Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  Come to visit? Like this was Easter. Like he hadn’t asked me to come back and help him with our mother, the town’s own female Boo Radley but with more attitude and less social value.

  “Damn carpenter bees, they been eating on the eaves since spring,” Dan said, looking down at the sawdust.

  Yeah, okay, I got that—his house was being consumed by bugs. What I didn’t get was why my mother was accused of murder. Dan’s face didn’t suggest now was a great time to ask.

  “So?” I said, which is the word I prefer to use on the rare occasions when I can’t think of a thing to say. “So.”

  “So, get in here, Lilly Belle Rose. Want a Coke?”

  “I do,” Bobby said.

  “No, thank you,” I said. I was still sloshing from the sweet tea syrup that Eleanor Spivey had poured over ice cubes in thick brown rivulets after I narrowly escaped killing her pet peacock, and all the while I kept insisting to her I didn’t want a second glass of tea and no, ma’am, I never did learn what a present perfect progressive was, but I’d managed to graduate from law school and make a decent life for myself despite this grievous shortcoming. “I don’t care for a Coke and I’m just using Lilly these days.”

  “Well, come on in, then, Lilly Belle Rose, we’ll get us some Cokes,” Dan said.

  Okay, apparently I no longer spoke English.

  In short order, I was sitting on a plaid couch, with Bobby on one side and Dan on the other, and all three of us had cold Coke bottles in our hands, and Dan was explaining something that was going in one ear and out the other.

  Dan has that effect on me. He’s a sweet guy, salt of the earth, steady taxpayer, but he’s delivered Cokes from a truck on the same delivery route for eighteen years. The only time he hadn’t lived in our hometown was the four years he was in the Marines, and even that didn’t make any particular impression on him. His politics were limited to considerations of the antics of the high school football coach, and his main economic concern was whether Pepsi was making any inroads in the local Coke consumption. Dan was the boy who always did his homework, Dan is the man who never calls in sick to work, and who will wash the dishes and do a good job, when it is his turn. Dan is the father who actually goes to PTA meetings, and he can sit through a three-hour Easter salvation sermon and not fidget a single body part. His are the mutant genes. I have trouble relating to him. I have trouble sitting still.

  So, while Dan prattled, I fretted about assorted professional worries. Bobby poked my leg, and I looked at Dan and had the sudden feeling he had just asked me an important question and was waiting for an important answer.

  So I gave him the perfect lawyer answer: “That depends.”

  “Well, that’s about what I thought too, and about what I told the city attorney, but he sure seems to think it’s the best thing. You being the lawyer, I reckon you’re gonna have to talk with him. Anyway, I wanted to warn you. Before we get to the hospital. So, Lilly, you and me can go to the hospital soon as you’re ready.”

  As soon as I was ready? Ready to see my mother in the psych ward of the local hospital after she had shot a man? Ready to see the woman who had evicted me at age fifteen and hadn’t said two consecutive words directly to me since then? Oh, let’s put that ready thing down on the calendar for 2015.

  We sat on the couch a few more minutes, me wondering what Dan had just told me about the city attorney and what I was going to do with my undrunk Coke that wouldn’t hurt Dan’s feelings. Before I could decide what trick I might play, Dan got up and went into the kitchen. Being so busy worrying about not listening to him the first time, I hadn’t been listening again, so I didn’t know why he got up, but I took advantage of the moment.

  “Here,” I said to Bobby, “trade you.” I took his empty bottle in exchange for my full one. “Now what did your dad just tell me about the city attorney?”

  “They want to lock Grandmom up in a loony bin instead of jail, only I’m not supposed to call it a loony bin.”

  Placing Willette Rose Cleary in a mental institution? Well, that’s probably the most sensible thing to do, I thought, although in truth, she seemed to do all right on her own so long as nobody tried to get her to leave the house—or at least that was Dan’s take on things in the past. I looked at young Bobby sitting attentively beside me, and I asked him, “Have you ever actually seen your grandmother?”

  “No, but I’ve shouted at her through her door a good many times. Momma takes us over there every Christmas to yell through the shut door and leave her presents on the porch, and every Easter to wish her a Happy Easter, and leave her a basket.”

  “She ever talk back at you?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “What did she say to you?”

  “Not so much,” he said, and shrugged.

  Yeah, pretty much the same conversations I’d had with her as a kid.

  “So, Bobby, what’s the scoop? Why are they saying she killed that man? Where in the world did she get a gun? I mean nobody goes in or out of that house, and my father never left her a gun.”

  “Daddy told me not to talk to anybody about it.”

  “I’m not anybody, I’m your aunt, you can tell me.”

  “Naw, I better let Daddy tell you.”

  Okay, so the kid could keep a secret. And was a bottomless pit, apparently, I thought as I watched him gulp the last of my Coke. I had a sudden urge to hug him again, but was afraid I’d scare him off.

  Dan came back into the living room. “Police chief got our momma under guard at the hospital, but his under-chief says we can go on in, being as how we’re family, but you aren’t supposed to upset her or anything. They had to have restraints on her when they first brought her in. She was a real mess. Had a whole psychotic fit in the ER and then the next morning.”

  “She’s never been psychotic before,” I said.

  “She’s never shot a man before.”

  “Well, why’d she shoot this man?”

  “Aw, Lilly Belle Rose, it’s a long story, and the truth is, we don’t know why. Tell you what, you being so sensitive to bug bites—them mosquitoes’re tough this time of day even if it is fall—Bobby, son, you wait here with Lilly, and I’ll run the car up by the front door.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Bobby said.

  As Dan went off to be chivalrous, I looked at my youngest nephew. He was so cute it was almost unreal. Wavy blond hair like his momma, big blue eyes like his daddy, full lips like me—I had to say, this kid was a heartbreaker. I had that urge to hug him again, but I stifled it in favor of plying him with questions.

  “So, Bobby, one more time. I’m your blood aunt. You can talk to me. Now tell me what is going on.” Then I remembered where I was, in a family where proper manners were only one rung below God, and I said, “Please.”

  Bobby, over-sugared by now, twitched a bit, as if needing movement for thought, and then said, “Don’t you tell nobody I told you this, but Grandmom shot a man who came to get paid for a deep freeze.”

  “Willette bought a deep freeze?”

  “No, ma’am, that was the problem, see?”

  “She didn’t buy a deep freeze, a man came to get paid for the deep freeze she didn’t order, and so she shot him?”

  “Yeah, but there was a voodoo curse on the deep freeze too, how come she shot him.”

  “She admitted she shot him?”

  “I don’t think so, but the chief of police saw her do it, that’s the way I heard it, but I didn’t get the whole story ’fore Momma shooed me out a the room.”

  My priming him for more questions was cut off by the sound of Dan honking the car horn.

  “You be sure, now, not to say nothing about that voodoo curse, you hear? You know how Momma is about stuff like that.”

  No, I didn’t, though I had the feeling I might be about to learn. In the meantime, I promised my nephew I could keep my sources secret, and went outside, wondering, Great, now what?

  chapter 3

  I’ve never yet been in a h
ospital that didn’t make me want to scream and then shower in Clorox. Staph and other germs, grown wholly immune to antibiotics because we eat penicillin and tetracycline pills like M&M’s, are everywhere, leaping from the thin air into my mucous membranes, where they can grow faster than mildew in the summer in my hometown.

  Though I shuddered, Dan pushed me on down the hallway toward a room I didn’t want to go into.

  Standing outside the door was a man in a police uniform. He looked uncomfortable.

  As a delaying tactic, I stopped and smiled at him. “Hey,” I said in hometown cheerleader fashion. “Could I get you a chair?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “I ’preciate the offer, but I’m on duty.”

  “On duty?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m guarding the er, the er…the lady prisoner. And making sure nobody hurts her.” He stood up a little straighter as he spoke.

  “Guarding Willette?” Why? I wondered as I studied the man in what I hoped was a less-than-obvious way. He was short, rounded at the edges, and at or near retirement age, and not anyone who could deter me from any course of action I chose. I pegged him as a school crossing guard, one much kidded by the students and liked by parents, and wholly without fighting skills.

  And a man who very much needed a chair.

  “I’m Lilly Cleary,” I said, and offered a hand, which he took. “I’m Willette’s daughter. Thank you for helping her. And I think you need a chair.”

  “Rodney Harrelson, assistant chief of police,” he said. “A chair’d be nice, now you mention it.”

  This man was the assistant chief of police? And he was guarding my mother? I turned questioningly to Dan, who had already ducked into the hospital room and come back out to see what was keeping me.

  “I’ll get him a chair,” Dan said, sabotaging my stalling. “You go on in and see your mother.”

  “I’ll get the chair,” I said.

  “Lilly Belle, it’ll be all right. Go on in there,” Dan said, his voice softer. “I’m sure she’ll be glad to see you. I mean, you know, if she recognizes you.”

  Ah, Dan the optimist.

  I inhaled and walked into the hospital room, and stood, rock-still, just inside the door.

  A few inhale-exhale, cool, clean waterfall visualizations later, a Hispanic woman slipped beside me, approached my mother, and spoke something too low for me to hear to another woman standing beside the still life-form in the bed. Then the Hispanic woman put a cake on the bedside stand, knelt, seemed to pray, stood up, made the sign of the cross, and left.

  “You can go all the way in,” Dan said, reappearing in the doorway.

  Step by small step, I tiptoed into the room. It was filled with flowers, and this surprised me. Who sends flowers to a comatose crazy woman who shoots a man?

  As Dan took my hand and squeezed it, I peered into the bed. The woman there bore some resemblance to the mother I remembered, except much smaller. She was hooked up to an IV, with a bag feeding something pale yellow and liquid into her veins. Probably a banana bag, I thought, the fluid used to rehydrate drunks, filled with vitamins and dextrose.

  My mother lay very still. Her eyes were closed, and her color had a gray tinge that didn’t look good.

  But it was her jaw and mouth I noticed most. Well, that and the fact there were cake crumbs all over her bed. I brushed these off as I peered closer at her face.

  Definitely bruises. Fresh bruises. I leaned even closer over her face and squinted at the blue and purple marks.

  “Why is her mouth so bruised up?” I asked, rising up and turning back to Dan.

  “Say something to her,” Dan said. “Greet your mother.”

  I glared at him a moment, then spun around and stared at my mother. And said, “So.”

  “Greet her properly. Maybe she can hear you,” he said, the sound of reproach clear enough.

  Great, first Eleanor, now my own brother was fussing at me.

  “Good evening…Mo—Mother.” I strangled a bit over that Mother. No way I could say Mom.

  Then I put my finger under her head, moved her chin up as gently as I could, and looked under it. More bruises. In exactly the same spots one might have put one’s fingers if, say, one were trying to force her mouth open. Or hold it shut.

  “What do you know about these bruises?” I asked.

  “Not so much, really. The hospital folks all say she came in with those bruises. The police chief, he’s not so sure.”

  I looked back at Willette, who slept without moving. “What’s wrong with her?” I mean, you know, besides the fact she had been basically crazy as far back as I could remember.

  “She’s doped up. The doctor, Dr. Weinstein, he’s keeping her full a Thorazine. She was a real sight when they first carried her in, kept fighting everybody and yelling,” the woman standing by the bed said. “Didn’t want to be taken out of that house of hers.”

  For the first time, I turned and really looked at this woman. She was almost plump, broad-shouldered, brightly dressed, and pretty in an everyday sort of way. For a moment I wondered how she got all those tiny beads into her black hair, and then I realized I knew her.

  “Lilly Belle Rose,” Dan started to say, “this is—”

  “Shalonda,” I shouted out. “Shalonda Rivers.”

  Shalonda jumped over and gave me a tight hug, stepped back, and said, “Well, white girl, you sure grew up hot.”

  We started giggling.

  Shalonda and I had spent a large part of our high school experience in after-school detention, because, for reasons the guidance counselor never could pinpoint, neither of us could ever do what we were told to do. I escaped expulsion only because my father was the school board’s lawyer, and that, in turn, meant no matter what Delvon or I did, we didn’t get expelled. Shalonda never got kicked out of school because she was a gold-star swimmer and everybody figured her for a top-college scholarship and an Olympic medal. She was that good. We could have burned down the gym and still graduated.

  What we’d had in common, besides a marked tendency to get into trouble, was a shared crush on Big Lonnie Ledbetter, the boy who was going to go somewhere, a strapping blond with the look of a surfer about him, and a heck of a flirt, who sang a good country tenor and played a seriously mean guitar. In high school, he was always putting on shows attended mostly by the girls, and we all figured him for the next Vince Gill, the country tenor that simultaneously made three generations of women swoon.

  Big Lonnie’d actually had a kind of a hit once. Something about lost love and a bad hand of cards. Long before the radio even started playing Big Lonnie’s only hit, I had let go of my crush, had shed it as quick as I’d shed my hometown. But he’d come crashing back into my life, albeit not in person, when he purchased my grandmother’s house from my mother a few years back. I hadn’t been happy about that then, and, truth be told, I was still pissed that my own flesh and blood would sell that house, sacred as it was to Dan, Delvon, and me, to Lonnie when Delvon and I had done our damnedest to buy it.

  Yeah, Willette’s betrayal on that still stung. But right now there were more important things to ponder than losing that house. Like the four hundred questions hatching in my head about Willette, and catching up with Shalonda.

  “You ever get that gold medal?” I asked, though surely Dan or Delvon would have mentioned this, or I’d have read about it in the papers.

  “Naw. Stuff happens, you know? Now come say something nice to your momma. Your brother’s right, she may be out cold, but I just bet you she can hear you anyway, down deep where it counts.”

  With Shalonda tugging at me, I approached my mother again, bent down over her and said, “Hello…Mother.” My mouth dried up. I swallowed, and bit my tongue. And, finally, got this out: “This is Lilly. How are you?”

  Naturally, she didn’t move or respond.

  “Well, that’s all right,” Dan said. “She’ll come around. You wait and see, she’ll be up and glad to see you in no time.”

  Oh, s
weet Danny and his good soul, I thought. After all this time, still thinking Willette would be glad to see me. Warm and fuzzy with my thoughts of my gentle older brother, I started to reach out to Willette, but I felt the first warning nudge of anxiety kicking up inside my stomach.

  Making myself breathe deeply, I backed up to the center of the room where there was the most air space, and tried to distract my worry by playing twenty questions. “So, Shalonda, you work here at the hospital, or what?”

  “Naw. Your sister-in-law and me are big buddies now, you know that? We got close volunteering at the library’s literacy program. So I’m sitting with your momma to help out, her being under arrest and real upset and confused ’bout where she’s at. Ever time they let her wake up out of that Thorazine mess, she has a huge fit. Thought maybe I’d be a comfort to her if I was here next time she wakes up.”

  A comfort to Willette? That suggested a relationship. Though Shalonda and I had hung out at my grandparents’ house a lot, I didn’t remember Shalonda ever actually being inside Willette’s house. Couldn’t even remember if she’d met my mother. “You know Willette?”

  “Nobody knows her, you know? But I’m a social worker and I got me some tricks.”

  “A social worker?”

  “Yeah, but I’m kinda between things right now.” She looked away from me when she said that, then turned back. “Got Rodney outside the door so she can’t get up and run off.” Shalonda giggled again, and then apparently she thought maybe she should not have, because she said “I’m sorry,” and hushed.

  “I don’t think she’s going to run away,” I said.

  “Well, she is under arrest. Demetrious thought having a guard would be better than handcuffing her to the bed.”

  “Demetrious?”

  “Oh, he’s the police chief,” Dan said.