Mockingbird (5 page)

The platter he carried over to the table was laden with four deep casserole dishes and a red clay Dutch oven. Astonishing scents crept out from under the covers and made my mouth water. La Gonzales, who had the virtues as well as the vices of the old-style Mexican mother, was an incomparable cook. “We have brought just a little something,
chica,
” she said, coming over to me. The hands that clasped mine were firm and soft and warm as dinner rolls. “You poor thing, with your mother passed away, now you must look after everyone,
sí?
We have just a few chili rellenos, and a plate of tamales, a chicken mole and some rice and in there a little pig,” she said, pointing at the Dutch oven.

Her eyes rested a moment longer on the table, and a frown settled over her face. She let go of my hands. Her frown deepened. She reached out to the three boxes of beautiful cakes and pastries Candy had picked up, and poked one with a finger fat and mottled like a breakfast sausage. “Store-bought?” she asked, looking at Candy. “Your sainted mother is dead, your sister is making the plans, the calls, is a comfort to the father,
and you have only store-bought on the table?
”

“
Mamá!
” Carlos said.

“
La madre fallece, ¡y compran panecilfos!
”

“
Entre ellos, no es igual, Mamá.
”

“
Y cuando paso a la más allá, ¿que vas a traer a la mesa? ¿Una caja de Kentucky Fried Chicken y un Milky Way?
”

Candy looked murderously at Carlos, as if this were somehow his fault. “When you die, Señora Gonzales,” she said, “I promise I will cook a feast.”

d

Slowly the garden began to fill up. Visitors continued to arrive on our doorstep, more than I had ever imagined. Women who had come to Momma for advice or winning Lotto numbers or for curses on their cheating husbands, a couple she had helped elope, a woman she had hidden in our house for a month to escape her abusive boyfriend, the manager and stylist from her beauty shop, friends of Daddy's, people from Friesen Investments, and many others I could not place. Everyone brought flowers or, more often, food, and soon our long farmhouse table was laden with potato salad, devilled eggs, coleslaw, barbecued brisket, chicken and dumplings, chicken sopa, meatloaf, pecan pie, lemon pound cake, sopapillas still warm from the vat and sprinkled with icing sugar, green beans with sautéed almond slivers, mashed potatoes with cream and brown gravy both, shrimp étouffée and red beans and rice, a rust-red jambalaya seething with okra and onions, and a growing array of spreads and jams and jellies put up in Mason jars by the older women of Momma's acquaintance: plum preserves and apple butter, pickled onions and banana peppers, and from Momma's oldest friend, Mary Jo, an extra jar of the things she gave us every Christmas: jalapeño jelly for Daddy, the special chow-chow that I loved on burgers and hot dogs, mustang-grape jam for Candy. Last of all, a pot of the Mexican mint jelly Momma used to love to slather on her pork chops and lamb. “For your mother, wherever she is now,” Mary Jo said to me, and gravely I accepted it.

Mary Jo had known Momma forever. Her secrets were the only ones Momma ever kept, and I suspect the opposite was also true. Mary Jo's husband had left her and his eight-year-old son for his secretary when I was eleven. If Mary Jo heard from him after that, we girls did not know of it.

Mary Jo had worked at Sears for a time, but now stayed at home stuffing envelopes. The last time we had taken her for dinner, before Momma got too weak to go out, Mary Jo had claimed to be able to tell the astrological signs of our fellow diners from the thickness of their ankles. Later on she had remarked, in a loud voice, that a gentleman two tables away gave clear evidence, in the set of his neck and the shape of his ears, of mental retardation.

We loved Mary Jo to death, but we didn't show her to strangers much.

I let her help me set out some more plates and silver for the guests and then took her outside, still talking, around the edge of the house to an area of the garden away from the main throng. All Mary Jo could talk about was the will. “Did you ever notice that she changed it, Toni?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Never told you to call a lawyer for her in the last month or two?”

“No.”

“Dagnabbit,” Mary Jo said glumly. We stood together in the shadow of the west fence, looking up at the leaves of the small palm tree that shaded the kitchen window. Our palm trees aren't like those willowy, anorexic things you see on TV shows shot in Los Angeles. In Texas we grow them short and plump and pretty, like the waitresses in a good Tex-Mex joint.

“I told her I was going to need me a piece of change to get my roof fixed,” Mary Jo said. “Darn thing leaks all the time now. Every time it rains, the drips come down the insides of my walls.”

Having the Widow mount me had taken its toll; even hours later I felt tired and empty inside. “I guess we'll just have to wait to see what's in the will, Mary Jo.”

“I know what's in the will,” Mary Jo snapped. “'Less she changed it, anyway. Ain't any of us going to know. She had her lawyer put it under court seal. She told me she didn't want anyone looking at it, even us.”

“You're kidding. No, you're not. That would be just like Momma. Lord only knows what secrets she thinks she has left,” I said. “Well, she's welcome to them, and any money too. I wouldn't get your hopes up, Mary Jo. Momma wasn't the saving kind.”

“Well, you're right and you're wrong both, Toni.” She looked at me. “Aren't any of you children going to miss her like I do,” she said. I started to speak but she held up her hand. “I ain't saying you didn't love your momma, you especially, Antoinette. But you won't miss her like I will. You got your sister and your daddy. I got nobody. Not one soul.”

“Mary Jo. I—” She held up her hand again, and I stopped because she was right. Her husband was lost and her son never wrote, and I could not pretend to be lonelier than her.

“So what did the Widow have to say, honey?”

I stared at her, shocked. “How did you know?”

“Smelled her on you. You think I don't know that smell, the number of times I picked your momma up after the Riders dropped her on her fanny?”

“Oh.” I hadn't thought of that. “I don't know what the Widow said. I wasn't there. Ask Candy.”

But Mary Jo shrugged, losing interest. “I doubt the old horror told how to fix my roof,” she said.

Greg, our childhood friend from across the street, showed up just after dark. “Sorry I'm so late,” he said. Typical Greg, that: apology without explanation. He dropped his linen jacket on the coat tree and tapped the door shut behind him with one foot. Greg had spent a lot of energy learning juggling and stage magic in his early twenties, and though it never made him a living, I always thought it suited him well, physically. He moved in lovely, graceful, unexpected ways, frequently doing different things at once; for example, leaning forward to kiss me on the cheek while pulling a bottle of red wine from behind his back. “What stage are you at? Fear, denial, depression? Bargaining?”

“I thought acceptance was supposed to be in there.”

“Nope. Too soon. Don't kid yourself.” He held me by the shoulders and studied my face. “You look dreadful.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“No, I mean it. You look like you ran a marathon. Have you not been sleeping?”

“I'm okay.” If having your dead mother's gods crawl into your head is okay.

Greg walked over to the chifforobe and stood a long minute, staring up at Momma's dolls. “She used to scare the shit out of me, you know.”

“Momma?”

“Oh man, did she have my number.” He reached up and scratched behind Sugar's pointed cat ears.

“Don't touch that. It's not a toy.” Greg hopped back from the chifforobe. “Um. Sorry,” I said.

“No, no. My fault.” He shook his head. “I remember once, I must have been about sixteen, I met her in the pharmacy there on Yoakum. Have I told you this story?” I shook my head and he grinned. “I was dating this girl, Cindy Sanford. God, what a body. So there's Cindy and me in the drugstore, loitering around trying to get up the courage to buy a pack of condoms. I'm just reaching for the Trojans—not the ribbed kind or anything, we weren't ready for that—when your mother swoops down on me like a buzzard from a blue sky, smiling the biggest smile you ever saw. Cindy does the smart thing and pretends not to know me. If there'd been a drain in the floor, I would have gone down it.

“This is bad enough, but it gets worse. Instead of chatting and then moving on, or even just giving me a wink, which would not be beyond your mom, she puts one claw on my shoulder and draws me aside. Then she whispers, only she whispers very loudly, so I'm sure Cindy can hear, and she says, ‘Oh Greg, she's so pretty! Now listen, honey, the cost of a good, safe abortion is about two thousand dollars. Call me if you need one, okay? You know, later on. I know some good people. Don't be embarrassed. Promise?'”

“Oh my God.”

Greg cackled. “Then she swoops off down the aisle and never says another word about it.”

“Did you ever sleep with the girl?”

He grinned. “Never even held her hand again. I was a virgin until I was twenty, swear to God.”

“Good Lord, Greg. You?
I
would have fixed that for you at seventeen.”

“Yeah, I know. I mean—”

Yeah, I know.
And I had been so careful never to let him know I had had a crush on him. Tore the pages out of my diary and flushed them down the toilet so Candy wouldn't find them and tell. Only apparently he had known all along. And hadn't even tried to take advantage of it or anything. Which was good, but I hated him for it just at the moment. A horrible hot prickle of embarrassment crept over me before Greg could save the situation. “Um, what I mean is, I think your mom was warning me off you and Candy, too.”

You could have lit paper by touching it to my face. “Good old Momma,” I said.

I showed Greg into the garden and then crept upstairs to compose myself. The party didn't seem to miss me much. I pulled open the balcony doors and lay down in my old bed. The smells of perfume and cigarette smoke drifted up from down below, mixing with the sounds of ice clinking in glasses and laughter and lies being told while birds sang and fluttered darkly in the night. I could hear the plips and pats of live oak acorns dropping onto the roof, and the parked cars beyond our fence, and into our ornamental pond, steady as rain.

All the serious eating, drinking, and entertaining at our house was done outdoors among the monkey grass and oleanders. How familiar this all was, the company-night smells of cigarettes and hibiscus and charcoal briquettes; ropes of smoke coiling around the crepe myrtles; candle flames shaking, their reflections burning like stars in our little pond. Other nights the small mop-headed palm trees would have been shaking with laughter as kids dove for them, calling out “Home Free!” Mary Jo might strum some chords on her beat-up guitar while Momma sang old Mexican songs full of people who died for love; and over everything the black, thigh-wide branches of the live oak beyond our wall.

And when we could stay awake no longer, and the guests with children had gone, Daddy would take us upstairs and brush our teeth, and after I got Candy into her pajamas Momma would come up, humming and smiling, and she would tuck the baby in and touch my cheek with her hand, and sing to us always the same lullaby:

Hush little baby don't say a word,

Momma's gonna buy you a mockingbird.

If that mockingbird don't sing,

Momma's gonna buy you a diamond ring.

If that diamond ring don't shine . . .

The shock of Momma's death and the Widow's possession must have been greater than I knew, for I found I had fallen asleep. The clock said an hour and a half had passed since I came upstairs. Voices still murmured in the garden below, though fewer of them, and they spoke more quietly. I struggled out of bed and switched on a lamp. I passed my fingers through my hair and then sat for what seemed like a long time, looking at my face in the hand mirror on the bedside table. Daddy never let us buy a full-length mirror after Momma broke all the old ones.

Momma always said I had her eyes, but I didn't believe her until I saw her in her casket, surrounded by carnations and calla lilies. Sure enough, there they were. My eyes with her wrinkles around them.

I looked at my face for a long time. Looking for her.

When I crept downstairs I found Penny Friesen standing at the long table nibbling on a piece of cornbread. At twenty she had been prettier than Momma, I suppose, in a bland white-bread way, but her looks hadn't lasted, and she had never blossomed as Momma had. Momma at forty and fifty and even sixty had so much life in her, the room got bright and dangerous when she walked in. But Bill Sr.'s big shadow had left Penny pale and starved for sunlight.

She held a glass of Greg's red wine in her hand. “Having a rest?”

“It's been a long few days.”

“Hm.” She took a sip, and gave me an odd look. “You know,” she said, “the hardest thing about having someone die, I find, is forgiving them.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You can love them or hate them, but when they die they've gotten the last word, and now you'll never be able to even the score.” Penny drank a little more of her wine. “That's hard to forgive, isn't it?”

“Yes it is,” I said.

After the last visitor had left and the dishes had been brought inside and washed, after Candy had gone home to her apartment and Daddy had gone upstairs to sleep, I went back to the little bed at the top of the house and lay down. The whole jumbled day turned and twisted in my thoughts, falling away piece by piece, until, just before sleep took me, I was left with only the grim spare figure of the Widow staring down at me. “What's your name, Little Lost Girl?” she said in her steam-iron voice. The smell of burnt cloth and silver polish made my head swim as she loomed over me. “What's your name?”