I held my breath, hoping she would go on. She so seldom forgot that I was a child. She lay on the rug looking up at the ceiling with dreamy eyes and let me see her as she'd been that hot summer day when Daddy drove by in the first yellow convertible she'd ever seen.
Sweaty and barefoot, she'd just hoed to the end of a long tobacco row when Daddy tapped his horn and asked if he were on the Raleigh road. He wasn't, but before he could turn the car, its radiator boiled over.
"Your Uncle Paul was only sixteen and practically pushing his mule and plow down the furrow, just dying to see that car up close."
One good look at Mama with her long black hair hanging free beneath a faded straw hat, and Daddy couldn't seem to get his yellow convertible started.
He accepted Grampa's invitation to a cold glass of sweet tea and would have maneuvered to stay for supper if Uncle Paul, tempted beyond the limits of good manners, hadn't slipped down the lane in the growing dusk and started the car with no trouble. Mama walked down the land with him, pausing in the twilight to pick a cluster of Gran's climbing roses.
"They were still warm from the sun and your daddy took them and said he was sure he could get lost again the next week if he tried. Anyhow, we got married right after barning season."
She was eighteen.
It was better than a fairy tale and Daddy was Prince Charming. I was so full of love for them both that I hugged Mama hard. She squeezed me absently, then got up and stood before the mirror above our marble fireplace. She tucked stray ends of her black hair back into its smooth pageboy.
"I'm twenty-five years old and just look at me! My life's half over and nothing's happening. Oh, Libby, your daddy's been gone so long and this old war's never going to end. I'm so tired of being lonesome!"
I could have wept for her; but Sadie came in just then, her small frame draped in a long raincoat, to tell Mama our lunch was ready. With Daddy gone, there wasn't enough work to fill Sadie's day, so Mama made her leave at noon.
She would have dispensed with Sadie altogether if Daddy'd let her because she felt Sadie blamed her for all the changes the war had made: Daddy's absence, the parties no longer given, the other maids lured away by higher factory wages.
But things had been changing for our family long before this latest war. Once the whole northwest quadrant of town had been Watson land; now our house stood on less than a hundred acres of overgrown pasture and scrub woodland. A hundred acres out of all those thousands, and what had been an isolated country estate was increasingly threatened by gas stations, factories, and truck-filled highways as the town pushed north and west and began to act like a city.
As the youngest Watson, I didn't mind the encroachment. A ten minute walk along neglected bridle paths brought me out to the highway where a small general store sat between two truck depots. Sugar rationing or not, one glass case was always heaped with penny candy, and if I didn't have a penny, one of the drivers lounging there between runs would usually treat a little girl if she looked wistful enough. At four-going-on-five, I'd barely heard of Shirley Temple or Margaret O'Brien, but already I knew instinctively how to lift my blue eyes to those male faces and get what I wanted.
That's where I met Jethridge. He gave me cinnamon jawbreakers and dizzying, heart-stopping rides on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. In one truck yard, around the store, and back through the other yard. Most of the truckers were too old for the army, but Jethridge was youth and laughter and swaggering masculinity in a black leather jacket studded with bright nailheads and chips of red glass. He made a pet of me, and as I ran through the lane, jumped the ditch, and darted across the cement road, I always hoped he'd be there, back from Nashville, Atlanta, or Lexington.
He was there the day after Daddy's perfume came, and when I tripped on the doorsill and fell sprawling on the planked floor with a skinned knee, it was Jethridge who picked me up and took me home.
He placed me on the back of his glittering machine as if I were a princess and I clasped him tightly around his waist and laid my cheek against the cold leather of his jacket. It smelled of motor oil and hair tonic as we roared along the highway. He throttled down as we came to the end of our long driveway into the yard, but Mama heard and came out onto the porch.
"Carry me,” I coaxed and was swooped up in his arms again. For one aching moment, I longed for my own daddy; then Mama was there with worried questions as Jethridge carried me into the house.
She removed a splinter and cleaned my knee, but before she could ease him out of the house with polite dismissive thanks, I put on my prissiest Watson manners, which always amused her. “You must allow us to repay your courtesy, Jethridge."
That was the first time, and if Sadie didn't approve of serving coffee to leather-jacketed truck drivers in our living room, she kept it to herself.
Or tried to.
Jethridge must have noticed, though, for when he stopped by to ask how I was the next day, it was after Sadie had gone.
Mama sparkled that afternoon, gayer than I'd seen her since Daddy left, and her dimples flashed when Jethridge said, “Now I see where Libby gets her charm.” I made him tell her my favorite trucking stories, and Mama laughed as much as I did.
I was central and necessary those first few days until the phone call about Uncle Paul made Mama cry. When I returned from the store with my candy, something in the relationship had shifted—a sudden tension in the air which didn't include me. Later, though, as I lay in bed, their voices floated up the stairwell and I could hear Mama's careless laughter and the familiar swagger in Jethridge's tones. The whole house seemed to drift on a sea of warm June roses and I fell asleep reassured.
* * * *
April set a new pattern for our days: Mama no longer let me go to the store, but Jethridge made up for it by spending most of his layover times with us. Soon after Sadie left each day, we'd hear the pop of his motorcycle and I'd race across our wide porch and down the steps to fling myself upon him and rifle his pockets for the jawbreakers he kept stashed for me. Then he'd swing me up behind him, and we'd roar through the old bridle paths, avoiding Sadie's cottage on the far side of the land, to end up in a skid by the porch where Mama waited with mocking laughter. “Four-year-olds, the both of you!"
At first Mama refused to ride behind him. “It's not ladylike,” she protested; or, “Can you imagine what Sadie would say if she saw me?"
We hooted at the thought of Sadie's face, but Jethridge teased her and eventually she even managed to ride alone—never very expertly, but she could wobble down to the end of our long drive, circle awkwardly, and return without falling. She was so competent with the little red coupe Daddy had given her when I was born that I couldn't understand her ineptitude, but Jethridge seemed charmed and corrected her mistakes indulgently. Then Mama would shrug prettily and declare that only a man could handle such a monstrous machine.
Late in April, he left for a four-day haul to Nashville, and as Mama and I waved goodbye from the porch, I squeezed her hand and said, “Aren't you glad I found Jethridge? You're not lonesome any more, are you?"
She jerked her hand away with a strange look, then kneeling beside me and talking very fast, she explained that Jethridge was my friend—she let him visit only because I liked him so much. Did I understand? Her hands hurt as she grasped my shoulders, and I nodded, too scared by her sudden intensity to speak.
Mama changed after that. The house no longer smelled of warm roses. Spring was upon us and soon Daddy would be home again, but I felt confused and often caught Mama looking at me as if I were about to do something horrible.
Jethridge changed, too. He still came, but he had no laughter and no time for me. I was turned out of the house to play in the sun or hide myself under the Cape Jessamine bushes and brood on what I'd done to make them hate me.
One early May night, a roll of thunder from a spring storm awakened me. It sounded like Nazi bombers, and I'd just opened my door to go to Mama when I heard her voice, no longer low and sweet but edged with the
new sharpness she used on me. Jethridge's words were soft and coaxing but hers shrilled above them. “Leave all this for some white-trash bungalow while you're on the road half of your life? Don't be as childish as Libby!"
Lightning flashed outside as matching anger rose in his voice. I crept back to bed, pulled the covers over my head to shut out both storms, and wished that the next roll of thunder really would be Nazi bombers so Jethridge could be brave and rescue us and make Mama like him again.
I must have dozed off, because when next I sat up in bed, all was quiet downstairs. The rain had dwindled to a steady drizzle, but I heard the sound of Mama's car as lights swept briefly across my bedroom ceiling. From my window, I heard the motor go silent in the drive below and the door quietly open and close. I waited to hear her come up the porch steps but long minutes passed. Suddenly I realized that Jethridge, too, must have been there in the dark shadows beyond her car, for I heard his Harley-Davidson splutter several times before catching.
Kneeling by the window, I saw its red taillight wobble unsteadily down our long straight drive and disappear in the rain.
And still Mama did not appear.
At last I crept out to the landing, feeling strange and lonely. Viewed through the railings, the big rooms below were shadowy and frightening in their emptiness, and one of Grandmother Watson's Chinese lamps was lying on the floor, its silk shade torn and the bulb splintered upon the rug.
I huddled on the landing, afraid to go down and even more afraid to go back to my dark room. I must have slept again because Mama woke me as she was tucking me into my own bed. I clung to her, sobbing, and felt her hair hanging in cold wet strings like a soaked floor mop. Her cool skin smelled faintly of gasoline.
"You left me,” I sobbed. “You and Jethridge went away and I was all alone."
"Little goose,” she soothed. “Jethridge left hours ago, right after you went to bed. And I didn't leave you. I just ran outside to bring in the lawn chair cushions before the rain spoiled them."
"But the lamp,” I quavered, confused. “I didn't break it, Mama. It was just lying there. Honest."
"There's nothing wrong with the lamp. You've had a bad dream. You always have bad dreams when it thunders. Remember? Go back to sleep now and forget all about it."
In the bright sunlight of morning, the night's strangeness really did seem like a bad dream. The Chinese lamp was in its accustomed place, bulb intact; and if there was a neatly mended tear in the silk shade, well, many things had been repaired instead of replaced during the endless war.
By the time Sadie arrived that morning, Mama had begun a sudden orgy of spring cleaning. Even after Sadie left, Mama kept cleaning, and Jethridge did not come.
That afternoon I sneaked over to the store with the last pennies he'd given me. Afterwards, Mama heard me crying under the Cape Jessamines. At the store they'd talked of Jethridge's death—how this beautiful Harley-Davidson must have skidded at that bad curve on Ridge Road during the thunderstorm and plunged down the hillside. A terrible accident, they said. Just terrible.
Mama's hand clenched my arm as I sobbed out my news. One of her pretty red fingernails was broken into the quick and I remembered that it was broken like that when she soothed away my bad dream. Yet as soon as I told her what the men said about Jethridge's terrible accident, the tightness went out of her fingers and she forgot to spank me for going to the store.
By the time Daddy came home, she was almost her old self; but if her face froze when I was prattling to my father, then I would choose my words with care.
Fear that she would tell him whatever it was that I'd done wrong those past few months made me avoid any references to that time and I buried Jethridge so deeply that only the smell of sun-warmed roses could—
"Aren't you going?” asks Beth from the doorway and before I think, I hiss, “What are you doing here, you sneaking little—"
Suddenly everything snaps back into focus.
"Sorry, honey,” I smile. “I was daydreaming and you startled me."
She hugs me in relief. We find the toy she came back for and I kiss her goodbye again.
So that's all it was!
Poor stupid Mama! How incredibly careless to let a four-year-old witness her one shabby little affair. But what a stroke of luck for her that Jethridge was killed when their romance turned sour, before Sadie found out for sure. Remembering the man's swaggering confidence, I doubt if he'd have let Mama go back to being a proper Watson wife without a messy scandal.
If it weren't so pathetic, I could almost laugh with relief to know finally, after so many years of wondering, that the coldness between Mama and me wasn't something Beth and I need ever endure.
I'll have to be careful, though, about lashing out at Beth like that again. She's not me and I'm not Mama, but neither is she a baby any more. I mustn't let her become puzzled or uneasy—she and Carter are much too close.
I glance at the diamond-rimmed watch Carter gave me on our fifth anniversary. Nearly four. Already?
Carter expects me at seven. Even if I hurry, I'll only have two hours with Mitch and he'll probably spend most of it sulking and going on and on about how I put my reputation above his love. He's really getting tiresome. I could almost wish he had a Harley-Davidson so I could...
Oh my sweet Jesus!
Mama?
Copyright © 1990 by Margaret Maron, reprinted by permission of the author. Originally published in AHMM, March 1990.
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THE MYSTERIOUS CIPHER by Willie Rose
Each letter consistently represents another. The quotation is from a short mystery story. Arranging the answer letters in alphabetical order gives a clue to the title of the story.
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CIPHER ANSWER: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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COMING IN DECEMBER 2006
NO VIDEOTAPING DURING THE MURDER by John H. Dirckx
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