Painted Dresses

by Patricia Hickman

  He turned and walked back to his post.

  Delia waited near the fireplace in the lounge, touching the Christmas tree ornaments. She lifted one off the tree and held it up to the light.

  I checked us into a room with two queen beds, overlooking Houston toward Galveston. By the time I checked in, night had fallen. Delia had struck up a conversation with a businessman wearing a suit and a cowboy hat. He was tall as a pine, smiling down at her admiringly.

  “My sister and I are rich now too,” she told him. I hooked her arm in mine to lead her toward the elevator.

  “What about drinks? You promised,” he said to her. His eyes traveled from her to me.

  “We’ve already called a cab,” I told him, still leading her away.

  Delia fumed all the way up to the ninth floor. “He’s an oil man, Gaylen. Keeps horses out on a ranch and flies back and forth to work in a helicopter.”

  “He told you all of that in the two minutes it took for me to check in?”

  “Why you got to ruin the night? I had us double dates set up with rich brothers.”

  “Married, Delia.”

  “He didn’t say he was married.”

  “His ring finger was white, while the rest of his hand was tanned. He took off his ring to get a date.”

  She looked stunned, like she had never taken Dating 101. “Still. Rich and good-looking men don’t come along like that in Boiling Waters. Least not down at the Blue Water Cafe.”

  “Here’s our floor,” I said. I handed her a room card and demonstrated how to swipe it like a credit card. I washed up while Delia found a TV special about the Bush family.

  “If I was going to be a Republican, I would vote for him. I like the way he goes in gangbusters to kick the bad guys’ butts,” she said. “TV’s been so much better with him in the White House.”

  I slipped into black pants and put on some jewelry. “Since when were you not a Republican?” I asked. Delia and I were both brought up to vote for the Republican rather than the candidate. It was the Syler way.

  “Lee hated Republicans.”

  “So you’re a Democrat because of Lee and a Catholic because of Freddy Deals.”

  “Basically.”

  “He can’t run again anyway, Delia.” We locked up the room and headed down to the lobby. Duke had the cab waiting. He helped Delia into the backseat. She giggled.

  “Take these two lovely girls to Cafe Annies,” he told the driver.

  I tipped Duke and he winked. I was starting to like Houston, as well as spending at least a little of the money my father had hoarded in case the world might end. The bluing dusk that settled over Houston’s green city glow gave me an assurance that for this one night the world would continue, at least into the big Texas sunrise only twelve hours away.

  Delia stared out and up at Houston’s cityscape. I was certain we had been to Raleigh as girls, but Houston was the mother ship next to Raleigh’s pod.

  The Mexican driver drove through a red light, which made Delia squeal and then laugh. After that, it seemed as if he ran red lights just to hear her snort and guffaw.

  “Tell me your name,” she said to the cab driver.

  “Benny,” he said, no accent whatsoever.

  Delia hooted.

  “What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

  She kept laughing and slapping her knee until we pulled up in front of the Cafe Annie’s royal blue awning. “Look, a for-real Texas palm tree,” said Delia. She cocked back her hat, smiling serenely at the doorman. “Let me check us in,” she begged me. “My turn, my turn to play big shot.”

  A foreign woman, perhaps European and blond, checked our reservations. She invited us to wait at the swanky bar until she pulled up our name. Delia ordered a margarita.

  “Pinot noir,” I told the bartender. I was feeling irritable, so I had to resist the urge to down the wine.

  A waitress approached me. “The gentlemen seated behind you have ordered you a bottle of whatever you want,” she said, a waifish twenty-something wearing a black dress and white beads.

  “Tell them to keep it,” I said, without looking behind me.

  Delia whipped around in her chair. “That was downright rude, Gaylen.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “No, let me talk for once. Here we sit like two queens in Houston, drawing good-looking men like sirens, and you run them off.” She sipped her margarita and then whispered for the first time all day, “Is it because you’re not over Braden?”

  “That’s no secret, Delia.”

  “Or is it Truman? The way Mr. Savage spilled the beans today, not holding back, I mean, made me sick at my stomach.”

  I pushed aside my glass, again deciding that I would not drink. “Does it seem like we never knew our mother?”

  She asked the bartender for an extra plate of limes and then said, “That’s no secret either.”

  “You and Mother went at it, but not us, not like she did with Daddy or the aunts,” I said. I knew Mother didn’t have many friends. But that was why I thought she felt a bond with me and considered me a confidant. Even at the age of seven, I felt I held a strange power over her. “Of all people, I thought I knew her. Now, starting on the drive back from Pasadena, all of these things are coming back to me. It’s like she’s speaking to me from the grave.”

  Delia said, “Hmmph!”

  But something about watching Delia sucking limes while Cowboys’ fans seated around the horseshoe bar cheered triggered a small fragment of something my mother said. “I remember her standing in the kitchen and telling me that she would go to her grave with the things that Truman did. But she was so irate, she intimidated me. I was a kid, and she was being loud, and I just wanted her to calm down. So I never asked her what she meant.” I was seeing Mother differently now. “Those things she said about Truman were not clear, not then.”

  “Now you know.” Delia was floating away into a mellow margarita state.

  I was in the third photograph of my mother I had pinned inside my suitcase. I was eighteen months old, and she was holding me on one knee, squatted in front of my grandmother’s house. She was smiling in a way that must have faded with time. I never remembered that look, not that effusive smile, not in real life, not like the one frozen in that still photograph. She was happy. That I did not remember about her without looking at that photograph of us.

  I was round cheeked and laughing as if my mother and I were posing for a happy family magazine. I was so young that baldness was expected.

  “But I can’t prove anything. I keep trying to see Truman at our house. But there wasn’t an extra room for him. There was me and you and—” I stopped.

  Delia sucked the guts right out of a lime wedge.

  “She made you and me sleep in a bed next to her. Do you remember?” I asked.

  “Um-hm.”

  “But where was Truman? Did he sleep on the couch? Why did she sleep with us instead of in Daddy’s bedroom?”

  “She was a big nut, not sleeping with her own husband.”

  “Or she was keeping us close by.”

  “Hah!”

  “I wish I would have known enough to ask before she died.”

  “She wouldn’t have told.” Delia closed her eyes, allowing the drink to trickle down her throat. Then she opened her eyes, curiously watching the bartender who was shaking a fresh margarita.

  “I would’ve made her.”

  “You were afraid of her,” said Delia.

  I was stunned at her words. “Why do you say that?”

  Delia turned around in her seat to try and pick out the men who had attempted to buy wine for us.

  Things that my mother said that, at the time, seemed inconsequential seeped into my mind. “I’ll never forgive that boy for the way he treated us … No one knows what he put me through.” The words
fell into some of the missing slots of the past, but did not entirely fill every gap; they were just enough to leave me wanting to know the whole of the matter.

  “Everybody was afraid of Fiona Syler. Even Mr. Savage,” said Delia.

  14

  WE CHECKED OUT of the Magnolia Hotel early. Delia came out yawning and wanting to stay in bed until noon. “Our flight home leaves in two hours,” I said. “And the concierge says we ought to check in early.”

  “What’s left to go back to in North Carolina?” she asked. “Lets start a new life in Houston. I like it here. No Gradys or Mason Freemans to hold threats over your head. The pickings are good as far as guys are concerned. We got money to burn.”

  “You’ve got to stop it, Delia.”

  “I’ve never had so much.”

  “If we don’t stop and get it in an investment where we can’t spend it, it will all be gone, and you’ll be no better off.”

  “But we had a good time,” she said. “That’s worth something.”

  Duke phoned up for our car. We waited on the walk in front of the hotel.

  My cell phone rang. I answered. Braden had come home and found the apartment turned upside down. He was breathing hard, having trouble talking, but finally said, “What’s happened to our place, Gaylen? Looks like a war zone, like someone took a bat to the place. Your leasing agent, Kimberly, is frantic and wanting to know if you’re alive.” He did not sound easeful, nearly like when he could not find a landing strip in the dark. “Did you really quit?”

  “Fired and quit,” I said.

  Delia twirled around to face me, staring with her mouth open.

  “I hated that job anyway,” I said, wondering why it mattered if Delia heard.

  “You loved it,” he said. “Like I’ve never seen you work so many hours.”

  “I was never off work.” He really thought I loved that stinking, awful job.

  The sound of someone moving furniture around or lifting broken objects made it difficult to understand him. In the background, Kimberly said, “Omigosh! I called the cops. Is she hurt?”

  “I’m coming home, Braden, but that guy whose eyes you blacked is a hit man. He wants Delia really badly. I got a first name. It’s Grady. I don’t know where to take her, where its safe.”

  “Where are you now?”

  The driver pulled up with our car. Duke said, “Your carriage awaits, girls.”

  Braden asked, “Who was that?”

  “Duke,” I said.

  “Do I know him?”

  “I’m in Houston. Delia and I came here to try to put together some facts about my family.” When he did not answer, I said, “I needed to get Delia out of town.”

  “Did you find what you’re looking for?” He sounded melancholy and put out.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. There was not enough time to explain Truman Senior or Amity’s dresses.

  Duke took my luggage and stowed it in the trunk.

  Delia slid into the open door on the passenger’s side. She waved good-bye to the valet as if they were old friends.

  “Are you coming home?” Braden asked.

  “Grady will be looking for us. I don’t know what to do.” I finally told him, “He stole our wedding bands.”

  It took a moment for Braden to answer. “It’s time to take Delia to the police,” he said. I could hear sirens in the background. I imagined Deputy Bob pulling up in front of Building B on Moss Court while Kimberly ran up and down the stairs and Mrs. Shane paced back and forth on the landing.

  Delia pulled down the visor and found a mirror. She dug through my purse and pulled out a lipstick. She put it on and grinned at herself.

  “I agree. I’ll take her straight to the police,” I said.

  Delia mouthed, “Let’s go,” through the window glass while I tried to please both Braden and her.

  “The cops are here,” he said. “I have to go. Call me when you land in Wilmington.”

  We had not pulled all the way out onto Texas Avenue when Delia blurted out, “You was fired? See, you don’t tell me a thing. You’re the last person I would think would be fired.” She was still holding my handbag in her lap. “Me, I get fired drop of a hat. You got any mascara?” She fished through my bag like she did our mother’s whenever she took us to church.

  “Braden’s going to the cops, Delia,” I said. “He has to tell them about Grady, and that will mean telling them about Sophie.” I was tired of holding back, worried that Delia would explode. “You should have told the cops from the start.”

  She sat up, frowning, her chin drawing up tight as a baseball. “They’ll not protect me, Gaylen! They’ll be waiting on me when we land in Wilmington. I’ll be thrown in jail. Don’t you get it? I can just hear Deputy Bob laughing his hind end off, dropping the jail key down his britches.” She set to crying, so she pulled tissues out of my handbag and alternated wiping her eyes and applying little dashes of mascara to her thin, damp lashes. “I didn’t mean to shoot Sophie Deals, and she’s moving on with her life, isn’t she? Let’s all just make up and get on with things. Why is it everyone always has to blow up everything I do as if I was a mass murderer?” She kept pumping the wand into the tube and working her lashes until they were stiff and black as spider legs. “You got to take me some place far away. Mexico. Or Paris, how about? I got new clothes.”

  “Delia, if I hadn’t started running you all over the country, I’d not have lost my job. I can’t keep running.”

  “You have me to thank, then.” She feigned sobbing. “I heard you tell your husband you hated that job.”

  “What else was I supposed to say?”

  “You’ll get another job.”

  “I’m so employable,” I said. “I crash planes, steal airport food. I’m everyone’s low man on the totem pole.”

  She wiped a long, dark, salty stream from her cheek. “That’s why you hooked up with that professor.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, and I was mad at her for continually bringing him up.

  “He was a hoity-toity man.”

  “You’re so off base, I can’t believe it! But that’s because you don’t know me. How could you? Never do you try to get to know me. I’m the one always left to figure you out.”

  “You never wanted to be like the rest of us, Gaylen.”

  “What are you saying, that I slept with Max Swinson to elevate myself?”

  “What does a man like that talk about anyway, I’d like to know.”

  “Philosophy.”

  “You sure know how to flirt.”

  “Are you saying that my stupid fling with Max had an ulterior motive?”

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  She annoyed me to the point of losing my way out of downtown Houston. “Until we get on the plane, will you can it, Delia?” I asked. “I’ll never get us out of here, and I don’t want to miss the flight.”

  I finally saw the interstate sign and ramped into the stream of morning traffic. Most of the commuters were coming into the city while we were leaving, so I drove onto the interstate with ease. The airport sign guided me back to Hobby Airport. It was a gray morning that, according to the radio weather report, would break forth into Texas sunshine within the hour. But all I could see before me were Max Swinson’s eyes the color of muddy ocean water and his slightly crooked smile. He was a bookish nerd who expressed how surprised he was when I so easily followed him out to his beach cottage. I finally hated him.

  Delia was humming, not any tune in particular but a ditty that she seemed to make up.

  Max hovered inside me like a funny little enigma of a man buzzing around in my head. Whether or not I was trying to elevate myself had not been so clear up until the moment that Delia unearthed it without a bit of, reflection or effort on her part. My sister was wrong, but now I was left to figure out
how the only good Syler girl had fallen so easily for a man who seduced me with so little effort. How well I remembered.

  It was the second rendezvous to the beach cottage, and Max brought champagne. Not even good champagne, but he poured it into my glass like it had cost him a weeks pay. He wore a black suit that made him look lean. The suit was fresh from the dry cleaners. I saw the tag in the collar when he laid it over the chair.

  I was getting over a cold and wore so many layers it took fifteen minutes to undress. But Max never undressed fully. He kept sipping his drink and watching me. I was a floor show, but it was not like me to succumb to this brand of monkeyshines. My high school friends voted me the only girl who did not know how to flirt. I dropped my neatly folded tights onto the floor next to the blue cardigan and the knit plaid skirt.

  I never felt comfortable the first time a man saw me naked. I was thin and subconsciously aware of my size B cups. I had hated puberty anyway, so when hormones trickled into my skinny frame at age nine, it filled up more of me below the waist than above. This was just another new experience with the sickening sense of discomfort that ruled over me.

  Max pulled me close. It occurred to me that he had never kissed me. I closed my eyes and prepared for the kiss. I hoped his kissing me would finally rev things up between us. But he barely touched my lips. I opened my eyes, and he was holding me as if he did not know what to do next.

  “Is something the matter?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to be here.”

  “Im here. Isn’t that proof?”

  “You’re not into me at all.”

  Braden had said the same thing. “You’re ruining this!” I said, angry.

  I sat on the bed crying. He left me there with a key telling me, “Spend the night if you want.” There was a slight tremor in his voice, as if I had stolen his virility. “I’ll call you.”

  “Delia, if you’ll not bring up Max again, I’ll buy you a pair of black boots. You need black for the sake of your basics.” I drove into the rental car lot piecing together a plan for how I could use my share of the inheritance to finish my education and get out of Boiling Waters. But that thought was put on hold when Braden called again. The police were looking for Delia, he said, and for me. “Don’t come home until I can sort this all out. Wait for my call,” he told me. “And whatever you do, don’t get back on that plane.”