The Most Wanted (8 page)

Funny, at work I wasn’t squeamish in the slightest. Nothing stopped me from wanting to know about the depths of other people’s sordid experiences, down to the molecule. In lawyer life, knowing why people do things is my intoxicant, my power cell.

It’s different, though, when it’s close. Some things you just don’t want to look at.

The reason I couldn’t call Rachie right up, right now, and ask her about Carlos was that it would seem too little too late, to both of us. A dozen years and more had passed. How did she feel today about her passion for her free-fisted black-eyed pyro sweetheart, the boy she once swore to love forever? Did the self who loved Carlos seem, now, to have vanished in a puff of smoke, even the smell of sulfur little more than a memory? There were good and obvious reasons to talk about it today, a sort of need-to-know situation. But even a parallel with a professional incident didn’t seem like a good enough excuse to explore what was probably the major blank spot in my relationship with my sister.

A trio of chewed-up Bics lay on the blotter before me. I was worn out: all that introspection isn’t easy for a lawyer. Weird how a minor avenue of thought had become a huge time sink, sucking up most of a crowded Wednesday. It was nearly three. By the time I could get to Avalon, it would be close to four. Arley would have to be home from school. Unless she was working.

I gathered my things and went out to the car. On the cell phone, I called information and asked for Taco Haven.

The answering voice there said only “Jack.”

“I’m trying to find Arlington LeGrande.”

“This is Ginny Jack.”

“Yes. I’m trying to find an employee, Arlington LeGrande.”

“No one works here by that name.”

“No Arley? A waitress?”

“Arley Mowbray, you mean. She don’t work tonight. Can I please ask who’s caring about that?”

“This is Anne Singer. I’m, well, I’m Missus LeGrande’s attorney, Arley’s attorney.”

“She in trouble?”

“No.

“Beyond the obvious, I mean.”

“Ah, excuse me?”

“Missus LeGrande, indeed.”

“Oh. Well. No, she’s not in any trouble.”

“She’s a sweetie pie, you know that?”

“She seems to be.”

“Got the wrong heritage, though.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, you meet little Rita, her mama, and you see why that girl’s about half better than she should be, which ain’t saying much.”

“Excuse me?”

“No, excuse
me.
I shouldn’t be saying this stuff.”

“I appreciate it. Really. I don’t know much of what has gone on with Arley. . . .”

“She’s just such a nice, sweet kid.”

“I know.”

“She’s too nice and too sweet to be involved in all this junk. I just ain’t been able to think it all through straight. It happened so sudden.”

“It sure seems that way.”

“I knew Rita in high school. She was two years younger, but she was going like sixty before I knew what twenty was, if you know what I mean.”

“Can I come by and see you, Missus. . . . Jack? I’m actually going to pass by the restaurant on my way out to Avalon today. . . .”

“Well. Maybe. Well, no. I need to stick my nose back where it belongs. I’m sorry. I got a late lunch rush here, ma’am, so you’ll have to pardon me. I’ll tell Arley you called.”

I wanted to know more. Despite her critical error in getting herself married to a convict, Arley had made far fewer revolutions around the block than most of my clients, and their children, not to mention
their
children. I’d once hosted three generations of women from the same family, all pregnant by the same man. Just sorting out the genetics was enough to make you rip out fistfuls of hair, never mind the psychodynamics. I had only Arley’s manner and appearance to work from, but she seemed pretty unaffected by her upbringing. So whatever else her former schoolmates thought about her, Rita Mowbray had to be a fairly protective, consistent parent, if not a plaster saint. I knew plenty of very good mothers who somehow never managed to buy skirts long enough to allow them to sit with their legs crossed. A taste for the fiesta didn’t mark a woman as a poor parent, especially in Texas. And Rita Mowbray, as her daughter had told me, was a fully educated registered nurse. That alone took smarts and guts, particularly for a woman on her own. I was looking forward to meeting her, little Rita who went like sixty.

And then I did.

When I finally found the little white house, set back on a corner lot from the dusty, pitted surface of Jean-Marie Street, it was Arley who opened the door. Even through the screen, I could see her brown eyes widen and grow darker. They looked like horse’s eyes, with that tightly strung combination of challenge and fear. “Hello,” she said, but it was a whisper. It was the whisper that made me realize why I’d come at all—a sixth sense that Arley was in more trouble than even her bizarre romantic life indicated. That there was something she needed protecting from, and she was afraid to tell about it.

“Arley, hi,” I told her. “I know I didn’t call ahead, but I told you I’d be in touch.”

“My mama’s here,” she said. “My mama is here, though.”

“Well, that’s okay. I probably should meet her.”

“Who is it?” called a voice from inside, a voice that sounded like the inside of a hundred bars at three a.m., with the lights just blinked on, revealing all the straw papers and beer spills on the dance floor. “Who’s there, girl?”

I gently shouldered Arley aside and walked in. I still don’t know where I got the chutzpah—you have to understand people’s boundaries in my work, and respect is the thing you most need to keep in mind. But I did what I did.

Rita was standing there, tapping her foot, watching a saucepan of water on the stove. When I saw her from the back, I thought right away she looked just like Cherry Ames, student nurse, in those books I used to read when I was ten. She had on the kind of starched and bleached uniform that seems so dated on a nurse today, it’s almost like a costume. And yet it’s somehow . . . what? Sexy? Baroque? Like seeing a nun under the age of sixty in full habit. When she turned around, though, I could see that Rita Mowbray’s cherry days were far behind her. She had a face like a good boot, seamed and browned and yet handsome in its way. Like the central casting version of the dance hall girl with a heart of gold, rubbed to a faint sheen between the stones of experience, she looked like a woman with a good memory for the way nature had made her. Shiny, long, thick hair in a heavy blunt cut swept her shoulders, but it was a parody color, yolk orange, like a farm-fresh egg. One of her index fingernails was varnished blue and spangled with stars. She said, “Can I help you?” Her accent was thick South Texas, the “yew” a couple of syllables long.

“I’m Arley’s lawyer. I’m Anne Singer,” I replied, awkwardly covering the distance between us and holding out my hand, which she grasped delicately with three fingers—a thing that makes me want to slap women my age who do it. I couldn’t help but notice that under her cap sleeves, Rita Mowbray’s small arms were as incised with good muscle as Stuart’s were; she could probably have whipped me over one shoulder had she cared to. She was, if anything, shorter than I am, and slender, and she had the strangest way of looking, as if she were listening to a great dirty joke on a hidden earpiece. Her white smile was as cold and eager as a dog’s grin. It scared me. She scared me.

“I didn’t know my daughter had a lawyer.”

Arley cringed, seeming to shrink from her blossom-stalk carriage into a kind of crouch; even her hands crept up near her chest. I thought I’d got it then. She beat her. She’d let a succession of hang-arounds use the child sexually, perhaps so long ago Arley didn’t even remember. There was nothing in this room but fear, fear so dull and accustomed no one even seemed to recognize it as such anymore. No wonder the kid had turned to the first kind of shelter she’d ever encountered: she was a hungry heart on the half shell for the likes of Dillon LeGrande. As it turned out, I was right, and I was wrong. Rita Mowbray never laid a hand on her daughters or her son. She had never needed to.

“I’m having me a hard-boiled egg,” she said pleasantly. “It’s my egg-fast day. I’ve had an egg-fast day once a week every week for fifteen years, and I never gained a single pound in my life.”

“That’s remarkable,” I said, looking at the one egg in the pan. “I . . . ah, I’m sorry if I intruded on you.”

“Shoot, no, that’s just fine,” said Rita. “I’m interested. I’m truly interested. Would you like to sit?”

It was basically a picnic table. Without my having asked, Arley brought me a glass of water with ice and then sat down beside her mother.

“My shift starts in half an hour,” said Rita.

“Do you work at a doctor’s office?”

“I’m a registered nurse, at Texas Christian. Surgical floor.”

“You work nights?”

“I don’t mind. You get more.”

“Missus Mowbray . . .”

“Actually, it’s Miss Mowbray. I’ve never been married.”

“Okay. I . . . ah, my business is really with your daughter. It’s about the suit she wants to help her . . . husband bring against the warden of the state penitentiary at Solamente River. . . .”

“Oh. That stuff. Then I guess it don’t matter any to me.”

“You mean it’s okay with you?”

Rita Mowbray half turned on the bench. “Wake your brother up,” she said to Arley. “He’s about going to be late for work.” Arley departed swiftly into a room just off the kitchen. I heard a loud
plong
from inside, as if someone had dropped a guitar (I would later learn that Cam often slept in a hammock with his guitar and tended to roll over on it). “Miz Singer, I was surprised to hear Arley wanted to get married. Not that they don’t start earlier now. My daughter Lang had a boyfriend since she was eleven.”

“You
did
give your formal permission for the . . .”

“Not because I was in favor of it. People will do what they want, anyhow. Teachers are always calling up telling me she’s smart enough to be in college. I’m not her conscience.”

“You’re her mother.”

“That’s true enough. Good brains run in the family.” She smiled, and again I found myself fascinated by those sharp teeth. I turned to Arley, in the doorway now.

“Want to go out for some coffee?”

Rita said sharply, “She needs to make dinner for her brother.”

“You have a younger child, then, too? A little boy?” I asked.

“Hardly. He’s six two,” Rita said proudly, “and only sixteen. Hasn’t got his growth yet.”

“Is he disabled?” I asked, and Arley made a coughing sound, which I realized a second later was laughter she was trying to hold back. When Rita turned, ever so slowly, and fastened that merry, malicious gaze on her daughter, and Arley went still and examined her sandals, my heart started to knock. I began wondering why everything about Rita had raised my hackles from the first instant, which I wouldn’t really understand until that night at Texas Christian with Arley, many months later. This was our first meeting; I was being unjust. “No offense meant,” I said quickly.

“He’s not disabled more’n any male,” she said. “Look, Miz Singer. If she didn’t give him food, he’d just eat banana peppers and hot sauce out of the jar with a spoon, and after a while of that he’d get sick, and I’d have to pay for it. Arley’s been cookin’ since she was a child, and unless you all are going to find a way for her to move in over there at Solamente River and keep house for her man, she’s going to go right on doing it here, or she can do it somewhere else I don’t have to support her.” She looked up at Arley, then down at me. “You really a lawyer? Or an assistant?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“How old are you?”

“Forty in January.”

“You got any kids?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Well, I am thirty-eight years old, and by the time I was the age of my older girl, I already had me two.” Rita was younger than I was. I felt like lying down. How did we look side by side? “My mama had me when she was sixteen. Her mama had her when she was sixteen. I waited. I was seventeen.”

“I know children are a tremendous responsibility.”

“Well, it’s like we learned in biology. They’ll survive. They’re meant to survive you. All the while I was in school, day and night and day, I had to pay for those kids to sit in the day care at the hospital and draw with markers I couldn’t never scrub off their clothes, and play with pretty blocks while I shoveled caked shit out of comatose patients’ butts.”