Mothers and Other Liars (13 page)

“What on earth?” Chaz stares down at the bucket of pink glop and the crowd of lidless brown bottles on the newspaper that is spread out on the back porch.

Ruby stirs the mixture with a wooden spoon, squeezes a few drops of red food coloring from a tiny plastic bottle. The drops splat into the bucket, swirl into the mixture, then disappear, barely deepening the shade of pink. “I bought all the single bottles at Albertsons and the Plaza market, but it still wasn’t enough.” Ruby gestures to the stack of small rectangular cartons beside her. “So the Ms went back and bought up the variety packs as well.”

“We’re the food-coloring cavalry,” Margaret says from a deck chair.

Chaz squats down beside Ruby, brushes away the strands of hair that have escaped the elastic band, places a hand on her neck. “But why are you using food coloring in the first place?”

“Because I didn’t have time to pick berries.” Ruby scratches her brow with her forearm.

Chaz’s face registers a
huh?
as he sits down beside her. The dog lumbers over and licks Chaz’s cheek.

“The milk paint.” Ruby waves her wooden spoon toward the dismantled pieces of pie safe strewn around her—bottomless drawers, cabinet doors, shelving, and the empty husks of the base and upper half. The inside of the upper casing is painted white; the rest of the wood is bare. “I wanted to replace the original finish.”

“So you’re making paint.” Chaz picks up a box of instant milk, pours a few flakes into his hand. “From milk.”

“Yes,” Ruby says. “Hence the name
milk
paint.” She picks a dog hair from the mixture, flicks it onto the newspaper.

Molly laughs. “Duh, Chaz. What did you think, that the pioneers rode their horses over to Sherwin-Williams?”

Chaz shakes his head. “I don’t think I ever thought about that at all.”

“Neither had we. Of course, the pioneers used milk straight from the cow.” Margaret pauses to drink from her goblet. “Ruby has allowed herself a few modern shortcuts in her quest for authenticity.”

Ruby pulls the red-coned top off another little bottle, squeezes it over the bucket. “I have to get it red enough, then I can add some blue to tone it down. I just didn’t know it would suck up this much tint.”

“We suggested wine.” Margaret refills Molly’s glass then her own from the bottle on the table. “Berries, grapes, what’s the difference?”

Chaz picks up a roll of mesh wire, fingers the mesh. “This for the doors? I’ll cut it for you.”

“No!” Ruby grabs the screening from him, places it out of his reach. “I need to do this one by myself.” She can hear the streak of mania in her voice, can read Chaz’s wary look. He often helps her, screwing legs and armrests onto chairs, even sanding if he’s really bored.

A flash of memory sears her mind, Lark at two, shoes on the wrong feet, struggling to find the armhole of her shirt. “By myself. All by myself,” she would demand.

“Don’t be offended,” Margaret says. “She yelled at us, too.”

“Okay, then,” Chaz says. “Can I at least keep you ladies company?”

Molly gestures to the wine. “Grab a goblet. Join us for the show.”

Ruby realizes she is acting crazy, but this one, she needs to do by herself. She needs to put this warped, rotted, mouse-holed pie safe back together before she goes on trial. Somehow, she just needs to salvage this one piece.

The wooden bowl of popcorn rests on the ball of daughter that used to be Ruby’s lap. Clyde sits at attention beside her, his head following the movement of her hand from the bowl to her mouth, waiting to catch any pieces she drops. Popcorn and orange juice, together, what an odd craving.

Casablanca
fills the TV screen in all its black-and-white glory. Ruby keeps waiting for Lark’s pure-honey voice to chime in with her favorite lines.
Will they always have their Paris?
she wonders. Will Lark even remember her after a few years?

When the reflection of headlights swooshes across the wall, Clyde leaps from the sofa and lands almost at the front door. Ruby, however, needs several attempts to heave herself out of the sofa sinkhole. In the process, she elbows the bowl, and popcorn showers the room like confetti shot from an air gun. She opens the door as the Ms step onto the porch.

“We were in the neighborhood.” Molly’s grin is sheepish.

Ruby looks back and forth between Margaret and Molly. “You guys making sure I haven’t crawled back under the covers?”

“Of course not.” Margaret whistles to the dog. “Hey, Clyde, let’s go for a walk.”

Clyde pauses his popcorn snarfing, looks to the door, to the floor, to Ruby. “Tough decision, buddy,” Ruby says.

The Ms’ terrier mix darts around Margaret, grabs a puff of popcorn, dashes back out the door. Clyde’s tail swats Ruby’s leg as he shoots past her in hot pursuit of the small dog, leaving behind, amid the popcorn, a swath of rug worthy of a vacuum cleaner commercial.

Margaret nods to Molly. She calls her other dog and follows Clyde and Dudley down the drive. In their wake, Ruby motions Molly inside.

“You throwing popcorn at TV shows again?”

“Ha ha,” Ruby says. “Want some tea?”

Molly answers by heading to the kitchen, grabbing two mugs out of the cabinet.

Ruby follows her, fills the kettle, puts it on the stove. She lifts down the acrylic container of tea boxes from the top of the fridge, slides it across the counter to Molly. “Well?”

“Something herbal, I think,” Molly says.

“No, why are you here?”

“Since when can we not just drop by?”

Ruby raises an eyebrow, waits for the water to boil, while Molly makes her tea selection like one of Ruby’s clients choosing polish from the rack. Ruby pours steaming water into the mugs, and she and Molly walk out to the back porch. These August days are still summer hot, but the taste of autumn is in the night air.

In a deck chair, Ruby holds her mug in two hands. “Okay. What?”

“My grandfather was a bootlegger,” Molly says. She tells Ruby how he ran liquor through half of Missouri. Ruby has heard this story before, over bottles of wine, but she tucks a chenille throw around her legs and lets Molly talk. About how her grandfather didn’t marry until he was fifty, how he and her grandmother had just one child, Molly’s mother. The grandfather was a mean old son of a bitch, but he was a smart old son of a bitch. He put half his proceeds into stocks—just after the big market crash of 1929—and buried the stock certificates in a cast-iron box in the yard. The other half he kept in cash, in an oil drum in his shed, and he supported his family through the Great Depression on periodic withdrawals from the “Bank of Jim Beam.”

Clyde leaps onto the porch before Molly gets to her point, no doubt running ahead of Margaret as usual. Molly rubs his head while he licks her chin, and through the kisses she tells Ruby her idea. “It’s a karma thing, see, to pay your legal fees with my trust fund. You’re in trouble because you did right by Lark. He never did right by anyone. His own daughter was a punching bag. To use his money, it’s just karma is all.”

Ruby leans back into her chair, puts her mug on the table. Clyde moves over to her, lays his head in her lap. This is big. This could be Ruby’s answer, at least to the financial end of her problems. Molly’s generosity, though, is just too big.

“Please. You and Lark—you’re family.” Molly talks with her hands. Freckles of paint, yellows and greens, dot her cuticles, lie under her nails, mirror the freckles that splash across her nose. “Let me do this. At least think about it.”

Margaret’s voice comes out of the shadows of the driveway. “Oh, she’ll let you, for damn sure.”

Ruby can’t help grin. Maybe Celeste’s candles are working. Because for the first time, Ruby actually does think that everything could turn out all right. Of course, that thought usually precedes her world turning to crap.

Ruby hasn’t been on an airplane since that day long ago, the day that marked the end of her first life and the beginning of her second. And now she’s flown twice in a month. She leans her head against the cool glass of the window and stares down at the swipe of land far below. The odd alien circles and sewing machine–straight roads are like the repeating patches and seams of that crazy quilt that she pictures as her several lives.

She squirms against the upright seat, anxious for the trial to be over, anxious for it to start. Anxious in its correct definition, definitely not as a substitute for eager. And eager doesn’t begin to describe how she feels about seeing Lark.

Beside her, John does a crossword puzzle. He fills in the squares, line by line, in confident blue ink. Ruby tries to absorb some of that confidence.

The pilot announces the descent into Dallas impossibly soon after the takeoff from Albuquerque, and the hemstitched land is replaced by car-clogged highways and shopping centers and houses with turquoise patches of backyard pools. House after house in tidy rows, as if they had been planted, crop dusted by Butch from her Iowa hometown.

The plane touches tarmac as smoothly as a busybody neighbor running a glove across a dusty mantel, and Ruby and John join the conga line of people and black roller suitcases and strollers down the jetway. When did people start wearing their chore clothes to travel? she wonders. She remembers a Sunday-best atmosphere on that other flight so long ago.

She herself is dressed for her appearance in court. John urged her to look young and sweet. And pregnant. The makers of maternity clothes made the sweet part easy. This stretchy lavender top and dotted skirt were on the unsweet end of the spectrum. Lark’s image lady would have barfed over all the girly pink ribbons and bows.

The idle chatter of the airport gate area distills into a steady buzz as they approach the security point, excited whispers, heads craning side to side.
Maybe it’s a proposal,
Ruby thinks; she read about one of those in a celebrity magazine at the salon.

As they approach the narrow exit from the secured area, microphones and cameras and people press against the glass wall. The crowd parts like Moses’ sea as she and John step into the glare of lights. Not a proposal, she realizes; this is a perp walk. And she is the perp.

“Shit,” John says under his breath. His expression is somewhere between pained and totally pissed off. “That asshole lawyer,” he mutters.

A uniformed agent runs interference inside the secured area, but once they cross through to the main terminal, they are on their own. John leans over Ruby like an umbrella, trying to protect her from pelting questions. “Keep your head down and your mouth shut,” he hisses over the din.

Ruby stares at the carpet fibers sliding under her feet, trying to ignore the microphones waving around by her ear. Shoes. Lots of shoes. Down-in-the-heels Hush Puppies, shiny loafers. And a pair of black-and-white Barbie heels. She recognizes these shoes; in her peripheral vision she sees a slash of tight crimson skirt—Little Miss Red Suit. John whisks Ruby down an escalator, past merry-go-rounds carrying baggage instead of horses, and out the door into a furnace of Dallas air. He waves to a taxicab parked at the curb, and when it pulls forward, hustles her inside.

In the backseat of the cab, she leans her head against cracked vinyl, closes her eyes and breathes the pine-in-a-can air, in out in out. Beside her, John sputters an apology, says his “soon-to-be-latest ex-receptionist” must have given out their flight information to a cunning caller. Up front, a scrawny dark-faced driver shouts into a cell phone in a gutteral language, competing with the crackles and squeals from a CB radio and the pulsing bass from the dashboard radio.

Ruby tunes out all of it. She scrunches her eyes against the spectacle etched on her lids and breathes.

The court house conference room is icebox cold. The cramped space smells of sweat and fear and anger. Ruby sits on a scarred wooden chair at a scarred wooden table. Across from her, John reemphasizes points about the hearing to come, talking in the comforting tones of her obstetrician just before he puts her feet in the stirrups. But all Ruby can concentrate on is why her precious daughter has not come through the door.

John’s words are hard to hear through the tick of the clock in Ruby’s head. He gripes about having to relinquish his cell phone at the metal detector, looks at his watch. “This is ridiculous. They’re playing games.” He stands. “It’s a bit like running to Daddy, which can be trouble in someone else’s jurisdiction, but I’ll go check with the judge’s clerk.”

Ruby puts her head down on the table. And waits.

She jerks up at the click of the door handle, turns to receive John’s update. Instead she sees five and a half feet of slickness, a too-shiny suit, a bad comb-over, a self-important sneer. The Tinsdales’ civil lawyer, she guesses, the bulldog street fighter with his eye on a slice of political pie. Then Lark rushes past him and into her arms.

Ruby hugs her daughter, still her daughter, always her daughter, sinks her face into Lark’s hair. She runs her hands down arms, across hips, wanting to touch every molecule of her child. Behind Lark, John reenters the room, glares at the short stack of smugness. “Let’s give them some privacy.” John practically shoves the other lawyer into the hall and closes the door behind them.

The miracle in front of her requires all of Ruby’s focus. She lays her hands on Lark’s pale cheeks, winces at the charcoal smudges beneath Saint Bernard eyes. “Oh, baby,” Ruby says, “Oh, my sweet baby bird.”

Lark’s eyes brim, but the tears don’t spill over. Ruby pulls Lark’s head onto her chest, presses her daughter’s forehead against her own breaking heart. They stay like this for several minutes until Ruby catches movement from the corner of her eye. On the other side of the gritty window, a matronly court clerk, a stack of manila file folders wedged in the crook of her arm, gestures to John, points down the corridor.

The door opens and John steps in. “I’m sorry,” he says. “We have to go. Now.”

Mr. Smug sidesteps his squat form past the clerk, around John, tugs at Lark’s shoulder. Lark raises her head from Ruby’s chest; her noodle arms drop to her side. She inches her face closer to Ruby’s until they are almost nose to nose. And Ruby looks into those same soulful eyes that stared out at her from that rest stop trash barrel almost a decade ago. Those same eyes, peeling away the layers of Ruby’s soul, begging her not to disappoint them. Again. “
Do
something,” Lark whispers before she shakes off Mr. Smug’s meaty hand, turns, and walks out the door.