Orchids and Stone (11 page)

CHAPTER 10

An old yellow Mercedes, blocky and curvy at the same time, sat cockeyed in the end parking spot. Daphne ran for the passenger’s side, calling for Thea to hurry, saying they had to get to a toilet right away.

“Didn’t they have bathrooms in there?”

“No, they did not have
bathrooms
in there.”

In a few blocks, Thea swerved to the curb in front of a Starbucks. Daphne bolted from the car.

“Excuse me, where’s the bathroom?” she asked the barista.

The girl plucked a key with a giant wooden fob from a hook. “It’s for customers only,” she said, pointing to the back of the store.

“Thea, please buy a goddamn coffee,” Daphne said over her shoulder. As she grabbed the key and ran for the back, she heard Thea request one goddamn coffee in her sweetest voice.

Back in the car, Thea paused, an opening in traffic wasted. She gestured a toast to Daphne then sipped the coffee, eyeing Daphne’s shaking hands. “I don’t think coffee’s what you need,” she said. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

Daphne waved at the road. Thea pulled her Mercedes out and Daphne took an enormous breath. “The short explanation is I was trying to catch up to a car, it had the same couple from last night. That couple took the little old la—Minerva Watts. They took her again. And I got in an accident and the car got away and I got arrested for reckless driving.”

Thea rolled her lips in, looking dubious.

“Thea, that’s it. That’s what happened. And then nothing happened. The police didn’t catch the car, or if they did, they didn’t tell me about it. I mean, can’t they do something?”

“What do you want them to do? Magically conjure up this car of yours and the people you saw in it? All they can do is broadcast a
locate
for the car, stop it if they find it, and send an officer for a welfare check at her house.”

“Welfare? She’s on welfare?”

“A welfare check is what they call it when they send an officer to knock on someone’s door. Someone who doesn’t show up for work, say, and a coworker’s worried about—”

“If a coworker was worried, why wouldn’t the coworker go check on the person who didn’t show up for work? Why doesn’t anybody make a goddamn effort?”

“Daphne, I’m just explaining to you the concept of a welfare check.”

“Then isn’t a welfare check what I did when I went to her house?”

“Yes, well, look how well that turned out.”

“What am I going to do?” Daphne half-shrieked. “I mean, for God’s sake, what happens next?”

“I think I take you home, you take a bath, we drink a bottle of wine, and we both go to work in the morning.”

“I’m not working tomorrow,” Daphne said. “I’ve got it off.”

“Okay,” Thea said, “reasonable enough. If I ever get my ass arrested, I’m taking the next day off, too.”

“I already had Friday scheduled off.”

“So take Monday.”

“Could you just take me home now, please? God, how am I going to explain all this to Vic?”

Thea smiled and drove on in silence, but opened a bag on the seat between them. One by one, she offered Daphne treats. Fair trade chocolates, Bing cherries, French cookies.

“Is this your standard bail-someone-out care package?” Daphne asked.

Thea pulled more goodies from the sack and Daphne began her story with arriving at Minerva Watts’s house, at the address Thea had written down in Vic’s kitchen that morning.

With candied almonds, Daphne described the encounter at Minerva’s threshold. With mozzarella balls wrapped in basil leaves, she told of shrugging out of her jacket, sprinting around houses and down the alley. Of hiding while she got dirty and her hair came loose and leaves stuck in her bangs. She was down to garlic-stuffed olives and the aftermath of the traffic accident by the time Thea pulled onto Westpark Avenue.

“He’s still not home,” Daphne said, her voice dull as she eyed the empty driveway.

“I brought something else,” Thea said, lifting the almost-empty sack as she got out of her car.

“How long were you grocery shopping while I was sitting in jail?”

“All this stuff came from my house,” Thea said. “I was home, working. Got your message and started grabbing stuff out of the fridge and my cupboards while it was playing. And I had to listen to the message twice. Thought about bringing wine but I know it’s verboten at that facility—”

“Facility!”

“I stopped at a couple of ATMs to get enough cash. If you’d stuck with journalism and me, if you’d graduated and got on at my paper and suffered through doing the crime beat like I did, well then you’d know they don’t take VISA at the jail.”

Daphne nodded as they walked around the house, through the side gate and into the backyard together. “I’ll pay you back,” Daphne said as she crawled through the dog door.

Grazie stood, wagging and chortling. Enchanted, Daphne stayed on her knees and hugged the warm, golden fur while reaching with the other hand to let Thea inside.

“Hi, good girl.” Thea pulled a soda can from her bag and popped it open. “You want a beef broth drinkie?”

In the kitchen, Thea poured the can of special canine soda into Grazie’s bowl.

Daphne winced as she leaned in the doorway and watched the dog sample the offering. “That’s your surprise?”

“The last treat,” Thea confirmed.

“I hope people in Afghanistan and Somalia and wherever else don’t know that you’re buying flavored drinks for my dog.”

“Why?” Thea thrust a hip sideways with attitude.

It needed an explanation? Daphne thought of jail and desperate people. She shook her head, realizing she’d been about to go down the road of offending a friend who’d done nothing wrong. How unreasonable was it for her to pick apart what Thea gave a beloved dog? Look at the choices she’d made today, the accident she’d caused. She’d butted into something she didn’t understand and she’d gotten grabbed, chased.

“They have my ID, Thee. They have my mother’s address.”

“
They
could be just a misunderstanding. The whole thing. Other people have other things going on in their lives. And to us, in a glimpse, it looks bad or wrong, but if we knew the whole deal, we might know that there was no actual problem. And it’s someone else’s business. What you’ve done today, if you’ll just stop and think—”

Daphne raised her palms. “She called her
lady
and then when she saw me, she called her
Mother
.”

“You are making no sense at all.”

Swallowing, Daphne tried again. “Two women. One is the older lady, Minerva Watts. She’s the one I saw first in the Peace Park Wednesday afternoon—”

“Yesterday.”

“Right. And the other one . . .” Daphne thought about her encounters with the police and her inadequacy at description. She could do better. “The other one was wearing a big black coat yesterday, jeans and a fleece sweater today, and she’s younger. She’s our age, maybe a few years older. That one called Minerva Watts
lady
but then, two seconds later, when she saw me looking at them, she called Minerva
Mother
.”

“So maybe she just speaks that way, the other woman. Lady, mother, whatever. Haven’t you ever done that?”

Daphne folded her arms across her chest. “I have never addressed my mother that way.
Lady
.”

“I have never gotten arrested. I can’t believe you did.”

“Me neither, but believe it.”

“Why didn’t he cite and release you?”

Daphne rubbed her face, worn to the marrow. “I don’t even know what you’re saying, Thee.”

“It’s Thea.
Thhhee-uh
. And I’m saying the cop could have given you a criminal ticket. You have to screw up pretty bad to get physically arrested for reckless driving. You have to be racing in the streets or having sex while driving or hurt somebody, plus basically be an uncooperative crazy person.”

“The last two.” Daphne’s grimace and shudder came with a flood of memories, the blond woman with the cut face, the young man and his bloody knuckles. The wreck could have been so much worse. “I’ve wrecked everything, haven’t I?”

She pulled the paperwork from her pockets and threw it on the counter, then noticed the answering machine blinking in a consistent pattern of four blasts. Four messages.

Thea flipped through Daphne’s paperwork, reading aloud. “Operating a motor vehicle with willful or wanton disregard of persons or property. A gross misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail and a fine of five thousand dollars.” She looked up. “Wrecked things? That’s a—”

“That’s a yes,” Daphne finished. Motion out the window caught her eye. Her truck was pulling in. “Vic!”

Jed and Vic stepped out of her Toyota pickup in the driveway. Vic turned to eye Thea’s car as he came to the door. Daphne rushed from the kitchen, ignoring Thea on her heels and Grazie struggling to stay with both women. She threw the door open just as Vic’s hand reached for the knob, wrenching it from his grasp. His glance wavered to Thea and back again.

“Hello, you’re here. You missed Josie’s game,” he said. He sounded worn and disappointed. Jed adjusted his glasses and slouched past them toward the living room.

Daphne rolled her eyes, indicating the hallway where Jed had gone, mindful of hearing the TV turn on in the living room. She spoke through clenched teeth. “I got arrested. Why didn’t you come bail me out?”

“I’m staying,” Thea announced with gusto. “This is going to be good.”

While Thea tried to interest Grazie in the remaining special canine soda, Daphne gave Vic the short version of her afternoon. He rubbed his jaw and pursed his lips.

“My,” he said, reaching for Daphne while shooting quick looks in Thea’s and Jed’s directions. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, kissed her hair, pulled a bit of leaf from a tangle, and said, “Do you perhaps want to get a shower and some clean clothes?”

Daphne nodded and twisted out of his embrace. Upstairs she startled at her reflection. Hair loose, a scrap of dried rhododendron bloom stuck on her scalp. Again the image of her sister entered her mind, even as she was able to deny that she looked like Suzanne. Suzanne was never dirty, just wild.

Daphne shed her clothes and stepped into the shower, soaping up and shaving to pare the sensation of grime from her body. She thought of being younger, at home, watching Suzanne shave her legs at the old house on Mapleview Drive.

“Mom,” she said aloud, shutting off the water. Her mother might not be safe at home. Speed drying herself, she hurried back to the bedroom with the towel around her naked body.

Oh, no. Jed’s here.

She was always uncomfortable being scantily clad when Vic’s kids were in the house. She booted the bedroom door ’til it latched and phoned her mother.

Rising panic burbled in her chest as the telephone rang. The hum of adult voices downstairs, indecipherable through the closed bedroom door, made a background murmur of white noise she wanted to click off. In her ear, the ringing droned.

“Thursday night bridge.” The answer came as she thought about the time and day and she nodded at her spoken thought. Her mother played with another widow and a sweet older couple once a week.

Her mother’s answering machine came on.

Imagining that guy, Guff, would go to the Mapleview house was paranoid, worst-case-thinking, wasn’t it?

Not trusting her voice and warning herself not to blurt about the mess she’d made of the day, Daphne mumbled a hello and was telling her mom’s machine she’d call later when a voice picked up.

“Daphne? Is that you?” The croak of a dedicated smoker always sounded pleading.

“Yeah, it’s me, Mom.”

“Oh, Daphne, I’m late. Out the door this minute. I called you earlier. And yesterday, you know. I’m going to bridge now, but when I heard your voice on the machine, I came right back.”

Daphne closed her eyes. Vic, too, couldn’t ignore the phone when his kids weren’t with him, thought no parent could.
What if it’s them calling? What if they need me?

“Well, when are you coming over?” her mother rasped. The request would soon turn into a wounded whine.

Frances Mayfield sounded like such a happy name, Daphne thought. She’d thought so as a child, back when she discovered her parents had first names, back when she was happy and believed everyone got along like her, a mid-pack girl, neither popular nor scorned.

Her mother baked cookies and had dinner on the table at six o’clock and cleaned the house and got frustrated with Suzanne, and that’s how it was. There was no yelling, no swearing, and dad came home every night to hug his girls. They all kissed each other good night, every night, and they all said and meant good morning.

The kitchen stove and fridge were harvest gold. The telephone was the old-fashioned kind with a long, curly cord. Suzanne would have long phone conversations, swinging the cord for young Daphne—coming in for a glass of milk—to jump like a skip rope.

“I don’t know, Mom.”

Her mother’s voice became begging. “But you’re coming to see me, aren’t you?”

As though they didn’t live in the same city, less than ten miles apart. Daphne pressed the telephone’s earpiece to her forehead and offered, “Maybe next week?”