Double Cross (22 page)
“It’s all right.” I turned sideways and brushed between two groups of people who were waiting for a table. “Excuse me.”
“What? I couldn’t hear you.”
I switched the phone to my splinted hand and opened the front door of the restaurant. “Nothing. I was just trying to get past some people. I’m at Chili’s.”
“Sorry to interrupt your lunch, and sorry about the Simon thing, too.”
“It’s okay—really. Even though I didn’t believe it could be possible, I have to admit that I’m relieved. You seemed so certain.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Listen, Taylor, there’s something else about the list.”
I stopped on the sidewalk, just in front of a bench that faced the parking lot. A few feet to my right, a man in a blue and silver Dallas Cowboys jacket flicked an ash off his cigarette, took a drag, and dropped the butt onto the curb. “What about it?”
“Didn’t you tell me your mother’s last name was Venable?”
“Yes, why?”
“And she lives in Southlake?”
“Yes.”
“Is her husband’s name Stanley Venable?”
Something tumbled in my stomach. I felt for the bench behind me and sat. “Why do you ask?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
I’VE OFTEN WONDERED WHY I have such a knack for choosing worthless men. For the most part, though, the guys I’ve dated have merely been lazy, deceitful, or fawning. None of them has ever hit me, and there have been no total sleazes among them—at least not to my knowledge. Upon learning from Katie that Stanley—my own mother’s Stanley—had been a regular john for a prostitution ring, the genetic origin of my man-picking problems came into focus. I may have made some bad choices in my life, but I had nothing on my mother. For the past twenty years, her love boat had popped more rivets than the
Titanic.
Titanic.
Although I had far too much practice in awkward, relationship-ending conversations with men, I had no idea how to break it to my own mother that her husband was a scumbag. When I called her and said I needed to drop by for a minute, I was semi-hoping that she would say she was busy. Sometimes delay for delay’s sake is a welcome refuge for social cowards like me. But she wasn’t busy. She told me to come around to the backyard when I arrived.
I drove to her house with the top down on my Camaro. Maybe I thought that the wind in my face would somehow blow an idea into my brain about how to break this sort of news. It was one of those unseasonably warm days that visit Dallas nearly every December for a brief time; days that smell of moist soil and wet bark—the air clean and fresh and hinting that somehow, somewhere, something should be blooming. On days like that it was easy to be seduced, to close the eyes and inhale and imagine that spring was just around the corner.
But it wasn’t spring, and I wasn’t feeling bright. I was about to tell my mother that when it came to marriage, she was, as she had feared, a three-time loser. Despite the car ride, the back of my neck was warm and damp beneath my hair as I stood at her backyard gate mustering the nerve to open the latch. I lifted my hair off my shoulders and let the breeze cool my skin. Then I took off my cotton cardigan and tied it around my waist.
When I stepped into the backyard, my mother was standing with her back to me, gripping her pruning shears in one hand. A trowel jutted from the back pocket of her faded jeans. Her plain white T-shirt was untucked and smudged with dirt. She turned her head slightly, frowning at a gangly shrub, as if preparing to scold it for allowing itself to go to seed over something as easily endured as a few weeks of cold weather.
She hadn’t heard me come in, so I stood and watched her. As she reached down to take hold of a stem, I caught her profile. She wore little makeup, and once again I was struck by how pretty she was. The early afternoon sun lit her cheeks, and her face showed barely a crease, even around her sharp gray eyes. It was stunning that fifty years, some of them undoubtedly harder than I could imagine, could have had such an inconsequential impact on her skin.
She bent over with the shears and snipped, then caressed the stem with her fingers. Her frown disappeared and her lips moved, as if she were whispering to a child or a pet. I wondered what strange entanglement of spirit allowed her to be at peace in the presence of something mindless that sprang from the mud, yet so roiled when dealing with flesh and bone.
She must have sensed my presence, because she straightened up and lifted her chin. “You found me,” she said, without turning around.
I felt bad about intruding, about dragging her back from a world where she seemed to fit so much better. “I came through the gate, like you told me.”
“I was thinking about you and Chase.”
She turned, and the glow lingered in her face long enough to ignite a smile unlike any she had given me since the day I saw her inspecting the vase in our entryway. It was a warm smile, a mother’s smile, and I remembered it from when I was small. She had loved me during her good spells; she had loved me when she was able. Seeing that smile, I wanted to pull her down and sit in the grass and talk about important things and inconsequential things. I wanted to talk the way that mothers and daughters were supposed to talk. I couldn’t, though. Not now.
I hated what I had to do, and I wanted to cry.
As quickly as the smile had brightened her, the light flickered and went out. She nodded at the sweater wrapped around my waist. “You don’t have the hips of a high school girl anymore, dear. That might not be the most flattering look. Accentuate the positive, I always say.”
She had snapped me back to reality in a way that was uniquely hers. Eventually I would become accustomed to the irony of her thoughtlessness, but at this point I was still adjusting. It struck me that what I had so far been giving to the relationship was vastly disproportionate to what I was getting.
I loosened the sweater from around my waist and started to drape it over my shoulders, but a mental picture flashed through my mind. In it, my shoulders were as big as a linebacker’s. The notion was absurd. At five foot nine, I weighed only 140 pounds. I was learning, though, that a mother’s cuts—even ridiculously unfair ones—slashed exceptionally deep. I clutched the sweater in one hand at my side.
“I didn’t know bushes had to be cut during the winter,” I said.
“It’s not cutting, it’s pruning. You wouldn’t go the whole winter without trimming your hair or your toenails, would you?”
I tried to recall how long it had been since I’d had a pedicure, but I resisted the temptation to look at my feet. The conversation was already crashing. Time to get right to the point. “I’ve got something to tell you.”
She bent over and snipped another stem. “It must be important if you came all the way over here on a workday.”
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “It is.” I looked over at the table and chairs by the pool. “Do you think you should take a break? Maybe we should sit down.”
Her back stiffened. “It must be bad news.” The pace of her snipping quickened.
“You’re right. It’s not good. It’s about Stanley.”
She kept her eyes on the shrub. “What about Stanley?”
“Katie Parst—the
Morning News
reporter who was with me that day at Starbucks—called me today. She’s been doing an investigative piece. It led her to something that involves Stanley. It’s pretty shocking.”
Morning News
reporter who was with me that day at Starbucks—called me today. She’s been doing an investigative piece. It led her to something that involves Stanley. It’s pretty shocking.”
She brushed a strand of hair from in front of her eye. “How long is this buildup going to last, honey? Should I come back in the morning, or are you just going to tell me?”
“Okay, here it is. A prostitution ring has been operating in Southlake. The police busted it and they confiscated a list of the johns. Do you know what a john is?”
She gave me a patronizing smile. “You must be kidding, dear. I lived for part of a year under a highway overpass. There are few things about the seedy side of life with which I am not familiar.”
I cleared my throat. “Stanley was on the list. He was paying for sex. Some of the girls were as young as fourteen.”
She looked at me over her shoulder for several moments, her expression never changing. Then she turned her back again, lowered herself to a knee, and reached out to select another stem. “Don’t be so quick to cast the first stone.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I said prostitutes. Did you hear me?”
She snipped the stem in two. “Everyone is always so high and mighty with me. If I find something that’s good for me for a change, they always want to tear it down. I’m used to that.”
“This has nothing to do with tearing you down. It’s about Stanley.”
“Don’t try that approach. I know exactly what this is about. First you wanted to accuse Stanley of blackmail. Now, this. You resent me so much for leaving you and your father that you’ll do anything to get back at me. Maybe it would be better if you just left now.”
I shook my head. “That’s crazy, Mother. I’m not trying to hurt you.”
Her head bobbed as she snipped several stems in rapid succession. She tilted her head, and the sunlight glinted off something moist in the corner of her eye.
I moved over to her and put my hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I really am. But Stanley’s not the person you thought he was. If I were you, I would want to know.”
She sat in the dirt, reached up, and put her hand on mine. Then she took a deep breath and let it out. “I was the first pretty woman who ever gave Stanley the time of day. He was bookish, not the strong, athletic type like your father. You can see that, of course. So could I. In fact, I manipulated him with it. When I met him, I was divorced again and . . . well, I was desperate.”
Her fingers tightened around my hand. “No matter what happened, I was never going to live in the streets again. I may be crazy, but I am not an animal.”
I knelt beside her and put my arms around her neck. I rested my head on her shoulder and waited for her to pull away from me, but she didn’t.
She sniffled and wiped her nose with the sleeve of her T-shirt. “Stanley was stable, respected. I was willing to do anything for that, even marry a man I didn’t love; a man who didn’t love me. I invented a make-believe marriage in my mind—one in which we shared everything, knew everything, about each other. I suppose that’s the upside of craziness. It makes it easier to mentally pack up and leave. When things were bad, I just transported myself to my imaginary marriage. It was the better marriage anyway.” She looked into my eyes. “As you can see, I hardly know the man. I’m a trophy for him, that’s all.”
As I had learned the day that Kacey and I cried together in the kitchen, one of life’s strange mysteries is that the awful moments can also be some of the best. I suppose the chasm that separates pain and pleasure is more like a narrow ditch. Sometimes it’s small enough that a person can step back and forth over it, or even straddle it for a while. During this brief time in my mom’s backyard, I had been all over it. Kneeling there with my arms around her, I loved her more than I had at any time since she’d returned. More important, as we sat with our arms around each other in the expanse of her backyard, I knew in my heart that she loved me. I’d been waiting to know that since I was nine years old.
I’m not proud of it, but after twenty years of being alone I figured that if my mother—Mom—had to suffer for a while so I could know what it was like to be loved, I wasn’t about to feel guilty about it. She owed me, and for these few seconds I was collecting what was rightfully mine. I even let myself hope that this might be the beginning of a different sort of life for both of us, that we might look back on this as a turning point.
But wishing so hard for something can make a person naive. If I had been thinking instead of feeling, I would have deduced that Stanley’s hold on Mom was stronger than either she or I imagined—and that breaking her free would not be easy.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
ONCE THE INITIAL SHOCK wore off, Mom became a woman of action. She planned to confront Stanley that evening when he returned from a conference in Austin. She wanted me to be there and asked me to come over for dinner. I was glad that she wanted me there. We were going to be a team, the way a mother and daughter should. First, though, there was something I had to do. I told her I would be back for dinner, and I hopped in my Camaro and sped back to Dallas.
By the time I got home, Kacey had returned from her second final exam. She was lying on her bed, her head propped in her hands, staring at her laptop. At least she would have been staring at her laptop, if her eyes had been open. Her computer screen was rotating through a series of party pics from her sorority’s fall dance.
I knocked on her open door. “Meditating?”
She jerked, and her chin fell off her hand. “Geez, what time is it?”
“4:15.”
“Okay, that’s not so bad.” She stood up and stretched. “Econ is beating me down.”
I tossed my sweater over her desk chair. “Look at the bright side. You’ll finish the semester well-rested.”
“I could sleep all afternoon and that still wouldn’t be the case.”
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