The Art of Crash Landing (18 page)

I
wrap ice cubes in a wet towel and hand it to Karleen where she sits at the kitchen table. Pressing the bundle gingerly to her swollen face, she asks, “Is beer the only option?”

“As far as I know.” I open the fridge, hoping that Tawny didn't drink the only one. The bright emptiness reminds me that I left all my groceries over at Father Barnes's house.

“Crap,” I say.

“Not even beer?”

“I don't know. Hang on.” Although there's nothing in here that I want to be in here—like food—when I open the crisper drawer three bottles of Budweiser roll forward stopping at the front of the drawer with a clank. “Found it,” I say.

I turn to hand the bottle to Karleen, but she's no longer at the table. “Never mind,” she calls out from the other room. “I just remembered something.”

I go in the living room and find her climbing the stairs. I follow her up. When we get to my mother's bedroom, she stops at the doorway. “Wow,” she says. “The land that time forgot.” She
stands there, holding on to the doorjamb, staring at my mother's room, and then she crosses to the window and opens it a crack. Immediately a cool night breeze pushes into the room and dilutes the thick staleness.

Karleen pauses to look at the conch shell on the nightstand. She lifts it carefully and carries it to the dresser, and then scoots the nightstand away from the bed, grabs the corner of the mattress and starts tugging.

“Help me with this.”

When we get the mattress pulled halfway off the bed, Karleen crawls up over it to the far corner and plunges her hand into a slit in the box springs. She pulls out a large Crown Royal bag. Turning around, she opens the drawstring and dumps the contents. A handful of photo negatives slide out followed by a baggie.

“Bingo,” Karleen says, handing me the baggie. Inside is a handful of grayish-brown dust and some loose rolling papers.

Surprised, I laugh. “Are you kidding? I'm not smoking this moldy old shake.”

She plucks it from my hands and leaves the room saying, “More for me.”

I turn off the light, but before I go back downstairs, I pause and look around the bedroom. A cool breeze sucks the curtains against the screen and then pushes them back toward me. From somewhere in the distance I hear a few notes of music . . . I listen more closely—something classical, but I can't make out the melody. I shiver although the breeze isn't cold, and feel a faint prickle of . . . what? Apprehension, perhaps?

From somewhere downstairs, I hear Karleen call for me, so I shake off my strange mood and go down to find her. I'm imagining things. There's nothing wrong. I'm sure I just left the light on and didn't shut the gate firmly enough.

Karleen is seated at the kitchen table with the baggie open in front of her.

“This is harder than I remember,” she says. She's struggling to roll a joint.

“That shit's gonna make you so sick.”

She sniffs at it. “It smells pretty bad.”

“Please just drink the beer.”

She sighs. “God, it's been so long since I got high. I was really looking forward to this.” She pushes the mess away from her and picks up the beer with a grimace.

“Wait . . .” I go in the pantry, grab a Kool-Aid packet and toss it on the table. “Pink Lemonade. Add it to your beer and you'll have a shandy.”

Karleen laughs. “Shit, even I'm not that desperate. Who would even think of drinking a shandy?”

“Who would even think of smoking thirty-five-year-old weed?”

She laughs again and twists off the beer cap. “You're not having one?”

I shake my head.

“Then, make yourself some damn lemonade. If I wanted to drink alone I'd have gone back home.”

I get a glass out of the cupboard, drop in some ice, and then fill it with water. “I don't drink lemonade.”

“Who doesn't like lemonade?”

“I like it okay. It's just the principle of the thing.”

“Lemonade has a principle?”

I could try to explain, but I don't. Instead, I sit down across from Karleen and lift the glass to my lips. The ice is stale and makes the water taste like cardboard.

“Last night I met a little girl named Shandy,” I say. “That's what made me think of it.”

Karleen digs in her purse and pulls out her cigarettes. “Who names a kid after a drink?”

“I went to a school with a girl named Mary. We all called her Bloody.”

“Yeah, but nobody named her that.”

“Tom Collins, Rob Roy, Margarita . . .” I'm on a roll now.

“Tequila Sunrise,” Karleen adds. Noticing what must be a puzzled look on my face, she explains. “She's a dancer up at the Bare Trap. But she also bakes terrific cream pies. I can get you one if you're interested.”

I run through about five obnoxious replies all involving the words
cream
and
stripper
before I settle on, “No, thanks.”

“Your mother loved lemon meringue.”

I nod. “I remember.”

“She also liked lemonade.”

“Not as much as she liked gin.”

We sit in silence for a while. Karleen dabs at her face with the ice. The house is quiet except for the sound of the wind outside. The little magnets on the dog door flap make their little
click, click
sound with each gust.

“Can I ask you something?” I say.

She nods.

“Did you and my mom really dye Fritter's dog?”

Karleen throws her head back and laughs. Her laughter is throaty and contagious. By the time she quiets down I'm laughing, too.

“Oh my God, I'd forgotten all about that.”

“Fritter hasn't.”

“I bet.” We're grinning at each other, but as I watch, Karleen's smile fades. “Can I ask
you
something?”

I say, “Okay,” even though I'd rather she not.

She reaches back into her purse for her lighter, then she knocks
a cigarette out of the pack and lights it. I can see her relax with the first inhale. “Why are you here?”

I get up and open a cabinet to grab a little china saucer for an ashtray and then sit back down, setting the dish in the middle of the table. “Tilda's lawyers called, so I came.”

Karleen reaches out and pulls the saucer toward her. It's quiet enough that I notice the sound it makes on the tabletop. Karleen is staring at me with the eye that's not covered up by the ice pack, and it's pretty obvious that she's calling bullshit on my answer.

“You know the conch shell upstairs?” she asks.

I nod.

“Your mom and I found two of those at a garage sale, priced just a quarter,” she tells me. “We each bought one and then gave it to the other—a symbol of our pact. We were going to California. Your mom was going to play music, and I was going to be an actress. We were going to sunbathe on the beach and meet men. Nice men.” Leaning back in her chair, she takes a drag and exhales the smoke slowly, angling her lips and head away from me. “So she moves to Florida and I'm still here. Fifty-five years old and I've never even seen the fucking ocean.”

I weigh the blue water in Karleen's imagination against the salty burn at the back of my throat, her version of my mother's life against the truth.

“Things aren't always what they seem,” I tell her.

She lowers the ice pack and looks at me through both of her eyes. For a long second she watches me, taking my measure, and then she asks me what I knew was coming. “Why are you
really
here?”

Watching the cigarette in Karleen's fingers, I feel a desperate longing to have one in my own, to fill my lungs with burning smoke. To stall for time. I want to answer her question, but I can't. I thought coming here would change things for me, but
I'm starting to worry that I've done what I always do: mistake a distraction for a chance at redemption. How can I explain that to Karleen? Would someone who's never seen the ocean believe me if I were to tell her how easy it is to mistake a buoy for a ship?

“I don't know why I'm here” is what I tell her, and it's true enough.

She sets the ice pack on the table; the skin around her eye is bright red from the cold. “The thing about your mom and Trip . . . I mean, what they had together, it was . . . Hell, it's hard to explain.”

She hesitates, but I just wait. It may be hard to explain, but she's going to.

“One time I saw them,” she says, “in Winston's. I don't think they saw me. They both sat on the bench at the Steinway, shoulder to shoulder, each with one arm wrapped around the other's waist, and the other hand on the piano keys. I don't know the name of the song they were playing, but I do know it was complicated and fast, and they were flawless. Perfect. When I closed my eyes it was impossible to believe that it wasn't one person.” Karleen lowers her cigarette to the table, tapping its ash into the saucer. “I don't go for all that soul-mate crap, but I'm telling you there was something there. You could see it. You could feel it. Even when Tilda found out about them and blew her top, forbidding Genie to see Trip, it didn't change a thing. If anything it added fuel to their fire.”

“But I still don't understand—”

“I'm trying to tell you that I don't know. All summer long, Trip and your mother were Romeo and Juliet. Then one day she was gone.”

“So nothing happened?”

She shrugs. “Every day something happens. Today you ate dinner with a priest, I got a black eye—shit happens. That's life. If you're asking me if I know why she left town, the answer is
no
.”

“Gordon Penny thinks she was pregnant.”

Karleen gives a little snort of disgust. “You shouldn't believe anything that man ever says about your mother.”

“Why? What'd she do to him?”

Karleen waves the question away. “Genie wasn't pregnant.”

“Are you sure?” The possibility of having a half brother or sister out there somewhere had never occurred to me before talking to people around here, but now that the idea has been suggested, I'm having a hard time letting it go.

She takes a drag from her cigarette and studies me. It feels like she's trying to decide whether or not to tell me something. I bite my lip to keep from begging.

She nods. “I'm sure. Now, tell me about your father.”

I'm disappointed with the change in subject, but I do my best to hide it. “He was a bartender named Rocket.”

She smiles. “Rocket?”

“He went by
Rock
.”

“I would imagine so,” she says, still smiling.

“He worked at a bar called Cock of the Walk.”

“You're kidding me.”

“Nope.”

She's laughing a little now and shaking her head. “Well, what was he like?”

I was eight or nine when my mother took me to meet him. I remember that the bar was dark and almost empty and smelled like floor polish. She ordered me a Coke and told me to stay there, then she and the bartender walked to the far end of the room and talked. My barstool was wobbly, and every time I moved it made a dry little squeak. I'd only finished about half my soda when my mother came back and pulled me off the stool. She pointed at the man behind the bar and said, “Mattie, that cheap bastard is your father.” I looked up at him, but he was rinsing my glass out and
didn't look in my direction. He had pale hair and sad eyes. He needed a shave.

“I never really met him,” I tell Karleen.

“You know, I can't picture someone like your mother looking twice at a man named Rocket.”

“Someone like my mother? Oh, please.” I've been trying hard to be extra agreeable to keep Karleen talking, but this is total crap. “As far as I could tell, my mother woke up every morning looking for a new way to fuck up her life. I realize that everyone in this town thinks that she was something special, but I've got a news flash for you. She was nobody, and she didn't do shit with her life.”

Karleen nods. There's a faint hiss when she drops her cigarette butt into the beer bottle. “Well, I can see you're doing all sorts of terrific stuff with yours.”

Ouch. “Touché,” I reply.

She gives me a wry grin that lets me see she was talking as much about herself as she was about me. We're peas in a pod, Karleen, my mother, and I.

Karleen stands, stretches, and then picks up her bottle and carries it to the trash. It lands with a clink against Tawny's from yesterday.

“Don't go.” I want to keep her talking, so I ask a question she might answer. “Tell me what happened with Gordon Penny. Why the grudge?”

“Oh, nothing really. He just can't take a joke.”

She starts talking, using that voice we all use when we're making excuses for our bad behavior. The story gets convoluted and long, something about a costume party, and my mother tagging little Gordon with a nickname, and I have to admit my attention wanders. I'm tired and her complicated telling of the story reminds me of how often I've tried to soft-pedal my own bad behavior and casual cruelty. It's funny how when it's somebody else
telling the story it's easy to see that
He can't take a joke
is just another way of saying
I'm a jackass.

Eventually Karleen's story winds down with the usual, “We were just stupid kids.” Lifting her purse from the back of the chair, she slings it over a stooped shoulder. “Thanks for the beer.”

“Wait—”

“No, it's getting late.”

“But—”

“Mattie, stop. I need to get to bed.”

“I have more questions about my mom.”

She smiles a little sadly. “I know. Will I see you tomorrow?”

She's reminding me that I agreed to help with the soup kitchen lunch again, and although Fritter has forbidden me to go, I tell Karleen that I'll be there. My mother isn't the only person who has an adverse reaction when people start forbidding things.