Lookaway, Lookaway (45 page)

So few, so very few visitors in recent years. She had not encouraged people to look in on her or trouble themselves. Perhaps the shrine, as Jerene had termed it, had scared off her acquaintances. It had begun as five or six framed pictures of Christopher as a boy, leaving out his ragamuffin teenage years, his drugged-out twenties. He was such a fair-skinned boy, so blond in coloring, that he looked in many of his later photos like he hadn’t slept, like he was glassy-eyed and on something even when he wasn’t. He was too easily marked by his abuses, creased, reddened, hardened to the point that by twenty-five his smile was permanently cynical and sneering. She had stopped keeping photos of him by then. Oh she would take them, against his will, his offering up to her a cross or compromised face; she kept taking them in hopes of capturing the angelic boy she had raised single-handedly. A year after he died, Dillard had created a chronological diorama of photographs from childhood to young adulthood. Yes, she had gotten carried away for a while, added his Little League trophies, a debating plaque or two from his middle high school years, field day second-place ribbons, a sash of merit badges. It was all tastefully done, she thought … but Jerene disapproved.

“Dillard,” she had pronounced, surveying the mantel-shrine at its maximum growth, “I say this out of love. Take this down or move it to the bedroom—better yet his bedroom, not yours. There is too much to dwell on here, none of it happy or helpful.”

Dillard defended her display to Jerene, but within a day she came around and dismantled it. Anyway, all of her collection, save a single school-era class photo, was in the hallway closet, easy to hand if she wished to reconstruct it and risk people thinking she was unwell. Because, of course, she was unwell. She had lost her only child. She had powerlessly watched him corrupt himself and deteriorate, her angel seeking out the gutter, beholden to people who were only too eager to drag him further down into it.

Yet there were days, after all, here in the living room, here where she spent so much time thinking and remembering, that she was very cold about Christopher and his life choices, even unforgiving:
I gave you life and you threw it away. Have it your way then, Chrissy. Don’t expect me to sacrifice the rest of my life to your selfish nonsense, your inconsideration. I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you how it might be for me watching you become a methamphetamine addict. It never passed through your mind, even once—I’m sure of it—what will my poor mother think if I keep going down this path. How sad she will be, how devastated.
Well, she thought, when she swept her shrine into a cardboard box, you see, don’t you, Christopher, how I am not so devastated that I cannot pack you up and put you in a closet for a little while. I can get on with things, I have moved forward and have done so in fairly admirable fashion. Yes, they say, poor thing, poor Dillard, how does she scrape through? But they also say, she suspected, that she’d made the best of it, been able to soldier on and function in the world you and your father left me.

Sitting in her living room today, listening to the dry tick of the chestnut clock, giving just a glance to the surviving Christopher photo, she relived all her inescapable soliloquies and dialogues with … with whom? Who was “they” who were in constant commentary about how poor Dillard was doing, how she soldiered on? Charlotte society, she supposed, once upon a time, was “they.” But “they” had written her off some time ago, when she married young and stupidly. And when Christopher died and his tragedy and crimes became news for the City page (front page of the B section), the obituaries (page 43), little noticeable in the plentiful pages of the
Charlotte Observer,
then she found herself receiving a little more pity—oh, she hated pity!—a little more judgment. In every Charlotte family of note, in every generation, there is a black sheep or a screwup or someone solely mentioned by people as a lesson, a marker in human unhappiness, and Dillard Jarvis Revelle had fulfilled that role for her generation and her son, Christopher, for his.

That chestnut clock. How it had accompanied her unpleasantly through life. She should sell it. Apparently it had great value, that’s why it wasn’t already destroyed—her brother was willing to take a hammer to it, but she and Jerene spared its life. But how had she ended up with it? It should be over with their mother in Lattamore Acres.

When they were children, their mother made them dress up for dinner. Their father felt if he had to suffer the indignity of coming home for his evening supper then it should be a bit of a ceremony, and his little girls should dress up. They sat in the parlor of the homeplace, staring at the clock. Four-thirty would be the sign that they had to run upstairs and slip on a Sunday dress. And then they’d return to the parlor and wait until five when Daddy would appear. How they’d stare at the clock, and in return, how the clock would lengthen the minutes. Dillard was sure the clock was louder sometimes than other times … it couldn’t be proven of course, but sometimes the dry tenor click of the minute hand was like a stiff playing card being played upon a card table, sometimes that noise filled the whole of the room. With each passing moment that Daddy did not come home, the more everyone’s fate would darken. By six it was clear Daddy had made a detour to the country club or Harlan’s Tavern down near the Union County Courthouse to gladhand with other lawyers and judges, and it was clear that he would come home inebriated. Oh every once in a great while, he’d come in sweet and docile, kissing Mother and saying he had gotten held up and he hoped we weren’t starving, but those times were so rare as to be memorable.

The usual routine was his coming back at nine in a fiercely bad temper—who knows what transpired to make it so. They would all be chastised for something in turn, not eating vegetables, putting a stain on a dress, or maybe he would be furious that something was cold, despite its being served so late. Father slinging a plate of mashed potatoes against the dining room wall was particularly vivid to her; usually, he would just shove things to the floor. Dillard remembered her mother, who conducted herself through all the bad behavior by not acknowledging it, running to stop him only from smashing a soup tureen to the floor: “God no, Gaston, that’s worth a fortune!” Such interference spared the tureen but got her face slapped. And Gaston Jr., her little brother, would enter into it to defend his sisters and mother, God bless him, and that got him sent to his room without dinner, and later there would be a follow-up for that backtalk with a belt. By that time, their mother would be in hiding downstairs, again, expert at that small stoic expression that nothing bad was happening, nothing need move her to intervene. She was a pure coward, Dillard reflected. Better her little boy and daughters slake her husband’s pitiless rage than herself.

“Did you ever stop to think,” Mother would bring out mournfully, “that if you didn’t annoy your father, he wouldn’t be like this?”

So each night we combed out our hair a little longer, tied the bows a little tighter, pulled up our white socks a little higher, learned to sit up a little more straight, as we sat there in the parlor, Dillard reflected, watching that clock keep time on our childhoods. And here that cursed thing is still astride my afternoons, preparing to tick-tock me into old age, Dillard thought calmly. Probably the last fool thing I will hear in this world. It was 4:26. She might take a hammer to that thing yet—

Then, the doorbell.

Dillard’s heart skipped a beat; she steadied herself and pushed her bulk out of the chair and saw, through the bay window, that Jerene’s BMW was in the drive.

“Sorry to break in on you like this,” Jerene said, storming past the foyer and into the kitchen. Dillard simply followed her.

“That’s all right. I can tell something’s wrong, Jerene.”

Something was wrong because Jerene was uncharacteristically frantic, and Dillard’s sister was never frantic. Jerene paced the dining nook, circled the kitchen island, rustling the shopping lists and newspaper clips on Dillard’s small bulletin board, then, declining all the while Dillard’s offers of coffee, iced tea, a Diet-Rite cola, Jerene did a circuit of the living room, her kelly-green swing coat sweeping around her like an impresario’s cape. Jerene held a sealed manila envelope.

“Would you like a fat-free granola bar?” Dillard asked, primarily to see Jerene’s expression of horror.

“I hired a detective,” she said, settling on a couch.

“For Duke?” Dillard sat in a straight-backed chair beside her.

“Why would I hire a detective for Duke?”

“I thought that’s why people hired detectives, to spy on their spouses.”

“Oh what do I care what Duke does. I should have said that my lawyer hired him, Darnell McKay.”

Dillard leaned forward to convey gentleness. “Are we pressing Darnell into service again? I know why you want him looking out for your interests, but are you sure he is up to negotiating a civil suit with Liddibelle’s pack of wolves?”

Jerene was on her feet again, pacing toward the kitchen, still clutching the manila envelope. “Duke has left sorting out everything to me, and among Darnell’s attributes is his having detectives on his payroll.”

Dillard, with effort again, a twinge of sciatica announcing itself, got out of her chair and followed her sister into the kitchen. “And this detective is supposed to find dirt on the Baylors?”

“
Their
detective is investigating Jerilyn to make her out to be some crazed madwoman with a past full of reckless action, and there was a … some unpleasantness at Carolina, some misadventures where boys were concerned. I don’t want any of Jerilyn’s past—or my past or your past or Annie’s past—making its way to a civil suit as part of a larger attempt to suggest that the women in the family are unbalanced or hysterical and shouldn’t be in the same room as a weapon.”

Dillard didn’t approve of dueling detectives, let alone dueling teams of lawyers, but said, “Perhaps none of us should be in the room with a weapon. I would shoot Randy Revelle between the eyes without a trace of guilt.” Dillard opened the refrigerator and got herself a Diet-Rite cola; Jerene shook her head again that she didn’t want one. “Now Jerry, you simply
must
settle this case—have Liddibelle name a price and get it over with. It can’t go to court! I thought she was a better friend to us than that.”

“I am dealing with Liddibelle directly and I think that will put an end to it, but in the meantime, her detective can learn much that we all do not want him to learn. Darnell, as I was saying, brought in this detective…” She sighed. “… and I thought, what an opportunity to have a detective to look into various and sundry matters.”

This couldn’t be good. “Oh Jerene…”

Jerene sat quietly, running a manicured hand over a pleat repeatedly. “There are a number of things,” she continued slowly, “that we don’t speak of in our family and God knows I am most thankful that we
don’t
talk about them.”

“Yes?”

“Asheboro,” Jerene said simply.

Dillard nodded soberly. “The baby. Your daughter.”

Jerene reached for her sister’s hand. “I couldn’t have made it through without you being there with me, Dillie. I remember Mother was on the warpath, wouldn’t hear of you accompanying me but you did anyway.”

“Of course I did.” Dillard squeezed Jerene’s hand back.

“And you helped scrape the money together for Miss Grace and Halliford House. Bless your heart.”

Neither said anything for a minute, surprised by the power of this wordless moment, this minute of closeness, when in truth they hadn’t historically been overly sisterly at all. They had mutually survived their home but that gave them closeness of soldiers in a battle, and often soldiers return from wars never choosing to see their comrades again, preferring to start fresh once their war is over, and it had been that way for them a bit, formal, cordial, respectful in allowing an envelope of space to re-invent and assemble another life. Their formality was a final act of survival and coping, but when it had counted, when one needed the other, they were indeed sisters. Dillard and Jerene, though, had not completely honored it until this moment.

Jerene slowly opened the manila envelope and slid out the few sheets of paper inside. “He found out about
her
.”

Dillard put her hand over her mouth.

“Yes,” Jerene said.

“What are you going to do?”

Despite declining the Diet-Rite, Jerene reached for Dillard’s can and took a small sip. Jerene found her reading glasses in the pocket of her overcoat, then she read: “Shawna Jane Mabe, born September third, nineteen sixty-six.”

Dillard sat again, at the other end of the breakfast-nook table, putting the length of the small kitchen between her and her sister. “September—I remember that hot-as-Hades September.”

“The adoptive parents were Jane and Edwin Mabe of Fayetteville, North Carolina. He was in the service. That seems a gamble, letting a soldier and his wife adopt in the middle of the Vietnam War, but that’s what the Children’s Home did. The father’s dead now, according to that next piece of paper.”

“My goodness. What do you intend to do now that you know she’s … she is alive, isn’t she?”

“Forty-one years old. She got married late, at thirty-two, to a Kyle Crotts, but is divorced. Two kids by him, a baby from somewhere else. Living in Matthews, North Carolina. Darnell’s man got me an address. Carolina Acres … Could be some kind of gated community or something.”

Dillard shook her head. “I suspect a trailer park, more likely. You’re just going to drive out to Matthews and say, surprise, here I am, your long-lost biological mother?”

“I have no idea what I will do so I’ve barged over here to ask my big sister.”

Dillard felt an unaccustomed giddiness: Jerene seeking the counsel of her big sister. In the last decades, the polarity reversed itself; it was always Dillard coming hat in hand to Jerene, and Duke, and Gaston, who lent her money, then just flat out gave her money, money they’d never see again for her divorce, her setting up a new life after Randy, and then once for a drug treatment clinic for Christopher. She became the classic poor relation. No one that one would go to for help.