Pawns

by Willo Davis Roberts

  “What seems strange to me is that Mamie’s son would marry some girl and never tell his mom, especially after he knew they were expecting a baby.”

  “That seems funny to me, too,” Teddi admitted. “And about the insurance, too.”

  “What about the insurance?” Jason wanted to know as they approached the tennis courts.

  “He bought it at the airport, before he got on that plane. And he made it out to Mamie as the beneficiary, not to his wife. Wouldn’t you think he’d have made it out to Dora?”

  “Yeah,” Jason agreed. “Hmm. Hey, looks like those kids are just leaving the court. Let’s claim it before anybody else gets here.”

  It felt good to get hot and sweaty, running around the court, smashing the ball as hard as she could. By the time they walked home, Teddi was almost back to normal.

  As they parted, Jason said, “Thanks for introducing me to those other guys. They’ve asked me to do things with them a couple of times. A movie, bowling. It’s kind of hard to get acquainted when it’s too early to meet kids in school. Did I tell you that I’ve got a part-time job, starting next Saturday? At Harada’s Grocery, putting up stock. It’ll be a little spending money, and maybe I’ll get more hours by fall, if one of their clerks quits then to go away to school. He’s talking about it.”

  “That’s great,” Teddi said, forcing enthusiasm. If he worked Saturdays, that would end her tennis lessons on weekends. “Well, I’ll see you later,” she told him, and walked into the house.

  Everything was quiet except for the muted sounds of the TV. Dora was in her customary position, sprawled on the couch, watching a soap opera. Mamie was nowhere in sight.

  Mamie despised soap operas. “I’ve had enough trouble in my own life,” she had once observed, “to want to steep myself in anyone else’s miseries.”

  Yet Mamie was the one who always came to the rescue when someone was in trouble. It wasn’t only Teddi and Dora; it was anyone in the neighborhood or the church who needed help. Mamie was always making a pot of soup or a casserole to carry to someone, and attending a funeral or sitting with an acquaintance to talk out a problem or a sorrow.

  Teddi didn’t interrupt Dora’s TV. She walked past Dora’s open bedroom door, then Mamie’s, to use the bathroom to wash up. On her way back out, intending to head for the kitchen to see what might be interesting for lunch, she heard the baby begin to whimper.

  Teddi hesitated. He wasn’t really raising an outcry yet, the way he would if he were hungry. It was probably safe to leave him alone until he did.

  On the other hand, Dora often was the last one to hear him when she was watching TV. It covered Danny’s small sounds.

  Teddi enjoyed looking at the baby. She hadn’t yet gotten used to admiring the tiny, perfect fingers and toes, and the little round pink face as it yawned or howled or relaxed in sleep.

  The door to the room was open. She didn’t feel that she was invading Dora’s privacy by stepping over the threshold, bending over the bassinet.

  Danny’s eyes were squeezed shut, but he was squirming restlessly.

  “What’s the matter, you have a gas bubble?” Teddi asked very softly. “You want someone to pat you on the back?”

  She picked him up, ever so carefully supporting his head, loving the feel of the downy hair under her hand. Over her shoulder he went, with a cloth diaper under his face so that if he spit up it wouldn’t go all over her.

  She patted for a few moments, murmuring soothing words, and eventually Danny rewarded her with a gentle burp.

  “That all of it? Okay, back to bed, then,” Teddi told him, and eased him once more into the bassinet.

  Dora had rearranged the furniture when they brought in the crib and the big basket on legs. Teddi had forgotten that there was a small square table just inside the door, behind her, until she bumped into it and knocked something off.

  It was Dora’s purse, an inexpensive sling-type black bag, and in falling it spewed out its contents across the floor.

  Teddi bit back an exclamation, glancing apprehensively to the doorway, afraid Dora might show up and resent finding her here.

  Quickly, before that should happen, Teddi dropped to her knees and began to gather up the contents to return to the purse. It was a simple one, with only one compartment, and Dora didn’t carry much in it. Lipstick, a few coins, some Kleenex, a compact, a comb, a ballpoint pen, half a package of gum.

  Teddi scooped them all up, then returned the purse to the table.

  She was halfway out the door into the hallway when she stopped, suddenly struck by the thought that something was missing.

  She turned, glancing toward the living room where voices were raised in some sort of confrontation on the TV. Then she stepped quickly back into Dora’s room and opened the purse up wide to verify the impression she’d had.

  There was no wallet. No I.D. of any kind. No driver’s license, no Social Security card, no credit cards. No personal correspondence, no snapshots.

  Wasn’t that kind of odd? Teddi had often enough been sent to get something out of her mom’s purse, and even a few times from Mamie’s, to know that most women carried more than Dora did.

  Teddi’s own purse, sparsely filled as it was, had a Junior High Student Body I.D. card and a wallet with a few pictures, even though it didn’t often have much money in it.

  How did anyone get along with no personal identification? Even teenagers carried something to show who they were. How come Dora didn’t?

  In the kitchen, she saw a note on the table from Mamie.

  Salad in the fridge. Fresh fruit in the bowl. I’m over at Mrs. Hall’s, helping with her laundry. She burned her hand and can’t do much today. If the paperboy comes to collect, take the money out of the jar.

  The jar had once held mayonnaise, but now it was where Mamie dropped her change. It sat inside the cupboard next to the sink. Teddi glanced at it as she got down a glass for milk, noting that it had a few bills in it this time, too, including a twenty clearly visible among the ones.

  She carried her lunch out onto the back porch to eat and read a few chapters in the latest library book.

  It was several hours later when she saw the paperboy coming and got down the jar to pay him.

  “Thanks,” the boy said, and handed over the current paper.

  It wasn’t until Teddi reached up to put the money jar back on the shelf that she noticed the twenty-dollar bill was missing.

  She paused, then reached in to pull out the currency, laying it out on the counter. Three one-dollar bills and assorted change. But there was no twenty.

  Teddi replaced the bills in the jar, feeling uneasy. Mamie hadn’t taken the twenty; she was just coming in the front door right now.

  Danny set up an outcry, and Teddi moved to the hallway in time to see her pick up her grandson and cuddle him. “I think he wants his mama,” Mamie said, patting him as she carried him toward the living room. “That sounds like a hunger cry to me.”

  “He’s always hungry,” Dora agreed, accepting him. “This time you get to eat in the living room, kiddo. I want to see the end of this program.”

  Mamie smiled a little. “I need to make a phone call. If you don’t mind, I’ll turn down the TV a little bit.”

  “Sure,” Dora said. “I guess it would be better if I had a set in my room so I could watch whatever I want when you want to watch something else out here, wouldn’t it? Do you suppose that insurance check would stretch to something like that? Another TV set?”

  “We’ll talk about it,” Mamie said. “Of course the money won’t be here for weeks, probably. Maybe even months. Insurance companies don’t work very quickly.”

  Mamie went into her room and closed the door, stretching the phone cord out behind her. Dora was unbuttoning her blouse to feed the baby.

  Teddi hesitated as heat swept over her in a guilty flood at what she was thinking.

  Instead of going upstairs, as she’d intended, she slipped boldly into Dora’s room. Her heart was
pounding, and she didn’t know what she’d use for an excuse if she were caught, but she moved swiftly to the purse still standing open on the table.

  One glimpse inside was enough.

  There was a single twenty-dollar bill in plain sight, and some quarters Teddi didn’t think had been there before.

  There was a pain in Teddi’s chest. It hurt to breathe. She pressed the heel of her hand over the pain and walked quickly out of the room, scarcely aware of anything except that Mamie’s new daughter-in-law apparently was a thief.

  Chapter 10

  It was the most uncomfortable afternoon Teddi had ever spent in Mamie’s house.

  She went over and over it in her mind, like an equation in algebra, trying to make it come out with a different answer.

  Somehow, Dora must not be a thief. Yet the evidence was there, so clear that Teddi could reach no other conclusion.

  She was positive there had been a twenty-dollar bill in the mayonnaise jar when she was fixing her lunch. It had been gone a few hours later when she paid the paperboy.

  Virtually the entire contents of Dora’s purse had spilled out when Teddi knocked it off the table. It had held perhaps a dollar or two’s worth of coins. There had been no bills.

  Then after the money had disappeared from the jar, a twenty had magically, horribly, appeared in Dora’s purse.

  Mamie had been gone all afternoon. She could not have taken the money or given it to Dora. Teddi even managed to verify that Mamie had not once run back home for anything. She had had no chance to do anything with the money.

  While Teddi was mulling this over, further potential complications occurred to her.

  Mamie seldom put anything more than silver and single-dollar bills into the jar. Not once since Teddi had been living there had she seen the jar holding a twenty, until today.

  Dora wouldn’t know that.

  Sooner or later, probably the next time she went to drop change into the jar, Mamie would notice that it no longer held a twenty-dollar bill.

  What if she thought that Teddi, rather than Dora, was the culprit?

  A wave of icy sickness swept over her as she realized Mamie might think she had pilfered the money.

  How could she prove otherwise?

  To explain how she knew that the money had not been in Dora’s purse earlier in the day, and how she knew it was there later, she would have to admit looking, not once but twice. Teddi’s face grew hot and she felt guilty, even though she had never touched that twenty-dollar bill. There was no way to explain without seeming guilty.

  Who would believe the truth?

  If she went to Mamie right now and told her what she believed, wouldn’t Dora deny any knowledge of the money, or of how it came to be in her possession? Dora might even accuse Teddi of planting the evidence on her, in a fit of jealousy.

  And if it came to a choice, believing Dora or believing Teddi, how would Mamie choose?

  A shudder of something close to anguish ran through Teddi’s body, just thinking about it. Dora was family, while she was only a neighbor kid Mamie had taken in out of the goodness of her heart.

  Oh, please God, don’t let Mamie think I’ve repaid her kindness with this kind of treachery!

  She had prayed when she opened the door into the garage and seen her father slumped in the front seat of the car, too. Oh, no! Please God, don’t let him be dead, too!

  But that prayer had not been answered. What chance did this one have?

  Mamie did not seem to notice that anything was wrong with her. She was talking about Mrs. Hall’s burned hand and how she’d urged her to see a doctor, so they’d gone together to have it taken care of.

  “She won’t be able to get it wet for at least a few days,” Mamie related, checking the refrigerator crisper for the makings of a salad. “Teddi, honey, would you put this together in that green glass bowl?” She had put lettuce, tomato, green onions, and a jar of marinated artichoke hearts on the counter. “Maybe throw in the rest of those ripe olives, too. There isn’t time to bake an omelette now, so I guess we’ll just have hamburgers.”

  Teddi moved automatically, getting out a paring knife and the cutting board, scarcely aware of what her hands were doing. When she realized they were shaking, she thought for sure Mamie would realize something was wrong with her.

  But Mamie was busy with her own thoughts. She chatted on about Mrs. Hall and a friend they’d met in the doctor’s office, one who had foot problems.

  “Alice Thorgild has a new grandchild, too. Of course we had to exchange grandchildren stories. Danny is too young to have generated very many yet, but oh, what a difference it makes to know that he will! I remember so many cute, funny things Ricky and Ned did when they were little, and I’d thought all of those things were gone forever for me. And now look! So much to look forward to!”

  Teddi couldn’t come up with a response to that. In fact, her throat felt as if it were closing; she had trouble breathing.

  Sooner or later Mamie would know about the missing money. She was going to reach a conclusion, rightly or wrongly, about what had happened to it. It would destroy her trust in one or the other of them, Teddi or Dora.

  The smell of onions was strong as Mamie put the hamburger patties in the frying pan. Usually Teddi loved the aroma of hamburger and onions; today, it was making her sick, and she wondered how she’d ever manage to get through supper, through an evening of waiting for the bomb to fall, when Mamie learned that money was missing.

  Teddi’s parents had always told her it was better to confess before being caught for a misdoing. But here she hadn’t done anything wrong, except look in Dora’s purse, which had seemed justified under the circumstances. There was no way she could confess the truth as she saw it without accusing Dora.

  Dora had finished feeding the baby and put him back in his basket; she came into the kitchen as Mamie was dishing up the hamburgers and patties made from leftover mashed potatoes.

  “Is there anything you want me to do?” Dora offered.

  “No, I think everything’s ready. Teddi, do you want to say grace tonight?”

  Ordinarily they took turns. Dora, shortly after her arrival, had declined to take a turn, telling them, “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  Tonight it was almost more than Teddi could do to think straight, but she had to make an effort. She fell back on a simple little verse her mother had taught her when she was no more than a toddler.

  “ ‘For food and drink and happy days, accept our gratitude and praise; in serving others, Lord, may we repay in part our debt to thee.’ ”

  She sat opposite Dora, which was torture. It was hard to look at her, yet at the same time it seemed important to study her perfectly ordinary, pretty face.

  Dora ate and drank, responding to questions Mamie put to her. She laughed at the story of Ricky losing a four-foot-long garter snake in the laundry room for two weeks, so that Mamie was reluctant to enter the room. She clearly enjoyed hearing about the time Mamie had been cooling four pumpkin pies intended for a church bake sale. Ricky, age two and a half, had reached up to the table over his head and taken a good handful of filling in each hand and eaten it with great relish.

  “So you couldn’t sell the pies,” Dora observed.

  “So we had to buy them ourselves,” Mamie said. “Oh, I can’t wait until Danny gets up to those tricks!”

  Teddi’s pain grew worse. What would Mamie do if Teddi told her about the money and Mamie believed her? Would she throw Dora out, giving up this new but quickly loved grandchild?

  Of course the more likely scenario would be that Mamie would believe Dora, and that it would be Teddi who would go. Or, not much better, be allowed to stay but be lectured about stealing. How could she stand to be tolerated but be under suspicion from that time on? It would be even more painful than if she were actually guilty of the crime.

  How could she even consider depriving Mamie of that baby? Ricky’s son, all she had left or would ever have of her younger son?
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br />   When her mother had become too ill to serve as her confidante and confessor anymore, it was to Mamie that Teddi had come in moments of stress. Mamie had advised her on school problems, on how to deal with a difficult teacher, on how to avoid getting involved in a feud between two warring factions of girls.

  Mamie had always taken a commonsense attitude toward these problems. Her advice had usually worked out fairly well. But she couldn’t go to Mamie with this, not without hurting her irrevocably.

  If it hadn’t been for the baby, Teddi wouldn’t have had much compunction about telling on Dora, even knowing that she herself would be at risk as soon as she did. Mamie would be hurt knowing either of the girls in her house had violated her trust, but Danny made it a different matter altogether. The moment Mamie had seen Danny for the first time and held him in her arms, she had loved him with all her heart.

  Teddi couldn’t wait to escape from Dora’s presence, but Dora seemed to make that impossible.

  “Why don’t I clear up tonight?” she asked. It was the first time she had ever made such an offer. “That is, if you wouldn’t mind watching Danny for me, Mamie? Maybe rocking him if he’s fussy?”

  “I’d like nothing better,” Mamie declared. “Teddi can tell you where things go.”

  Teddi’s mouth went dry. How could she be alone with Dora?

  She was rescued by Callie, who called on the phone. “Can you come over and help me decide between two outfits? We bought both of them, but Mom says I can only have one, so I have to take the other one back tomorrow. Please, Teddi?”

  “I’ll check with Mamie. I’m supposed to be helping Dora put things away,” Teddi said, eager to flee the house.

  “Oh, I’ll figure it out,” Dora assured her, to Teddi’s surprise and relief. “Go ahead, if it’s all right with Mamie.”