by Pamela Morsi
Behind the low counter that served as a receptionist’s desk, a heavyset brunette woman of indeterminate age was talking on the phone. When the bell heralded Ellen’s arrival, the woman looked up immediately and smiled.
“Can I help you?” she asked eagerly.
“I’m Ellen Jameson. I have an appointment with Mr. Roper.”
The brunette hung up the phone and immediately rose to her feet, offering her hand to Ellen.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m so sorry I was on the phone. I’ve got a friend going in for tests tomorrow. She’s had diarrhea for a month. She’s tried all the stuff over the counter and nothing works. I told her, hey, diarrhea is your friend, but then I’m speaking as a woman who’s been constipated for thirty years. I’m Yolanda Ruiz, by the way. And you’re Ellen. You don’t mind if I call you Ellen?”
“That’s fine, I—”
“For crying out loud, Yolanda,” a voice called out from the back. “Are you going to talk the woman to death or bring her back here for an interview?”
“Go on back,” Yolanda instructed Ellen. “Second office on the left.”
“Mr. Roper, I’m here about the accounts supervisor position,” Ellen said when she entered the office, and extended her hand across the desk.
“Have a seat, have a seat,” he offered, shaking her hand. “And call me Max. Everybody does.”
Ellen seated herself on the edge of the chair, back straight and chin up. Bravely she put a determined smile on her face as Max looked over her résumé. She knew she didn’t look good on paper. That’s what the woman at the state unemployment office had told her. But she needed this job—desperately. Just thinking about her financial situation made her stomach tighten miserably. Vomiting during a job interview was never a good thing.
Also by Pamela Morsi
DOING GOOD
PAMELA MORSI
LETTING GO
For my mother, Zoe Sylvester,
who has patiently read all my previous stories
where the moms are dead. Finally here’s one
where Mom lives happily ever after.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
1
“Face it, Mom,” Amber Jameson said, gazing not at her mother but at the road in front of her. “Your life has been like macaroni salad, white, bland and ordinary. It’s just that lately, your mayonnaise has begun to go bad.”
Ellen Jameson glanced up from the newspaper section of the classified to eye her twenty-one-year-old daughter disapprovingly.
“There is nothing whatsoever wrong with my mayonnaise,” she insisted. “We’re simply moving closer to downtown because I’m hoping to get a job there.”
Amber rolled her eyes. “Denial is more than a river in Egypt,” she said.
“Denial is a river in e-jepp!” three-year-old Jet parroted from the back seat.
Ellen ignored Amber and turned her attention to the child. The sight of her little dark-complexioned, curly haired granddaughter never failed to lighten her heart.
“Are you learning geography?” she asked Jet. “You are so smart!”
“I’m smart,” Jet agreed.
“Yeah baby-girl,” Amber piped in. “You better hope you inherited your geography genes from me. Your grandma couldn’t find her own ass.”
The child giggled delightedly. “Gramma’s ass,” she repeated.
“Amber!” Ellen scolded her daughter and then directed her next comment to Jet.
“You mustn’t say the words your mama says,” Ellen told the little girl. “Mama has a smart mouth and a smart mouth is very ugly.”
“Mama’s not ugly,” the little girl declared with the absolute conviction of one who loves.
Ellen smiled. She appreciated the child’s loyalty. And she agreed. Amber was beautiful. One just had to look beyond her current fashion incarnation to see it. Her pretty chestnut hair was overgrown and bleached out to an unrealistic yellow blond color accented by one inch brown roots. Her hands were encircled on the wrists by tattoo “slave” bracelets, a permanent reminder of a difficult adolescence. And she’d never quite lost that last five pounds since childbirth. But she still had the long lean body that was too tall for gymnastics and too curvy for ballet.
“Mama is very pretty,” Ellen explained to her granddaughter. “But ugly words are worse than ugly looks.”
“Oh, right, Mom,” Amber disagreed sarcastically. “Don’t listen to Grandma, Jet. Grandma is full of it.”
“Gramma’s full of it,” she repeated.
Ellen voice was a scolding whisper. “Stop talking that way in front of her, Amber.”
“Then stop giving the kid platitudes that portray the world as unrealistically benign and fair,” her daughter said. She gestured toward the expanse of downtown San Antonio in the distance. “It’s hell out there and the sooner she knows that the less likely she’ll get screwed over.”
“What would you have me tell her?”
“The truth.” Amber replied. She glanced at her daughter in the rearview mirror. “Jet, there’s no such thing as a bad word, just ones that are hard to spell. And people will treat you a lot better for being thin and pretty than for being kind or smart.”
“Amber!”
The younger woman didn’t appear in the least contrite. “I’m just being straight with her, Mom,” she said. “I wish you could have been as honest.”
Ellen didn’t argue with her daughter. She didn’t have the strength. Besides Amber always won somehow. Instead she focused her attention on the road in front of her.
“The turn’s coming up on your left,” she said indicating the side street between the Purple Dragon Restaurant and Señora Oma, Psychic Advisor.
“I know where the turn is,” Amber told her, irritated. “I don’t need directions to get to Wilma’s.”
“Wil-ma! Wil-ma!” Jet began repeating her great-grandmother’s name as if it were a yell-leader chant.
“Yes, we’re going to see Wil-ma,” Amber told her.
Wil-ma, with the accent on the last syllable, was Jet’s name for Ellen’s mother. It rhymed with all the other women in her life. There was Mama. There was Gramma. And there was Wil-ma.
“Slow down a little,” Ellen cautioned. “The car handles differently pulling a trailer.”
“I’m the one who’s driving,” Amber answered. To prove her point she turned left in front of oncoming traffic.
Brakes screeched. Horns honked. Ellen cursed, gritted her teeth, and waited for the inevitable crash.
When they were safely on the residential street, Amber spoke to her daughter in the rearview once more.
“Gramma said a bad word,” she told the child.
“Gramma said a bad word,” Jet parroted.
“I thought you said there were no bad words,” Ellen complained.
The aging Chrysler, with attached orange trailer, bumped along the narrow shaded street filled with vintage bungalow homes. Mahncke Park was a working-class neighborhood. Hemmed in between the expressway interchange, Brackenridge Park and Fort Sam Houston, it was relatively clean and looked after, but far from the highly manicured suburbs where Ellen had lived the last twenty years.
Lush springtime growth disguised the deterioration of Wilma’s neighborhood. It appeared sweet a
nd quaint and nostalgic. But graffiti tags could be spotted upon the empty buildings. And the occupied homes, no matter how modest, had burglar bars on every window.
Her mother, Wilma Post, or probably more accurately, Wilma Pruitt Johnson Wilcox Abston Post, give or take a name or two, had finally, it seemed, settled into a stable life. She had been something of a serial bride. Widowed twice and divorced more than a couple of times as well, she had dragged her children, Ellen and her half brother, Bud, from one miserable Texas city to the next. Each new home came furnished with a new Daddy, and he was always called Daddy, as head of the house. Ellen could hardly keep the names straight, so she simply associated different towns with different stepfathers.
Wilma’s last, a widower near eighty on his wedding day, had brought her into his little house just north of downtown. She’d taken care of him for about eighteen months before he died.
Mr. Post’s children were still unhappy about that marriage. Whether their anger was derived from guilt about their father or simply a dislike of the chosen bride of his twilight years, Ellen didn’t know. But one thing she was certain about. Her mother, who had always been unable to sit still anyplace very long, had been expected to move onto greener pastures long ago. Clearly she intended to stay put—just to irritate the in-laws.
That was a good thing. If Wilma hadn’t had this place, Ellen and her family would have been homeless.
As soon as the thought crossed her mind, she pushed it back. Ellen no longer thought of the future. It was easier just to remember the past.
Wilma’s home, not quite two blocks from busy Broadway, was badly in need of paint and repair. The grass was weedy and the shrubs overgrown. Amber pulled the car and its accompanying rental trailer onto the long narrow driveway at the side of the house. Wilma was standing on the front porch. At sixty-one she was still a tall, slim, attractive woman. And she was smoking a cigarette. She hurriedly flicked the butt into the nearby box-hedge when she saw the car, but not before Ellen saw her.
“She’s smoking again.”
Amber snorted. “Like she really ever quit.”
“She told me she had,” Ellen insisted.
Amber put the transmission into park and turned to her mother, explaining matter-of-factly.
“Wilma lies,” she said.
“Wil-ma lies!” Jet repeated from the back seat.
Amber chuckled. Ellen sighed.
They climbed out of the car. Ellen ignored her mother, turning instead to open the rear passenger door and unhitch Jet from her car seat. The child was missing a sneaker. Ellen practically had to stand on her head to retrieve it from under the front seat. She straightened the little girl’s sock before helping her get it on.
“Grandma loves Jet,” she whispered closely, confidentially.
“Jet loves Gramma,” the child replied just as quietly, and by rote. It was a pretend secret, as familiar as the alphabet.
Ellen took her hand as she got out of the car. Jet leapt the twelve inch distance from the door frame to the concrete as if it were a feat of athleticism and then applauded herself appropriately.
By the time they reached the front porch, Amber was seated with Wilma on folding lawnchairs. They were laughing and talking and smoking.
“Don’t encourage her!” Ellen said to her daughter. “Mother, the doctor told you that you have to quit.”
“He told me I can’t smoke if I’m on oxygen,” Wilma clarified. “You don’t see that fancy tank out here, do you?”
“I won’t allow any tobacco smoke in the house with Jet,” Ellen declared firmly.
Wilma’s eyes narrowed.
“I absolutely demand that my granddaughter not be exposed to secondhand smoke,” Ellen insisted.
“Oh, puh-leeezz, Mom,” Amber chimed in. “Don’t start it. It’s no big deal.”
“It’s a big deal to me,” Ellen said. “And if you had any sense of being a mother, you’d feel exactly the same way.”
Amber was rising to the bait, but Wilma waylaid her.
“I always smoked around my kids,” she pointed out. “I don’t see that it’s hurt you none.”
Ellen spoke slowly, distinctly as if to infer that her mother had difficulty understanding her. “Bud has asthma,” she said. “He spent his entire childhood struggling to breathe. That’s why he never comes to see you.”
“He doesn’t come to see me because of that hog-faced heifer he’s married to!” Wilma said.
“I will not let you endanger this little girl’s heath,” Ellen insisted. “I will take us to a shelter before I let that happen.”
It was an ultimatum and could not be mistaken for anything else. Wilma backed down.
“Don’t get your bowels in an uproar,” she told Ellen. “That’s why I’m smoking out here. The little dickens is my grandbaby, too.”
That was the end of it.
With Amber taking a break, Ellen didn’t rush to unload the trailer. Instead, she got the sack of refrigerator transfers out of the back seat. The bag contained partial containers of milk, butter, ketchup and jelly that they’d had in the house for their breakfast. Ellen was too thrifty to throw them into the garbage.
As she passed her mother and daughter, she reminded them that she was stepping inside.
“Keep an eye on Jet,” she cautioned.
They both waved and nodded, as if to assure Ellen that they were on the job. Truthfully, Ellen didn’t trust either of them. She was personally aware of her own mother’s parenting skills. And from what she’d observed so far, Amber was no better.
Jet was an amazing child. At least she certainly was in Ellen’s estimation. Besides being well-behaved and good natured, she was also smart, funny and very, very pretty. Her big dark eyes, generous lips and café au lait skin set her apart as a natural beauty. It was as if God had taken all the physical traits of Africa and Europe, mixed them in a cosmic cocktail shaker and when the best rose to the top, He skimmed them off and made Jet Jameson.
That perfect little miracle was currently jumping an imaginary rope on the sidewalk in front of the house.
In the kitchen, Ellen set the grocery bag on the counter and opened the refrigerator.
“Damn it, Mother!” she said, angrily, knowing that Wilma couldn’t possibly hear her.
The huge thirty-two cubic foot Frigidaire was packed to overflowing. There was no way to even see inside. Ellen’s refrigerator wouldn’t have had this much food on Christmas day!
She pulled out the first layer and found exactly what she expected—fresh produce. Bought yesterday or today, it was merely stashed in front of the less fresh stuff, some of it weeks old. Ellen pulled the trash can over beside her and began to dump the worst of it.
It was a good thing her life wasn’t macaroni salad, she would have been the first one to simply throw it out.
It took her better than fifteen minutes to sort the fridge out to stow her things.
She returned to the car to unload her most fragile and important item. It was surrounded by packing material and secured with duct tape. It was not overly large or heavy, but she’d wrapped it so thickly that it was unwieldy.
Ellen carried it to the front step and then hesitated, resting it on her raised knee as she caught her breath.
“What the devil have you got there?” Wilma asked.
“It’s Paul’s urn,” Ellen answered.
“Good Lord!” Wilma exclaimed. “What are you still doing with that?”
“I’m not doing anything with it,” she answered.
“The widow is supposed to scatter the remains,” Wilma pointed out. “Not lug them around in a jar for years on end.”
“I haven’t decided what to do with him yet,” Ellen defended herself. “Until I do, I’ll just keep him in the urn on my dresser.”
Wilma and Amber exchanged a glance.
“Crematory Decorating Themes,” Amber said, snidely. “It must be a program I’ve missed on Home & Garden Television.”
She ignored them. Th
ere were no rules about when, or if, a widow had to dispose of her husband’s ashes. Five years might seem like a long time to others, but to Ellen it was just yesterday.
She carried the urn to the back bedroom of her mother’s house. Carefully she unwrapped it and placed it atop the chest of drawers. She had never believed that he was going to die. Even yet, it was hard for her to remember that he was gone. People thought she should be over it. Her own family said that she was supposed to move on. But she didn’t want to. She shouldn’t have to. Her life had crumbled all around her. Still, she had the memory of Paul and the ashes in this urn. It was something to hold on to.
Ellen walked back through the house. The place was furnished like a consignment store on steroids. Wilma’s scraped, worn pieces from the WWII era had been dragged from house to house for forty years. Ugly reminders of Ellen’s childhood alongside the legacy of Mr. Post’s first wife—heavily upholstered Early American in an unpleasant orange.
It was hard to imagine finding a place among all this for the remnants of Ellen’s peach and white ultra-modern decor. Or for the piles of pink and primary-colored plastic that were the requisite possessions of a typical three-year-old.
On the porch Amber had finished her cigarette. Wilma had lit up another one.
“Come on, let’s get this trailer unloaded,” Ellen told her daughter.
“Don’t know if you should bother to do that,” Wilma said.
Ellen looked at her quizzically.
“What do you mean?”
“Lud came to see me this morning,” she announced. “That man could drive Billy Graham to a pack of smokes.”
Ludlow Post was Wilma’s stepson and the late Mr. Post’s eldest son and spokesman for the family. Wilma didn’t like any of them, but at least the rest of the children kept their distance.
“What did that old crankface want now?” Amber asked.
