Marrow (14 page)

There are only three things on her list this month. I look at the first: laxatives. Not an unusual request, but there were girls in my school who used laxatives early in pregnancy. The rush of wet bowels flushed out the barely fertilized egg, or that’s what they believed anyway. You could often see a bottle of MiraLAX being passed from hands, shoved in a backpack. A home remedy that never worked. Also on her list is a request for a birthday card—
(something masculine)
she writes next to it. I wonder if it’s my father’s birthday, or one of the others. Who would she feel is special enough to receive a paper acknowledgment? My bitterness causes me to temporarily fold the paper. No birthday card for me. No acknowledgment. When my bad feelings subside, I unfold it to see what her last wish was. Written in different color ink than the first two items is something that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Tell Margo. That’s it.

Why would my mother write this on her shopping list she’d know I’d see? What does it mean? Had she meant to write more and forgotten? Tell Margo about…the baby? Maybe she thought I didn’t know about the money underneath the floorboards. I bury my face in the crook of my arm.

Howard Delafonte had his offices on Main Street. And when I say offices, I mean both the law firm and the wine bar five doors down that he’d opened a year earlier. Someone else ran the wine bar for him, and he had partners at the firm, but the ex-mayor was keeping himself busy. “Busy, busy like a bee,” I say under my breath as I watch him walk into the bar, a paper latte cup in his hand.

It is amazing what you can find out on the internet. A little trip to the Harbor Bone Public Library, and bam, more information than you know what to do with. There is no such thing as not airing your dirty laundry anymore. Anyone’s shit-stained knickers are just a web search away nowadays. Howard Delafonte’s knickers had a divorce smeared across them. I guess the Missus finally left him. And, according to the internet, his oldest son is addicted to heroin, while his youngest has an arrest record for battery. Between my mother and Howard, I was part of a pretty nasty genetic cesspool.

He’s in the wine bar for a good thirty minutes before he comes out—a paper bag in his hand. He’s whistling, though I can’t hear the tune from my bench across the busy street. I wait until he’s almost to his car before I stand up and follow him. He hits the electronic button to open his car—not the Mustang, I notice, but a shiny, white Mercedes. He puts the paper bag in the backseat, then opens the door to the driver side. That’s when I make my move. I sprint across the street and grab onto the passenger side door, sliding into the car at the same time he does.

“Hey Dad.”

His face blanches. I expect him to leap out of the car, but after giving me a long, hard look, he buckles his seat belt, and the engine purrs to life. It’s raining. The wipers whip water back and forth as he pulls out of his space and onto the road. I feel slightly uneasy. I am at his mercy, and he can do anything he wants with me buckled into his front seat. I won’t give him the upper hand. I relax into my seat and wait for him to speak first. I want him to ask me why I’m here. I had to take five buses to get to the quaint little town he calls home, and I wonder now if he’s paranoid about one of his small town people seeing us together.

“Your mother … did you bury her?”

“Cremated,” I say.

He nods.

“Did you give her the Misoprostol?”

He nods again. I clench my fists and stare at the side of his face. It’s a strange thing, looking at your father. Knowing that you’re somewhere in his face—maybe the curve of a cheek, or the dip of a nose—and searching so hard for it that you want to cry, because you’re ashamed and desperate.

“You killed my sister. Why did you let me live?”

“How do you know … how do you know it was a girl?” he asks. He glances at me briefly.

“Because I found her on the floor.”

This seems to make Howard uncomfortable. He wipes a meaty hand across his face, then slams it down on the steering wheel. His gesture reminds me of why I’m here.

“She wanted you,” he says. “I tried to get her to have an abortion, and she wouldn’t do it.”

“She told me my father left…”

“That’s what I wanted her to say,” he says quickly. “We knew each other for a long time. I gave her the job at the firm when she graduated high school. It was different in those days. You could get a job based on competency rather than a degree. She was a very competent woman. Saved my ass a bunch of times when clients went haywire. I used to send her in to talk to them, calm them down.”

“I didn’t come here to reminisce about my mother,” I say.

“So why are you here?”

“I want to know about your regrets.”

He pulls into the parking lot of a diner—Peppered Pete’s—just off the highway. There are a couple of semis parked in the lot, a trucker’s diner. Before turning off the car, he says, “Let’s get something to eat.” I nod reluctantly. This will be my first official dinner with my father. I follow him out of the car and through the parking lot. He’s making things way too easy for me. He doesn’t wait to see if I’m tagging along.

When we get to the door, he holds it open for me. A real gentleman. The air in Peppered Pete’s is loaded with grease. But I can’t even remember the last time I was in a restaurant, so I feel charmed. We sit in the back by the bathrooms where every few minutes I hear a toilet flush. I don’t comment on Howard’s choice of table, or the fact that he positioned himself with his back to the door. I leave to go to the bathroom before the waitress can come over. “Whatever you have,” I tell him.

When I get back, there are two steaming mugs of coffee on the table. I hold my cup, but don’t drink anything.

“I loved her,” he says. “I wanted to marry her. My wife got sick…”

I think about my mother. Had she loved him? Had she been using him?

“But you didn’t want your children with her?”

He picks up his knife, sets it back down. “I have children.”

“If you loved her, you should have wanted
her
children.”

“You think it’s that simple, but it’s not,” he says. “You’re just a kid. You don’t know how hard things can get. Complicated.”

I smile wryly.

“Excuse me,” he says. He disappears into the restroom. The timing is perfect. It’s like the universe mapped it all out for me. I see our waitress turn the corner with two plates in her hand. I get up and go to the restroom again, making sure to leave my purse on the seat so she knows we didn’t run out on her. She can’t see my face. I come out a few seconds later. Blueberry pancakes, eggs, and bacon. I dip my hand into my purse and pull out the Ziploc baggie I brought.

Then he’s back, sliding into the booth, his hands still damp from washing.

“Margo.” It’s the first time he’s ever said my name. It makes me feel empty. Sad. My eyes dart around, looking for the waitress. She will be back in a minute to check on us … bring more coffee.

He takes the first bite of his pancakes. Then the second. I watch, mesmerized as he eats what I put on his pancakes.

“She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have a baby. I don’t know what she was saying to you, but she was depressed. She spoke about death a lot.”

“She didn’t speak to me at all.” I still haven’t touched my food. He looks up at me, his fork still cutting through pancakes. It looks like he wants to say something, but then changes his mind.

“I loved her,” he says again. “I don’t regret that.”

“You killed her … and the baby.”

He wipes his mouth with a napkin, and it leaves a purple smear. “No. That was … she wanted…”

“You gave her the drugs that killed her, ex-Mayor Delafonte. What will people think about that?”

“What do you want?”

I smile. “Nothing. Nothing at all. I have everything I need now.”

And with that, I get up and leave, keeping my head ducked.

I don’t know what happens after that. I don’t check. But I fed my father nightshades and hoped to hell he died.

THERE IS NOTHING
in the news about the former mayor, Howard Delafonte. I look and look, but I can’t find it. If the nightshades I gave him stopped up his black disgusting heart, no one was reporting it. Unlikely. I decide to take a bus out to Cress End, the town where he lives—larger than mine, but still smaller than most. I have an address for him that I found in a notebook in my mother’s bureau, scrawled in sharpie across the page. I wonder what she intended to do with it? If it ever crossed her mind to go to his home and confront him with his family watching. It was his old house I was going to see, the one where his children grew up. I walk the two miles from the bus stop and stand across the street under a sickly looking tree. The Delafonte house is a white colonial with plum shutters. The lawn is neat—evergreen bushes trimmed to ovals and smooth white stones lining the path to the door. I wonder if politicians always choose this style of home because it gives them a sense of the White House. I can imagine his children running across the lawn, and Christmas twinkling through the front window. I can imagine it all because it is the quintessential life.

I’ve been standing on the corner long enough to not be able to feel my toes, when the former Mrs. Delafonte walks out of her front door and heads down the path. It’s a quarter ‘til three in the afternoon. She opens her mailbox and bends her head low to look inside. I am shocked. She is the opposite of my pretty mother—round and sturdy with a helmet of iron-colored hair. She is wearing the ugliest sweater I’ve ever seen, which makes me smile. She likes ugly things; she might like me. She is about to turn to go back into the house when she spots me standing across the street. I stand very still as she crosses the two-laner, her head swinging left then right to check for traffic. She throws me a cautious smile that lights up her plain face.

“Hi there,” she says. “You from around here?”

I shake my head. She looks me curiously up and down, not the way rich people do when they’re assessing your net worth, but almost sweetly like she’s seeing what she can do to help.

“You okay, honey? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” And I have, haven’t I? The ghost of mayor Delafonte’s past.

“I’m okay,” I say. “Just a little lost.” That is true, isn’t it?

“Lost in life, or in the technical sense of the word?” she asks.

I just smile.

“Very well then…” She pivots her body toward the main road I walked down to get here and says, “Highway’s that way. You can also find the Greyhound station and the bus stop.” She turns so she’s facing the opposite way. “Over yonder is the pathetic excuse for a town—I’m more of a Seattle girl—but there’s a couple restaurants, the post office, stores that sell shit you don’t need, yada yada.” She turns to face me again. “Do you need some money? Do you have a way to get home?”

I nod my head, though my eyes are burning from the salt water fighting to escape my tear ducts. She wasn’t supposed to be so nice.

“Can I ask you a question?” I say. She stops her rundown of Cress End and blinks at me. There’s flour on her sweatshirt; I wonder what she’s baking.

“Yes,” she says. “I suppose you can.”

“Are you happy?”

She presses her lips together ‘til they burn white. “Well, that’s a strange question, isn’t it? I haven’t been asked that in a very long time…”

She stares out at nothing, her eyes narrow slits as she thinks. “I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time. It’s not the happiness I imagined for myself as a young girl, but I’m alive, and no one has broken my will to live.”

She looks directly at me then. “You have to be willing to be happy. Despite the mess of your life—just accept what’s happened, throw away your ideals, and create a new map of happiness to follow.”

It’s the best thing anyone has ever said to me. The best advice. I’m so sorry for what my mother and father have done to this woman that a single tear trickles down my cheek. I nod my head and turn to leave. If I were her daughter, I would have been good to her.

I am half a block away when she calls out, “Goodbye, Margo. Live well.”

I don’t stop walking, and I don’t turn to look back, though every hair on my body is standing up in a surprise salute. I can’t stop myself from wishing she had been my mother. A woman so kind, she takes the time to speak to her ex-husband’s bastard—probably the reason for her divorce in the first place. My mother wouldn’t even acknowledge me, and there she was, a stranger who had every right to hate me, speaking to me with incredible kindness.

My last stop is the wine bar my father owns. I want to see if he’s there, or if not, there should be someone who can tell me something about him. There’s a young man polishing glasses behind the bar when I step through the doors. He glances up and away quickly enough to let me know I’ve been dismissed.

“We’re not open ‘til six,” he says. “And you look too young to be in here anyway.”

“I’m looking for someone,” I say. “Mr. Delafonte…”

He looks up suddenly, and I realize I’m seeing my brother. He is the very image of his mother, with a little of Howard in his shoulders and around his downturned mouth.