Follow the Dotted Line (14 page)

“Betrayed? What are you talking about?”

“I am talking about Our Savior’s Tabernacle University. This is not a good school, Aunt Andy. These are not righteous people!” he declared. A single tear ambled down his chubby cheek. Followed by a second.

“Speak to me, Harley,” she said, suppressing her impatience.

“These people—the ones at the party—have not been faithful to our beliefs.” Andy had never seen him this agitated. “It’s not so much the music and the dancing,” he explained with some difficulty.

“Okay. Keep going.”

“Or even the beer and marijuana.”

“Okay. Okay. No comment. Now out with it.”

“I can’t, Aunt Andy.”

“Har-ley.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” she said, pointedly. “Believe me, whatever happened, you’re screaming to talk about it.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes. You are, Harley. And do you know how I know you’ve got something important to tell me?”

He wrinkled his traumatized brow. “How?”

“Because you haven’t cleaned up the mess downstairs.”

“What?”

Andy hadn’t spent all those years as the mother of teenagers without learning that kids either cover their tracks or they don’t. And when they don’t, they’re desperate for you to follow in their foolish footsteps until you find them cowering in some corner and force them into a full confession. “My house is a disaster, Harley, and you’re squirreled away up here in your room like you can’t move.”

More tears began seeping from his lashes and onto his boyish cheeks.

“You knew I’d be angry if you didn’t clean up, right?”

He nodded.

“You knew I’d want to know what happened?”

He nodded again.

“Then tell me.”

The squinty blue eyes bubbled open and shut. His nose was leaking badly.

“Speak, Harley,” she said. “I’m listening.”

He drew a sleeve across his soggy face.

Andy ripped off a pillowcase and handed it to him. “Blow,” she commanded.

He blew.

“Now talk.”

“After everybody left, I heard noises in your closet,” he began. “In the master bedroom.”

Ah, yes, she thought, nodding knowingly, as it all came together in a familiar gestalt; Andy suddenly knew exactly where this was headed.

“What kind of noises, Harley?”

“People. I mean, I heard laughing and stuff. I wanted everyone out, so I opened the door.”

“And what did you find?”

“I found two people in there.”

“Um hum.”

“With their clothes off.”

“Listen, Harley. That kind of stuff just happens . . .”

“Aunt Andy,” he sobbed, “they were completely naked, you know, and doing it on the floor.”

Damn it, she grumbled silently. Now I’m going to have to fumigate. Haven’t I suffered enough? Then without thinking, she quipped, “Boys? Girls? One of each?”

“What?” he screeched.

“Nothing. Nothing, “she said, quickly.

But the damage was already done. “A boy and a girl,” he howled, as if anything else would have turned him into a pillar of salt. “A boy and a girl!”

Then in a perfect storm of insecurity and self-loathing, he threw himself face down on the bed again.

“Okay,” she said, rubbing his back and cursing the lack of over-the-counter tranquilizers. “It’s all right, Harley. It’s all okay.” Then reluctantl, she added, “Come on, let’s have a hug.”

As she opened her arms, he raised himself up from the mattress like a struggling jellyfish. Finally, he collapsed headlong into her maternal embrace, gushing his regret. As Andy sat their dutifully holding him like one of her own, she wondered, not for the first time, what this child was doing in her house.

The pair spent the better part of the next three days restoring the house to its original condition. This required replacing a bathroom door, repainting the baseboards in the living room, and renting a carpet cleaner from the local supermarket. Andy soaped and vacuumed the violated closet twice. As curious as she was about how all those campus crusaders managed to wreak so much havoc, she decided not to ask. Harley, for his part, volunteered nothing. Still, he worked like a dog, and she found it harder and harder to be mad at him. She also decided to say nothing about the fact that, even though it was Wednesday afternoon, he had not yet returned to class.

Home and hearth restored, Andy finally got around to mixing herself that long-intended wine spritzer, a concoction of cheap Sauvignon Blanc, grapefruit soda, and blended fruit. Glass in hand, she fell onto the living room sofa and jokingly told her assistant he should get himself one of the leftover beers. To her astonishment, Harley walked into the kitchen and returned with a brown bottle. Holy metamorphosis, she thought.

“Well, it’s all cleaned up,” she said.

“All cleaned up,” he repeated.

“Feeling better?”

He nodded and took a sip from the bottle.

“Mitch asked me to dinner tonight. Would you like to come along?”

Harley hadn’t been out of the house since that fateful Friday night, and she felt compelled to ask him along.

He sipped again. “Will Melissa be there?”

“Probably.”

This time he took a swig. “Sure. That would be great.”

He downed what was left in the bottle and announced he was off to take a shower—something else he hadn’t done in five days. Such was the power of The Impresario, she thought, and realized it was a good time to ask one of the hard questions they’d been avoiding. “Harley,” she called out, as he approached the stairs, “I was wondering, when are you going back to school?”

“School?”

“You know, OSTU?”

But before he could answer, the house phone rang.

“I’ll get it,” he said, jumping on his exit opportunity. “Don’t get up.” He pivoted, headed to the kitchen, and grabbed the phone. When he returned to the living room, he was holding the handset.

“It’s somebody named Larry O’Dowd.”

“Okay,” she said, reaching for the phone.

He took a step back and put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Who’s Larry O’Dowd?”

“None of your business.”

“Seriously, Aunt Andy. He sounds gravelly.”

“I don’t care how he sounds, Harley. Give me the phone.”

He smiled for the first time since she’d returned from Idaho. “Come on, Aunt Andy.
Please
.”

She stuck out her hand for the phone once again.

He waited.

She relented. “My private investigator.”

“No kidding!”

“No kidding. Now hand it over, you cheeky bastard.”

The smile broadened. He gave her what she wanted and then came as close as Harley Davidson could to bounding up the staircase.

“Larry?” Andy said, when he was out of earshot.

“I got some info for you, Andy.”

“Really? Anything interesting?”

“Most definitely the start of something interesting.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’ve done just about everything the Pings will pay for. You’re going to have to do the rest.”

“Okay. What did you find?”

“It’s all in the files. I’ll overnight them to you.”

“Are you going to tell me what you found?” she asked again.

“No. I want you to read the files first. You can call me with questions. I’ve got a surveillance job starting in the morning, so I want to get these off my desk.”

“Any idea where she—they might be?”

“No. I’m still working on that. But you’ll find everything else in the files.”

Worst Behaved Person in the Room

Mitch made tortellini with a cream sauce. By the time they finished eating, Andy felt her arteries scream for mercy. She was sitting with Mitch, Melissa, and Harley at a long wooden table in her son’s Spanish-style dining room designed with arched windows, a red tile floor, and a ceiling with cross beams adorned by vines of hand-painted flowers.

“I don’t want dessert,” Andy said.

“What is it?” Harley asked.

Simultaneously, Melissa and Andy answered, “Bananas flambé.”

Mitch spread his hands in his signature it’s-what-I-do gesture.

“And it’s not good for any of us. At least not for another thirty minutes,” Andy pronounced.

“Let’s do the dishes first then,” said Melissa, rising to the task.

Before Andy could offer to assist, Harley was on his feet. “I’ll help,” he said.

“Good,” said Mitch. “Because I need to have a serious discussion with your aunt.” He eyed his mother. “On the patio, please. I’ll stop at the humidor on my way.”

They met at the lounge chairs next to the pool. Mitch handed his mother a Swisher Sweet and lit up something more exotic—and expensive—for himself.

“Do you think it’s a mistake to leave Harley alone in the kitchen with Melissa?” he asked before taking a seat.

“He does seem besotted, doesn’t he?”

“Besotted? Are you writing for the BBC now?”

“No. But it’s a word that doesn’t get enough exercise. I sort of like saying it.”

He leaned down, lit her cigar, and then took the chair next to hers.

“Is he as much of a dweeb as he appears to be?”

“Funny. Another underused, highly applicable word. And I’m not sure.”

“Do you like him?”

“Even that’s still pending,” she ruminated. “I’m trying.”

“He seems pretty naïve.” Mitch adjusted the chair so that he reclined slightly. “What about sex?”

Andy grimaced. “Excuse me?”

“Has he had much experience?”

She took a drag on her pencil of a cigar and, like Mitch, leaned back into the plush lounge cushion behind her. “I can say, with some degree of confidence, that he knows it when he sees it. And that’s about all he knows.”

“He actually told you this?” Mitch asked in disbelief.

“In so many words.”

The adult son eyed his mother with renewed respect. “I see you haven’t lost any of your interrogation techniques.”

“Some things you never forget, Mitchell. Does this conversation have an intention?”

He contemplated the question, which she found refreshing. As a consequence, his answer was exceptionally tactful. “I just don’t want him getting hurt. That’s all.”

“Hurt?”

“This crush. On Melissa. Should we do something about it before
she
has to?” he asked.

Andy puffed again and let the biting sweetness of the smoke wash around her mouth. Harley was so different from her own children; after only two months, she’d already reached her level of incompetence. “I don’t know,” she mused. “At the moment, Melissa appears to be one of the few things that make him happy. And he’s unbearable to live with when he’s unhappy. So I say we leave it up to her. At least for the time being.” Andy took Mitch’s silence as tacit agreement with her strategy. “Is that why you asked me to dinner? To talk about Harley?”

“No,” he said, flatly.

“But you did have a reason?”

“I did. I do.” He snuggled deeper into the plush cushion, stogie dangling from his lips and eyelids in repose.

“Are you going to tell me what it is?”

Deliberately, he wagged his head from side to side.

Andy knew her children enjoyed being obtuse in exactly the same way she did, and it drove her crazy.

“Spit it out,” she groused. “Come on.”

“I invited you here to make a point. Part of my point is that you should be able to guess my purpose.”

“Is that a joke, Mitchell?”

He opened his eyes and cocked them acerbically in her direction. “This is important, Mom.”

She sat up. “Something I’ve done?”

“A crime of omission.”

She could tell he wasn’t teasing; something significant was bothering him.

“Okay, then tell me the point, and maybe I can guess the purpose.”

“The point is your tendency to give your attention to the worst behaved person in the room.”

She’d heard this charge before. It was known in the family as Mom’s Prodigal Son Syndrome; take care of the bad actors, and the good actors will take care of themselves.

“The worst behaved person in the room was most often you, Mitch, if memory serves,” she said, sounding unnecessarily prickly.

“Touché. And while I was getting that attention, you were neglecting your other children.”

This time she nearly rose to her feet. “I can’t believe you just said that!”

“Don’t over dramatize this, Mom. Please.”

“But you just accused me of being negligent.”

“Okay, maybe not negligent. Let’s just say you were distracted.”

“Where are you going with this? I’m starting to bleed a little on the inside.”

He waved away her maternal insecurity with his Cuban. “Take it easy. Hear me out. I was a pain in the ass as a kid. I admit it. Everybody in the family knows it. But that doesn’t mean that you and I can forget the fact that the other three got the shaft.”

“The shaft? Did you just say I gave the girls and Ian the
shaft
?”

“What I mean to say is, they probably didn’t get as much of you as they deserved. Because of me. I’m responsible, too. That I turned out so well,” he added with another wave of the cigar, “only shows that your time was not wasted. Still, the others probably didn’t get what they needed.”

Andy was neither amused nor mollified. “You are still a piece of work, Mitch,” she said. “And this conversation is a perfect illustration.”

“Will you let me finish?”

She restrained herself from diving into the family arsenal of cheap shots.

Mitch nodded his appreciation and continued. “I’m just saying that over the past few years I’ve tried to make up for sucking so much oxygen out of the room as a kid. And a big part of that effort has been keeping in touch with Ian.”

“Oh,” Andy said, surprised at his newfound sibling sensitivity. Then embarrassed that she hadn’t noticed.

“You know how he is,” Mitch told her. “He doesn’t upset the apple cart. He doesn’t complain. He just plays music. The way he did growing up.”

Admittedly, Ian was the sole, underappreciated introvert in a family of extroverts. She couldn’t argue with Mitch’s contention that Ian’s personal drama inevitably took a backseat to everyone else’s.

“And because he doesn’t ask your advice, the way the girls do. Or talk your ear off about work, the way I do. Well, you don’t talk to him, Mom. In fact, you rarely call.”