Backseat Saints (40 page)

“I
did
love you, Rose,” she says, repeating the first words she spray-painted on the car out at Cadillac Ranch. She isn’t speaking
in the past tense, to mean she does not love me now, as I once thought. She means she loved me even as she walked away.

I find the hanged man with his wolf-head helmet in the deck. I pick him up, examine him by candlelight. As I look at his placid
face, his praying hands, I find I do believe her.

She did love me; she left me anyway. That one choice has shaped her life into this ruin. She’s been flying across the country
to spy on me for years now, never brave enough to speak to me. I wonder how many of my old haunts hold her aborted messages.
I suspect she’s left obscure directions for contacting the Saint Cecilias all over Amarillo, perhaps carved in the wood under
my table at my favorite coffee shop or hidden in the graffiti-covered bathroom of the place Thom and I liked to go for wings
and beer.

She hid the messages too well because she knew that if I went with the saints that helped her escape, she would never see
me again. She told me that herself, that her underground railroad would never deliver me to any place or person at all connected
to my past.

I set the hanged man to the side, faceup, and search the fanned deck for the burning tower. There she is, the abandoned girl
forever waiting, framed by a window that already pours smoke. I lay it out beside the hanged man. My mother lives alone in
a rented apartment with a guest room that must feel like a gaping hole in the center of her house. That room upstairs is my
room, and it always has been, even while a chain of other young women slept there. She’s tried for years now to fill it up
with her sad Lilahs, and they
have not been enough. The Lilahs, even the ones who got free, got divorced, got saved, they have all failed her. Even the
ones who kept her rules have failed her, because none of them were me.

“I know you loved me, Momma.” I do not add,
but not enough.
I do not have to add it. She knows her weakness already. Not loving me enough is the essential truth of her life. It’s the
thing that has broken her.

I have my answer, and it should be the textbook definition of unsatisfying. Even so, the inside quiet that I felt upstairs
after praying with Parker is coming over me again. My mad is leaking out of me, slow but steady, like I’ve been punctured.
Underneath, I find something that feels a lot like peace, and with it, a pragmatic understanding: I cannot stay here.

There is only one card missing from the reading that she gave me. I search through the deck and pull out the two of swords.
That’s the card I hold up to show her.

“No,” she says at once. “You have to stay.”

But the reason I could not leave the house earlier is in the room with us. She has said it over and over. She has known it
all along.

I set the two of swords down in its place beside my other cards. I can tell my mother and myself that I am Ivy, but I cannot
change myself to Ivy in Thom’s mind. He doesn’t even know I’m trying to change inside my own. That’s why my mother was so
angry to learn that Thom was still alive. She’s seen enough bad men in her life and work to recognize the ruthlessness in
my bad man. As long as Thom Grandee is alive, then he is coming. To Thom, I am always and forever his Ro, emphasis on his.
I have betrayed him, and he cannot bear to leave me breathing.

My mother is shaking her head at me, an emphatic denial. I say, “I can’t be anyplace or with anyone that has even a tenuous
connection to my old life. I’ve left a trail. I found you with a library book, for the love of God. If I sit here and wait
long enough, he’ll find me and come to me at his time, on his terms. He’ll kill me.”

In the deck I find a picture of a girl with long dark hair in windswept
loops. Gypsy hair. I pick it up. A strip of lace winds around her head, covering her eyes. She holds a slim sword in front
of her, and she has an old-fashioned set of scales in her other hand.

She is readying to weigh my tarnished dime against my mother’s reading, to weigh all the girls Claire Lolley saved against
the one she left behind. Her scales will never come out even. Everyone in the room knows it, except perhaps my dog, watching
me anxiously from the foot of the stairs.

I lay the fourth card down above my cards, and then I turn away from the table. I come closer to my mother and sit down on
the love seat. Gretel trots across the room and jumps up on the cushion beside me. She presses close to me, trying to fit
the whole of her walrus body into my lap. I push her shoulder, make her settle for laying her head across my thighs.

I scratch her ears, almost a reflex, and she nudges her shoulder up against my hip. The feel of the air in the room has her
worried. It is still charged, but this is coming from my mother, not me. I came here with a thousand other questions, but
almost none of them matter in the light of the one answer that I finally have.

I am almost finished here. Only one thing is lacking. I feel it as pins and needles at the center of my back, like an itch
in that one place I can never quite reach to scratch. Daddy. I promised I would tell him when his note had been delivered.
Now it has.

But it is more than that.

Punch buggy green
, I think. Thom is coming. My father’s car is one hell of a bread crumb, and it is parked a few blocks away. I hope the old
Grandee Buick is already vivisected into untraceable parts, scattered over Alabama, but I need to know. Thom thinks my father
is dead, but the name
Eugene Lolley
is printed plain in Fruiton’s slim phone book for anyone who thinks to look for it.

I think I have always known that Daddy is my canary in the mine shaft. I have gotten what I came for here in California. Before
I go, I need to know how far along Thom is on my trail, how much of a lead I have.

I go to get the cordless phone from the kitchen, pausing as I pass to blow out the sage candles. The burned smoke smell of
extinguishing them overpowers the herbs. My mother watches me, sitting in her ruined heap. I bring the cordless phone back
to the love seat, but Gretel has flopped around and spread herself out to fill the space. I perch on the armchair and dial
my old friend 411.

The connection makes, and a woman asks in mechanical tones, “City and state, please?”

I say, “Fruiton, Alabama. Home number for Eugene Lolley.” My mother’s spine straightens, her shoulders tensing as the same
neutral-voiced operator—it may be a recording—recites my father’s number.

It’s not quite four
A.M.
on the East Coast. Daddy should be home and sleeping. I dial.

I let the phone ring ten times, but he doesn’t answer. I stand up and pace down to the store at the front of the room, my
mother’s eyes set on me as unblinking and cold as snake eyes. She sways like a snake, too, her top half rising up from her
coiled legs, her arms wrapped tight around herself.

I let the phone ring on, twenty times, pacing back to my mother’s reading table. Daddy still doesn’t answer, and no machine
picks up. I hit thirty rings. Then thirty-five. Forty.

I press the disconnect button, my brow furrowing. I saw my father barely over a week ago, and where the hell can he be at
this time of the morning?

I call 411 and ask for Fruiton again, but this time the name I give is Bill Mantles, Daddy’s neighbor across the street.

“Who is Bill Mantles?” my mother says. I ignore her, but Gret whines and sits up at the tension in her voice.

A woman answers the phone, but it’s a grown-up, not Bunny. She sounds sleepy and displeased.

I say, “Is Bill there?” and then there is a distinctly female silence that has no sleepiness left in it and even more displeasure.

“Who is this?” the woman says.

“I’m a friend of Bill’s. I—” I stop, because when I hear it out loud, I realize my father is also a “friend of Bill’s.”

“What friend?” she demands.

I try again. “I’m sorry to wake you, but this is important. Is Bill there?” It’s a testament to what I’ve learned earlier
this evening that I try not to sound bitchy.

“Do I know you, friend of Bill’s?” the woman asks, and she’s making no such effort.

I say, “We haven’t met. Your neighbor across the street, Eugene Lolley? I’m his—” With my mother’s gaze on me, I find I can’t
quite say what I am to him. I have not been his daughter for years now. I pause and inhale, and then I say, “My name is Rose
Mae Lolley.”

“Oh,” she says, and then again. By the second “Oh,” her voice has gone up an octave, high with urgency and nerves. “I’ll get
Bill.” She sounds sorry for being sharp with me. Very sorry. Too sorry. I hear her saying, “Bill, honey, wake up… Bill?” Then
she covers the phone with her hand or sets it down because all I can hear is a wordless murmur of anxious conversation.

I wait for Bill to come on. But I know already. I know it in the pit of me, and I stop pacing. I turn to my mother. She sees
my face and rises, coming across the room to me. I feel a hollow ball of nausea curdling in my stomach even before Bill’s
voice says, “Rose Mae? I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how to get in touch with you.”

“How,” I say. “Just tell me how.”

“He got mugged,” Bill says.

“Bullshit,” I say. “That’s not what you mean.”

“Yes, it is, Rose Mae,” Bill says, and his voice is very gentle, with the sweet undertones I remember him using every time
he spoke to Bunny.

“What’s happened?” my mother hisses at me.

I want to tell her, but I don’t want to say a mugging. That’s a lie, and the very word sounds silly. It is harmless words—giggle
and
clogging and pug dog—that are full of cheery g’s. I want to tell her truer than that.

“My daddy got beat to death,” I say for her, correcting Bill at the same time. My mother’s body does a sudden half bend, sharp
and shallow at the waist, but her face doesn’t change. It looks like an invisible fist has punched her and she has eaten the
blow, as stoic as a spartan wife. “Someone beat him until he died.” I feel a scalding wetness on my cheeks, and I have to
reach up with my free hand to feel that I am crying. Bill’s pause is an affirmation.

Finally he says, “So you heard already. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t believe it either.” I don’t answer. I’m gulping, trying to
get air in, trying so hard not to throw up. My mother turns away to face her table. She is staring down at the four cards
I have left faceup. Her shoulders begin to shake, and Bill talks on, filling up the silence. “I saw him earlier that same
night, drinking down at Chico’s.” I know the place, I can see it. Ten blocks from his house, a one-room neighborhood bar with
neon beer signs in the windows. “I tried to talk him into a ride home, but he was pretty drunk already and mad. I let him
be. He had a good bit of cash on him, and I guess I wasn’t the only one that noticed. He tried to walk home a couple of hours
after I left. Someone—maybe a couple of someones—followed him from the bar. They rolled him too hard, you know? He hit his
head on the curb and cracked his skull. He was a tough old guy, but they rolled him too hard.”

Behind every word he says, I see the big hands of my husband. Not someone, it was Thom. Thom found Daddy, and Daddy is over
now. My fault. I knew Thom would search Fruiton. I knew he would find my daddy and question him, but I should have realized
Thom was too angry to save murder just for me in the sickest kind of fidelity. Under the wash of guilt, an ugly self-preserving
part of me wonders what-all Daddy spilled under the persuasion of Thom’s fists. What did he say before Tom helped the curb
rise up and meet his head too hard?
Punch buggy green.

“When?” I ask. My mother turns to look over her shoulder at me. Her body is still shaking, but her red eyes are desert dry.

“Two days ago,” Bill says. “I identified the body, but you’ll probably want to come here. There’s things need doing—”

“Two days,” I interrupt for my mother’s benefit. She nods. “Bill, I can’t talk anymore right now. Sorry.” I hang up, and then
I drop the phone and run ten steps into my mother’s store and drop to my knees to throw up into a big bowl full of worry beads.
When my stomach is empty, I turn and sit flat on my butt facing my mother, wiping at my mouth.

Thom Grandee was in Fruiton two days ago. He is close behind, much closer, much faster than I ever would have thought.

“We should call the police,” I say, and my mother stares back at me, impassive. She has picked up the cards I laid out and
is holding them in a fan. But which police? The ones in Amarillo? I could tell them they can help close a mugging case several
states away, and all they have to do is take on one of the most influential families in the city. Call the cops in Fruiton?
I’m not sure how to explain to them who I am and how I know an angry man in Texas rolled their drunk. Thom is no doubt already
home and alibied five ways from Sunday by Joe and Charlotte and his middle brother, as loyal and ball-free as a neutered dog.
I may only succeed in giving Thom a better bead on my location. “Should we call the police?” I ask.

“They never did me much good,” my mother says. “I need to think.” I look at her hand, pinching those cards so tight that her
fingers are as white as fine china.

Upstairs, I hear my mother’s bedroom clock chime one. We have come to the end of the witching hour, and I am wasting time.
I have to go, and quickly.

But my mother moves first, walking quickly past me to the front door. Gret starts to climb down off the love seat, but I tell
her, “Stay.” I don’t want my dog out in this dark night when Thom is coming. It’s foggy out, and the wind pushes its way across
the floor to touch me, misty and cold. It lifts my mother’s layered skirts,
swirling them around her calves. She looks more gyspy now than she ever did at the airport. More gypsy and less my mother.

“I’m sure we can fix this,” she says, firm voiced, stuffing the cards into her skirt pocket. But my daddy is dead, and there
is no we. Thom is coming, and there is no fixing.