Mockingbird (11 page)

“I think you will find you have no case, Ms. Beauchamp. Don't waste your money.”

“Oh, I'm not filing for wrongful dismissal,” I said. “I'll be naming you in a sexual harassment suit.”

“What! I've never—”

“You invited me out to lunch. I couldn't very well say no, could I? Not to the boss. We came here, sat down, and then you made it clear that if I wanted to keep my job, I would have to sleep with you. When I turned you down, you came up with this ‘downsizing' scam.”

Bill's doughy face got blotchy and congested. “That's ridiculous. No one would ever believe I'd force myself on you. Why not Maria, or that pretty secretary down the hall?”

I smacked my forehead with my hand. “Gosh, Bill, you sure know how to flatter a girl. I don't know, maybe you have a thing for bowlegged chicks.”

He started to flush. “Toni, I didn't mean—”

“It's too late to be a Southern gentleman now.”

“I can't believe you'd . . . You'll never win that suit, you know.”

“Probably not. I'll make sure to get it in the papers, though. Often, and I'll be especially sure to tell your mother, Bill. Gosh, how upset will she be to think that her son—” He slammed his hands on the table. “My momma used to call me the hatefulest child there ever was,” I said. “You oughtn't to mess with me, Bill.”

“Go ahead,” he said, white with anger. “Try telling my mother. While you're at it, you can tell her how your mother was screwing my dad nearly up to the day she died.”

The instant he said it, I knew it was true. Oh, Daddy. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

Momma, you lying, lying bitch.

“He told me the night of the funeral,” Bill said. “He had a few too many bourbons in him. Wanted to stay up talking after we got home. Mother went to bed. ‘Just between us,' he said. ‘Man to man.'” Bill looked down at the table. “You are exactly right. Your momma made us. She made our money, and she made fools of us too. She made a fool of my mother, all those years. The Friesens have to make it on our own, Toni. Can you see that? We just . . . we can't have our families joined together like this. It's not right. It's dirty. It's a bad, dirty story, and we have to stop it.”

Another wave of dizziness swept over me. Houston kept sliding, sliding, slipping away from me as we spun.

“Yeah, well, it's one thing to call the game over when all the chips are on your side of the table, isn't it, Bill? You've made your profits off Momma, so now you get to cast her off. But what about me? I'm—” I bit it back. “I'm not in a very good position right now. Financially.”

“It's a really good severance package, Toni. Really generous. And the letter I wrote is embarrassing. It's a great letter. I looked it up in one of those magazines of mine you were talking about. ‘Winning References, and How to Write Them.'”

I wouldn't do the bastard the favor of smiling.

Bill said, “When you're trying to convince my mother that I'm a sexual predator, don't mention about Elena and Dad, okay? She doesn't know.”

“Okay.”

But I was remembering how Penny Friesen had looked when I came downstairs the night of the funeral and found her alone by the kitchen table.
The hardest thing about having someone die, I find, is forgiving them. Oh, she knew about Momma and Bill Sr., all right. She had known all along.

I wondered if Daddy knew. God, I hoped not. That too, on top of everything else he had put up with. Too much. Too much.

“Are you going to file that suit?” Bill asked.

I looked at him across the table, a great lump of a man sitting there, greedy and pompous and well-meaning and a prick. “Funny how it always works out like this, isn't it? The rich guy's son goes to business school and has a nice suit and when the axe falls it's somebody else's head bouncing in the street.” Susan the perky waitress was approaching with our orders. “No, of course I'm not going to file any damn lawsuit.”

“Thank you. I really think—”

“But you know what I am going to do, Bill? Let me tell you, as my mother's daughter. I'm putting the curse of the Beauchamps on you and your crummy company,” I said, shaking with fury. I heard the Preacher in my voice, his iron sentences. “You're going to drill three thousand meters into bedrock and suck sand, Bill. Your partners will get scared, your creditors will all ask for their money on the same day. Strange blips on the world currency markets are going to thin out your cash reserves overnight, costs for your rigs are going to be two hundred percent over budget, and stains will appear on the office carpet that no amount of shampooing will remove.
Are you listening to me?
”

“Here we are!” Susan said, setting down our lunches. “Y'all enjoy now.”

Rich steam rose from Bill's Cobb Spindle, heavy with the smells of provolone and Gorgonzola cheese. “Thank you,” I said, and rising with all the fury and dignity I could muster, I walked proudly to the bathroom and threw up.

I didn't go back to my office at Friesen Investments. I drove to Slick Willie's instead, the swanky sports bar-cum-billiard hall where Candy worked as a waitress. I had promised her I would report back about my date.

“He
fired
you?”

“Yep.”

She pulled a beer for a customer. “Wow. Bad date.”

“Yep.”

The black bicycle shorts of the Slick Willie's uniform made her legs look chunky, but the white peasant blouse emphasized her excellent breasts; as, presumably, it was supposed to do.

The real action at Slick Willie's was always on the pool tables and at the jukebox, which played an assortment of my generation's rock 'n' roll favorites VERY LOUDLY.
Just an . . . exCITable BOY!

“Did you tell him you were going to have another mouth to feed?” Candy shouted. “For that matter, why didn't you tell him earlier, and skip the restaurant gig entirely?”

“He was—I . . .”

“Didn't want to scare him off?”

“Yeah.”

She hugged me and pathetically I started to cry. “Oh God, Candy. What am I going to do? Baby coming, no job, no money from the will . . .”

“You know that for sure? The lawyer called?”

“Yeah. It gets worse. It turns out that Momma owed the IRS a lot of money. A lot of money. I went and talked to my accountant about it last week. To make a long story short, it took most of my savings to keep them from putting a lien on Daddy's salary.”

“Oh my god. Can I, uh . . .”

“No you can't,” I said. “You haven't got any money, right? Of course. I still have some stuff stashed away in my IRAs. I figured I'd be okay in a year or two. But now I don't have a job . . .”

Two college-girl types next to us laughed, billiard balls cracked, and the jukebox continued to thunder around us.

“Isn't that just like her?” I said. “Spend everything and then skip town, leaving me to clean up.”

Candy shook her head and held a finger up to my lips. “You can't take care of everybody, Antoinette. You can't cover all of Momma's debts.”

“Yeah? If I don't, who will?” I said bitterly. “That's my job, picking up after Momma. If she hadn't been—”

I stopped myself. Candy didn't need to know I had lost my job because of Momma's affair with Bill Sr. Candy, pretty Candy—she saw happy things. And she did her job. She cheered us up, she laughed and joked. She pulled her weight. It was my job to pay the debts, to hold the bitter things. And I was going to pull my weight too. Because if there was one thing Momma taught me, it was to endure.

I shook my head and changed the subject. “So, have you proposed to Carlos yet?”

Her face fell. “Almost. Very nearly. We were supposed to go out last night, and I was going to do it then.”

“He cancelled?”

“No, I did.” She grimaced. “Jeez, Toni! I'm not supposed to have to do this! He's supposed to go through the whole humiliating down-on-one-knee thing. What if he says no?”

“He won't say no.”

“Then what if he says
yes!
” she cried. “You know what that means, don't you? I'll be married! To Carlos! I'll be La Hag's daughter-in-law!”

George the bartender finished polishing a couple of glasses. “I think those beers should have nicely hit room temperature, Candy. You can deliver them any time now.”

“Kiss my banana-flavored butt,” Candy yelled over the music. Two patrons volunteered. “Shit, I gotta go or we'll both be looking for work.” She kissed me quickly on the cheek. “You'll be all right. The Widow is looking after you and that kid, you know. The old bitch will take care of you, whether you like it or not.”

As soon as I got home I went to sit out in the garden. After the roar of Slick Willie's it was very quiet. The temperature was back up around 60° now, but there had been a frost the night after Sugar possessed me, and ferns lay dead everywhere. The banana tree had been pruned back to an ugly stump. So winter came, even to Houston. Even here.

I was pregnant. On some mad whim I had conceived this child. I had no father for my baby. I had lost my job and God only knew if I would be able to find another one with training as specialized as mine. Maybe I should have been like Momma after all. Maybe the real money was in fortune-telling, palm reading, casting the Evil Eye and blessing little children.

What was I going to give my baby? What kind of love could she expect from me, the hatefulest child who ever was? Maybe we could sit down and work out mortality tables together. That would be fun, wouldn't it?

Or maybe, a little voice whispered, you will mother in the only way you know how. You will be another crazy Beauchamp woman, driven half-mad by Riders, only this time there won't be any Daddy to shelter your baby. It will have no protection from you at all. You used to be sane, you used to be in control. But now the Riders can get into you. Maybe Sugar will whore you out next time, or the Preacher will beat your child for its sins. You are out of control, Antoinette. You're no safer than Elena now.

I closed my eyes and squeezed them tight, trying to cry, but no tears came. I couldn't even do that right, I couldn't even cry.

d

Her name was Mary Keith. She was a secretary in an insurance office in Phoenix. She had stepped off the roof of an office building with her six-year-old daughter in her arms. The little girl's name was Kirsten.

The story had haunted me since the first report on the TV two nights before. The door to the roof of the building should have been locked. God, I had lain in bed with my hands over my still-flat belly obsessing about it. Had Mary known the rooftop door was open? Had she taken her daughter up there, knowing what she was going to do? Or had it been pure chance that they had wandered up the wrong stairway?

Was it something the little girl said, or did, that made Mary Keith snap? Was she on medication, had she just lost her job, was her husband leaving her? Or was it “only” depression: a black animal that ate at her and ate at her, as it had always eaten at Momma. Only Momma was too tough to kill, she was a tough bitch and not even her gods could break her. Not everyone could be so strong.

We had this secret, Mary Keith and I, this bond, because I was going to be a mother too, and she needed someone to defend her. That's why I was mad at Bill for passing judgment on her. Because there is no way of knowing whether that black moment will break you until you are in it. You can't ask everyone to be like Momma. You can't ask every woman to be so strong.

Thinking of little Kirsten, her first-grade photo on the nine o'clock news, I remembered a fragment of one of Momma's stories. In it Sugar says, “Now tell me again, honey-child, how did you come to be on your lonesome?” And the Little Lost Girl says, “My momma sent me to the store to buy a sweet potato for a sweet potato pie, but she give me the wrong directions. I did what she told me, but there weren't no store there. So I went on a piece, looking for another store, but I couldn't find one that had a sweet potato in it, and when time came to go home, I couldn't find my way back.”

“Now wait a minute,” Sugar says, and she puts her hands on her hips. “That ain't the same story you told me last time. Last time you said she dropped you at a movie and didn't pick you up. And now I come to think of it, I recollect one time you said she took you to a softball game and went for a soda pop but never came back. Now, how can you be lost all these different ways?”

The little girl looks up at Sugar with big, solemn eyes and says, “I been lost pretty bad.”

Poor Mary Keith. Poor Kirsten. Sweet Jesus, protect my baby.

I sat in a wrought-iron patio chair trying not to think about Mary Keith, trying not to think about being fired. I had eaten nothing since throwing up in the Hyatt Regency bathroom, and though the day was not cold, I was starting to shiver. I shivered and shivered, I couldn't stop. As I sat shaking in my chair, a mockingbird dropped down from the live oak and landed on the stump of the banana tree. It perched there and it stared at me. It stared at me for the longest time, and then it opened its beak and rang—a long, trilling dingle. It must have chimed three times, opening its beak to let out the sound, before I realized that the rings were coming from the telephone in the kitchen.

I scrambled out of the chair and made it to the phone on the fifth ring. “Hello?” I gasped.

“Oh—I was just hanging up.” A woman's voice on a long-distance connection.

“Hello?”

“Ah, is this the . . . Bow-shawmp residence?” There was no trace of a Texas twang in the caller's accent, nor anything of the South.

“Beech-um, yes, that's us. Sorry.”

“Ah, yeah. Beech-um? Okay.” There was a pause. “Look, I know this is going to sound kind of strange, but I think we might be related. My name is Angela Simmons. I'm calling from Calgary, Alberta. That's in Canada.”