“Don’t grieve for the portraits, Aunt Kat. Susan and Jon both hated those pictures.” Hollis seemed to think that was a consoling thought. “I’d throw out the one Mom had painted of me, except she’d kill me.”
“Very likely. We didn’t get them painted for you kids, we had them painted to suggest to strangers that you were once sweet and lovable. Let me get my purse, and I’m ready to go.” Katharine needed a moment to compose her face.
Hollis must have realized she had blundered, for she called after her, “I’ll be lovable the rest of the day. I’m lovable when I’m shopping. And I’ll drive. I’m in my rental car and get unlimited mileage.”
Katharine agreed, until she saw the car Hollis was driving. “That thing looks like an upholstered roller skate. We’ll take my car. I also have a rental with unlimited mileage. And I’ve had a brilliant idea.” She picked up several CDs from the countertop. “How about if we head up I–575 to Jasper, Ellijay, and Blue Ridge, and browse some of the little antique shops we were talking about last night? Some of them have pretty reasonable prices, and we’ll get a jaunt out of town.”
Hollis eyed her aunt suspiciously. “You aren’t planning on trying to find Kenny’s old home place, are you?”
“I don’t have a clue where that might be.”
“Then it’s a dynamite idea. I’ll bet we can find some great stuff.”
Katharine drove and Hollis fed the CD player. Not until they were past the Woodstock exit did Katharine get around to the question that had bothered her the evening before. “Why, exactly, don’t you like Kenny? He seemed nice enough to me.”
“Would you drop that subject?” Hollis blazed. “There’s bad chemistry between us. Can’t you let it go at that?”
“Subject dropped,” Katharine assured her.
A few minutes later, Hollis brought it up again. “Don’t you think he seems a little phony? I mean, I know other kids from North Georgia, and they don’t spout sentences like ‘the old log cabin up home’ or ‘the floor of our shack.’”
As Katharine remembered it, Kenny had used that phrase in a sarcastic reply to something Hollis had said, but she had to agree with Hollis’s next words.
“Maybe he thinks it’s cute to put on that hillbilly act, but I’ll bet he lives in a neat brick house on an ordinary street in Canton, or even around here somewhere.” She indicated the suburban sprawl that was inching north as Atlanta stretched into the hills. “I’ll also bet the only antiques his mother has are dishes her mother left her. He was trying to impress you, that’s all.”
Katharine thought that over. “Maybe so, but he was right about our hall table and the dining-room rug. On the other hand, his grandfather looks like he rode his Harley down from a mobile home. The man wears black T-shirts and boots that have been scuffed by hard work, and he has a ponytail, an earring, and tattoos on both biceps.”
Hollis grinned. “Sounds like my kind of guy. Too bad Kenny isn’t more like him.”
“Where did you all meet, again?”
Hollis screwed up her face, like she was trying to remember. “I think he was in the car one time when Jon gave me a ride.”
Katharine had known Hollis too long to be fooled. She knew there was more to the story.
“That’s it? You hadn’t seen him but once until yesterday?” That didn’t explain the antipathy between them. Or Kenny’s reference to Hollis’s “problem.”
Hollis lifted her chin and gave Katharine the icy face she usually reserved for her mother. “If you intend to spend the afternoon discussing Kenny Todd, I’d as soon go home.”
She did not speak again until they pulled into the first parking lot.
Katharine would not look back on the afternoon as one of her best that disturbing summer. Hollis handed her the list and forgot it while she drifted off in each store to examine embroidered linen hand towels and cutwork tablecloths. Katharine, meanwhile, wandered the aisles and recognized half the “antiques” as things she had grown up with.
Only the knowledge that if she didn’t finish Hollis’s list that afternoon she’d have to spend yet another day shopping kept her doggedly buying figurines, porcelain plates, and other bric-a-brac that had absolutely no meaning in her life. Some of it she liked well enough to live with awhile. Most of it she would box up and give away as soon as the party was over. Her only comfort was that it was cheaper than Bloomingdale’s.
The last shop had a set of twin bedspreads she actually thought quite pretty. “How about getting these for the upstairs bedroom? I can take back the ones we already bought, and we wouldn’t have to repaint.”
Hollis wrinkled her nose. “Eeew. Boring and ugly, and not old enough to be cool. I’ll bet you had some just like them in high school.”
Katharine took a second, startled look and recognized them. She hadn’t had any like them, but the most popular girl in her high-school class did. Katharine had wished she could have them instead of the practical corded spreads her mother ordered from Sears. Boring and ugly, indeed! She headed to the car reflecting that maybe she’d take some of her new bric-a-brac out to the patio after the party and smash it. It would be cheaper than a psychiatrist.
It was past ten before they got back to Katharine’s and unloaded their purchases. Hollis promised to come the next morning to hang pictures and help place things. Disgruntled and exhausted, Katharine looked forward to bed with a good book. The end of the day had to be better than the rest.
That’s what she thought until she listened to her voice mail messages.
Posey, bewildered: “Bara just left. She’s dead drunk and telling some rambling story about how you figured out Winnie wasn’t her father. She wanted to know if Daddy was in Atlanta during the war. Can you imagine? Call me and fill me in on what’s going on.”
Murdoch Payne, whiny: “Katharine, I wish you hadn’t offered to help Bara with those medals. She has been over to the nursing home upsetting Mama. Daddy is furious. I can’t reach Bara, but when you see her again, tell her not to bother them while I’m away.”
Ann Rose: “Kat, do you know what is going on with Bara? She stopped by a few minutes ago demanding to know where Oscar was during the war. From something she said, I gather you had suggested Winnie wasn’t really her dad. Is that true? If you have time, give me a call.”
Payne Anderson, distraught: “Katharine, please give me a call. I don’t know what you told Mama today, but she has gone plumb crazy!”
Rita Louise, proper and staid: “Katharine, I don’t know why you stirred Bara up like this, but you did her no service. If she asks you to do more research for her, I urge you to decline.”
Katharine decided to make herself a gin and tonic and carry it up to bed. It had been that kind of day.
When she took her first sip, she was puzzled. After her second, she was furious. Bara Weidenauer owed her half a bottle of gin.
Chapter 19
Thursday
Bara had the old dream again, the one that used to terrify her as a child.
She roamed her house, looking for Mother, but Mother was gone. Nobody would tell her where. She begged and cried, but they put her in a dark place. “Until you stop crying,” a woman warned. Then two men came, enormous and black against sunlight streaming behind them in the door. “They have come for the child,” the woman said. Bara turned and ran into a back room, screaming. Another man—someone she ought to recognize but didn’t—tugged her by the arm and drew her back to one of the strangers, who knelt and picked her up. She screamed and tried to get away, but he pressed her head against his shoulder and would not let her go. She was terrified she would smother. Finally she collapsed, sobbing, and he carried her away. The only difference this time was that she wore a huge heart-shaped locket that thump, thump, thumped against her chest and made it ache.
The dream had come often when she was small. She would scream and scream until Winnie came and held her. She had continued to have it during times of stress all her life, and she had dreamed it often since W
innie’s death.
Her therapist suggested that it represented her fear of the unknown, the loss of her maternal side because of her anger against Nettie, and the child within that she had allowed others to steal. Bara knew only that it still had the power to terrify.
She awoke Thursday morning shaking and confused. Every bone ached. Her cheek rested on something scratchy and wet. She heard the phone and waited for someone to answer.
It kept ringing. Why didn’t the servants get it?
She lifted her head to see where she was. That was a mistake. The entire world whirled while a hammer pounded her skull steadily from behind.
She dropped her head and identified the dampness beneath her cheek as drool. Disgusted, she would have moved, but didn’t dare. At least the drool was warm.
After a couple more rings the phone stopped. But where was she?
After two futile tries, she summoned the skill to open one eye.
Legs. Furniture legs. She blinked, looked again, and recognized the sleek ebony table in her foyer. By moving her head the tiniest fraction of an inch she saw she was lying on her hall rug. The thick wool Bokhara was bright red with medallions picked out in black and cream. The medallions seemed to be dancing. She couldn’t remember them ever dancing before, not since she and Ray brought the rug back from their trip to Pakistan.
“My trip to Pakistan,” she muttered. “Ray was too drunk to know where he was.”
She knew where she was, but what was she doing on the floor?
Gradually pieces of the previous day descended like buzzards to pick her spirit to shreds.
Katharine and her dreadful printout. Scotty. Rita Louise throwing her out of her house. Had there been others?
She could not remember. She was as bad as Ray.
Fat tears squeezed between her closed eyelids. “I am so ashamed,” she whimpered an apology to anybody she had offended. “So ashamed.”
Also nauseated. The world seemed to be moving in a slow whirl.
She couldn’t remember driving home or how she had gotten as far as the rug. How long had she been lying there?
She squinted toward the sidelights and saw sunlight streaming in. Lordy! Had she slept on the floor all night? No wonder she was so stiff. The Bokhara was thick, but not thick enough to compensate for the marble beneath.
“I must be a princess,” she muttered. “I feel every vein in that marble.”
You’re no princess. You are sixty-two, too old to sleep on the floor.
“Cut me some slack, Nettie.” She rolled over and dragged herself to her feet, but when she tried to stand she stumbled and crashed into the table, sending the Fräbel heron crashing to the floor. With a cry of dismay she reeled, embraced a potted ficus, and fell with it to the floor.
She lay amid dirt and shredded fronds and contemplated the mess. Any minute Foley would dash upstairs and cut off her head with a crystal shard. When she heard nothing, she squinted and checked her watch. Already ten? Foley would be at work. She must have lain on the floor for hours and hours. No wonder she was stiff. And sick. So sick—
She barely made it to the powder room before she lost everything she had eaten for the last twenty years.
She scooped water onto her face, splashing it all down her front. “Why on earth did you drink so much?” she asked the hideous woman in the mirror. “You know it makes you sick and revolting.”
She staggered toward the nearest phone. Sinking into a chair, she called Maria.
Maria did not live in Buckhead. She never attended fancy parties. Yet she was possibly the best friend Bara had. With Maria she never needed to pretend.
“Maria? It’s Bara.”
“¡Querida! I haven’t seen you for nearly three weeks. Have you been traveling?”
“No, I’ve been, um, dealing with stuff around here.”
“Are you off the wagon?” Bara heard worry in Maria’s voice, not criticism. In the background she also heard children’s voices. Maria ran a day-care home for two of her grandchildren and several other children. It was the only way she had to pay her bills.
Bara hated to keep Maria from the kids, but she needed to talk to her.
“Yeah. More and more stuff kept coming down, and I fell off. Now I’m sick as a dog. I think I’m going to die.”
“You are not going to die. You are too tough to die. You are going to stop drinking. You can do it. You’ve done it before. But you must come to the meetings. And pray. You cannot do this alone.”
“I don’t think I can do it at all. Things have never been this bad, and I can’t pray since Winnie died.”
“Your father was not God. I keep telling you, but you do not hear me. He was a man, like other men. Smart, maybe. Rich, certainly. But still, only a man.”
Bara’s voice came out in a whisper. “He may not have even been my daddy. Yesterday, I learned something….”
“Whoever he was, he cannot help you now. Ask God to help you.”
“Nobody can help me. You don’t know—”
“Don’t give me that. I do know, and if I can do it, you can do it. It’s only for today, remember? One day at a time.”
“It’s harder this time. Last time it was for the kids.”
That was what had drawn her to Maria Ortiz in the first place.
They had met twenty-five years before, at the first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting Bara ever attended. Externally, they had little in common: Bara, rangy and sleek in a black turtleneck and black jeans she had donned as the least conspicuous clothes in her wardrobe; Maria, short and curvy, wearing a cheap red blouse and the new jeans that were the best she had.
Nor was Maria’s story Bara’s story. Maria had been born in Mexico and as a child, regularly crossed the border with her migrant-worker parents. From ten she had been used and abused by a series of men. When she was twelve one of them had introduced her to alcohol. In it she had found solace from the hell that was her life. “Drunk out of my mind, I had four children by four different men, none of whom ever provided a penny of child support,” she had told the group, “so for years I supported my family with my only marketable skill, the world’s oldest profession.”
Then she had said the words that caught Bara’s attention: “Two months ago, I looked at my kids and said, ‘Maria, for the sake of your kids, you have to stop drinking. They did not ask to be brought into this world, but they deserve the best you can give them.’ I have been sober two months today. With the help of God and those in this room, I intend to stay that way.”
The previous day, Bara had sat, sick as a dog, on the side of her bed and looked into two-year-old Payne’s bewildered eyes. “Mommie sick?”
“Mommie’s sick.” Bara headed to the toilet.
Later that morning, her doctor had confirmed her suspicions: She was pregnant with her second child. “You need to stop drinking,” he told her. “Alcohol does permanent damage to unborn children.”
She had gotten home from the doctor to find Ray drunk and screaming at Payne while the nanny cowered in a corner. Bara sent Ray off to play golf, calmed the nanny, reassured Payne, and confronted her own face in the mirror. “You have got to stop drinking for the sake of your children. They deserve at least one sober parent.” She called AA that morning.
Maria had walked beside her during the pregnancy and for twenty-five years since. Bara thought of Maria as a secret jewel she kept hidden from other friends. She had no idea what Maria thought of her.
“Promise me you will not drink today and you will come to the meeting tonight. You need us.”
“I won’t drink today. Well, maybe one. The hair of the dog. But after that—”
“That’s what we say. Just one more. You are an alcoholic, Bara. Say it.”
“I am not an alcoholic. I can quit any time I want to.”
“So quit right this minute.” When Bara didn’t answer, Maria spoke in a gentler tone. “You cannot do it by yourself. Come spend the day with me and the children.”
Bara shuddered
. “I am not a sight for children’s eyes.”
“Do I need to come over there? I can ask a neighbor to watch the children and get somebody to bring me.”
That told Bara how worried she was. Maria had never come to her house, and had no car.
“You don’t have to come. I’ll be all right.”
“Will I see you at the meeting tonight?”
“I don’t know if I can come tonight. I’ve got some stuff I have to figure out. But I will not drink today.”
“Vow it on your mother’s grave.”
“My mother would roll in her grave if I swore on it.”
“It’s your own grave, if you keep drinking. Remember that. Now promise me you will come tonight.”
“I will come.” It was to make that promise that Bara had called in the first place.
The level of noise behind Maria had been steadily rising. “I gotta go before Luis kills Conchita for the last doughnut. See you tonight.”
“See you tonight.” Bara hung up and felt a better person already.
Back in the hall, she looked at the mess. She ought to get a broom and sweep up the glass and dirt, but she didn’t know where the broom was kept. Or how to use it, for that matter, but how hard could it be? She’d buy one next time she was out. She was going to take control of her life again.
She went to the powder room and looked the woman in the mirror straight in the eye. “You will not let the bastards get you down. Not Foley, not Nettie, not even Winnie.”
But the new loss of Winnie was too much for her to bear. She collapsed on the powder-room floor, sobbing.
Chapter 20
Thursday morning, Katharine put off returning calls as long as possible. It wasn’t hard. She was extremely busy. But she worried about Bara—and was puzzled by that.
She scarcely knew the woman and didn’t particularly like her, so why should she worry so? She certainly felt no responsibility for Bara’s erratic trail through Buckhead the day before. I merely did what she asked me to do, she reminded herself. Yet the disintegrating eccentric kept intruding on her thoughts.
Daughter of Deceit Page 17
