called Terri every fifteen minutes, growing increasingly anxious. He talked his niece into another glass of wine.

But, finally, as the living room was Lovelace’s bedroom, he had no choice but to leave her to get some sleep before her flight. He read for a while and finally fell asleep. He had no idea when the first call came, but he went back to sleep afterward. The idea that it might be Terri just didn’t penetrate. He’d gotten that kind of wrong number before; he thought nothing of it.