Something True (9 page)

Laura continued staring at the lasso-noose.

Tate tried again, her voice gentler this time.

“I appreciate whatever you are trying to do here—fulfilling your commitments—but you don't have to. And honestly, I've got to start looking for a new job, and I've got to figure out what's going to happen to Maggie.”

Laura lifted a finger and hovered it an inch above the velvet.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“It's just business,” Tate said, stepping away from her. “Your business and my business at opposite ends. And there's no point in us going through this charade. You're buying the building. I'm not going to hang myself with my lasso.”

Laura turned, a sharp authoritative turn like a prosecutor spinning to face the jury, but then she stopped and stood clasping and unclasping her hands.

“There is nothing wrong with working at a coffee shop.”

“No. There's not,” Tate said.

“I am sorry about what I said last night.”

Tate waited for the caveat.

“It's nice,” Laura said, almost to herself. “I got there early. Some woman sat with me for half an hour and told me how she was trying to make a ‘didgeridoo' out of pine trees thinned from timberland. I'm not exactly sure what she was talking about, but it was nice. She cared. She thought she could do her part to change the world, and she wanted to share that with me. Then Maggie and Krystal showed me the artwork.” She shrugged. “It's very…”

“Postmodern American primitive?” Tate suggested.

Laura looked surprised.

“I took an art class my last term at PSU.” Tate stared over Laura's shoulder at the street outside. “Though I think ‘postmodern' might be a little bit grandiose for the Vagina Denta series.” She turned away to hide her smile.

“If you have other things you need to do, I understand,” Laura said. “But if you still want to show me around Portland, I want to see it. Nothing is set in stone yet. I could still talk to the board about Out Coffee.”

Tate looked at Laura. Her brow was furrowed and her lips turned down in an expression Tate could only read as hope.

In the car on the way to their next stop, the Grotto, Laura broke the cautious silence that had fallen between them.

“I hate it,” she said, staring ahead at the paint wholesalers and used-tire shops that lined Sandy Boulevard.

“The velvet cowboys?”

“Being a senator's daughter.” The words were like coins pushed across a counter, an offer. “I want you to know that. I hate it.”

“Why?” Tate asked.

“I think you know.”

Laura pulled to a stop at a red light and looked over at Tate.
No
, Tate thought,
not
at,
into
. She felt like Laura looked right into her soul, into her past and her future, into everything that she was and could be. It was distinctly uncomfortable, even if the stare came from a beautiful woman, and Tate kept her eyes fixed on the red light. When it turned, she was quick to say, “It's green.”

The Grotto was more than the name promised. There was, indeed, a mossy grotto at the foot of a cliff where a few Catholic women clustered in prayer. But beside the actual grotto stood an equally mossy elevator that carried visitors up to a meditation garden and a glass-fronted prayer room perched on a cliff 110 feet above the city. Inside the glass room, pews sat in three rows and a wax statue of the Virgin Mary stood in a plexiglass case, presiding over the city below.

Here Tate and Laura sat, facing the window that looked out over northeast Portland. In front of them, a toddler pressed his sticky hands against the window. A young woman looked at the drop and turned pale. Two Chinese teenagers flashed the peace sign while their friends photographed them against the Portland skyline. But eventually, the tourists filed out.

“It's beautiful up here,” Laura said.

Tate ran her hand along the smooth surface of the pew. “I slept up here once. At night, it's amazing.”

“You slept here?”

“When I was homeless.” She hadn't meant to reveal anything. Every important person in her life knew her story and had always known it. Now she felt suddenly self-conscious. She shrugged and looked away. “It was only for a week. Then Maggie rescued me.”

“Why were you homeless?”

The concern in Laura's voice touched her.

“It was all a long time ago. I was only sixteen.”

She meant to explain it away. Sixteen was a lifetime ago.

Laura exhaled carefully. “Sixteen.”

Tate could not tell if it was tenderness or pity that pulled Laura's lips into a frown.

“What happened?” Laura asked.

“My mother is something of a lost soul.”

Tate meant to leave it at that, shrug it off and return to some safe topic. But it was so unexplainably easy to talk to Laura, much easier than it should have been given that Laura was poised to crush Maggie's dreams. The woman who had, only the night before, told her she was a miserable underachiever. The woman who had left her breathless and then left her entirely.

Still the story poured out of her, as if of its own volition: the hot motel rooms she shared with her mother, Debby-Lynn, Debby-Lynn's on-and-off jobs, the equally transitory boyfriends. Then there was
the
job, the temporary filing job that put Debby-Lynn in the path of Jared Spaeth.

“He was everything my mother wanted. He was a State Farm agent, which to my mother was like being the prince of England. He had a little ranch house in Gresham and a boy about my age. He told my mother he would take care of us.”

“And then?”

Laura rested her hand on Tate's, and Tate felt like a rare bird had landed on her. She was afraid to move lest it fly away. But a second later Laura withdrew her touch and folded her hands in her lap.

“My stepbrother was three years older than me,” Tate went on. “Tommy. When I was fourteen he started touching me. I told my mother.”

“But she wouldn't help you?” Laura asked.

“She did not want to, and it kept happening, so I told one of my teachers at school.” Tate shrugged. “After that, Mother took away my house key. One night after I was out late with my friend Vita, my mom wouldn't answer the door. I thought she was just punishing me for staying out late, but the next day she sent Tommy out to school, and he told me to get lost. He said I wasn't part of the family anymore. He said if I told anyone else, he'd kill me.”

“I'm so sorry,” Laura murmured.

“I would have run away anyway. I wasn't going to let him touch me again.”

Tate glanced over at Laura. Her face was pale.

“It was all a long time ago,” Tate said, because the story felt both too big and too small for the glass-fronted room where they sat. Beneath them, Tate could see airplanes rising off a distant tarmac. In her peripheral vision she felt Laura's gaze on her face.

“The other night.” Laura stumbled over her words. “I…I wouldn't have done that to you if I had known.”

Tate cocked her head, trying to discern what vile, clammy-handed Tommy Spaeth had to do with the other night.

“I mean…” Laura's eyes darted to the tourists who had just walked in and then down to the floor. Her pale cheeks flushed scarlet. “Does it remind you of him?”

“You mean sex?” Tate realized a second after it should have been obvious. “I like sex.” She tried to catch Laura's gaze, but Laura stared at the tiles beneath her feet. “I wouldn't let Tommy Spaeth take that away from me.”

“Is that why you prefer women? Because of him?”

Laura's voice was still hushed, and Tate lowered her own to match.

“I've been kissing on girls since I was six years old. I like women because I'm gay,” Tate said. “Is that why you…?”

Another wave of tourists came in, snapping photographs and ogling the wax museum Mary. When the room emptied, Laura said, quietly, “No. But that was always the party line in my father's campaign. Homosexuality was the result of childhood trauma. ‘Protect the child; heal the victim.' Sounds good, doesn't it?” Laura had regained her composure and now stared out the window like an executive waiting for her flight in the skycap lounge. “Say no to that, and you're saying yes to child abuse. Reframe the question, and you're supporting pedophiles and molesters.” Her voice had taken on a dry, bitter edge. “He has a whole team of people who think these things up for him.”

“I can see why you would hate that,” Tate said.

Laura stood and strode to the window.

“What happened after your mother kicked you out?” she asked.

“I slept at my girlfriend's house until her mother kicked me out too. That was my friend Vita. We only dated for three months, but when she found out what Tommy had done to me she tried to burn their house down. She got the whole porch on fire before it started to rain, and the fire department showed up. You can imagine why her mother didn't let me back in the house after that.” Tate smiled. “That was the last time
I
was a bad influence on
Vita.
”

Laura stood, backlit by the window, and Tate could not read anything in the shadows of her eyes. Still it felt good to tell her the story, to lay it out like the bony surface of the cliff on which the Grotto garden perched. The foundation. The beginning.

“I spent the first night after that in a bus station,” Tate said. “I spent the next three nights here, one night in a club called the City Nightclub, and one night in an abandoned RV. I started showing up at Out Coffee in the morning and staying until closing. That's when Maggie realized something was wrong.”

The sightseers ambled out, leaving the quiet more potent than when they entered.

“I remember the day after the RV, I went to Out,” Tate continued. “I didn't have money for coffee, and I was sure Maggie was going to bust me for being there. She was tough, or she seemed tough to me, but she gave me a cookie and a coffee and she said, ‘You better come home with me tonight.' I think she spent the rest of the day triaging her relationship with Lill. Or the rest of her life.”

It made Tate sad to think of that first night at Maggie's, how she had lain on the couch and listened to them fight.

Laura listened, neither sympathizing nor interrupting. When Tate was done, she said simply, “You're strong.”

Tate stood, shaking off the compliment.

“You do what you have to do. And that was twenty years ago. It felt like the end of the world then, but it wasn't.”

“Are Lill and Maggie a couple?” Laura asked.

“Come. I'll tell you the whole sordid story on the road.”

Without thinking Tate reached her hand out to Laura. To her surprise, and perhaps to Laura's own, she took it.

Their next stop was Powell's Books, the largest independent bookstore in the world. Then they took a tour through the seedy red gates of Chinatown, past Darcelle XV's drag club, and through a few avant-garde art galleries. As they strolled, Tate regaled Laura with tales from Out Coffee, the Mirage, and all the other venues she frequented, each a strange, troubled, loving family unto itself.

She told her how Lill and Maggie met when Lill first worked for her. How Lill said she wasn't gay but fell hard for Maggie. And how they had fought the night Maggie brought Tate home, because Lill didn't want another problem child sleeping on their sofa. Then how, after what seemed like a lifetime together, Lill left Maggie and a year later was married to Stephen. They adopted Bartholomew and some years later adopted little Sobia. Their family looked as well-established as if they had been together forever. And she told Laura how Maggie found Krystal when she aged out of foster care and ended up in the shelter of Out in Portland Coffee, cold and hungry and full of Hollywood dreams.

“She is like the kid sister I never had.” Tate dropped her head back and stared up at the vaulted ceiling in one of the galleries. “I see all the mistakes she's going to make, and I can't stop her…”

“She seems like a bright girl.”

“She'll do great if she can stay away from her father. He's in jail right now. I'm just worried one of these days he'll get out and convince her to go away with him, and we'll never see her again. She thinks he's getting out. I just hope it's not true.”

“Do you think he will?” Laura asked.

“Every year or so he writes to her and tells her he's getting out. He's got an appeal. Nothing ever comes of it, but I'm still worried. He's got a history of violence against women.”

Laura laid a gentle hand on Tate's lower back. Tate jumped slightly at the unexpected touch.

“I can't talk to Maggie about this,” Tate said, shaking her head. “She's already worried enough about Krystal. But if Krystal's father gets out, I'm afraid he's not going to see her as a daughter. He's just going to see a pretty, young girl, and that's who he's preyed on in the past. Krystal doesn't understand that. She still thinks he's ‘Daddy.' And he's been in prison for so long all she's got, really, are dreams.”

“Families have such a tight hold on us,” Laura said, turning away from the ink prints to the window and the leafy street outside the gallery. “There's no way to get out, is there?”

It was almost five, and Tate had promised to get Laura back to her hotel. They were just getting in the Sebring when Laura asked suddenly, “Why did you drop out of PSU?”

“What?”

It had been almost nine years since Tate had walked into the registrar's office and withdrawn from her courses. The man at the counter had looked at her transcript. “Remember,” he had said. “Your credits are good for ten years. If you don't finish your degree in ten years these credits will disappear and you'll have to begin all over.” Ten years. She had laughed. Ten years was a lifetime. “I'll be back next quarter,” she had told him. Nine years ago.