The Queen of Everything (27 page)

He drove me home. Wordless again. But you can
be silent and give a thousand gifts.

He pulled up in front of my house.

I do not know what craziness made me hop
angrily out of the car and slam the door.

"Stop rescuing me," I said meanly.

269

Chapter Thirteen

No, I did not see my father when he came home.
Yes, I knew what time he came in: one forty-seven. Yes, I was sure. I saw the
glowing numbers of my bedside clock when I heard the front door close. No, he
did not take a shower, leave again, or run the washing machine. And for all the
people who get into that mystical shit like that prune Cora Lee at the
Theosophical Society, no, I did not experience a moment of horror, of knowing,
near or around eleven fifteen. Near or around eleven fifteen I was only sitting
in the passenger seat of Kale's car, driving toward the Delgado Strait with the
music on too loudly and windows rolled down on a stormy, electric night. That
would have been nice, wouldn't it? A warning, a flash of

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knowing at that very moment? But you can be
peeling an orange or waiting for a light to change or looking for clean socks
when your life is changing horribly and forever behind your back. Just sitting
in a car and listening to a cruel boy say, "You have lipstick, right
here."

My father didn't protect me the way he should
have. He went to work that next morning knowing what was going to happen. He
should have at least warned me. I'm angry about that. Instead he showered and
dressed and put on a tie and aftershave. Put his cool, knowing hands against the
cheekbones of his patients, shining his little flashlight into their eyes as if
his own saw nothing different that day. He let me go to work, to True You,
sullen and sick from the night before but most of all, unprepared. He let me go
to measure the arms and waists of fat girls, who in only a matter of hours would
be the ones measuring me in their thoughts. In a matter of hours they would
shudder because my hands had been on them.

"Where were you last night? I tried to call
after ten and you weren't there," Melissa said. She grabbed the metal ring of
the projector screen in the conference room and pulled down, covering the
chalkboard with a sudden square of white.

I walked the long snaky cord of the overhead
projector to the outlet. "Kale," I said to the

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wall. "With Kale." I felt sick with the memory.
It seemed both too close and far away and unreal, the way bad things do. My
voice gathered up in my throat. I thought I might cry.

"Jordan?" Melissa said.

I was afraid to look at her. It was one of
those times you know the smallest sympathy will do you in. I walked to the
overhead projector, snapped it on. A goofy misshapen square shined somewhere
over by the coffee machine. I centered it on the screen.
^C
A party," I
said. "On a boat."

"A party on a boat," she said. "In last night's
weather." She began to unstack the folding chairs, snapping them open and
arranging them in rows.

"That's where I was," I said. My voice got
high, stretched tight. I remembered myself, hiding underneath the sheets of
someone else's bed.

Melissa stopped. "What?" she said. "Jordan,
what?" She walked over to me, her head a big looming shadow on the screen. She
actually took hold of my chin, turned it so I looked into her eyes. The white
mustache she'd had a few weeks ago was gone now; she looked like herself again,
her blonde hair frizzy and cut to her shoulders, her eyes the color of that blue
china old ladies have. She looked so much like her mother; underneath all of her
silliness, there

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was kindness in her eyes. I doubted if anything
truly bad would ever happen to her.

"Oh God, what?" she said. My eyes filled with
tears. Melissa reached out to hug me but was interrupted by Laylani bursting
into the room and chirping in the annoying fashion of those overambitious
springtime birds who wake you at five a.m.

"In this weather I want the air-conditioning on
first thing, girls," she sang. She fanned herself with a manila folder.
"Whewie." She rustled about in the folder, took out a plastic sheet, and placed
it on the overhead. In big letters it said, a setback is a special gift . She
stepped back and admired the words on the screen. "Buddy's coming in today as a
guest speaker. Here I was, thinking and thinking and thinking about how to talk
to these girls about their episodes of backsliding, and
bam!
It came to
me: Buddy."

Melissa looked at me in a way that said,
You
and I aren't finished.
She said, "Buddy had a weight problem?"

Laylani looked brave. "Before he gave himself
to the Lord he had another little problem. Gambling?" she said, as if she wasn't
sure we'd heard of it before.

"What, like on football games and stuff?"
Melissa asked.

"That's not exactly the point,
what
he
lost so

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much money on now is it? The
point
is
that he Let Go and Let Lord. He fought back against his demons. He avoided
tempting situations." Laylani was getting worked up now.

"Like what, the racetrack?" Melissa
said.

"Craps tables," I guessed.

Laylani sighed. "I think it's wonderful what
he's done. An inspiration. And I think the girls might be interested to see just
who
is
married to Laylani Waddell. I want to introduce them to my rock.
That's what I told Buddy. I've mentioned his name so many times, this way they
can see a face. You two are welcome to stay and listen as long as the phones
aren't busy."

Buddy arrived during the weigh-in and
measurement and just stood in the back in his white suit. Where you get a white
suit anymore, I have no idea. He got several suspicious looks from the girls,
which he returned with a big smile. It would be easy to be suspicious of Buddy
Waddell, broad and no-necked as he was. You'd think Laylani would have the thin
guy with the shiny face and extra white teeth, but no. Looking at Buddy, you're
not a bit surprised he had a gambling problem. You wouldn't be a bit surprised
if he ran an illegal gambling operation or killed people while wearing that
smile he was giving the fat girls. He was a big jewelry guy, even though he wore
only a gold cross on his lapel. He was an extra-onions guy.

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Put-on-the-Monster-Trucks-and-
hand-me-a-beer-honey guy
There were three new team members that day, or two if you discounted Marilynne
Monroe, this girl who was close to a hundred pounds overweight and who kept
leaving True You and coming back. Laylani insisted she be treated as a new team
member each time so that she could have what Laylani called a "clean slate." And
so she could pay the start-up fee every time. If you ask me, all Marilynne
Monroe needed was to go by her middle name and most of her problem would be
solved. The second new team member was a young woman returned home from college
with more than a bag of dirty laundry, and the third, a sullen looking girl who
I'd seen working the espresso cart at the Front Street Market. She had a tattoo
on her bare arm, an eagle, and when I measured her, I made its talons sit on the
tape as on a perch.

Laylani introduced Buddy and clapped for him,
her manicured nails making little lightning-bolt flashes of red as they moved
back and forth. They made me think of Gayle D'Angelo's hands. Buddy walked to
the front and stood beside his wife. With Laylani in her bright pink suit and
Buddy in his white, they looked like a pair of Good & Plentys.

Buddy gave his sobby tale. Seems he almost lost
their house and actually watched his car

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being towed away by creditors. Laylani sniffed
a lot during his speech. Then she stood up, patted her chest with her hand, and
put up the overhead, which read, five things you can do after a setback . She
used a pointer to go down the list

avoid further temptations, grasp hold of the
situation.

"Crap," I heard someone mumble. My eyes shot
around the room. Laylani had not heard. She was moving toward the "Thin Person
Screaming to Come Out" speech. Buddy hung around the front as though he was
unsure whether to sit down or not.

"Everyone has a personal story of backsliding
to tell," Laylani said. "I'd like to congratulate Marilynne for coming back and
joining us." Laylani applauded, starting a lukewarm splattering of claps.
Marilynne looked like she'd like to push Laylani off a cliff.

"I can't believe this crap." Louder now. The
Espresso-cart woman with the eagle tattoo. This time Laylani heard.

"Something you want to share with the
group?"

The woman stood. "I said this is crap," she
said. Laylani blushed. The woman looked around the room. "Who are you all doing
this for,
her?"
She pointed to Laylani. Her neck strained with
anger.

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"Well, certainly not for
me."
Laylani
gave a half-laugh. "This is something you've got to do for
yourself..."

"Didn't you just hear the guy in the ice-cream
suit?" With this Buddy lifted himself up as if he were getting out of a chair,
despite the fact that he was still standing. "He just said he did all that
because he wanted a nicer car, something to impress the neighbors ..." She
looked around. "Sheesh," she said. She scooted out of her row with a fury,
upsetting her chair, which the lady behind her caught with her foot. She strode
past me, creating a burst of air that made me shiver. Either that or Laylani had
turned up the air-conditioning too high.

"Well," Laylani said. Her pink suit was turning
dark under the armpits. "The need for change can be a difficult thing for people
to accept," she said. That's what she said whenever we had a walk-out. She took
a big breath. One she would call a "cleansing breath."

"Maybe Mr. Waddell can take some questions." I
wondered if she always did this, handed the ball to Buddy when the going got
rough.

Marilynne Monroe raised her hand. "Mr. Waddell
never said what kind of gambling problem he had," she said.

Laylani caught his eye, but it was too
late.

"Bingo," Buddy said.

***

277

Because we had been asked to listen to Buddy
Waddell's inspirational story in the conference room, I was not in the reception
area as I would have normally been, answering phones and listening to Peppy
Johnson on the radio. I did not hear what some already knew, that Wesley
D'Angelo of Parrish Island was missing and presumed dead. I did not hear that
his wife, Gayle D'Angelo, had gone to police saying she knew who had killed him.
I did not hear that the suspect, Dr. Vincent MacKenzie, a local optometrist, had
been taken from his office and brought into the Parrish station for
questioning.

I also did not hear the two messages on True
You's answering machine from my grandmother. It is another fact that your life
can be falling apart and Mole Thurber from Boss Donuts can know it before you
do.

"Ew, maybe he has like a crush on you," Melissa
said as we walked home, me holding the waxed bag that Mel/Mole the Donut Man had
run from his shop to give me. "Here," was all he had said, kindly, before
running back in. I hadn't even had the time to say thank you. Later it would
strike me as one of the strangest things about tragedy. Who would be there for
you. Who wouldn't. How you couldn't even guess.

I didn't tell Melissa about what happened
between me and Kale. I told her it had been an

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awful party, drinking, how I saw him with Wendy
Williams. I needed the sympathy then, without the distance she'd have put
between us if she knew what I'd really done. This way she said only nice things,
"Women are from Earth, men are from Uranus if you ask me," and she gave my arm
what she thought was a knowing squeeze before she went inside the Beene house.
"Just think bingo," she said, pointing at the corner of her own smiling
mouth.

I was surprised to see Grandma sitting on the
front porch of our house. At first that was all it was, a surprise. That
double-take you do when you see someone where you don't expect them, like seeing
one of your teachers in the video store. When Grandma saw me she got up and came
forward. But it was the way she came toward me, with her arms out. It was bad. I
understood that. You don't go to someone like that, with your arms out, unless
it's bad.

Dad. I knew it was Dad. She put her arms around
me.
Dead,
I thought. I thought I'd lost him. I
had
lost
him.

"Dear," she said. "Oh my dear." She started
crying into my shoulder. I started crying too, even though I wasn't sure exactly
why except that I knew my life had changed horribly. Sickness clutched at me.
Dread was swimming so violently inside that I thought I might
shatter.

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Grandma pulled away from me. The space between
us seemed very big and sudden. "I didn't know if you had a key somewhere, hidden
under a flowerpot..."

"Is he ..." I said. "Oh, Grandma
..."