Hissy Fit

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Not Hardy Boys?”

  He wrinkled his nose in distaste. “The Hardy Boys had no style. Now Nancy…” He sighed. “That roadster coupe. The chic little frocks. And don’t get me started on that Ned Nickerson.”

  “Okay. So you had a crush on Nancy Drew’s boyfriend. What’s that got to do with me and my mother?”

  He waited. “I’m trying to figure out if this is the best time to talk about this. You’re kind of in a pissy mood today, you know.”

  “I am not being pissy,” I said, slapping the Volvo’s dashboard for emphasis.

  He rolled his eyes. “Whatever.”

  “You started this, now finish it,” I said. “Or I really will get pissed.”

  “All right, all right. The other day, when you told me you had no idea where your mother was, I just started thinking. I mean, as I may have mentioned, I know right where my mother is at. And most of the time, she’s standing right on my last nerve cell. Don’t get me wrong. I love the old girl, but she makes me crazy. The thing is, we all need our mothers. And you need yours. Good, bad, or indifferent. Especially now…”

  “Now, meaning what?”

  “Now that you’ve called off this big wedding. You’re at a crossroads here, Keeley. And with what’s happened with A.J., and your abandonment issues, it just occurred to me, having your mother around could help matters.”

  “No.” I said it flatly. “She’s been gone more than twenty years. I appreciate the thought, Austin, but I’m over losing my mother. And I don’t have abandonment issues.”

  He rolled his eyes again. “Oh please. Take a look at yourself, girl. You have more issues than the National Geographic.”

  We were just passing through the new gates to Mulberry Hill. There was no traffic coming, so I could have pulled onto the county road. Instead I stopped the Volvo, leaned across Austin, and opened his door.

  “Out,” I said.

  “Keeley!” he protested.

  “I mean it,” I said. “I don’t want to hear another word on this subject. You’ll have to hitch a ride back to town with somebody else. Maybe one of the Mexican stone masons can stand to hear you jibber-jabber. You don’t speak Spanish, do you?”

  “No I do not,” he said. He closed the door and locked it for effect. “You just don’t want to hear the truth, that’s all. Denial, denial, denial.”

  “All right,” I said, turning off the Volvo’s engine. “Let’s get it over with. Right now. Tell me everything you’ve just been itching to tell me. Then I’m gonna haul your ass back to town, and I don’t want to see you or hear from you again for at least the next couple days.”

  “Tsk. Tsk. Could you cut the air conditioning back on so I don’t suffocate out here?”

  I turned the motor on, but for lack of anything better to do, cut the radio off.

  “Okay,” Austin said. “Your mother’s full name was Jeanine Murry Murdock, is that correct?”

  I nodded.

  “Birthdate 1–31–53?”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “Research,” he said airily. “And she and your daddy were married on 11–27–71?”

  “Right.”

  He bit his lip. “Let me ask you something. When and where do you think your daddy divorced your mama?”

  “I don’t know. I guess right after she left us. Daddy never talked about it. I just assumed he went off and got a quiet divorce.”

  Austin swung his head back and forth dramatically. “Negative. I could find no record of a divorce between Wade Murdock and Jeanine Murry Murdock in any county in Georgia. So I searched the records in Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama. Every state that touches Georgia. No record of any such divorce.”

  I felt a faint buzz in my head. “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Austin admitted. “Just that as far as I know, and the law’s concerned, your parents are still married.”

  “On paper.”

  “There’s something else.”

  I felt a jab of unexpected pain, right around my rib cage. Why was this so hard? I’d written my mother off years ago. After she’d missed my eighth birthday. After she’d missed Christmas. Middle school graduation. Having my tonsils out. My first date. High school and then college graduation. Each occasion had been another reminder that she was gone, well and truly gone. Never coming back gone. “She’s dead, then.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I can’t find any death certificate.”

  “What did you find?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me.

  “Mostly dead ends,” he said, his voice full of regret.

  30

  I jounced the car back onto the tarmac and turned a sharp left, toward town.

  “I don’t want to hear another word,” I said, my teeth clenched. “You had no right to do this. Did you?”

  Austin’s face fell. “I just thought you needed to know. For closure.”

  “You don’t get to decide what I need to know,” I said.

  The ride back to town was less than five miles, but it seemed to take hours. Austin turned the radio on again, and turned his back to me.

  Traffic around the square was heavier than normal. I pulled up to a parking space at the courthouse, across the street from Fleur. “This is the best I can do,” I said.

  “It’s fine,” he said, stony-faced. He opened the car door, started to get out, then thought better of it and got back into the front seat.

  “You can stay mad at me if you want,” he said. “But I care about you, Keeley. I know you think you’re over your mama’s leaving you. But you’re not. You can’t be. Nobody could be over something like that. Just think about what I’ve told you. Okay? I searched the vital records data bases for all those states in, like, two hours on the computer. All that stuff is online now. If I had more information I could really get some answers.”

  “No,” I said. “Look. It’s not like I’m some motherless waif. I had Daddy and Aunt Gloria, and they did just fine by me, thank you very much.”

  “I need the name of the man your mama ran off with,” Austin kept up, pretending he hadn’t heard what I said. “And there are a bunch of other questions I want to ask you too.”

  “Goodbye,” I said pointedly.

  After he’d gotten out of the car, it took a few minutes before I could back out into traffic. I circled the square three times, looking for a parking spot, but it was hopeless. Without thinking about it, I headed the car toward my daddy’s house.

  The driveway was empty. Monday. It was Daddy’s golf day. Before my hissy fit, before I’d gotten him kicked out of Oconee Hills Country Club, Daddy usually played eighteen holes with his cronies on Monday afternoons. He hadn’t said anything about it, but I knew he’d switched over to playing the public course over at the state park. This was something else for me to feel guilty about. The state course has more rocks and red clay than greens or fairways, and there was no posh clubhouse, locker room, or grill to repair to with his buddies after a punishing round in the blazing sun. He probably sat on the trunk of his car to change out of his cleats, and stopped at the Starvin’ Marvin on 441 for a cold Budweiser on the way back home.

  Which would be several hours from now.

  I let myself into the kitchen. It was neat and tidy, as always. For a bachelor, Daddy was a bit of a biddy. He never left dirty dishes in the sink, never failed to sweep the kitchen floor, which he mopped every Saturday morning.

  The kitchen still smelled like Pine-Sol. When had he gotten into these habits, I wondered. Was that something his mama had done, mopped on Saturdays? Or had it been the practice of my own mother? I’d been such a little kid when she left, I had no idea how things got done around the house back then. I knew Daddy worked at the car lot, and Mama stayed home and did lady things, like cooking and cleaning and making sure I got to school and dance lessons and spend-the-night parties at my friends’ houses.

  I opened the refrigerator door and
reached automatically for the green Depression glass refrigerator jug full of cold water. The refrigerators had changed over the years, but the jug had not. We always had a pitcher of cold water in that green glass jug. Even though Daddy’s refrigerator had an ice and cold water dispenser on the door now, he’d kept that jug refilled, year after year.

  In the cupboard over the sink I found a juice glass and poured myself some water. On the bottom shelf of the pantry I found the Porky Pig cookie jar, and helped myself to a package of Nabs. Daddy bought cases of Nabs to keep at the car lot for his customers and salesmen. I think they fed them to me as a baby instead of teething biscuits.

  Chewing and sipping, I walked aimlessly around the house. In the living room I toyed with the gold-framed photos Daddy kept displayed on Mama’s piano. I had never actually heard anybody play that piano. Now I plinked some of the keys, surprised to find that it sounded as though it was in tune. There was my high school graduation photo, with me wearing the off-the shoulder drape the studio had supplied all us girls. I’d felt self-conscious about the amount of cleavage that drape revealed, but never said anything about it to anybody. Next to the graduation photo was one of Daddy with his arms around me and Gloria, on his fiftieth birthday, taken a few years ago at the surprise party Gloria had organized at the country club. There was an awful baby picture of me too, in a frilly pink and white dress, with a pink bow Scotch-taped to my nearly bald head.

  I plinked the piano some more and wondered about what wasn’t there. No photo of my mama. Had there ever been any? I tried to remember. Once maybe, a wedding picture of the two of them. It seemed to me Mama had been feeding Daddy a piece of wedding cake in that picture. Or had I just made that up?

  The bookcases that flanked the fireplace were full of old Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, my red leather-bound Encyclopedia Britannica set, and some tired-looking twenty-year-old hardbacks. I pulled each out by the spine and looked them over. Daddy’s reading mostly consisted of the Morgan County Citizen, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Car and Driver, Sports Illustrated, and the occasional paperback spy novel.

  So these would be my mama’s books. The titles seemed to run to romances—Forever Amber, The Flame and the Flower, like that.

  I leafed absentmindedly through the pages. A yellowed slip of paper fell out of the pages of The Flame and the Flower. Despite all the years that had passed, I recognized her printing, instantly. She always printed my name on the brown bag lunch I toted to school. Keeley Murdock. As though there were another Keeley in my class. We’d had two Jennifers, two Stephanies, a Kirsten and a Kelly. But I was the only Keeley.

  The paper was a grocery list, written in pencil on a scrap of lined notebook paper. Nothing exciting, nothing that gave a hint of what my mother’s daily life was like back then, or why she’d up and left.

  Coffee. Sugar. Haf-’n-Haf (she was a terrible speller), Clorox, baloney, tin foil, eggs, shaving cream, aspirin, strawberry Jello, pineapple tidbits, cream cheese.

  The baloney would have been for my lunch. I had a baloney sandwich on Sunbeam bread, with French’s mustard, every day. Mama cut my sandwich in half on the diagonal, and I always threw the crusts away, because Daddy said eating crust gave you curly hair—and mine was already way curlier than I wanted. The pineapple and cream cheese and Jell-O would have been for one of the congealed salads she liked to make. I never could figure out how something with Jell-O and pineapple qualified as a salad, but in Madison, Georgia, it did.

  I smoothed the grocery list with my fingertips. She would have borrowed the paper out of my Blue Horse school notebook, I thought. Driven her red Chevy Malibu over to the Piggly Wiggly, probably while I was at school. After I got too big to ride in the shopping cart, she didn’t like to take me with her to the grocery store, because I drove her crazy begging for sugary cereals, candy, ice cream, and potato chips. Maybe she’d stopped off at Madison Drugs after the grocery store, for a Coke over crushed ice, and to hear the latest gossip at the soda fountain.

  And then home to unpack the groceries and do whatever else she did all day. What did she do with her time? I wondered. I didn’t know if she watched soap operas, like my grandmother. I’d never known her to play bridge, like some of my friends’ mothers. She talked on the phone, saw her friends, went to Myrtle Beach for a week with them every summer—no kids, no husbands.

  I ran my fingers over the spines of the other books on the shelves, and feeling slightly guilty, shook each one out. What was I hoping to find? An airline ticket? Love letter? I thought about all those birthdays that had passed. Each year, for the week up to and after the big day, I’d raced home from school, hoping to find a card from her. I never got one. After I came home from college, before I moved into the apartment, I’d surreptitiously gone all through the boxes and trunks up in the attic, hoping to find some stash of cards and letters from her that Daddy had hidden. I never found anything.

  On the top shelf of the bookcase I pulled out four different volumes of Echoes, my parents’ yearbooks from Morgan County High. I took the latest one, 1970, picked up my package of Nabs and my juice glass, and climbed the stairs to my old bedroom.

  I put the glass down on my nightstand and opened the top drawer of my bureau. The bottle of Joy was hidden under some half slips. I uncapped it, closed my eyes, and inhaled.

  The pages of the Echoes stuck together slightly, so I used my fingertips to pry them apart. How many times had I gone through this yearbook with her? As a child I’d been fascinated with the idea that she’d been a teenager once. At bedtime I’d beg her to show me the yearbook, point out her friends, her enemies, her favorite teachers. I’d looked in vain for Daddy’s picture, until she’d pointed out that he was four years older, and had graduated before she ever set foot inside Morgan County High.

  Here was the page of faculty pictures. I smiled at the one of her geometry teacher, Mr. Osier. Somebody (not me! Mama had protested in mock horror) had drawn a mustache and pointy horns on his head. She’d never been any good at math either.

  I’d loved the club pictures. Mama had been so popular. Spanish Club, Drama Club, Pen & Palette, Student Council secretary. She’d worn a different outfit in each picture, cute little miniskirts or bell-bottom hip-huggers. In my favorite one, she’d worn an Indian headband and fringed leather skirt.

  “Were you in a play?” I’d asked.

  “That was just the latest style, that year,” she’d said. “I saw Cher wearing an outfit like that on television, and saved up my allowance and bought one just like it at Rich’s at Lenox Square Plaza in Atlanta. I was the first girl in school to go native!” And she’d laughed and laughed about that.

  I flipped through the pages of senior portraits until I got to hers. Jeanine Marie Murry. Her chin was tilted up in the picture, and her eyes, with their dramatic sweep of black eyeliner, frosted eyeshadow, and goopy mascara, seemed focused on something far away. Beneath the picture was listed a list of her activities and accomplishments, and then, as with every senior, her favorite quote. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by.” Robert Frost.

  Sure did, I thought, slapping the book closed.

  I started to put the perfume bottle back in the dresser drawer, but thought better of it. Instead I took it, and the yearbook. Downstairs, I washed out the juice glass, dried it and put it back in the cupboard. Everything was as it was when I’d come in. And Wednesday night, salmon loaf night, I would come back here, sit across the table from Daddy, and talk about the things we always talked about. How, I wondered, could I get to the place where I could talk to him about the thing we never, ever, talked about? Jeanine Murry Murdock and the road less traveled.

  31

  Wednesday morning I got up and brewed a pot of coffee. I poured two mugs, tucked the yearbook under my arm, went downstairs, and pounded on the back door of the florist’s shop.

  It was early, not yet seven, and I knew Austin’s feet never hit the floor until just after nine, but I had no pity on
him, just kept banging away on the heavy metal fire door until he opened up.

  He wore a pair of unlovely gray gym shorts, with the satin kimono thrown hastily on, still unbelted. I was surprised to see how trim his bare torso was, even more surprised to see his chest hair was nearly all white, while what hair Austin still had was a sunny blond.

  Austin saw where I was looking and quickly belted the robe. He yawned hugely. “So now you know my secret. I touch up my hair, and I’m a religious Abz-Er-Cizer. To what do I owe the pleasure of a visit at such an ungodly hour?”

  I handed him the mug of coffee and followed him into the shop and up the stairs to his own apartment.

  “It’s all your fault,” I said, blowing on the coffee to cool it down. “You opened up this can of worms.”

  He shuddered. “Do we have to talk about worms before I’ve had breakfast?”

  “His name was Darvis Kane,” I said, wanting the words out quickly, before I could take them back.

  “Who?”

  “The man. The one my mother ran away with. His name was Darvis Kane. He was the sales manager at Murdock Motors.”

  “Ow,” Austin said. He took a sip of the coffee. “Okay. This is a start. What else do you know?”

  “Not a lot,” I said. “Gloria told me some of it. After one of the girls at school spilled the beans. Darvis Kane was her uncle. We were playing dodgeball one day, and I hit her, and she got really mad. And she screamed at me: ‘My Uncle Darvis run off with your mama! My mama says your mama’s nothing but a little runaround! So don’t you be thinking you’re better than me.’ ”

  “Nice,” Austin said.

  “I hit her really hard. It left a mark on the back of her knees.”

  “Should have knocked the little bitch out cold.”