Mama Gets Hitched (4 page)

The blond newcomer followed
me down the driveway and pressed some rolled-up bills into my hand. “There’s a little something extra, for you being so brave!”

I smiled modestly, glancing at Maddie just in time to see her roll her eyes.

Once we were back on the highway, my sister turned in her seat to the rear of the Jeep. Lifting the air-holed lid off a plastic pail, she peeked inside at the snake.

“Oh, c’mon, Mace.” She snorted. “You took that poor woman’s money for this? It’s still a baby!”

“Not technically, Maddie. Two feet is definitely an adult.”

“So that works out to, what? Forty dollars a foot?”

“Fifty. Not including the tip.”

“You’re shameless, Sister!”

“Hey, she had a problem, I was the solution. That’s business. Besides, that gal with her white slacks and manicured nails is not about to go crawling around after a snake. To her, it’s worth what she paid, maybe more, to not have to do it herself.”

“So you’re really performing a public service.”

“That’s right.”

“Yeah, and Donald Trump just wants the best for all those people he fires on TV. Be sure to take that creature in the pail far away from my house. And, by the way, Moneybags, you’re buying the pizza for Mama’s house tonight.”

Maddie and I passed the ranch for sale again on our way back to town. Cattle herded together in stands of sabal palms, seeking shade from the midday sun. I envied them, in a way. They had no concept of the future, no foreboding about the development creeping inland from the coasts, threatening to ruin the ranches-and-rodeo lifestyle that makes Himmarshee unique.

“Look at that sign,” I said to Maddie. “It’s a shame, huh?”

“Sure is,” she said. “Looks like they’re aiming to build a new housing development when what we could really use is a Super Walmart.”

I looked at her.

“What?” Maddie said.

“Are you sure we’re sisters?”

“Shopping is not a sin, Mace. And, yes, I’m sure. I remember Mama saying you were growing in her tummy, and then Daddy and her bringing you home from the hospital. Everyone said how adorable you were with those big blue eyes and that shock of black hair.”

I worked my fingers through my hair. It was still black, whipped by the wind through the windows into some shocking snarls.

“My reign as the center of the universe was over.” Maddie shook her head sadly. “And I wasn’t even four.”

“You need to get over that sibling rivalry, Sister. It was thirty-two years ago.”

She sniffled, playing it up. “Early traumas aren’t easily forgotten.”

Then her face turned grave. “Speaking of trauma, I didn’t even ask you how you felt about finding Ronnie this morning. That must have been horrible.”

An image of Mama’s neighbor and all that blood forced itself into my mind. I gazed ahead at the road, keeping my eyes focused on the center yellow line.

“Yeah,” I finally said. “It was hard. And I felt so sorry for Alice, too. I’m glad Carlos wouldn’t let her see Ronnie. She should remember her husband the way he was.”

The radio was playing a commercial for the Home on the Range Feed Supply and Clothing Emporium. I switched to a station giving the weather forecast. High humidity, temperatures in the 90s, and we were barely into June. Welcome to middle Florida, where the nearest ocean breeze is sixty miles away.

“What do you suppose that weird look meant that Alice gave C’ndee?” I asked.

Maddie was punching up Dr. Laura’s station again, even though it was my Jeep, and she knew how I felt about that show. She lifted a shoulder in a shrug.

“Don’t know. C’ndee’s from New Jersey. Maybe Alice doesn’t like her on principle.”

“No, it was more than that. It was like Alice knew her, and she wanted C’ndee to
know
she knew her. It was like she was sending some kind of signal.”

“Maybe it was disapproval,” Maddie said. “Alice is pretty modest, and did you see that skirt C’ndee had on?”

“Oh, yeah. And you know what Aunt Ida would have said about that skirt …” I began.

She finished, “ ‘Girl, go put on something decent! We can see clear to the Promised Land.’ ”

We’d almost made it to Maddie’s school when she turned off the radio and brought up the topic I thought I’d been lucky enough to avoid.

“You didn’t think I’d forget, did you? I’m a school principal. I can remember the names of two hundred students by heart.”

I squirmed around in the driver’s seat. But it was no use trying to get comfortable. The comfort zone my sister was violating wasn’t physical. It was emotional.

“Well?” she repeated. “What’s your problem with Carlos? After you patched things up on the Cracker Trail Ride, the man moved back here from Miami. But every time y’all get close to having something real, you find a reason to pick a fight or back off. I can’t believe you even asked him to give you some space. What a cliché, Mace.”

I could feel her eyes boring into me. My own gaze never left the road.

“He’s going to get tired of your hot-and-cold bit. And you’re not getting any younger. By the time you hit your mid-thirties, the bloom’s off the rose.”

I’m not vain, but I couldn’t resist a peek at myself in the rear-view mirror. Startling blue eyes looked back at me, my best feature, I’ve been told. But were those crow’s feet beginning to branch out around the corners? The Florida sun is no friend of fair skin.

Maddie pinched my arm. “Stop admiring yourself. You’re going to run us into a ditch. You’re just as pretty as ever. Men’s heads still turn at your figure, even though you’re usually hiding what you’ve got in those awful clothes. My point is it doesn’t last forever. Do you want to be a wrinkled old crone, living alone in your house in the woods, with a bunch of animals you treat like your kids?”

I remembered a homeless woman we’d seen once in downtown Fort Pierce. Dressed in several layers of mismatched clothes and muttering to herself, she was pushing a black carriage. A little dog sat inside, wearing a baby’s bonnet tied with a bow under the chin.

“No,” I said. “But maybe the reason I’m not ready to take it to the next level with Carlos is that he’s not ready either.”

“What do you mean?”

“He smothers me. And I know it’s because he hasn’t gotten over the awful way he lost his wife. I can’t live with someone who’s constantly afraid some kind of harm is going to come to me. I feel like I can’t breathe with the way he always needs to protect me.”

“Wanting to protect someone is not normally a bad thing, Mace.”

“It is when it’s motivated by guilt. The last time we were together, he woke up from a nightmare just drenched in sweat. His heart was pounding so hard, I could feel the vibration on my side of the bed.”

“Was he dreaming about his wife?”

I nodded.

I could barely get the image out of my head of how I found Ronnie. How must it be for Carlos, to replay the same murder scene over and over? Except in his case, the body lying bloodied on the floor was that of his beloved, pregnant wife.

Mama’s crazy Pomeranian threw
himself against the front door, yowling as if I were an ax murderer come to slaughter the innocents inside.

“Hush, Teensy!” Mama’s command echoed from the kitchen. It worked just as well as usual. He ratcheted up, in both volume and intensity. I feared the dog might give himself a stroke, which would definitely take the fun out of our regular, gals-only Beginning of the Week Pizza Party.

“Will somebody come and get this dog?” I yelled through the window. “My hands are full of food.”

I knew that last part would bring Maddie running.

“Teensy!” My sister bellowed, using her scariest principal voice. The dog gave a final yip, and skedaddled back to the kitchen and Mama’s protection.

Opening the door, Maddie frowned. “What took you so long?”

“Good evening to you, too, Sister. Oh, no, that’s all right. You don’t have to thank me for going to get the pizza. For paying, either.” I performed a little bow. “It’s my pleasure. I exist to serve you.”

“Stop it, you two,” Marty called from the kitchen. “Did you get my cheese pizza, Mace?”

“You mean the meatless pizza you have
every
Monday night? No, Marty. It came to me suddenly as I was standing at the counter: Maybe Marty quit being a vegetarian. So, I ordered you the carnivore special. Hope that’s all right.”

“Sarcasm is an unattractive trait for a lady,” Mama shouted.

“So is yelling from the kitchen, Mama.”

I sidestepped Maddie and walked into the kitchen just in time to hear Mama whisper across the dinette to my little sister, “We’ll just have to ignore Mace’s sour mood, honey. She’s probably got her monthly visitor.”

“Too much information, Mama,” Maddie said, as she followed me in.

She put out her hands for the two boxes. “Let me take those. And, have I mentioned how eternally grateful we are that you bought the pizza? I know that poor newcomer’s hundred dollars must have been burning a hole in your pocket.”

Mama shouted, “A hundred dollars!” which startled Teensy, and began a whole new round of barking, along with a discussion of supply and demand and the principles of capitalism.

Just kidding about that last part. It started Mama and Maddie on the topic of what a bad person I am for taking advantage of nature-wary rich folk who can’t tell a rat snake from a rattlesnake.

“Can we just eat, please?” Marty finally said. “All this arguing is making my head hurt.”

We all hushed up, quick. Marty suffers terrible migraines. Sometimes, they’re bad enough to send her to bed in a darkened room for a full day. None of us wanted to be to blame for one of those headaches.

Maddie opened the pizza boxes and started divvying up the slices onto the good china.

“You know what I always say, girls: Life’s too short to eat off paper plates.” Mama topped off hers and Marty’s glasses from a cold box of Rambling Rosé wine.

I grabbed a Budweiser from the fridge, and got Maddie a glass of tap water with ice. Teensy circled the table, looking for the easiest mark. He bypassed Maddie and me for Mama, who plucked a pepperoni slice from her pizza and slipped it to him under her chair.

“That’s why that dog begs, Mama,” I said. “You’ve taught him all he needs to do is stand there and look pitiful.”

Mimicking Teensy, Maddie turned soulful, starving dog eyes on us. Marty and I laughed. “I’ve seen that same expression,” I said. “That’s how Mama looks when one of us is eating butterscotch pie. No wonder she loves that dog so much. He’s just like her when it comes to mooching hand-outs.”

Mama scooped Teensy off the floor and into her lap. A shower of white dog hair fell onto her blueberry-colored pantsuit. “Come up here, you darlin’ dog.” She nuzzled his neck. “You’re Mama’s little baby, aren’t you? You’d never criticize or make fun of me, would you?”

The dog licked her face. When Mama kissed him on the mouth, I nearly lost the bite of pizza I’d just swallowed.

“Mama, are you still planning on having Teensy be your ring bearer?” Marty asked the question in a careful, neutral tone.

We’d all tried to talk Mama out of that plan. But she wouldn’t be dissuaded, not even when we told her it wasn’t very
Gone with the Wind
to have a Pomeranian prance down the aisle with wedding rings tied to a satin pillow secured to his back like a miniature saddle.

“Teensy’s a member of the family, girls,” she’d announced, and that was that.

She’d even bought him a little vest and bowtie in celadon-colored satin to match the ring pillow. I could hardly wait for the wedding pictures.

“Of course I’m having him carry our rings, Marty.” Mama held up Teensy for our inspection. A few stray hairs floated onto my pizza slice.

“Look how adorable Mama’s little darlin’ is! Besides, Betty at the salon already helped me find him the cutest little top hat from that Wide World of the Web. Those people with the Internet are going to put a rush shipment on it, so it’ll be here in time for the wedding.”

And here I’d thought the ceremony couldn’t get any tackier.

“Now, don’t forget, girls,” she continued, “our final fitting for the dresses is Wednesday morning. And then the shower is Thursday night at Betty’s. She says she has all kinds of fun games planned.”

My stomach formed a hard knot around the beer and pizza. I loathed bridal showers, with their organized gaiety. Mama had invited most of the female population of Himmarshee. There’d be enough estrogen in the place to make me start smiling at babies and weeping at sad movies. Most of the invited guests would probably show, too. Everybody wanted to see how a woman about to embark on her fifth marriage would manage to blush when she opened the gift wrapping on yet another sexy negligee.

I was just about to point out that Mama seemed to be going a bit over the top, considering this wasn’t the first, or even the fourth, time she’d tied the knot, when a sound from outside stopped the words in my throat.

“Shhhh.” I held up my hand. “Did y’all hear that?”

Maddie cocked her head, her pizza stalled in midair. Marty brushed a lock of blond hair behind an ear, as if to listen harder. Mama put Teensy, now barking and squirming, on the floor. The dog flew toward the living room, his nails scrabbling across peach-colored tile. He launched himself against the front window like a cartoon dog, howling at whatever was outside.

“I don’t hear anything but that ridiculous animal,” Maddie said.

“It sounded like a scream,” I said. “I think it came from Alice and Ronnie’s house.”

Within moments, there was a loud pounding at Mama’s front door. A woman’s frantic voice called from the porch. “Let me in, Rosalee.”

We jumped up from the table. “That’s Alice,” Mama said, as we rushed to the living room.

“It’s awful.” The tremor in Alice’s voice came right through the front window. “Dead. Bloody. Somebody left it on my front porch.”

When I opened the door, Maddie grabbed a hold of Alice. She was white and trembling; her eyes glazed. I hoped she wasn’t going to pass out.

“Get her onto the couch,” I told Maddie, who did so without argument.

“Who would do such a thing?” Alice muttered the words, not really focusing on any one of us. “Especially now.”

Once Alice was seated, Marty asked her, “What is it? How can we help?”

“I can’t talk about it. I don’t want to see it again.” Alice’s hands tugged at the fabric of the same faded housedress she’d worn that morning at the VFW. “The stench. It’s horrible. Would you go over and get rid of it for me?

“Well, what …” Mama began, but I put a restraining hand on her arm.

Whatever was dead on Alice’s front porch clearly had her in a state. With everything she’d been through, the least we could do was take care of this without a lot of back-and-forth and fuss.

“Mama, why don’t you pour Alice a little drop of that wine you and Marty had? We’ll go on over there and see what we can do.”

Maddie got a cast-iron frying pan from the stove top. Marty grabbed a heavy cane from the umbrella stand in the hallway. We started for the door.

“Mace?”

Alice’s voice, a bit stronger now, stopped us. I turned around. The color was returning to her face. She took a tiny sip from the wine glass Mama poured.

“I don’t think you’ll need those weapons,” she said. “But you better take a shovel and a big trash bag. It’s not pretty.”

_____

We crept toward Alice’s house, hugging the picket fence that runs along the property line between the two yards. An orange jasmine bush bloomed out front, snowy white flowers glowing in the moonlight. A scent as sweet as orange soda perfumed the air.

As we got closer to Alice’s, a different odor prevailed. Rusty, like dried blood, and fetid, like rotting meat. I heard the buzz of flies before I saw them. Within seconds, Marty and Maddie heard them, too.

“That doesn’t sound good.” Marty nodded toward Alice’s house.

“Well, she did say something was dead,” I said.

As we approached, I shone a flashlight onto the porch, near the front door, and toward the far railings.

“What is it, Mace?” Maddie and her cast-iron pan were right beside me, so close I felt her breath on my cheek. I got a faint whiff of the grease Mama uses to season the heavy pan, which was preferable to that other smell that hung in the air.

“I don’t know yet, Maddie. I need to get closer to see it. And watch out with that pan. You could knock somebody out.”

“Isn’t that the idea?” she said, lowering it just a little.

At the bottom step, we stopped. The thing that Alice saw was a dark mass in the shadows at the corner of her porch, placed between a white wicker footstool and a pot of geraniums. Flies circled and landed, illuminated in the beam of my flashlight.

“Can you see it yet, Mace?” Marty hid behind me, her hand a tight fist balling up the back of my T-shirt.

“Marty, honey, let go.” I pulled at the shirt’s hem until she loosened her grip. “I’m going up to take a closer look.”

My sisters linked arms, planting themselves on the concrete walkway. I climbed three steps, and started across the wooden porch. Potted plants vibrated with my footsteps. The flies took off, buzzing as if in annoyance.

“Be careful, Mace,” Maddie whispered.

Rivulets of nervous sweat pooled at the small of my back. My flashlight flickered, and then died. I stopped, pounding it against my thigh until it lit again. I continued across the porch.

Covering my nose with the sleeve of my shirt, I drew close and aimed the light. Cloudy black eyes stared lifelessly. Two yellowed tusks curved upward. The flies were back, a moving blanket over coarse bristles and leathery skin.

“It’s a wild hog,” I announced. “Or was.”

Marty gasped. “Oh, the poor thing! Is it dead, Mace?”

“I’d say so, Marty. There’s nothing here but the head.”

I stooped to examine the creature’s neck in the light. The spinal cord had been cleanly severed.

“We better call Carlos,” I said over my shoulder. “Looks like whoever took off this critter’s head knew how to use a big knife.”