“Here,” Allie said and handed something to Olivia. “You have to use tokens. You can have the rest of mine.”
Olivia opened her hand and saw four shiny, golden tokens. She giggled again as she rushed right over to the open lane and dropped two tokens into the slot.
“Bah da da da da de dum! Charge!” Olivia sang as nine heavy, wooden balls released and slid down the chute. She picked the first one up and turned to Clete and Allie. “Prepare to be amazed!”
Now, it should be noted that unlike bowling or soccer or volleyball, which are all games of chance and dumb luck, skee-ball is a game of skill, and Olivia was gifted with massive amounts of skee-ball skill. When she told Clete that she would be Olympic champion of skee-ball, she wasn’t exaggerating, and she proved it with a score of 750. Allie’s eyes bugged out as the tickets spewed out of the machine as if it were possessed by the devil. Olivia ripped the rope of tickets off and handed them over to Allie, then slid the last two tokens into the slot. Her next game was only 695, but she didn’t care. She was in the zone.
Like a twitchy junkie needing a fix, Olivia demanded, “Gimme more tokens!”
Clete pulled five dollars out of his wallet and gave it to Allie who rushed over to the token machine and returned to Olivia with a plastic cup full of golden coins. Olivia turned the golden coins into a mile-long purple snake of tickets, which Allie then carted off to the ticket counter. The attendant traded her tickets for a handful of scented erasers, some plastic bracelets, a Be-Dazzled coin purse, a stuffed monkey, six lollypops, and a poster of the boy band Allie adored. Allie immediately unrolled the poster and drew a heart around the face of Nick Jonas with the magic marker she carried in her back pocket at all times just in case he happened to be in Juliette, Nebraska, shopping at the Walmart or eating a Big Mac at McDonald’s and he wanted to give her his autograph.
Allie handed all of her goodies off to Clete and linked arms with Olivia, declaring them best friends forever. The two skipped off through the parking lot and splashed in the puddles. Clete grumbled words that didn’t belong in idle conversation under his breath as he tagged along behind them. Allie fell asleep in the backseat as they drove through Juliette, headed towards South.
Olivia watched Clete watch Allie through the rearview mirror. “She’s a cute kid.”
“Yeah, she is,” he agreed. His grip tightened on the steering wheel, his jaw clenched hard as he turned to look at Olivia. “And she’s a good kid who shouldn’t have had to witness what she did tonight. My daughter is off-limits to you from now on.”
“Why?” Olivia cried out, completely floored. Clete’s words smacked like a slap to the face, and they hurt. “What did I do?”
“What did you do?” he asked in dumbfounded disbelief over her stupidity. “You got fall-down drunk and lost control of yourself, and your temper, in front of a seven-year-old kid!”
“But, I—”
“And Mitch?” Clete practically spat out the name. “I’ve known that jerk for a long time now. He’s not a nice guy, and he’s not someone I want my daughter around.”
“I’m not drunk,” Olivia said. “And what’s wrong with Mitch?”
“You are drunk. You’re just too drunk to realize it. And Mitch was born an asshole and will always be an asshole,” Clete said without explaining anything.
“You guys didn’t act like you knew each other when you showed up at the bowling alley,” Olivia said.
“Oh, I doubt Mitch remembers me, but I sure remember him.”
“What, did you guys grow up together, or something? He bully you at school and steal your lunch money?”
“No,” Clete answered but said no more.
“Steal your girlfriend?”
“We’re not talking about this right now, Olivia. Not with Allie in the car.”
“Whatever.” Olivia pressed her body against the car door and stared out the window at the neon lights of Juliette’s main drag reflecting in rain puddles as they drove by. She was upset and close to tears, and didn’t want to be trapped in the car with Clete anymore, but she didn’t want to walk home either, so she kept her mouth shut and sulked.
When Clete pulled up to Olivia’s trailer, Eugene was sitting on her deck, smoking and knee-bouncing, waiting for her. The rain had stopped but the trees overhead sprinkled leftover rain drops down upon him, spotting his glasses and peppering his grey, one-pocket tee with water spots that spread like black ink as they soaked into the cotton fabric. Chester was nowhere to be seen, which meant he had probably run off again. Eugene confirmed her suspicion as soon as she stepped onto the porch.
“He’ll come home, Eugene,” she assured him with a weary sigh. “He always does.”
Olivia asked if he wanted to come in for awhile. He said nothing in return, like always, but he did watch out of the corner of his eye as Clete stepped out of his squad car and approached the deck.
“Good evening, sir,” Clete said with a nod of greeting. He did not offer his hand to shake Eugene’s. Instead, he pulled a card from his wallet and held it out to Olivia. “I want you to keep my phone number on you at all times. You can call anytime, day or night, and I’ll be here in an instant.”
“Why would I want to call you?”
“Olivia, please take the card.”
“Bite me, asshole.” Olivia went inside without taking the card and slammed the door in his face. If she never laid eyes on Officer Cletus Wade ever again, that would be too soon for her.
* * *
Mitch stayed pissy at Olivia and wouldn’t return her calls or texts or answer his door when she knocked. Izzie’s house was overrun by kids 24/7 and the sheer volume of it made Olivia’s ears bleed. She wasn’t talking to Clete, and she was still avoiding Kitty’s and George like the plague. So, with nowhere else to go, Olivia started hanging out at the Walmart again after work.
Afraid they had video footage of her stealing their scooter and were eagerly waiting for her to walk through the doors to pounce on her and send her to the pokey, she was cautious the first time she went. But when alarms didn’t sound and the ninety-five-year-old security guard didn’t hogtie her in the aisle, she got her confidence back. She did her normal, initial purchase scoot-around, and then did her follow-up laps with vodka and Dr. Pepper in her McDonald’s cup as though it were any other day.
She was on her third lap without seeing Louise and figured the old woman had quit coming to the Walmart altogether when Olivia came across her in the Garden Center. Louise’s scooter was parked next to one of the display patio sets and she was lounging on a lounge chair, wearing a big floppy sunhat, drinking out of a pink, plastic martini cup, playing Sudoku. Louise was brazen in her rebellion, and Olivia was highly impressed.
“Well, Olivia, my child! I haven’t seen you in ages! How in the world are you, my dear?” Louise asked in a faintly-southern accent.
Olivia paused for a moment, confused. She had just seen Louise not even two hours earlier at Garretson. Of course, she hadn’t seen the off-work Louise in a long time, so maybe that was the personality who was talking to her.
“I’ve been good,” Olivia said, and scooted over to her.
“Don’t park on the carpet, child,” Louise scolded. Olivia immediately reversed off the outdoor rug and climbed off the scooter. Louise picked up a plate of Vienna Fingers off of the end table beside her. “Cookie?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Olivia gingerly took the top cookie, careful not to disturb the pretty, pinwheel display, then sat in the chair next to Louise. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”
“How sweet of you to notice.”
Louise did have a nice set-up. She had re-arranged the furniture in the display, and added rugs, strings of lights and an oscillating fan. Giant bushels of fall mums and pansies were scattered about in a way that looked haphazard but homey. Patsy Cline sang softly on a Bose CD player, and the area smelled faintly of jasmine and wild orchid, thanks to the Glade Plug-In powered by the extension cord tucked under the
rug. She had a stainless steel shaker and a bucket of ice on a silver tray standing at the ready for another martini, the pinwheel of cookies, an assortment of cheese chunks, and a pretty bowl of fruit salad in case she got hungry.
Louise sure knew how to crash the Walmart.
“So, what have you been up to since our last visit?” Louise asked.
“Umm…” Olivia hummed as she thought about what to tell Louise.
“Don’t be shy, now. This is just girl talk. You can tell me anything and it will stay right here, under the umbrella.”
Olivia looked up at the blue and white striped patio umbrella that Louise had set up to shade herself from the harsh, southern fluorescent lights. It did make the area feel intimate.
“Well… I met my sister,” Olivia said.
“I never knew you had a sister!”
“Neither did I.” Olivia grimaced at the memory of Toni Tennille Dinwiddie. “She’s a bitch.”
“Olivia,” Louise scolded.
“Sorry, but it’s the truth.”
“Why is she not a nice woman?”
“Well…” Olivia paused, and then figured, what the hell, why not, and dove into the tale of her adventures at the Omaha Barnes and Noble. Uncharacteristically for Olivia, she didn’t expand on or exaggerate anything—except she might have made Clete come across as a money-hungry louse who wanted her to collect her inheritance so he could share in her riches—but he deserved it, the prick.
Louise listened carefully and nodded and clicked her tongue and tsk-tsked in all the appropriate places, then said, “Well, it sounds like you did the right thing. It’s unfortunate how despicable family can be. I have a sister of my own who is a bit uppity. Mean as a snake that one. Ooh, chile! That girl… Uh, uh, uh, I tell you…. We don’t speak much, just at Christmas and the likes, and that’s fine by me.”
“Well, I don’t plan on seeing her ever again, at Christmas or any other holiday. She can take her inheritance and shove it up her pie hole,” Olivia said. She wanted to say asshole, but she didn’t want Louise to scold her again.
“How did your parents become acquainted?”
Olivia shrugged. “No clue.”
“Your daddy never tole you the story of your conception?”
“No!” Olivia laughed, trying to imagine Eugene telling that story. He was uncomfortable just saying hello.
“Well, I was conceived under a cloudless sky behind the bleachers of Juliette High,” Louise said in a musical voice with a far-away look in her eyes and a dreamy smile on her face. “It was 1957 and Gogi Grant was singing ‘The Wayward Wind’ on the transistor radio. My daddy was a senior and the local football hero, and my mammy a starry-eyed freshman. They snuck onto the football field during lunch for a little tête-à-tête, and the condom broke. They weren’t real reliable back then, you know? When my granddaddy found out—ooh!— he about kilt my daddy, but my mammy calmed him down like she was good at doin’, and her and my daddy got married in front of the judge the very next day. I was born seven months later. My sister Edna came next, then Martha, then Rita—the uppity one—then finally daddy got his boy, Thomas. We called him Tommy, and he died of the pneumonia when he was six… Daddy never was the same after that… He’d get t’ drinkin’ and get mean…”
Louise trailed off and her eyes drifted away from Olivia, pulling inward. After a pause to recollect, she took a slow, deep breath then forced a smile on her face and turned back to Olivia. “What is your daddy like?”
“Eugene? Well… he’s…” Olivia struggled to find the right words. She usually didn’t have to explain Eugene. Everyone just knew him. “Don’t you know Eugene?”
“Well, sure, I know Eugene. I was just wondering what it was like to be his daughter,” Louise said.
Olivia shrugged. “What you see is who he is. He’s no different at home than he is around town.”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s a difference.”
“Not really. He’s quiet and keeps to himself. His kitchen and living room are full of parts and pieces of toasters and blenders and washing machines. There’s boxes and boxes of them everywhere. He hasn’t dusted or vacuumed ever in his entire life, and every corner of the trailer is full of cobwebs and dust bunnies the size of Gizmo. The one time I tried to clean he kinda flipped out in his own way, which means he went for a walk. I was maybe six or seven, and he was gone for a week. I put everything back where it was and then he came home. He’s very particular about his bedroom, though. He makes his twin-sized bed every morning as soon as he wakes up, making sure the sheets are tucked tight. His clothes are all lined up according to color and he folds his underwear… He can’t cook so we lived on whatever you could make in the microwave… He cuts his own hair once a year… I don’t know… what more do you want to know?”
“I was looking more for what you felt like growing up,” Louise said. She poured another martini for herself and handed Olivia a hunk of cheese.
“What I felt like?”
“Yes.”
“Umm… I felt… fine? Like a girl?”
“Were you happy or sad?”
“I don’t know. I guess…. I just was… I don’t know…”
“Did you have friends over?”
“No. I mean, not until I met Izzie. But even she never stayed over. I always went to her house. Sometimes she would play outside at my house, but her mom wouldn’t let her go in the trailer.”
“Why not?”
“I think her mom was afraid Eugene was a perv or something. Everybody thinks that when they first meet him, and it pisses me off because it couldn’t be further from the truth. Eugene doesn’t touch people and he doesn’t like to be touched. He gets nervous if someone sits too close to him, or stares at him, or gets too chatty—which is another reason Izzie could never come in the trailer. She never shuts up.”
Louise sipped her martini. “So, you don’t know the story of your conception, but do you know the story of how your parents met?”
“Nope. For all I know I was an alien baby that fell out of the sky and hit Eugene on the head.” It was what she’d told people when she was a kid, after the story of being an ex-con got to be too pathetic to share.
“Oh,” Louise said, clearly disappointed.
“Look, all I know is my mom was in jail when I was born and she dumped me on him and never came back to get me, and I hate her and I am ecstatic to know that she’s dead. Eugene might be weird, but he raised me when no one else would. He’s my dad. Ok?”
“Ok,” Louise said with a smile.
They settled into their chairs and sipped martinis and nibbled on cheese and Vienna Fingers until the night crew signaled it was time to skedaddle before the day crew started to trickle in.
Chapter Eleven
Turns out, Mitch wasn’t avoiding Olivia. He was just a bit preoccupied with the fact that he was in jail. He wasn’t a gun-runner for the mob, like Olivia suspected, but his business dealings for the auction company he was employed by were a bit on the shady side. He had been arrested on suspicion of possession of stolen goods, which was funny because the auction company he worked for specialized in farm equipment. It’s a little hard to squeeze a John Deere tractor into a five-hundred square-foot apartment.
But, apparently, Mitch had a few storage units on the outskirts of Juliette in his name, and inside those storage units was a heck of a lot of copper wire—the same copper wire that had been stripped out of a heck of a lot of irrigation pivots in the tri-county area. Mitch pleaded stupidity and gullibility, and might have mentioned the possible whereabouts of a particular missing T-Series John Deere combine, and the judge eventually let him go.
Mitch showed up on Olivia’s doorstep angry as a bear, smelling of piss and prison, and Olivia pointed him to the shower. After she fed him a microwaved Hungry Man meal and a half a box of Ho-Ho’s, and he finished off a few beers, he was feeling more like himself and wanting something else he hadn’t had since they’d thrown him in the pokey. He shoved the Hungry Man
tray aside and made love to her right there on the kitchen table. Then he took her to the bedroom and made love to her again.
As they lay in bed afterward, Mitch held Olivia close and proposed to her.
“What?” Olivia pushed away from him. “Why the hell would you want to marry me?”
“Because I love you,” he said as if it were obvious.
“So?”
“So? What do you mean ‘so’? I fucking tell you I love you and you say ‘so’? Well, fuck you then.”
He shoved her across the bed and kicked his way out of the twisted sheets. Olivia grabbed after him, but he shoved her again and bent to pick up his jeans.
“Mitch!” Olivia jumped off the bed and lunged at him, landing on his back. Mitch lost his balance and pitched forward, hitting his chin on the corner of the dresser on the way down. They ended up a tangled, naked mess on the floor, him hollering out in pain and his chin bleeding like a stuck pig, but Olivia kissed him and soothed him and stroked him and said “Yes!” to his proposal.
They made love right there on the floor and then again in the shower after they washed off the blood, and Olivia was happier than she had ever been in her entire life… until she told Eugene her happy news the next morning.
“Eugene, me and Mitch are gettin’ married.”
He was sitting in his kitchen with his glasses pulled low on his nose, a soldering iron in one hand and a roll of flux in the other as he worked on repairing a vacuum cleaner. As soon as she said the word “married,” he froze.
“We’re thinking a spring wedding, maybe in the park over by the pond, or up along the river somewhere. I don’t want to get married in the Pizza Hut like Mel did. I want to get married out in the open, with nothing standing between us and God except air—Oh, crap! Speaking of Mel, I should probably tell her I want a divorce. Man, I hope she doesn’t take it too hard. It’s not like we were in love or anything, but still, you know…”
Olivia rambled and Eugene simply sat there, bug-eyed. It wasn’t unusual for Eugene to play statue when he was upset, so it took Olivia a minute to realize he wasn’t breathing. And then it took her another minute to realize he wasn’t breathing because he couldn’t breathe.
Olivia Page 17
