Shem Creek (22 page)

“Hurricane season?” I said, holding up the shiny aluminum beacon.

“You got it, baby cakes!” she said.

“Did you call Mom
baby cakes?
” Gracie said.

“Yeah, I’m her baby cakes!” I said and giggled.

“Come on, baby cakes,” Gracie called to Lindsey, “let’s get the last load!”

“Just move it, lard ass,” Gracie said.

“You know, Gracie, you are going to have to tone down your language if you want the nice girls to be your friends!” Mimi said.

“Um, bad news, Aunt Mimi,” Lindsey said in the doorway, “she doesn’t
want
the nice girls to be her friends.”

“Don’t slam—” I said.

“Oh, my,” Mimi said, in a defeated tone that lasted about one second, adding, “Well? Every flower blooms in its own time.”

Mimi assessed the kitchen and began wiping down the countertop, the insides of the cabinets and the stove. When she began to tackle the refrigerator, I stopped her.

“The cleaning service did all this, you know,” I said. “You don’t really have to do it.”

“How do you know where their sponges have been?”

I just shook my head and smiled.

“Smirk if you want, but I read this article that said your sponge is a bacterial nightmare and you should microwave it for a minute every day!”

“Okay, okay! I’ll microwave my sponges!”

About noon, I looked out to see Louise’s car pull into the yard and park next to ours. She had somebody with her—a Spanish woman.

“Anybody home?” she called out.

“Get on in here!” I called back.

“This is Lupe! She made lunch for y’all ’cause I know you ain’t gone feed nobody ’less we bring it!”

Louise came up the steps smiling, followed by Lupe, who carried a cardboard box filled with food I had never seen before. She had made fish salad in pita bread, grilled eggplant with mild chili peppers and marinated jicama rollups, and a sticky rice and mango pudding.

“Hey, Lupe!” I said. “It’s nice to see you someplace besides the Piggly Wiggly parking lot and have a chance to talk.”

Well, that was all I had to say and then Lupe took over. Here was a woman starved for conversation and believe me, she talked nonstop for two hours. While we stuffed our faces and returned to unpacking, we learned all there was to know about Loretta and her daddy fixation, but mainly she talked about Brad and Alex. It became clear that Lupe was more than a little dedicated to them.

Lupe, Louise, Mimi and I were standing around the kitchen counter eating, using paper towels as plates. The girls were setting up the bathroom and the music from their boom box was so horrible that I had to ask them to turn it down twice.

“I can’t hear myself think,” I said.

“Mom! You need to learn to appreciate—”

“Turn it down!” I said and then whispered, “It sounds like screw music!”

They giggled and when I went back to the adults, Lupe was still talking.

“I say to
heem,
Mr. Brad? Lupe fix home for you and Alex. I sleep in teeny bedroom, and they sleep in the other two. I don’t mind. I just glad Jesus put me here to take care of them.”

“Amen!” Louise said. “God’s got his plan.”

“Humph,” Lupe said in a grunt. “Plus, I know plenty that nobody knows.”

“Like what?” I said.

“Like his secretary, thees Amy who try to get him in the bed, she’s in town and been watching hees house. She come every single morning and sit outside in the car, jess watching.”

“Good Lord!” Mimi said. “That’s stalking! Isn’t it?”

The talk went on well into the afternoon while I rushed around trying to make an instant home. I tried to ignore Lupe, unsure exactly what it was about her that irked me so much. Maybe it was that she worked her jaw like a jackhammer. I could see that it had annoyed Louise, but Louise was very old school, believing that we all had a place in the world and should stay in it. Mimi, however, hung on Lupe’s every word. If Lupe was suffering audience deprivation, Mimi was suffering from the confines of her narrow world. I didn’t like the fact that Brad’s old secretary was hanging around and spying on him. That made me nervous. Finally, I couldn’t stand Lupe’s gossiping any longer so I went to Louise.

Louise was on the balcony, wiping off the plastic table, which had not seen a squirt of Lysol in ages. There was a pile of dirty paper towels next to her.

“Louise! You don’t have to do that!”

“This thing is filthy! Besides, if that woman doesn’t shut her mouth, I’m gonna lose my mind.”

“Just tell her you have to go. Seriously! I can do this and the girls can help too!”

“You stupid? She in there taking the oven apart and cleaning it while your sister is lining the shelves! You got more free labor today than—”

“Listen, Louise,” I said, looking back to the kitchen through the sliding glass door at Mimi and Lupe going to town on the kitchen, “it ain’t worth it. Lupe’s gotta go. Now.”

Louise just stared at me and then said, “I don’t know how Mr. Brad can stand it. That man’s a saint. But between us in the daytime and Lupe at night, Mr. Brad is safe.”

“With a stalker?” I added.

“Yeah, that ain’t no good.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said, and in that statement there was a slight shift in the world between Louise and me.

As a rule, everything that reached Brad’s ears passed through Louise. She was very protective of him. Now it had become acceptable for me to step in the circle, and on a personal matter.

“You just make sure you
do
tell him,” she said. “And fast.”

“Count on it.”

I thanked her profusely for lunch and she said,
Thank that Lupe with the motor mouth, I just wanted to see what kind of mess you got over here, that’s all.

I knew that wasn’t true. I knew Louise had come out of friendship.

I stayed on the terrace and continued cleaning the table until it was white again, which took large applications of elbow grease.

Finally, when Mimi was happy with the kitchen, she came to get me to show me what she had done. It was marvelous to have a sister like her.

“See? All your glasses are here and the plates are in this cabinet. I ran them through the dishwasher because they had been lying around in newspaper since you got here.”

“I don’t even know why I bothered to bring them. Ah, well. Mimi? How can I thank you?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll figure out how to get even later.” She picked up her purse and ran her hand through her hair. Her forehead was laced with perspiration and I knew she had pushed herself. “By the way, I gave Lupe twenty dollars. I hope you gave Louise something.”

I just stood there, shocked.

“No, I didn’t, I mean, I don’t think . . .”

“Honey, you think those girls don’t expect to get something?”

Then, she looked at me with the funniest expression, realizing that Lupe was Brad’s housekeeper, but Louise was my friend. Needless to say, Mimi did not have a single friend with walnut-colored skin.

“Well, maybe Lupe did but . . .”

“No, of course, you’re right.” She gave me a peck on the cheek. “I think you’re in pretty good shape now. I’ll call you later.”

I could read her mind. She was thinking that something terrible had happened to my social sensibilities during the years I had lived in the north. Something had happened all right, but it wasn’t a terrible thing.

The phone rang, which almost scared me out of my wits. Gracie answered it.

“Sure,” she said, “definitely!” Then she turned to me. “Mom? It’s Alex. Can we go to the movies tonight? Lindsey too? Mr. Jackson said he would drive us there and pick us up.”

“Sure.”

The worst of the work was over. Not having a lot of possessions was strangely liberating. It didn’t take weeks to unpack. I checked the linen closet and wondered why I had bothered to bring my ratty old sheets and towels from New Jersey. I decided that when the house in Montclair sold, I would have a yard sale for all the things I had left behind and use the money to buy new down pillows and threehundred-count sheets, whatever that meant.

Within the hour, a horn was honking in the yard. It was Brad and Alex and the girls were off. They asked me if I wanted to come but I was so tired I couldn’t have stayed awake long enough to watch the previews. I pressed twenty dollars into each of their hands and told them to have fun.

When they were gone, I sat down in Mr. Epstein’s recliner chair, lifting the footrest. My legs were throbbing from going up and down my steps. My hands ached from overuse. I rubbed them with some lotion, giving each tired knuckle a little pressure.

It was twilight, my favorite time of day. When we were little girls, Mimi and I called it
the magic hour
. We knew that our parents and their friends were all gathered on their front porches for a gin and tonic or a bourbon and branch, long after the supper dishes were washed. In our seersucker pajamas, hair still damp from our baths, and barefoot, we would run across the yard for one last moment of play. On the horizon there was always a freighter that we would imagine was headed for some exotic port.
Take us to Zanzibar!

I didn’t have to get up to see that the sky was streaked with red or that the blue was deepening. I knew the evening star was out along with a sliver of the new moon and that the tide was coming in. I must have been dreaming because there was an older man by my side, squatted on the brick hearth of the tiny fireplace. His hair was white and he wore a camel-colored cardigan sweater with gray trousers. His hands were folded across his lap and he seemed very pleased. He was telling me what a nice place this was and how good it was to see it filled with life and the laughter of young women. He asked me about Lindsey and I told him all about her. Then he asked me about Gracie and his face became very serious as he listened. I worried about his concern but I couldn’t remember if I had asked him why he looked so somber. Then he left the room and I remember curling up on my side, thinking I would just stay there until the girls got home. I wasn’t really hungry, just exhausted.

It was pitch-black dark when I heard someone coming up the front steps.

“Who’s that?” I called out.

“Just your dinner delivery, ma’am!”

It was Brad. I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty. I had slept for over two hours. I scrambled out of the chair to the door, smoothing my hair and turning on lights.

“God! It’s dark! I fell asleep! Come on in!”

“Look at you! Go wash your face! You’re a wreck!”

“Right!”

It was awfully nice of Brad to bring dinner, I thought. Definitely above and beyond the call of duty. I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror. The buttons in the tufting of the chair had left marks on my face. I splashed water on my face and gargled with mouthwash to get the taste of sleep out of my mouth. Where was my brush? I opened the top right-hand drawer of the sink’s vanity and there it was, right where I must have put it. I stopped for a second, because I had no memory of having unpacked my cosmetics and bathroom things. Well, I thought, maybe one of the girls had done it. I would thank them.

“Whew!” I said, coming back to the kitchen. “I fell asleep in the chair! What a day!”

“Glass of swill?” he said and offered me a goblet of white wine.

“To be sure! Thanks!”

We raised them to each other and he said, “Congratulations on your new home!”

“Thanks! I’d never have it if you didn’t find it!”

“Glad to be of service.” He took a sip and offered me the cardboard-covered aluminum container. “Fried shrimp, French fries and coleslaw.”

“Perfect! Let’s go outside on my huge terrace, uh, palazzo!”

“Palazzo. Um, I’m not sure about that word. Well, this place sure shaped up in a hurry,” he said.

“We’re working on it, but we got rid of most of the boxes today and that’s always the worst thing. Tomorrow we have to hang pictures and organize things a little more. I still have tons of stuff in New Jersey that I’m seriously considering abandoning.” I pushed the sliding glass door open and placed my dinner on the table. “Come sit! Hey! Guess who showed up today?”

“Louise? She told me she was gonna check on you to see how it was going.”

Brad sat down at the table with me and put the wine bottle between us.

“Yeah, she came over but she brought Lupe!”

“Lupe’s a trip, isn’t she?”

“Well, I’ve been assigned the task of telling you something you probably won’t like, but here goes . . . .”

“What?”

“First, Lupe drove us crazy today, but so what, right?”

“And?”

“And, because she’s got a tongue as long as the Amazon she told
us,
but she doesn’t want
you
to know that your old secretary has been sitting outside your house for the past few days, watching you come and go.”

“Amy? Amy’s here?”

“Apparently.”

“Well, why doesn’t she just knock on the door?”

“Because she’s a sociopathic lunatic?”

“Why wouldn’t Lupe just tell
me?
”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to get in the middle of something that’s really none of her business?”

“Maybe. Are you sure it’s Amy?”

“No. How would I know? But Lupe seems convinced. Anyway, just thought you should know that.”

“Boy! No shit! How weird is this?”

“I don’t know, but I think I’m gonna hear?”

I munched away on the shrimp and fries and watched Brad’s face as he told me the story of Amy in full detail for the second time.

If I had ever learned anything about men, I knew this. You could predict with the precision of Doppler radar where their britches would fall when opportunity came knocking on their zipper. They would fall in the first available location.