Butchers Hill (31 page)

"Sammy, Sammy," the boys
yelled, still holding on to her ankles. "Will you work on our
drills with us?"

"I'm tired of
practicing," she said, but she was smiling. "Let me
get something to eat and I'll be right out."

"Mom's got cheese straws
and little sandwiches in the gazebo. She let us have some."

"Cool." Samantha King
bounded up the steps of the gazebo, stuffed a cheese straw in her
mouth, then gave Molly Edelman a kiss on the cheek, leaving a few
crumbs behind. Molly didn't seem to notice. "I
finished my science notebook today and turned in my final paper for
English. I'm cruising."

Again, Molly made the introductions, but her
voice was more strained this time. Sam reached out and shook their
hands with a heartiness so familiar that Tess could almost imagine
their overlapping DNA meeting at the fingertips. After all, she was
related to her, too. There was as much Weinstein as there was King in
this striking young girl.

"So what's Mom trying to
save this time? A house, a whale, some Guatemalan kid? If
she's not careful, she's going to give it all away
and we'll have to get athletic scholarships to college, in
which case my brothers are really in trouble."

"I'm a fund-raising
consultant," Jackie said, her eyes drinking in the girl
before her, taking in every detail. "We're going
over strategy."

Sam was busy loading up a napkin with
sandwiches and cheese straws.
I know that appetite
,
Tess said.
I just never knew which side it came
from
.

"I'm going to play with
the pests, then walk over to Darla's house, okay? She wants
to try on her new bathing suit for me, ask if I think it makes her look
fat."

"Okay," Molly said, her
voice croaking a little. And the girl ran away, long legs carrying
across the lawn in a few quick strides.

"She's
beautiful," Jackie said.

"She looks like you,"
Tess said. "I'm surprised she didn't
notice."

"Girls that age, they're
a little self-centered," Molly offered apologetically.
"I don't think they can see anyone's face
but their own."

Jackie stood. "Okay,
that's enough."

Molly looked up fearfully.
"Enough?"

"I've seen what I needed
to see. I won't take her from you. She's a good
girl, and she's happy. You've given her a life I
never could have. Thank you."

Tears fell down Molly's cheeks,
but she tried to control herself so the children wouldn't
realize anything was amiss. "We could work something out, you
know. I'm sure she'd love to know you, to have you
be a part of her life. We'd have to talk to a psychologist,
of course, but it could work. I know it could."

"I don't think I can do
it halfway," Jackie said. "I know I'm
being selfish in a way, but I can't settle for just a piece
of her. I gave her up thirteen years ago. I have to live with
that."

"We could tell her
you're alive, at least, that you're not dead as she
always assumed."

Jackie shook her head. "Maybe
later, when she's a little older. But I'd like to
help out, if I could. I could help with her college, or even the
private school tuition."

Molly wiped her eyes. "Oh, Sam was
kidding about my causes. David makes plenty of money, we're
not hurting."

Well, someone is
,
Tess thought, looking at Jackie's face.
Someone
is definitely hurting right now
.

For the first time, Jackie let Tess take the
wheel of her beloved Lexus. She crawled into the passenger seat and
stared ahead, her face unreadable.

"For what it's worth, I
think you did the right thing," Tess offered, cautiously.
"It's hell for a single woman to bring up a
kid."

"I've got
money," Jackie said in a dull, flat voice. "Money
makes it easier. I could raise her if I wanted to. But what do I have
to give her? My life is sterile. I don't have any real
friends, any life. All I do is make money."

"I wouldn't say
that," Tess said nervously.
"You're…self-contained, self-sufficient,
but not sterile."

"I am what I am, Tess. I adapted
and I survived. The question is, what did I give up along the way? I
gave up my daughter. I gave up myself."

Tess thought of the
Just-So
Stories
in Sal's
Kipling
Compendium
, each one the story of someone who
had changed in order to survive. The camel had to have a hump, the
leopard had to develop spots, the elephant needed a nose, if only to
remind him of the perils of satiable curiosity. For several miles,
neither woman spoke.

"Are you going to be
okay?" Tess asked as they headed east toward Butchers Hill.
"I mean, there's this thing at my mom's
tonight that's absolutely mandatory, but if you need me,
I'll go late, or leave early."

"No, your job is done,"
Jackie said. "I asked you to find my daughter and you did.
How much do I owe you?"

"The retainer more than covers it.
You don't even owe me mileage. We always used your
car."

At the curb outside Tess's office,
Jackie suddenly pressed a hand to her forehead.

"Do you have an aspirin in your
office? I don't think I can make the drive back to Columbia
feeling like this."

Tess dashed inside and returned with a
generic ibuprofen, a glass of water, and a panting Esskay, who also
wanted to pay her respects. Jackie drank the water gratefully, patted
the dog, then slid over the driver's seat, handing Tess her
backpack along with the empty glass.

"Thank you," she said
formally, offering her hand. "I actually came to like you
over the past two weeks."

"Hey, me too. How does the song
go? You may have been a headache, but you never were a bore. Besides,
we're connected, aren't we? We're family,
if you think about it."

"You and Sam are connected.
There's really nothing between us."

"Oh," said Tess, feeling
rebuffed. She thought they had shared quite a bit. Then Jackie smiled.

"What's so
funny?"

"Oh, I was just thinking about our
adventures together. Meeting Mr. Mole, going to that lesbian bar, that
stupid story you made me tell about
Fresh Lake
Trout
. Did you ever find that kid, by the
way?"

"Yeah." Insular Jackie
had to be the one person in Baltimore who didn't know she had
found Sal Hawkings. "It didn't quite turn out the
way I expected, but I found him."

"And that white trash Willa Mott,
the rabbit holes she sent us down. You think there ever was a Mr. and
Mrs. Johnson, who planned to name their baby Caitlin?"

"I guess we'll never
know."

"I guess not," Jackie
said, waved, then drove out of Tess's life.

Tess and Esskay walked into the office. Tess
sat down at her computer and looked at her once unblemished desk
calendar. It wasn't so unsullied now. Names, leads, and
doodles covered its surface, spilling over into days she
hadn't even lived yet. There were rings from Coke cans, rogan
josh drippings, greasy smears, and, of course, traces of chocolate. It
was messy. Life was messy. She would have to remember to tell Jackie
that. Life was messy.

Then she remembered she would never see
Jackie again.

T
ess
hated all seafood. Crab hated her back. One bite, the tinest sliver of
its flesh in a casserole or a dip, and she'd go into
anaphylactic shock, her trachea swelling until she couldn't
breathe. On the plus side, her allergy had made for an unforgettable
eighth birthday party for Noam Fischer. Whenever she ran into him,
usually browsing the history table at the Smith College book sale, he
still spoke of it with great cheer, as if it were a high point of his
childhood. "You turned blue! You almost died!"

So one might think that, given the
twenty-nine years she had been hanging around, her own parents would be
able to remember this salient fact. But as the crab feast got under way
at the Monaghans' house, it quickly became apparent that
Judith had forgotten to plan an alternative main course. Unless Tess
found something in the pantry, she was going to dine on cole slaw, corn
on the cob, and her own fruit salad, which she didn't even
particularly like.

"Don't you have any
peanut butter?" she asked her mother, pushing jars and cans
around. Judith never threw anything out, so her well-organized shelves
were filled with the exotic but not-quite-edible foods people send as
gifts. Chutney, fruit cakes, jellies in strange flavors. "I
could at least make myself a sandwich."

"I could run up to
Arby's, get her a roast beef," her father said
helpfully. He still had on his summer work clothes, a short-sleeved
white shirt and clip-on blue tie, a shade lighter than his eyes. He
also had his summer sunburn, one shade lighter than his hair.

Tess thought if someone was going to escape
on her account, it should be her. "Or maybe I could just go
get takeout from Mr. G's, or the Chinese place over on
Ingleside, the one with the dancing cow. That's it,
I'll get some dumplings, maybe an order of spare
ribs."

"No!" Judith screamed,
in a voice so shrill and hysterical that it stopped them both in their
tracks as they edged toward the kitchen door. But no one looked more
surprised than Judith at the strangled sound that had come out of her.

"I mean—don't
leave me. I need you both here. If you get me through this, Pat,
I'll go down to the ocean with your family in August, stay in
that horrid little condo of theirs, and never say a word."

Tess exchanged a look with her father. This
was a serious concession indeed. Judith insisted on staying in a
separate hotel when the Monaghans staged their August reunion and
usually came up with a reason to leave two days into the week-long
vacation.

"Okay, hon," he said.
"I won't leave, and neither will Tess.
She'll just have to dig up something around here she can
eat." He opened his arms and Judith allowed herself to be
embraced. As they snuggled, Tess was reminded of the chemistry that had
sizzled between her parents all these years, the one constant in their
marriage. They had thrown in their lot with one another less than two
weeks after Donald Weinstein had introduced his kid sister to this
up-and-coming Monaghan kid in the West Side Democratic Club. Both
families had predicted, hoped, prayed, that the union would founder.
But here it was, thirty-plus years later, and there was still a glimmer
of whatever had passed between them at that first meeting. Tess would
have found her parents' relationship inspiring if she
didn't happen to believe it had warped her for life.
Hadn't she sent her last boyfriend packing for the simple
crime of being too nice, too easy-going?

"I'll go put the
newspapers down," Tess said. "Should I tape them or
just weigh them down with dishes?"

"Tape the first layer,"
Judith said, her words muffled by Patrick's shoulder.
"Then spread another over the top, so we can gather them up
as the tables get full and put them straight into the garbage
bags."

Within an hour, the paper-covered picnic
tables in the backyard were full and bits of crab shell flew through
the air with each swing of a crab mallet. Even crab-aversant Tess
couldn't help being impressed by the professional skills her
relatives brought to the dismemberment of this non-kosher delicacy.
Uncle Jules and Aunt Sylvie had special mallets, of course, wooden
heads on sterling silver handles, their monogram engraved along the
shaft. They were messy types, sacrificing large pieces of crab meat to
greedy haste. Cousin Deborah was neat, but prone to tiny cuts along her
manicured nails, painful when the Old Bay seasoning rubbed against
them. Little Samuel sat between his grandparents, pounding on the table
with his own monogrammed mallet, as if practicing for the day when he
could eat more than Saltines and corn sliced from the cob.

Uncle Donald dissected his crab with a knife
and was expert at extracting large pieces of back fin, the best part of
the crab. But Gramma was the fastest, cleanest picker of all. She had
once won a crab-picking contest for local celebrities, thirty years
back, when the proprietess of Weinstein's was considered a
certain local celebrity. She told the story at every family crab feast.
She was telling it now.

"The second-place winner, the
woman from the little ice cream store, what's her name, she
wasn't even close. Her wrists were strong, from all those
years of scooping, but her skin was soft, and she was
squeamish." Gramma rotated her wrist, as if scooping
something hard from a carton, chocolate chip or Rocky Road.
"But that little ice cream business was bought out by
Beatrice Foods last year, so I guess she had the last laugh. Her
husband knew how to manage a business. She could afford to have soft
hands."

Tess, munching unenthusiastically on her
butter-and-guava jelly sandwich, studied her grandmother. She
understood Gramma's bitterness now, these repeated jabs about
Poppa's failures as a breadwinner. Gramma must have known, or
guessed, of his betrayal. Then again, Gramma had always been a sour,
unhappy person. There was no Jackie around in the early years, when she
was monitoring Tess's time on the flying rabbit. Or was
there? Was Jackie a one-time thing, or one in a string? She put down
her sandwich, what little appetite she had gone.

She got it back quickly enough when she saw
Aunt Sylvie bringing out her homemade German chocolate cake. Whatever
her other failings, Aunt Sylvie made good cakes. Gramma was standing at
the head of the table, tapping her fork on the side of her glass, while
Samuel continued to pound at the table with his mallet. Gramma gave him
a look. She didn't like to be upstaged, even by the
two-year-old great-grandapple of her eye. Both lost their audience when
a police car pulled up in the driveway.