The Most Wanted (9 page)

“You did it, though. You got your education.”

“Well, what was I going to do? Cut hair? Tend bar? I could have took care of myself. Maybe found somebody who’d do it for me, too, at least when I was younger. But I had them all”—she pointed her chin at Arley—“and I wasn’t going to go down begging for welfare on account of them. You can’t live right off that, anyhow.”

“But you wanted a family—”

“You don’t have to want one to get one.”

A door banged open, and a barefoot blond boy in surgical scrub pants and a T-shirt that read “Hell Freezes Over” stumbled into the kitchen. His was the strawberry-blond hair color his mother’s must have remembered, and the topography of his smooth face gave him the beautiful, vacant look of a B-movie star. He nodded at us without expression. “Ma,” he said. “Ma’am.” A Texas kid will always say this when you meet him, and a Texas kid can make “Ma’am” sound like a four-letter word. But this boy didn’t. He didn’t have that much energy.

“I got to go if we are going to go,” Arley put in, softly. Dazedly, I waved to Rita and Cam and sort of crab-walked out of the house. They stared at us as we got into my car.

Arley strapped herself in, smoothing her jeans, plucking at her rayon shirt. Her breath was coming in little chuffs, and she let her impossibly long hair fall over the side of her face like a tent flap.

“Arley?” I said, backing out around the motorbike I assumed was her brother’s, which seemed constructed mostly of duct tape. She didn’t answer. “Arley, your mother’s one tough cookie, isn’t she?”

She looked up at me then and blinked her eyes once. “Yes,” she said. “She does what she wants.”

“That must not be easy to live with all the time.”

“She ain’t hardly . . . well, she’s hardly ever home all the time. So it doesn’t matter so much.”

She probably didn’t need the advice. But I felt compelled to give it.

“Arley,” I began, “you know from school that there are people who help kids out if they have trouble with their parents. No matter what kind of thing happens, it’s already happened to some other girl before, and nobody has to put up with it. . . .”

“What do you mean?”

“Abuse, Arley. Hitting. Or neglecting you.”

She smiled, and she looked patient and old, like one of the veiled and straight-backed señoras, of incalculable age, who prayed on the steps of the cathedral on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. “Mama wouldn’t never hit us.”

“Do you feel . . . close to your mother? Even if she acts kind of distant?”

“No.”

“Do you like her?”

“Well, this is going to sound awful, but I used to like her more when I was a kid.”

“What changed?”

“The big thing was, when I got in school I started to see that things at our house weren’t . . . normal.”

Here it came, I thought. The cigarette burns. The “uncle” with the curious hands. The skin on my forearms prickled. “What do you mean?” I asked carefully.

“Well, it’s hard to explain. Like, okay, I know that some people don’t like to cook. Elena’s mom, she cooks all the time, and it’s like this big thing with her. She’s always telling me how you have to make the food nutritious, but you also have to make it look good, or nobody will eat it.” She drew a big breath, and I fidgeted, impatient with the teenage digression. “And Ginny, my boss,” Arley went on, “she totally hates to cook. And she owns a restaurant! But my mama, see, I can’t never remember her cooking, not once. I know she must have done it before I was big enough to do it. We’d have starved otherwise, you know? But I don’t remember. Even on Thanksgiving.”

She went on, describing a life so devoid of joy or recreation, it could have been lived inside a grim monastic order. Arley’s mother barely spoke, and then only to give commands. When she was not at work, she was out dancing. She did not neglect her children; neglect might have required more concentration than Rita was able to muster up. For Arley, school was a respite, not another chore. Arley’s mother simply did not love her, and not only did she not love her but she regarded Arley’s school successes, as well as her timid attempts to involve herself in extracurricular activities, as a source of irritation, an obstacle that got between her and her right to cheap labor.

Arley’s breaking away, to claim time for herself with Elena’s family, to take her job, was not a minor teenage rebellion; it was an all-out revolution. No wonder Arley was tense, wondering what her mother would “do” to her about Dillon.

Dillon . . . With Dillon, Arley had probably traded more words and feelings than she’d ever expressed in the previous fourteen years of her life. No wonder she’d been knocked off balance by the force of his attention.

“Did you ever have people over? Family? At Christmas?”

“No. We once went to her sister Debbie Lynn’s house in Galveston.”

“So what do you do on holidays?

“Mama usually works. You get more if you work a holiday. Cam and me usually have a sixteen-piece bucket. You know, they’re open on Christmas, too.”

“What does your mother do at home?”

“Well, nothing. She just talks on the phone. Or she sits at the table and smokes. She never eats nothing; just sits there tapping with her boot and looking out the window and waiting for us to eat and get the dishes done. Or whatever. Then she goes to work. When I was little, I would talk to her sometimes. I remember once I told her about the tarantula in the glass case at school. She didn’t really get mad at me; it was more like she could see right through you, like you were glass . . . no, like you were water.” She smiled. “I sound like a real case, huh? It’s not, like, at all as bad as it sounds.”

I might have felt relieved. No lech uncle. No hidden bruises. But as we drove through Avalon to the drive-in restaurant, Arley’s account of her life, though told without a trace of self-pity, left me feeling more bowed, more helpless, than I could recall feeling when faced with the most miserable case of spousal battery. You could name that. You could find that. If you could find that, you could fix it. Not easily. It would always be like drawing out cactus tines with a tweezers—every time you got one, you’d spot three more. But what Rita did to her children had no name, because it was nothing. Nothing that could be legally called abandonment. She walked the line. She was careful and correct. She did nothing more than let her children pass through.

We sat in the lime glow of the Dairy-Brite and sipped our cherry colas, and Arley told me that things actually got better, for her and her brother, when they got tall enough to use appliances and smart enough to remember the number of the Bexar County police and Rita’s nursing station at the hospital. Rita switched to nights—more money—“because we didn’t need anybody to take care of us when we were asleep. There were whole weeks when I never saw Mama, Miz Singer—”

“You can call me Annie,” I said. “Your big sister, where was she?”

“Oh, she had to live at Grandma’s.”

“Your grandma took care of her?”

“No.” Arley dropped her eyes shyly. “It wasn’t like that.” She swiped at her mouth with a tassel of her hair. “You know, Cam used to mind me. But now he can’t do one thing. He’s like dead from the neck down. He works at Electric Mirage three nights a week, but the rest of the time he just sits in his room with his guitar and his fiddle and smokes. Or he rides around with his friends. This is about a year it’s been like this. I was really mad, at first. I, like, want to ask him if he has a genetic defect that makes him so he couldn’t push a button on the washing machine.” She smiled at me. “That’s why I started laughing today. Mama lets him get away with it ’cause he’s a boy. She just—she really likes men.” A prostitute, I thought. That was the shoe that hadn’t dropped. But then Arley added, “Not that she ever gets any of them. She hasn’t had a date with a guy in, like, a year.”

She was quiet a minute, then she piped up again. “Plus Cam can sing.”

“Sing?”

“He has a really good voice. One night, he was at this tavern where Mama goes with my sister, whenever Langtry comes around, and Cam was there moving some boxes for the owner, and he just got up there and sang some Willie Nelson song, and Mama and Lang was knocked right on their ass. I mean . . . I’m sorry I swore.”

“It’s okay.”

“So now, you know, Cam is a genius.” Arley had even overheard her mother, on the phone, telling a girlfriend that with his voice and that big cleft in his chin, he could be as big as Clint Black. “She told my sister a cleft looks bad on a woman, but it’s sexy on a man. And you know, my sister does have a cleft in her chin. A little one.”

“Her name’s Langley?”

“Langtry. That’s a town name, like all of us. Mama says people say you look at them from behind, you can’t tell who’s the mother and who’s the daughter. At the bars, they get taken for sisters.”

“What does Langtry do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know where she lives. She just comes and goes. She got her own place when she was sixteen. I didn’t even know she moved away till Cameron—that’s
his
real name—found all her stuff was gone out of that room up in the attic. I took that for my room then.”

I asked Arley, “Didn’t your mom ever want to marry?”

“She wanted to marry a doctor.”

“And does she go out with doctors from the hospital?”

“Not really. I mean, once in a while she has. She worships the doctors. The doctor who fixed my leg when I broke it on the side horse in gym came over here once and picked her up. But he didn’t come in. Mostly, she’s dated guys that are kind of losers. They come around here, and they stay for a while. But then they leave.”

“Is she really sad then?”

“She doesn’t cry. She just rips all the pillowcases off to wash and tells me to throw out whatever they left. A razor or whatever.”

“How did they treat you?”

“They never treated me any way at all, except one guy once bought me some barrettes, but Mama had a hissy fit and stomped on them. They were mostly asleep in the day and gone at night. They’d get really thirsty, though. They’d drink all the juice.”

“Speaking of thirsty, I could use another Coke. You too?” I asked her.

“I would,” she said. “But I can pay.”

“It’s okay. Do you want anything to eat?”

“I really want onion rings. They have the best ones here. But I shouldn’t. Do you know that if you eat that greasy stuff, it makes little grease bubbles in your blood? I mean, that’s what they mean about clogging your arteries. Can you imagine having greasy blood?”

“I think you’d have to eat a lot of onion rings, over a long period, to get greasy blood.”

“Well . . .”

“I love onion rings. When I was a kid in New York, we used to go to this one place where they would just give you a paper bag full of them, and the whole bottom would be soaked through in minutes—”

“That’s just like here!” She smiled.

We got two orders, and Arley asked me suddenly, “You want to see where my grandma is?”

“Okay,” I said, glancing involuntarily at my watch. She saw it. “It won’t take long,” she said, with a burble of laughter in her voice. “It’s not like what you think.”

She directed me a half block down the road to a little cemetery, almost invisible from the car. I followed Arley up onto a small ridge, through a choke of weeds and wildflowers. We came to a black marble stone, shaped like a square footlocker. “This is my grandma,” Arley said softly. “Amelia Mowbray. My grandfather, I never knew him. He’s buried somewhere else, I guess. But Grandma I remember. I was about nine when she passed. She used to live right here, down on Miranda Street, with my mother’s brother Randall, who has schizophrenia. He lives in a state home now. I always thought he was kind of nice. Grandma was nice too. She worried about Randall all the time, but sometimes she would come over and play checkers with me, and sometimes took me to bingo. Langtry, she stayed home with Randall, and they had a teacher come in once in a while because of a hardship situation. So Lang never had to go to school. She did the cooking and cleaning for Grandma, because Grandma had an ulcer. I wish Mama would have named me for her, instead of how she did.”

“I think you have a beautiful name.”

“It’s humiliating, though, when you know how I got it. See, she named us after the towns where she was when they . . . when she . . .”

“What?”

“When she got pregnant. That’s what she said. When I wanted to change my name to Amelia when I was about ten or eleven, she said, ‘I named you what I named you for a reason. Just count yourself lucky you’re not called Brownsville or Matagorda.’ I told Dillon that right off. You can’t imagine telling something like that to a stranger. That was how I knew there was something special between us.”