The Secret's in the Sauce (28 page)

I thought about it as I prepared the tuna fish pie for dinner and decided to call Vernon to tell him of my plan while on my way to the trailer park where Dee Dee and Velvet live. Of course, by then it was the same time as the shift change over at the sheriff’s office so it wasn’t much of a surprise that Vernon didn’t answer his cell
phone.

I elected not to call his office line.

I drove my car down the snowy path to the trailer Dee Dee and Velvet called home. It was an old single-wide with turquoise siding running around its base and cream-colored siding from there up. The small and dirty windows were book-ended with fading black shutters. There was a rickety latticed porch that rested beneath the peak of the trailer’s center and front door. Lying catty-corner across it was a mop that appeared to be frozen stiff, and along the back of the steps were potted plants that had long ago tasted the
bitter pill of death.

“Oh, Lord,” I prayed. “Why have you brought me here?”

Not waiting for an answer, I opened my car’s door and exited its warmth for the chill of the day. I looked up for a moment, hoping for any sign of sun in the gray sky, but found none. Heaving a sigh, I walked toward the porch, keeping my gaze on my feet, careful of where I stepped. Seconds later I was knocking on the door with my leather-gloved knuckles, then standing back in wait.

When Dee Dee opened the door and saw me, she sighed so deeply her shoulders visibly sagged. “What in the . . . what do you want, Evangeline?”

I arched my back so I stood a bit taller. “Do you have a minute?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head, then looked back at me. “For what? Another fight with you?”

“No.” I swallowed. “Actually, I’d just like to talk to you. Like we used to do . . . when we were kids.”

“When we were kids?” She coughed a laugh. “Evangeline Benson, you do beat all.” She ducked her chin a bit. “Excuse me. Evangeline Vesey.”

“Seriously, Dee Dee. I want to talk to you. Are you alone? Is Velvet here?”

“Velvet’s at Wal-Mart working.”

“Then may I come in?”

Dee Dee looked at me long and hard before stepping away from the door. “By all means. May as well warn you: it ain’t Buckingham Palace, but it’s a roof.”

I stepped over the threshold. She was right. It wasn’t Buckingham Palace. The place was clean but with stained green and yellow shag carpet someone must have stolen from the set of the Brady Bunch and furniture that screamed of the Spanish hacienda motif era. The pictures on the walls were mostly replicas of oil landscapes, no doubt purchased at a thrift store. Still, it was clean.

“I just made some coffee. Want some?”

“No.” I watched her walk into the open kitchen of orange Formica and off-white linoleum floors that buckled here and there. “Thank you, though.”

“Well, why don’t you have a seat there in the living room?” She poured a cup of coffee into a chipped mug and then made what I felt was too big a production out of adding sugar and non-dairy creamer.

I moved into the living room and sat in the first chair I came to. I sat up just a bit to tug my coat tightly around me as I glanced at the oversized maple end table next to me. There was an ashtray with the telltale sign of a recently smoked cigarette (as though the trailer reeking of it wasn’t enough), several five-by-seven and wallet-sized framed photos, and an old Bible.

When Dee Dee joined me, I jumped.

“That’s some of my family.” She moved to the other side of the table, then squatted down, holding the coffee cup with both hands. “That there,” she said, pointing to the frame nearest her, “is my boy Darrin.”

I looked at the handsome young man made all the more dashing by his army uniform.

“He’s over in the Middle East right now. Not a day goes by but what I don’t pray for that boy, even though I don’t know him real well.”

I remembered Vernon telling me that one of Dee Dee’s children had been raised in a foster home. I nodded once in acknowledgment.

“He was mine and Danny’s son. Danny was my fifth husband.” She looked at me with a sharp eye. “I suppose you know I was married a bunch of times.”

Again I nodded. “I’ve heard.”

“Six times.” Again she pointed to a photograph, this time of a man who looked old enough to be our fathers’ age. “My husband Neil McGurk. Neil was my last husband. He died right before Velvet and me moved back here.” I looked from the photograph to Dee Dee, who blinked back tears. “He was a good man, Neil was. That man loved me and he didn’t care what my past was about. He just loved me.”

“How’d he die?” I nearly choked on my words.

“Heart attack. Then a stroke. Velvet and I nursed him like he was a baby, but he died anyway.”

“I’m sorry, Doreen.”

“Yeah, me too.” She paused before continuing. “Anyway, Danny and me had Darrin, but he was taken by the state when Danny and I were busted for selling marijuana.”

I opened my mouth to ask how a woman got involved in such as that, but then closed it when she pointed to another photo of another young man, this one with a woman and small boy who appeared to be about four or five. “That’s Dion.”

“Dion? Like DiMucci? The singer from the fifties?”

“I got pregnant with him while listening to ‘The Wanderer.’”

“It’s amazing you can know that,” I commented. I felt my shoulders relax, and I briefly wondered how she could squat for so long. Women our age—in our late fifties—can’t usually stay down for that long.

“Well, it was a one-night stand in the back of a club.”

I frowned and felt myself tense up again.

“Those weren’t my best days. Anyway, I never married his daddy, whose name, for the record, is Paul. Paul actually owned the club, and I was his bartender, and one thing just led to another, if you know what I mean.”

I didn’t, but I just nodded.

“Paul was a pretty good guy, and he and his wife—”

“His wife?” The words flew out of my mouth before I had a chance to mull them over.

Dee Dee all but sneered at me. “Like I said, Evangeline, those were not the best of times. I was divorced, I had a child to feed, and I was lonely. Sometimes, when you’re young, you think that men mean what they say when they say it and then you grow up and find out they rarely do.” She took a sip of her coffee then. “Leastways, not when they’re married, they don’t. But, like I said, Paul wasn’t all bad; he was just hot for me. In those days a lot of men were, but Paul was the only one who could make things happen for me, or so I thought. So I had this one-night fling with him, and he told me the next day he’d made a mistake and that he loved his wife, he really, really loved his wife and that I had a job as long as I wanted one.” She barked another laugh. “Sure I did. As long as I didn’t tell his wife. And I never did, even when I handed her Dion to raise.”

“Oh, Doreen.”

“Don’t feel bad for me, Evangeline. I made my choice out of love and a little desperation. Paul knows, of course, that Dion is his. He knows but we never discuss it.”

“What do you mean? How can he know if you never discuss it?”

“Because I named him Dion. That’s all it took for him to know that I hadn’t been with any other man. Anyway, I told Paul there was no way I could raise another child and asked if he and his wife would take Dion.”

“How old was he? Dion?”

“About six months. Cutest thing you ever did see.”

I smiled at her.

“So Paul and Connie—that’s his wife—took Dion because Connie couldn’t have children and thought that this was God’s way of providing. In the meantime, they never kept me from Dion if I wanted to visit. They told him all along that I was his real mama and, in return, I never bothered them much.”

“Is that his wife and son?” I asked, pointing to the photo.

“That’s my baby and his baby,” she said and smiled a crooked smile. “Little Dion Bunn Jr. We call him D.J.”

“Has Dion ever asked you about his father?” I shocked myself at the forwardness of my questions, but I figured I had come here for answers, so I might as well ask.

She paused before answering. “No. But I think he knows. I think Connie knows, to tell you the truth, but no one says anything.”

“How could they know?”

“Dion is the spitting image of his daddy.”

“Like Donna is the spitting image of her mother? And Velvet too?”

Again Dee Dee laughed. “Yeah, I guess so. Except my girls are ten times prettier than I ever dreamed of being.” At that she heaved herself up and moved to the sofa, where a pack of cigarettes and a lighter waited for her. She pulled one from its pack and lit it, then said, “Now you know my story.”

I picked up the faded color photo that had been closest to me all along. It was of Donna, taken with Santa the Christmas before Doreen had left town, I imagined. “Not all of it, Dee Dee. What happened with you and—”

“The choir director? Horace Shelly?”

“Yes.”

“Horace and I married after we moved to California and my divorce from Vernon was final.” She drew on her cigarette and blew the smoke upward. “I was so stupid. I actually thought that dog of a man loved me. We’d move to California, get married, get involved with a church, and I’d be the beloved pastor’s wife. But he said he couldn’t work for God after what he’d done. He reminded me every stinking day of what his ‘lust for me,’ as he put it, had cost him. He took a job in a shoe store, I took a job in a restaurant—that’s where I learned how to bartend—and then, after a year or so of pure misery, I met Steven.”

I cocked my head in puzzlement.

“He’s Velvet’s daddy. He was from Alabama.” She took another drag of her cigarette, leaned back against the rough cushions of the sofa, and crossed her legs. “Lord have mercy, but I was hot for that man.” She laughed again. “He was in L.A. on business and just took to me, wham-bam. I ran off with him after knowing him less than forty-eight hours.”

“Goodness.”

“Shock you?” She sat up and thumped ashes into the ashtray on the coffee table.

“Ah . . .”

“Sure it does.” She answered her own question, then leaned back again. “That’s okay. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To learn all my secrets?” She waved her hand at me. “Don’t even bother to answer that.” She took another drag of her cigarette before she leaned up again and ground it out. “Steven and me—our good days lasted about six months. Just long enough for me to get pregnant and realize I’d made a huge mistake . . . or, in this case, another huge mistake. I was drowning my sorrows in the bar where I worked—”

“While you were pregnant?”

“Gosh, no. I’d already had Velvet. She was about a month or so. I’d left her with Steven’s witch of a mother who thought she was God’s answer to motherhood and I was just some cat Steven had brought home from the pound. I went out and got myself plastered while Steven was on one of his ‘business trips.’ Oh yeah. I knew all about those business trips.”

She paused long enough for me to take this in.

“So you divorced Steven?” I asked.

“No. He divorced me, right after he found out that while he was tom-cattin’ around, I was kitty-cattin’ around, if you get my drift.”

I did.

“No doubt his mother told him. Anyway, Velvet and I left, I moved to another town, and that’s when I met Paul. As soon as Steven found out about me being pregnant with Dion, he hauled my rear end into court and took custody of Velvet. Him and his mother, of course.”

I took a deep breath, then blew it out. “Doreen, I am so sorry about all this. I . . . well, why didn’t you just come back here? To Summit View? To your old home and your friends and . . . to Donna?”

“After what I’d done? No way in . . . you-know-where. Even after I heard that Mama died, I stayed as far away as I could.”

“Until now.”

Dee Dee lit another cigarette. “Velvet and her daddy had a fallingout when she was about sixteen, and she came to live with me and Mickey, my fourth husband. We’ve been together ever since—mama and daughter.”

I was afraid to ask what had happened with Mickey. So far I felt like I’d fallen into a Jacqueline Susann novel.

“Velvet was the one who suggested we move back here. She wanted me to come first, to get things set up a bit, to get the lay of the land, so to speak. So I came. What blew my mind was that none of you even recognized me.” She leaned up and took a sip of what I imagined was tepid coffee.

“You don’t look the same, quite honestly.”

“No. Years of smoking and drinking and going from one man to another and having one kid after another. This is what it gets you.” She gave me a hard look as she drew on her cigarette. “Sin’ll age a girl.” She blinked before she said, “You’re lucky, Evangeline.”

I agreed with her there, with one exception. “I never had children, Doreen. And I’ll never have a grandson like your little D.J.”

She seemed to ponder my words before answering. “You got me there.”

No, I thought. You got me.
“Do you remember how, when we were kids, we used to play that little game with the folded pieces of paper?”

“To tell our fortune?”

I nodded.

“Good gosh, I haven’t thought of that in years.”

“I dreamed about it last night.”

“You have weird dreams, Evangeline.” She drew on her cigarette again.

I chuckled then. “Maybe. But what I was thinking was . . . how it all turned out . . . and really, how unfortunate your future was. Only we didn’t see that back then. What I remember about the dream is that the game said you would marry a lawyer and have a few kids and live in a wooden house.”

Dee Dee was quiet. She pursed her lips, then said, “Seems like no matter how many times we played that game, we got a differ- ent answer. But life isn’t a game, Evangeline. It’s a gamble, but it’s not a game.”

I looked over to the Bible lying on the table next to me. “Not according to the Good Book.”

“That was Mama’s. Mama believed without question what I have trouble believing even with the answers.”

Maybe, I thought, because certain Christians haven’t made it too easy for you to believe the message of the book.
I looked back at her and, for the briefest of moments, saw the little girl who had once been my friend. “Look, Doreen . . . Dee Dee. I know you and I won’t ever be close, and that’s okay. But I would like to work with you as best as possible. We’ve got the catering business going, and you’ve got the bartending thing going—you and Velvet. We can at least keep it civil.” I looked at the photos again. “It’s helped, I think, knowing what you’ve been through.”