When Courtney found him after church he was still sitting slumped over in his car in the parking lot with his cell phone pressed to his ear. His head was bowed and his eyes were closed. Anyone who didn’t know him might think he was praying.
BEFORE TRUELY LEFT that afternoon to drive back to the city, Courtney said, “Too bad you can’t stay for the unveiling on Tuesday.”
“You got somebody to go with you?” he asked.
“Myra said she would,” Courtney said.
Myra was Courtney’s maid and to a certain degree her paid amiga as well. Hastings had originally hired her to come Monday through Friday for general all-around housecleaning, but Courtney was so hands-on, do-it-herself, such an over-the-top perfectionist, that over time she gave Myra enough days off that she could probably have taken on a second job.
“I really prefer to change my own sheets,” Truely had heard Courtney say. “I like to clean my own kitchen too. Anyway, how much of a mess can a house be with only two adult neat freaks living in it?” Sometimes Myra would go to the farmers’ market with Courtney, comb through all the produce in every booth, make an event out of it. Or they’d go to cooking classes with Courtney’s idle friends — Thai, Indian, Italian, or French. Or wine tastings, which would leave Courtney tipsy and happy and Myra less so because she would be the one to drive them home with a cargo of selected wine in cases in the backseat. They had planted gardens together — a few vegetables, but mostly flowers. They had taken flower arranging classes together too — suppressed their urges to be anything but simple, maybe even stark.
Over the years in Courtney’s employ Myra had become almost a mind reader. She had learned Courtney’s various houses and with each move hauled away a truckload of high-end discarded furniture. Myra knew exactly how to cook the Thanksgiving turkey with the pecan and cornbread dressing, how to decorate the Christmas tree so it was perfect but never overdone, never gaudy. She knew how to wrap gifts so the wrapping was a gift in itself. She knew how to select gifts too, choose fresh vegetables, fold fitted sheets so they looked like flat sheets and arrange them in the linen closet in neat ensembles. She knew how to keep fresh flowers (from the yard whenever possible) in the public rooms and Courtney and Hastings’ bedroom and bath and on occasion the guest room too. Myra had one hell of a good job. That was the way Truely saw it.
MAYBE TRUELY should have stayed until Tuesday, been there for the removal of staples from Courtney’s skull. Lord. It would have been a loving gesture and he could have managed it.
“I haven’t been able to get in touch with Shauna — and to tell you the truth it has me a little spooked.” Truely was gathering his things to take to the car.
“You’re worried?” Courtney said.
“She hasn’t called me all weekend. Usually she checks in.”
“Maybe she’s just trying to give you some space,” Courtney said. “Isn’t that one of your personal themes of late?”
“Used to be,” he said. “Right now I am not feeling like space is the real answer.”
“You are worried,” Courtney said.
“Got a wild imagination, I guess. Maybe I been watching too much six o’clock news or something.”
“You don’t think she’s off with somebody else, do you?”
“I hope not. But it might be better than some of the scenarios I’ve been conjuring up.”
Courtney walked Truely out to his car carrying a sack of homemade peanut butter cookies for the road. She probably sensed his sudden hurry to leave, watching him sling his overnight bag in the backseat. “Here,” she said. “Just like Mama used to make.”
He hugged his sister, careful not to touch her wounded face. “You’re the best, Court.”
“Thanks for coming,” she said. “Just some time with you … it gives me perspective.”
“Everything will work out,” he said. It was short of a promise.
“You mean … even if it doesn’t?” She smiled.
“I love you,” he said.
“Love you too, little brother.”
He waved to her as he started down the long drive. He knew he couldn’t have been completely in his right mind on the drive back because he didn’t touch the cookies Courtney gave him — which wasn’t natural. Ordinarily he would have put away a few of them for medicinal purposes if nothing else.
Ten
SHAUNA HAD A SMALL WALK-UP STUDIO at the outer edge of Nob Hill where she worked as a freelance designer for insecure women with more money than taste. She paid too much for the apartment because she had to buy the big address along with the tiny space — but it was pretty nice. It was not an accident that Shauna had created a career for herself as a designer, self-taught. She’d made the substandard space feel roomy and fresh by painting the walls in strong colors and furnishing it with sparse, clean white slip-covered pieces. It was that California less-is-more thing again. In Mississippi less still was and always had been less and he never came across anybody who wanted to claim it was more.
When he turned onto Shauna’s street he saw her car was parked at the curb. His heart took a little leap. She was home, then. Okay. Good. It was never easy to find street parking in her neighborhood, but he found a place almost big enough and fit his car into the tight space by leaving the back bumper protruding into the street.
Once almost two years ago Shauna had given him a key to her place. But he hadn’t been ready for that at the time, so he had given it back. She had never offered it again. Maybe she was waiting for him to ask for it. He was such a damn fool sometimes. He’d love to have that key now. What kind of man refuses the key to a woman’s place when she offers it? What did he think, that it was the key to misery? The key to forever?
Now he stood at the entrance and punched the buzzer to her unit. This was where she was supposed to answer his call. Hey, True. Come on up. But she didn’t. So he buzzed again. And again. He sat on the front stoop and tried to get a grip on this thing akin to fear that was slowly overtaking him. Then he remembered the cookies and made a run to the car and then sat again on the stoop and went to work on the cookies to ease the unbearable strain of waiting and not knowing.
He had been planted there less than an hour when he heard Foxie and Fred — Shauna’s dogs — bark at the corner. They always started to bark when their house came into view after a walk. He straightened up and looked down the street only to see Doug Vu holding their leashes along with Rocket’s, his own dog’s. Doug Vu had not noticed him at first, sitting slumped over like one of the vagrants that frequented the neighborhood, his face in a sack of cookies. But Foxie and Fred saw him now and they began to jump and bark and dance — their welcome ritual. It warmed his heart too. “Hey, man,” he yelled to Doug.
Doug saw him and nodded and was practically dragged up the walk by the rambunctious dogs. “How’d you end up with dog duty?” Truely asked.
“I owe Shauna,” he said. “But you don’t walk three dogs, man. Three dogs walk you.”
“So where’s Shauna?” There it was — the real question.
“She had to leave town. An emergency. Got a flight home to San Diego on Friday afternoon.”
“What kind of emergency?”
“You didn’t hear?” Doug was looking at Truely almost suspiciously. “Her brother, man. Shit. He got messed up by a car bomb over there. Her mother called to tell her. The kid got busted up bad. Lost one leg and both his feet. It’s bad, man. They were flying him to Germany. Not sure he’s even going to make it.”
Truely felt his stomach churn. It was like someone had come at him slinging a tire iron and got him dead-on in the gut. Gordo was just a kid. “More kid than soldier no matter what the U.S. Army says” — Truely remembered Shauna saying that. And he had tried to tell her different.
Gordo had been the surprise child in the family, ten years younger than the other three — and the only boy. He was not even twenty yet — a baby really — but he’d insisted to Truely that he was well educated in the school of hard knocks. T
hat’s what he used to say when Shauna tried to talk to him about college too. “I don’t need college. I already got my degree from the school of hard knocks.” Truely had actually chuckled when he said that.
Truely thought of the hours the two of them had spent shooting hoops when Truely had gone home with Shauna. It gave him something to do besides try to make impossible conversation with her two sisters and their husbands. He loved heading over to the basketball court for pickup games with Gordo’s buddies. The hours had flown. Truely was the oldest guy on the court and, Lord knows, he suffered near-death experiences more than once, but he had loved it. It was the main thing that had made visiting Shauna’s family manageable for him.
It was Gordo who told Truely that Shauna had instructed her family not to refer to him or introduce him as her boyfriend. Just call him my friend, she had told them. “What, you’re not into my sister?” Gordo had asked with obvious disapproval, holding the basketball like some sort of weapon in case Truely’s response was lacking.
“No, man,” Truely had insisted. “It’s not like that. Your sister is the best. They don’t make them any better than Shauna. She deserves one hell of a lot better than me.” Gordo had agreed totally and they went on shooting baskets until it got too dark to see.
At the time Gordo had been enrolled at a community college, but it was a waste, he’d said. He wasn’t what he disdainfully referred to as a college boy. “My sisters, they think everybody has got to go to college,” he told Truely. “They got my old man thinking the same thing. Shoot. He never finished college and he’s doing okay.”
The next time he and Shauna saw Gordo he had enlisted. Truely figured the army was his way to get Shauna and his sisters off his back, but it had had the opposite effect. Shauna was especially upset. There had been a surge of crying and arguing among the family members. But Gordo had made his decision and signed the papers. It was done. It was odd, but Truely remembered feeling as prideful as an old uncle when he shook his hand and wished him well. Gordo got a family send-off like nothing Truely had ever seen. Tears and kisses were second only to food and drink and toasts to his heroism and patriotism. All the family was there and half the neighborhood too. There was dancing and singing and at least two distressed would-be girlfriends weeping off to the side.
Before the party began Shauna’s father, Jerry, had declared a truce in the family uproar and basically announced that as of this day Gordo was a grown man. He ordered everyone to be proud of Gordo, which came easy to all of them. They had always been proud of Gordo. He was a smart kid, so much potential they said, and a heart of gold. So the praisefest had begun. The prayers too.
Shauna had been happy when Gordo got an assignment in food services, which embarrassed and disappointed him as much as it pleased his sisters. Food services. That would be safe, right? His parents hung an American flag on their front porch the day he left and pledged not to take it down until he arrived home again — safe. Lord, they must be going crazy right now. Shauna must be a wreck. He needed to be there with her. “I been calling Shauna for three days,” Truely said. “She’s not answering her phone.”
“I don’t think she has it,” Doug said. “It’s been ringing off the hook in her place. I can hear it. Thin walls in this building. She left in such a panic I think she forgot it.”
“You got a key?” Truely asked.
“Somewhere,” he said. “She gave me one when she needed somebody to let the cable guy in. Don’t know if I can lay my hands on it. Let’s take the dogs in, I’ll look for it.”
Truely found himself hugging Foxie and Fred, making them go wild at the attention. He wanted them to know that he loved them, just in case over the years he had never made that completely clear.
Doug couldn’t find Shauna’s key the way a person can never find the thing under his nose when there is urgency to the search. “It’s here somewhere,” he kept saying. By now the dogs were all going nuts, sensing something wrong, Truely thought, sensing trouble. Doug had to lock them in the bedroom to calm them down.
“You got a screwdriver or something?” Truely asked. “Maybe we can pick the lock somehow.” As it turned out Doug was pretty good with the credit card break-and-enter method. With a few minutes of effort they were in Shauna’s place and found her cell phone in the tangle of linens on her unmade bed. Truely grabbed it. “I’ll take it to her,” he said.
HE DROVE TO SFO without even going home first. No clean underwear. No fresh shirt. He would buy whatever he needed once he got to San Diego, and he wanted to get there as fast as possible. He kept thinking of Gordo, a soldier — a young, untraveled guy working the makeshift mess halls on the other side of the world, in the hot as hell desert full of angry and frightened people who both loved and hated him and his kind. He pictured Gordo doling out breakfast, lunch and dinner to the other soldiers before they went out on patrol, some of them as young and naive as he was. How the hell did a kitchen guy get blown up like this? He kept flashing to the TV news, all the nameless soldiers he saw nightly in desperate situations. The confident guys who led the way, shouting orders, danger be damned, and the nervous guys who obeyed and followed and hoped for the best. Heroes all in Truely’s eyes. And now one of those nameless guys had a name, Gordo Mackey, shooter of basketballs, question asker, truth teller, beloved little brother and only son, young man willing to do his part, a volunteer. Truely prayed to God Gordo would not die, had not died already. It choked him up to even think the thought.
The flight to San Diego seemed unusually long to Truely. He drank a whiskey — and then a second whiskey — and tried to imagine what he would find when he found Shauna. Unlike Gordo, he didn’t have much hero in him, but he hoped he could rise to the occasion for Shauna’s sake.
It was late when they touched down in San Diego. By the time he stood in line for his rental car and got out on the road it was past a decent hour to drop in on anybody — but in this case he doubted anybody would be going to bed or sleeping at all even if they did. He thought of Shauna’s mother. She was a small Mexican-American woman named Suleeta, who, according to Shauna, had surrendered her womanhood to early motherhood. Truely thought she maintained the residue of a formerly pretty girl. She had married Shauna’s Scotch-Irish dad, eight years older than she was, right out of high school. Already Shauna’s dad had had his own small construction business. He’d started out pouring patios and building decks for people in the neighborhood, but over time the jobs expanded to building entire houses from the ground up. Mackey’s Construction. He had done well for himself and his family.
When they finally had a son, years after Shauna’s dad had given up hoping for one, he had insisted that the baby’s given name be the same as his. But it was Suleeta who had given Gordo his real name. Shauna’s dad, Gordon Gerald Mackey, went by Jerry, and so when he named his son Gordon Gerald Jr. it was decided that the boy would go by Gordon. Suleeta had her own way of pronouncing Gordon where the n became silent and people mistook her Latino pronunciation of Gordon as Gordo. And so it was. Baby Gordon quickly became Gordo and stayed that way.
It was after midnight when Truely pulled up in front of Shauna’s parents’ house. The porch light was on and the hopefulness of that small gesture touched Truely with a quiver of sympathy. The outdoor landscape lights along the walkway to the front door presented themselves quietly but did little to illuminate the path to the house. Truely parked his car on the street out front. He glanced at the windows for signs of life, but saw none. He was beginning to wonder if he had made a mistake in coming, if the hour was all wrong and maybe his motives questionable too. Then he saw a lone figure up on the terrace, just the silhouette of a man, Jerry probably, pacing back and forth, maybe talking on his cell phone. It was hard to tell. Truely got out of the car, slamming the door as a way of announcing himself, and walked toward the house, cut across the yard’s steep slope of grass and beds of agapanthus up toward the raised terrace. “Jerry,” he called out. “That you?”
The figure st
opped pacing and looked out into the dark. “Who’s there?”
“It’s Truely Noonan,” he said. “Shauna’s friend.” He noticed his reluctance, even now, to introduce himself as anything more. Shauna’s boyfriend. Shauna’s lover. Maybe in time, Shauna’s fiancé. “I know it’s late,” he said. “Just got word about Gordo. Got the first flight out of San Francisco.”
“Come around to the front,” Jerry said. “I’ll open the door.”
“No need,” Truely said. “I can scale the wall — I mean, unless you’d rather I didn’t.”
“No,” he said. “Come on.”
So Truely propelled himself over the waist-high wall and found himself standing face-to-face with Shauna’s dad, self-made man, builder of sturdy things, proud American, father of a fallen soldier. They shook hands almost as if they had never met before. “I hated like hell to hear about Gordo,” Truely said.
“Thanks.” Jerry looked away then, focusing his gaze on the surrounding darkness. Truely saw that Jerry was holding a drink in his hand. He could smell the liquor on his breath. “Can I get you a drink?” Jerry asked him.
“Better not,” Truely said. “I threw back a few on the plane.”
“One more won’t hurt you,” Jerry said. “I don’t like to drink alone.”
“Sure then,” Truely said. “Pour me one.” He waited while Jerry walked to the outdoor grill area, where a small refrigerator was set into the rock wall. He watched him grab a fistful of ice, throw it in a plastic cup, and walk back to where Truely stood beside a small metal table with a bottle of bourbon on it. Jerry filled his cup nearly full. “Heads up.” He handed him the booze.
Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi Page 13
