“I need your help with Bex and Quinn.”
“Are my granddaughters okay? What have you done?”
My mother blamed me for Bex and Quinn’s eighteen-month molars. As if their teeth were my fault.
“I need a babysitter fast. Can you come?”
“Is this your way of telling me your marriage is in trouble?”
I pulled the phone from my head. I closed my eyes. I pinched the bridge of my nose. I took a deep breath. I went back to the phone. “Bradley’s traveling, Mother.”
“Well, what’s wrong with January?”
“Do you mean July?”
“January, February, July,” she said, “I can’t keep up.”
“July is fine,” I said, “and busy trying to get married.”
“She needs to put her money where her mouth is,” Mother said. “This trying to get married business. Who tries to get married? No one. They just get married. It took me two days to marry your father after he proposed.”
Oh, good grief.
“And I’d say her being busy has nothing to do with trying to get married and everything to do with that germy daycare where she works,” Mother said.
Apparently, she could keep up. “Who told you July worked at a daycare, Mother?”
“I have my sources. Never you mind who told me. And I’ll have you know I’m not a bit happy about it. Now your nanny’s loyalties are divided between my precious granddaughters and sickly stranger children. Did you think about that before you let her haul off and get another job? Of all the bad choices you’ve made, Davis, and you’ve made some whoppers, this might be the worst.”
“It wasn’t my choice, Mother. July is a grown woman who makes her own choices. Bex and Quinn are almost three years old. They’ll go to preschool soon. And where does that leave July?”
“Helping you with your new baby, Davis,” she said, “that’s where it leaves her. Have you looked in the mirror lately? You’re not getting any younger. If you intend to give your husband a son, something that despite my best efforts, I was unable to do for my own husband, you’d better hop to it. And in the meantime, your nanny had better not be taking my granddaughters with her to that filthy daycare.”
“It’s a childcare center, Mother, and it’s spotlessly clean. Not a daycare. July is the director of our new spotlessly clean employee childcare center and Bex and Quinn’s nanny. When she’s not keeping Bex and Quinn in our home—” I leaned hard on the in our home part “—she works a few hours a week in an office at Play, our new employee childcare center. Not at a daycare.”
“Don’t split hairs with me, Davis. I’ll see what I can do about coming tomorrow, but for today, you need to call your girl.”
“I tried,” I said. “She can’t.”
Silence.
More silence.
“Davis. Way. Cole.”
Uh-oh.
“Are you telling me you called your nanny before you called me?”
“You just suggested I call her, Mother, and now you’re offended that I called her? Which is it? And would it ever occur to you that I didn’t call you first because I didn’t want to bother you?”
“Well, you are bothering me, Davis. Being second fiddle with my own granddaughters bothers me. I already have to share them with Bradley’s mother, and she has that nervous eye tic, and she’s always clearing her throat, as if there’s something she wants to say and can’t get it out, and now you’re telling me I’m playing third fiddle to your nanny?”
I pressed the tips of three fingers on the raging headache hammering between my eyes. My mother had been in somewhat of a bad mood since the day I was born, but that morning, lucky me, I’d managed to catch her in an extraordinarily bad mood. “Mother, I wouldn’t dare call Bradley’s mother. If for no other reason, she lives in Texas. And the only reason I called July before I called you is because she only lives an elevator away. But she can’t help. It’s Sunday. Between keeping Bex and Quinn a few hours a week—” I leaned hard on the few hours part “—and her new job at Play, Sunday is July’s only day off.”
“I know what day of the week it is, Davis. It’s the Lord’s Day. I’m leading Ladies’ Sunrise Devotionals for Him this morning. And I need to tease my hair. Do you mind telling me what this is really about? If my granddaughters are okay and your marriage isn’t in shambles, I’d appreciate it if we could have this conversation later.”
“I really need your help, Mother.”
“Why?” she asked. “Are you sick?”
“I’m fine. It’s work. Something’s come up and it’s urgent.” One little old lady and five million dollars of urgent. “I need to work.”
“Take the girls with you, Davis. What do you think I did with you and your sister when I had to go to the market? You went with me.”
“I can’t take the girls to Louisiana.”
“Louisiana? What do you mean by Louisiana?”
(How many things could Louisiana possibly mean?) “The next state over, Mother.”
“When?” she asked.
“Now.”
“What do you mean by now?”
(How many things could now possibly mean?) “Right now, Mother. This minute. As soon as you can get here.”
She took a deep breath.
I braced myself.
“Davis, I’m sure you think I sit around twiddling my thumbs all day, and I’ll have you know I don’t. I’m very busy. Your father and his cat need my attention all day every day. We have the Tomato Festival coming up and I can’t leave my tomatoes. They’re blooming. Next, they’ll bud. Then they’ll produce. It’s not like I can run off and leave them. They need to be watered, they need to be fed, and they need to be weeded.”
I let her think about it a minute.
She thought about it a minute.
“Don’t do this to me, Davis,” she finally said. “Don’t send me on a guilty trip because you and Bradley have such big and important jobs you can’t even raise your own children. You know when you and your sister were little girls, I left you—”
“—every first Wednesday of the month for your Daughters of the American Revolution luncheon and that was it.” I finished the sentence for her.
“I don’t understand young couples having babies right and left, then going right back to their big jobs without a thought of who’s going to care for the babies.”
Who was sending whom on a guilty trip?
“The only thing I can do is have your father, who also has a big job, you might remember, load my tomatoes, and I’ll bring them with me. I’ll tend to them on your porches,” she said. “It’s not like I can just run off and leave them. If I have to drop everything this minute to help you, I’ll have to bring my tomatoes with me.”
I had a sudden vision of my mother driving down I-65 in her Chevrolet Impala with her garden, her whole garden, half an acre, in the backseat. Corn stalks, snap peas, bell peppers, and a scarecrow wearing Liberty overalls. “Mother, there’s no reason in the world to bring your tomatoes.”
“I’ll decide what’s best for my tomatoes, thank you.”
“I’m not asking you to move in,” I said. “Just help me for a few days.”
“A few days could make all the difference in the world between a good and bad crop, Davis. If I run off and leave them, who is it you expect to take care of them? The Tomato Fairy? I’m only willing to go to all this trouble because I love my granddaughters. I don’t want them to end up in a filthy daycare with child bullies while you work. And with this kind of trauma—”
“Mother, are you suggesting I’m traumatizing you because I need your help, or are you suggesting I’m traumatizing my own children because I work a few hours a week?” I leaned hard on the few hours part.
“I was talking about my tomatoes, Davis. The trauma to my tomatoes.”
My he
ad dropped on a sigh. I threw a hand in the air. Why in the world she’d drag tomatoes across a state line for a day or two was beyond me, but I knew better than to argue with her, especially about tomatoes, and I should have known better than to call her. Mother didn’t like her schedule interrupted, she didn’t like surprises, and she didn’t like the phone. She was somewhat warmer in person. And by somewhat warmer, I meant two degrees above freezing.
“After all the trouble it will be to bring my tomatoes—”
It passed through my brain that Birdy James could keep the five million.
It was only money.
“—I don’t want to hear a word, not one word, about my tomato crop this year,” Mother said. “If you slice into a tomato and even start to tell me it’s pale or mealy, I will tan your hide. And I’ll probably need to bring backup. I can’t tend to my granddaughters and my tomatoes all by myself. When would I rest?”
“When can you come?”
“Let me speak to your father. You know this means he’ll have to miss Worship Service.”
I was pretty sure he wouldn’t mind.
She lectured me for ten more minutes, mostly about the daycare business at the Bellissimo being very bad business, mark her words, then hung up.
That went well.
And I wanted a tomato sandwich.
By then, the sun, my daughters, and my dog were up. Just in time for a box of donuts to bust through the front door, Fantasy attached. I barely saw her, too busy wondering why my mother’s tomato plants were blooming in June. All my life, by June, she was shoving ripe tomatoes down our throats at every meal. Sliced tomatoes with breakfast, tomato salads and tomato soup for lunch, and tomato casseroles for dinner. Tomato relish, tomato chutney, stuffed tomatoes, pickled tomatoes, and tomato sauce on everything. Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes.
From across the living room, Fantasy raised an eyebrow.
“Tomatoes,” I said. “I was thinking about tomatoes.”
She rolled her eyes. “Where is it?”
I pointed to my dining room table.
For a good long minute, we stared at it.
“There’s no anthrax in that envelope,” she said.
“Then open it,” I said.
“I’m here to lend moral support from afar while you open it, Davis.”
We stared at it over strawberry-frosted donuts. We used kitchen gadgets—chopsticks, salad tongs, and steak knives—to push it around. After another cup of coffee, we were just about to rip off the Band-Aid and open it when Bex and Quinn finished their breakfast donuts in the kitchen. By the time I dressed them in their bedroom, then pushed the play button on the television remote for Disney’s Frozen in the living room—they were allowed to watch Frozen once a day, and only once, otherwise they’d watch it on a loop—the envelope had been on the dining room table for almost an hour.
“This is old school,” Fantasy said. “These cutout letters.”
“Old school as in old people.” I took a hard look at my name made up of nine different fonts, eight different sizes, and three different colors. “An old person did this. Anyone else would type and print it.”
“An old person as in Old Bird Woman,” Fantasy agreed. “Or Old Bird Woman’s sister. I told you, Davis. Bird Woman ran off with the money.”
“And with five million dollars in her purse, she’d take the time to cut out my name in magazine letters and what? Confess?”
“We won’t know until you open it.”
From the living room, Bex sang “Let it Go” at the top of her lungs. Quinn tap danced on the coffee table in pink cowgirl boots. Candy howled at the moon.
“Look at it this way,” Fantasy said. “If we’re right, and it’s from Bird Woman, there’s no anthrax. Where would she get anthrax?”
“We should open it,” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“Let’s open it outside.”
“Let’s put on gloves and masks just in case.”
We pilfered through my dresser drawers and left my bedroom with scarves over our heads and covering our mouths and noses, sunglasses protecting our eyes, and mismatched fuzzy gloves on our hands.
Fantasy said, “You look ridiculous.”
I said, “So do you.”
I peeked in on Bex, Quinn, and Candy, still busy with Anna, Elsa, and Olaf, then we stepped out the kitchen door to one of my three sunny porches.
“Go ahead,” Fantasy said from behind her scarf.
By then, I’d had it with the envelope, wondering what was in the envelope, and trying to talk someone—anyone—into opening the envelope, so I did it. I ripped it open. Not easy to do wearing fuzzy gloves. Fantasy and I read the note from two feet away. We stepped closer to read it from one foot away. Then, coming out from behind our scarves, sunglasses, and fuzzy gloves, we read the note from an inch away.
I’ve got your old lady.
I’ll sell her to you for $5,000,000.
I’ll be in touch.
Elvis
We fell into porch chairs, exhausted from our efforts.
Fantasy picked up the magazine-letter note and fanned herself with it.
“Did you come in through the lobby?” I asked.
“I did.”
“And?”
“A hundred,” she said. “At least.”
“At seven in the morning?”
She checked the time on her phone. “Davis, it’s nine.”
How had that happened?
I grabbed the magazine-letter note from her and fanned myself with it. “Tell me. Just tell me.”
“There were tall Elvises.” She took a deep breath. “There were short Elvises. There were black, white, blue, and I counted ten Asian Elvises without even trying. There were women Elvises, children Elvises, and I kid you not, dog Elvises, all checking into the hotel. Worse than that? Most of our employees are wearing Elvis costumes. Almost every employee I saw was in some manner of Elvis disguise. The only way to tell the Elvis employees from the Elvis guests is the employees are wearing nametags. And that, Davis, was just the lobby.”
“Wouldn’t the plural of Elvis be Elvii?” I asked. “Like the plural of radius is radii?”
“His name wasn’t Elvius.”
“I think the plural is Elvii.”
“Does it even halfway matter?” she asked. “Our problem is, of all the Elvises, or Elviis, one of them has Birdy James.”
“And wants five million dollars for her. Five million dollars we don’t have.”
“And the convention doesn’t even officially start until tomorrow,” she said. “It’s—” she checked the time again “—nine fifteen in the morning the day before the convention starts and we probably have a thousand guests and two thousand employees who look like Elvis in the building right now. And that’s not counting the Elvises on the street. The people behind the counter and everyone in line at Krispy Kreme were dressed as Elvis.” She leaned in. “Davis. The donut special today is Elvis. The donuts have chocolate Elvis hair.”
It was the Bellissimo’s first Elvis convention, and the entire Southeastern United States was excited about it. Twelve hundred Elvis lookalikes were descending on us and staying five nights. Elvis fan clubs from as far away as Michigan, Missouri, and the Mojave Desert who couldn’t book rooms at the Elvised-out Bellissimo were celebrating the King of Rock and Roll at every other casino up and down Beach Boulevard, spilling over to chain motels and Airbnbs around the city, and, bottom line, Biloxi had Elvis Fever. The Bellissimo lobby had been transformed to a Graceland vignette. The VIP lounge was serving bite-sized peanut butter, banana, and bacon grilled sandwiches. What was formerly a poker room in the casino was currently the Love Me Tender Chapel, with more than fifty weddings scheduled, officiated by five different ordained Elvii. Rumors were rampant that before the week was out, Elvis’s only child and h
eir to his vast estate, Lisa Marie Presley, would make an appearance. Included in the week’s festivities at our resort alone were impersonator performances, lookalike competitions, a Bellissimo-sponsored Run With the King 5K, a King of Cadillacs car show on the Mezzanine, a Hound Dog parade through the grounds, live concerts by the Jail House Rockers from California and the Blue Suede Shoes from New York, a seated luncheon book signing with the top ten Elvis biographers, Elvis-themed menus in all fourteen Bellissimo restaurants, and probably the biggest event of them all, on Friday night, the top twenty-five scores in the week-long Elvis slot tournament would be cast as extras for the remake of Double Trouble, an old Elvis movie.
When I first heard about the convention, months earlier, I didn’t think a thing about it other than it sounded like fun. (Who doesn’t love Elvis?) For the most part, Bellissimo conventions ran themselves, very rarely hitting our team’s radar. Or radii. But given present circumstances, with thousands of guests and most of our employees all trying to look like one person, how in the world would we pick out the one who had Birdy James? And where were we supposed to get five million dollars? Even if we found the five million already missing, we had to wire it to Seattle, not buy back an old lady. I could only find a single sliver of light in the five-million-dollar-Birdy-Elvii darkness. “At least we don’t have to go to Louisiana.” As soon as I said it, I stood.
“Where are you going?” Fantasy asked.
“To call my mother. If we’re not going to Birdy James’s sister’s house in Louisiana, I don’t need my mother.”
“You called your mother?”
“Fantasy, you were the one who told me to get a sitter. We were going on a road trip. But if an Elvis has Birdy James, then she didn’t necessarily steal the five million dollars, and this is internal. The person we’re looking for is here. Under our roof. Surely, between you, me, Baylor, and July, we can handle Bex and Quinn.” Two seconds later, I was back in my porch chair with my phone speed dialing my father, because by then, I remembered, my mother would have been praising the Lord. “Daddy.”
Double Trouble Page 5
