Olivia (22 page)

Louise sure knew how to crash the Walmart.

“So, what have you been up to since our last visit?” Louise asked.

“Umm…” Olivia hummed as she thought about what to tell Louise.

“Don’t be shy, now. This is just girl talk. You can tell me anything and it will stay right here, under the umbrella.”

Olivia looked up at the blue and white striped patio umbrella that Louise had set up to shade herself from the harsh, southern fluorescent lights. It did make the area feel intimate.

“Well… I met my sister,” Olivia said.

“I never knew you had a sister!”

“Neither did I.” Olivia grimaced at the memory of Toni Tennille Dinwiddie. “She’s a bitch.”

“Olivia,” Louise scolded.

“Sorry, but it’s the truth.”

“Why is she not a nice woman?”

“Well…” Olivia paused, and then figured, what the hell, why not, and dove into the tale of her adventures at the Omaha Barnes and Noble. Uncharacteristically for Olivia, she didn’t expand on or exaggerate anything—except she
might
have made Clete come across as a money-hungry louse who wanted her to collect her inheritance so he could share in her riches—but he deserved it, the prick.

Louise listened carefully and nodded and clicked her tongue and
tsk-tsked
in all the appropriate places, then said, “Well, it sounds like you did the right thing. It’s unfortunate how despicable family can be. I have a sister of my own who is a bit uppity. Mean as a snake that one.
Ooh, chile!
That girl… Uh, uh, uh, I tell you…. We don’t speak much, just at Christmas and the likes, and that’s fine by me.”

“Well, I don’t plan on seeing her ever again, at Christmas or any other holiday. She can take her inheritance and shove it up her pie hole,” Olivia said. She wanted to say asshole, but she didn’t want Louise to scold her again.

“How did your parents become acquainted?”

Olivia shrugged. “No clue.”

“Your daddy never tole you the story of your conception?”

“No!” Olivia laughed, trying to imagine Eugene telling
that
story. He was uncomfortable just saying hello.

“Well, I was conceived under a cloudless sky behind the bleachers of Juliette High,” Louise said in a musical voice with a far-away look in her eyes and a dreamy smile on her face. “It was 1957 and Gogi Grant was singing ‘The Wayward Wind’ on the transistor radio. My daddy was a senior and the local football hero, and my mammy a starry-eyed freshman. They snuck onto the football field during lunch for a little tête-à-tête, and the condom broke. They weren’t real reliable back then, you know? When my granddaddy found out—
ooh!
— he about kilt my daddy, but my mammy calmed him down like she was good at doin’, and her and my daddy got married in front of the judge the very next day. I was born seven months later. My sister Edna came next, then Martha, then Rita—the uppity one—then finally daddy got his boy, Thomas. We called him Tommy, and he died of the pneumonia when he was six… Daddy never was the same after that… He’d get t’ drinkin’ and get mean…”

Louise trailed off and her eyes drifted away from Olivia, pulling inward. After a pause to recollect, she took a slow, deep breath then forced a smile on her face and turned back to Olivia. “What is your daddy like?”

“Eugene? Well… he’s…” Olivia struggled to find the right words. She usually didn’t have to explain Eugene. Everyone just knew him. “Don’t you know Eugene?”

“Well, sure, I know Eugene. I was just wondering what it was like to be his daughter,” Louise said.

Olivia shrugged. “What you see is who he is. He’s no different at home than he is around town.”

“Oh, I’m sure there’s a difference.”

“Not really. He’s quiet and keeps to himself. His kitchen and living room are full of parts and pieces of toasters and blenders and washing machines. There’s boxes and boxes of them everywhere. He hasn’t dusted or vacuumed ever in his entire life, and every corner of the trailer is full of cobwebs and dust bunnies the size of Gizmo. The one time I tried to clean he kinda flipped out in his own way, which means he went for a walk. I was maybe six or seven, and he was gone for a week. I put everything back where it was and then he came home. He’s very particular about his bedroom, though. He makes his twin-sized bed every morning as soon as he wakes up, making sure the sheets are tucked tight. His clothes are all lined up according to color and he folds his underwear… He can’t cook so we lived on whatever you could make in the microwave… He cuts his own hair once a year… I don’t know… what more do you want to know?”

“I was looking more for what you felt like growing up,” Louise said. She poured another martini for herself and handed Olivia a hunk of cheese.

“What I felt like?”

“Yes.”

“Umm… I felt… fine? Like a girl?”

“Were you happy or sad?”

“I don’t know. I guess…. I just was… I don’t know…”

“Did you have friends over?”

“No. I mean, not until I met Izzie. But even she never stayed over. I always went to her house. Sometimes she would play outside at my house, but her mom wouldn’t let her go in the trailer.”

“Why not?”

“I think her mom was afraid Eugene was a perv or something. Everybody thinks that when they first meet him, and it pisses me off because it couldn’t be further from the truth. Eugene doesn’t touch people and he doesn’t like to be touched. He gets nervous if someone sits too close to him, or stares at him, or gets too chatty—which is another reason Izzie could never come in the trailer. She never shuts up.”

Louise sipped her martini. “So, you don’t know the story of your conception, but do you know the story of how your parents met?”

“Nope. For all I know I was an alien baby that fell out of the sky and hit Eugene on the head.” It was what she’d told people when she was a kid, after the story of being an ex-con got to be too pathetic to share.

“Oh,” Louise said, clearly disappointed.

“Look, all I know is my mom was in jail when I was born and she dumped me on him and never came back to get me, and I hate her and I am ecstatic to know that she’s dead. Eugene might be weird, but he raised me when no one else would. He’s my dad. Ok?”

“Ok,” Louise said with a smile.

They settled into their chairs and sipped martinis and nibbled on cheese and Vienna Fingers until the night crew signaled it was time to skedaddle before the day crew started to trickle in.

Chapter Eleven

Turns out, Mitch wasn’t avoiding Olivia. He was just a bit preoccupied with the fact that he was in jail. He wasn’t a gun-runner for the mob, like Olivia suspected, but his business dealings for the auction company he was employed by were a bit on the shady side. He had been arrested on suspicion of possession of stolen goods, which was funny because the auction company he worked for specialized in farm equipment. It’s a little hard to squeeze a John Deere tractor into a five-hundred square-foot apartment.

But, apparently, Mitch had a few storage units on the outskirts of Juliette in his name, and inside those storage units was a heck of a lot of copper wire—the same copper wire that had been stripped out of a heck of a lot of irrigation pivots in the tri-county area. Mitch pleaded stupidity and gullibility, and might have mentioned the possible whereabouts of a particular missing T-Series John Deere combine, and the judge eventually let him go.

Mitch showed up on Olivia’s doorstep angry as a bear, smelling of piss and prison, and Olivia pointed him to the shower. After she fed him a microwaved Hungry Man meal and a half a box of Ho-Ho’s, and he finished off a few beers, he was feeling more like himself and wanting something else he hadn’t had since they’d thrown him in the pokey. He shoved the Hungry Man tray aside and made love to her right there on the kitchen table. Then he took her to the bedroom and made love to her again.

As they lay in bed afterward, Mitch held Olivia close and proposed to her.

“What?” Olivia pushed away from him. “Why the hell would you want to marry me?”

“Because I love you,” he said as if it were obvious.

“So?”

“
So?
What do you mean ‘so’? I fucking tell you I love you and you say ‘so’? Well, fuck you then.”

He shoved her across the bed and kicked his way out of the twisted sheets. Olivia grabbed after him, but he shoved her again and bent to pick up his jeans.

“Mitch!” Olivia jumped off the bed and lunged at him, landing on his back. Mitch lost his balance and pitched forward, hitting his chin on the corner of the dresser on the way down. They ended up a tangled, naked mess on the floor, him hollering out in pain and his chin bleeding like a stuck pig, but Olivia kissed him and soothed him and stroked him and said “Yes!” to his proposal.

They made love right there on the floor and then again in the shower after they washed off the blood, and Olivia was happier than she had ever been in her entire life… until she told Eugene her happy news the next morning.

“Eugene, me and Mitch are gettin’ married.”

He was sitting in his kitchen with his glasses pulled low on his nose, a soldering iron in one hand and a roll of flux in the other as he worked on repairing a vacuum cleaner. As soon as she said the word “married,” he froze.

“We’re thinking a spring wedding, maybe in the park over by the pond, or up along the river somewhere. I don’t want to get married in the Pizza Hut like Mel did. I want to get married out in the open, with nothing standing between us and God except air—Oh, crap! Speaking of Mel, I should probably tell her I want a divorce. Man, I hope she doesn’t take it too hard. It’s not like we were in love or anything, but still, you know…”

Olivia rambled and Eugene simply sat there, bug-eyed. It wasn’t unusual for Eugene to play statue when he was upset, so it took Olivia a minute to realize he wasn’t breathing. And then it took her another minute to realize he wasn’t breathing because he
couldn’t
breathe.

He was having a heart attack.

“
Shit!
” Olivia ran to the phone in panic.

Her hands were shaking so bad she had to try three times to get 911 on the line. Once she did, she couldn’t talk coherently because of her hysterical tears. By this point Eugene was unfrozen and lying on the floor and he looked dead. The soldering iron was under him and she could smell his flesh burning, but she was terrified to move him, afraid that if he wasn’t dead, the simple act of rolling him over would kill him for sure.

The paramedics burst into the trailer, took one look at Eugene, and loaded him into the ambulance. Olivia fought for her right to ride with Eugene, refusing to let go of the ambulance doors until they finally threw her in the back of the bus with him and took off toward the hospital with lights flashing and siren screaming.

The paramedics warned her several times to back up and stay out of the way because they couldn’t work on Eugene with her screaming and carrying on like she was from the sight of Eugene—her father—her daddy—who looked so small, so frail, and so very, very dead. After the fifth unheeded warning, they sedated her. They only gave her enough to calm her, but she rode the rest of the way completely numb, trying to remember how to breathe.

The hospital was a scary place and the doctors pushed her out of their way as they frantically worked on Eugene. He had tubes and wires and hoses coming out of everywhere and machines were beeping and buzzing and screaming out alarms. The room smelled of disinfectant and sickness and death and a nurse’s overpowering vanilla and sandalwood perfume. Everyone talked at her at once and another nurse wouldn’t leave her alone, waving a clipboard, demanding insurance or Medicare information.

They wheeled Eugene up to surgery and left Olivia standing all alone in the suddenly empty room that was too quiet, too bright, too still, and too big for one person. She needed someone to help fill the void. She called the one person who had the power make her feel safe. When he showed up less than five minutes later and scooped her into his arms, she cried.

“It’s ok,” George whispered in her ear. “
Shh
, don’t cry. I’m here, Baby Girl.”

Olivia couldn’t stop crying as she clung to him for dear life. He rubbed her back and stroked her hair and whispered in her ear, and yet she still cried. She cried for Eugene and for herself and for everything they’d had together and everything they never could. When George led her into the private family waiting room, she tripped alongside him and continued to cry. When they sat, he held her tight to his side and she rested her head on his shoulder and curled up against him and continued to cry and sniff until her head hurt so bad she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore.

“Thank you,” she whispered into his shirt and he held her tighter yet.

“I’ll do anything for you, Baby Girl, you know that,” he said.

She kept her eyes closed and listened to his heart and breathed his scent of cologne mixed with Tide and Snuggle and Kitty’s air, and slid her arms around his waist and tried to shrink away from the world and disappear to a place where there was no pain and no death and no worries. George rested his head on hers and she told him she loved him and he whispered it back. When she kissed him, he returned her kisses and added some of his own, and then stroked her cheek with his thumb and kissed her closed eyes and repeated his words of love for her. And through it all, they waited.

Late into the night, when the surgeon finally came looking for them, George roused Olivia from her sleep. She lifted her head from his lap and rubbed at her eyes as the doctor sat on the coffee table across from her and explained hearts and valves and diets and smoking and complications and rehabilitation and then left, leaving Olivia scared and confused and unsure if Eugene was dead or alive.

When George took her hand, she clutched onto his arm and followed him into a room where a skinny, frail, sleeping man lay hooked to machines that breathed for him.

“He’s alive,” Olivia whispered in disbelief.

“Yes,” George said.

Olivia let go of George and pulled a chair up next to Eugene’s bed. She took his hand in hers and rested her head in her other hand and cried a fresh round of tears, this time of fear and happiness and confusion and joy and exhaustion. George stood behind her and placed his hand on her shoulder and they stayed by Eugene’s side until the Intensive Care nurses dragged her away with the promise she could return in the morning.