Mockingbird (12 page)

“I know.” Calgary was another oil town; lots of Houstonians had been there in the course of business.

“Oh, okay. Ah, when the lawyer contacted me about Elena's will—that was her name, wasn't it? Elena? Anyway, I hired a detective to find you. Shit, I'm starting in the middle, aren't I? My mom and dad came up here when I was real little. He had a job in the oilpatch. Only my mother didn't stay. She went back south. Elena. That was her name, Elena Beauchamp.”

“Oh my God,” I said.

“Yeah.” The woman on the other end of the line laughed. “Kind of a shocker, eh? Are you one of her kids? The detective said she had two daughters. Two besides me, I mean. So I guess you and I are related. Half-sisters. All my life she would send me money. I'm thirty-seven, by the way. My name is Angela Simmons. Actually it's Angela Jarvis, but only until the papers come through, then it's back to Simmons. I'm just finishing up a divorce. Anyway, a few weeks ago this lawyer calls to say my mother has died and left me a bequest. That's when I hired the detective. He found this number . . . Hello? Hello?”

“Yes?” I whispered.

“Look, I'm kind of embarrassed here. Have I got the right place? Did an Elena Beauchamp used to live there? Did she ever talk about having a daughter up in Canada?”

“No. Never.”

“Oh. Well. I must have the wrong—”

“Oh my God no. No, you don't have the wrong number.” Everything was falling into place for me. The scenes and the drinking. The way Momma went over to Mary Jo's to cry sometimes. The way we never had any money, even in the years when Bill Sr. was good to us.

Now the tears that wouldn't come when Momma died flooded into my eyes, and my throat cramped. I couldn't see and my whole body was shaking. “My God, my God, you see? You are the Little Lost Girl,” I said. “And your name is Angela. You are the Little Lost Girl. Only now you've found home.”

“Sorry, Carlos,” I murmured, and racked for Candy. I finished and she exploded his head into fifteen rolling pieces. My sister has a howitzer break and she was really outdoing herself.

“Speaking of money—” Candy said.

Had she been sober and paying attention, she would have known this was the last topic to bring up. “No!” I said. “I can't lend you just a few twenties until you get your paycheck, or cover your last parking ticket, or make the payment on your Visa card.”

Candy blinked. “What the shit?”

I stalked around the table pretending to look for a shot. “I'm so sick of you hitting me up. Don't you get it, Candy? I got laid off. I bought eight hundred dollars worth of stuff for Sugar in the Galleria and spent six hundred more on that stupid jacket and shoes. I made a thirteen-hundred-dollar downpayment on a baby, remember? I've got responsibilities of my own to look after. Only that isn't all. Now I've got all of Momma's responsibilities too: I'm supposed to look after Daddy and Mary Jo and my little sister who at twenty-six years old still can't live on a budget like an adult.”

Candy looked at me. “Shoot the three. Or else the ten for the side pocket. Do you think a quick couple of beers would really hurt your baby? Because you could surely use them, Toni. Don't go postal on me here. I'm the jilted drunk, remember?
You're
supposed to be holding
my
hand.”

“Were you going to ask me for some cash? Were you?”

Candy didn't answer.

“I swear, Candy. Giving money to you is like pouring water in a lace bucket.”

“Yes, Momma.”

I grunted and shot at the three so hard the cue ball jumped the rag and went rolling under the table next to us. “That would be a scratch,” Candy said.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. That night at Slick Willie's happened when my panic over money had become crippling. In the first days after Angela's call I wasn't thinking about money yet; I was grappling with the idea that suddenly, at the age of thirty, I had inherited an older sister.

Momma had married before she finished high school, a man named John Simmons who worked for Texaco. Together they had a daughter, Angela. John was transferred to Calgary when Angela was only three months old. He went to work downtown; Momma stayed home to look after the baby. Two months later John Simmons came home to find his daughter in the care of a next-door neighbor. Momma had paid her twenty dollars to watch the baby for the afternoon, saying she had some shopping she needed to do. She never came back.

She did not lose touch entirely. From time to time, Angela said, an envelope would arrive, stamped with a Houston postmark but no return address. There would be cash inside, or Treasury bills; never a check or anything listing the sender's name. Momma never wrote letters, but sometimes in the envelope there would be drawings in charcoal or soft pencil, or watercolor paintings of cats or ponies or shells. These kept coming long after Angela was grown; her daughter, Monica, had grown up with Momma's pictures in her room. Like gifts from a fairy godmother, Angela said.

Ever since I was a teenager I had despised my mother for drinking up our money. I didn't know exactly how much she took in from old Mr. Friesen, but I knew it was more than we ever saw. I blamed her for the weeks Daddy had to stay on the road for American Express instead of being home to look after us when the Riders or the booze mounted Momma's head. Now I knew where the money had gone.

It hurt, oh it hurt to find out there was another little girl she had loved more than us. Well, maybe not more, and maybe it was guilt, not love; but suddenly Candy and I weren't so central to Momma's life as I had always believed. My whole notion of my childhood was adrift. At fifteen I thought I understood my mother to a T; now at thirty I found I hadn't known her at all. Not really. She hadn't been daydreaming, those long afternoons at home when she told me to hush and cried to herself. She had been looking north to Canada. It was Angela far away she was thinking about, not Candy and me playing quietly at home.

I always thought things would be better if Momma would only go away. But when Angela said, “I spent my whole life wishing she would come back,” I was filled with a strange, aching jealousy and confusion, and could not speak.

(I am holding my mother and patting her on the back while she sobs in my arms. She is crying because she has hit me. I am fourteen. “I never wanted to be bad to my girls. I never wanted to. I'm so sorry.” She cries with the crazy abandon of an actress on TV. Her guilty tears make me strong and I feel nothing for her but contempt.)

Except now I know those tears weren't all for me; they were for the Little Lost Girl most of all.

I went to Daddy with Angela's story. “Your mother didn't much care for the cold up there,” he said.

“So you knew. You knew about this all along.”

He got a Dos Equis out of the fridge and brought it back to the kitchen table. “It was January. Thirty-five degrees below zero, she said. She couldn't take the baby outside in that. So she was all day, every day, trapped in that apartment. You can imagine how well that set with your Momma. The sun didn't get up till nearly nine and it was dark again by four. One day she was feeling pretty sick, and the baby was fussing and fussing, and finally she went to attend to it. . . . Next thing your Momma knew, she was waking up on a Greyhound bus at the border.”

He looked at his bottle, not at me, but I heard the story he wasn't telling. I saw Momma half-crazy with boredom, crying and lonely in her little box of an apartment in a cold, alien land, the baby wailing, and maybe Momma hit her, or picked her up to shake her, or maybe she started to take her up to the roof of the building, as Mary Keith had. Except something had stopped her.

“The Widow,” I said. “The Widow drove Momma out. She put her on the bus back home and she never let her see that child again.”

Daddy said, “I can't speak to that.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why would Momma never tell us? My God, to all the time be thinking of that baby she had left behind . . .” A foolish thing to say. As if she hadn't told us every day of our lives, with her tears and drinking and slaps and lies.

Daddy looked into the garden. “She was afraid you'd think poorly of her.”

Daddy drank a little more beer. “I hear you're bringing up a rookie.”
He glanced at my abdomen.

“Candy told you? That little brat. Don't you worry, I won't make you raise it. I'll handle it on my own.”

“You and yours are always welcome in this house.”

“You're not mad at me, are you? Please don't think I'm crazy. I worked it all out, and I'm not going to be like—I mean . . .”

Daddy held up his hand. “Seems to me like the organization could use a little fresh blood,” he said. I looked at him with my eyes wet and grateful. “Where you figure on playing this rookie in the line-up?”

I laughed. “Oh, lead-off, I expect.”

He nodded. “Let's hope this 'un can learn to take the occasional base on balls. The last lead-off hitter we had through here,” he said, looking at me, “got on base all right, but led the league in Hit by Pitch.”

“Ouch,” I said.

“‘Worry never climbed a hill, worry never paid a bill.'” Candy, this was, drunk as a skunk that night at Slick Willie's. She had just won her sixth game of eight-ball. She was quoting one of Momma's favorite slogans. “Don't worry, Toni, as soon as I sober up, I'll start missing shots.”

“Easy for Momma to say. She never even balanced a checkbook.”

“‘Ooh, baby, who sewed those pleats between your eyebrows, Antoinette?'”

“Shut up, Candy.”

Candy burped and laughed. “‘Who tacked your mouth down at the corners?'”

(“Here come the scissors,” Momma would say, and then she would tickle me under the chin with her long red nails and I would shout “No!” and squirm to get away.)

Momma never worried, least of all about money. She grieved and she despaired, but Momma's problems were always in the past. The future did not trouble her, the future was a place not yet marred by her mistakes.

I always thought the future was my only hope of heaven. I needed it to be perfect there. I spent all my time worrying and working for some distant tomorrow. The only thing I knew about happiness was that it was still a long way off. I meant to build me a bunker there, in the future. In it I would stash financial security, a decent house, and at least one healthy child. A doting husband and a winning Astros team would be nice ornaments, but were not essential. And when I had this bunker ready, I would crawl into it and slam the door, while life's war raged overhead.

Now I had not even a hole in the ground to fortify. I was stuck in my parents' house with no husband in sight and careening toward bankruptcy, while the Astros were coming out of the grapefruit leagues with grave questions in their bullpen and infield defense.

Worrying about money is the worst kind of worrying, because it is the most demeaning. To be concerned about your health is reasonable; to care for a loved one is laudable. Worrying about money is only humiliating.

Mr. Copper says, “Cash is cold.” What he means, I think, is that money is simple. Money is inert. But we surround it with this haze of our desires, our fears, our hopes. Even business people are frequently much too emotional in their dealings with money. The standard actuary's joke goes:

Boss:
What are the numbers on that project you were looking at?

Actuary:
What numbers do you want?

Okay, it's not a side-splitter, but actuaries are notoriously boring. Go into an office and trust me you will find the joke apt. Even working two-thirds time at Friesen Investments (I had two hours a day to study for my actuarial exams) I must have had dozens of conversations with Bill Jr. where he would say, “Shouldn't we be making more? What return are you assuming?” and I would say, “Seven percent a year over three years.” And he would say, “Oh, I'm sure we can make ten percent,” despite the fact that guaranteed securities like bonds and T-bills were paying in the five and a quarter range. Sure, you might get ten percent . . . but to assume it?

Unfortunately the day I cleaned out my desk I lost my head for money. With the baby on the way, financial worries were eating me alive. The job-search experts say to allow yourself at least a month of looking for each $10,000 a year you want to earn. With my qualifications, it was not unreasonable to think I might get a job starting in the $40,000 range. Actuaries are rare and expensive. After getting my math degree I had to take four hundred fifty hours of exams to become a Fellow. My salary ought to reflect that.