Ms. Miller and the Midas Man (17 page)

“People were bound to find out eventually.”

“I know,” she said, sitting across her kitchen table from him, her left hand in her lap, going around and around. Now when she failed him, the whole town would know that as well. She’d had a nightmare about the looks and the turning heads, the cold shoulders and pitying pats on the arm she’d endured the last time she’d failed. Warm milk was a poor substitute for the regime of antidepressant drug therapy she was beginning to feel she might need. “I just thought there would be more time.”

The milk in his glass had grown a skin and taken on a life of its own, so he set it aside.

“Time for what?” he asked, his expression gentle with understanding. “Just the two of us? To cocoon ourselves in our little secret? In our own little world?” He slipped the tips of his fingers under hers. “I admit, I’m going to miss those looks across a crowded room, our surreptitious meetings, but it’ll be nice to hold your hand in public too. Take you to the movies. Go to dinner in romantic restaurants...”

But couldn’t he see how much worse that would make everything when she let him down? When he couldn’t bear the sight of her any longer and yet he’d let everyone know how he’d once felt by taking her out in public? She couldn’t tolerate the thought of his humiliation.

“What about your reputation?”

“My what?” He laughed.

“You’re the principal of the high school. People look up to you, they trust you to set a good example for—”

Again he laughed. “What? You think I’ll strip you down in the park so we can make love in the fountain?” He hesitated. “I don’t think anyone would put that past me, come to think of it, but the fact is, they knew I was a red-blooded single male when they hired me. Now, I don’t intend to do anything so scandalous as to attack you on the school playground, but I also have no intention of living the life of a monk, just because I’m the principal. I’m a man. A human being. I’m in love, and I’m proud of it.”

She sighed loudly and melted all over the Formica tabletop. He didn’t play fair. She saw the unsuspecting sincerity in his expression, then shook her head and lowered her eyes away from it. He wouldn’t understand until it happened. They were a slow-motion train wreck in the making: two locomotives on close parallel tracks, heading in the same direction, equal in size and strength, seemingly safe—with track missing up ahead.

“Come on, Gus,” he said after several minutes of watching her stew. “It won’t be so bad. And it’s certainly nothing to lose sleep over. Come back to bed, and I’ll help you forget all about it.” She smiled when she looked up and found him staring lecherously, wagging his brows. “Truly. This is what small towns are all about. The babies grow up, fall in love, get married, have babies of their own. In another week, the two of us will be old news.”

Wanting very much to believe him, and ignoring the potential of any and all events bringing them suddenly back as front-page news, she began to climb out of her muddy pit of despair—only to recall the approach of another impending disaster which had her slipping back to the bottom.

“In another week my mother will be here.”

He couldn’t help laughing at the dread in her voice and on her face. “Want me to warm up more milk?”

“You wait. You meet my mother and then try to laugh.”

“Listen, the whole time she’s here I’ll be wearing my shining armor. All you have to do is squeak in distress, and I’ll come running to rescue you.”

She simpered and nodded at him. “And who’s going to rescue you?”

He looked appalled. “Me? Ha! She’s gonna
luuuv
me.”

“Hmmm. Think you’re pretty slick, don’t ya?”

“As frog fur.” He flashed his dimples at her to prove his point. He pried her empty milk glass from her hands, drew her to her feet, and placed her hand in the bend of his arm. “I don’t know how you missed noticing it, but I happen to be a
huge
hit with the over-forty crowd.” He was also a huge hit with the under-forty crowd, but why split hairs, she thought. “I’m as irresistible as a rumba on Saturday night,” he said, twirling her into the bedroom. His boxers could just as easily have been a tux with tails as he caught her and took her down for
the dip.
“As overpowering as apple pie à la mode,” he added, dropping kisses along her throat. “As beguiling as all things warm and fuzzy.”

“Actually,” she said, laughing as she fell onto the bed with him. “I did notice.”

“You are the best sister I’ve ever had.”

“Remember that the next time Alan and I want to go to the beach for a month, alone,” Lydia said, verbalizing her favorite haggard-young-mother fantasy. “Which could very well be the day after Thanksgiving when Mother leaves. I told Eric he’d be sleeping in Jake and Todd’s room for a little while, and he broke out in a rash. I didn’t even have to tell him why.”

“Aw, poor guy. I know exactly how he feels. But if he’s that upset...”

“I’m kidding. Besides, it makes more sense for her to stay here with us. You’re gone all day. God knows what she’d find to get involved in without constant supervision.”

“That’s true. Lord, what if she volunteers to help with the play?”

“It’s too late. Everyone in town has a job to do for it, there aren’t any left. She’ll just have to sit passively in the audience.”

“Well, at least that will be something to look forward to. Mother passive. Mother with nothing to do. I—Hang on, Liddy, someone’s at the door.”

Not time for a violin lesson. Not Scotty or Chloe, because they always used the back door. She was curious, and glancing out the front window, she saw no car out front.

“Mother!”

“Augusta, honey, help me with this, will you?” Wanda Miller said, breathlessly hoisting a heavy cardboard box at her daughter. “Can you believe the cab driver wouldn’t tote it into the house for me? He just set everything there on the sidewalk.” She dropped a quick kiss on Gus’s cheek before she reached out the door to drag in a large suitcase. “The world is going to hell in a handbasket, I’m telling you. No one has any manners anymore. Men think the gentle part of gentleman is a synonym for gay, and most of them won’t have anything to do with it.” She stopped short and looked at her. “What have you been up to, sweetie? You look lovely.”

“I do? I mean, what...”

“Now, I know we all agreed that I’d stay at Lydia’s, but I was thinking about it, and with the play and Thanksgiving coming up, she doesn’t need me underfoot, and I think I should divide myself evenly when I come to visit anyway. I know you’re quiet and set in your ways, but I promise I won’t interfere. Oh, I love the color you chose for this room. What is it? Peach?”

“Dainty Apricot.”

“Apples and oranges,” she said, laughing as she hauled her suitcase to the middle of the room, dropping it like a ton of bricks. “I was close.”

Gus shuffled the heavy box to a chair and set it down. “What’s in this?”

“Fifty-six hundred copies of
It’s My Rain Forest Too.
One for everyone in town,” she said, still marveling at the paint. “And you did all this work yourself?”

“Yes.” She looked around the room as if she’d never seen it before. She felt vague and confused. “Most of it.”

“You still need drapes, I see, but I imagine you’re taking your time and picking out the exact right colors. I’m so parched. Honey, can I bother you for some tea? I hate to admit it, but my nerves aren’t what they used to be. I remember a time when I thought a bus ride from Seattle to Muskogee, Oklahoma, and then on to Augusta, Georgia, and back again in the heat of the summer to attend a couple Civil Rights rallies was a lark—and now an eighty-minute plane ride just frazzles me.”

“Well...yes. Of course. Tea? Ah, right. I didn’t even ask how your trip was, Mother,” she said, as if she’d had a chance to. “Oh dear, I left Liddy on the phone. Come...come into the kitchen. That way. You can say hello to her while I heat the water.”

Listening to her mother reexplain her independent thinking to Lydia was like watching reruns of the first O.J. Simpson trial, but ten times more frustrating.

It was one unbelievable little complication after another. Two weeks without sex notwithstanding, she wasn’t looking forward to being interrogated about Scotty or the long evenings of empty conversation as they both skirted all subjects that might brush on the failure of her musical career or the tense moments of heavy innuendo pertaining to her contributions to society...albeit Tylerville’s.

This as she actively waited for the blight of her life to have its inevitable effect on what was fast becoming the one thing in her life she didn’t think she could bear to fail at—her future with Scotty Hammond. How much more could she deal with?

“Gus! Gus!” Chloe shouted, blasting through the back door without her usual ring on the bell. “Guess what I got? Just guess. I get to keep her here at Daddy’s house. Guess what it is. Guess
where
it is.” She laughed excitedly. “Just guess.” Spotting Wanda two feet away on the phone, she frowned a moment, then asked, “Who’s that on your phone?”

“That’s my mother, Chloe. Mother,” she said, noting the keen interest she was taking in the child. “This is Chloe Hammond from next door.”

“How do you do, Chloe?” she said, smiling.

“I’m doing real good. Guess what I got? Guess where it is?”

“All right. One moment, Lydia. Chloe?” she said, bending low, playing the game like a pro. “What have you got? And where is it?”

Chloe laughed again, putting both hands in the muff-pocket of her hooded sweatshirt. “You’ll never guess,” she chortled. “I got a mouse in my pocket. See.”

Though the mouse was hardly much bigger than Chloe’s fist, the thin pink tail dangling long and rat-like from the bottom, it was the unexpectedness of it that triggered the bloodcurdling scream from Wanda, which frightened Chloe half out of her mind, causing her to drop the mouse, who—understandably—ran for its life.

“My mouse!”

“My God, a mouse!”

“My mouse!”

“Where’d it go?”

“My God, a mouse!”

“There. There.”

“Anybody home?”

“My mouse!”

“Quick. Get it.”

“There.”

“What’s happening here?”

“I’m fine, dear. Lydia, I may have to call you back. It’s...there. There.”

“Get it, Chloe.”

“Aw! There it goes!”

“My mouse! Daddy, look out.”

“There. Catch it. There.”

“My God, a mouse!”

Gus did a high-stepping jig when the rodent passed between her feet, then grabbed the first thing she touched off the countertop—a plastic bowl. Cautious as a lion tamer, slow as a postal worker on Valium, she trapped the cornered mouse under it.

“I got it. I got it.”

“Chloe, how did I tell you to bring it over to show Gus?”

“In its cage.”

“And where is its cage?”

“Who are these people?”

“At home, but I had her in my pocket and I was holding her real tight. And then she screamed,” she said, pointing an accusing finger at Wanda.

“Augusta? These are friends of yours?”

“She scared my mouse,” Chloe said, frowning with animosity. “It wriggled right out of my fingers.”

“Hello. I’m Scott Hammond...” Dimples dented, but went unnoticed as Wanda’s attention was directed at the child.

“You startled me. I’m not used to having mice stuck in my face. I mean, you’d be expecting something like that from a little boy, but...”

“Mother, these are my next-door neighbors. My friends. My—” How to put it delicately?

“...And this is my daughter, Chloe.”

“Obviously,” she said.

“I’m sorry about all this. I didn’t realize you were here already. How was your trip?”

“The cabbie was a cretin, but other than that it was fine,” she said, looking at him directly for the first time. “Are there any others?”

“What? Children? No, it’s just me and Chloe next door.”

“Oh. Oh, yes. The next-door neighbor,” she said, and even though Gus hadn’t mentioned him to her mother, there was a light of recognition in her eyes.

Lydia...

“And your daughter,” Wanda added, her appraising stare moving from Scotty to the frown on Chloe’s face. Wanda started thinking so fast that Gus could actually hear the whirring of gears. “I’m very fond of little girls. I had two of my own once, but now they’re all grown up. And do you know that I once saved thousands of mice from being put to death? At a pharmaceutical company. Hundreds of thousands of them, just like yours. I’m actually very fond of all animals,” she said, sucking up to Chloe in the most conspicuous fashion.

Ingratiating oneself to the daughter to get to the father was such an obvious ploy—Gus blushed from the tips of her toes to the roots of her hair.

“Why don’t you get...What did you name your mouse?”

“Annabelle,” Chloe said, wary but open to a diplomatic relationship.

“Well, why don’t you get Annabelle out from under that bowl and come into the living room so I can drink my tea in comfort, and I’ll tell you all about saving the mice,” she said, then turning her overpowering personality on Scotty, she smiled and said, “I understand you’re a man with a calling...”

I
T WOULDN’T BE FAIR
to say that Wanda moved in and took over Gus’s life...it was more like she was just
there,
and really,
really
comfortable. Certainly, more comfortable than Gus was—but then, hadn’t that always been the way of it with them? Wanda taking the ups and downs of Gus’s life in her stride, propelling them both on to the next step, the next audition, the next accomplishment, the next performance, the next failure...

“Don’t you worry about a thing, sweetie,” she’d said that morning. “I’ll have dinner ready on the table when the three of you finish dress rehearsal. Then I’ll take my Chloe girl next door, give her a bath, put her to bed, and read her a couple stories until she falls asleep. I can watch television over there as well as I can here, and you two can have a few minutes alone...or several hours if you want. I’m not so old I can’t remember how it is to be young and in love.”

Something evil in her heart wished her mother was that old. Forgetfulness could be a blessing sometimes, but aside from that she could at least look more her age, if she couldn’t act it. Even after years of sun worshiping and the fifty-six years of living she’d admit to, she still looked way too young and too vibrant and too full of life.