The Next Queen of Heaven-SA (10 page)

Tabitha played Christmas music on the CD player until Mrs. Scales said, “Leap in heavenly peace, my ass,” and snapped the CD in the garbage disposal and turned it on. Tabitha had to admire her gumption. If only her mother could learn to use her lunatic superpowers for goodness.

On Monday morning Mr. Reeves called and asked to speak to Mrs. Scales. “She can’t come to the phone right now,” said Tabitha. “I’ll take a message.”

“I’ve called and left three messages,” said Mr. Reeves. “You’re not giving them to her.”

“Says who? I am too. I can’t make her call you back if she doesn’t want to.” The phrase came to her too fast to hold it back. “Am I my mother’s keeper?”

“Well.” An intake of breath from the principal. “That’s a good question. I am giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming your absence from school is because of your mother’s accident. But I better not find out you’re milking this, Tabitha.”

“Don’t worry. You won’t.”

“If you can’t bring your mother to the phone I’m going to have to stop by, or get Social Services involved.”

“She’s deep in prayer, but when she comes up to room temperature again I’ll tell her you called.”

“I need to know how to reach your father, Tabitha. The forms we have on file here don’t give a current phone number—”

“Oh my mistake she’s on the toilet and needs a little attention. She’ll call you back, Mr.

Reeves. Promise.” Tabitha hung up so hard the mute plastic angels swayed in consternation.

I hate this prison. Where is Caleb hanging out these days? Why doesn’t he answer my messages? How dare he abandon me when my mom is on the fritz?

Tabitha had gotten tired of driving by the trailer Caleb shared with his older brother.

There’d been no lights on for a week. She didn’t dare ask Hogan to keep an eye out for him, because Hogan could take a request like that too far and she didn’t want Caleb to get hurt. And she had all too few girlfriends from school left, not after making cozy with their personal jackhammers. Her only confidant was Linda Pearl at the beauty salon. So she’d have to set Linda Pearl on the job of sleuthing out the dirt about Caleb.

The principal’s remark about her father brought back a conversation with Caleb Briggs a month ago or so. Generally Tabitha wasn’t the reflective sort, so she didn’t step outside her own skin to look back in. But Caleb had asked a question about Mrs. Scales, and Tabitha had found herself foaming to pin down for him the contradictions about her mother.

Mrs. Scales. Admired for a lot of good reasons. A pillar of the community, salt of the earth, steady as the Rock of Jehovah or whatever that insurance company was. Yet she had been married three times. Tabitha, Hogan, and Kirk had sprung from different dads. So as far as Tabitha was concerned, her own adventures in the vans and backseats and pool rooms (and once even in her cell at the jail) were in line with the standards of the Scales family.

No, she hadn’t ever wanted to talk to her mother about men. Tabitha had prepared a rejoinder in case her mom ever got on her case about it. If you know so much, Tabitha would bark, how come you botched up three marriages in a row? Where’s your next husband coming from? And don’t you get any big ideas, she had joked to Caleb Briggs, who had kissed her dirty and changed the subject.

Later, lingering, unwilling to let him off and away on his bike too soon, she’d continued rehashing the family bio. The first husband was the Scales, and the Scales name had dribbled down over Tabitha’s half brothers even though they weren’t his kids. Casey Scales, purveyor of flooring materials. Ya gotcher linoleum, your Congoleum, your rush matting, your simulated pine planking in three-and-a-half and five-inch widths. You name it.

Casey Scales had come home from Vietnam and found Leontina Prelutski where he had left her, behind the goldfish counter at Woolworth’s, back when Thebes still had a Woolworth’s (now it was the Budget Five and Dime). Scales had thought Tina Prelutski was still there because she was faithful. More likely she’d been batting her eyes at every connoisseur of goldfish to come along, but since goldfish customers tended to be boys under the age often she hadn’t gotten very far.

The wedding pictures, in Tabitha’s humble opinion, were vomitrocious. In his tuxedo with a lime-green ruffled shirt her father looked like a percussionist escaped from the
Lawrence
Welk Show.
And Tina Prelutski had been photographed tipped into a wedding dress designed for someone willowy. Leontina was more like a box hedge than a willow. You could see a tummy bulge that even studio lighting couldn’t erase. She must have been lowered feet-first into that dress by a crane. And Farrah Fawcett-Majors’s hair. What was everyone
thinking
of in those days?

The mothers-in-law, Mrs. Prelutski and Mrs. Scales, two attendants who looked like Soviet aerospace mathematicians, stood grimly on the side, flabby arms folded. Twin widows old enough to guess, accurately, that no good would come of this union. And along comes Tabitha to prove their point.

Describing her two grandmothers, now decently dead where they belonged, she’d laughed and laughed, but Caleb had not found her as amusing as she intended. He had disentangled himself and wiped up the beaded spill on his thigh and gone off to do something else he had to do. She had tidied up the trailer when he was gone, and in an excess of trust and confidence she hadn’t even thrown out the well-thumbed dirty magazines she’d found under his mattress. And except for the night in the Nixon mask, that was the last she’d seen of him.

She’d given Caleb every chance. Every chance and, God knows, every liberty. Where was her fucking payback? No phone call, no help with Mom, no nothing.

She didn’t want Mr. Reeves bringing the county authorities down on her. So Tabitha found her father’s phone number scribbled in the back of the NYNEX yellow pages. He lived with his new wife down in Vestal, near Binghamton. Flooring was big down there, apparently.

“Hold the line, Tabitha, he’s on his way,” said his new wife, who wasn’t very new even when he’d married her.

Tabitha didn’t bother to grunt a thank-you. She didn’t like the second Mrs. Scales very much. Maybe if she ever met her she might change her mind, but till then, forget it.

“Howcha doin’, Tabbles?” said her dad. He was always coming up with new childish nicknames to disguise the fact that he had cut out when she was two.

“Good. You okay?”

“Things are great. Never better. Getting into indoor-outdoor carpeting. All over again.

The new thing. You’d be surprised. Consumers fickle? Whatcha gonna do. Wait and see attitude.

The grass is always greener when it’s Astroturf. Butcha never know. Still, imagine vacuuming your lawn. No dandelions. Whatcha say?”

“I’m calling about Mom.”

“What’s that?”

“She had an accident. Not a car accident, no, a church accident, I guess. The nurse and doctors say she’s fine, but she’s not very much like normal.”

“Nurses and doctors?
That’ll
be the day. She was never much like
normal,
Tabinetta.

You want I should what? Talk to her? Put her on.”

“I’m not sure she’d talk to you.”

“She sounds her old self to me. Cooking with gas. Try her and see, Tabbles.”

“Mom.” Tabitha held out the receiver. “Guess who. It’s the Dad behind Door Number One.”

Mrs. Scales didn’t look at Tabitha. “Eek and ye shall find.”

“It’s Daddy Casey. He wants to talk to you.”

Her mother just shook her head.

“See?” said Tabitha to her father. “She won’t come to the phone.”

“Tell you what,” said Daddy Casey. “Try Daddy Wally and then try Daddy Booth. If she won’t talk to anyone, call me back. But I’m probably not going to be here. A trade fair. Floor show. I’m the opening number. Ha ha!”

Tabitha didn’t laugh, just hung up. Men. Daddy Casey on one hand, Caleb Briggs on the other. Unreliable. Caleb would be laying somebody else soon if Tabitha dropped out of sight entirely.

She perked up though. Maybe he’d been too drunk to remember what he’d done so
right
that wild session on Halloween night. That miraculous spree, from which she’d come home masked, stoned, and elated from the orgasm so intense she hadn’t even been able to lie about it to her mother. Prompting the fight that had forced Mrs. Scales into seeking solace in a Catholic church, of all godforsaken places. So it was sort of Caleb’s fault. In a way. She hadn’t really put it to herself like that before. He owed her.

“Gotta go shopping, Mom.” Tabitha noticed she was talking more loudly, as if her mom had gone deaf, though there wasn’t any real sign of that. Her mom had just lost interest in her kids, that’s all. She seemed to take no notice of Tabitha’s walking around, jangling the car keys.

Ordinarily Tabitha wasn’t allowed to drive after that incident with the state trooper in the rest stop. But Mrs. Scales showed no sign of objecting this morning. She was cuddling the Bible and glancing every now and then at some talk show in which they appeared, at quick glance, to be stir-frying a dozen or so severed human ears. Maybe they were oysters.

Caleb Briggs wasn’t to be found, which wasn’t such a problem except that Tabitha also wasn’t running into Stephanie Getchen, either, that whore. That slut waiting for an opportunity.

Neither Caleb nor Stephanie were hanging around the soda machine behind Scarcese’s Budget Gas, not loitering at the low-budget KFC knockoff, Tennessee Fried Chicken.
(Visit the
Corporal,
said their menu, after which wags always scrawled
Punishment.)
Nor were Caleb or Stephanie anywhere near the Crosswinds Shopping Center at Cleary Corners, which was the closest to an honest-to-God mall that Thebes could manage.

Whatever. Tabitha would find that cockteasing bitch and tear her limb from limb. But what if it wasn’t Stephanie? How embarrassing to trash the wrong girl.

She thought of driving out to Caleb’s trailer and breaking in. She knew she could. But then what? She couldn’t envision herself draped in Caleb’s big shirts just sitting around the way her own abandoned mother sat. After all the times Caleb nudged Tabitha through the trailer’s flimsy tin-can door in a whimpering, desperate kind of way, like a dog who needed a walk, bad?

What a comedown.

Tabitha didn’t believe she had much of a sense of pride. I don’t know the meaning of the word, she thought of saying aloud, with her chin up and a bright spark in her eye. Still, she wasn’t going to stoop to ambushing Caleb in his infidelity. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Or Stephanie Getchen, or whoever else it might be.

So why don’t I feel better about myself?

When she got home, Hogan was in his room, blasting some toxic talk radio thing on his speakers the size of Stonehenge. Kirk was making cookies. “So how’s it going, Suzy Homewrecker?”

“I hate being a sophomore,” said Kirk. “Everybody’s so juvenile. Hey, do you think I’m supposed to grease this cookie sheet? I thought maybe Mom would like something fresh baked.”

“Freihofer’s not good enough for her now?”

“I finished the box when I got home.”

“What? And ruin that girlish figure?”

“Tabitha, cut it out, will you? Mom’s in her room with the lights off and a pound of bacon on her eyes. Don’t ask me why. I’m just trying to do something nice for her.”

“Suck-up.” Still, the phone was free and not under surveillance, so Tabitha decided to call Hogan’s dad. His name was Wally Hauenstein and he lived in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. Or, apparently, he used to. The phone was disconnected and there was no Wally Hauenstein listed, not in the whole greater Philadelphia metropolitan area.

Tabitha considered sauntering by Hogan’s room and letting him know this interesting piece of news. But that could wait; she didn’t have the time to be nasty. She just continued down the list of her mother’s former husbands to Booth Garrison. A long phone message listed all sorts of fax numbers and beeper numbers and weekend cottage numbers. She maintained a steady hand on the receiver until the ping sounded. “Daddy Booth, this is Tabitha, would you call us, thanks,” and she heard his voice say “Hello?” just as she was about to hang up.

“You want me to come out to Thebes?” said Daddy Booth. “Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

“I don’t know,” said Tabitha. “I’m asking you to do something.”

“Put Kirk on the line.”

“He’s making cookies. It’ll take him a minute to fold up his frilly apron.” She wasn’t fond of Daddy Booth, and she hadn’t been fond of him during the nineteen months of his marriage to their mother. He’d coddled baby Kirk, he’d been wary of Hogan even as a toddler, and he’d considered Tabitha moronic. But he’d been marginally more involved in the upbringing of his son and stepkids, even after the divorce, than either Daddy Casey or Daddy Wally. He alone sent a check once in a while. And if his work took him into the vicinity he would stop by for a meal.

He had a real love-hate thing for Kirk, Kirk being his only son but so disappointing. He knew that Kirk was bright even if he was probably going to be a faggot someday. Booth Garrison liked bright people; he liked himself in that regard, too. All the more reason for Tabitha to sneer at Kirk as he came up and took the phone receiver. “Hi,” said Kirk, noncommittal with his dad as always.

Tabitha listened to the conversation for a while, and then lost track. She wandered down the hall and pushed her mother’s bedroom door open an inch or two. Her mother had fallen asleep on her bed. A red lacy shawl was draped over the bedside lamp and rosy patterns, like cells in bio lab, spiderwebbed the walls. It was less like a bordello than a trip into someone’s large intestine. The packet of bacon had slipped to one side and lay halfway across an inert Bible.

Her mother looked like an old woman, though she was a pert late fortysomething; Tabitha could never remember the age exactly. Her mother’s mouth drooped a bit, and Tabitha noticed creases in the skin around the jaw. Interesting, when her mother believed in being not just active but
active:
She liked to move. She liked to swing from room to room and do things, to run from place to place, to guide that car along the roads. She was supposed to be full of zeal and criticism. But asleep in the late afternoon? She was a picture of someone’s grandmother.