Safe from Harm (9781101619629) (24 page)

“And when I sit Jenny down to talk to her, what I get back is not, ‘Oh, I love you, don't leave me.' Jenny thinks this could be
her
ticket out. Right? You got that? I'd be married to a rich lady and I could make a nice settlement on her. Jenny is
excited
. Our marriage was clearly over—at least that part I know I didn't ruin.

“But Bear, rich people don't get to be rich people by throwing their money away. Liz's lawyer has me move out of the trailer and into an apartment while he handles the whole mediation—I'm not even there except for the end when he calls me in and says ‘Sign here' and I do.”

I had started this lunch feeling sorry for Mark. I wanted to help him be a stand-up man—the more I heard, the less I liked him.

“The divorce is finalized three months and one week after Liz promised Jenny the new trailer and the lawyer tells her she'll get thirty percent of my salary. I'm getting married to my
second
pregnant wife. Then Jenny finds out that she is going to get thirty percent of nothing. Liz has structured my salary so that I'm not making much more than I was when I was working the fourdrinier machine.
And
Liz wants me to pay ‘my fair share' of the household expenses. Bear, when I'm done paying those two women, I got
nothing
in my pocket. I had to go hat in hand to Liz to ask for money to pay for Phoebe's
school pictures
!” He's smiling as if this is all a funny story and not his own messed-up life.

“I'm going to have a beer,” he said. “You want a beer?”

I shook my head. I wanted to go home and take a long walk with Baby Bear and then tuck Jo in bed if she'd let me and then pull Annie into the shower with me and scrub her back and hold my good woman in my arms and tell her I would never stray because even if I didn't think it was wrong, it is way too complicated for this old guy.

You know that play,
No Exit
? One of those French existentialist guys wrote it. It's about personalized Hell. That's what Mark was describing to me—my version of Hell. The man could have his house and his garden. You know what? The price was too damn high.

The waiter brought Mark a frosted glass. It looked good but it was early afternoon and I was going back to the office. If the story was ever over.

“Then, because that's not enough, right? God hasn't punished me enough already. The boys come early and they have to be in the incubator and however I felt about Liz, I loved those boys the second I got ahold of them. What little fighters.”

Mark threw his hands up, “And then Jenny gets sick. Look. I didn't love her anymore. But I didn't
hate
the woman, and I wouldn't wish throat cancer on Kim Jong Il—or his son. Phoebe is there and I can't get her to come live with us, not that Liz is encouraging her to. And, oh my God, when I go over there to get Phoebe? If Mitch, Jenny's dad, was there, he'd get on me like pitch, he never stopped, what a lowlife I was, that it was my fault his daughter was sick. On and on he went. That old man was a loon. How was it my fault Jenny got cancer? She smoked two packs a day!
That's
why she got cancer!” Mark pointed his fork at me. “Do you know Mitch had a life insurance policy on Jenny? With
himself
as the beneficiary? I could see it if the money had been for Phoebe, for her college fund, say. But for himself? Do you have policies on your daughters?”

Okay, this was awkward. I had to admit I did.

“The girls have whole-life policies. If they cash them in when they're fifty, I think, they'll be worth a little money. My agent convinced me.”

Mark looked surprised but he didn't comment. Instead he continued, “Jenny had a life insurance policy on herself. I think some good-looking salesman talked her into it. That one goes to Phoebe—went to Phoebe. Mitch will get that one, too. The way he lives, he won't have to work again.” Mark propped his elbows on the table and leaned over to me. “One thing Mitch DeWitt had right. I did have to help out some, you know? Only where's the money coming from? Not Liz! I barely brought the subject up and Liz crawled right down my throat, grabbed a handful of my testicles and pulled them up to my sternum before she let go. Damn me.” He shook his head at the memory.

“I pawned my Rolex.
I
didn't know how much Liz had paid for it. I didn't know a watch
could
cost that much. I gave the money I got to Jenny and right away, I mean, a
day
after the watch was gone, Liz noticed it was missing. I told her I lost it. I go to sleep and she wakes me up in the middle of the night holding the pawn ticket. She went through my wallet.” Mark drank deeply and then laughed mid-sip, spraying foam across the table. “Oh, geez, Bear, I'm sorry.” He handed me a linen napkin. “Only, Bear, you should have seen her. She's holding the ticket in my face and she is shaking, she's so mad. You remember those old cartoons, there'd be a bull, ripping up the sod with his hooves and smoke coming out his nose and the bull is making a sound like a steam engine? That was Liz.” His laugh died down. He pulled a cuff up to show me a blue-faced Rolex surrounded with diamonds. “See that?” he said, “I'm not supposed to take it off. Not even to swim—it's waterproof to some depth I don't plan on going to. I wear it when I sleep. She wants that damn watch on, and if I want any peace, I've got to wear it.”

“What's next, Mark?” I didn't want to hurry him . . . no, I did want to hurry him. I didn't want to
look
like I was hurrying him.

“This is my plan.” He knew I was getting impatient and he got to business. “First, the memorial service. Next, I'm taking Toby and Tanner to the Hermann Park Zoo, and we're going to ride the train. I'm going to get the last car in the train, and I'm going to scatter Phoebe's ashes on the train tracks.”

“What?”

“I didn't have any money when Phoebe was little, but I had enough for the zoo and the train. We went to the zoo almost every weekend. Jenny would pack us a lunch and she'd go have a day with her friends while Phoebe and I went to the zoo. And we always rode the train, even if it rained. She loved it. It made her happy.” He finished his beer and put a platinum card on the table. It was whisked away almost before it settled. “It's not like she's going to be in that box anyway, Bear.”

I knew he was right. I hoped the conductor didn't catch him.

“Once that's done I'm getting a job.”

“I thought you were working?”

His mouth twisted. “Not after she sold the company. I follow her around while she looks for investment property. But I'm through with that. I think I can get a job as a golf pro at Bridgewater. I won't make that much, but it will be my own money.”

“How's all this going to go down with Liz? The name change, the job?”

He gave a shrug. “Guess I'll find out.” He gave me his perfect-toothed grin. “My granddad says Liz will thank me if I start acting like a man. We'll see. Liz may be a different breed of woman than what Granddad's familiar with.”

“What if she tells you it's her way or the highway?”

“She won't.” A quick, tight smile, no teeth. “As long as I don't push her too hard, as long as she can spin it, ‘Mark is such an independent spirit,' something like that. She's not going to want her picture broken up even more.”

I thought Mark was probably right about that.

Sixteen

T
he Pickersleys got a huge turnout for Thursday's seven o'clock memorial service. There's nothing like dying to make a teenager appreciated. Kids love a tragedy. Something to do with hormones.

Liz was surrounded by women from the church and I'm glad to report that she was composed and dignified and if she wasn't warm when she greeted me, neither did she dance around me on her toes, hissing like a lizard. So that was good. I wondered if she would give as composed a greeting to DeWitt when he showed up. After all, she hadn't told me I couldn't come. She had said I couldn't do the service—it was DeWitt she had told not to come. I wasn't expecting Mitch DeWitt to ignore his granddaughter's service.

Liz's mom, Susan, was there, again wearing beautiful clothes and looking uncomfortable in them. Sue Ellen stood outside the funeral home door and smoked cigarette after cigarette before dusting the ash off a black jacket and stalking inside. Mark's grandfather introduced me to his son Jimmy, Mark's father, who looked mad, and Mark's mother Lou who looked weepy. Annie Laurie sought them out and told them stories about her times with Phoebe. Dan's eyes filled and he looked madder than ever.

Alex arrived and scanned the building. He saw me and headed my way.

“Where's Jo?”

“I thought she was coming with you.”

“Yeah, well, she changed her mind, but she should be here by now, shouldn't she? The service starts in fifteen minutes.”

I interrupted him to greet a newcomer.

Jonathon Reece had come with his brother David. Jonathon had kept in touch with Brick and Jason, our youth ministers, and had learned about Phoebe's death from them.

I shook David's hand, but it was withdrawn too quickly for me to be able to read the letters tattooed across the knuckles.

I asked Jonathon where he had ended up interning after leaving us.

“Mr. Wells, I think God has turned me in a different direction. All the churches I had applied to had already filled their rosters, but by a happy chance, a pastor I know told me his brother's law firm was looking for an intern. I spent the summer at Cobble and Shelby in Dallas and I loved it. I'll be taking the LSAT in January.”

Ahh. That was a disappointment. I really did think this young man was cut out for the ministry. I know many fine lawyers, good and godly men and women. But that's the thing—I know a ton of them. There are so few gifted young people who feel drawn to the ministry.

With an effort, I kept my smile on. “That's fine, Jonathon. I know you'll be a success.” The idea that our church had played a part in his decision to turn away from the ministry just made me sick. “How does your mother feel about the career change?”

Jonathon checked out the tips of his shoes. “Fine. Mom's fine about it.”

David spoke up, his voice a low purr. “Our mom is getting on her knees every night praying Jonathon will see things true again. It's a shame your church didn't protect your interns as well as you protected your own kids.”

I flushed and Jonathon grabbed his brother's elbow to pull him away, but David stood his ground.

Alex touched my back. “Mr. Wells—”

I said, “Wait a minute, Alex. David, you're right, we should have done a better job and we have put some changes in place—”

“Too late for Jonathon, you hear what I'm saying?”

“David, would you please—” began Jonathon.

“Jonathon could have gone to any church he wanted to. My parents never wanted him to come out here to your rich white—”

Jonathon swung his brother around. “This is not—”

Alex stepped in between us and said, “Mr. Wells, I have to talk to you
now
and no, I can't wait a minute. I'm trying to do the right thing here but if you don't come with me right this second, I'm doing it on my own.”

The three of us stared at Alex, who stared back and then strode off.

I said, “Excuse me, please.” The boy had his car keys in hand and was out the door before I caught up to him. “Alex, what the heck?”

“Jo isn't here. She's on her way to that trailer park.”

“What?”

He didn't slow down. “Jo's headed to Phoebe's trailer.”

“
What
?”

“I'm going to go get her.” He unlocked the huge, red Ford F-150 truck his grandfather had bought him for his sixteenth birthday. It was a big truck made bigger to accommodate the thirty-five-inch Toyo all-terrain tires beneath it.

“Wait a minute, Alex—”

“She's got at least fifteen minutes on me and I'm not waiting. You want to go, get in the truck.”

“I'll drive,” I said.

“You don't know how to get there,” he said, and swung himself up into the cab.

I held my keys up and jingled them. “You could give me directions, Alex. I can take directions.”

He shut his door in my face and powered down his window. He looked down at me from the ridiculous height that truck was jacked up to. “Can you?” he asked. “Then get into the truck.”

I didn't know where the trailer park was. I couldn't even remember the name of the place. Out by Hobby was all I knew. I climbed into Alex's jacked-up truck and buckled my seat belt. I was mad but he had me. There was no way I was going to let this boy take care of a situation that called for a man.

The truck had a new addition: a gun rack in the back window, complete with a glossy Remington 1100, an automatic shotgun

“You allowed to carry that thing?”

“I am. This is Texas.”

I sighed. Cold dead fingers and all that.

“I've got to make a call,” I said and punched in Brick's number.

He answered right away. “Bear?”

“You're going to have to do the eulogy, Brick, I've got an emergency.” I checked my seat. Alex was not driving to impress his girlfriend's dad tonight. He was driving to get from point A to point B in the shortest time possible.

“What?”

“You heard me, Brick.”

“Wait. Me? Oh, no. Ask Jason. I can't do it.”

“I didn't ask Jason, I asked you. And I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. This is a job, Brick. Sometimes that job means you fill in for someone else. Today you're filling in for me. You're going to have about twenty minutes, so go someplace quiet, collect yourself, say a prayer and jot down a few notes. Talk from the heart. You'll do fine.”

“What's wrong? Why can't you do it? Didn't they ask you? I've never done a eulogy. I don't know any dead people.”

Alex didn't bother with the driveway. His monster tires bounced off the curb and onto the frontage road.

“You knew Phoebe. Do your best. That's all I was going to do.”

“Oh, Bear, I can't do this, I—”

“Cowboy up, Brick.” I closed the phone call. “What the heck is going on?” I said to Alex.

He didn't let up on the gas pedal. “I'm going to be dead for telling you this,” he said, “but if anything happens to my Jo, I die anyway.”

See, this was the kind of talk Annie Laurie and I object to.
His
Jo. I tried Jo's phone. No answer. “She's not
your
Jo, Alex. She's mine. I know my daughter better than you ever will.”

Alex cut in front of an eighteen-wheeler and entered the freeway a quarter inch ahead of its bumper. The driver gave us a taste of his air horn. I used a word I haven't used since college.

“Really? Know about the tattoo?”

I didn't reply. There was no tattoo. The girls know how I feel about tattoos.

“Don't crack up over it, Mr. Wells. It's the size of my thumbnail. A gray-and-white bird. A phoebe.”

“Oh yeah? Where is it?” There was no tattoo.

“On the nape of her neck. She got it Monday. After school. You know that place across the block from her dance class?”

I had noticed the small storefront when it moved in and thought it didn't have a chance of surviving in the suburbs.

Alex glanced over when I didn't say anything. “Don't worry about it. Her hair covers it. She's going to tell you. I made her promise she would.”

Alex had made my daughter promise to tell me. To let me in on the news. To allow me to be a part of her life. My daughter.
My
Jo.

“All right, fine. I don't know anything. You want to tell me what's going on?”
Or do you want to keep on lording it over me?
I added silently.

“You told Jo that Phoebe killed herself by overdosing on Dilaudid.”

“So? Oh, my gosh, look out for that Mini!” I saw a white-faced passenger stare out at us as Alex whipped to the side of the slow-moving toy car.

“
So
,
Jo doesn't think Phoebe killed herself. Either she can't, or she won't, believe it. She wanted to go to that trailer to look for . . . to see if she can find out anything and she asked me to take her. I said we didn't want to miss the service. Jo said there was more than one way to honor a person's death and she was honoring Phoebe in her own way. I said I'd take her tomorrow, it wasn't safe at night. We had a fight and she stomped off.”

“Well, dang it, Alex, she's not at the trailer then, she doesn't have any way to get there.” I didn't add “Duh,” but I thought it. It's not like the greater Houston area is known for its public transportation system. Every Texan over sixteen has a car. It's practically the law.

“Cara took her.”

“Cara didn't take her—whoa!” Alex took the entrance ramp to the Sam Houston Tollway at a speed the engineers had not planned for. I began again. “Cara can't drive, either.”

“Yes, she can. Better than—”

“Cara's fifteen, too!”

Alex squeezed between a van and a tow truck and I swallowed my teeth.

“She can't drive
legally
, but her dad started teaching her when she was five, out at their ranch. She can drive.” He threw me a look. “Cara's parents are at the memorial service for Phoebe. She took her dad's Jeep.” Alex blew through the first EZ TAG station.

“The one with no top or doors?”

“That's the only one he has.”

See, that's not a vehicle, that's a grown-man's toy. That's not the car you stick a newbie driver in. Annie Laurie and I had given Merrie a 1993 Volvo sedan. It won't go very fast and it's armored like a tank. That's a good car. I felt sick. I sent Annie a text so she could feel sick, too.

“Where is this place?”

“Telephone Road between Almeda-Genoa and Hobby Airport.”

That would be a half-hour drive, easy, if you never hit a red light and everybody else in the city was driving somewhere else, leaving the roads wide open for you.

Telephone Road is a broad, flat ribbon of a road lined with strip centers with check-cashing stores, liquor and convenience stores and the kind of resale shop that stacks worn and battered baby furniture on the sidewalk outside its doors. There are a number of charmless apartment complexes promising the first's month's rent free. Telephone Road is the kind of place where men congregate in parking lots and on corners to do their drinking and talking and fighting. It's not a place you want your fifteen-year-old daughter and her fifteen-year-old friend to be out after dark in an open-top, doorless Jeep that can't be locked.

I had a vision of the girls stopped at a red light. Oh my gosh.

“Let me drive,” I said.

“No.”

“Well, can you go any faster?”

Alex pressed his foot down and the red monster roared. Up ahead, cars were parting for us.

“Jo isn't answering her phone,” I said after trying for the twentieth time to call her.

“I know it.” He didn't add, “Duh,” but it was clear he thought it.

“So how do you know what she's doing?”

“Because Cara posted it on Facebook.”

Well, sure she did. Because if you're fifteen years old, it doesn't occur to you to go or do anything without letting the whole world know it—just on the outside chance that someone might be interested.

I shut up. We were making too big a deal of this, me and Alex. It couldn't be that bad. I was overreacting. Lots of girls live on Telephone Road . . . lots of girls who know where it's safe to be and where it isn't; lots of girls who aren't driving their daddy's forty-thousand-dollar modified Jeep Wrangler, sans top and doors, in a glossy burnt orange, Go Texas!

“How do I get on Facebook?”

“Aw, Mr. Wells, don't go there, okay?”

Alex took the Telephone Road exit. He didn't even slow when he turned left and pulled between crumbling brick columns that held up a sign reading
VAN MANOR
.

I yelled, “Alex!” and he slammed on his brakes before he hit a scruffy puppy blinded by his lights. The puppy wobbled off the road and Alex crept forward through the narrow, unlit alleys, trailer homes and RVs on either side. Alex slowed to a stop.

I saw the orange Jeep parked next to a green-and-white mobile home. The Jeep was empty. I had my hand on the door handle when a girl's face slapped up against my window. I yelled.

It was Cara, her eyes saucer-big. She fumbled at the door handle and in spite of her, I got the door open. Cara fell into my arms and grabbed my head. She put her mouth to my ear.

“Mr. Wells, Jo's inside but someone's there and he was yelling and he's got a gun and I called nine-one-one and I didn't know what to do and Jo was crying!” The last three words were a soft wail in my ear.

“Cara, get in the truck with Alex and lock the doors. Stay there. Lie down on the floor. Don't either of you dare move until the police tell you it's okay.”

Wanderley would have told me to wait for the police, too. I set Cara aside and moved toward the trailer. There were no lights on. Behind me, I heard the squeak of a screen door opening. I turned and saw the large form of a woman. A soft voice said, “That's Mr. DeWitt's trailer.”