“You should keep it in case your wife wants it. She can trade her right arm for it.” I didn’t want to be mean, but wanted him to go away.
“Is that your way of saying you won't ever be my wife?”
“I can’t do that conversation. I’m just saying you ought to hold onto it until you know for sure.”
“You’re right.” As soon as he snapped the box shut I was sorry. I couldn’t even believe he’d given me something like that. He stood up and said, “My aunt wants to send some birthday presents for Annadore. She asked me to find out what size she wears.”
“She’s a 3T.”
“Can you write that down for me? And her shoes?”
“Sure.”
While I was in the front room looking for a pen, he said, “I guess since you’re not ready to have that conversation, I’m still not allowed to talk to you.”
“You can talk to me, it’s that you can’t talk to me about that.” I wanted to explain better, but I knew it would just be another argument.
That must have been all he wanted to talk about, because he left after I handed him the piece of paper with Annadore’s sizes on it.
After Annadore woke up from her nap, I went into the kitchen to fix her a snack. The east wall, the ceiling, and the tops of the cupboards were scattered with little dots of light. Bernie had left the necklace box sitting open on the drain board, and hung the necklace on the latch of the sink window, where the evening sun came in.
“Pretty, pretty,” Annadore said, trying to catch the sparkles on the wall.
As bad as he was, Bernie was better about it than my family. Gramma went around muttering about how I was going to end up in a ‘bad way.’ Then Aunt M. brought Mom and Loren over with her, and they started in on me.
“You know, my mother still thinks of Mr. Raleigh as a teenager, when he was so shy and awkward. She thinks Meda took advantage of him,” Aunt M. said.
“Mary Beth, that’s not fair,” Mom said.
“I’m not saying that’s what I think. He’s a grown man and he should have kept his pants on, but Mama thinks it’s Meda’s fault. Before you get mad at me, Meda, you’ve gotten yourself into plenty of trouble all by yourself, and you know I don’t mean what those boys did.”
I knew all about what Aunt Bryant had to say about that: What can you expect when you dress and act like that? A girl can bring that kind of thing on herself.
“I hope you get your money out of him.” Gramma was still stuck on Mr. Gertisson.
“I hope you get enough money for all of us,” Loren said. “Crap, I’d marry him. He can’t be that bad.”
“I thought you didn’t like him,” I said.
“I don’t, but who gives a fuck? You don’t have to like someone who has that much money. You think Anna Nicole Smith really liked that old fart she married? Don’t be stupid, Meda.”
“I’m not being stupid. I’m trying to be decent.”
“Well, what are you going to do?” Mom said.
“I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing.”
“I don’t know about that,” Aunt M. said. “Mr. Raleigh asked me about you working. I told him I didn’t think you ought to be doing that kind of work while you’re pregnant.”
“You should mind your own business,” I said. Aunt M. glared at me really hard.
“I suppose it is my business when he asks me about it. I know you did work right up until you had Annadore, but then you didn’t have anybody to take care of you, either. Mr. Raleigh told me I should hire extra help, because he doesn’t want you working.”
“I don’t suppose she needs to work, does she?” Mom said.
“No, he’s perfectly willing to take care of her. If she had any sense she would have married him as soon as he asked her.”
“I guessed that was the last thing you and Aunt Bryant wanted. You didn’t want me involved with him.”
“That was before. Now, at least there’d be some decency to it. You said you were trying to be decent. That would be the decent thing to do,” Aunt M. said.
“If he wants to marry you, why don’t you?” Mom said.
“She’s her own kind of fool, Muriel.”
“I saw how well it worked out with you and Uncle Ari,” I said. They were married for all of two years.
“Oh, good grief. What happened with Ari and me has nothing to do with your situation. I was crazy to marry Ari. You’re crazy not to marry Mr. Raleigh.”
“Why? Because he’s rich?”
I already knew the answer. Aunt M. shrugged. Mom nodded. Loren glared at me. I couldn’t trust any of them to tell me what was the right thing to do.
Annadore’s birthday party
I hated having to ask Mrs. Trentam about Meda’s working conditions, but I was scared to talk to Meda about it. I wanted to tell Meda she didn’t need to come to work anymore. I was willing to share everything I owned with her, so it was utterly absurd for her to be “working” for me. Honestly, I was afraid I’d never see her again if I told her that. I was counting on that Midwestern work ethic to keep her in my life. As long as she was still on the payroll, she would keep showing up. Also, I couldn’t forget the conversation we’d had when I first asked her out. I’d promised her I wouldn’t fire her, and short of doing that, there didn’t seem to be any way to keep her from coming to work. Meda did what she wanted, including inviting my aunt to Annadore’s birthday party.
Aunt Ginny showed me the invitation, and it gave me a melancholy pleasure to see Meda’s handwriting. It was made of perfectly rounded cursive letters, almost like a teenaged girl’s, except that she didn’t dot her i’s with hearts or smiley faces.
“She didn’t invite me,” I said.
“I believe it’s implied that you would be welcome.”
I didn’t believe Meda was implying any such thing. I hadn’t made any more visits to her, nor had I repeated my drunk at Aunt Ginny’s house. More troubling, I wasn’t exactly sure what I did when I wasn’t working under Celeste’s watchful eye. Ironically, the thing that had initially made me wretched had turned into the one tangible part of my existence. The money that had seemed like a curse was finally coming to life in the foundation. My original idea had blossomed in a half-dozen different directions.
For the most part, I looked at Meda’s family and asked myself, what did they need? From there, I extrapolated what any other group of women needed. Muriel needed health care, so I imagined clinics and insurance subsidies. Loren needed an education, so I started thinking about scholarships. Meda had talked about how Rachel wanted to start a business, so I wrote up ideas for a program to provide small business loans to low-income women. It was funny, but I thought even Pen would have approved of that. It wasn’t really charity. It was a capital investment risk.
I didn’t know how Meda would have felt about me using her family as a template, but I felt like I was doing something useful. When I was working on the foundation, I was aware of what I was doing. My first major task was to choose a Board of Directors and prepare an agenda for the first meeting of the board, so that was what I put myself into eight hours a day. Sometimes it was the only real thing, and I got caught daydreaming about it when I was supposed to be doing other things.
Aunt Ginny patted me on the leg and said, “At any rate, I won’t go to the party, if you don’t think I should.”
“I think you should go.”
“No, I think it might be uncomfortable without you.”
She insisted on her point, so that eventually she allowed me to concede that we would go a little before the party and deliver Annadore’s gifts, but we wouldn’t stay.
Choosing Your Relatives
Meda
If you could choose your relatives, everybody would have an aunt like Mrs. Raleigh. She showed up in a fur coat with a pile of packages, and gave me a little wave when I opened the door. I helped her get the packages inside and started to take her coat, but she shook her head.
“Oh, I’m not staying, dear.
I just wanted to drop off some presents.” She looked back over her shoulder, so I thought she wasn’t going to stay because of Mr. Grabling.
I was about to tell her that Ron was more than welcome to join us, when I looked out the screen door and saw who her driver was. There was Bernie, all six feet and however many lied about inches of him slouched up against his aunt’s car.
“Oh, no, sweetie. We just wanted to get a few things for Annadore. We don’t want to impose.” She was still going to give me a chance to get out of it. Her manners were so good I didn’t wonder how Bernie could have grown up to be so polite about sex. I guess when you’re raised that way, you’re polite about everything. “Give the birthday girl a kiss for me, Meda.” She gave me hug and a kiss.
“At least stay and see her,” I said.
I hated to see her leave that way, and she let me take her into the kitchen where Annadore was coloring. She was only planning on spending a few minutes, but she got to playing with Annadore, and after a while she took off her coat. I went to straighten up the front room, and when I went back in the kitchen, Mrs. Raleigh looked surprised and picked up her coat.
“I forgot all about Bernie! I’d better go, dear.”
“It’s okay. I’ll ask him to come in.” I was pretty sure she’d tricked me.
When I went to the door, he was still leaning up against the car. It wasn’t a really cold day, but it was cold enough he shouldn’t have been standing outside. When he saw me, he looked at me with love, I guess. It scared me to see how he had his heart in his eyes. He didn’t even give me a chance to say anything.
“She said she wasn’t going to stay, but I knew she’d want to. When should I come back for her?” He opened the car door and started to get in, so I knew whatever his aunt’s trick was, he wasn’t playing along with it.
“We should be done by five,” I said, wondering whether there was any way I could say something else and not have him misunderstand it. He nodded and closed the door.
Chutes & Ladders
When I came back at five, the party was still going on, so I had to wait a while before Meda came and answered the door.
“Chutes & Ladders,” she said when she saw me.
“There’s no hurry. I’ll wait in the car for her.”
“Oh, Bernie, come in and see Annadore.”
That convinced me. She wouldn’t have mentioned Annadore if she wanted me to say no. In the living room, Annadore, Aunt Ginny, Muriel and Miss Amos were gathered around the game on the coffee table. Annadore gave me a hug and kiss, but couldn’t be taken away from her game. The reactions of Muriel and Miss Amos were harder to read. They both said hello, but not much else.
“You want some cake? At least this year she didn’t destroy it,” Meda said. In the kitchen, she cut me a piece and gestured for me to sit down.
Before either of us could speak, Muriel came into the kitchen and whispered, “I need to talk to you, Bernie.” I let her take me out into the hallway, thinking she was going to give me some sort of maternal rebuke. She clutched my arm, looking past me to be sure no one else was coming down the hallway. “We need to talk about what my abductions might mean for your and Meda’s baby. You know about hereditary abductions?”
“I’m not really familiar with that, Muriel.” I didn’t want to have the conversation, but didn’t know how to get out of it.
“Nobody wants to admit it, but our government made a deal with the devil. Before we got the bomb, the government made a deal with the Grays. In exchange for some technology we needed, they gave the Grays the okay to experiment on certain families. That’s why they’re called hereditary abductions, because multiple family members, over several generations, are being used in the experiments.
“My mother’s mother had what she always called ‘blank spells’ where she’d disappear and come back and not know where she’d been. At the time they thought she was sleepwalking or blacking out. Some people think the Grays are—are developing a new race. I don’t know about that.” Muriel stopped with her nervous clutching once she’d got that all out, and started patting me reassuringly. “I don’t want to scare you, Bernie. I just wanted to warn you there’s a chance Meda’s baby might be part of that genetic group that the Grays are studying,”
Great, my baby might be an alien-bred super-mutant. Just what I needed. I stood there with my mouth hanging open, before I managed to say, “That’s okay, Muriel. It’s better to know these things, better to be prepared.”
“Well, sure, they say knowing is half the battle.” Muriel smiled brightly, but there was real fear in her eyes.
When I went back to the kitchen, Loren had come in from somewhere and was sitting at the table with Meda. I sat down and took a bite of my cake.
“You know, most people don’t invite their stalkers over for birthday cake,” Loren said.
“He’s not a stalker,” Meda said.
That surprised me. I felt like a stalker.
“You broke up with him and he still comes around and calls you and invites himself over. How is that not stalking you? Now you let him stalk you in your own house.”
“It’s more convenient that way,” I said. “Otherwise, you never know where the stalker will show up.”
“Did Mom want to tell you about my alien genes?” Meda asked.
“Mmmm. This is good.” I took another bite of cake to avoid answering.
“Don’t encourage her.”
“I’m not. I’m just trying to be nice.”
“Why are you here?” Loren said.
“Because your sister invited me in. I’m like a vampire that way.”
“I never liked you.”
“I liked you until you started being so mean to me,” I said. Meda snickered. “What have you got against me, Loren?”
“You’re not treating my sister right. Look at how she’s living. And making her clean your house.”
“Shut up,” Meda murmured.
“Loren, I don’t owe you an explanation, but I’ll give you one and then you can owe me. I’d marry her today and she doesn’t have to work if she doesn’t want to. I’ll write her a check right now for any sum of money you care to name.”
“A million dollars,” Loren said. She thought I wouldn’t do it.
“That seems awfully modest.”
I took out my checkbook and wrote a check to Meda Amos for $20 million, the amount we’d once joked about. I wrote, “I love you” in the memo and tore the check out. It would have required a few phone calls to make that particular check clear the bank, but I was good for it. I showed Loren the check before handing it across the table to Meda. “Now, what have you got against me?”
“You’re stupider than I thought you were.” Loren stood up and walked out. Meda cracked up laughing.
She was still giggling when she said, “I love to see you get her. ‘Well, her boobs are big.’”
“I miss you,” I said. She held the check out to me. “Oh, keep it. Put it in the bank for a rainy day.”
When I wouldn’t take it, she tore it in half and put the two halves on my cake plate. I guessed there were easily several thousand women in America who would have married me sight-unseen for my money. She wasn’t one of them.
“Checks are easy to tear up,” she observed. She started laughing again. “That’s quite a love letter, Bernie.”
“Here’s another one.” I reached for my wallet and she protested at whatever she thought I was going to do. I took out the marriage license I’d been hauling around and handed it to her. She frowned when she saw what it was.
“Don’t think just because I’m happy to see you that I want to marry you.”
“That would never occur to me,” I said, trying not to be glib. She refolded the license to put it in her pocket. I hated to see it go, but she didn’t offer to give it back to me.
She surprised me by saying, “Do you want to come over after the party to talk?”
Two Stalkers
Meda
It was la
te when Bernie came back, so I said, “Why don’t you put Annadore to bed?”
“She’d probably rather have you.” He frowned like he was thinking about saying something else.
Since he’d asked about adopting her when he first proposed, I didn’t want to talk to him about his relationship to Annadore. I said, “Put her to bed. You need to know how to help with the baby.”
He picked her up then and took her into her room. For a while I heard him reading her a story, but I got worried when it had been twenty minutes and he hadn’t come back. When I went into her room, he was sitting on the floor with his hand on her chest.
“You can leave her now. She’s down for the count,” I said.
Bernie nodded, but he didn’t budge, until I took his hand and made him get up. I’d intended to lead him back to the front room, but between Annadore’s room and there, he kissed me and we ended up in my bedroom.
I wasn’t going to help him out the way I had the first time, so it took him a long time to get around to anything but kissing until he asked, “Is it okay if we have sex? I wasn’t sure if you wanted to.”
So instead of just letting it happen, he made me agree to it. I was sort of nervous, but he was like always, gentle and intense, but sad. It was so good to be with him that I didn’t even let myself think about what was going on in his head.
Afterwards, he pressed his ear to my belly like he was listening for the baby. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was too early.
“Are you really going to let me help with the baby?” he said.
I’d been worried he was going to ask something else, so I was relieved, but it made me think about all the guys in the world who, if they were as rich as him, would have done whatever they liked. That scared me, because I knew he had enough money to hire enough lawyers to get custody of the baby, and part of me regretted tearing up that check. He might not always be that nice.
“It’s your baby, too,” I said. "If Travis had been even remotely interested, I would have let him do stuff with Annadore, too.”
“Then you’d have two stalkers,” he said.
“I don’t think so. I wouldn’t let him…”
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