The Good Daughter

by Alexandra Burt

  I don’t recall the reason why we left but it was in the middle of the night, my mother’s preferred time to get away. Always at night, always just packing what we could fit in the backseat and trunk of whatever shabby car she owned at the time. I remember my mother yelling at me in the car but I don’t remember what I had done. I shift the responsibility to her—I was eight, what could I have possibly done?—and there’s this explicit conviction that she is to blame. There’s an accumulation of moments, definitions from my encyclopedia, adjectives defining me, nouns describing my world. Even with all I now remember, I’ve grown to hate the blanks I’m unable to fill in, the riddles I can’t seem to solve. Being denied that knowledge magnifies the crimes she has committed against me.

  Sometimes I stand next to her, in the barn, or at a random spot on the property, and she looks at me as if I’m supposed to read her mind. Don’t you see what I see? her eyes seem to say. How come you’re so blind?, and I know she’s getting at something, but I’m not sure what.

  Looking at her now, in her sixties, on this farm, me no longer a child, I see her for what she is: I believe that my mother is the biggest perpetrator of them all and it’s going to take a lot to convince me otherwise.

  There’s no more time to waste. One day I confront her head-on.

  “You used to call me Pet. What was that all about?”

  Twenty-three

  MEMPHIS

  MEMPHIS watches Dahlia wipe the counters, continuously rubbing the same spot, going over it again and again, as if there’s some sticky residue refusing to be removed. Then she moves on to the floor using the same approach. Memphis often wonders how much Dahlia remembers about their lives, leaving everything behind, clothes and toys, the only constant the old used cars and a book she used to carry around. I know her so well, Memphis thinks. Know her better than she knows herself, even though Dahlia is very cautious with exposing her emotions, giving nothing much or nothing at all away, as if she’s playing cards and not permitting anyone to see her hand.

  They had left Texas behind, then New Mexico. Nevada was a mere ghost, and then they ended up in California. But life was complicated for a single woman toting a little pretty girl behind her. Men want what they want and they take it too, no doubt about that.

  They went to Wichita Falls first—Memphis remembers the tiny room above the gas station—where all Memphis tried to do was keep them fed and a roof over their heads, but things became difficult; she couldn’t enroll Dahlia in school without a birth certificate and had to buy old school books at thrift stores, but Dahlia turned out smarter than most kids her age.

  There was Elvin Herring, a man she thought might be the answer. His name did him justice; sweaty hands like a dead cold fish and even now Memphis shudders at the thought of ever having allowed him to touch her. First he pretended he wanted to help because no woman should be all alone but then the tables turned and all he wanted was to touch her body and use her. Memphis never knew Elvin had a wife, never knew he had three children, one of them slow, unable to feed himself or go to the bathroom. There were times he’d go home and shower and come back to the gas station—it was busy during the day but still off the beaten path and hardly any cars came through at night—and he’d bring food and wine and he’d put the sign up for folks to ring for service and they’d eat and drink cheap wine out of cloudy and chipped glasses.

  Memphis wasn’t opposed to being with Herring, he was kind and generous on payday, but his wife showed up in the middle of the night with his son, a boy with eyes wandering aimlessly about, and that was too much for her. She’d seen Herring’s oldest boy in a wheelchair once in the garage and assumed he was merely watching him for someone. Elvin had rolled him into the back room at some point, and the boy sat there, his hands flailing, his foot stomping, drool dripping off his chin. Memphis doesn’t want to think of Herring and the boy and his matronly mother and the other children, and she absolved herself of guilt; she didn’t know he was married and even if she had known, she did what she had to do.

  It’s hard for Memphis to know where to start, where to begin, so Dahlia can understand.

  Dahlia found the deed to the farm and began to ask questions, and maybe that’s the way to go, not to offer any stories, just tell the truth, but Dahlia asks all the wrong questions, about trailers and hotels, schools and coming back to Aurora—that seems to be at the forefront of it all, Why did we come back here?—but Dahlia doesn’t know it was all done by then. Anything between leaving Aurora and returning was just the product of what came before. What happened before was what pushed on Memphis’ heart, deepening the crack.

  One day they walked the property and ended up in the barn, where Dahlia commented on the well and the plumber, money they didn’t have, and other things unimportant.

  Look around you, Memphis wanted to say, see this barn? Forget the well, forget the deed, forget all of this, just smell this barn. Doesn’t the smell hit you in your gut? When you lugged open this damn door with its worn-out hinges that creak like the moaning of old tired women, don’t you smell the straw? The stuffy musk of animal fur and old, dried-out dung and droppings, and the sharp scent of oily metal and iron machinery? Allow your eyes to get used to the darkness of this barn, allow your sight to compensate for the lack of light, then take in the wooden stalls. Do you hear the barn moan, do you see the insidious process of rot? Look below, Dahlia, look below, and don’t judge its surface. See the ghosts, Dahlia, do you see them? They are right there.

  Why did you call me Pet?

  In the grand scheme of things Pet means nothing but it’s what Dahlia focuses on. She should ask questions that are more important. Memphis tells herself to cut Dahlia some slack. There are all these paths but there’s no map.

  There was the storm. That’s when it all began and that’s where Memphis is going to start. With the storm.

  It’s as good a place to start as any.

  Twenty-four

  DAHLIA

  YOU used to call me Pet. What was that all about?”

  My mother makes a halfhearted attempt at smiling by pulling her lips up but it comes across as distorted and slanted, like she just came from the dentist and half of her face is still paralyzed.

  “Forget the name,” she finally says and folds her hands in her lap after she angrily swipes at some gnats swirling around her. “Forget your name and my name and forget the deed.”

  “What is it you’re not telling me?”

  My mother has an aura of defiance about her, I can feel it coming through her pores. I give up on the counters and stab the mop in the bucket of sudsy water. I feel anger rise inside of me. I move the tattered old rug and begin to clean the foyer floor with wide irritated swipes. From her chair at the kitchen table she watches me.

  “After I finish here, we are going to walk the property,” I say. I watch her closely—there’s the trembling of her hands, the rapid blinking with her eyes, but other than that she has her emotions under control.

  “There’s not much to it,” she says, and I detect a sharpness in her voice.

  “According to the deed, it’s forty-eight acres of land. That’s quite a bit of property.”

  “Never concerned myself with that,” she says and refolds the laundry I brought home from the Lark, where I wash all our clothes. Her movements are severe and angry.

  “Why have you never told me about this place?” I ask and look sternly at her, making it known that I will be relentless in hearing the story of how she came to own a farm with almost fifty acres that she’s never mentioned to me.

  We go back and forth—my asking and her not answering by now a delicate dance we perform, yet she refuses to even get up off her chair.

  “I have so many questions and I get it, that was your life and all, but I feel I’m part of a story you’re not telling and I . . .” I pause and take a deep breath in. “I kind of have the right to know.”

>   “You have questions?” My mother eventually says, tinged in sarcasm. “Let me tell you a story.”

  I see this moment almost like my last chance, an opportunity that will never return. I must weigh my options, must make a wise decision, or she’ll never get this close again.

  “A story?”

  “Before I begin, I have a question for you,” she says. Her eyes scamper, something only apparent if you know her. “Have you ever been in the eye of a storm?”

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, 1991

  The Gateway Motel is our new home. It’s a horseshoe-shaped building that has managed to retain its presence between a pawn shop and a block of apartments. Three floors, each one stacked on top of one another like toy blocks, each one with a view of the courtyard. The backside of the hotel is windowless and hides the Dumpsters and an employee parking lot made of dirt.

  When I wake, dust swirls in the white morning light. A donut shop is a short walk away and the air smells of powdered sugar and sweet pastries.

  It takes me less than fifteen minutes to put my few belongings in the wobbly dresser. The drawers stick and only slide open after I wiggle the worn knobs just right and pull at them simultaneously. This move was hasty yet again, and some of my things have been left behind. Some of them I’ve had as long as I can remember. I’m ten and I don’t want to cry like a baby. Mom gets mad when I complain.

  The bathroom is grimy, the sink is chipped, and the Formica is peeling off the vanity.

  “What does Gateway mean?” I ask to distract myself.

  “It’s just a name.”

  “Like Camelot? The trailer park where we lived before?”

  My mother doesn’t answer as she swirls the mouthwash from the left to the right side of her mouth.

  “Why did you pick this hotel?” I ask her.

  I’ve been wondering why ever since we arrived a couple of days ago, after a long drive from Arizona in another middle-of-the-night operation I didn’t understand. Every time I ask her why we always leave, she tells me it’s about paperwork. Out of all the hotels and motels I have seen as we drove down Las Vegas Boulevard, the Gateway Motel was by far the most run-down. And it is just about at the farthest end of the city it seems like.

  “It’s out of the way,” my mother said, “and they were hiring.”

  I’m old enough to know that out of the way is code for I don’t have to look over my shoulder and they were hiring means no one asks questions.

  It’s a live-in position, my mother says, and explains that we live in one of the rooms and she works the front desk and supervises the maids. “And they are flexible,” she adds.

  Flexible as in she’ll get paid off the books. Everything we do is off the books. Free clinics, Sunday meals in church basements, trips to food kitchens. Those are good off the books. Bad off the books is the fact that I still haven’t been to school. When I ask her about it, she tends to slow down her speech as if I can’t comprehend words at normal speed.

  “Paperwork,” she says. “We don’t have any of what they’re asking for. They’re making it near impossible if you don’t have the right paperwork.”

  I wonder how other mothers have the right paperwork. Where do they get what they need and how come we don’t? We’ve been to offices and she tried to get the paperwork straightened out but it never works. At those offices where it takes hours sitting around and waiting and mere seconds to be turned away once you go into rooms with numbers. Below the numbers are little knobby dots and I close my eyes and run my fingers over them, attempting to train myself to discern between the arrangements of the dots and their meanings, but I can hardly feel a difference. Every time a door opens I jerk and look around as if I’m doing something wrong.

  “What’s that mean,” I ask, “not having the right paperwork?”

  “Be a good girl, don’t ask so many questions.” A stern look, raised eyebrows.

  I’ve been difficult lately, according to my mother; I ask too many questions and she’s run out of answers a long time ago and something has got to give. While she curls her hair, I sit on the edge of the tub and I inspect my fingernails, which, unlike my mother’s, never turn out perfect with my frayed cuticles and uneven nails, and she never has the time to show me how to do it properly.

  I’m leaning backward and pretend to fall into the tub, which causes my mother to gasp and then yelp as the curling iron touches the nape of her neck. She’s in her Marilyn phase, short hair dyed platinum blond, red lipstick, and thick eyeliner. It might be a Vegas thing. I’m not sure about that.

  “You never got me that book you promised me.”

  My voice is strict, almost as if I’m the parent scolding her for ignoring her chores. I’ve been turning the tables on her lately, and that’s when she began to call me difficult. I like being difficult—it’s my new thing.

  “What book?” she asks.

  “The one with all the answers.”

  She looks at me, puzzled, then her face relaxes. “Will you stop bothering me if I get you that book?”

  “Sure will.”

  Later, using the free local call feature, she makes a few phone calls asking if they have what she calls The Columbia. I watch her, intrigued and speechless. She looks beautiful with her blond hair and red lips, completely different from the long brown hair and bangs. It was short before, but never blond. “Would you believe it,” she says after about ten calls. “That pawn shop right down the street has one.”

  I’ve lived around pawn shops before and they seem to be nothing more but dusty stores with an odd array of products, like Goodwill. They all disappear between liquor shops and motels and diners with steamy windows and alleys leading to brick walls. But much more expensive. Why a book with all the answers would be tucked away in a pawn shop is beyond me but it seems as if soon is going to be now and so I don’t ask any more questions.

  “Let me see,” she says and checks her watch. She tips her head to the left and rubs lotion into her hands, then she runs her hands through her hair. It’s her trademark, Xia Xiang, a beige bottle with a red flower. “I still have time.”

  As I wait for her to return from the pawn shop, my hands pull the plastic curtain taut as I peek through the gap—something I’m not supposed to do but do all the time—I see her walk up the courtyard with a bag that seems heavy, making her shoulder droop as she walks.

  The first word I’m going to look up is paperwork.

  Twenty-five

  MEMPHIS

  MEMPHIS watches Dahlia mop the foyer floor, dragging the mop back and forth. She’s been going over the same stain again and again but it seems to only deepen. Memphis is mesmerized by the storm Dahlia makes every time she pulls the cotton fibers out of the bucket, her movement creating a twister on the surface of the water. Dahlia hasn’t said anything in a while—she’s stewing, Memphis can tell.

  “Have you ever been in a storm, one of those that almost rip the roof off a house?” Memphis asks again and Dahlia looks up.

  “I’ve seen storms, of course I have.”

  “Did they have a name?”

  “What do you mean? A name?” Dahlia gives up on the stain in the foyer, pulling the bucket into the kitchen.

  “The big storms have names. Back before you were born, all storms were named after women. Did you know that?”

  Dahlia dumps the dirty water down the drain and joins her mother at the kitchen table.

  “Now they have male and female names. Women can cause a lot of trouble, did you know that?”

  Memphis watches Dahlia look at her hands, reddish and scaly as if she’d dipped them in some sort of chemical; the hands of a woman who cleans for a living. “I assume so.”

  “That stain over there”—Memphis points at the foyer—“do you know what that is?”

  “I have no idea. I assume someone spilled something. Maybe the shellac stain soaked in
; I’m not sure.”

  “It’s not a spill. Not a wood stain either.”

  “I guess it’s there for the long haul, then, because it’s not going anywhere.”

  “He had just put in the new floor. Cherry. He had sanded it and cleaned it to get rid of all the dust. Then he mopped it to raise the grain and he was supposed to apply the stain with an old rag the next morning. But he never got around to that.” Memphis sits in silence, reaches for her mug. She wraps her fingers around it, then realizes it has long cooled.

  She feels Dahlia stare at her, can tell she doesn’t know what to make of this. Doesn’t know who he is, can’t comprehend how Memphis just went from storms named after women and stains to he.

  “She had such an odd name,” Memphis continues. “I never understood who gave her such a strange name. I’d never heard it before, nor have I heard that name since.” She pauses, then adds, “Tain Fish.”

  “The name of the storm?”

  “Not the storm. The woman.”

  “What woman?” Dahlia’s eyes widen. Memphis can tell she’s worried that this is the moment her mother will go to the other side and remain there.

  “The woman who came during the storm, back when they still named the storms after women. If you ask me, that was only right. Women have a lot of power.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Memphis chuckles, then gets up. With a clink she puts her mug in the sink.

  “Stop bothering with the stain, okay? It won’t come out. It’s deep in the grain, it can’t be removed short of refinishing the floor. She bled all over it before he stained it.”