People were indeed incurably weird. All you had to do was figure out who they were versus what they wanted, and you had it made. Glenda Walker and Sophia Redmond. Two in one day, and, still better, she could bill both clients.
Emma had saved herself a client. Plus she’d saved Billie’s ass.
This one time. She didn’t intend to make a habit of it.
Or ever to tell her.
Twelve
Penny sat quietly on the back steps in the early-morning stillness and watched Mr. Oliver next door examine a plant. He half stooped, a coffee cup in one hand, the puzzling leaf in the other, engrossed and completely unaware of her. His posture, his caring, reminded her of long ago when she was little and feeling sick. Something about the unsaid words that filled the space between her mother and herself then, Mr. Oliver and his plants now.
But that was then. Her mother—that mother—had disappeared. Arthur had put a spell on her eyes and ears while he hit and shouted at her.
Mr. Oliver sighed so loudly she heard it on her side of the fence. “Time to go to work, good friends,” he said. Once she would have laughed at a man talking to leaves. Now she didn’t think it was so funny. He loved them. They were his first concern in the morning and his last at night.
Maybe everybody had things that filled their heads as soon as their dreams were over. She surely did. Mr. Oliver’s were nice, and the worry and care made them grow. Hers were not nice, not to be fed and let to flower. But even as she thought this, another part of her brain replayed the pictures she didn’t want to see, replayed the day the ice-thin image of her family had shattered once and for all.
Almost two months ago, she’d been out on her bike on a Thursday given over to teacher’s meetings at her school, but not at Wesley’s. She’d had no responsibilities, no guilt, and she set out with no known destination or purpose except to work herself and move. She headed south, toward the Golden Gate and Sausalito, where she wanted to sit in the little park and watch the City across the Bay.
It had been a good plan, except that as she pedaled down Bridgeway toward the park, she felt hungry and decided to buy a bagel at Molly Stone’s. And parked in front of the market, she saw a dark blue, waxed and shining Lexus with the license plate JUS KIDN. Arthur’s true love, pampered and adored, always garaged and even dusted, for God’s sake. He said he kept it in perfect shape and Penny couldn’t borrow it because it was a mobile ad for Just Kidding, the children’s-wear “outlet” store, final resting place of the samples and stock of the lines Arthur represented.
But the store was in Novato, the other end of the county, as was their house in San Rafael and Arthur’s office in Terra Linda for his repping. He literally had no business in southern Marin. Besides, this morning, after criticizing everybody else, he’d said he was “off to the salt mines.” He said that every day, as if it were witty or ever had been. Then he added that he’d be in Novato, getting a special sale ready.
She stared at the license plate, as if it might rearrange itself into something less familiar and troubling. And then at the supermarket.
Her stepfather never did the food-shopping. Never even helped. She’d had to drive her mother every single day to her big adventure—food-buying. Arthur wouldn’t pick up a loaf of bread on his way home. Even if he’d had an impulse to suddenly buy a treat for himself, why detour to Sausalito for it? Besides, he was so miserly, he’d never enter an upscale market like this. Arthur had told Penny she’d better find a way to put herself through college because she and her mother spent so much money, he couldn’t afford one more expense. Something smoky and caustic filled the pit of her stomach.
This wasn’t where he should be or what he should be doing. This wasn’t anything like his so-called “normal” behavior and it was therefore frightening.
She squelched an impulse to clamp down her mind, to stop knowing anything more, the way her mother did. Pretend it’s okay, that it makes sense, that there’s a good reason for it, even if you can’t think of one.
Arthur had a secret. She was sure it was another woman. She wanted it to be, wanted her mother to feel as miserable and hate Arthur as much as Penny did.
What if she was wrong? After all, this was only a market. Maybe Arthur had suddenly discovered a kind and charitable impulse, making history, and he was saving a starving family.
In Sausalito. Right. In which of the picturesque million dollar hillside homes?
The fierce, hot pressure she felt gave way to a sense of peace. Good. Something real, finally. This would force her mother to notice. Provoke a break. She’d have grounds, even if this was a no-fault state. She’d have reason—as if she didn’t already with his foul treatment of his stepdaughter and natural son.
“How could I leave him?” she’d said too many times. “I don’t have money or skills, and I do have two children—one not his—and I don’t even know if the law would make him provide for you.” Her mother always told her both more and less than she wanted to know.
Penny had said that as soon as she graduated, she’d get a job, help out—that away from Arthur, Wesley wouldn’t cringe and try to disappear all the time and her mother wouldn’t be weepy and crippled. Would stop playing helpless and waiting to die.
The words blew through the house and were dusted away by her mother. No job Penny could get would make enough money. Then maybe this sighting would do the trick, much as Penny didn’t want to know this, not really. She detested him, but the idea of the delicacies he was probably buying, or how much he’d pay for sex on the side, made her literally ache with rage.
The smart thing would be to leave now and have the pleasurable day she’d envisioned. Contemplate the sailboats on the bay and drink a latte. She walked her bike to the end of the lot, and waited, not sure what she was going to do next.
There were no questions, however, when she saw him emerge from the store, a shopping bag in his arms, the tops of two champagne bottles visible. She was galvanized by her fury. When his car pulled off the lot, she followed without thinking it through. Odds were, she was on a futile trip and wouldn’t be able to stay with him for long. He could be on the freeway in seconds, or heading away from the water up toward the hills where her pedaling power had no chance against his horsepower.
She was in luck. He stayed on the flats, turning right on Bridgeway, then right again, into the marina and the houseboats.
She wouldn’t have thought of an assignation in a village of beached boats in Richardson Bay. She had always thought the Sausalito colonies were romantic, but not for Arthur! It made him still more disgusting.
She followed at a distance, watched him park, then walked her bike as he and his groceries progressed past the recycling hut to the entrance to the boats and then, onto the walkway between the two lanes of them. At least he couldn’t lose her there. There were no side “streets” or off-roads. She stayed well behind him, somewhat hidden, if he turned, by the dock’s angles and the potted foliage that lined both sides.
Still, she felt foolish, a kid playing detective games. Nervous, too. But more than any of that, she felt compelled to find out and expose his secret.
They passed houseboats with spiral staircases, roof gardens, fantastic towers with stained-glass windows, but the one he finally entered was a small, stubby thing, more boat than house, more box than boat. The sort you’d pass right by.
She waited to move closer when it felt safe, but he came out again within minutes and without his groceries, heading back toward the parking lot—and her. There was no place to hide, only the walkway with short-planked entries like side roads into each boat, so she turned and hurried off, waiting behind a car in the parking lot in a state of confusion. Was it really possible he had been dropping off groceries on a mission of mercy?
She felt foolish until she wondered what variety of mercy required two bottles of champagne.
Then it appeared he wasn’t leaving. He leaned into the backseat and brought out an undersized violin case, one a circus midget might use. Then he ext
racted a silvery tube—a music stand, she thought, the kind an orchestra used.
He wasn’t musical in the least—didn’t even like listening to it. Would never have provided such luxuries for Wesley.
He checked that his car doors were locked, and headed back to the dock.
She waited, then edged all the way back out to the house. But she couldn’t see anything because the drapes were drawn over the small front windows. She couldn’t remember if they’d been that way earlier.
Couldn’t hear anybody playing the tiny violin, either. Maybe the child for whom it was intended was in school now, didn’t have a teacher’s workshop. Maybe Arthur was using the instrument as a bribe, a gift to the child via the mother, when it was the mother he wanted.
She couldn’t tell anything about the inhabitant from the blandness of the exterior. One semi-alive plant slumped over in a clay pot on the step at the front door. The most a person could say was that this place was easily forgettable. She made a point of memorizing its number.
Finally, she rode off, leaving him to his mistress. Or, for all she knew, his entire other family including the musical midget. On the way off the dock, she tried the mailbox for that number. It, like all its unidentified neighbor boxes, was anonymous and locked.
That night, she asked him about his day, giving him a chance to come up with an alibi, a chance to make her suspicions foolish hallucinations.
“What’s to say? Same as always, too much work.” He dunked a piece of sourdough into the chicken gravy. “Why do you suddenly care? What do you want?” He didn’t even glance at her. Her spying had gone unnoticed.
So she repeated the act three more Thursdays, cutting school to make a circuit to the houseboat parking lot at about the same time of day. Once nobody was there, but both other times, her stepfather’s car was parked in the lot.
On one of those days, while she paced at the beginning of the dock, two men carrying a green velvet sofa came through the narrow opening to the dock. “’Scuse us,” one of them said, and she pressed herself and her bike against the wall of mailboxes.
She watched them progress down the dock to, surprisingly, the mistress’s house. He was buying the bitch a sofa the day after he’d told Penny that if she went out for the play and had to rehearse at night instead of baby-sitting, he would not make up the difference, and she could forget about going to her own senior prom.
She watched them maneuver the green sofa into the house, and even though it hadn’t touched her, she felt its velvet against her skin—against the Mistress’s skin until she thought she’d be sick.
Leaving the dock, she passed a parked van that read, Rooms to Rent: The Comforts of Home in an Hour. She didn’t connect the sofa with the van until she was on the road home, but there hadn’t been any other commercial vehicle in the place. Maybe he wasn’t counting on this affair’s lasting too long and he only loaned his woman things. That would be like him.
From then on, when her stepfather punched or slapped her mother, blamed business reversals on his wife, treated Wesley as if he were a failure at age eight, called Penny a slut—the heat of her knowledge worked its way from behind her ears up into the top of her forehead until her brain was on fire with it. He called Penny a slut while he drank champagne with his whore and furnished their love nest.
“Mom,” she said one afternoon when they were alone. “I have something to tell you.” She spoke as gently as she could, hating herself for deliberately hurting a woman who already looked down for the count, and she didn’t mean the wheelchair business.
“I have bad news, but I’m sure you’d rather hear the truth than have me lie to you.”
Her mother put down the calculator, deep worry-lines between her eyebrows. “Are you in trouble?”
“No. Well, maybe we all are. I saw Arthur—”
Her mother winced. She hated that Penny called him by his given name, but damned if she’d call him “Dad” the way her mother wanted, and “Stepfather” sounded too weird, especially for this conversation.
“I think—I’m sure—Arthur is having an affair.”
Her mother’s mouth dropped open. “Why would you say such a thing? And how would you possibly know if it was true, which I can’t believe.” A sudden single tear hovered on the lower lashes of her mother’s right eye. “He wouldn’t,” she said, and the tear dislodged and made its way down her cheek.
“I saw him. Three times.”
“With…with somebody?” Her mother looked pitiable. Penny wondered if she should hold her hand during the telling, or pat her head, but it all seemed so sordid and topsy-turvy, she stayed where she was.
“Not exactly.”
“Well, then, how dare you say such an ugly—”
“First time was by accident. I saw him where he didn’t belong. Carrying champagne. And food.”
Her mother shook her head; she all but clapped her hands over her ears. She looked old, and like a loser.
But the way she looked and the things she did weren’t to be trusted and surely not to be pitied. Penny had seen her mother get out of the wheelchair when she thought none of them could see. She’d seen her walk normally to go have a cigarette—also a secret, and denied—outside the back door. She thought she understood why her mother chose to live like an invalid, why she wanted the disability money. She also understood that she couldn’t trust her mother.
“Arthur promised me he would never—” her mother said. “I was so shaken by your father when he turned out to be such a…” Her real father, whose mention was always followed by “bastard” or “liar” or “cheat.” Sometimes “whoremonger.” Sometimes all four of them in a string. Penny hadn’t seen or heard from him—although she’d certainly heard enough about him—since she was five, two years after he dumped her mother. But because he’d been so bad and had made her mother’s life so hard, she was never, ever, to say a word against his successor.
“…I couldn’t stand it if it happened again and in my condition!”
“He brings her gifts. Champagne. Food. He brought a violin one time—a really little one. And a sofa next time, and you know how cheap he is with us.”
Her mother’s mouth dropped open a little. “A violin?”
Penny nodded. “She probably has a child. A musical child.”
“Where?” Her mother leaned forward in the wheelchair. “Where were you? How could you see this?”
She was paying attention at last. “A houseboat. In Sausalito.” Her mother relaxed back to her normal slump.
“Do you know her, then?” Penny demanded. “You look like you know who it is.” Her mother’s focus had moved to the far wall. “Mom?”
“What? Oh…no. I don’t know anybody in a houseboat, but you’re all wrong. Besides, it’s wrong to sneak around after Dad that way.”
“He’s not my dad! He’s a man who treats you like shit while he brings champagne and gifts to somebody else. Why don’t you care?”
“There’s an explanation.”
“Name one—besides what I said.”
Her mother shrugged. “It’s not important. Don’t worry about it anymore.”
“Fine. I’ll ask him myself at dinner.”
“Don’t. You’ll only—”
“Are you telling me you knew about this?”
Sophia looked blank, momentarily confused. “It’s business, not that I know every single promotion and detail. There are home demonstrations, fashion shows as school fund-raisers.”
“Twice in the same tiny home? Come on, Mom—there was no sign of people and the drapes were closed. And why deliver a sofa? That’s crap and you know it.”
“It’s business. But the manufacturer doesn’t like spending the money, so it’s kind of…siphoned-off, then put back. You wouldn’t understand. Arthur has his faults, but what you said isn’t one of them. Besides, even if it was, it’s not your marriage, it’s mine. When it’s your turn, you do better. You find the perfect man, all right?”
“I’m trying to he
lp and you’re treating me like—”
“This is the last I want to hear about you sneaking around and slandering him. You look for reasons not to like him, you make up stories about him, and I won’t stand for it anymore. Who provides you with a roof over your head? With a beautiful house? Who puts food on your table? Do you understand?”
She didn’t and she couldn’t. What she understood was that her mother was determined to stay as crippled in her mind as she pretended to be in her body.
What she understood was that she couldn’t live in that place anymore, to pretend that it was a home or shelter of any kind.
In that moment, she knew she had to move past or over or through her mother in order to knock down Arthur and change things. To get the chance to breathe. She couldn’t spell out what she meant except that action was required. She had to escape, because if not, she’d die.
That was when she slammed out of the house and headed for Fourth Street where she saw a yellow hearse parked outside the yogurt store. When she met her rescuer, knew that he was the way out, the one who would save her. And now, two months after that first Thursday sighting of the houseboat, a month after the scene with her mother and her first meeting with Luke, she was here, on the back stairs of a house in San Geronimo.
And nothing had been resolved or gotten better.
She stood and dusted herself off. Listened. Silence inside. Not even the sound of cups lowered onto the table. No talk. He was still asleep, then, and most or all of the others were gone.
An opportunity. Too much was still unfinished. This was as good a time as any to begin to finish it.
Thirteen
Emma had referred to the nonexistent receptionist/office manager often enough, waving imperiously at the tiny outer area as if its desk would be reoccupied any instant. Privately, Billie had assumed the missing person was a figment of Emma’s imagination, born of her need to appear more successful than she was.
Nonetheless, the day before, day one of Billie’s search for Penny Redmond, a tall and handsome Amerasian named Zachary Park had appeared. Korean, Billie thought, because of his last name. Half, at least. Plus something or several somethings else. He was all cheekbones, dark hair, gold skin, and grace.
Time and Trouble Page 12
