The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb

  The day of Maureen’s sentencing? After Carole Alderman had begged the judge to throw the book at her and Velvet had caused that commotion? She’d followed me out of the courthouse. I’d just watched them haul my wife off to prison, and all I wanted to do was get the fuck out of that parking garage before my head exploded. And Velvet had run after me, calling, “Mr. Quirk! Wait up!”

  I’d pivoted and faced her. “What are you doing here? How’d you even find out about this?”

  She said she’d been cleaning offices someplace down South and had lifted a bunch of magazines from waiting rooms. Taken them home, and opened up to “A Victim’s Victims” in the New Yorker. It was “a sign,” she’d said. She’d started hitchhiking up to Connecticut the next morning.

  “Well, hitchhike back,” I said. “There’s nothing for you up here.”

  Yes, there was, she said. Her “mom” was here, and she was going to stand by her. Visit her and give her moral support. She asked me if I wanted to go someplace and talk—get a pizza or something.

  “A pizza?” I said. “Velvet, after what just happened in that courtroom, do you think I’ve got an appetite?” I got into my car and slammed the door. Backed out of my space and took her out of reverse. But just as I was about to give it the gas, she stepped in front of the car.

  “It was Columbine,” she said. “That’s what messed up her head.”

  “Gee, really? You think? Get out of my way.”

  “Could I crash at your place? Until I get a job and a room someplace?”

  “No!” I was fighting back tears.

  “Can I borrow some money then?”

  I fished two twenties out of my wallet and threw them at her. And when she bent to pick them up, I swerved around her and got out of there.

  That was the last I’d seen of her until two nights earlier, when she’d shown up at the locked door of the Mama Mia. Which is not to say she didn’t call me five or six times in between—so much so that I thought about getting caller ID. She kept bugging me about asking Maureen to add her name to her visitors list. Mo had enough to contend with, I figured, so I kept saying no, it’s not a good idea, maybe down the road sometime. What were they going to do: reminisce about Littleton? I could spare Mo that much. And anyway, when an inmate puts someone on her visitor list, they do a security check to make sure the person doesn’t have any felony convictions. I figured Velvet might very well have racked up one or two of those, and that it might raise a red flag with DOC.

  Velvet circumvented me, though. Wrote to Mo, Mo put her on her list, and, what do you know, they approved her. I didn’t know all this had gone down until after the fact—after Velvet’s first visit. It was hard seeing her at the place, Maureen said, but she appreciated the kid’s effort. “She’s still so needy, Caelum. And it’s not like I can help her while I’m here.”

  “You two talk about Columbine?” I asked her.

  Tears welled up in Maureen’s eyes. She looked down at the tabletop and shook her head.

  “Let Velvet take care of herself,” I said. “You take care of yourself.”

  THOSE FIRST TWO NIGHTS AT the Mama Mia, over all those free cups of coffee, Velvet filled me in about her life since I’d gunned it out of the parking garage. It was the edited version, I was pretty sure. She was renting a room downtown. She’d gotten a job on a cleaning crew, but then the company had done urines on all their employees and fired her.

  “What did you test positive for?” I asked. Marijuana, she said, but I had my doubts. Who wears an army jacket during a summer heat wave? And why were there blood stains on the cuffs of that jacket? Jesus, if she was doing heroin, I didn’t want her going anywhere near Maureen and I’d told her as much that first night. “Heroin?” she’d said. “God, I’m not that stupid.”

  Yeah, and I’m not that naïve, I thought.

  She was on town welfare now, she said—had established residence and qualified. She did some dishwashing and maintenance work at the Silver Rail, and they paid her under the table. I suspected she might be turning tricks, too—she’d mentioned hanging out at the highway rest stop on I–95 and at the all-night diner where a lot of the truckers eat. She and I had a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy about that, though. I didn’t want to know, because I was damned if I was going to become her surrogate dad again. I’d tried that once before back in Littleton, and she’d burned me pretty bad.

  “Mom seemed good yesterday,” Velvet told me now, matter-of-factly. She’d picked up Ancient Myth and Modern Man and was leafing through it while I mixed a bucket of butter cream. “She said there’s a Survivors of Violence group down there and she went to one of their meetings.”

  “I know she did,” I said. “I visit her three times a week. She’s my wife.”

  “And she’s my mom.”

  “No, she’s not,” I said. “You need to back off from that ‘mom’ crap.”

  Her eyes narrowed angrily. “Why? Because you hate my guts?”

  “No, because she’s got enough to deal with without having to feel responsible for you.”

  “Who says she’s responsible for me?” she shot back.

  “You imply it when you call her Mom. Mothers take care of their daughters.”

  “Not all of them,” she said. We stood there, facing each other. She emptied the rest of the coffee into the sink and started a new pot. “It’s just a nickname,” she said. “God.”

  I did end up putting her to work that night, though—mainly because somewhere around three a.m., when I figured I’d pretty much gotten things under control, it dawned on me that I’d forgotten to check the “special orders” book. And when I did, it said that someone from the junior high was coming at seven to pick up three dozen as-sorteds and three dozen muffins for a teachers’ meeting and that half an hour later, Yankee Remodelers was picking up a half-sheet cake, marble with butter cream frosting, “Happy Retirement, Harry!”

  “Fuck!” I shouted, louder than I meant to. When I looked up, Velvet was staring at me. “God,” she said. “Why can’t you just let me help you.”

  “Take off your jacket then,” I said. “And wash your hands.”

  I got her an apron. Showed her how to cut doughnuts. Taught her how to use the pump for the filled ones. The hand pump, not the electric. You can fill two at a time with the electric pump, but it takes a while to get the hang of it. I glanced at her arms a few times, but I didn’t see any tracks. That didn’t necessarily mean there weren’t any. When she was done with those jobs, I had her make muffins and bake a few dozen of those frozen hockey-puck bagels Alphonse sells, much to the disdain of his father.

  Truth is, Velvet saved my butt that night. By six a.m., the cases were full, the special orders were done, and I was reading chapter four of Ancient Myth and Modern Man. Daedalus, Theseus, the Minotaur, the maze. “Throw me a pen, will you?” I said to Velvet. I’d just read something I wanted to underline: “The labyrinth is simultaneously inextricable and impenetrable. Those inside cannot get out and those outside cannot get in.” Like Maureen and me, I thought. For the next four years and ten months.

  By eight a.m., Velvet had taken a hike and Tina, Alphonse’s day shift gal, had taken over. I was seated in a booth, reading still, and having a coffee and a cruller. Tina reached up and turned on the TV in the far corner. The Today show was all about New Orleans still: the fiasco inside the Superdome, the mayor’s frustration with FEMA’s and Bush’s bullshit. Gunfire had been exchanged between looters and police.

  “’Scuse me,” the guy at the next table said. “Y’all mind if I turn that thing off?” He was black or part-black, unshaven and baggy-eyed. The sad-eyed white woman sitting across from him looked like she’d been through the wringer, too. We were the only three out front. I told him no, I didn’t mind.

  “Good,” he said. “Because she and I been on the road for three days driving away from that particular nightmare.”

  “You’re from New Orleans?”

  “Used to be. Now, who knows?”
>
  He got up and deadened the TV. Back at the table, he extended his hand. “Moses Mick,” he said. “This is my wife, Janis.”

  “Caelum Quirk,” I said. I shook hands with both of them. The bones in hers felt as fragile as a bird’s.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Moses said. “You don’t know, by any chance, where she and I could rent a place short-term?”

  I told him Three Rivers had two motels, and that there were three hotels down at the casino, two high-end and one not.

  He shook his head. “I’m talking about a couple of months maybe. Our game plan was, we’d head north to Cape Cod, because Janis has been there and says it’s pretty. But I’m damn sick of driving. Y’heard me?”

  chapter eighteen

  MOSES AND JANIS MICK WERE a handsome couple, mismatched in intriguing ways. Moses was a big guy—biracial, blue-eyed, blue-collar. He had an easy smile and a slow, deliberate way of moving that was in sync with his Louisiana drawl. Janis, a petite, wide-eyed academic, was Type A all the way—and cute as hell. She had a cute little body on her, too—not that a guy whose sex life was on hold for five years would notice. That morning at the bakery, I put down Modern Man and Ancient Myth and listened to the details of the Micks’ Hurricane Katrina ordeal.

  Their shotgun house was on Caffin Avenue in the city’s Ninth Ward, they said—flanked by a beauty parlor and a Family Dollar. Fats Domino’s blond brick place—a palace in comparison to the rest of the neighborhood—was half a block away.

  “What’s a shotgun house?” I asked.

  “Narrow but deep,” Moses said. “Bedrooms up front, kitchen in the back. No hallway. You want something to eat, you gotta walk from room to room to get to where the food’s at.” He gave a nod to Janis. “House drove her crazy at first. California girl.”

  “I love that house,” Janis said. Stroking his arm, she turned to me. “Moses was born there.”

  At first, they had planned to stay put and ride out the storm, they said, but sometime after midnight on Sunday, with the predictions so dire and the TV showing live shots of the necklace of headlights inching along I–10, they’d relented. “My mother kept calling from Sacramento and begging us to leave,” Janis added.

  “Begging her,” Moses corrected. “Her mama don’t have much use for the black guy who kidnapped her daughter and dragged her down to the big, bad Lower Nines.” It jolted me a little to hear him put it that way. When they’d entered the bakery, I’d just been reading about Persephone’s abduction to the underworld and the creation of the seasons.

  “My mom’s pretty conversative,” Janis said. To which Moses added, “Big Limbaugh fan. ‘Mega-dittoes, Rush. It’s an honor and a privilege to speak to a bigot and a drug abuser such as yourself.’”

  “Moze, stop,” Janis said. “We don’t know what this guy’s politics are.”

  I assured her they fell well to the left of her mother’s.

  “We’d already boarded up the windows, so that was done,” Moses said. “I figured the rain gutters and some of the roof shingles’d go. Maybe even the roof itself if the chinaberry tree fell the wrong way. Figured a category four or five might uproot that ole boy.” He stopped, swallowed hard. “I thought we might get some flooding, but I was picturing a foot or two. I didn’t calculate the levees’d fail and the whole damn Lower Nine would go under. We left everything there, pretty much. Packed up her computer and my molds and tools and drove off.”

  “What kind of molds?” I said.

  Moses said he was a sculptor, angels and gargoyles his specialty.

  Their cat, Fat Harry, had probably drowned, Janis said. They’d delayed leaving for over an hour, calling him and shaking his box of treats. But Harry hadn’t come home. “That ole rascal’s gone fat and lazy, but he’s still got an interest in the ladies,” Moses said. His smile was rueful. “And if he died tomcattin’, well, I guess there’s worse ways to go.” Janis rested her head against the tabletop, and he reached over and massaged the small of her back. He said it softly. “Sugar, we gotta get you some sleep.”

  I invited them to crash at the farmhouse. I had the room, and they seemed like decent people. And I mean, Jesus Christ, their whole goddamned life had gone underwater.

  An hour later, Janis was sacked out across Lolly and Hennie’s bed and Moses and I were downstairs, drinking ten a.m. beers and staring at the havoc on CNN. I thought about confessing that, six years earlier, I had stared at that same TV, that same channel, watching Columbine unfold—watching the beginning of the end of our shared life as we knew it. Instead, I kept my mouth shut. What was I going to say? That if he thought things were bad now, he should brace himself for the repercussions? That if his sleeping wife had come away from Katrina with posttraumatic stress, they were fucked far worse than he could imagine?

  “You married?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Yup.” He waited. “My wife’s away for a while.”

  He nodded. “Where’s she at?”

  Rather than answer him, I asked if he knew Fats Domino.

  “The Fat Man? No, not really. See him sometimes, driving past in his big pink Cadillac. I was at his house once, helping a friend of mine move a piano. Mr. Antoine wasn’t there, though. That’s his given name: Antoine. I know his wife a bit. Miss Rosemary. She was church friends with my mamaw.”

  “Your mother?” I asked.

  “Grandmother. Some of us families go back to when the Nines was neighborly. My Granddaddy Robichaux built our place back in nineteen-fifty, way before crack and crime took hold. I inherited it after Mamaw passed—what you’d call a mixed blessing, I guess. But even with all the problems, a neighborhood’s a hard thing to let go of, y’heard me?” He looked back at the TV, shaking his head. He said he recognized some of the rooftops from the aerial footage, and a few of the people stranded on those roofs.

  “My granddaddy built his house square and true,” he said. He was picking at his beer bottle label and talking more to the images on the TV screen than to me. “That place survived three of his and Mamaw’s kids, six of Mamaw’s and my step-granddaddy Mr. Clarence’s, nine of us grandkids, and Hurricane Betsy.” He turned and faced me. “Betsy’s how I come by the name of Moses. I came into the world just as she was blowin’ through. That ole she-devil put the Nines underwater, too. My mama’d been in labor the better part of the night before, but when the water come, she got up out of bed, put me in a dresser drawer, and waded in neck-deep. Sixteen and single, and Mamaw said she pushed me along inside that drawer past bodies and debris until me and her reached higher ground. Two days later, she died from infection. ‘Name him Moses,’ she told Mamaw. It was Mamaw who raised me—her and Mr. Clarence and Miss Delia next door. Auntie, I always called her, but she wasn’t really blood. Might as well have been, though. Used to run Delia’s High Classe Beauty Shoppe before her legs swelled up bad. Ain’t no way she survived this, or that ole shop of hers neither.”

  “Maybe she did,” I said. “Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”

  He shook his head. “Miss Delia’s two hundred pounds and wheelchair-bound. We asked her to come with us, but she said no. Figured if she’d survived Betsy, she’d weather Katrina, too…. No, she’s gone. Who was gonna hoist her up onto her roof? Her son in prison? Her crackhead granddaughter who steals her blind? I shouldn’t have taken no. Should have insisted.”

  The six-pack was sitting on the couch between us: five empties and one last beer in the carton. I picked it up, twisted the cap off, and handed it to him. “Miss Dee?” he said. “When I was growing up? At Christmastime, after midnight church, we’d head back to her house for reveillon dinner. Eggs and grits, red beans and rice, cherry bread pudding, turtle soup. Crawfish boil on top of all that other. She’d of been cooking for days.” He drank his beer in two or three long gulps, then rose abruptly. Staggering a little, he left the room, then left the house.

  A banging sound brought me to the parlor window. I stood there, watching him kick the driver’s side door of his pickup, over and
over, until he’d dented it pretty badly. In the process, he’d spent himself. Slumped to the ground and rested his forehead against his knees.

  “WHAT DOES SHE LOOK LIKE?” Maureen wanted to know.

  “Janis?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. She kind of reminds me of that little actress. What’s her name? Legally Blonde?”

  “Reese Witherspoon,” Mo said.

  “Yeah, her.” I caught a flash of disapproval and amended the comparison. “Well, half Legally Blonde, half Energizer Bunny. She vacuumed the house yesterday, cleaned out the refrigerator, went grocery shopping. She’s cooking supper tonight. Says she feels better when she keeps busy.”

  Maureen’s frown was pensive.

  “But it’s kind of buggy, you know? All that manic energy.”

  “Do they know about me?” Maureen asked.

  “Some,” I lied. “Not all of it.” Janis had inquired about Mo’s whereabouts, too, and I’d made up a story about her needing to go back to Colorado to help with a family emergency. Because she’s a nurse, I’d said.

  “They figure their cat drowned. It hadn’t come home yet when they had to evacuate. Nancy Tucker’s kind of adopted them, though. Janis, especially. Follows her around, sleeps on their bed.”

  “It’s not their bed,” Maureen pointed out. “It’s Lolly’s bed.”

  The visitors’ room racket was worse than usual that afternoon. Two seats down, a Latina with Cheeto-colored hair and the inmate across from her were arguing in breakneck Spanish. Two tables over, a black guy with gold front teeth was singing “Happy Birthday” to a pretty inmate in orange flight risk scrubs. Mo said something I didn’t catch, and I cupped my hand behind my ear. “Come again?”

  “I asked you what he was like.”

  “Moze? Well, older than she is. Forty or so. She’s twenty-eight. They’re one of those opposites-attract couples, I guess: he goes maybe six-four, six-five, and she doesn’t quite clear five feet. She’s halfway to a Ph.D. at Tulane, she says. In women’s studies. But all that’s in limbo for the time being, I guess.”