WIDOW (6 page)

In the car with Dr Shawn on the way to the bus station, ticket clutched tightly in hand, Kay watched the hospital grounds slide past the windows. She had felt so confident when she talked with Charlene about the future. Now facing the reality of that future made her uneasy.

“I don't know how to be a maid,” she said, blurting out her anxiety. “I'm scared of being on my own.”

“Now, now, don't panic, Kay. I've talked with the manager of the best maid service Houston offers, and she's promised you a job. You're going to do fine, just fine.”

But a maid, Kay thought. What sort of job was that? Yes, it would pay a little more than the minimum-wage jobs she might find on her own, and she wasn't too good to clean someone else's house, that wasn't it. She just feared the prospect of this new life that had dropped her so suddenly toward the bottom of the social scale. How should she behave? What if the people didn't like her or they found out she'd been in Marion for over a year? She had offered a home to Charlene. Somehow she'd have to live up to that promise. She would find some way to survive.

Once the doctor drove them off the hospital grounds, a bright, buoyant confidence took over where she had just been entertaining thoughts of failure. She straightened in the seat and when Dr Shawn looked over at her, she smiled. She sure didn't want to waste another year of her life. She would let the hospital help her find work, and make her plans as she got back on her feet. She could use the money to have her hair styled. She could join a health club, get herself into shape. She wouldn't have to remain a maid all her life. Was she too old for dancing? She glanced surreptitiously at her reflection in the car's side mirror. She looked younger than her true age.

She looked sallow, too, and a little haunted. Frightened. She'd have to lose that look.

“I'll do all right,” she said, breaking into the doctor's reverie. “The important thing is to get myself together.”

“That's right, Kay. That's what I wanted to hear. You're a capable young woman. Your life isn't over.”

She wanted to argue that point, but chose not to. It was men who continued to ruin her. They deceived, betrayed, and murdered her love and her children. As soon as she was on her own in Houston she meant to call her mother-in-law in New Orleans. Scott, in ten years of marriage, had never taken her to visit the woman. His father was dead, and he was an only child, so she thought it extremely odd they never went to see his mother.

It wasn't that far to New Orleans from Houston. She suggested they go there on vacation or at Christmas, but he always managed to lure her elsewhere. Canyon Lake and a camping trip in the hill country of Texas. Canoeing down the rapids of New Braunfels. Once they went to Disney World in Orlando. But never to see his mother. All she had known of the woman was the infrequent telephone calls that came once every two or three years. And then Scott spoke to his mother in grave tones, carrying the extension phone with him into the bedroom for privacy. Mrs Mandel had never seen her own grandchildren. Had she been at the funerals? Had anyone attended them?

Before anything could be set at peace in her life, Kay had to discover the source of Scott's madness. It had something to do with his blood, that's what he'd said to her. And now she knew it had something to do with the mother he deliberately neglected and kept separate from his life.

As the car moved through downtown Austin, Kay closed her eyes a little and let the exterior world shimmer and blur. She missed her home. She wished she were returning to it. But no, she never could have gone home again, not with the boys' bloodstains on the den carpet, or would they have taken it up by now? She would never know. Shawn had softly explained to her that she had lost the house. Repossessed due to her illness and no one to make the mortgage payments. Scott's life-insurance policy didn't pay on suicide. The state had taken over and buried her husband and sons. Everything had been sold to pay off debts. She had nothing. Not a checking or savings account. Not property or insurance money. Nothing. She could draw a small Social Security check from Scott's pension fund, but it wouldn't be enough to live on.

Shawn was an old-fashioned gentleman who made her sit in the passenger seat until he came around the car to open her door. He walked her into the bus station. When he said goodbye and wished her luck, he took one of her hands and pressed a prescription bottle of Valium into it. Though she protested she didn't need the tranquilizers, he said go ahead, keep them, you might need them after all and it's better to be safe than sorry. He asked her to call him if she needed help or advice. He waved at her window as the bus pulled away from the station. When they were two blocks from the bus station, she took the prescription to the bathroom at the back of the bus.

She flushed all the little tablets down the toilet and put the empty bottle back into her purse.

He had told her she was strong. She didn't feel strong. She felt physically weak, almost ill, her stomach full of butterflies like a girl leaving home for the first time, her hands shaking. She put her thumb into her mouth and chewed at the nail. Caught herself and jerked it out again. No. She shouldn't mutilate herself like that. People would think she was nuts.

She'd find something besides the maid's job in Houston to keep her mind off the children. She would go to the workout gym and, no matter what it took, get her body in shape again. She did a mental assessment of her body and thought it wasn't bad. She had never been overweight, and bearing the children had left no stretch marks on her fine skin. Not so much luck as a strict regimen of exercise during pregnancy, keeping the weight down, and using oils on her expanding belly. Maybe she could find a nice little apartment and decorate it in mauve and gray . . . No. She wouldn't decorate it to look like her lost home. She'd let Charlene decorate it, that's what she'd do. She'd find a job and make some money, Charlene would keep house . . .

Regrets. So many of them. She should have forced Scott to talk to her about his mysterious relationship with his mother. She should have called someone when he began acting strangely. She should have gone to school before the children were born so if something happened to Scott, she could support her family. And she had done nothing, but let it happen. It was as much her fault, almost, as it was Scott's.

She had never prepared herself for life, and even less for loss and misfortune. She had known they didn't give jobs—had she needed one—to mothers and housewives. They had no need of them at all. Women hardly ever did those jobs anymore, except on a part-time basis. She had let herself become an anachronism. She was about as worthless—and unneeded—as an extinct species.

The thumb crept back to her mouth and she gnawed on the nail as the miles rolled past.

She was just a little scared, that's all. And that was natural. She wasn't backing out now. She had plans. If she took them one at a time, she could handle anything. Other people found a means for coping after suffering tragedies and deaths. She wasn't so different.

She blinked at the sudden, coppery taste of blood and jerked her thumb from her mouth.

She laughed and the man across from her flinched in his seat by the window. He looked over, frowning. She frowned back until he turned away.

All right, so she wasn't altogether one hundred percent absolutely normal and sane, and she had a compulsion to bite the skin from her fingers, and she was scared shitless, but . . . but . . .

She could still find a way to live.

The next time her thumb moved up to her lips, she put her hands beneath her hips and sat on her burning fingers.

Houston wasn't far now. Here I come, ready or not.

She daydreamed about a little apartment with a balcony full of flowers, her new job a nice, easy one where they paid her enough to cover all her expenses, and life began taking on some kind of shape and meaning again. Charlene was there with a feather duster and a recipe book. Somewhere a wise person waited to tell her all about what had happened that day and why. God whispered in her ear at night that the children were safe and free of pain, free of fear and suffering. Scott was there with God and he was being taught what he had done wrong, where he had erred, and he was sorry, he was prostrate with grief for his sins. All she had to do was move forward through the days and the days took care of her. The questions were going to be sorted and answered. She would find new spirit and hope. Life was bountiful again and the future was more than a black deadly wall waiting for her to run into it.

That's what she had to think.

So she wouldn't lose her way again through the fog.

Before the bus reached Houston, her hands were once again free, and she gnawed at the little finger of her right hand.

~*~

By the end of the day Kay had a room in a cheap boarding house near downtown Houston, not far from the bus station. Twenty-five bucks a week, bath down the hall, no one could use the kitchen. She unpacked her few things, carefully setting out the two silver-framed photos of Gabriel and Stevie on top of a rickety chest of drawers. She ate a cheese sandwich and tomato soup in a downtown diner, and when she paid, she asked for five dollars worth of quarters. Outside, she stepped into a telephone booth that was open to the traffic and held the receiver close to her ear. She called information and found her mother-in-law's phone number. Her hands shook as she dialed it. It rang once, twice, three times. Her palm began to sweat and she changed the phone to her other ear so she could wipe her hand on her skirt.

A bum passed close by and saw her pile of quarters on the phone stand. He held out his hand to her. She made a face at, him and shooed him away with her free hand.

On the fifth ring the phone was picked up at the other end. “Mrs Mandel?” Kay asked.

“Who? Who do you want?”

She had to speak louder. The evening traffic was horrendous. “Is this Mrs Mandel? Scott's mother?”

“It is. But my son is dead. What is this about?”

Kay shuddered. This is Kay.”

“Hey?”

“Kay. Katherine Mandel, your son's wife.”

“He killed your kids,” she said without pause, but her voice lowered as if in respect for the dead. “I thought he might, it was always in the back of my mind, and I was scared all the time for them.”

Mystified, Kay said, “Why didn't you ever warn me? What was wrong with him? You've got to tell me why he shot my boys and then himself right in front of my face. Did you know he did that? He said it was because of something in his blood. What did he mean by that, could you tell me? I have to know why he did it.”

“His father died a raving maniac, took a shotgun to himself, pulled the trigger with his big toe. Scott was just a little boy, five or so. Scott found him in the garage where he did it. I was at work. Neighbors had to call the ambulance. Later Scott's cousin Brucie got cancer and blamed his whole family. They found them stabbed to death in the kitchen. My sister-in-law, her husband, and Brucie's two brothers and one sister. Piled them up in the middle of the kitchen floor, how do you like that?

“But me, it wasn't me. None of my side ever did nothing crazy like that, let me tell you. We come from Georgia, good stock, and except for my granddad who was supposed to have shot a couple of niggers worked with him on the WPA, there never was any mental defectives on my side. I expect that's what Scott was talking about in the blood and all. And it was, too. He done the same thing his father did. I wanted to tell you about it, but he wouldn't never let me talk to you.”

Kay hung onto the phone as if to a lifeline, the blood draining from her face. She felt faint. The bum was back hanging around the glass side of the booth, beckoning to her, pointing at the quarters. “I have to go,” Kay said, fearing she might fall to the floor of the booth and be vulnerable to robbery by the bum or anyone else who happened by this busy street. A man riding in a pickup truck leaned out and whistled at her. She wiped sweat from her forehead. “I have to go now.”

“It weren't my fault,” Mrs. Mandel was screaming over the receiver. “I told Scott to be careful, he had bad genes in him, he might do something terrible some day, but he never listened to me. He wouldn't even let me come see my own grandchildren. I had to wait until they were in sealed caskets going into the ground, that awful Texas ground . . .”

Kay hung up and pressed her face against the booth's wall. The glass was cool to her feverish skin. She turned, stumbled from the booth. She had to remember where her room was, where she lived now. She halted, remembering she'd left the rest of her change in the booth. When she turned she saw the bum scuttling away into a weedy overgrown acre that separated the diner and an apartment complex. To hell with it.

Afternoon had shaded rapidly to evening while she had listened to Scott's mother, and now a ribbon of lights from the traffic showed her the sidewalk. She had to get to her room. She had to forget what Mrs. Mandel had told her. She hadn't been able to think directly about what Scott had done ever since she'd come back to herself in Marion State. She walked around the edges and peeked at it from out of other thoughts that crowded her mind, but she never took a good look at it head-on. She couldn't. Not and stay sane.

She knew what he had done, and she remembered the sounds of the gunshots and the color of the blood, but she never allowed herself to see all the pieces together, never approached that scene in her memory too closely because it would swamp her with grief and submerge her with sorrow. She would never climb from that pit if she went into it again.

The first man in her life had been a liar and a cheat. She married a man twenty years her senior when she was just seventeen. Her mother said don't do it, you're making a big mistake, it won't work. But he was wealthy, she was poor. He offered her a home, a future, security. All the wrong reasons, and she had suffered the consequences. After a year she suspected him of philandering—late business meetings, out-of-town trips, cooling ardor—and she called him on it. "You think marriage means fidelity?” he asked, laughing at her. “Not for me, Kay. I'm way too old for that sort of thinking.”