by Nancy Rue
It went downhill from there. I couldn’t look at anyone. All I could do was put my hand in front of my mouth to smother the kind of guilty giggles you get at a funeral.
Group control wasn’t one of my gifts. Most of the soccer moms looked as if they were in shock, but I couldn’t make a move to stop Hazel, not even when she got to the part where her mother named her for the tattoo on the trucker’s arm. From there she led us through the series of cars, campers, and house trailers she’d grown up in. The entire tale was punctuated with a pair of glasses she took out of her bag but never put on. She was well into a rendition of her adolescent years before I realized the earpieces were exact replicas of Barbie-doll legs. I kind of envied her panache.
“I never lived in anything without wheels until I married my first husband,” Hazel said. “We did the granola thing. Lived in a log cabin. Stopped shaving. Both of us. We were supposed to ‘become one with the earth.’ ” She pointed with Barbie’s high-heeled foot. “I should have stuck with the wheels.”
Lissa darted a series of “do something” looks at me. But I merely watched with increasing fascination while Hazel enchanted my group with an autobiography that grew more outrageous by the word.
“I had my oldest in that dump,” Hazel said. “Twenty hours of labor. I was really starting to hate that kid—”
Rebecca gasped out loud.
“And that midwife. About the tenth time she told me this was my finest hour, I told her to—”
“Well!” I said. “I think a lot of us can relate to getting off to a rocky start with our children, can’t we?” I nodded my head like a dashboard dog. Nobody nodded back. Evidently nobody related.
Christine sat with her pen poised over the notepad, one exquisite eyebrow arched in a frozen state of I-wasn’t-expecting-this.
“I never knew a seven-pound kid could fill so many diapers,” Hazel went on. “The third time I took a load of those nasty things down to the stream to beat them on a rock, I knew I was outta there.”
“You left the baby?” Rebecca asked.
Hazel laughed in a drawn-out wheeze that made me want to giggle right along with her.
“I’m not a complete loser,” Hazel said. “I left Nature Boy and took the kid with me, but I didn’t know what to do with her. I still don’t, and I’ve had two more since.”
She was only up to her first baby, which meant we probably hadn’t heard half her life story yet. She looked to be at least forty. Of course considering the sun damage, maybe thirty-five. That would mean she was four years younger than I was and had somehow lived four times longer. I had to admit, I was strangely hooked.
“So, Mighty Mom,” she said to me, “can you fix me?”
“Um,” I said, “I don’t know that fix is the word I’d use.”
“Is there hope for me and my kids? That’s what I’m asking you.”
“Well,” I said too cheerfully, “you’re here, aren’t you?”
“There’s always hope in the Lord,” Rebecca said.
Hazel put on the Barbie glasses and leveled her eyes at Rebecca. An outward-moving spray of lines radiated from them, the way a child draws a sun with a crayon. “Can the Lord make my kids do what I tell them?”
“He can help you make them do it,” Rebecca said. She sat up straighter. A minisermon was imminent.
“That’s true,” I said. “God’s our guide.”
I’d been in church groups with Rebecca for six years. It was always a good idea to make her think she was right, lest she add the slicing, sideways look to the pursed lips. She was always the first one on the scene with a casserole when a family had a crisis, and she knew her Bible better than anybody in the congregation except Pastor Gary. I felt guilty every time I got a mental picture of her being baptized in vinegar.
Hazel took off the glasses and leaned toward me, bracelets clinking up and down her arms. “Okay … so … I want to be amazing at motherhood—no matter what it takes—before my kids turn out to be shoplifters or topless dancers.”
“I want that too.” Christine clicked her pen. “Aren’t there bullet points you can give us?”
“Well,” I said, “like, in this group I’m basically showing you what our Father says about parenting—in Scripture?”
I knew I wasn’t speaking even as coherently as Max would have, but Christine seemed to be writing it all down. Hazel looked at me as if I was trying to sell her a time-share.
Lissa nudged me and tapped her watch. Hazel had eaten up more than an hour and a half.
“We’re out of time, unfortunately,” I said. “For next Thursday, why don’t we continue our study of what kind of parent God is?” I rubbed my palms together, now oozing sweat from my life lines. “We’ll pick up with Luke.”
“We were supposed to discuss chapters five through ten tonight,” Rebecca said. She sliced Hazel a look. “But we never got around to it.”
“Right. That’s where we’ll pick up next week, okay?” I said. And then I added the obligatory, “Unless you have some verses you want to share, Rebecca.”
“I might,” she said. “We’re totally skipping the Old Testament, and it has things I’ve used with my boys—”
I wimped out completely. “We’ll save some time for that.”
As everyone lunged for their purses, Lissa gave me a one-armed squeeze. “I should be the little bundle of love you are,” she whispered to me. “You handled that so well.”
The cell phone chirping in my purse interrupted my inner debate over whether Lissa was talking about Hazel or Rebecca. The display showed Nick’s cell number, so I moved toward the room’s accordion partition.
“Thank you, honey,” I said, hand cupped around the phone.
“For what?”
“For saving me from the most awkward moment on the planet.”
I could almost hear him grinning his straight-across grin. “You owe me, then, and I’m ready to collect.”
“What flavor do you want—chocolate chip or rocky road?”
“Fudge ripple, and I need you to pick up Tristan.” His voice tightened. It wasn’t the first time that summer he’d reminded me that I was the one who had talked him into letting her get a job on the boardwalk and that he still didn’t think it was a good idea. That was just Nicky. “I don’t want her walking home by herself.”
“Honey, she knows to wait for one of us.”
“Aunt Pete says Max is with you.”
“You called home, then.”
“I just have to check on my girls. How soon can you pick up Tristan?”
“I’m on my way,” I said. “Our meeting just broke up.”
“How did it go?”
I felt the irrepressible gurgling in my throat. “Interesting,” I said. “Too bad it’s all confidential, or I’d get you to explain it to me.”
“I’ll get it out of you. Okay, Tristan clocks out in ten minutes—”
“I’m gone,” I said.
I closed the phone with my chin.
“Orders from hubby?”
I turned to Hazel, who was the only one left at that point. She made no attempt to cover up the fact that she’d been unashamedly listening. “That’s one of the five hundred reasons I’m not married anymore,” she said. “Three husbands were enough for me to figure out there isn’t a man alive who doesn’t want to run your life.”
“Nick’s just a little bit protective,” I said.
“Is that what I need to be so my kids will be perfect like Jo and Hermione or whatever their names are?”
I finally let go of the laughter I’d been holding back. A slow smile broke the grip of Hazel’s hard mouth, showing a nicotine-stained fence of capped teeth.
“I wasn’t expecting that to come out of you,” she said. “You sit there looking like a virgin petunia, and then out comes this deep … laugh thing. It sounds like it should be coming out of some 1940s movie diva. Marlene Dietrich or somebody.”
“I know it sounds sort of devilish, which isn’t the best—
”
“Is that why you’re always putting your hand in front of your mouth? So nobody will know what you’re really thinking?”
I did not want Hazel discovering the impish Serena inside. I headed for the door, Nick’s voice in my ear, Hazel on my heels.
“So maybe you aren’t perfect,” she said. “That’s good to know. I’m trying to decide if this is the right place for me.” She glanced ruefully at the sign over the door I was locking behind us that read: God Is Good All the Time. All the Time God Is Good. “I don’t exactly fit into the church scene.”
Just before she stepped out of the halo of light from the porch lamp, I saw her purse her lips and narrow her eyes into hyphens. She was a dead ringer for Rebecca. My laugh put even Marlene Dietrich to shame.
“I think you and I might get along after all,” she said.
I was trying to edge toward the parking lot where Max was waiting next to the Blazer, doing the combination tap-jazz-hip-hop routine she was constantly in the midst of. But Hazel stopped me with a wave of the Barbie glasses.
“When I first saw you in this little package you present, I thought, ‘Uh-oh. Supermom.’ You’ve got the little wispy haircut. I bet you’re still a natural brunette … I hate women like you. The cute little body in the boutique Capris—”
“Cute little body?” I said. “My mother always told me I was built like a fireplug.”
Hazel smacked her own hefty hips. “Get over it. Anyway, I see all that, plus the churchy smile, and I’m thinking, ‘What can this chick teach me? She probably says “excuse me” when she belches in an empty room.’ ” She peered at me. “You do belch, don’t you?”
“Sure,” I said, although I hoped she wasn’t going to ask for a demonstration. I didn’t do well under pressure.
Hazel flipped a few bleached strands off her shoulder with one of Barbie’s calves. “But I was watching you while I was talking, and you weren’t judging me. I can smell that kind of thing.” She made another Rebecca face. “There was some of that going on with the rest of them.”
I didn’t bother to deny it.
“Anyway, Sarah—Savannah—What is it?”
“Serena,” I said.
“Yeah, look, the Bible’s not my deal, but I am going to study you. I want to dog you until I see how you do this master mother thing.”
I glanced at my watch. It was later than I’d thought, and Tristan would be about to punch out. I hurried toward Max, and Hazel followed. She wasn’t kidding about dogging my trail.
Beeping the Blazer’s lock, I called out, “Get in, Max. We have to pick up Tristan.”
“Oh, yeah. Three blocks is way too far for her to walk by herself.”
“I really have to get going,” I said to Hazel.
I half expected her to hop into her car and dog me all the way to Boardwalk Fries. But she only gave a final Barbie poke and said, “You really are a good mom. I can tell that.”
“Who was that?” Max said when we were both in the car.
“That was a lady that wants some help with her kids,” I said.
“She was scary looking.” Max patted my arm. “I guess they can’t all be Supermom like you, huh?”
I laughed at her. But I couldn’t help thinking that, next to Hazel, I could be Supermom.
Chapter Two
It was a few minutes after nine, and the crowd at Bethany Beach had thinned. It was still more packed than it used to be even at peak times twenty years before when Nick had first started taking me there. Even when we’d moved into the shore house six years ago, there weren’t the throngs of families that pressed the boards and the sand now.
Two blocks from the boardwalk, where I had to park, Max and I wove among people in clumps thick as beach grass. Most of them were wiped-out parents with sleeping children draped over their shoulders. Grandparents craned their necks, calling out, “Do you remember where you parked?” “Where’s Mikey? Does somebody have Mikey?” I smiled at each of them for enduring the sand in diapers and coolers piled like mule packs that were involved in taking kids to the shore. Your children will never forget this, I wanted to assure them as I walked past. Even if you can’t wait to.
We were five miles north of Ocean City, Maryland. Our part of the Delaware seashore still promoted Bethany Beach and Fenwick Island just to the south of us as “The Quiet Resorts.” Nick growled every time he saw one of the quiet resort flags flapping along the boardwalk. His idea of a quiet beach came from his sixteen growing-up years in the Bethany shore house, before his mother died. He and his father moved to Washington, D.C., after that, and life as Nick had known it disintegrated. Now his early memories of the beach were like watercolor paintings of a sleepy shoreline where sandcastles lasted forever. Bless his heart.
A few weathered cedar cottages from those simpler times still stood, and the boardwalk retained some of its 1930s cotton-candy charm. But the stream of neon-bright beach umbrellas as far as Nick could see in both directions was more of a Picasso to him. He didn’t like abstract art.
Despite the hordes of summer tourists, the town of Bethany Beach was still predominantly a residential community. Garfield Parkway, which we were now navigating like salmon swimming upstream, was the main street of surf shops and souvenir stores. But to the north and south and between the ocean and the coastal highway, the town wasn’t much more than shore houses of all shapes, sizes, and decades of design nestled together in happy cohabitation. Right now the crape myrtles lining the wide green spaces down the middle of each street were in luscious, fuchsia-colored bloom, and hidden backyard gardens were ripe with tomatoes split by the sun and corn so sweet I could usually eat it without butter.
By the time I ran up the steps to the boardwalk, holding on to Max’s arm, I was picturing Tristan punched out and wiping the sweat off the back of her neck with her apron before she dropped it in the laundry hopper. Still, I knew there would be no eye rolling or “Hello, I’ve been waiting” or any of the things Max would have done.
Boardwalk Fries was the first stop on the north end of the boardwalk. It was the best location on the boards, but it would have done the same killer business if it had been obscured in a second-story garret. That boardwalk offered a nose feast of wonderful, greasy smells—funnel cakes, mustard-smeared corn dogs, fried clam sandwiches—but for me, it was all about the fries. They came marvelously tangled in tubs—a small was sixteen ounces—julienned with the skins on. I always told myself that made them healthier. Dusted with a masterfully small amount of salt, they held only the merest suggestion that they had touched hot oil. To bring ketchup anywhere near them was a desecration. I couldn’t get within the smell of the place without salivating, which was the reason I’d gained five pounds in the three months Tristan had worked there.
“Can we get some?” Max said.
“We have ice cream in our near future,” I said. It took extreme will power.
Yuri was the only one at a counter window when I walked up, the sleeves of his blue uniform T-shirt rolled to his shoulders. He was Russian. All the kids who worked there that summer were international students except Tristan. The sign over a striped coffee can read:
Tips Are for Travel
Show Us Your Beautiful Country
I gave Max a handful of change, and she tossed it in.
“That will get you a few miles closer to someplace,” I said to Yuri.
He leaned over the counter, blue eyes dancing the Drobushki. “You have come for our date?” he said.
“Hel-lo-o!” Max said.
I laughed. “I keep telling you, Yuri. I’m already taken.”
“It is tragic.” He reached for a tub. “You want what you get always?”
I shook my head and looked behind him. “Is Tristan ready?”
Yuri’s eyebrows drew into a velvet V. “Tristan?” he said. “She did not come to work tonight.”
“No, seriously,” I said.
“I am seriously. We wonder here why.”
Inga, the Swedish gi
rl, emerged from the back wearing her Boardwalk Fries shirt two sizes too small and her shorts rolled down below her navel. There were two tiny burn marks branded on her bronzed belly.
“She never showed up, Mrs. Soltani,” she said. Her English, like her skin and her cheekbones, was flawless. “We thought she might have had an emergency or something.”
“But I dropped her off,” I said. “You never saw her?”
They both shook their heads.
“I don’t get it,” Max said.
My thoughts banged into each other like orbs in a pinball machine.
Tristan wouldn’t just leave without telling anyone. Tristan never did anything without telling anyone. She must have walked home. But she wouldn’t walk home. Aunt Pete hadn’t told Nick she was home. She wasn’t home.
Game over.
I clutched the counter and stared stupidly at my knuckles.
“You are all right?” Yuri said.
Inga patted my arm. “She probably went off with friends. I know I—”
“You don’t know Tristan,” I said. Unless Tristan had adopted a new personality, something was very wrong.
Chapter Three
Mom?”
I looked down at Max, who was studying me. “Where’s Tristan?” she said. “How come she’s not here?”
I manufactured a smile. “One of us must have gotten something mixed up. You know what, Yuri. Give us a small after all. Can Max stand right here and eat it?”
I moved to the boardwalk railing and fished out my phone. My fingers had all the dexterity of a mittened child as I fumbled to dial Nick.
“Let me guess,” Nick said on the third ring. “They don’t have fudge ripple.”
“Tristan’s not here.” I barely recognized the brittle voice as my own.
“She’s not where?” Nick said.
“At work.”
Nick sighed. He could sigh with a martyrdom even my mother had never achieved. “How many times have I told her not to leave without one of us there?” he said. “How much clearer do we have to make it?”
