A Dime a Dozen (16 page)

“How can men be so dense?” I asked. “I could hear it in her voice from halfway across the world.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve had my head buried in a computer for four months,” he replied. “I’m out of practice.”

“Good,” I said. “From now on, though, just practice with me, okay?”

“You’ve got yourself a deal.”

Feeling so much more at peace, I didn’t even want to talk about the problems that I was having here with the investigation. As the conversation turned that way, I said simply that it was complicated but I was too tired to go into it right now.

“Fair enough,” he said. “I need to get back to work anyway. Just tell me, are you at the house? Your cabin, I mean?”

“Yes. I got here a little while ago.”

“Was it difficult to go inside?”

“No,” I said firmly. “It’s changed, new furniture and stuff. It doesn’t even look the same. This isn’t difficult at all.”

“I’m so glad.”

In the silence that followed, I thought perhaps, in a way, my coming here to this house, to this town, was tougher on Tom than it was on me.

“Hey, Tom?”

“Yeah?”

“This visit isn’t…” I hesitated, not knowing how to put it. “I’m not…I haven’t been spending my time here constantly in mourning.”

“You haven’t?”

“No. There are a lot of good memories, of course. But the person that’s most on my mind—the one I keep wanting to tell things to and show things to—is
you
. I miss you.”

He was silent for a moment.

“Thanks for telling me that, Callie,” he said finally, exhaling slowly. “You didn’t have to. But it means a lot to me that you did.”

Thirteen

Feeling so much better after our phone call, I decided I was too full of energy to settle down for the night. My mind went to Luisa and the questions I wanted to ask her, and it occurred to me that I might be able to catch her in town right now.

She had told me earlier that she had no phone but that she spent her evenings at the Laundromat doing other people’s laundry for pay. Thinking it might be worth a shot, I decided to drive into town and see if I could find her there. I had a feeling she might still be distraught enough from this afternoon’s fire to welcome a shoulder to cry on and a sympathetic ear.

I changed into jeans and a light sweater before putting together a small basket of Laundry. According to Yahoo!, Greenbriar had two laundromats, so I texted myself the addresses of both, loaded the car with my dirty laundry, and headed down the mountain toward town.

Once there, I easily found the first Laundromat, a tidy, art-deco-looking establishment with glass block walls and swing music playing loudly from a sound system. The place was empty except for an attendant, so I drove on and sought out the other one, which turned out to be a much more likely candidate for where Luisa probably spent her evenings, placed as it was between a Mexican restaurant and a little Spanish church. It was in a strip of shops near a row of run-down apartment houses, and each of the signs on the wall was printed once in English and once in Spanish. Several Mexican children were playing with an empty laundry cart in the parking lot.

I parked in front and carried my laundry inside, spotting Luisa at a table with a mountain of clean clothes in front of her.

“Hello again,” she said as she saw me. “Callie, is it?”

“Yes. How’s it going?”

“A little better,” she said softly, looking almost embarrassed. “I’ve had worse days, I suppose.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “I hate doing laundry alone.”

“Ha,” she said tiredly. “Laundry is my life.”

Knowing we would have a less self-conscious conversation if it seemed as though I were here for a reason, I set down my things and began to put my load into a washer. Before I got very far, Luisa spoke again.

“Excuse me, but that washer tends to eat clothes,” she said.

I looked at her, and she was gesturing toward another machine.

“Try that one instead.”

“Thank you,” I said effusively, moving my load to the other washer. “I hate when machines do that.”

“It completely ruined a sweater of mine,” she said. “I think there is something wrong with the—what do you call it? The thing in the middle. The aggravator.”

“The agitator?”

“Yes. Agitator. It sucks things in underneath and gets them all tangled.”

“Thanks for telling me.”

I poured detergent into the machine, closed the lid, and put quarters in the slot.

“You do laundry here a lot?” I asked as I slid in the tray and the machine kicked to life.

“Every night,” she replied. “I can do yours too, anytime you want. Pickup and delivery included if you’re not too far out of town. Cash only.”

It took me a minute to realize she was asking me for work.

“Oh, sure, next time, definitely,” I said. “Tonight, I’ll do it myself. I don’t have anything else going on.”

I offered to help her fold the clothes on the table in front of her, but she declined, so I took a seat along the wall. As I did, I realized her daughter was quietly coloring in a corner. That was too bad, because I had a feeling Luisa wouldn’t really want to talk about all of the vandalism in front of the child.

“Is that your daughter?” I asked. “She’s adorable.”

“Yes, that is Adriana.”

“Don’t you have a son too?” I asked. “Where is he?”

She rolled her eyes.

“He is fifteen,” she said, as if that answered my question. “I will not know where he is until he walks into the trailer at one minute before his curfew.”

“Mommy caught Pepe smoking last month,” the little girl suddenly volunteered from the corner.

“Adriana!” the mother scolded.

“Well, he was! He got grounded for a week and everything!” I smiled at the little girl, a small beauty with straight black hair and big saucer eyes.

“Smoking’s yucky, isn’t it?” I asked her.

“I learned a song in school,” she said. “Wanna hear it?”

“Sure.”

She stood and began singing a ditty about “No no to smoking, no no to drugs,” complete with hand motions. The tune was catchy, the motions cute. When she was finished, I applauded and then asked about her school.

“I go to school online!” she said proudly.

“It is a special plan for migrant children,” Luisa added. She went on to explain that her children took part in a wonderful program that allowed them to keep up with their studies here in North Carolina, even though the credits they were earning applied to their home school in Texas.

“Is that Go the Distance?” I asked.

“Yes. My children are at Go the Distance Learning Center almost every day.”

“So you really like it?” I asked, settling back in my chair.

“Oh, yes. It is so hard during the picking season when the kids have to keep switching schools,” she said. “They used to lose a lot of credits, but now they do not, because no matter where we travel they are still basically going to the same school. We love it.”

“Are there many students there?” I asked.

“At this time of year, no,” Luisa said, her face clouding over. “My children are the only ones. I mean, technically, they should be back home at their own school by now. Mrs. Weatherby is letting them stay so she can test out the new curriculum.”

“We can’t go home until our daddy comes back,” Adriana announced gravely.

Luisa looked at me, the pain in her eyes still very fresh. I wondered what the children thought of their father’s disappearance, especially Pepe. A 15-year-old boy with an absentee father had to be a fairly confused creature. I wondered if there was any chance he had started today’s fire, perhaps with the same matches he’d used when smoking.

“Hey, didn’t I see you with a coloring book?” I asked the little girl, hoping to distract her. “Why don’t you color a special picture just for me?”

“Sure! Do you like horses or dogs?”

“Hmm…I love them both. Why don’t you surprise me?”

“Okay!”

She ran to the corner and picked up her coloring book and began flipping through the pages, totally engrossed in her assignment.

“So, Callie,” Luisa said, “tell me about yourself. Your husband is dead, no?”

I jerked back as if struck.

“Y-yes,” I stammered, startled by her bluntness.

“Mrs. Webber, she misses him a lot. She talks about him to me.”

“She does?”

“She says he was very talented, even as a boy. When his brothers and sisters were still scribbling stick figures, he was drawing houses to scale.”

I smiled.

“That sounds like Bryan, yes. He studied to be an architect. He was very smart, very talented.”

“Mrs. Webber talks about you, too. She says that when her son died, his beautiful wife ran away to the sea and lost herself inside of her pain.”

I swallowed hard, thinking of those early days, wondering how Natalie had known to put it quite that way. Yes, I had been lost in the pain of it all. But eventually, I had found my way out. I was still finding my way out, a little more each day.

“I’m sorry,” Luisa added softly. “I’m not trying to pry. But I know that pain. If I did not have two children I have to be strong for, I would be lost too.”

I didn’t know how to reply, so I stood, peeked into my washer, closed the lid, and sat back down.

“Mrs. Webber said your husband, he had a heart for the migrants.”

“Yes, he did.” Eager to get off the subject of my late husband, I turned the conversation back to my informal interview. “He was especially interested in migrant housing. Have you ever used migrant housing programs, or have you always been in the trailer?”

“No, we usually stay in the migrant family dorms. But when the season ended last year, I had nowhere to go, so Mr. Butch let me and the kids move into his trailer.”

“Mr. Butch?”

“Butch Hooper. He owns Hooper Construction. I do his laundry in exchange for rent.”

“Sounds like a good arrangement.”

“He is a nice man. Very kind to a woman like me.”

I looked at the attractive Luisa, thinking that for some men, it wouldn’t be hard to be kind to a woman like her.

“Does he know about the fire yet?” I asked softly, so Adriana wouldn’t overhear.

Luisa nodded, glancing at her daughter and lowering her voice.

“He has insurance, like Mr. Webber said. It is not a problem.”

“So what are the dorms like?”

“They are nice. Small, but warm and dry. And at least we could all be together as a family.”

She went on to talk about the dorms for a while, and from there I moved the conversation to some of the other migrant services in the area.

“Anyway,” she said finally, “I am all finished here now. It was nice talking to you. It helped to pass the time.”

I was surprised to realize she had made it all the way through the laundry pile. Everything was neatly folded into baskets.

Reluctant to see her go, I had no choice but to help carry the baskets to her car and load them into the back seat. There was still a vague stink bomb odor, though the window had now been replaced. I said goodbye to Adriana as she presented me with the picture she had colored just for me.

“It’s got a horse
and
a dog!” she said happily, her wide smile warming my heart. Looking at her, I had a hard time believing that a loving father could walk away from a smile like that.

Once they were gone, I was eager for my own load to finish so that I could get back to my house and go to bed. After I moved my clothes to the dryer, I left the load tumbling and walked over to the little Mexican restaurant next door, where I bought a bottled water.

Then I returned to the Laundromat and drank it sitting in a hard plastic chair, watching my laundry tumble around and around through the little window in the dryer, wondering how it would feel to be all alone with no money, no home, two children, and an absentee husband.

Fourteen

After a good night’s sleep, I was awake bright and early the next morning. The sky was cloudless and clear, so I ate my breakfast out on the deck, enjoying the glow of the sunrise despite the early morning chill. Once it was fully light, I could see the lake at the bottom of the mountain, the view as pretty as a postcard from way up here.