Mothers and Other Liars

by Amy Bourret

  “It’s like a giant furniture purgatory,” Antoinette says, as if she’s never been here before.

  “No,” Ruby says, “purgatory is the county dump where the stuff goes from here. This is limbo, one last chance to get it right.”

  Antoinette weaves between a row of dining tables stacked face-to-face, running her hands down legs in a variety of styles. “I always feel like I’m at the dog pound. I want to rescue them all.”

  Ruby pauses in front of a tall piece, a sturdy cabineted base with a bookcase-like top, two wide screen doors opening to narrow shelves.

  “What is that?” Antoinette asks.

  Ruby picks at the faded blue paint. A thick chip breaks loose. Underneath are layers and layers of several colors, like the sandstone cliffs at the ancient Anasazi Indian pueblos. She tugs at two drawers. One has a rotting bottom; one won’t even open it is so warped. “A pie safe.” She tips open a tin-lined drawer below the shelves of the top. “This is where they stored the flour. And here”—Ruby yanks out a wooden cutting board hidden above the drawers of the base—“is where they rolled out the crust. Then, after the pies were baked, they cooled on the shelves.”

  “Cool,” Antoinette says. “What are you thinking you’d make out of it?”

  “Here, help me.” Ruby motions to Antoinette to tug at the heavy base while she slips a hand between the piece and the armoire it stands against. She knocks on the back of the pie safe; it is solid wood, not cheap plywood as on so many modern pieces. “I don’t know. I let them tell me. Sometimes a table stays a table, sometimes it becomes something else.”

  “Oh, Ruby.” Ernesto—as always in shiny black cowboy boots, dark dress pants, and starched western-cut shirt—walks up to them. When he shakes his head, his trim beard scrapes against his collar, jiggling the strings of his bolo tie. “That one, she’s a lot of work for not so much wood. And Lord knows even what kind of wood is beneath all that paint.”

  “Ah, but she speaks to me,” Ruby says. “We’re kindred spirits.”

  Ernesto shakes his head again, his tie strings swaying. “You and your talking wood.” He opens one of the upper doors; its rusty screening sags forlornly. He reaches into the back corner, and two of his sausage fingers appear outside the top, waggling in the air like bunny ears. “Did she tell you she come with her own mouse hole?” Ernesto laughs as he extracts his hand. “I know you the furniture doctor, Ruby. But this, she need one heck of a salvage operation.”

  Ruby scrapes her fingernail across the flaking paint. “Like I said, we’re kindred spirits.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  The biggest draw of the season, Indian Market, is still a month away, yet the flea market is crowded with fat tourists wearing bright T-shirts and fanny packs, and skinny locals wearing smug disdain. Anyone who doubts the reports of rampant obesity in America need only spend a Saturday morning in Adobe Disneyland. Of course this is an exaggeration—there are lots of skinny tourists and fat locals, too.

  Fortunately, the media have lost interest. Another child goes missing, another wife is axed, and the storm is over as quickly as it started. Lark who? Their story, praise God, just didn’t have “legs.”

  Several of Ruby’s clients stop in, each with a dog beside her. Two golden Labs, one regal Bouvier, and a snuffling pug in a sun hat. Everyone and his dog, literally, are at the market today.

  All the humans have heard the news, offer their support. “Oh, Ruby,” they say. “Oh, dear.” All the dogs offer licks. Ruby keeps from drowning in sympathy by reminding herself that the visit with Lark is next week. Even though she knows no visit will ever be long enough, at least she’ll get to see Lark, see for herself how her daughter is doing in her new life.

  Beer Barrel Pete sidles up to Ruby just after noon. His watery eyes dart over her shoulder, scanning the aisle. He looks like he’s jonesing for caffeine, or something more sixties. Pete has been wearing the same pair of jeans and woven hippie shirt for the past decade. His hair is a wilder, longer tangle of gray, and the road map of hard days is etched more deeply on his face. He, too, has heard, but he hasn’t come with words of support. “You didn’t get it from me,” he whispers. Ruby can taste the Winstons on his breath.

  This man only looks like an addle-brained derelict; he remembers every single one of his customers and what he supplied each of them. And he wants assurance that Ruby won’t tell the authorities where she got Lark’s birth certificate all those years ago. Pete need not worry. John didn’t exactly advise her to burn evidence, but he did make sure she understood that the federal crime was for possession of a forged document.

  “Get what?” Ruby says with theatrical confusion.

  “That’s my girl.” Pete spins away from her and melts into the crowd.

  Just before closing, as a nice couple from Minnesota arranges for the shipping of Ruby’s last pair of porch chairs to their lake house, John comes into the booth. “This stuff is gorgeous.” He wanders around the booth, running his hands along the surfaces of the few remaining pieces until Ruby finishes her paperwork. When the Minnesotans leave, he gestures behind him. “Let’s take a walk.”

  He leads Ruby down the mostly deserted aisle, past the vendors packing up their wares in trailers and trucks, disassembling their tents. Her blood has stopped flowing altogether as she imagines all kinds of horrors. “Is it Lark?” Her voice sounds like it is coming from very far away, farther than even Lark is right now. “Tell me.”

  “She’s okay.” John puts a hand on Ruby’s back. “They wouldn’t let me talk to her, but their lawyer assured me she’s okay.”

  “But?”

  “The prosecutor presented your case to a grand jury and got an indictment. That means there is no need for the probable cause hearing. And we have a trial setting, for six weeks from now.”

  “That’s good, though, right?” Ruby asks. “I mean, you said we’d lose the probable cause hearing anyway. At least this moves it along. I want it to be over. And I can still go next week, for the visit with Lark.”

  John’s shoulders sag. “They rescheduled the visitation for the day of the trial.”

  The hubbub around Ruby becomes a blur. Six weeks. How can she possibly hold on that long? They loop their way around the perimeter of the market, past the concession stand reeking of popcorn and hot dogs cooked too long, and back down Ruby’s aisle, as she tries to absorb the reverberation of this latest blast.

  Then John reaches into his pocket, pulls out a cell phone. The cell phone Ruby gave to Lark. “They sent it to my office. They don’t want Lark to call you.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  “At all?” Ruby takes the phone from him. “For six weeks?”

  John explains that the Tinsdales got a court order barring Ruby from any contact with Lark. Phone calls, even letters, interfere with the reestablishment of their bond. And they’ll refuse delivery of any more packages from the Ms as well. “They want their child back, and they want her to themselves.”

  “They lost their child that night at the gas station,” Ruby says. “Lark is not that same child. There is no bond to reestablish.”

  “Hey,” John says. “You’re preaching to the choir. I’m the good guy, remember?”

  Ruby tries to take a deep breath, but a ball of air and dust catches at the back of her throat. “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s more,” John says as they reach Ruby and Jay’s booth. “They will produce her for the visitation prior to your hearing, as CPS recommended.”

  “But?”

  “But the Tinsdales are ‘unreceptive,’ as their lawyer put it, to the idea of any form of visitation, beyond the one visit.”

  Anguish rises like morning sickness in her throat. Ruby lied when she told herself she was preparing for this. She could never be prepared for this. “So that’s it? One visit and good-bye forever?”

  She walks across the booth, sinks onto the little folding stool that she never seems to find time to use while the market is open, drops the phone in the dirt at her f
eet. Not forever, she tries to remind herself. Seven, maybe eight years before Lark is old enough to decide for herself. But what if the Tinsdales poison Lark’s memories of Ruby, turn Lark against her for keeping them apart? Her hands land on her belly, and the realization that this child may never know her sister spins around in the dust at Ruby’s feet.

  Jay shoots her a worried look, then turns back to packing up the last of his serving pieces into the milk crates he “recycled” from behind the Albertson’s at the edge of town, with an ear cocked toward Ruby and John.

  “We’re not giving up yet,” John says. “We can still file a petition for visitation in family court. A lot will depend on what happens at the trial.”

  “You mean if I go to jail.”

  “Let’s not even go there right now.”

  Ruby puts her hands on her knees, drops her head between them, trying to make the ground and sky stop their dance. Jay gives up all pretense of not listening, gives her a bottle of water.

  “Can I try?” She lifts her head up, looks at John. “Can I try to talk to them.”

  “With the protective order, and the trial pending, that wouldn’t be appropriate.” John shakes his head. “Let’s just give this some time, see if it settles down a bit.”

  “And if it doesn’t,” Ruby asks. “If it doesn’t settle?”

  John shrugs, shakes his head.

  The first thunderhead of an impending afternoon storm speeds across the sky, a solitary ship on a vast azure sea. Across the field, the imposing structure of the Santa Fe Opera is barely visible over the hill. That’s another thing Ruby didn’t get done this summer. Since Lark was five, they have gone to an opera each season, either in the nose-bleed cheap seats or with up-close tickets that a client happened to offer her. There just wasn’t enough time; there could never be enough time to spend with Lark.

  Beer Barrel Pete galumphs past and gives Ruby a conspiring look. Maybe she should steal Lark back. Sometimes doing the wrong thing is the only way to make something right.

  FORTY-SIX

  Dawn doesn’t break so much as seep. Shiny obsidian fades to streaks of deepest purple, then lavender. Stark slashes of trees flesh out into trunk and limbs and leaves. Ruby is as road-weary as her Jeep; neither of them has driven much beyond Santa Fe in the past decade. She took the back route, through Galisteo, down to Clines Corner, picking up the interstate to Amarillo then state highways to Wichita Falls, interstate down to the city. All towns are ghost towns in the hours before sunrise; the strip malls of larger cities as ethereal as the cotton gins of the hamlets.

  Then she reached Dallas. This neighborhood is a pocket of verdancy in the midst of all the cement, houses set back on large lots, parkways stretching their long green legs behind them. The house is plunked down between two cottages-on-steroids that look like they grew from irradiated seeds in their own gardens. Next to them, the Tinsdales’ newer Tudor seems ill at ease, as if company is coming and it must be on its best behavior. The yard is immaculate, not a sprig of a shrub or a blade of grass out of place. The stone is scrubbed-with-a-toothbrush clean. Windows and gaslights gleam in the silver light, and a massive Martha Stewart wreath chokes the front door. This is not the house of an accidental house keeper.

  Ruby stares at the windows, but she sees no evidence of life beyond the fancy draperies. The house doesn’t breathe, let alone laugh. She can’t imagine her sprite of a daughter springing like Tigger through its hallways.

  The tears come unbidden with a startling new thought: what if Lark is better off here than with Ruby? What does Ruby have to give? She hasn’t amounted to much in her uneducated ragtag series of lives. These people can offer Lark so much that Ruby can’t. Maybe a Tigger less life was what Lark was meant to live all along.

  Ruby crumples over the steering wheel as the weight of it all comes crashing down on her. The pain of losing Lark will never go away. Ruby knows this, because she has lost so much, too much, already. The hurt may wane, even scab over for a time, but it will be there, always. And now the wrenching guilt of having deprived Lark of who she was meant to be. It is all too much for one body to contain. If Ruby can’t live without Lark, yet Lark shouldn’t live with her, then how can Ruby live at all?

  The rap on the Jeep window penetrates Ruby’s hiccups and gasps. Her head jerks, arm flails against the door handle.

  “Ma’am, I need you to step out of the car please.”

  Ruby wipes her sleeve across her face. She looks out at a paunch stuffed in beige, then an irritated mouth comes into view. “Ma’am?”

  The rest of her day is interminable. Alone in a cell in a police station, Ruby sits on a bench bracketed to the wall. Her body is wrung dry of tears. She feels crazed in the exposed cage, even in a clean, rather Mayberry cage. If she were to be sentenced to prison…she’ll end up in a mental ward.

  Midmorning, a polite young officer brings her a sausage biscuit, and a few hours later, a fried chicken platter. “Bubba’s finest,” he says. Ruby is amazed to find she is ravenous, devours everything, sops up cream gravy with a flaky biscuit.

  She tries to doze, but phones ring incessantly. And she can’t stop the screaming in her head. Finally, the cell door slides open and John stands in front of her.

  “What were you thinking, Ruby?” He waves his arm. “No, don’t answer that, not here.”

  An officer leads them through a series of hallways to a courtroom. Dark wood paneling, movie-theater seats. Ruby sits beside John as he talks to the judge, more a conversation than TV-courtroom banter, like buddies chatting over a pitcher of beer. Technically, she is not in violation of the protective order; she didn’t attempt to contact or communicate with the child in any fashion. And though she is on bond in the federal matter, she did not cross state lines with the intention of fleeing.

  The judge has thick white hair and a country-club tan. “What do you have to say for yourself, Ms. Leander?”

  “I just needed to see it, where she is living, so I could picture her somewhere.”

  After more talk and admonishments, Ruby is released into John’s custody. They will fly back to Albuquerque; her Jeep will be shipped to Santa Fe.

  Anger reaches the brim of John’s voice as they leave the courthouse. “You are damn lucky those folks live in Highland Park and not the city of Dallas. Separate cities, separate jails. You’d still be just some number in a cell for sure.” He tells her she screwed up royally, that this may impact the outcome of the federal case.

  “I wasn’t going to take her,” Ruby says. But she’s not altogether sure what she would have done.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Ruby’s arm muscles ache. Her hands are raw, knuckles scraped of a layer of skin for each layer of paint she has scraped off the old pie safe. Tonight she sits on the shed floor, maneuvering around her belly to scour drawer faces between her splayed knees.

  The final layer of paint simply dissolves under steel wool instead of loosening and lifting in pieces like a typical strip job. None of the usual chemical solvents even penetrated this last layer; Ruby spent many frustrating hours trying to chip through it with her scraper. And now, after all that work, the stubborn stuff just liquefies with plain old vinegar. Milk paint—made with actual milk way back in the day. She hadn’t come across that one before, but fortunately one of her grandfather’s books held the answer.

  All her labor has done nothing to dull her other ache. The loneliness is unfathomable, this Lark-sized hole in the world. Like a bird knows where to fly south for winter, like a tree knows to reach for sunshine, Ruby knows she has made the biggest mistake of her life. Lark was right; Ruby shouldn’t have told. They should have run if they had to. Sometimes doing the right thing is worse than doing nothing at all.

  A memory fizzes to the surface, Mrs. Olestein, the high school health teacher, scratching yet another of her many lists on the chalk-board. The seven warning signs. A sore that does not heal. This Larkless life is a cancer. Eating away her heart, her soul. This sore will never heal; it i
s a gaping wound.

  She trudges through her days. Each morning, she rolls out of bed, chokes down her vitamins. She goes to work at the salon, home, then here to the shed until her legs refuse to support her body any longer. Then she lies in bed, clinging to Lark’s “I am” shirt, a piece of pure Larkness, her Lark, not some Tyler the Tinsdales are determined to reclaim. She watches through the window as light shifts through a spectrum of gray, while she thinks up unthinkable plots to kidnap her daughter all over again.

  Clyde’s bark alerts her before Chaz steps into the shed. His bulk absorbs a wedge of the fluorescent light. She sets aside the vinegar bottle as he steps behind her, slips his hands at her armpits and hoists her to her feet.

  He keeps a hand on her shoulder until she stands steady then turns her to face him. “Wow,” he says to the belly that brushes against his belt buckle. The struggle is there in his eyes, to comprehend the reality, the overt actuality of this other life. “Wow.”

  An angry welt rises from his cheekbone. Ruby reaches out, stops short of touching it.

  “It’s nothing,” Chaz says. “The kid got in a cheap shot.”

  Ruby’s struggle to comprehend this reality is like pouring that bottle of vinegar straight through her veins. Chaz’s job is not only unpredictable; it is dangerous. If something were to happen to him…Ruby doesn’t know how she can possibly make this relationship work, with the chasm of the secret she kept from him and the void of Lark between them. But she doesn’t know how she can not make it work, either. The scent of Chaz, lime and musk, mixes with her acrid workshop smells.