The Trials of Nellie Belle

by Sydney Avey

  A dog groomer. Leone never expected this would be her life’s work, but it fit her. In some senses, she had stepped into her dream. When she wasn’t working, she roamed the Palos Verdes beaches with her own Yorkies. Although the muse had largely left her—her novel lay uncompleted in a bottom drawer—she contributed opinion pieces to the local newspaper. Sometimes the ones she wrote when she wasn’t drunk got published. Once, she submitted a poem to Dog World, and they published it.

  Rosemary was her biggest fan. “You know, Leone, stay off the booze, and I bet you could get paid for what you write. You express yourself well.”

  “We all have our demons.”

  A similar conversation repeated itself often, and one day Rosemary took Leone on.

  “We may all have our demons, but you don’t have to be so cozy with yours, do you?” From lawn chairs where they sat in the backyard, they watched the dogs play in the grass. Leone had just poured her third scotch, in violation of her agreement with Rosemary.

  “Ha,” Leone answered, setting the glass aside for a moment. “It seems I lack the will to banish them, so I befriend them instead.”

  “You’re being flip.”

  “I suppose.”

  The slurring wouldn’t start until later in the evening after she’d finished the bottle. Then she would make phone calls she would regret and vows to stop, and she would, for awhile. She never told anyone about the demons’ promises to fill the empty place with warmth and light. She knew it was a lie. There was no courage in the bottles she hid from Rosemary.

  On her best days, Leone knew that magic was not an elixir. Magic was the joy she felt from the nuzzle of a dog, the peace of shared moments of domesticity—the first tomato from the garden, a taste of Rosemary’s bolo de bolacha, coffee-soaked wafers layered with buttercream and tangy fruit compote. For these fleeting moments, she was grateful.

  As the years passed, Rosemary would ask Leone why they spent all their holidays with her family. Why did they never visit Leone’s family? “We will,” she would answer, but they never did.

  32 - The Last Ride

  32

  The Last Ride

  Los Altos, 1939

  When did Nellie’s heart begin to fail? While Felix languished in a rest home, Nellie lay in her small twin bed in the back bedroom of the house, never quite sure whether her eyes were open or shut, or whose face loomed above her, whose voice murmured in her ear.

  Eustace leaned in to kiss her. She was blind. No, no, those were John’s thin, dry lips pressed to hers, his mustache a not unpleasant tickle under her nose. Tucked up under his arm, wearing a light cotton dress, her body warmed to his on the porch of the new house he had built for her in Kansas.

  In the yard, Johnny stirred up dirt practicing his rope tricks. The girls played dolls on the wooden steps. Wood steps? No, that was the soddie. Never mind. Focus. There was Mabel, giving instructions to her cornhusk doll, and baby Opal gathering fistfuls of dirt, letting them fall from her hand and blow away in the wind.

  Stone still, Nellie lay in her bed and let memories tumbleweed past. Steam whistled in the distance. When did her affection for home and hearth boil away? A copper kettle dragged across an iron burner; wheels clattered on rails; burnt coffee grounds prickled in her dry mouth. She thrust her tongue past her parted lips to receive the ministrations of soothing icy coolness amid snatches of conversation.

  Look here; see the lines on the bullets and the casings. What was the question? What was the answer?

  The scent of roses and the whisper of words; we wanted you as a witness to our marriage. Who stood under a bower of roses?

  A hand on her back; a handsome lawman. Did she? Nellie’s outstretched hand was taken up, fingers pressed rose petals into her palm and gently moved her hand toward her nose.

  “Smell these, Mother. These are from the rose bush you and I planted last spring. It’s a Harison’s Yellow rose.”

  Nellie’s eyes flickered. So seldom had she used her voice in the past few days she hardly recognized it as hers. “Tell me.”

  Opal sat on a chair by her mother’s bed. “It’s a vigorous, hardy rose, known for resilience and resistance to disease.”

  “Good stock”—Nellie squeezed Opal’s hand— “like us.”

  “Yes, like us. It’s also called the Oregon Trail Rose because the pioneers carried it west.”

  Her speech came easier now. “Did we have roses in Kansas?” Nellie blinked away tears that protested the bright sunlight shining through the window.

  “I seem to recall that we did.” Opal took a tissue from her pocket and dabbed at the corner of her mother’s eyes. She stood up and walked to the window to lower the shade.

  “I should have brought some root cuttings with me when we left Kansas.” Nellie’s arm fell to her side and the petals Opal had placed in her hand scattered onto the cream chenille bedspread. Real tears fell in earnest now. “Do you blame me for leaving your father?”

  Opal took her mother’s hand and placed it gently under the covers. “I missed Johnny very much.”

  “Your brother.”

  “Yes.”

  “But not your father?”

  “Well, yes, but I didn’t know him very well.”

  “I don’t think I did either.”

  Nellie closed her eyes. Some minutes later, a ragged noise in her throat choked her. She struggled for breath, her eyes opened, and she tried to sit up. Opal pulled a pillow from the foot of the bed and helped her mother lean forward so she could fit it behind her. She held a glass of water to her mother’s lips, but Nellie refused it.

  “What will you do, Opal? With Leone on her own now, and Felix. He can’t last much longer.” Nellie coughed and wheezed with the effort of speech.

  Opal put her finger to her lips. “Don’t try to talk.” She took a long, deep breath and raised her eyes to the partially shaded window. Outside, the morning glory vine stretched along the window ledge, its flowers tightly closed against the heat of the summer day. “Felix is in God’s hands. I’ve made my peace with that. God has been good to me. I have Jane. We take care of each other. I have my students. I have my little house. My life is full of blessings.”

  A shadow passed across Nellie’s face. In a spurt of energy, she wrestled her hands free from her covers and grabbed Opal’s arm. “It isn’t dying I’m afraid of, Opal. It’s leaving you to fend for yourself.”

  Opal sat very still. She pulled her arm out of Nellie’s grasp and placed her hand on her mother’s forehead, smoothing a few thin strands of hair. “Mother, if there is one thing you taught me, it was how to fend for myself. Don’t worry about me. Jane and I will be okay.”

  Nellie relaxed into her pillow. “And Leone?”

  Opal slumped a little and then pulled herself up. “All I can do is pray that God is watching out for her.”

  Nellie closed her eyes and Opal slipped out of the room to get a vase for the roses. The room darkened. Stillness laid a hand on Nellie’s chest and pushed her back into her pillows. She fought to hang onto her thoughts … Leone and Jane … Jane had been a twin. What had happened to that baby? Her name had been Jean. No. Helen, that was her name. Helen couldn’t see either.

  A honeyed smell filled the room; sweet like grass; sour like hay; musky like her Indian paint pony. Racing across the Kansas plain, her long dark hair whipped across her cheeks. Her legs wrapped around his belly, she urged her pony toward the horizon and drew her last breath.

  PART 3

  PART 3

  Christine

  33- Discord

  33

  Discord

  Los Altos, 1956

  It wasn’t easy for Leone to talk Jane into letting her take ten-year-old Christine for the weekend. Jane sat stiffly beside her husband on a beige sofa in a beige living room and brought it all up again, the irresponsibility, the drunken midnight phone calls, the loan requests.

  “I don’t remember asking you for money.”

  “You did. You took money f
rom our mother too.” Jane’s face was a stone.

  “‘I’m sure I did not do that.” Leone was getting nowhere. She would have to change her tactics. She looked over at Christine, who stood near the front door rising up and down on her toes in her effort to contain the energy that buzzed in her body. Leone could feel the child’s excitement. She tried one more time.

  “She’s an antsy one, isn’t she. I bet that gets on your nerves after awhile. You could use a break, couldn’t you?”

  In the hallway, Christine nodded her head vigorously. Jane glared at the girl and shook her head.

  Leone attached another lure to her line. “And by the way, I’m not strapped for money. My business does quite well. I’ll take her shopping for school clothes. You can give me a list.”

  It was not lost on Leone that her half-sister’s husband had set her up nicely in one of the new tract homes the government helped veterans get into, but they appeared to have the basics, nothing more. She was willing to bet that Jane kept a tight rein on the purse strings.

  “Mom, I want to visit with Aunt Leone.” Christine slipped out of her shoes and stepped onto the carpet. Small feet in thin white socks tiptoed across the room to stand next to Leone, which did not please her mother.

  “Why do you want to do this, Leone? You’ve never shown any interest in me or my family.” Jane raised her chin and tightened her lips, erasing the natural prettiness of her face.

  Be careful. You will freeze that way. It is the very same expression I saw on Grandmother’s face the last time I saw her. The two of them are so like each other, stubborn and complicated.

  “I like your daughter. She’s got spunk. Tell you what. Let’s scotch the idea of my taking her back on the train to San Pedro.” Poor choice of words. “I’ll spend a couple of more days at Mother’s. It will be a supervised visit.”

  Christine knew better than to turn her pleading eyes toward her mother. Instead, she locked eyes with her father.

  “Let her do it, Jane.” He placed a hand on his wife’s knee. “I can drive them over to your mother’s, and if Christine decides she wants to come home later she can telephone us, and I’ll go get her.” He stood up and took a couple of steps toward a stain on the rug. Bending down, he rubbed his fingers into the fibers, pulled his fingers up to his nose and sniffed. “I think we need to shampoo this carpet, Mother. I’ll take care of that when I get back.”

  He calls her “mother.” How odd. I never really thought of Jane as motherly.

  “Can I go pack a suitcase?” Christine asked in a small voice.

  “Take one out of the closet.” Her father sat down on the couch again. He took Jane’s hand in his and rubbed it gently. “I’m going to go back the car out of the garage and check the oil. I might stop at the gas station after I drop them off.” Another knee pat, a nod to Leone, and he escaped to the garage.

  “Can I use your telephone to call my friend, so she knows she doesn’t have to pick me up here at your house?” Leone was halfway to the desk phone when she turned around and faced Jane. “You have a nice home here. A nice husband. Nice children. Don’t you think you could find it in your heart to forgive me for all the mistakes I made?”

  Jane stood up. “Make your phone call, Leone. I have to make lunch for Carolyn. She’ll be waking up from her nap soon.”

  “You’re a lot like her, you know?”

  “Carolyn?”

  “Our grandmother. Nellie.”

  Jane turned red in the face. “I’m nothing like her. She was a mean, bitter woman.”

  “No, she wasn’t. You didn’t understand her. She had a sense of decorum, that’s all.”

  “Yes, well, she liked you. She didn’t like me. She thought I should never have been born. She tried to get my mother to do something about it.”

  “What are you saying?”

  A commotion in the hallway cut off further conversation. Christine dragged her suitcase into view, her little sister tagging along behind her.

  “That’s the other one?” Leone pointed to red-nosed Carolyn, who was sick with a cold.

  “You make it sound like I had a litter of puppies.”

  The two women glared at each other; then Leone burst out laughing. Jane’s eyes brightened. Despite her best intentions, the corners of her mouth turned up. Leone shook her head slowly. “You are just like her. Wicked sense of humor. Neither one of you lets a person get by with anything.”

  Christine set her suitcase upright and sat on it. Carolyn hung back, eyeing Leone with suspicion.

  “Go to the kitchen, Carolyn. I’ll fix you some soup. How’s your throat?”

  Carolyn rolled big blue eyes from her mother to her aunt. “You don’t look like sisters.”

  “We’re half-sisters. Never mind that. It’s time for your cough medicine.”

  Carolyn fell into a paroxysm of coughing. “I want the orange flavor cough syrup, not the cherry flavor.”

  Leone shooed them into the kitchen and made her phone call. Then she leaned on the kitchen doorframe, waiting until Jane looked up from the stove.

  “Thank you for letting me come. And for letting me take Christine for the weekend.”

  Jane spooned a little of the chicken soup she was stirring to her lips and turned off the stove. “When are you going back to San Pedro?”

  “Monday.” A car engine revved in the driveway, choked, started up and settled into a rough idle.

  Leone continued to stand in the doorway while Jane ladled soup into a bowl, then set it before Carolyn. They looked at each other: one blue-eyed, fair-skinned, and tense as a mouse; the other brown-eyed, weathered, and wary as a possum. It was Jane who broke the silence.

  “I’m glad you came, Leone. I have a favor to ask you.”

  Leone pushed herself up from the doorframe. “What’s that?”

  “Would you please call or write to Mother more often? She worries about you.”

  “I will try to do that.”

  Two short blasts of a car horn moved Leone to the front door where Christine sat on her suitcase, jiggling her foot. When she saw Leone, she jumped up and shouted over her shoulder, “Bye, Mom.” Leone picked up her suitcase and led the way out the door.

  34 - Disconnect

  34

  Disconnect

  Opal lived alone in the cottage now. Earlier in the week, Leone had asked her how she was getting by.

  “Social Security. Plus a small income from a few private dance students helps put food on the table.”

  “You’re still teaching?”

  “That surprises you?”

  “I don’t know. I figured that Jane would take care of you.”

  “Is that where you think the money I send you comes from? Jane?”

  What to say? She could not recall a moment when she thought about it at all. She remembered nothing of the blackness that rolled over her, invited by too much booze and too many regrets. In her lucid periods, she attended only to those sensations that carried her from one moment to the next, the smell of a freshly shampooed pup, the featherweight feel of a shell picked off the beach, what else? So little satisfied. It was a mistake to come here.

  Opal was still talking. “And a part-time job as a companion puts gas in the car; I don’t need anything else.”

  “A companion?” Leone had never considered that her mother might have anyone in her life besides family and a few neighbors. “Who?”

  “I make lunch for an old gentleman whose family needs someone to keep an eye on him. After lunch, we play cards and watch the early news on the television.” Opal threw Leone a knowing look. “Then I go home.”

  “Sounds pretty chummy.”

  “Yes, well, he did ask me to marry him, but I suspect what he really wants is an unpaid nurse not a wife. Besides, I will never marry again.”

  “I should hope not. What are his kids worried about, anyway?”

  “Sometimes he gets it in his head to pick up his shotgun, go outside, and shoot it down the gopher holes on the front
lawn.” Opal laughed. “If he should miss and shoot himself in the foot, my job is to notify the family.”

  They had a good laugh, and then Leone asked, “What does Jane think of this arrangement?”

  “Oh she likes him. She has us both over on Christmas morning. He brings presents for the girls.”

  A familiar pain had flashed in Leone’s chest. “How cozy.” The words escaped before she could strangle her naked resentment. I’ve never had an invitation to Jane’s house. I had to invite myself.

  Today would be different. Today Leone walked into the cottage with Christine as a shield. Once inside, her husky baritone voice filled the room. “Mother? I’ve got Christine with me for the weekend.” She shooed Christine. “Get busy with something for awhile. We’ll go shopping a little later.” Then she dropped the girl’s suitcase in the living room.

  Opal appeared in the kitchen doorway. “I bought you a couple of comic books and a Mars bar,” she told Christine. Opal pointed to the kitchen table, where the groceries still sat in bags. Christine retrieved her goodies and started to pull out a chair, but Opal put a gentle hand on the girl’s shoulder and guided her through the back door. Why don’t you go out back for a little while? I’ll call you when we are ready to go.” Then she turned to Leone.

  “Why did you bring her here?”

  Leone pressed her lips together in puzzled bemusement and shook her head. “I thought you and Jane would like it if I showed an interest.”

  “Oh, Leone. Do you feel an interest?” Opal began to unpack her groceries and put them away.

  “I feel like a drink. Do you have any beer?”

  “No.”

  The back door squeaked open and nails clicked on the worn linoleum floor. “Scochie wants to come in.” Christine’s voice came through the door.