It's Just Lola

by Dixiane Hallaj

  Charlotte did not take the news well. She ran from the room with loud sobs. Lola started to run after her, but Juana put her hand on her arm. “Leave her for a few minutes. She needs to vent her anger before she can accept comfort for her grief.” Lola nodded, scattering her own tears. “I’ll make us some tea and some cocoa for Charlotte.”

  By the time Juana came back with the tea, Lola had pulled herself together. “Have you heard from Charlie recently? I hope he’s transferred the stocks.” She blinked back a fresh spurt of tears. “Now that my children have lost their father, I need to bring them home as soon as possible. They need to be near their mother.”

  “I’ll write to him tomorrow,” Juana said.

  “You haven’t asked him yet?” Lola couldn’t believe her ears. “I asked you months ago.”

  “Charlie’s been busy lately—and don’t forget we had our own loss.”

  “But Juana—“

  “Don’t worry, Lola. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Three days later she was in the back of the shop putting the finishing touches on a new hat before leaving for the day, when the proprietress said there was a gentleman asking about her. To her surprise it was the man who had “rescued” her from the bosun.

  “Well, hello,” said Lola with a smile. “Did you remember to wear your shining armor today?”

  Before he answered, Mrs. Ashton said, “I’m going to close a few minutes early tonight. Why don’t you just leave now, Lola?” The man gave Lola a boyish grin.

  “I wanted to make sure you were all right.” He smiled at her. “Will you have dinner with me?”

  “It’s the least I can do to thank you for your concern when you thought I was in trouble.”

  “To be truthful,” said the man with a laugh. “It was lucky I was mistaken about his intentions, since I’ve never lifted a hand to another human being in my life!”

  “Really?” Lola was intrigued. “You never hit anyone? Even as a small boy?”

  “Really.” He gestured to a parked car. “I’d like to drive you to a restaurant on the other side of town. But if you don’t feel comfortable in the car with me, we can eat here.” They had reached the restaurant where she had gone with the bosun. She forced a smile and turned to her companion.

  “I think I’ll be safe enough with a man who can’t raise a hand against me.”

  “I promise you’ll be safe.”

  Over dinner the man explained that he was a Quaker, and they didn’t believe in violence. During the war young Quakers had been subjected to jeers and taunts of people who called them unpatriotic or even worse, traitors. He’d left school and worked his way west, finally settling in San Francisco. His talent for machinery and his hard work had eventually earned him a position as manager of three garages owned by one of the wealthiest men in San Francisco.

  Lola excused herself to powder her nose. The smiling face in the mirror looked unfamiliar. How long had it been since she smiled because she was enjoying herself? She pictured Wulf greeting her at the dock in San Francisco. Lola returned to the table, sad and sobered.

  That night she lay in bed for hours. Wulf may have forgiven her, but could she forgive herself? She’d left her husband when his soul was wounded and broken. She brought out her rosary and prayed for forgiveness and salvation for both of them.

  Two days later the man was waiting for her when she closed the shop. He asked if he could take her to dinner again. She had to discourage him. “I can’t possibly go to dinner tonight. I’m going to buy my youngest son a pair of shoes.”

  Instead of muttering something about “maybe another time” and walking away, he surprised her by falling into step beside her and asking more about the children. Lola was tired, her feet hurt, and she didn’t have the energy to dissemble. He offered to drive her to the shoe store and then take her to dinner—or home if she preferred. Lola’s feet did not allow her to refuse. Once in the car she hoped he wouldn’t notice as she slipped her feet out of her horribly painful shoes.

  “What made you come into the shop instead of calling for help that day?”

  He laughed as he answered. “I saw the beautiful princess being attacked by the beast of nightmares.” His face turned serious. “It went against everything I’d ever lived by to threaten your attacker, but I had to rescue you.” Lola sat for an instant in stunned silence. He had breached his code of honor for her. He’d held that code for a lifetime—at great personal cost, yet he’d broken it for her. “I figured if I let that man rob you, or worse, then I’d be the cause of more violence and hurt than if I tried to stop it. Exceptional circumstances need exceptional deeds.”

  “And you are indeed an exceptional man, Mr.-- Why, I don’t even know your name.”

  “Sam. Just call me Sam.”

  XX. March, 1928: Lola Turned 34

  It took six months for Lola to decide that this gentle, gentle man could calm the demons she was convinced still lived within her, lurking beneath the surface. It took another three months for Sam to ask her to marry him. She found later that he’d decided much earlier, but had spent the intervening time and his savings to buy a small house. In the meantime he had taken Lola and the young ones on the dreamed of trips to the zoo and the parks. Nellie and Harry were captivated immediately.

  Joe had been released and came home. When he arrived he was a lump of anger, wrapped up in foul language. His anger was as quick and violent as Wulf’s—a study in contrast from his new stepfather. Sam taught by example. He replied to Joe’s outbursts with calm logic. At most he told Joe to go to his room until he could act like a member of the family. He never yelled; he never threatened; he never met anger with anger. To Lola’s surprise, it worked. She watched as Joe’s grudging respect grew.

  She smiled as she remembered the expression on Joe’s face when Sam offered him a position as an apprentice in one of his garages. It made her happy that Sam thought Joe had real talent with cars. She was interrupted in her musings by the door opening and slamming shut. She left her cooking and walked toward the front door, drying her hands on her apron as she went.

  “Joe! What’re you doing home so early?”

  “I quit.”

  “You what? Why?”

  “I quit. I’m not going back.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “There weren’t any cars for me to work on today so he gave me busy work. I cleaned the whole damned shop. Then he told me to clean the bathrooms—the bathrooms.”

  “I clean bathrooms all the time. What’s so awful about that?”

  “You don’t clean those bathrooms. They haven’t been cleaned since the water receded and Noah got off the ark.” As he talked he strode to his room with Lola following behind him. He grabbed the cardboard suitcase he had been given when he left the school and began to throw clothes in it.

  “I don’t clean shit for nobody,” he said angrily.

  “Anybody,” corrected Lola automatically.

  “What?”

  “You don’t clean shit for anybody,” Lola said without thinking as she stared at Joe in shock and confusion.

  “Glad to hear you see it my way,” Joe said as he snapped the catches on the suitcase. His lips brushed her cheek as he moved past her. “I’ll write when I get an address. Love you, Mom.” And then he was gone, leaving Lola staring open-mouthed after him.

  Sam looked tired when he came home. Lola was trying not to panic over Joe and not to be angry with Sam for letting him leave.

  “I’m sorry, Lola,” he said simply.

  She looked at his gentle eyes and could see the pain he felt. She swallowed her anger, but her worry was not so easily put aside. “How will he survive? Maybe we should have the police look for him. What’ll he do?”

  “He’ll be fine, Lola. He’s not a little boy; he’s a grown man. I didn’t want him to leave, but he’s a very talented and capable man. Don’t worry, Lola. He knows where we are, and he knows we’ll be here if he needs us.” Lola nodded and
tried to believe what Sam told her.

  It was a month before they got a post card. It was short, but reassuring.

  Got a job in a garage in Fresno. Doing well. Love, Joe

  “How did you know?” she asked Sam.

  “I’ve been there,” he answered. She loved Sam with all her heart. He was such a good father. He had a flair for managing the children and their woes. Every evening at the dinner table Lola gave thanks for her new life; every night she said prayers of thanksgiving.

  ~ ~ ~

  Lola was showing her newest creation to a customer when the shop door opened. Sam walked into the shop and sagged against the counter. She handed the customer a hand mirror and walked toward Sam.

  “Can you leave now?” he asked as she approached.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No, I’m not all right. Can you take off now?” Sam’s face was pale and his voice shook.

  Lola hesitated. The proprietress wouldn’t be back for another half hour, but her husband came first. She hurried back to the customer.

  “Mrs. Pierce, perhaps you could come back in an hour when Mrs. Ashton will be here? I am sorry, but my husband is ill, and I must take him home.”

  Mrs. Pierce frowned and looked past Lola to Sam. Then her expression changed. “I’ll take the hat. Don’t bother to wrap it.” She reached in her purse and pulled out some bills, thrusting them at Lola as she grabbed the hat and hurried to the door.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Pierce,” Lola said to her retreating back. Sam was struggling to stay on his feet. She ran to him and placed a chair behind him. With her arm around him, she guided him into the chair. There was no way she could support his weight.

  “Bucket,” he said weakly as he swallowed convulsively. She grabbed the waste basket from behind the counter and brought it to him. He hugged it to his chest and began to heave into it. Lola shut the door of the shop and flipped the Open sign to Closed. She brought a glass of water and a wet towel.

  By the time the owner returned, Sam said he’d thrown up everything he’d eaten in the past week. Lola cleaned everything; the only problem was how to get Sam home.

  Mrs. Ashton suggested getting a policeman to help. To Lola’s surprise, Sam seemed to panic. No police, he insisted. As Lola got her purse and hat, Sam took deep breaths and stood. With one hand on the wall of the buildings and the other on Lola’s shoulder, he made it to the car. “Let’s just sit here for a few minutes.”

  “You aren’t having a heart attack or a stroke,” said Lola.

  Sam shook his head. “I know. Give me a minute.” The color was returning to his face and his breathing slowly returned to normal. He started the car and began to drive. Lola watched him anxiously. His hands were shaking.

  “I’m not going back to the garage,” he said. “My boss is dead.”

  “Businesses don’t disappear when the owner dies. Someone inherits, and they’ll need a manager because they won’t be familiar with the business. You’ll be indispensible to them.”

  “If they need a manager, they’ll have to find someone else.” There was a long pause before he spoke again. “He didn’t just die. He was killed...in front of me…with guns.” Sam pulled the car to the side of the street and stopped. He opened his door and leaned out, grasping the door for support. Lola heard him retching again and she searched her purse for a handkerchief. She handed it to him when he sat up straight and closed the car door.

  “Nothing left,” he said weakly as he waved away the handkerchief and leaned his head back on the seat. Lola said nothing. She could hear the fear and loathing in his voice, and she felt a chill go through her body. After several minutes he restarted the car. The drive home was completed in silence.

  It took two days for Lola to get the whole story. Sam told it in small bits because if he thought about it too long, he got sick again. Lola had been raised with the constant knowledge of violence, and even she had a visceral reaction to the story. She couldn’t imagine the mental reactions of a man raised in a community deeply committed to non-violence. Inconceivable was the closest adjective she could find.

  Sam had learned that the wealthy man who owned the garages did not get wealthy from fixing cars. The garages were only something that the public saw as his source of income. He was a big wheel in local organized crime.

  “Not big enough, though,” Sam said. “Someone is either bigger or hoping to get bigger. He was standing in the way.”

  Lola felt cold. “Did they see you? Do they know you saw them?” Fear made it hard for her to breathe. “What would they do to you?”

  “I don’t think they knew anyone else was there. I was in the grease pit showing one of the new men how to do a repair. We didn’t know anything until we heard them shouting at each other. I started to get out to see what the problem was, but the other guy grabbed my shirt and yanked me back down.

  “He asked if I knew who that was. When I said no, he said it was a big boss of the mafia. I didn’t even know what the mafia was. We peeked out from behind the tires of the car. All we could see were feet.

  “Then we heard the shots, and I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. I think I was in shock or something. I just froze—no movement, no thought. I don’t remember feeling afraid. In fact, I don’t remember feeling anything at all.” Sam stopped talking, and his eyes seemed to be looking inward. He took a few deep breaths before continuing.

  “The shoes walked away, and that’s when we saw the body. It was the owner, and blood had already pooled around him and was spreading. The other guy pulled on my arm and said we had to get out of there. I said we needed to get help.

  “’Dead men don’t need help,’ he said. Then he asked if I wanted my picture in the paper as the cops took me away for questioning in connection with a mafia turf war. I knew that would be a disaster. He said what I already knew but hadn’t thought through yet. He said that once my name got in the paper ‘they’ would know I was there, and my family would always be hostage. I couldn’t put you in danger like that.” Sam got an anguished look on his face and Lola wanted to rock him like a child. “Besides, what could I tell them? That the killers wore shoes?”

  “I’ll get you some tea.” Lola knew he had to take a break before talking more.

  “I let the kid lead me out of the garage and around the corner. Then he asked about my car and I pointed in the other direction. He stood there swearing at me for a few seconds, and then he pulled me with him. We circled the block and came to the car from the other direction. He asked for my keys and we drove off. We just made a lot of turns and finally he asked where I wanted to go. I told him to the hat shop, and you know the rest. He parked the car and took off.”

  Lola was relieved no one had seen him, but she worried about Sam. He had nightmares; his hands shook when he picked up a cup of coffee; he said he never wanted to go down in a mechanics pit again. Days grew into weeks.

  Lola took an afternoon off work and went back to the lawyer. She had allowed Juana and Carlos over a year to mourn and recover from their loss. She told Mr. Brown that she needed money. For the first time she revealed the true extent of her stock holdings. She promised him a percentage of everything she recovered if he would go ahead with the work with the money he already had. To her relief, his eyes did not light up with greed. Instead of answering, he asked her to wait. It was several minutes before he came back with coffee.

  The lawyer looked at her seriously. “I needed to talk to my wife since what you propose involves spending money that belongs to both of us.” Lola held her breath. “She agreed.”

  “Thank you both. You don’t know what this means to me.”

  “Don’t count on an early resolution. Even if we meet no resistance from your brother-in-law, the red tape of the international aspect of the case will guarantee a long timeline. Perhaps you should ask your sister to try again.”

  She wrote one last request to Juana, asking her to add her voice to the request that Charlie give her back control of her stocks.
She wrote an impassioned plea for the stocks to be sold. “In the name of God,” she wrote, “if there was ever a time to sell, it is now. Even I know that stocks are at an all-time high.”

  ~ ~ ~

  One day she came home from work and Sam came into the kitchen from the back door. He was dirty and sweat was running down his face, but he was grinning.

  “Come and look.” He pulled her toward the door. The entire back yard had been cleared of grass and there were neat furrows running from end to end. There were two lines of tired looking plants, but the rest just looked like dirt.

  “It’s too late to plant tomato seeds, but I got some plants from the nursery. They may not give any fruit because it’s so late in the season, but they were cheap. I planted spinach and cauliflower because they can grow this late. We don’t get really cold weather here. There’s more, but that’s the bulk of it. Oh, I forgot to say there are onions by the door.” He looked at her proudly.

  “You did all this today?”

  “Yep. I figure if I can’t bring home a paycheck, we’ll need to cut down on grocery bills. The fresh stuff is better anyway. I was just sitting here after everybody left for school and work this morning, feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t know what to do because all I know is cars. Then I thought of my Grandpa and realized that was nonsense. I grew up on a farm. I know farming.” He sat up straight and grinned. “My Grandpa had a theory. He said that bad stuff gets into people sometimes. There’s some of it can be taken care of with a laxative, but if you can’t poop it out, you just have to sweat it out. I decided to sweat today.”

  That night Sam’s sleep was deep and undisturbed by dreams. The next day he started looking for work. It wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped. Weeks grew into months.

  ~ ~ ~

  Lola canvassed the secondhand stores and found a man’s beige overcoat that was perfect except for paint on one sleeve. On her way out of the store, she saw a filthy doll tossed in a stack of rags. Lola bought them both. She made winter coats for Nellie and Harry with the man’s coat and removed the doll’s porcelain head from the filthy body. She cleaned the head and painted new features on it. She bought material and made a dress for Nellie and a new body and matching dress for the doll. It was almost Christmas and she was planning ahead.