So Close (6 page)

              “Where are we going?”

              He doubled back to swipe two bottles of champagne from behind the bar as his mother took the microphone to welcome everyone.

              “Won’t we miss Tom introducing Watkins?”  I asked as I followed him down the uneven steps. 

              He plunked himself in the sand just below the dunes.  “You don’t want to be up there,” he said as I stumbled down to him in my heels. 

              “Well, I kind of do, actually.”  Then I realized maybe he wasn’t embarrassed for himself, but angry at me—maybe he thought I’d ruined his night.  Over the waves I could hear everyone applauding as Cricket handed the mike to Tom Davis. 

              Pax took a long swig.

              “Really?” I asked.

              “What?”

              “You’re just going to sit down here and get trashed?”

              “So?”

              “So, you’re ridiculous.”  I wanted him to apologize to me or shrug it off.  At the very least stick it out at the party.  “You walk around looking like an Abercrombie ad and now you’re sitting here like one of those eighties movies on cable.  So that guy is a dick, so what?”

              “You don’t know anything about me.”

              “You’re right.  I don’t.”  I wanted to strip that dress off and throw it in his face.  The ocean air was beautiful and I wasn’t working—I was here—with him—and this should have been different.

              He picked up a stick of sea grass and made an arc in the sand.  “I guess I should be touched the bore’s been vouching for me—however ‘reluctantly’.”

              Pax didn’t even notice I’d been called a ho—again.  It was all about him, which just made me angrier.  “I’m sure he just cares about you and wants to give you time to find your footing.”  It was a very un-me thing to say, but I couldn’t afford to give up on trying to network and I didn’t have the guts to walk back alone. 

              “What Taggart loves is breaking ninety on the golf course, Pym’s GPA, and when the Dow crosses fifteen hundred.  Look, he’s not a bad guy—he adopted a junkie’s kid—everyone around here thinks he’s a saint.”

              “Your Dad was an addict?  Is he still using?”

              He snorted.  “When you have as much money as my dad you can get your blood cleaned every day.  He’ll live to be a hundred.”

              I nodded.  He wanted me to feel sorry for him.  But whatever kind of trapeze act his life might have been I saw a big fat safety net under everyone in it.

              He took another long draw and looked up at me.  “Shit, you’re so hot in that dress.  I didn’t bring a blanket,” he said as if he expected one to just appear.  Maybe things just appeared in his life—I had.  “How do you feel about getting sand in your hair?” 

              As.  If.  “Does that line work?”

              “Usually.”

              “Dude.  I would give an-y-thing to have a job I couldn’t get fired from.  A family that could send me to college.  I bet you’ve never been hungry.  Or left alone to figure out how to take care of a kid a third your age.  You have first class problems, princess.”

              His eyes darkened.  “The night we met you were so insulted when I tried to hold the limo door for you that you went in on Trevor’s side instead—which is how you kicked off that mistake.  I may have too much, but it’s taught me how to take what’s on offer.” 

“Well,
I’m
not.”  I stomped back up the steps and found my way to the house as the Senator was finishing his speech.  I quickly cut across the lawn to the white-jacketed valets.  “I don’t have a ticket,” I told them. “But it’s the only Honda with a duct-taped door.”

              As I stood there waiting, fuming, chagrined, disappointed, one of the staff showed another his phone.  “Shit,” he said, voice low.  “Isn’t that the guy they’re raising money for tonight?  Watkins?  Damn.”

              “What?”  I asked as the party behind us got suddenly silent and it seemed some sort of ripple was going through the guests.

              The guy extended his phone to me and I saw a photo with black-bars over the nipples.  “Somebody hacked the Senator’s phone and found a lot of pictures of titties—sorry, uh.”

              “I’ve heard the word.”  My car came belching over.  As I was about to get into the driver’s seat I saw the Davises rushing back down into thrum of tittering tables from the veranda, with their arms linked, and I tried to imagine having a partner.  I’d never felt that—romantically or otherwise. 

I also had no idea what the fuck a bootstrap was, but I had an inkling that it was probably myself. 

Chapter Three

Seeing Delilah sucking Saltines the next morning, her skin once again the same green as the ratty couch blanket, sent me out of the trailer as fast as my sneakers could go.  By nine am I was already slapping the offending dress and heels on the counter of the Post Office.  “Hey, Vera.”  I puffed at my sweat-slickened bangs.  “What’s the cheapest way to mail this?”  I looked at the rack of Priority Mail envelopes.  Had it been an option I’d have plopped Mom in one, too. 
Dear Pax, real life from me to you.
   

“Fancy.”  Vera eyed my booty over the newspaper whose reading she metered out to last until closing.  “You don’t want ’em?”

              “No.  Nope.  So . . .”  I twisted my lips to the side.  “Yeah.”

              “Shame.”  She drummed her flamingo-hued nails and I recognized Tom Davis’s face in the photo beneath them.  She clapped her hands excitedly, bringing my attention back to her.  “Sell ’em on ebay, how ’bout that?”

              “Delilah already made that suggestion.”  Yelled it out from the bathroom floor, to be precise.

              “Bet she did,” Vera said with an implication I’d long since learned to ignore.

                “So how much?”  I hated that I cared enough to send his purchases back.  It was exactly the wrong amount of caring.  But the satisfaction in imagining Pax’s chagrin was the only potentially attainable thing I had going at the moment.  Usually, I wasn’t that girl.  I was the one who’d worked her way through Stephen King in the passenger seat of her mom’s Buick while her mom waited for some guy to leave his own house.  That woman put more energy than she applied to just about anything into analyzing what those asshats did in the steps to their cars.  As if a lighter-flick, phone-check or wedgie-tug revealed something relevant to her, or us—it never did. 

But I just couldn’t stomach the idea of Pax thinking he’d given me a treat yesterday.  Or writing me off because he’d brightened my sad little life with a dress he’d picture me storing in my sad little closet and embracing in Brokeback moments of regret.  My life would not be sad.  It would not be little.  And he sure as hell was not
cause for regret.  “I want it gone.  How much to West Palm?” 

              “Hold up, now.  Lemme see.”  Vera hopped off her stool, her toes bulging over the soles of her flip-flops as if sprouting from the green plastic leaves on their straps. 

The fan, decades into its losing battle with the humidity, kept pace with Vera’s geisha shuffle.  “Fifteen dollars and seventy-five cents, Priority.  Or eleven fifty, First Class.” I did not have twelve dollars to spend on this.

              “Really, nothing cheaper?  How much for a hitchhiker heading south?”

              “Seven bucks for Parcel Post.  That’s for books and magazines, but I won’t tell if you don’t.  Best I can do.”

              It was a quart of milk, two loaves of bread and a torn package of eggs.  A gallon and three quick hand pumps of gas.   I needed money to make my point that I didn’t need money.  The luxe fabric slid over the edges of the plastic scale like a jellyfish attempting escape. 

Get it together, Amanda.

I had hoped by the time I saw Grammy I’d have good news or, really,
any
news, so I’d avoided telling her I was home.  But after seeing Vera, if Grammy didn’t already know, she would within the hour. 

Walking up to her little Victorian always made my chest rise in anticipation of the comfort that would greet me there, complicated as it was.  In that house, designed for the air to cross through before machines could be plugged in to force it, order awaited me.  I knocked on the porch’s screen door, pressing my forehead against the mesh to peer into the breezeway.  “Grammy?”

              She came out from the kitchen, hands wet, stopping when she saw me, an irrepressible smile breaking through her obvious dismay.  Grammy knew; how hard I tried, how much I wanted—she wanted it all for me.  When I was struggling to make enough money at Kath’s to stay in college she offered to take out a reverse mortgage.  I couldn’t let her do it—if only because I needed the security of being related to at least one person not in imminent danger of losing her home.  When my grades started slipping from exhaustion she held her tongue and when I told her I was leaving with Diego I know she hoped for the best but feared . . . well, here I was.

“Hi,” I said in a small voice.  Drying her hands on the apron she wore over her work dresses, she unlatched the door and held it open.

“Come here.”  She reached up to hug me to her, the faint scent of gardenia and baby powder making me rest my eyes for a half-second. 

“Missed you,” I said into her soft shoulder.

              She pushed me back and cocked her head sternly.  “Now don’t you mistake my being happy to see you for my being happy to see you.”

              “No, ma’am.” 

Everything was exactly as it always had been, the shades three quarters drawn, the little living room we never sat in with it’s vase of Jonquil from her garden, the wood floor creaking with each step—making the sneaking out Delilah did as a teenager impressive on a certain level. 

I followed her grey pin curls to the kitchen where I knew she’d be drinking her coffee before leaving to answer phones at the dentist’s office.  When my grandfather had been alive he’d had strong opinions on the subject of married women working.  He’d apparently had strong opinions on just about everything.  But as long as I could remember Grammy liked having a place to go every day.  And even in Tallyville the cost of living had outpaced social security pretty sharply. 

On the Formica table sat the basket waiting to be taken upstairs with her pressed pillowcases, just one of the little rituals that defined her.  Delilah did not believe in ironing.  If my grandfather had strong opinions Delilah had equally strong beliefs.  And she did not believe in anything Grammy. 

              At eighteen Barbara had had ‘the good sense’ to marry Richard Luker, a man who was always found where he was supposed to be.  Either keeping the books for Harding Citrus Suppliers or at church if it was a Sunday.  I never met him.  He died a month before I was born, “from shame,” Grammy supposedly told Delilah.  Had there been someone to point a gun at he would have seen to it that a wedding to his knocked-up daughter would have occurred, but my dad was apparently just, “some guy passing through.” 

I’ve been told by both of them that Grammy tried to get Mom to come home after I was born, but on
her
terms.  Which, knowing Delilah, was pretty much like saying don’t come home.  Grammy tried to help out with me—and later, with Billy—but her help always came with a lot of questions: “Is Mandy getting enough calcium?” “Why don’t you get her shoes with some arch support?” that would send Delilah into a rage: “I am perfectly capable of taking care of my own Goddamn children!” (She was not.) Which would make Grammy tear up. 

While it wasn’t a frequent occurrence, being around Grammy and Mom at the same time felt like standing in an electrical storm.  I told myself that I didn’t mind that Grammy had attempted, not so quietly, to wash her hands of Mom.  A part of me needed to know such a thing was possible. 

“Vera says hello,” I ventured as Grammy wrapped her sandwich in wax paper.  “I’m sorry I didn’t stop in earlier.”

She nodded me over to the table as she lay down a crisp linen placemat.  I took a seat.  Cold tea was poured over crackling ice and two Stella D’Oros were taken from the jar.  I could never reconcile that Mom had grown up with things like full cookie jars.  Although, as she’d be the first to tell you a few drinks down, it wasn’t the cookie jars she was running away from, so much as their getting thrown at the wall.  My grandfather’s impatience for Delilah being Delilah didn’t start at my conception.

              Grammy stood at the end of the table while I took a long sip.  The fact that she wasn’t joining me or returning to her coffee meant that I was to explain myself.  I searched for a spin on my failed departure. 

She spoke instead, “Your Momma should have left you well enough alone in Miami.”

              “Pardon?”

              “You were getting yourself settled.  She had no right to rope you back into this mess.”  So she knew.  She shook her head, her face pulled downward by the pregnancy, her daughter compounding a disaster Grammy had failed to contain the first two times. 

              “She didn’t.  I came back on my own.”

She studied me for signs of lying, looking no more relieved at finding none.  “I’m between things,” I said quickly, cringing.  We both knew where I’d gotten that phrase.  The disappointment in her eyes was unbearable.  Averting them, mine landed on the newspaper at the other end of the table.  Tom Davis.  I craned to read the headline. 
Tom Davis Running for Watkins’ Seat.
  “On my way, I mean.”  I would have said anything to make our present circumstances not be what they were.  “To something pretty different, actually.” 

She waited for me to continue.

I wanted it to be true.  “In government.”

              “Government?”

              “Yes, that guy was speaking at the hotel where I was working.” I pointed at the paper.  “Tom Davis?  Well, he’s running to take over from Watkins, who—”

“Yes, I saw it on the news—these politicians are disgusting.”

“It’s a last minute thing so there’s a lot going on.” It
was
last minute.  There probably
was
a lot going on.  I mitigated the risk of failing her lie detector.  “I’m going to join the campaign.”