Unexpected Dismounts (3 page)

“Ms. Willa, this is our Allison,” India said.

“Does she have a last name?”

I stopped midway to her and stared. There was nothing frail—or syrupy—about her voice. It sounded so like a terrier barking out of its nose, I had to practically swallow my tonsils to keep from laughing.

“Chamberlain,” Bonner said for me. “Allison Chamberlain.”

I finally found the woman’s face tucked in the middle of the mane of blueish whiteness, and I knew immediately that face wasn’t happy. I didn’t get the impression it always looked like it was on the edge of a snarl. This was a little something special just for me. And I hadn’t even opened my mouth yet.

“Chamberlain,” she said. “Any relation to Alistair Chamberlain? Of Chamberlain Enterprises?” She spat it out like it was a taste she had to get rid of.

“Alistair Chamberlain was my father,” I said. “But I haven’t been connected with the family or Chamberlain Enterprises for twenty-five years.”

Her small dark eyes sparked at me like angry suns. The rays of wrinkles deepened. Her voice didn’t.

“If you’re a Chamberlain, what do you need
my
money for?”

My neck stiffened. “As I
said
, I am completely disconnected from all things Chamberlain.”

“What did they do, disown you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Right after I disowned them.”

Her mouth went into a startled pucker, which gave me a moment to try to get my bearings. Bonner was already pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers, and India was pushing a steaming cup toward Ms. Willa. What happened to everybody else doing the talking?

The old lady waved the teacup off with a hand so veined she seemed to have teal yarn running beneath her skin. I was actually surprised she could move it at all. There must have been fifteen carats worth of diamonds weighing down her skeletal fingers. We could slide those babies off and probably pay for
two
more houses.

“Is she telling the truth?” Ms. Willa said to Bonner.

He cleared his throat, rendering him apparently not quick enough, because she turned to Chief. “What do you know about it?”

“I’m privy to her financials, Ms. Livengood,” Chief said. “She is, essentially, devoid of significant cash flow.”

The shriveled thing settled back into her chair and poked a finger toward the ottoman located nearby. “Sit,” she said to me.

“Don’t mind if I do,” I said.

I could hear Bonner clearing his throat even more emphatically, and I imagined Hank and Chief exchanging significant glances behind me. India gave up on the tea service and bit into one of the petit fours.

“Talk,” the old lady barked.

India moved the cake away from her mouth, but Ms. Willa pointed at me. The stifling of moans was thunderous. None was harder to smother than the one in my own head.

But I said, “I’m sure my board members have already explained our ministry.”

“This is your board?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What kind of board rides around on motorcycles?” She eyed me shrewdly. “Don’t think I didn’t notice half of you came in here dressed like the Heck’s Angels. And what’s that dirt on your forehead?”

I didn’t dare look at Chief. A guffaw at this point would not be a good idea.

“Don’t let that fool you, Ms. Willa,” India purred. “Miss Allison has a heart as—”

“She has a
bleeding
heart, far as I can tell.” Ms. Willa waved the bejeweled hand at India without taking her eyes from me. The old lady’s talons were polished to a crimson sheen.

“These women,” Ms. Willa said, “don’t they have food stamps and Medicaid and everything else my tax dollars are paying for?”

“Yes, ma’am, they do,” I said. “We use every service available to them.”

“Then again I ask: What do you need my money for?”

Bonner purged his throat yet again. I was beginning to suspect he had a hairball. “Ms. Livengood, what we’re most in need of is an additional residence so we can house more women and provide them with the kind of personal assistance—”

“You want me to buy them a house.”

I thumped the ottoman. “There you go. That would be fabulous.”

The old lady leaned forward in her chair, leaving an indentation in the cushions just big enough for a five-year-old. “Can you prove to me that these ho-ahs aren’t going to turn the building named after me into a drug den?”

It took me a few seconds to realize “ho-ahs” was Southern for “whores.” India leaped into the stunned silence.

“That’s the beauty of it, Ms. Willa. Once they come into the Sacrament House ministry, they can leave their old lives behind. They don’t need drugs anymore.”

“Nobody ‘needs’ drugs in the first place,” Ms. Willa said. “They choose to take them, and the minute you give them everything else they want, they’ll just go out and do it again. They’ll be coming around here robbing our homes. I’ve taken to keeping a gun in the house because I
know
how these people are.”

“Really,” I said. “You have some drug-addicted friends, then?”

Ms. Willa drew herself up to her full sitting height, all of about four foot ten. “I most certainly do not!”

“Then how do you know ‘how they are’?”

“I think what Ms. Willa is trying to say—”

Ms. Willa chopped India off with the diamonds yet again. “Don’t tell me what I’m trying to say.”

“Then
you
tell me, lady,” I said. “Because I’m not getting how you can sit there and tell me you know all about something you haven’t been within a hundred feet of.”

“I read.”

“Can I read a book about you and know Willa Livengood?”

“No one has written a book about me.”

India tittered an octave out of her range. “I wish they would, Ms. Willa. That would be a best seller, now, wouldn’t it?”

Ms. Willa ignored her this time and craned her neck at me like a ticked-off turkey. “All I know is that you
might
be able to rehabilitate a person who has turned herself over to drugs, but you cannot keep her rehabilitated. People don’t change.”

She sat back and pursed her lips like she was pulling a drawstring. At first all I could do was blink at her—and listen to the nervous shuffling around the room, which was enough to rattle the Lladró in its cabinet. I’d have cheerfully yanked open the glass door and let every china-faced angel jitter itself out. Until I heard it again:
Allison, wash their feet.

Yeah. Somebody get a bucket so I can soap up this lady’s gnarly old dogs. I wasn’t appreciating God’s sense of humor at that point.

“Maybe we should regroup here,” Bonner said.

“Would some figures help?” Chief said.

“I think we all just need to take a little break and sweeten our palates,” India said.

Or let’s all take off our shoes.
Really? ‘Wash their feet’? That’s all you have for me in this situation?

“Well?” Ms. Willa was watching me, a victorious glint in her eyes.

“Well,” I said. “If people don’t change, then I guess we’re done, because evidently I have a bleeding heart. And yours is completely anemic.”

Ms. Willa gasped. Or maybe that was India. Actually it could’ve been anybody in the room, except Hank, who didn’t appear to be breathing at all.

I wasn’t sure how we got out of there. The next thing I knew we were all back in the alley with the three bikes. Hank leaned over her silver blue Sportster and laughed until I thought she was going to throw up.

“I just do not see what is so funny,” India said. She tossed one end of the pashmina shawl over her shoulder and planted her hands on her hips. “You just completely blew it with a woman who probably has more money squirreled away than Bill Gates spends in a year. I don’t see the humor in that.”

Chief evidently did, because his eyes sparkled at me. “You sure have a way with people, Classic.”

“Just people like her,” I said. “I grew up with that crowd.”

“You couldn’t prove it by your manners.” Bonner’s reddish hair picked up the shaft of sunlight in the alley as he shook his head. “Seriously, Allison, did you have to tell her she was bloodless?”

“I said she was anemic.”

“Oh, that’s so much better. I’m surprised she didn’t pull her gun on you.”

“All right, listen, y’all.” India swept the other end of her shawl over her arm and shifted her face from Appalled Bystander to Madam Chairperson. “This was our first try with a wealthy potential donor, and I think we learned something.”

“Definitely,” I said. “That I shouldn’t be within a hundred yards of any of them.”

“You have to be,” Bonner said. “You’re the heart and soul of this ministry.”

“Just not the mouth,” I said.

“I can help with that.” India’s voice had recovered its honey smoothness. “I’ll coach you, Allison.”

“This I have to see.” Those were basically the first words Hank had spoken since we walked in Willa Livengood’s door, and they were probably the most accurate. She dabbed at the laugh-tears in the corners of her eyes and supported herself on Chief’s arm. Her shoulders were still shaking.

“No, really now.” India’s eyes begged Bonner. “Don’t you think with a different kind of venue, where Allison can speak from a podium instead of—”

“Getting into discussions with anybody east of King Street?” Chief said.

“There you go.” I ran my hand down my neck to smooth the quills I was sure were standing straight up.

India tucked my other hand between hers. “I’ve seen you be positively eloquent, Allison. You don’t whine like you have a personal ax to grind. You speak for God, and that is the whole reason I came over to your side.”

“We’re not choosing sides,” I said. “I want to get rid of the sides.”

Bonner pulled off his glasses and replaced them with his Ray-Bans. The black Croakies dipped toward his shoulders. “You’re going to need a nylon strap to pull Ms. Willa over.”

“You can’t pull a fat lady out of a doughnut store with a nylon strap,” India said. “We’ve got to get us a chain.” She finally flashed her handsome smile at me. “I’ll work on that.”

Chief glanced at his watch. “Look, I have to go. I’ve got a meeting with a judge.” He backed toward the Road King. “Tell Desmond I’m sorry I couldn’t come to his show, but we’ll make it up tonight.”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Almost two,” Bonner said. “I have to get going too.”

He took India’s arm, and as Chief roared out of one end of the alley, I watched the two of them stride toward the street at the other end like the pair of polished entrepreneurs they were. Surely one of them should be the spokesperson for Sacrament House. They could probably make even “Wash their feet” sound sane.

“You out of here?” Hank said, helmet under her arm.

“Yeah. Desmond’s getting an art award. I promised him I’d be there.”

“You okay, Al?”

I shook my head. “You keep calling me a prophet, so why don’t I know how all of this is supposed to pan out?”

“Because you’re a not a ‘foreteller’—you’re a ‘forthteller.’ Think in the present, not the future.”

Hank watched me for a moment longer before she climbed on her bike and eased it down the alley.

The present. Did she mean the present where wealthy blue-veined women heard two words from my mouth and tucked their checkbooks back into their purses? That present?

I mounted my own bike and flipped down my visor.

“God?” I whispered. “You’re going to have to be a whole lot clearer.”

Then I remembered my long-ago breeding and added, “Please?”

CHAPTER TWO

I barely made it to the gym at Muldoon Middle School before the presentation started. Between having to climb over several rows of parents to find a seat on the aging bleachers, and the fact that I was still in chaps and bandanna and had an ashen cross smudged on my forehead, it was hard not to gather stares.

The only pair of eyes I cared about, though, was Desmond’s. It wasn’t hard to locate the big ol’ head perched atop the skinny body with enough arms and legs for an octopus. Before I started having his ginger-colored Brillo pad cut every other week, Chief used to say the kid looked like a mulatto Q-tip.

He was sitting on the speakers’ platform, already sending me a “Where you been, Big Al?” look and pointing at the Harley watch dangling from his bony wrist. I’d let him wear it to school only for this special occasion, since it usually provided too much of a distraction in the classroom. Although, what about Desmond
wasn’t
a distraction in a seventh-grade classroom?

I grinned and motioned for him to pay attention to the fluffy woman approaching the microphone. Desmond always referred to her as Vice Principal Foo-Foo. She did sort of have the air of a Pekingese show dog, but I’d threatened Desmond with permanent loss of his motorcycle helmet if he ever called her that to her face.

While she thanked everybody and their mother for attending and sang the praises of the two art teachers, I shifted into mother mode. That was still a grinding move sometimes, since I’d only been at it for a few months. At age forty-two, it was hard to take home a twelve-year-old baby whose previous home life had consisted of abandoned storerooms and whatever food he could rip off without getting caught. The only thing harder to believe than the fact that I was this kid’s current mom was the fact that he was stepping up to the microphone to receive an award for something besides the ability to charm the change out of just about anybody’s pocket.

“Our first award,” V.P. Foo-Foo was saying—what
was
her real name, anyway?—“goes to a young man whose artistic talent just amazes us.”

“Ain’t nothin’ amazing about it,” Desmond’s voice shrilled through the mike. “It’s just what I do.”

The audience laughed, and Foo-Foo shuffled her notes. Desmond grabbed that opportunity to take over the sound system. “And I couldna done it without Big Al,” he said. “That’s my mama. Well, she almost my mama. And Mr. Schatzie. Where you at, Mr. Schatzie? Stand up and take you a bow. You, too, Big Al. Come on, both of y’all.”

Down on the bottom row of bleachers, my next-door neighbor Owen Schatz rose and doffed his golfing cap, revealing a sun-leathered scalp. His dentures gleamed at the crowd like he’d coached Picasso. I only let my backside come a few inches from the bench and sank back down.

“You’ve got yourself a character,” said the father next to me. His eyes glanced over my forehead and looked away as if he’d just noticed I had an extra nose growing there.

The woman in front of me was less appreciative. “There
are
other kids getting awards,” she said, sotto voce, to her husband.

Desmond waved his blue ribbon at his adoring fans and did some kind of hip-hop move back to his seat. I smothered my mouth with my hand and shook my head at him. He pumped the ribbon up in the air until I finally acknowledged with a large nod that he was, indeed, cooler than cool itself.

If, as the miffed mother had pointed out, there
were
other kids getting art prizes, I barely noticed. I kept my focus glued to Desmond, vigilant for signs that he might be planning to leave the platform and work the crowd like David Letterman. As soon as the other eight students, none of whom gave an acceptance speech, were in possession of their ribbons and we were free to browse through the “gallery” set up on the gym floor, I made a beeline for the kid. But by the time I reached him, he was surrounded by what he called his “women,” a bevy of pubescent girls who followed him around like he was Edward Cullen. So I made instead for the aisle of portable walls where his work was displayed.

Some of it I’d seen in progress, since at home, when he wasn’t wheedling for a ride with me on the Harley or finding ways to empty the snack drawer, he was drawing. Pen and ink was his current medium and caricature his style. I chortled at the faces that blossomed like comic strips on steroids from the wall before me.

He had informed me back in January, when he’d started this series, that as “a artist,” he knew what features of a person’s face to “blow up all big.” When I’d asked if he meant “exaggerate,” he’d said, yeah, that was the word, adding, “You got you a kick-butt vocabulary, Big Al.”

We were still working on his.

His drawings, however, said far more than verbiage could, in my view. He had a gift for overstating the right facial features until the final portrait was fully loaded with the person’s essence. At least as he saw it. Gazing at the drawings was like climbing right into Desmond’s head.

Each of the Sacrament Sisters had her own piece in a four-paned panel. He’d managed to capture the sarcastic twist in Sherry’s mouth and the constant pout in Zelda’s. Jasmine’s eyes took up most of her face and drooled oversize tears. Mercedes was all lips and in-charge eyes and held a gigantic sponge in her hand. I loved that there wasn’t a trace of their pasts in sight.

When Owen caught up with me, I’d just moved on to a squatty likeness of Hank, on which everything about her, including her shiny bob of hair, was square except her mouth. Desmond had caught it midway into an overblown twitch that made me want to twitch back.

“I’m s’proud of our boy I’m about to pop my buttons,” Owen said at my elbow. “I’m like a peacock strutting through here. I mean, didn’t he just hang the moon?”

I didn’t even try to sort through Owen’s usual mishmash of metaphors. I got his drift, which essentially matched mine.

“This is pretty incredible,” I said.

“It’s pure genius.” He waved an age-spotted hand toward a likeness of a wizened man with a toothy grin the size of a watermelon slice. “Now, this one’s new to me. I know I’ve seen this character, though.”

“You have, Owen,” I said. “In the mirror.”

“Well, I’ll be.”

“Okay, check this out.” I pointed to one of an ancient woman engulfed in her own wrinkles, with one huge ear straining for the side of the page. There was no mistaking my neighbor on the other side, whose current career was making sure I didn’t turn our tiny Palm Row street into a red-light district.

“That’s Miz Vernell all over, isn’t it?” Owen said. “He’s got her looking like an old crow. Exactly like the biddy she is.”

Crow. Biddy. Next she’d be a—

“Looks like she’s going to fly right out of there like a honkin’ goose.”

At least this time he’d kept all the similes in the same genus. Or was it class?

Owen turned to a parent who had the misfortune to stroll down our aisle and began to extol the virtues of Desmond’s undeniable brilliance. I continued to soak in the drawings. One depicted Bonner in swollen sunglasses that made him cute in that preppy kind of way. Another grouped some of the members of our Harley Owners Group, each HOG resplendent with gigantic leather shoulders or a Darth Vader–sized helmet. “Mr. Chief,” of course, had his own piece, bigger than most of the others because Desmond had portrayed him as larger than life. While I personally would have chosen his broad chest to exaggerate, or the crinkles of sixty-two years around his be-still-my-heart eyes, Desmond had selected the high cheekbones and the ponytail. The difference in our views of Chief was startling. To Desmond he was the bad Harley-ridin’ daddy who didn’t take nothin’ offa nobody. To me, he was the most provocative human being who ever climbed on a motorcycle—

Okay. Don’t go there.

I put both hands to my cheeks and commenced convincing myself I was just having a hot flash. It was time to locate Desmond, and I was about to turn away from the wall of drawings when one more caught my eye. The contrast between it and the rest of them was so jarring, I actually caught my breath.

It was a more distorted figure than the others and was drawn from the shoulders up. Desmond had hyperbolized a black patch over one of his subject’s eyes; the other seethed. A shudder ran through me, and I wanted to turn away, but the longer I looked at it, the more it forced me to stay. Was that half of the man’s head missing, or just the shadows Desmond had uncharacteristically shaded in behind him? He didn’t appear to be of any race at all. He was at once wild beast and cunning human, and the only thing I was certain of was that this person wasn’t anyone I knew.

But Desmond must know him, and that was more disturbing than the drawing itself.

“Owen,” I said, eyes still locked on the piece. “Did Desmond tell you who this is?”

Owen turned to me, and the father he’d been holding hostage bolted for the next aisle. Owen shook his head as he scrutinized the drawing. “That’s not one of his.”

I stuck a finger toward the signature at the bottom—Desmond Sanborn—curled around an unmistakable Harley-Davidson logo. “He signed it,” I said.

But Owen was still wagging his head. “I helped him with his whole portfolio, and this wasn’t in it, unless all the icing has slipped off my cupcakes, but last time I checked, I still had all my marbles.”

“Mr. Schat-
zee
.”

We both turned to Desmond, who’d managed to slip up behind us despite the gargantuan proportions of his motorcycle boots. His feet were growing so fast, he was already on his second pair since Christmas.

He and Owen did their private hand-slapping combination before Desmond turned to me, grinning lobe to lobe. I did not, of course, try to hug him. We had an understanding that I didn’t act like a mother in front of “other women.”

“You ain’t seen the one I done of you yet, Big Al,” he said. He squinted at my forehead, but he didn’t ask. I’d explained it to him beforehand, which apparently I should have done to the entire community.

Owen was pointing at the dark drawing, but I shook my head at him.

“Where
is
mine?” I said to Desmond.

He reached inside his sweatshirt and wafted out a page that flapped the blue ribbon attached to it.

“This what won me the prize,” he said. “I call it ‘Classic Mama.’”

I choked down a sudden lump and studied the drawing he presented to me. I had to admit he’d drawn me to a T. Light hair to my shoulders, about six weeks past the due date for a trim. Long face, eyebrows raised halfway up my skull, mouth in midword. He was right there: I was pretty much always telling him something, whether it was, “Keep your pickin’ fingers off my Oreos,” or “This is not West King Street, Clarence. We don’t pee off the back stoop.” He usually straightened himself out when I called him Clarence.

But what kept me staring at Desmond’s caricature of me was the look in my eyes. The gaze he’d penned stared back more through me than at me, and for a very strange moment I hoped this two-dimensional figure could tell me what I was thinking.

“Looks like I got you right here,” Desmond said. He tapped his palm with the index finger of his other hand.

“Dream on, kid,” I said. “I am not one of your women.”

His eyebrows drew in over his nose. “You dig it, though, right?”

“I definitely dig it,” I said. “Is my face really that bony?”

“Them’s muscles, Big Al.” He cupped his hands to his own cheeks. “You got, like, somethin’ strong going on here, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Strong enough to keep you in line.” I didn’t actually believe that, but I figured as long as I had him fooled, he might survive on my watch until he was eighteen.

“Desmond,” Owen said, “your mother and I are wondering about this particular piece.”

He nodded toward the eye-patch drawing. The sheen evaporated from Desmond’s eyes.

“That ain’t s’posed to be here,” he said. “I don’t know who put it up there.”

“I did.”

I turned to the very round woman with the cascade of
mahogany
-tinted hair who was all scarflike skirts and clay bead bracelets up to her dimpled elbows. Although I remembered the clothing that looked too rich for an educator’s salary, I almost didn’t recognize her as Erin O’Hare, Desmond’s history teacher. At our last parent conference she’d been a blonde. It must take several bottles of dye to color that mane; it was almost as long as she was tall.

Although Desmond had reported to me on more than one occasion that “Miss All-Hair’” rocked, he was now giving her the same look he gave me when I told him he couldn’t watch Lady Gaga videos. It didn’t seem to faze her.

“I found it under your desk when you left one day, and I asked Mrs. Pratt if she wanted to enter it.” She turned to me, head first, hair following. “It shows his range, don’t you think?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Owen said. “This young man has more depth than the St. John’s River. We’re talking the Grand Canyon here. I’ve seen shallower wells.”

Miss O’Hare only stared at him for a fraction of a second. I guessed if you taught middle schoolers all day, you heard pretty much everything.

“I’d say it was one of your best pieces,” she said to Desmond, “if I had the actual subject to compare it to.”

“There ain’t no actual subject,” Desmond said. I was glad this wasn’t his English teacher we were talking to. “It’s just somethin’ I made up.”

That may have been more disconcerting than the idea that Desmond might actually know somebody that creepy.

“Then as I understand it, we can’t really consider it a caricature,” Miss O’Hare said, gesturing toward it with a drapey sleeve. “Not if you don’t have an objective set of physiognomic features to draw upon for reference.”

Desmond’s brows shot up to his mini-’fro. “You still talkin’ American, Miss All-Hair?”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “That’ll keep you quiet for a while.”

“Good luck with that,” I said.

Desmond reached for the drawing, eyes still scowling. “Imma take this down—”

“Step away from the display,” Miss O’Hare said. “You’ll get it back when the show’s over.”