Concrete Angel (35 page)

She’d buy some expensive items with a counterfeit check and return the goods an hour or two later for cash. Thanks to Bud’s pal, she carried a wallet full of fraudulent IDs. She had to be quick though. Sometimes she and Bud altered the date on the receipt, too. It felt great to get something back from the kind of establishments that had sent her to the “country club” all those years ago. Once, on a dare from Bud, she stole a crocodile handbag from Wanamaker’s. Her heart raced as she headed for the door, but nobody gave her a second glance. Nobody expected that a well-dressed woman pushing an expensive stroller with an adorable child in it was up to no good. Profiling was a long way off.

I
didn’t know about any of this.

“Where are all these clothes coming from?” I asked her, looking in horror as the piles on her bureau and hangers in her closet grew in number. She’d resumed her old methods of housekeeping once Mickey fled the scene and the tabletops were spilling over with new stuff.

She had a shitty, shifty look on her face that always meant trouble.

“Bud’s hired me as an associate.” She was looking everywhere in the room but at me. “I told you about this already—about how we had a business starting up. I’m gonna pay visits to doctors’ offices and hand out brochures. Maybe try a few rehab centers—that sort of thing. I have to look professional. ”

This was a complete lie, but it would be a while before I knew it. Before Jason, when my attention was fixed on her like a spotlight, I might have realized the unlikelihood of her spending her days passing out brochures for a boyfriend.

“And you’re going to wear this?” I said, holding up a negligee.

“Bud said to get a few things for myself. I do get paid for my work.”

I felt like asking her what kind of work she was getting paid to do in negligees, but bit my tongue as I’d done a thousand times before.

“Who’s going to watch Ryan while you’re…selling Bud’s services?” My brother was now too active for my grandmother to watch for any length of time. But Mother would never admit this.

“Oh, I can take him along. I only drive to a few offices at a time. Ryan actually helps me out—being such a cutie pie.” She crinkled her face, and I struggled not to barf.

But that part
was
true. He was the lynchpin in Mother’s new scheme. But the venue for her endeavors was not doctors’ offices.

E
ve dressed Ryan more carefully than she dressed herself, buying him little sailor outfits, baseball uniforms—anything drawing attention away from the bogus IDs she offered stores, away from the fraudulent amounts on a receipt she handed over for a refund. He was her greatest diversion, thwarting, through his charm, the possibility that too much attention would be focused on her transactions. She learned quickly how welcoming department stores were to attractive women with cute babies, women who appeared to have plenty of money to spend and the will to spend it. In other words, her.

“What a darling child,” the person in line in front of her at the cash register might say, drawing the eyes and attention of the clerk and other customers away. “What a sweet outfit.”

Within weeks, Eve began to test the boundaries of their little scam. She’d pick an expensive item off a store rack—something like a silk blouse or a cashmere scarf—and surreptitiously rip off the alarm tags with a tool Bud gave her. Next, she’d push Ryan over to the service desk, seemingly overwhelmed by her child, her shopping bags, coats, his toys, and ask for a refund. She usually had a number of legitimate purchases she piled on the counter, creating a certain amount of chaos for the clerk. Most of the time, the clerks, taken aback by the atmosphere surrounding her, handed her a refund without asking for a receipt. She often chose an hour when the clerks were likely to be busy and anxious to send her on her way: Saturday afternoon was the best time. If she couldn’t remove the tag with her tool, she slipped it inside a foil bag and exited the store and had Bud remove it later.

One of her favorite schemes operated like this. She’d purchase an appliance at Strawbridge’s or even Korvettes. She’d take the receipt to a Xerox machine—most libraries had them—and make a copy. Next she’d show up at the same chain, but a different location, take the same item from the shelves, and return it using the Xeroxed receipt. When this went well, after the first time or two, she made ten receipts and pulled this stunt at ten different branches of the store over a few days’ time—the more quickly the better.

“My, God, this is child’s play,” she told Bud. “And it serves them right with the prices they charge.” What she really thought about was the money. What kind of junk she could buy with it. Just sashaying through these elegant stores day after day had lit the fire.

But buying too many things soon became a problem. “You can’t draw attention to yourself,” Bud told her. It was better to act like nothing had changed. So she put the desire to buy things on hold mostly and satisfied herself with piling up the dough and pleasing Bud.

“Baby, you’re a natural,” he’d say, counting the cash.

She beamed, picturing what she’d soon be able to buy. It was like burying the money in the desert in the old westerns or crime movies. The dollars might not be marked, but they were flags when too much was spent.

Soon driving to New Jersey or Delaware became commonplace. An overnight trip to New York netted many thousands of dollars.

“We can’t stuff all of this in a drawer anymore,” Bud said. They both eyed the money sitting in neat piles on Bud’s kitchen table. “And we certainly can’t put too much of it in our bank accounts.”

“So what then?” Eve asked. “What do we do?”

I
was not so infatuated with Jason nor so preoccupied with my schoolwork that I did not begin to intuit something bigger than usual was going on with my mother. It began to occur to me that what I thought was paste might be the real thing. She was often humming when I came into the house, was often on the phone with Bud.

Bud. He knew what I thought of him and avoided me as much as possible. When we ran in to each other, we exchanged wary glances. If my mother was intent on choosing men like this, I didn’t have to please them any longer. No sitting on laps, no asking his permission to babysit, no taking the fall.

Mother still kept all her junk. Nothing got tossed—even the most trivial item was stored away. I began to wonder if she also kept records of her various “purchases.” Was there a box somewhere with the records I had childishly written for her during the days of her return business? Was there a record of her court dates, her psychiatric visits, the various things she’d stored in all of those units? What schemes with Bud Pelham had allowed her to increase her wardrobe purchases, buy a new car, and all the new things at home. And this was only the stuff I knew about. What else had she been up to in the hours I was at school or away? If she couldn’t toss her junk, could she toss her records? Did a hoarder hold onto paperwork as tightly as product?

It seemed like a good idea to bring myself up to speed on Mother’s various purchases, thefts, incidents. At sometime in the near future, I might need to lay my hands on such information. If my priority now was Ryan, in preventing him from being used as I’d been, I needed to be ruthless in bringing my mother down.

I
started at my grandmother’s house. “You really want to go through all her stuff,” my grandmother said. “You’ll be in that cellar for a year.” Grandmother was wearing rubber gloves and scrubbing a trash can. The water coming out of it was as clean as what went into it.

“You know there are probably a hundred or more boxes. Half of ‘em haven’t been opened in a decade. More.”

“I’m working on a project for my social anthropology class,” I said. “We’re supposed to record the things family members have collected over time. A kind of social history of the last century.”

This sounded ridiculous and my grandmother seemed doubtful—but only for a second. I remember her incredulity when I told her I was able to identify hundreds of famous paintings on slides. She was as pragmatic as my mother in what she thought worth studying.

“When will you need to identify all those pictures? In real life, I mean,” she’d asked me. “You’d be better off learning shorthand or nursing.” She’d given me a book on shorthand at Christmas, advising me to learn it on my own.

“I’m pretty sure shorthand’s on its way out,” I told her.

“Well, don’t make a mess down there, Christine,” she told me today. “It’s taken me years to get Eve’s things boxed and correctly labeled. She had things packed away willy-nilly. I labeled each and every box, though she’d probably kill me if she knew it. But I couldn’t bear the thought of passing away and someone thinking the chaos was mine.”

I nodded sympathetically. If things turned out the way I expected, a cop or two might find their way down there.

Grandmother’s basement was organized like an extremely tidy warehouse. All of the windows in her basement shone as brightly as the ones a floor above. There was not a cobweb or a dust ball to be found. She was right behind me then, turning on lights as we crossed the room.

“Now don’t trip over anything,” she said, worriedly. “I only have forty-watt bulbs here. Maybe I should change one or two.”

“When you were organizing Mother’s things, did you run across any paperwork; you know—boxes with records in them.” Seeing the skepticism on her face, I quickly added, “Our professor would like us to include any documentation we can locate. He says people who keep records of their hobbies or pursuits provide society with an invaluable history.” My years with Mother had apparently taught me to how to lie.

And I was starting to believe in this professor and his assignment myself. Perhaps when this was over with, I would embark on such a study—maybe writing a book about Mother and her sickness. Save other children from living the life of a scapegoat.

“I think there are also boxes with papers in them. Not sure exactly what. Divorce papers, that sort of thing. Your mother added a box or two in the last six months. I glanced through it briefly. Records about antique cars. Maybe for the guy she kept house for.” She put a finger to her lips. “You mustn’t tell her I check the boxes, Christine. She wouldn’t like it at all. No sir.” A light bulb in hand now, she changed the one over my head, walking over to a group of red-striped boxes. “Still if I’m going to keep her things for her, I need to know what I’m getting myself into.” She paused. “Never know when I’ll be hauled into court.” She sighed. “You might as well start here.”

“We’ll keep my project between us,” I said, cementing our relationship as co-conspirators. “I’ll make sure things are on the up and up while I’m at it.” Little likelihood of that happening, I thought, taking the lid off the first box.

Anyway, finding a noose to hang her would be better than hanging her myself.

“D
o you really mean it?” Jason asked when I let that idea slip. The notion I might have to kill her. “You shouldn’t joke about it.”

“I suppose not,” I said. But I knew I would go pretty far to put an end to it.

“Think about Ryan,” he’d said. “What would happen to him without a mother or a sister? Do you want him living with Mickey? Or in foster care?”

I
waited until Grandmother climbed the stairs, gripping the railing till her knuckles turned white. In her late sixties now, but she was beginning to wear out. Being Eve’s mother probably hadn’t helped. Her husband hadn’t been the easiest man either from what I remembered. He skittered out of my head as readily as he’d skittered out of any room Eve and, by extension, me, were in.

There was no way Grandmother could take care of Ryan fulltime.

How long would it be before I looked years older than my age. Daddy certainly did. He was as tidy as ever but he had a bend in his back, deep lines in his face, and his hair was mostly gray. He was not fifty. He’d probably never marry again. How could he take such a chance? Who knew where another Eve lurked?

I began going through the boxes with resolve.