No Defense (7 page)

“The
City Paper
loves you, and you
have a fan club of devoted readers,” I said. ‘Just because
Universal Media doesn’t appreciate you proves they’re stupid,
that’s all.”

“Stupid or not, it means I have to get a
second job just so we can stay even. And ‘even’ isn’t exactly where
I’d hoped to be by now. I noticed in the Sunday paper that they’re
looking for people to do caricatures out at Six Flags over
Georgia.” He grimaced.

“We’re not that desperate, are we? Come on,
that’s like a joke job, Eddie.”

“Maybe I am a joke,” he said.

“You are not, but you’re acting like a
martyr. If you’re so worried about our future, then we should just
go ahead and move to Tallagumsa.” I regretted raising the subject
again but pushed ahead anyway. “You can write there as well as
here. The paper doesn’t care where you are, they’ve told you that
before. You could use the top floor of the house as a studio. Oh
Eddie, you’d have the time and the peace and quiet to concentrate
on your work. You’re always complaining about both. Why won’t you
at least think about it?”

“Because I don’t want your father to
determine the course of my life,” Eddie said. “That’s why.” He
stomped out his cigarette on the porch as if he wanted to kill
it.

“Then I guess I can look forward to many
more years of crappy, low-paying jobs and crummy apartments and
never finishing my degree. And Jessie and her siblings can look
forward to being brought up in day care. I’m thrilled.”

“Your father is managing to make me look
like the bad guy here. Don’t you see that, LuAnn?”

“All I see is …” I stopped myself before I
said what I was thinking. “Come on, please, let’s go inside. It’s
been a long day.” I took the bands out of my hair, unwound the
braid, and shook the hair loose, ready to go to sleep as soon as I
saw our bed. Then I picked up the cigarette butt, as well as the
items I’d deposited in the rocker, and walked inside the apartment
behind Eddie.

“It looks so clean,” he said, surveying the
room. “You didn’t clean this morning before we left, did you?”

“You know I didn’t,” I said. I looked
around. It only took a few seconds for me to figure out what was
wrong. “It looks clean because it’s empty. Our stereo, our TV, and
the two lamps Mother gave us aren’t here.”

“Shit,” Eddie said. “Jess! Come here!”

She ran back into the living room,
responding to the urgency in his voice.

“Let’s go outside for a minute,” he
said.

“Why?” Jessie asked. “We just got here.”

“I want to see if Violet’s outside,
sweetie,” I said, even though I knew Violet and Iris Ann were in
Augusta all week. “I need to tell her something.”

I lied to Jessie because I didn’t want to
tell her what had happened. How would she react when she learned
that someone had come into her home and taken her family’s
belongings? Most of my life--and certainly when I was her age--I’d
had an unshakable sense of safety and security. How dare someone
take that away from her?

We walked through the side yard single file,
well trained by the Crawfords not to step on their carefully
planned perennial borders.

From the vantage point of our backyard I
could see that the back door into the mud room was wide open. We
tried the back door to the kitchen. That door too was unlocked.

Biting on my lip, I walked out toward the
swing set Daddy had given Jessie last year. I sat on one of the two
U-shaped plastic seats and began to cry.

“What’s the matter?”Jessie stood in front of
me, her hand on my left knee.

No one answered her.

“What happened, Mommy?” she insisted.

Because it would be impossible to keep the
burglary a complete secret from her, I tried to cushion the blow.
“Somebody took some things out of the apartment without asking
first,” I said. I wiped the tears off my cheeks with a tissue from
my pocket.

“We think,” Eddie said.

“Oh Eddie, what else could have happened?” I
asked. “There’ve been a bunch of break-ins around here, we leave
town for the day, and our stuff is gone. How would you explain
it?”

“Well …” he said.

“Were they bad guys?” Jessie asked. Her eyes
grew larger. “Are they inside?”

“The Crawfords must have seen something,”
Eddie said.

“They’re in Augusta, remember?” I said. “Oh,
no! I guess you’d better check their house.”

Eddie trudged from our yard to theirs and
pulled on their back screen door. It didn’t budge. He went around
the house, tried the front door, and checked all the ground-level
windows. There were no signs of forced entry. That at least was
good news. It was unpleasant enough to imagine the reaction of
Violet and Iris Ann to our loss, but I knew they’d be heartbroken
if anyone had stolen their silver, one set of which Iris Ann
claimed her great-grandmother had hidden from the Yankees during
the War Between the States.

Jessie turned her hand into a gun and ran
down the path between the two houses. “I’ll shoot the bad guys,”
she said. “Bang! Bang, bang!”

“Where did you learn to do that?” I asked,
shocked. I’d never seen her pretend to shoot a gun. She played
house, dress up, horse show, and tea party, but never guns.

“At day care,” she yelled.

“Terrific. Maybe we all should go get real
guns,” I said.

“Don’t be ridiculous, LuAnn,” Eddie said. He
kicked one of the thick wooden legs that balanced the swing set. “I
don’t understand why, when their house is full of silver”-he waved
in the direction of the Crawfords’-”and enough rich people live
around here, why in the world did they choose ours? Anyone can tell
we don’t own anything valuable. Did you forget to lock the door
this morning?” His tone was accusing. “Or maybe you arranged it to
make Tallagumsa look better to me.”

I glared at him from my swing seat.

Jessie solemnly handed me a bouquet of the
Crawfords’ treasured pink and yellow tulips she must have gathered
from their garden.

Under the circumstances, I couldn’t
reprimand her. “Thank you, sweetie. Why don’t you go play in the
sandbox, Jes,” I said instead. I didn’t want her to listen to how
furious I was at Eddie.

“In my dress?” she asked, astonished at this
breach of my own rule.

“It’s okay, this one time.”

She ran off. Normally I wouldn’t have
allowed her to play in the sandbox dressed up. Sand would be
embedded in every seam of the sailor dress, under her shoe insoles,
and in her tights, but by that point in that day I didn’t care.

“You’re right, Eddie,” I said, my voice
rising. “Those seemingly innocent busboys at the Steak and Ale are
really criminals. I promised them all my tips if they’d pull off
the job. Who’s being ridiculous now? Goddamn you! I didn’t know
Daddy was giving us the Steak House until-”

“
You
, you mean,” Eddie interrupted.
“He gave
you
the Steak House.” He pointed at me
menacingly.

“But it’s for all of
us
! And I didn’t
know about it until today, at exactly the same moment you and
everyone else found out. You act like there’s a conspiracy between
Daddy and me or something. There’s not. I was as surprised as you
were. But you’re right: Tallagumsa looks better all the time!”

“See? You’ve made up your mind.” He paced
back and forth in front of the swing set. “I know you have.”

“I really haven’t, I swear. Would you please
just think about Daddy’s proposal? That’s all I’m asking. We can
discuss it later, rationally, calmly.”

“You’re just humoring me.”

“Oh, stop! I don’t want to argue with you
while we’re standing outside our burglarized apartment, you’re
furious at the whole world, and Jessie is nearby.”

“Why shouldn’t I be furious? The world
sucks,” he said.

Jessie suddenly jumped up out of the
sandbox, ran over, and grabbed my arm. “Did they take Lily Lee?”
she wailed, referring to her favorite doll.

“I’ll go in and check on her and everything
else,” Eddie said.

“Get Jessie and me a jacket too,” I called.
With the setting sun’s waning warmth blocked by the tall row of
cedars in our backyard, the temperature had dropped to the low
sixties.

Eddie walked in the back door of our
apartment.

“What if Lily Lee is gone?” Jessie
worried.

“I promise they didn’t take her,” I assured
Jessie, confident no one would. Lily Lee was the ugliest, rattiest
doll I’d ever seen, and Jessie adored her. When Jessie received
Lily Lee at the age of four months, Lily Lee was a lovely little
baby doll. Since then, though, she’d been colored and painted on,
thrown up on, and glued on and to various objects. After every
abuse, I’d done my best to restore her, but some of her hair and
most of her eyelashes had fallen out, and the blue of her eyes was
smeared across her plastic face. Lily Lee was safe from even the
least discriminating burglars.

“The vacuum, the radio, the blender, those
are
the
only other things I noticed missing,” Eddie said
when he came out of the apartment. He carried a beer in one hand
and Jessie’s jacket and doll in the other. I didn’t worry him about
my jacket.

“Sounds like they needed home furnishings,”
I said. “Maybe they were newlyweds.” I smiled at the absurdity of
this notion. “Is Lily Lee all right?” Jessie asked.

“She’s fine, honey,” he said, handing her
the battered doll and the jacket. “So are all your Barbie dolls. I
called the police, LuAnn.”

“The police!” Jessie cried. She pointed her
finger gun into the air again and ran around shooting it. “You’re
dead,” she yelled. “Bang, bang!”

“I think I’ll check with Adrienne, see if
she saw or heard anything,” I said. “Why don’t you swing with Daddy
while we wait for the police, Jes.” I thought I’d better warn
Adrienne, who wasn’t particularly careful about keeping her drugs-a
lot of pot, some acid-out of sight.

I held out my hands to Eddie. “Ooh!” I
yelped as he helped me up from the swing. My hands automatically
reached for my stomach.

He looked at me quizzically.

“It’s nothing,” I said, even though I wasn’t
sure what the sharp pain meant. Maybe the contraction was different
from those I’d felt over the last month, maybe not.

Focusing on my body and the pregnancy for
the first time in hours, I realized how incredibly exhausted I was.
The day had made more than its fair share of emotional and physical
demands: the trip to Tallagumsa, the dedication, the gift of the
Steak House, the trip to the
tree
and the memorial, Eddie’s
rejection letter, and now our house burglarized. Enough! Enough!
Enough! I wanted to pull a cover up over my head and forget about
everything for at least twenty-four hours, but instead I walked
slowly around to the north end of our front porch and rang the
side-door bell.

I could hear Adrienne walk down the stairs
to her front door. When she opened the door, two cats rushed past,
under the hem of her billowing floor-length skirt. She didn’t seem
to notice them. She was high. Very high. Her eyes were all pupils,
dilated as fully as they could be, perfect black circles. Her pale
freckled face was framed by naturally curly shoulder-length
strawberry-blond hair. She looked otherworldly, a wraithlike Orphan
Annie with a joint.

“We’re back,” I said. I gave a little wave.
“Just wanted to let you know and say hi.”

“I didn’t know you left,” she said. Another
cat walked slowly out the door past us.

“I told you yesterday, remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. She showed no signs of
concern about her flagging memory, only curiosity. “Where’d you go
again?”

“Tallagumsa, Alabama,” I reminded her. “And
someone broke in our place while we were away,” I said. “They stole
some things, the TV, the stereo, I don’t know what all.”

“Wow!” she said. Her expression reminded me
of Jessie’s when I’d arrive at day care with a surprise toy or
cupcake.

“You didn’t hear anyone or anything
odd?”

“I was at work. Then Bryce was here and”-she
shrugged and grinned-“we were busy, you know?”

“Eddie called the police,” I said. “They’ll
be here soon. Maybe you ought to go over to Bryce’s for a
while.”

“Thanks,” she said. She opened the door and
left, walking down the street without her purse, her shoes, or a
care in the world. I could hear her singing “Sugar Magnolia” as she
turned the comer.

C
HAPTER FIVE

At the sound of police sirens approaching our
apartment, Jessie dragged the toes of her new patent-leather shoes
in the dirt beneath her swing and came to a standstill. She let go
of the swing ropes, covered her ears, and squeezed her eyes closed
until the police car stopped out front and the sirens wound down
and jerked to a stop, then she ran around the side of the house to
greet the policemen.