Raveled (11 page)

Chapter
15

Allison… present

With a day to kill before meeting up with Jasper, I decided to take my mother into town. She didn’t venture in much anymore. The population had no doubt grown and memories had faded for many, but the deep roots of the community remained. With people like Mrs. Smith around to fertilize the gossip tree, Mom couldn’t hope to gain any degree of acceptance, let alone popularity. Heck, she’d settle for anonymity, but that was as likely as me reopening Artie’s Autos and expecting a thriving business. Usually, if Mom needed something, she’d drive to one of the new shopping centers in the bigger cities where she could walk without people shooting hateful glares in her direction, or order a sandwich without worrying someone had spat on it.

We passed my dad’s old garage on the way in. I would have avoided it, but the back roads were hell on shocks
and Mom’s old car had enough problems. The ancient green and white Artie’s Autos sign no doubt lay rusting in a dump somewhere. It had taken the neighborhood kids only a week after the discovery of Shelby’s body to destroy it. Rocks had shattered the lights. Graffiti had covered the letters. Words like
pervert
and
pedophile
and
killer
had decorated the outside walls of the structure that had provided our livelihood. I remembered passing it on my bike a few times and thinking how pretty the word
pedophile
looked. I didn’t even know what it meant then, but I liked the way it went down and up, down and up, with the
p, d, p,
and
l
, painted to give a three-dimensional effect in alternating pink and orange hues. A psychiatrist would have had a nice label for my reaction, but I preferred to think I was finding the positive in a negative situation. About as negative as you could get.

Mom
had tried to keep Artie’s Autos going for a while with Kevin and Enzo, but Enzo could barely walk in the place without feeling queasy and Kevin wanted to spend all his time working on a defense strategy for Dad. They’d helped her sell it to old Chester Givens a month later. Chester’s nephew, Graham, owned it now, but he’d stuck with the name
Chester’s Autos
, which now read
Che--er’s Auto-
, an irony not lost on this passerby. According to my mom, business was never as good for Chester and Graham as it had been for Dad, but there weren’t too many mechanics as gifted as Artie Fennimore had been.

“Sure is a different world today when they fix a car, isn’t it?”
my mom said as the garage faded into my rear-view mirror. “They figure out what’s wrong by hooking the car up to a computer. Can you imagine? I don’t think half these guys would know a dipstick from a popsicle stick.”

“Remember the greasy uniforms you had to wash
all the time?” I said.

She laughed. “One thing your father didn’t skimp on was the washing machine. I always told him to write it off as an expense for the garage, but he wasn’t very good at that stuff.
Enzo probably would have figured out to do that eventually. He had the head for business.”

“I ran into him, you know. He’s in town for his cousin’s wedding.”

“Really? How is he? I’d love to see him.”

“He’s huge,” I said. “Grew up and got all handsome. Runs a franchise of those oil-changing places.”

“Like Lube Auto?”

“Exactly like Lube Auto. That’s his company.”

“No!” my mother said. She shook her head in awe. “I never knew.”

I glanced at her to see if any resentment
dampened her joy for the skinny Mexican kid she used to feed. Nope. She’d either forgiven him for serving up the jet fuel that skunked up my dad and brother’s brains that night or she’d never blamed him at all.

“You know, Mom, he’s the primary donor to that fund.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ve often wondered about that.”

“
What do you mean?”

She turned to look out the window, perhaps reminiscing about a time when she liked this place, when it was still her
hometown.

“There were a thousand
if-only’s
that night,” she said. “If only they hadn’t stayed late to work. If only those customers’ cars hadn’t broken down. If only they’d left the guns locked up. If only it hadn’t been so hot. If only Bobby hadn’t stolen those tools. If only they’d come straight home. And then there’s one I hope Enzo doesn’t dwell on—if only he hadn’t broken out that horrid liquor.”

“I don’t see how he couldn’t dwell on it, Mom. He and I
chatted about it a little.”

She
whirled on me. “That night doesn’t have to be the focal point of every conversation, Allison.”

“Between us?”

“Between you and anyone. You can make small talk.”

“Small talk covers small things, Mom, like if you didn’t invite someone for barbecue and you run into them the next day. Or if gossip circles back around and you turn out to be the source. But small talk isn’t nearly stretchy enough to cover the mound of shit that was that night.”

“Allison! That’s very unladylike. I hope you don’t talk like that at your job.”

“Absolutely not,” I said with sarcasm stretching over the mound of shit I was about to lay on her. “I’d get fired in a heartbeat for cursing in a New York City bar.”

My mom stared at the approaching hub of Lavitte, its skyline as exciting as a Lego piece. If not broken up by the occasional silo in the distance, one might mistake it for a bump in the road.

“Where shall we go
for lunch, honey? Maybe somewhere not too crowded.”

Empty places, her solace.
I never understood Lavitte’s attitude towards Mom. It wasn’t like she sent Dad off every morning with a peck on the cheek and a cheery
Have a good day, Dear, and keep that murderous streak of yours in check
. Did they assume that her willingness to suffer a few slaps at Artie’s hand had emboldened him to up the ante to murder? Not that anyone in Lavitte took a slap to the wife real seriously then. Or now. All the ladies knew how the system worked. Our humble hamlet had mastered social networking long before Mark Zuckerberg came along, and no woman could
friend
the exclusionary Good Ol’ Boys network. If Mom had gone to the police and complained that Artie had slapped her for burning a steak, the cops would have taken her statement and asked if she wanted to press charges that would put her man in jail. Then they’d remind her that if she did, old Artie wouldn’t be around to provide for
her and them kids
. Besides, who would fix the police cars while Artie was locked up in the clinker? Once they’d shamed her for showing her slightly bruised face at all, they’d laugh behind her back and say that if a goddamn woman had the nerve to burn up a fine cut of prime rib, she deserved more than a red cheek. Maybe there’d be one or two decent fellas among the crowd, like today’s Detective Blake Barkley, but they’d have been as likely to speak up as a goldfish at a piranha convention.

Screw them
all. Mom and I were coming to town and she seemed to be in a great place today. I kept hoping that her whole memory thing was just the side effect of a passing virus and that she’d be back to normal in no time. But the bad spells came more frequently lately, and lasted longer. All the more reason to have some normal days while we could. Just let any of the locals mess with us. They’d find out I was no longer the confused girl forced to squelch her anger while eliciting sympathy from a jury. I’d love to get my hands on that jury today. They’d punted on their duty and they deserved to have someone call them on it.

“We’re pretty early for lunch,” I said. “We should be able to beat the crowd wherever we go. Then maybe we can catch a movie in a nice, cool theater.” Where we can sit in dark anonymity and avoid hostile stares.

“Oh good,” she said. “There’s a brand new theater. Four movies at once.”

We
chose a new restaurant, The Cozy Chair—the fourth proprietor to occupy the same site in as many years. I gave it six months. Ironically, despite its name, the wrought iron seats of the establishment pressed into my legs and hips in all the wrong places, but the sandwiches were awesome. Whole grain bread, romaine lettuce, and a cucumber-ginger mayo. The place must have been named for the oversized, stuffed chair in the center of the room where a collection of glum dolls sat in a row, their unseeing eyes staring out at the diners as if longing for life. But it reminded me less of Pinocchio than it did of the
Chucky
movies. I shifted in my seat so their eyes couldn’t suck out my soul.

As I
licked the final crumbs of sweet-potato chips from my fingers, I glanced across the street and down to Smitty’s house just as an ostentatious Cadillac pulled into the driveway. Mr. Abel Smith, no doubt. But not only Mr. Smith. When his passengers emerged, goose bumps crawled to life on my arms. Out of the front seat climbed Mrs. Smith, in a big hat and bug-eyed sunglasses, but out of the rear seat came the former mayor and his wife—Robert and Georgia Kettrick, Bobby’s parents.

Mayor Kettrick’s back bowed like a decrepit crypt keeper
. He’d been an older dad to Bobby and the marriage had produced only the one child. Or maybe Bobby had been so wonderful in their eyes, they couldn’t imagine another. The former mayor must have been closing in on seventy-five by now. The ring of hair around the base of his head had turned a steely grey and he wore it just long enough to be unnerving, like a man with well-kept, lengthy fingernails—a conscious choice. Even with the hunched spine, Mayor Kettrick took up a lot of space. A big, burly guy at well over six feet, he was definitely the source of Bobby’s football-ready body.

Mrs. Kettrick, on the other hand, was a whisper of a woman. But sometimes a whisper, well-directed, carried better across a room than a shout.
Despite her submissive standing to the mayor whenever they were out, tiny Georgia Kettrick dominated any room she entered with an upright posture and snooty nose to match. Maybe that bright blond topper she wore in a silky bob on her head gave her power like the cherry light atop a police car, the authority obvious with no need for a siren. In her petite, surely-manicured hands, she carried two bottles of wine. A gift for the Smiths, perhaps?

As if by telepathy, Mayor Kettrick
’s drooping head rotated slowly and steadily like a roasting pig on a spit. He ground it to a halt as his eyes seemed to bore into me through the large window of The Cozy Chair. I jerked back, pressed a paper napkin to my face, and averted my eyes to the table.

“You okay,
honey?” my mother asked, glancing out the window, but not far enough to see the mayor.

“
Fine,” I said. “A crumb went down the wrong way.” I sipped my water, hiding behind the glass as I peered across the street. The mayor and his wife followed the Smiths into their house. My eyes might have been playing tricks, but I thought I saw Smitty standing behind the screen door as they approached, eagerly awaiting the visitors. A few moments after they all entered, Smitty emerged onto the porch, scanned the immediate area, and then vanished inside, closing the heavy wooden door behind him.

“Shall we
get going?” my mother said.

I looked at
her, this woman who’d shown more guts in her life than I could ever hope to. She seemed innocent, perhaps even happy. I didn’t want to mar the mood but who knew how long her clarity would last?

“
Sure,” I said. “I saw a new shipment being delivered to North Carolina Antiques the other day. Want to check it out before the movie, see if they got anything that isn’t crap?”

“
You’re getting a bar of soap to the mouth when we get home, young lady.” But she smiled when she said it. Then she muttered, “They really do get lots of crap.”

As we exited, I glanced at the Smiths
’ house. “Looks like Mr. Smith has another new Caddy.”

“That’s like announcing a stray cat ha
s kittens,” my mom said, and then spared me the conversational manipulations I’d been planning. “Mayor Kettrick used to resent Mr. Smith’s Cadillacs. He always wanted to be the big shot in town but his Lincoln Town Car would break down twice a month.”

“What happened to the Kettricks?
I thought they moved.”

“
Only to a bigger house on the west side of town. Lots of land. I’m not sure exactly where.” She gave me a look that lay somewhere between resentment and sorrow. “They didn’t exactly leave me a forwarding address.”

I wanted to stop
asking questions, wanted to let my mom enjoy one day that didn’t revolve around that night. I remembered how she and Georgia Kettrick had been in the PTA together for years. They’d always organized the annual bake sale and had even co-chaired the local garden club, though Mrs. Kettrick surely resented the
co-
in front of her title. Never had been enough for Mrs. Kettrick to be
Mrs. Mayor
. In seventh grade, I’d helped my mom and Mrs. Kettrick plant a new flower bed at one of the local parks. The insignificant event had stayed with me because Mom had surprised me with my own spade—yellow and purple with a handle molded in a grippy rubber. Mrs. Kettrick, whose knees hadn’t touched the ground that day, chose which plants would go where while my mother and I had crouched, dug and perspired. Granted, Mrs. Kettrick knew her stuff, but only because she had more acreage to experiment with at her house. A magazine had even photographed her gardens once for a feature article that should have been called
The Gardens of Big Fish in Minuscule Ponds
, but was instead called
Notable Gardens of Small Town America
. The title had irked her so much that she’d called the editor and said she never would have agreed to be featured in their tacky magazine had she been aware of the article’s insulting title. Georgia Kettrick may have lived in a small town, but
she
wasn’t small-town and she looked down her squared-off nose at anyone who insinuated she was, although she’d do it with the utmost courtesy and a sweet howdy-do.