Hangman's Root (6 page)

Wilcox, my best friend and tenant, in her working clothes. I looked at Ruby and back at Amy, and suddenly I knew why Amy had seemed familiar the first time I saw hen

I straightened up. "Amy, my name is China Bayles. And this is Ruby Wilcox." I turned to Ruby. Over the past three years of being friends, we had often shared our life histories. Obviously, one of us had left something out. "Ruby, this is Amy Roth."

Amy's glance teetered from one of us to the other, finally landing on Ruby. "Uh, hi," she said.

"Hello." Ruby stepped briskly around the counter, her flats making little tap-taps on the floor. "Were you looking for something special?"

"In a manner of speaking," I said.

Amy looked back at me, coloring. "Fm sorry."

"That's quite all right." I smiled. "But you did startle me. I was beginning to wonder whether I'd misplaced nine months of my life."

Ruby frowned. "Excuse me?"

"I think," I remarked diplomatically, "that the two of you have something to discuss. Alone."

It was a good thing business was slow that morning. About an hour after Amy's dramatic appearance. Ruby came through the connecting door. Her face was red and splotchy and the mascara had run in sooty rivulets down her cheeks. Without a word, I handed her a glass of spiced tea and a plate of sage cheese crisps and made her sit down on the stool behind the counter.

"Bad, huh?" I asked.

"Awful." She blew her nose into her paper napkin. "It took her two years and every cent she could scrape together to get the court records unsealed and find out who I was. Honestly, China, I never thought the birth could be traced." She thought for a

Hangman '^ Root ^/

minute, then shook her head. "But I didn't have any other choice. I just did what I had to do and put it out of my mind. If I'd thought about it—if I'd thought about her, I'd have gone crazy."

I leaned against the counter, imagining Ruby as she must have been back then, a scared kid—younger even than Amy— with no choices. "Do you want to tell me?"

Ruby nibbled on a crisp. "I had her before I married Wade," she said. Ruby would have been in college by that time. She and Wade had a daughter. Shannon, now a junior at the University of Texas, in Austin. They've been divorced for four years.

"Why did you give her up?"

"What else could I do?" Ruby's head was bowed, her voice heavily scored with twenty-five-year-old guilt. "All I had was a part-time job with the phone company, and Roe v. Wade hadn't happened yet. Her father was killed in Vietnam the same week I found out I was pregnant. Mom took over after that."

"Oh," I said. I could imagine that. Ruby's mom still took over, every chance she got.

"Yeah. She sent me to a home for unwed mothers up in Dallas. I never even saw the baby. A couple of years later, Wade came along. The next thing I knew, we were engaged." She laughed sardonically. "Mom and Dad thought he hung the moon. He sang in the choir."

I took her hand. "I'm sorry," I said. "God, what a shock it must have been."

"It was so long ago," Ruby said despairingly. "I never thought Fd have to face it. I thought it was over."

"It is over. You gave her birth. Somebody else mothered her."

She lifted anguished eyes. "Over!" she exclaimed. "Now that I see her, I know it will never be over. If only I hadn't let Mom tell me what to do! If only I'd kept her! If only—"

I held up my hand, stemming the tide. "Ruby," I said quietly, "then is then. Now is now. What does Amy want from you?"

Ruby hesitated, not quite ready to relinquish her "if onlys."

"Now? Well, she's a graduate student in journalism at CTSU and she works in the pet store at the Pecan Springs Mall. She was very definite about not wanting money. She wants recognition. She wants to be part of the family."

I hesitated. "Are you sure about the family bit? I got the idea that she only wants to be acknowledged." Only? Isn't having our existence acknowledged the most important thing there is? Isn't that what we all want, deep down?

"That's what she said, " Ruby replied. "But she didn't come just to hear me say 'Hi, kid, sure, I'm your mom. Now beat it.' You don't spend two years digging up your mother—"

I smothered a laugh. Ruby's metaphors sometimes get away from her.

Ruby frowned. "I mean it, China. She said she dreamed about finding me for years and years. It was all she thought about. It's not fair to just sort of leave her hanging. Well, is it?"

"I don't know," I said. "I'm no expert on mothers and daughters." In my oldest memories of Leatha, my mother, she's getting blitzed while she waits for my father to come home from the office. After a while she stops waiting and just gets blitzed. Dad died ten years ago, she joined AA and got therapy, and now she's marrying again. But while I'm glad that Leatha is pulling herself together, her recovery doesn't mean much to me. I still feel a deep-down vacant place where the mother part ought to be. I hoped that Amy's adoptive mother had filled that vacancy for her.

Ruby closed her eyes, sighing heavily. "I'll have to tell Shannon."

"Why are you making such a big deal about it?" I asked. "It's none of Shannon's business. It's not like the three of you are going to be living together." When I said that, I remembered I had something important of my own to tell Ruby. Amy's birth announcement had driven it out of my head.

Ruby's eyes popped open. "But Shannon's got a sister! She has to know,''

"A half-sister," I said. "Really, Ruby, I think it would be a mistake to make a big deal out of this. Let Amy take the lead in this family thing. Wait and see what she's comfortable with."

But Ruby wasn't listening. Where matters of the heart are concerned, her only gait is a flat-out gallop. "I'll have to tell Mother, too," she said. "I wonder how she'll take the news."

"Speaking of news," I said, and told her.

"You're moving in with McQuaid!" She pummeled my arm, shrieking. "China! That's great! That's terrific! I'm so thrilled! We'll have to get everybody together and have a big housewarm-ing party!"

"Not so fast." I pulled my arm back, "I said, maybe. Anyway, first we've got to find a house."

"You're looking?"

I nodded. "He is, anyway. He's on spring break."

"Well, then." She was satisfied. "When you move in, then we'll have the housewarming." She grinned. "We can't let your Inner Child miss a chance for a party." Ruby started working on her Inner Child last winter, after she and her former boyfriend Andrew Drake broke up. Lately, she's been working on mine. I wondered when she'd start on Amy's.

"Well, at least it'll relieve the space problem," I said practically. "If I'm not living in the back, I can take down the wall and—"

"Is that all you can say?" Ruby was aghast. "Where's the romance in your soul, China? Where's the love}''

"Yeah, well, people can love one another and still make a mess of things, you know. Love isn't the magic wand that transforms all life's problems." The phone rang and I reached for it, but Ruby put her hand on mine.

"China," she said, very seriously, "did anybody ever tell you that you have a big issue around intimacy?"

The rest of Tuesday was ordinary, thank God. Since spring was practically here, sales of herb plants were brisk, along with gardening how-to books. The Library Guild bought over a hundred dollars' worth of materials for a potpourri party, and RuthAnn Lansdown, representing the Pecan Springs Garden Club, stopped in to ask if I would give a talk on edible blossoms at the April meeting. I wrote an ad for my spring herb classes and phoned it in to the Enterprise, reordered books and essential oils, and tried not to think about McQuaid's house hunt. About seven he came over to tell me he hadn't had any luck yet, and stayed for a mushroom omelet and an old Robert Redford movie on television. Because Robert Redford always makes me feel sexy, and because Brian was still in San Antonio with his mother, McQuaid stayed all night.

If the day had been ordinary, the night was extraordinary. "Does it strike you," McQuaid said, retrieving the blanket from the floor, "that sex gets better all the time?"

I yawned. "I guess so," I murmured, half asleep.

"Good." He gave me a friendly pat on the rump. "I'd hate for us to find sex boring on the eve of our moving in together."

He climbed under the blanket, pulled me up against him spoon style, and fell asleep almost immediately. But his remark

had jolted me awake. I lay there for a long time, alternating between wondering what it would be like to sleep with McQuaid every night, worrying what Brian would think of our sleeping together, and wishing that McQuaid's landlord would say it had all been a terrible mistake and that of course they could renew the lease.

Wednesday was like Tuesday, only more so. McQuaid went night-fishing at Canyon Lake with a buddy from the Pecan Springs PD, so I got more sleep. On Thursday morning, I woke up early, did some garden work, and settled down to another day in the shop. McQuaid called just before lunch to tell me he'd turned up a couple of possible houses and to ask whether he could pick me up at seven that evening for a look. I had just put the phone down when Dottie called. Her voice was tense and even grittier than usual.

"I got another letter," she said without preamble. "Can you come?"

"Come where?"

"My office. And while you're here, there are a couple of other things you ought to see."

"I thought this was spring break."

Dottie's laugh was short, abrasive. "The students get the break. I get to grade papers. Noah's Ark, first floor, two doors down from the chairman's office. Come in by the quad entrance—I want you to see what's going on in front of the building."

"What is it?"

"Just come."

"Let me check with Ruby," I said. I wasn't sure what I could do about the letters, but I had to admit to being curious about them, and about whatever was happening on the quad.

I put the phone down and went to the connecting door. Ruby was arranging an artful display of crystal balls. "Can you mind the shop for an hour?" I asked.

"Sure," Ruby said. She turned around, holding a crystal ball. "I've decided to have a family get-together tomorrow night. Can you come?"

I looked at her suspiciously. "Don't tell me. Let me guess. You're bringing Amy out of the closet."

Ruby tossed her head. "Mother will be there, and Shannon, and Ramona was coming down from Dallas for the weekend anyway. My mother, my sister, and my two daughters, ^nt you don't have to come."

I hedged. "I didn't say I didn't want to."

"Good." She rubbed the ball with her sleeve. "You can come early and help with the food. We're going to have a sit-down dinner. That way, we can all get to know one another. Get to know Amy, that is."

"Ruby," I said, "why don't you look in that crystal ball and ask whether this is a good idea? Maybe Amy doesn't want you to know her."

Ruby was indignant. "Of course she does. Why else would she go to all the trouble of finding me?"

"I won't be gone long," I said, and went back to tell Dottie I was on my way.

Central Texas State University started out around the turn of the century as a teachers' college. Its major growth spurt happened when the baby boomers got old enough to pay tuition. Now it's growing again, up from twelve to thirteen thousand students in the last year. The sprawling Spanish-style campus is made up of pink and yellow brick buildings roofed in red tile and located on the north side of Pecan Springs, a dozen blocks from my shop. To get there, you go west on Crockett to the square, hang a right, and go north on Anderson until it dead-ends at a

glass kiosk on a cement island, where a uniformed guard checks to see that your parking sticker is vaHd and you're not wanted for any major crimes, such as faiUng to pay your last sixteen parking tickets. If you are, they hold you for ransom until you fork over what you owe.

I have no sticker, but today it didn t matter. The kiosk was closed in recognition of the fact that all the paying customers had gone to the beach. I breezed through, made my usual right at the top of the hill and then down and across Pecan River, which flows, cool and green and lovely, through the middle of the campus. I found a spot in the almost-empty parking lot behind the pink-brick behavioral sciences building where McQuaid has his office. McQuaid's blue Ford pickup was parked in the lot. I made a mental note to drop in and see him when Dottie and I were finished, and headed for the Noah Science Building, which is located between the Behavioral Sciences Center and the river.

Noah's Ark is the building that's slated to come down so that Castle's Castle can go up. It's one of the original campus buildings, named for Mildred Noah, a popular science teacher of the 1920s. Although the Ark is unquestionably inadequate, a lot of people feel nostalgic about it. Its high-ceilinged, wooden-floored classrooms remind them of a time (long ago and far away, like a fairy tale) when teachers thought it was important to talk to students and students thought teachers had something to say. Others are worried that the sprawling, modernistic complex that's proposed for the site will have a negative effect on the river's fragile ecosystem. Backed into a corner by the preservationists, the environmentalists, and the Humane Society, the CTSU regents had put the Castle on indefinite hold. There was no telling when, or even if, they'd approve the new complex.