“Rumors about what?” Vic asked sharply. “About Erin and me?”
Mary Lou looked at Vic for a long, appraising moment, and then turned back to Erin. “Yes. About the two of you.”
“There is nothing to those rumors,” Erin said firmly. “You should know better than to listen to gossip. Vic and I are friends.”
“I didn’t believe those rumors,” Mary Lou agreed. “I think I know you better than that. After all, you and Terry Piper…”
Erin was glad that Mary Lou was being sensible about it. “Right,” she agreed. “Vic and I are just housemates.”
“But now, I think you should know… I’ve heard something else.”
Erin wondered whether Alton Summers had been that quick to start spreading lies and half truths about her past. She had thought that she had gotten through to him. But apparently not.
“What else?” Vic questioned, reaching over to pat Orange Blossom. He flicked his head around quickly as if to nip her, but she pulled back quickly enough to avoid the intent of his teeth. “Hey, settle down. I’m just saying hi.” He sniffed at her fingers and then let her pat him.
“About you,” Mary Lou said. “James.”
Erin and Vic both looked at Mary Lou, no longer distracted by the cat or other things. Erin looked at Vic, her eyes wide. Vic’s face was white.
“I don’t go by that anymore,” Vic said evenly.
Mary Lou couldn’t keep her eyes on Vic. She looked over at Orange Blossom. “Then it’s true.”
“That I changed my name? Yes.”
“And that you are… a boy.”
“No.”
Mary Lou looked confused by this. “You are,” she asserted. Her eyes went back to Vic. “Even if you don’t look like one anymore.”
“I am a girl.”
“You’re a transvestite. A boy who likes to dress as a girl.”
“No. I am a girl. Who dresses as a girl.”
There were a few more seconds as Mary Lou tried to sort that out. “Then what were you before?”
“I was a girl. But one who had been labeled at birth as a boy and tried to live as a boy to please everyone else.”
“Because biologically, you are a boy.”
“I am a girl,” Vic repeated.
Mary Lou sighed. “I don’t understand all of the new ways. Why people would accept this nonsense. A person can’t change their gender just by deciding that they are something other than they are. You are what God made you. A boy. No matter what you choose to call yourself.”
“Mary Lou,” Erin stood up. “It’s getting to be time for us to head to bed. You know we have to be up pretty early to get the bread baked before the bakery opens.”
“I’m not trying to be rude,” Mary Lou said. “I don’t know the politically correct thing to say. You know that’s not the type of person that I am. I’ve raised my boys to be boys, and I believe what my faith teaches about God making men and women different. They are supposed to be different, not interchangeable. This new idea that you can just choose what you want to be, without regard to biology, it’s just a fad. And a silly one. I can no more change my gender than I can change the color of my skin. Or my height. I am what I am, and there’s no point in denying it.”
Vic stood up as well. “You could tan or bleach your skin. Or tattoo it. And there are surgeries to change your height if wearing heels wasn’t good enough. People have been altering their physical appearances for thousands of years. Is that against God?”
“I think it is.”
“You have pierced ears? You dye your hair?”
Mary Lou touched her blond, bobbed hair. “That’s different. It is vanity… but it’s not the same as trying to change who you are. Or who people think you are.”
“I’m not trying to fool anyone. I’m just trying to be who I really am.”
With Vic and Erin both standing, and Erin’s comment that they had to go to bed still hanging in the air, Mary Lou rose to her feet.
“I won’t change the way that I treat you,” she said. “That wouldn’t be Christian. But it will change how I think of you. I know that you are a boy, physically, no matter how you dress and act and talk. I can’t change my thoughts about you. And neither can you.” She stepped toward the door.
“If you can’t change your thoughts about me, then why would you expect me to change the way I think of myself in order to please you? I’ve known I was a girl ever since I could remember.”
Mary Lou shook her head. “I’m sorry, Vic. But you’ve allowed people to mislead and confuse you.”
Erin opened the door. She didn’t say anything. Mary Lou stood there for a moment longer, then walked out of the house.
Erin watched Mary Lou walk back to her car. She closed the door and turned to look at Vic.
“Are you okay?”
Vic took a big breath in and breathed it back out again. She was still pale, but her face was composed.
“I guess I’d better get used to it. I’ve been spoiled, with the way that you’ve treated me. But that’s what everyone else is going to be like. They’re all going to be trying to convince or convert me. Cure me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was bound to happen sooner or later. It was only a matter of time. I knew when I saw my parents at the funeral…”
“If they don’t approve, why would they want to spread it around?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t run away far enough, and they want to push me further.”
Erin shook her head. “Sometimes… I wonder if it’s better that I didn’t have any parents who cared about me or what I did once I was an adult.”
They got ready and headed for bed, even though Erin was sure that neither one of them had any notion of being able to get to sleep in good time. They were both too wound up to even think about sleep. But the visit from Mary Lou hung between them. Neither one wanted to talk about it or to put any weight or importance on it. But they couldn’t just forget about it, either. Erin was afraid that talking about it or trying to console Vic too much was just going to make the girl feel worse. It would make things more awkward between them, and Erin was already feeling enough uncertainty over her feelings toward Terry and Willie.
While Vic was in the bath, Erin went up to the attic. Even in her attic retreat, there was no respite from her restless thoughts. She kept going over the visit from Mary Lou in her mind. She should have said more. She should have been more vocal in her defense of Vic. She couldn’t help feeling like she had just let Mary Lou into her house to run all over Vic. What a train wreck.
She sat in her little reading nook with one of the big genealogical books open, trying to focus on the pages. On anything but Mary Lou attacking Vic, while Erin just stood by.
She had picked up the book that had her family in it. Her parents’ birth and death dates.
Had the social worker intentionally kept the truth from Erin? Why would she lie about when and how they had died? The one foundational fact that Erin had relied on for so many years couldn’t be in question. How could that happen? Erin knew what had happened. She could remember it clearly.
Except that she couldn’t. When she tried to conjure up a picture in her mind, it was muddy and confused. She heard the words. She remembered the social worker and the first family she had been taken to. But she couldn’t remember what had happened to her parents. Why would she? She hadn’t been in the car with them when they had the accident.
Where had she been? She’d only been a child. Had she been at school? A friend’s house? A babysitter? Why wasn’t she with them? It seemed like the social worker, a tall, thin, dry woman, had come to get her in the night. The foster care transfer had been after dark. After Erin’s bedtime. She must have been with a babysitter, then. Her mom and dad had been out on a date when they met with tragedy. Bad traffic conditions, a drunk driver; Erin had imagined a lot of different scenarios over the years. She’d had a particularly vivid imagination as a child. After they had died, Social S
ervices had come for Erin. With no family to go to, she had entered the system.
But if she were to believe the information in Clementine’s book, that was wrong. She had been taken into care prior to their deaths. They had not died that first night but had lingered on for weeks or months. The details were so fuzzy after all of the years that had passed. Erin couldn’t pin down the date that she thought they had died. There had never been an anniversary date marked each year. It was usually on her birthday that she thought about it the most, because she knew that she had been seven when they died. Each advancing year marked another she had lived without them. Had the accident been on her birthday? The threshold between seven and eight?
But she couldn’t make that fit, either. The dates of her parents’ deaths according to Clementine’s records were not Erin’s birthday. They were afterward. Significantly.
Then the social worker had lied to her. All of the crap about them dying instantly. That had been a lie. Told to her to make her feel less traumatized, she supposed. So that she would think that they had just stepped peacefully out of their earthly sphere into some peaceful, heavenly existence. Mrs. Jayman, her foster mother, had insisted that they were with God. Even back then, Erin hadn’t believed it. God? In heaven? She was sure, after the accident, that neither existed. No one could convince her otherwise. And many people had tried.
Erin jumped when her phone rang. She picked it up and glanced at the caller ID. Melissa. Did she want to gossip about the funeral? Or had she too heard the rumors of Vic’s transgender identity and wanted to be the one to inform Erin, thinking that she didn’t know.
Even though she was too tired and scatterbrained to talk, Erin answered the call. It seemed like the best idea to just get it all over with. Better to deal with Melissa over the phone than in front of half a dozen other customers at the bakery. And if Erin didn’t answer her call, Melissa would probably move on to Vic next, confronting her directly. Erin didn’t want Vic to have to deal with two such confrontations in one day.
She swiped the screen to answer the call, and realized too late that it was a video call, not just a voice call. She swore under her breath, too quietly for Melissa to make out over the speakerphone setting. She considered accidentally ending the call, and then calling Melissa back with voice-only. If Erin called right back, Melissa wouldn’t think that she was avoiding her call. And she would just assume that Erin hadn’t noticed that the original call was a video call, or that her phone was malfunctioning. But Erin took too long to react, and found herself looking at Melissa’s face. A bit too close, at a low angle that looked up into her nostrils. Erin looked for a way to set her phone down for the call, somewhere with a higher, more flattering angle.
“Hi, Melissa,” she greeted, with a forced smile and cheer in her voice.
“I didn’t wake you up, did I?” Melissa asked. She was in pajamas herself, but would undoubtedly be up hours past the time that Erin and Vic would be in bed. Erin propped the phone on a bookshelf, carefully adjusting her framing in the smaller picture in the corner of the screen.
“No, I’m still up,” she acknowledged. “I need to hit the sack before too long, though.” That would warn Melissa that it would have to be a short call, and gave Erin an automatic retreat point if things got too sticky.
“Okay. I won’t be too long. I was just wondering how you were doing.”
Erin waited for a moment for the other shoe to drop. But if Melissa were approaching her about Vic, she was doing it gradually.
“I’m okay,” she said tentatively.
“I saw you and Vic at the funeral, but then you left so quickly. I had been planning to talk to you after. I thought maybe you were sick.”
“Vic had to leave. I drove her home. Went into the city to do some shopping.”
“Oh, okay.” Melissa nodded and smiled. Her movements on the screen were jerky, making Erin feel like it was all just a show. Melissa was putting on an act for her. “I’m glad everything is okay, then.”
Did she or didn’t she know about Vic? Erin couldn’t decide. If Mary Lou knew, then Melissa couldn’t be that far behind. Surely whoever had shared it with Mary Lou had spread it far and wide.
“Officer Piper was at the department late,” Melissa offered. “Doing a bunch of research.”
“Yeah. He said he had a bunch of work to do.”
“What did you say to him?”
Erin frowned. “What did I say to him?”
“It was something you said that triggered this flurry of research.”
“Something I said?”
“Is there an echo in here?” Melissa smacked the side of her phone playfully.
Erin thought about her discussion with Terry on the way back from the funeral. It seemed like it had been a week ago, obscured as it was by her confrontations with Alton Summers and Mary Lou Cox.
“I don’t know. I asked about who would own The Bake Shoppe now. I don’t remember what else.”
“The Bake Shoppe. Not looking at knocking off the next owner now, are you?”
“Melissa!”
“I’m just joking. I’m sorry, I get a morbid sense of humor working at the department.”
Erin knew that Melissa didn’t work at the police department full-time. Not even part time; she just contracted to do some occasional transcription and filing for them. But Melissa liked to make it sound like she was a fully qualified member of the police department.
“I feel really badly about Trenton’s death,” Erin explained. “It just tears me up that he was killed by an allergic reaction to something I made. The whole point of my baking is to provide food that is safe for people who have special dietary needs.”
“I’m sorry.” Melissa’s smile disappeared, and she sounded truly repentant. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”
“I know. But it did. It isn’t funny.”
“No. You’re right. I should be more sensitive. I do put my foot in my mouth sometimes. My mom always told me to think before I open my mouth.”
Erin nodded and shrugged. At least with a video call, Melissa could see her response, and she didn’t need to verbalize. She decided it was time to change the subject.
“So… you knew Trenton before he disappeared, right?”
“Yes.” Caution entered Melissa’s tone for the first time. She looked at Erin warily.
“Did you know Davis too?”
Melissa seemed to be waiting for more. It was a few seconds before she nodded. “Yes. Not as well, but I knew all of those kids.”
“What was he like? Was he as nasty as Trenton?”
“He wasn’t a pleasant person to be around,” Melissa hedged. She bit her lip and looked off-camera, thinking about it. “He was pretty messed up.”
“In what way?”
“He was a pot head. Always stoned. Trenton was the good brother, good marks, loved by all of his teachers, and Davis was the screw-up. No one would have been surprised if Davis had been the one to disappear.”
Erin thought about that. That was all she had ever heard about Davis. He was an addict. It seemed to be the only identity that had stuck to him since his youth in Bald Eagle Falls. She didn’t know if she would have immediately classified him as an addict on meeting him without knowing his history, but he was a rough-looking individual. It was obvious from his cadaverous face and yellowed teeth that he had not taken care of himself. He had probably spent at least some of his life living on the street. His yellowed fingers and teeth and stale breath clearly indicated that he was a smoker, even if he had beaten his other addictions.
“So, is he still…?”
Melissa gave an exaggerated shrug. “Talking to him after the funeral, he mentioned ‘his recovery’ more than once. That’s usually an ongoing process. Lots of ups and downs and setbacks. He doesn’t look like he’s been living life on easy street.”
“No, you’re right. He doesn’t.”
“Joelle seems taken with him, though.”
Erin sensed disap
proval. “I guess that’s natural, with him being Trenton’s only surviving relative. Or the only one available, at least. She needs someone to share her grief with.”
“Her grief.” Melissa snorted. “Even by her own account, she was only together with Trenton for a couple of months. Probably just long enough to figure out that she wanted out of it. She’s lucky he died and saved her an ugly break-up.”
“Maybe so.” Erin didn’t want to argue the point. Melissa had known Trenton, and Erin hadn’t. Melissa had a much better picture of the kind of person he was, even if it had been twenty years. People could change but, in Erin’s experience, few of them did. And from her brief encounter with Trenton, he hadn’t changed from a jerk into a super-sweet guy.
“Weird, Joelle taking up with Davis,” Melissa persisted. “He and Trenton weren’t alike. They didn’t usually attract the same kind of girls. Why would she want to go from a hard-headed businessman like Trenton to an on-the-skids loser like Davis? I figure she likes money; that’s why she was with Trenton in the first place.”
Erin frowned at her phone screen. “What makes you think that?”
“Have you seen the clothes she wears? Thrift store chic if I ever saw it. Go to the thrift stores that get donations from the upscale neighborhoods. Grab all of the big brand names. But you can tell, can’t you? I mean, nothing really fits her right, or it’s worn, or she’s tried to cover a stain with a broach or scarf. She wants to look like she shops all the fancy stores when she can hardly get from one paycheck to the next. It’s a scam. Look better, so people will treat you better. Trust you more.”
“You think she’s gone from one brother to the other just because of the money?”
“Davis doesn’t have any money.”
“He does if he inherited The Bake Shoppe after Trenton.”
Melissa cocked her head, considering that. “Maybe. But they aren’t going to know that until Trenton’s estate is sorted out. They don’t even know yet if he had a will. Someone will have to go back to Chicago and go through his papers, contact his lawyer, all that stuff.”
Dairy-Free Death Page 13
