The Three Miss Margarets

by Louise Shaffer

  “It’s a party for my ma, it’s her birthday. I have a cake and balloons and candles—”

  “That sounds lovely, dear,” Mrs. Peters said, in the tone kind adults used when they didn’t mean it. “Does your mama know about this?”

  “No, ma’am. It’s a surprise.”

  The word no was hovering on Mrs. Peters’s lips; Laurel could see it. Desperation made her smart. Although she was pretty sure lying to a preacher’s wife damned you to hell, she blurted out, “I didn’t do it by myself. I had help from . . . from my grandma.”

  For a moment she thought Mrs. Peters was going to ask her what her grandma’s name was, and she would have to die right there in the vestry. But instead Mrs. Peters smiled wearily. “Of course I’ll come, dear. Thank you so much for inviting me.”

  “You’ll have a good time,” Laurel assured her. “I bought the cake from Krausner’s.” She ran off, leaving Mrs. Peters to watch after her.

  When she looked back on it now, she figured the poor woman was probably remembering the old saying that no good deed goes unpunished.

  ON THE DAY OF THE PARTY, Laurel woke up with a knot in her stomach. The enormity of what she was planning hit her, and she thought briefly of bailing out on the whole thing. But she’d given out the invitations, and Mr. Krausner was probably putting the roses on the cake at that very minute. There was no turning back. She checked to see that her ma was still safely sleeping, then got dressed, strapped her basket on her bike, and took off. She never rode her bike to town, it was too far and there was no way to get there without going on the highway. But this morning she didn’t have any choice.

  Even though it was still early, cars and pickups whizzed past her, threatening to push her into the ditch at the side of the road. Eighteen-wheelers sprayed her with dirt and pebbles; diesel fumes made her eyes burn. A flatbed truck full of chickens on their way to the slaughterhouse pulled up next to her for a while; she was so close to it she could smell the stench and see the doomed birds flapping their wings. She promised God she would never ride her bike on the highway again if He would just let her get to Krausner’s. God was listening. She got there as the shop was opening.

  The birthday cake was beautiful beyond her wildest dreams; it made her mouth water just to look at it, with pink roses so big they could have been real, and her ma’s name looking grand in chocolate swirls. She carefully lowered it into the bike basket and started the return trip.

  By the time she reached the driveway to her house, her arms and neck were aching from the effort of keeping the basket steady.

  There was a small porch on the back of the house where she was planning to hide the cake. She had started walking her bike over the bumpy grass when a familiar voice called out, “Where the hell have you been?”

  It never occurred to her that Sara Jayne would get up so early. She tried to cut around fast to the back, but she was too late.

  “What’s that?” Her mother came out into the yard and indicated the bike basket with her cigarette. It seemed to be one of her more alert mornings; she was even dressed. Laurel stood rooted to the ground. All her plans and work would be for nothing if she didn’t think of something to say. But she just couldn’t.

  “I asked you a question.” Ma looked in the bike basket and saw the name on the cake box. “What are you doing with a cake from Krausner’s? Answer me.”

  It dawned on Laurel that everything didn’t have to be over. There wouldn’t be a surprise anymore, which was disappointing, but it also might be for the best, because now at least she could be sure Ma would put on a skirt and blouse for the party, which was something that had been worrying her. She pushed down her kickstand so the bike wouldn’t fall over.

  “It’s for your birthday,” she said.

  “You wasted good money on that?” Ma gave a short laugh and turned to go back to the house.

  “It’s for your party,” Laurel said.

  Sara Jayne whirled around. “My what?”

  “I’m having a birthday party for you.”

  Her mother was coming toward her. “What the hell are you talking about, girl?”

  “I invited some people—”

  “You did what?”

  “We’re gonna sing ‘Happy Birthday’—”

  “You asked people to come here? To this pigsty?”

  “I got a cake. It’s so pretty—”

  “Who did you ask?”

  “Just some people.”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Peters. She said she was real glad—”

  “You invited the preacher’s wife?”

  “She wanted to come.” Her mother grabbed her arm so hard it made her eyes water.

  “Ma, please. I wanted you to have something nice. . . .” But her mother was dragging her across the yard to the house. “Ma, it’ll be all right.”

  “All right?” Sara Jayne was screaming. “All right?” She pushed Laurel through the door of the house. “Look!” She grabbed Laurel’s head, twisting it back and forth. “Look at this! You asked people to come to this?”

  Laurel was sobbing now, in big painful gulps. “I’ll clean it—” she started.

  “You can’t get this clean enough for decent people! Don’t you know that? Don’t you know how decent people live?”

  “Ma, I’m sorry—”

  “Stop crying, damn you! I’m the one who should be crying. I’m the one who’s stuck with you!”

  And that was when Laurel Selene McCready, age nine, learned that there were times in life when there was no way you could cry enough for the hurt you felt, so she stopped.

  “Who else did you ask?” Sara Jayne demanded. Past caring, Laurel told her. Ma dragged her into the kitchen. “You come in here,” she said.

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “You’re gonna do it. You’re gonna call every one of those ladies you asked to come here, and you’re gonna tell them you’re a little liar. You’re gonna tell them there is no party.” Laurel had a picture of telling Miss Norton, whom she loved, and Miss Hudson, who was kind to her, and Denny’s mother—and most of all, Mrs. Peters.

  “I don’t know the phone numbers.”

  “I’ll look them up for you.”

  “I can’t. . . .”

  “Tell them it was a joke.”

  “Please, Ma, don’t make me.”

  “You got me into this, you’re gonna get me out of it.”

  “I won’t.”

  The belt was out of her mother’s blue jeans so fast she almost didn’t see it. But she felt it as it landed on the back of her legs.

  “You do this to me and then you say you won’t?” Ma was screaming so high it was almost funny. The belt started falling in a pattern. “You took away everything!” Whap! “I’ve got nothing because of you!” Whap! “Nothing!” Whap!

  The belt was hitting her on the shoulders and the back, but she didn’t make a sound. She could feel Ma was tiring. Soon it would be over.

  Sara Jayne dropped the belt on the floor, and stared at her, panting to catch her breath. Painfully, Laurel started for the phone. Her mother stopped her.

  “No. Go outside,” she said. Laurel went out to the front yard.

  After what felt like hours her mother came out, got into the car without a word, and drove off.

  SARA JAYNE DIDN’T COME BACK for the rest of the day. Laurel sat in the house and waited, not knowing what to do but not caring much either. Five o’clock came and no one showed up at the door looking for a party, so she knew it had been taken care of. At eight o’clock she made herself a sandwich. At ten she filled the tub and, in spite of the welts on her back and her legs, scrubbed herself carefully. She spread the sheets neatly on the sofa that served as her bed and went to sleep.

  Toward morning, a familiar sound woke her. Ma was fumbling with the front door. She closed her eyes as Sara Jayne made her unsteady way into the kitchen. Then there were more sounds, of drawers opening and her mother bumping into things. Once she muttered “shit
.” Laurel kept her eyes closed.

  Sara Jayne came out of the kitchen and moved to the sofa. “Hey,” she said in a loud whisper, as she leaned over her. Laurel could smell booze breath. “Come on, I know you’re not asleep. You heard me crashing around in there.” She sat on the sofa near Laurel’s feet and put something on the floor in front of her. Laurel didn’t look to see what it was.

  Sara Jayne started to laugh. “Want to hear a joke? Not a one of them was going to come.” She took a drink from the glass she’d brought with her from the kitchen. “Your skinny little schoolteacher started saying something about dinner plans before I even got a word out. That old bitch that runs the library nearly slammed the receiver in my ear; your pal’s mother acted like she’d never heard of any party. And your Mrs. Peters was so happy when I said it was off, I thought she was gonna start crying.” She laughed again, more quietly. “I embarrassed myself for nothing.” She reached over and shook Laurel. “Come on, sit up. I’ve got something for you.”

  It was the only way she’d go away. Laurel sat up. Her mother leaned down to the floor, brought up a plate, and handed it to her. It was a hunk of cake. Her ma had hacked it out so there was a whole rose on it. None of the little ridges that made the petals had gotten squashed on the bike ride home the way she’d been afraid they would. It sat there, big and pink and perfect.

  “Eat it,” said her mother. “No point in letting it go to waste.”

  Laurel put it down on the floor and curled up in a ball on the corner of the sofa as far away from her mother as she could get.

  Sara Jayne shrugged. “Be that way. I’m gonna have me a party.” She found her guitar, which was leaning against the wall, and went out on the porch.

  At first she was just strumming, not playing anything, just weaving together snatches of music she knew. Then the music worked itself into “Happy Birthday.” She played it through and then started messing around with it, making it sad and lonely like an old country song. Then everything was quiet. And then, the way Laurel knew it would be, the next sound she heard was her ma crying. She lay in the darkness until the crying finally stopped and she was sure there were no more sounds coming from the porch. Then she went into the bedroom and took the pillow and blanket off her mother’s bed and went outside.

  Sara Jayne was asleep, lying stretched out on the porch swing. As Laurel wedged the pillow under her head, her mother murmured, “It wouldn’t be like this if he was here. He loved us, baby.” Laurel put the blanket over her and went back inside.

  Chapter Twenty

  LAUREL WALKED BACK to her desk, looked down at the sheaf of yellow legal-pad pages covered with Reverend Malbry’s spindly handwriting, and admitted defeat. There was no way she could do any more work on the loopy article. She’d have to come in on Sunday to finish it. She put it away and left the office.

  THE SPORTSMAN’S GRILL WAS CLOSED, but Denny’s truck was parked outside. Laurel turned into the shopping center parking lot, pulled up next to the truck, and looked in the front window of the bar. Denny was inside, washing the floor. He hurried to the front when she started banging on the door.

  “A second pair of hands,” he said. “Get you a mop. I’m doing the ladies’ room next.”

  “Don’t you have someone to do this kind of thing?” she asked, as they swished soap and water over the bathroom floor.

  “He quit. Good help is hard to find these days. Daddy’s always going on about it.”

  “No one out there willing to do demeaning work for starvation wages?”

  “You’re not being fair. Daddy saves the demeaning work for blood relatives.”

  She mopped in silence for a while. Then she said, “Did I ever tell you about the time my Grandma McCready came to see Ma and me?” she asked.

  She could see him shift gears into his supportive mode. “No, I don’t believe you have.”

  She powdered the sink with Ajax and began to scrub, keeping her eyes on the buildup around the faucet. “Ma’s father threw her out when she told him she was knocked up and the daddy had gotten himself killed before making it right with the Lord. My grandfather was a deacon in his church, and the way he read the Bible the right thing to do was to cut off his seventeen-year-old daughter to fend for herself without a penny and a baby on the way. Then one day the old man got the word from God that he was wrong about the cutting-off thing, and in fact it was his Christian duty to forgive. So he sent his wife to give Ma the good news. The only hitch was Ma had to say she was—well, they wouldn’t use the word raped; they said forced. So she wasn’t a whore, after all, just a victim. Guess they figured, what with my daddy being dead and all, there wouldn’t be an opposing point of view. She told them to go to hell.”

  “Good for her.”

  “It must have been hard to do that, you know? She must have wanted to go home so much. She was just a kid herself, waiting tables, trying to keep care of me. . . .” She took a long pause. “I’m just saying, my ma—she wasn’t all bad, you know?”

  “No one ever said she was.”

  “I do. All the time.”

  “She wasn’t exactly mother of the year either.”

  “She was weak.”

  “She was a drunk, Laurel.”

  “Maybe she wouldn’t have been, if he had lived.”

  “Drunks always have an excuse—”

  “You don’t know what it did to her, when he died the way he did.”

  “—and the children of drunks always have an excuse for them.”

  “I’m honest about her.”

  “As much as you can be.”

  “I know what she was, Denny. But she didn’t start out that way.”

  “There’s a statute of limitations on how long you can feel sorry for yourself.”

  “She couldn’t get past what happened. I think it was because she could never be sure. She’d go on and on about how that man loved her and he had gotten a big new job to support us and he never would have done what they said. But she had to twist her mind into knots to keep believing it. Maybe if she could have accepted it—” She stopped and threw the scrub brush into the sink.

  “—she wouldn’t have been a mean drunk who treated you like shit. Is that what you were gonna say?” Denny asked.

  She walked out of the ladies’ room with him behind her. He sat her on a stool at the bar and poured her a soda. She wanted a beer, but it went against Denny’s religion to give anyone a drink when they were upset. “Why are you going back over all this stuff?” he asked.

  She took a swig of the soda. He’d given her RC, and she wished it were a Coke. “Josh, the writer, said when he interviewed Vashti he thought she was holding something back. Now he figures it was about her being sick. But when he said it, do you know the first damn thing that came into my head? Maybe Ma was right. Maybe the night my father died it didn’t go like everyone said. Can you believe I started up with that crap again, after all this time?”

  “Unfinished business, sugar.”

  “I don’t want to be crazy, Denny. I spent my life with a crazy lady.”

  “Maybe you’re still not sure it’s all that crazy.”

  “I know what happened that night. Everyone within a two-hundred-mile radius around here knows.”

  “Okay.” But he was waiting for more.

  “When I was little I used to believe her. I bought all of it: He did love us, he didn’t kill Richard, he wasn’t there with Nella for his nightly piece of ass, and the three Miss Margarets lied. I believed he wasn’t really dead, he was just waiting somewhere, and someday he’d come back and marry Ma. He was gonna bring us presents: mine was a Barbie doll, and she was gonna get M&M’s with peanuts. She loved those.” She paused. “Say something.”

  “What do you want, Laurel?”

  The question caught her off guard. “I don’t know . . .” she started, then the words spilled out. “I want to stop being stuck. I want to stop caring about things that happened before I was born. I want someone to swear to me that I’m n
ot like my mother.”

  He watched her for a moment. Then he said, “I think it’s time you took the box home.”

  It took Laurel a second to register what he’d said. “Where the hell did that come from?”

  “It’s something I’ve been thinking for a while.”

  “I don’t want the damn thing right now.”

  “I can’t keep it in my daddy’s storeroom forever.”

  “I didn’t realize it was crowding you.”

  “You gotta look at it. Or don’t. Throw it in the trash. But do something. She’s been gone a long time.”

  “I’ll take it. Just not today. Okay?” He waited for a minute; then he nodded and went back to the ladies’ room to clean the commode. She finished the soda and left.

  WHEN LAUREL ARRIVED AT HER HOUSE, the SUV was already there and Josh Wolf Eyes was sitting on the porch steps.

  “Is that a real outhouse in the back?” he asked.

  “Not only is it the genuine article, it is a historic landmark. An honest-to-God cement one-holer as put up by the CCC boys during the Depression. Did you get a look at the workmanship on the inside?”

  “Actually, that didn’t occur to me.”

  “Well, it was the deluxe model. I’m very uppity about having one.”

  “I’m sure.” He was silent, working his way up to something. “I saw a whole lot of deer about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “That’ll happen when you’re in the woods.”

  He got up and started pacing around her front yard. “I had my talk with the three Miss Margarets.”

  “And it was like trying to kick your way through a couple of miles of wet chiffon.”

  “Nice image. They gave me some of the worst coffee I’ve ever had in my life and then—well, if there’s anything you want to know about what it was like for a young female doctor to establish a practice here in the thirties, just ask me.”