Mockingbird (25 page)

“My Lord, do you ever look like Momma,” I said. She was leggy, like Momma had been, but instead of Momma's long skirts, she wore jeans and not much makeup. She was lean and looked fit. I sure wouldn't look as good when my daughter was seventeen.

Angela blinked. “Hello to you too.” She had Momma's low voice, but without the bourbon and cigarette huskiness to it, and instead of Momma's lazy drawl, Angela talked in an accent that made her sound like a TV anchor on the national news.

“Forgive me. It's just so . . . The set of your shoulders, the way you walk, it's exactly like Momma. It's amazing.”

“Hunh. You know I've never even seen a picture of her?”

“I'll show you some, if you like.” I felt myself beginning to flush. “Look, can I carry something for you? Is this all you've got?” I asked, looking at her purse and attaché case.

“Nope. Two suitcases to claim. I haven't learned how to travel light. I just ditched Darth Vader; if I let go of any more stuff, I'd float into the air like a balloon.”

“Welcome to Houston,” I said, picking up the attaché.

Once I got over the shock of how much Angela looked like Momma, I liked her just as much in person as I had on the phone. She was funny and energetic. “Hey, look at that!” “What?” “The Walk sign. In Canada, our little stick men stand straight up and down, very proper. But here, look at that little guy leaning! Go Go GO!”

Or, “So whose idea was it, anyway, to base
health care
on the
profit motive?
”

“Insurance companies,” I said. An actuary knows the answer to that one.

Or, as we were nearing the house, “What
is
it with you guys and street signs? Five blocks back the streets were spelled out in tile on the curb. Three blocks ago the names were, like, etched in these little concrete pylons. Now they're regular metal signposts, only they're being strangled by vines. It's all higgledy-piggledy.”

“Um, never noticed that. I guess it goes with being the only city in North America with no zoning laws.”

“No
zoning
laws?
No
zoning laws?”

“None. Our next door neighbor has a convenience store in his garage. A few years ago someone moved into a mansion in River Oaks and opened a strip club on his second floor.”

“What about the neighbors? Didn't their property values drop?”

“About three hundred thousand overnight. Yep.”

Angela cackled. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of young butt.” I parked in front of our house and then levered myself out of the front seat. Sigh. There was no doubt that I was pregnant now. I could no longer bear the feeling of anything across my tummy, not in the sweltering damp July heat, so the last of my maternity shorts with their elasticized panels had gone into the closet for good. It was knee-length granola dresses from here on in. Yuck.

I put her suitcases up in my room and fixed a pitcher of decaf iced tea and a mango for us to eat on the patio. I prepared the mango the way Momma taught me, cutting the two halves away from the stone, then scoring a grid into the flesh with a dull knife and popping the skin inside-out so the flesh stood out in raised rectangles. Angela had settled into one wrought-iron chair and I maneuvered myself into the other with the wary awkwardness of a hippo on a trampoline. The day was wretchedly hot, the sun a glaring spangle glinting through the live oak limbs, but we were in the deeper shadow under the broad leaves of the big banana tree. A mockingbird sang to us, hidden, and the gulf breeze lazed through the ferns and monkey grass.

Angela rolled up the sleeves of her white blouse. Damp stains showed at her armpits and the sweat had beaded up on her forehead. “It's hot! Whew!”

I drank some tea. I had put wedges of lime in the glasses, and the fresh green smell cut through the lazy heat a little. Angela followed suit and drained half her glass at a swallow. She looked at me, and smiled. “Kind of like dating, isn't it?”

“What?”

“This. Talking. You and me. Hard to know where to start.”

“So, Angela, what's your sign?”

“‘Stop!'” she said. “Or was it ‘Beware of Dog'? Monica—that's my daughter—Monica would love this place. She thinks Calgary is boring. She thinks we're boring. So did her dad, come to think of it.”

“Ouch.” I thought of Mary Jo, afraid to leave Chester and then ditched by him anyway, and wondered if the same thing had happened to Angela.

“At least Darth Vader is helping to pay for Monica's college. We were very particular about that. Neither one of us wanted me taking his money for myself.

“Did you know that in the year after a divorce, the average American man's standard of living goes up by forty-three percent?”

“And the ex-wife?”

“Down seventy-three percent,” I said. “Some people remember TV theme songs. I remember statistics.”

She tried the mango. “Hey! This is great. Kind of like a peach wearing sexy perfume. Just remember that stats aren't everything. You know the old line about lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

“Mark Twain,” I said. “You'd be amazed how many times you hear that joke when you're an actuary. Usually from people trying to buck the odds.” I thought of Bill Jr. frantically drilling for oil in the Hill Country. “It's true odds aren't everything. But they're still the way to bet, you know. Not many casinos go broke.”

“I suppose not.” After another drink of tea she said, “Did Elena's death cost a lot? Because if it did, if you're in debt—”

“No, no problem.” I didn't mention the IRS. Candy would call me foolish, but I wasn't going to start out with my half-sister by begging for money.

We finished the mango, and the heat drove us inside to the cool tile floors and the ceiling fan. Angela asked what I had been working on, so I lumbered upstairs and showed her my transactions book and the CNBC ticker and tried to answer her questions as best I could.

“Fantastic!” she said after fifteen minutes. “I want to make a trade.”

“I'm very new at this, Angela. I would rather not—”

“I've got the money, okay? We'll just let something run for ten minutes: one scroll on the ticker and I'll cash out, win or lose. Okay?”

Reluctantly I nodded. In the three and a half weeks since Mr. Copper made thirteen thousand dollars for me, I was up four hundred bucks. Better to be up than down, no doubt, but $100 a week was not going to send my daughter through medical school. The G squirmed in my womb and gave me a little kick in the bladder for emphasis.

Angela flipped through the brokerage handbook. Her sweaty hands left fingerprints on the pages. “Twenty thousand pounds of frozen orange products,” she said. “Buy some. In this heat, the idea of owning twenty thousand pounds of frozen orange juice sounds divine.”

I laughed. “You want to go short or long?”

“Um . . . long. It's too hot for the price to drop.”

I grinned and phoned in the order. A moment later the brokerage called back with the exact entry fill price and Angela watched me note the trade down in my book. “Now what?” she said.

“We wait for it to come by on the ticker and see how you did.”

Angela stared at the screen. The CNBC types were talking about Mexican opposition to NAFTA. Down below they were listing NASDAQ stocks. “Doesn't this waiting kill you? Is this what the big traders do, sit and watch TV?”

“No, they have second-by-second price updates coming in by satellite to computer setups. I can't really afford to take that much of a plunge.”

“What would it cost?”

“Maybe five thousand for the computers, and another five hundred a month or so for the service. Two thousand dollars for the software. That would get me an Omega Tradestation.”

“You want one?”

I laughed. “Like Candy wanted a Corvette when she was seventeen. Prices can change so fast that ten minutes is an eternity. If I had a full-service broker, oddly enough, I wouldn't need the setup so much, because then at least I wouldn't have to recall my stops every day.”

“Stops?”

“When you leave instructions with the broker to sell as soon as your contracts hit a certain price. Stops are how you keep yourself from taking a really big loss.”

“I see.” Angela looked at the TV. “Okay, I can't just sit here. Let's go where it's cooler and get some more to drink.”

“More iced tea?” I said, when we got down to the kitchen. “Or maybe some orange juice?”

“OJ. Definitely OJ. Hey—there's a message on your answering machine.”

“I must not have noticed it earlier.” I punched the replay button. The machine hummed and whined for a moment. Then came a crackle of static. Then a terrible voice, strained with desperate effort, like the voice of someone with MS or a stroke. “TO-NNNUH! Tone, z'mar! Mrjuh. Uhl!” The voice gasped, hoarse and ragged. Momma's breathing had sounded like that, in the last hour before she died.

“Mary Jo,” I whispered.

A bang and another rush of static. The phone had fallen. Mary Jo must have dropped the receiver. I could see it hanging there in the dim pantryway between her kitchen and her back door, bumping against her ancient washing machine. A long scrabble, squeaking linoleum, the receiver banging against the washer. Mary Jo called out my name in that strangled voice, grunting, strangely faint most of the time, but shot through with sudden loudness, as if she were getting her mouth near the receiver only for instants before it swung away. “She's lying on the floor,” I said. “She's lying where she dropped the phone.”

The machine beeped, cutting off Mary Jo's message.

“Jesus,” Angela said.

My fingers were shaking as I dialed Mary Jo's number. The line rang busy. “Oh shit. Shit. I've got to go.”

Five minutes later I was fumbling for the lock at her side door. I opened it and a wave of hot darkness rushed from the house, smelling of mold. I ran inside into the kitchen. The drapes were all drawn tight and I couldn't see a damn thing. “Mary Jo? Mary—shit!” I said, tripping over a chair. It had been left in the middle of the kitchen floor. I fell down hard, hurting my right knee. It was hot, dark and burning hot inside Mary Jo's house.

“You okay?” Angela said behind me, voice tense.

“No. Hold the door open.” Enough daylight came in for me to find the light switch by the front door. Mary Jo was sitting on the kitchen floor with her back against the refrigerator. She was staring at the cabinets in front of her and her head did not turn as I ran in. I scrambled across the kitchen floor. “Mary Jo!” Her eyes were wide open, alert and terrified. I could tell at once that she recognized me. She was barely breathing: shallow, curiously slow breaths that caught in her throat. I held her hands. “Mary Jo, what's wrong? What's wrong?”

“Call an ambulance,” Angela said. She stepped over me and Mary Jo, hung up the phone and then dialed 911.

I gave the ambulance directions and handed the receiver back. “Okay, honey,” I said to Mary Jo, “the ambulance is on its way.” I took her hands. They were completely unresponsive. “Can you move your fingers?” Nothing. A moment later, Mary Jo's feet twitched on the linoleum. “Good. Good. Now, can you move your hands, Mary Jo?”

Nothing.

“Stroke?” Angela said.

“I don't know. Mary Jo, I'm here, it's Toni. Listen, the ambulance is on its way. I'm going to take care of you, okay? I'm going to make sure everything is okay. Got that?” I tried to smile into her terrified eyes.

She stopped breathing.

“
Shit!
Mary Jo, don't quit on me here. Come on, breathe, sweetie. Breathe. Breathe.” She did not breathe. Her feet kicked and rattled against the cabinets. “Breathe!” I shouted. I put both hands on her chest and shoved hard. Air pushed out of her in a soft, painful grunt, but when I pulled back, her chest stayed still. I had forced the last air out of her, and no new air was going in. “Angela!”

“I don't know, I don't know!”

“What should I do? Oh God—” I tipped Mary Jo sideways and laid her on the floor on her back. Putting one hand behind her head, I covered her mouth with mine and blew, soft and steady, as if I were trying to fan an embering campfire. I heard a faint sound and felt a little current of air on my cheek.

“Her nose. Pinch her nose shut,” Angela said.

I tried again, pinching her nose shut. It was very awkward, bending over my own pregnant tummy. All I could remember about mouth-to-mouth was from ads I had seen as a kid for the St. John's Ambulance course; they had a man blowing into a dummy beside a swimming pool. Mary Jo's mouth tasted like cigarettes and mold and she smelled like an old person. Her skin was very soft and furred with fine hair. I blew into her mouth again, and again, and again, and again. “She's not breathing!”

“Keep going, Toni. The ambulance will be here soon. Do you need help?”

I shook my head, breathed into Mary Jo again, tried to remember the old St. John's Ambulance ads. Shit—the guy used to do mouth-to-mouth three times and then listen to the dummy's chest. I put my ear on Mary Jo's chest. Something bad was happening. Her heart wasn't beating right, it was in spasms, like a rag being wrung out. Her legs kicked and twitched, but her face when I went back to give her more air was slack.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

I put my head on her chest. No heartbeat.

“Where the fuck is that ambulance!” I put my hands together on Mary Jo's chest and pumped hard.

“Oh God, has her heart stopped?”

Pump. Pump. Pump. I put my head on her chest. No heartbeat. Pump. Pump. No heartbeat. I blew some more air into her mouth, and again. My back was on fire from bending over her and my shoulders hurt. Pump. Pump. Pump.

“Toni.”

“I don't know what to do.” Breathe. Breathe.

Angela put one hand on my shoulder.