“Hey Dad.”
His face blanches. I expect him to leap out of the car, but after giving me a long, hard look, he buckles his seat belt, and the engine purrs to life. It’s raining. The wipers whip water back and forth as he pulls out of his space and onto the road. I feel slightly uneasy. I am at his mercy, and he can do anything he wants with me buckled into his front seat. I won’t give him the upper hand. I relax into my seat and wait for him to speak first. I want him to ask me why I’m here. I had to take five buses to get to the quaint little town he calls home, and I wonder now if he’s paranoid about one of his small town people seeing us together.
“Your mother … did you bury her?”
“Cremated,” I say.
He nods.
“Did you give her the Misoprostol?”
He nods again. I clench my fists and stare at the side of his face. It’s a strange thing, looking at your father. Knowing that you’re somewhere in his face—maybe the curve of a cheek, or the dip of a nose—and searching so hard for it that you want to cry, because you’re ashamed and desperate.
“You killed my sister. Why did you let me live?”
“How do you know … how do you know it was a girl?” he asks. He glances at me briefly.
“Because I found her on the floor.”
This seems to make Howard uncomfortable. He wipes a meaty hand across his face, then slams it down on the steering wheel. His gesture reminds me of why I’m here.
“She wanted you,” he says. “I tried to get her to have an abortion, and she wouldn’t do it.”
“She told me my father left…”
“That’s what I wanted her to say,” he says quickly. “We knew each other for a long time. I gave her the job at the firm when she graduated high school. It was different in those days. You could get a job based on competency rather than a degree. She was a very competent woman. Saved my ass a bunch of times when clients went haywire. I used to send her in to talk to them, calm them down.”
“I didn’t come here to reminisce about my mother,” I say.
“So why are you here?”
“I want to know about your regrets.”
He pulls into the parking lot of a diner—Peppered Pete’s—just off the highway. There are a couple of semis parked in the lot, a trucker’s diner. Before turning off the car, he says, “Let’s get something to eat.” I nod reluctantly. This will be my first official dinner with my father. I follow him out of the car and through the parking lot. He’s making things way too easy for me. He doesn’t wait to see if I’m tagging along.
When we get to the door, he holds it open for me. A real gentleman. The air in Peppered Pete’s is loaded with grease. But I can’t even remember the last time I was in a restaurant, so I feel charmed. We sit in the back by the bathrooms where every few minutes I hear a toilet flush. I don’t comment on Howard’s choice of table, or the fact that he positioned himself with his back to the door. I leave to go to the bathroom before the waitress can come over. “Whatever you have,” I tell him.
When I get back, there are two steaming mugs of coffee on the table. I hold my cup, but don’t drink anything.
“I loved her,” he says. “I wanted to marry her. My wife got sick…”
I think about my mother. Had she loved him? Had she been using him?
“But you didn’t want your children with her?”
He picks up his knife, sets it back down. “I have children.”
“If you loved her, you should have wanted her children.”
“You think it’s that simple, but it’s not,” he says. “You’re just a kid. You don’t know how hard things can get. Complicated.”
I smile wryly.
“Excuse me,” he says. He disappears into the restroom. The timing is perfect. It’s like the universe mapped it all out for me. I see our waitress turn the corner with two plates in her hand. I get up and go to the restroom again, making sure to leave my purse on the seat so she knows we didn’t run out on her. She can’t see my face. I come out a few seconds later. Blueberry pancakes, eggs, and bacon. I dip my hand into my purse and pull out the Ziploc baggie I brought.
Then he’s back, sliding into the booth, his hands still damp from washing.
“Margo.” It’s the first time he’s ever said my name. It makes me feel empty. Sad. My eyes dart around, looking for the waitress. She will be back in a minute to check on us … bring more coffee.
He takes the first bite of his pancakes. Then the second. I watch, mesmerized as he eats what I put on his pancakes.
“She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have a baby. I don’t know what she was saying to you, but she was depressed. She spoke about death a lot.”
“She didn’t speak to me at all.” I still haven’t touched my food. He looks up at me, his fork still cutting through pancakes. It looks like he wants to say something, but then changes his mind.
“I loved her,” he says again. “I don’t regret that.”
“You killed her … and the baby.”
He wipes his mouth with a napkin, and it leaves a purple smear. “No. That was … she wanted…”
“You gave her the drugs that killed her, ex-Mayor Delafonte. What will people think about that?”
“What do you want?”
I smile. “Nothing. Nothing at all. I have everything I need now.”
And with that, I get up and leave, keeping my head ducked.
I don’t know what happens after that. I don’t check. But I fed my father nightshades and hoped to hell he died.
THERE IS NOTHING in the news about the former mayor, Howard Delafonte. I look and look, but I can’t find it. If the nightshades I gave him stopped up his black disgusting heart, no one was reporting it. Unlikely. I decide to take a bus out to Cress End, the town where he lives—larger than mine, but still smaller than most. I have an address for him that I found in a notebook in my mother’s bureau, scrawled in sharpie across the page. I wonder what she intended to do with it? If it ever crossed her mind to go to his home and confront him with his family watching. It was his old house I was going to see, the one where his children grew up. I walk the two miles from the bus stop and stand across the street under a sickly looking tree. The Delafonte house is a white colonial with plum shutters. The lawn is neat—evergreen bushes trimmed to ovals and smooth white stones lining the path to the door. I wonder if politicians always choose this style of home because it gives them a sense of the White House. I can imagine his children running across the lawn, and Christmas twinkling through the front window. I can imagine it all because it is the quintessential life.
I’ve been standing on the corner long enough to not be able to feel my toes, when the former Mrs. Delafonte walks out of her front door and heads down the path. It’s a quarter ‘til three in the afternoon. She opens her mailbox and bends her head low to look inside. I am shocked. She is the opposite of my pretty mother—round and sturdy with a helmet of iron-colored hair. She is wearing the ugliest sweater I’ve ever seen, which makes me smile. She likes ugly things; she might like me. She is about to turn to go back into the house when she spots me standing across the street. I stand very still as she crosses the two-laner, her head swinging left then right to check for traffic. She throws me a cautious smile that lights up her plain face.
“Hi there,” she says. “You from around here?”
I shake my head. She looks me curiously up and down, not the way rich people do when they’re assessing your net worth, but almost sweetly like she’s seeing what she can do to help.
“You okay, honey? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” And I have, haven’t I? The ghost of mayor Delafonte’s past.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Just a little lost.” That is true, isn’t it?
“Lost in life, or in the technical sense of the word?” she asks.
I just smile.
“Very well then…” She pivots her body toward the main road I walked down to get here and says, “Highway’s that w
ay. You can also find the Greyhound station and the bus stop.” She turns so she’s facing the opposite way. “Over yonder is the pathetic excuse for a town—I’m more of a Seattle girl—but there’s a couple restaurants, the post office, stores that sell shit you don’t need, yada yada.” She turns to face me again. “Do you need some money? Do you have a way to get home?”
I nod my head, though my eyes are burning from the salt water fighting to escape my tear ducts. She wasn’t supposed to be so nice.
“Can I ask you a question?” I say. She stops her rundown of Cress End and blinks at me. There’s flour on her sweatshirt; I wonder what she’s baking.
“Yes,” she says. “I suppose you can.”
“Are you happy?”
She presses her lips together ‘til they burn white. “Well, that’s a strange question, isn’t it? I haven’t been asked that in a very long time…”
She stares out at nothing, her eyes narrow slits as she thinks. “I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time. It’s not the happiness I imagined for myself as a young girl, but I’m alive, and no one has broken my will to live.”
She looks directly at me then. “You have to be willing to be happy. Despite the mess of your life—just accept what’s happened, throw away your ideals, and create a new map of happiness to follow.”
It’s the best thing anyone has ever said to me. The best advice. I’m so sorry for what my mother and father have done to this woman that a single tear trickles down my cheek. I nod my head and turn to leave. If I were her daughter, I would have been good to her.
I am half a block away when she calls out, “Goodbye, Margo. Live well.”
I don’t stop walking, and I don’t turn to look back, though every hair on my body is standing up in a surprise salute. I can’t stop myself from wishing she had been my mother. A woman so kind, she takes the time to speak to her ex-husband’s bastard—probably the reason for her divorce in the first place. My mother wouldn’t even acknowledge me, and there she was, a stranger who had every right to hate me, speaking to me with incredible kindness.
My last stop is the wine bar my father owns. I want to see if he’s there, or if not, there should be someone who can tell me something about him. There’s a young man polishing glasses behind the bar when I step through the doors. He glances up and away quickly enough to let me know I’ve been dismissed.
“We’re not open ‘til six,” he says. “And you look too young to be in here anyway.”
“I’m looking for someone,” I say. “Mr. Delafonte…”
He looks up suddenly, and I realize I’m seeing my brother. He is the very image of his mother, with a little of Howard in his shoulders and around his downturned mouth.
“Whaddoyouwanthimfor?” His sentence comes out tinny, slurred, and strung together like a party banner.
“That’s my business,” I say. “He here?”
“Nah. He’s taken a leave of absence…”
I cock my head, shift my weight from one leg to another. I am agitated. I want to snatch the glass from his hand and scream ‘Out with it!’
“Is he sick?”
He sets down his glass and wipes his hands on a towel. “Who’s asking?”
I can’t help the smile that creeps onto my face. I try to bite it back, but, in the end, who cares?
“His bastard.”
Paul—that’s my half brother’s name—freezes. And then all of a sudden he’s polishing glasses again.
“Ah,” he says. And I wonder if everyone in the family knows about me.
“You want money?” he asks.
“Nope.”
“Then what? A reunion? Because that ain’t gonna happen.”
“I wanted to see if he was dead.”
The glass slips out of Paul’s hand. He catches it before it can meet the floor. He walks around the counter, heading toward me.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
I smile. “Tell him I said hello,” I say. “It was nice to meet you, Paul.”
He stops just short of where I’m standing. I give him one last look before I head out the door.
Mission failed, but at least I made him sick enough to take a leave of absence.
When I get back to the eating house, the box in the oven is gone. I slide down the wall until I am sitting, and squeeze my head between my knees. A leave of absence my ass.
I CAN HEAR A BABY CRYING. I curve my way down Wessex, pulling my raincoat tighter around my body. My face is dotted with rain, and every few minutes I have to lick the water from my lips to keep it from running down my chin. The crying gets louder the closer I get to the eating house. My steps slow as I lift my head to catch its direction. It’s not at all unusual to hear an infant wailing in the Bone. The people here are conditioned to concentrate on survival rather than happiness. Parents let their babies cry while they bicker and yell; a single, ragged mother lets her baby cry so she can catch a few hours of sleep. Grandmothers let their grandchildren cry because a little crying never hurt no one. But the crying that I hear is not that of an unhappy baby; it’s the cry of a child in pain; frantic and high-pitched, it’s almost a scream. Mo.
I can hear the asphalt beneath my shoes, the shush shush of the rain, and the humming of cars on the nearby highway. I try to concentrate on those sounds—sounds that are my business. But something is whispering to me; it’s a cacophony of heart, lungs, and mind, topped by the anguished screams of a baby.
I follow the cries to the crack house. Not to the door, but to a window where I can see yellow light escaping from between the drapes. I know that Mo is beneath my feet, cooking meth in the basement. That’s what he does at night. Meth which he does not use, but sells, which is probably the smartest way to go about it. Except his baby is upstairs screaming, and he can’t hear him. Maybe the baby hurt himself … Maybe…
I press my gaze between the curtains; the sliver of space doesn’t afford me much of a look around the room. I can see a bed, and for a moment I feel relief. Little Mo is not alone. His mother is kneeling among the rustled sheets, her narrow back to me, a long braid trailing down her back. Her name is Vola. She is slender and exotic, Polynesian, Mo once told me. She is always screaming at Mo, and Mo is always screaming at her. Sometimes they take their screaming to the street; Vola always has the car keys in her hand as she threatens to leave Mo for good. Mo throws her clothes on the lawn in armfuls: yellows and purples fluttering onto the weed-stricken lawn, like confetti. He screams to get the fuck out of here, and that she’s a fucking slut, and that she’s going to fucking get hers if she tries to leave him. Her response is always silence. It seems more profound than Mo’s yelling, like she’s better than his cheap, slovenly used swear words. And Mo seems to get her message, because after that he starts to yell ‘What? You think you’re better than me, you bitch? Get out of here.’ Sometimes she leaves for a while. Goes to stay with her mother in Seattle. But the next week her car is back, and they’re groping each other in the driveway—his hand up her shirt, her grinding into him with such force it looks like she’s trying to wrestle him to the ground.
Vola is not from the Bone. You can tell. Mo met her at a bar in Seattle. None of us really know her, and she has no desire to know any of us. I tilt my head to get a better look at the bed. My breath is frosting the window. I wipe away the condensation carefully, and then steeple all ten fingers against the glass to steady myself as I lean in. Mo is playing music from the basement. It rattles the windows, but even that is not enough to drown out the cries of the baby. Maybe he’s sick. Maybe he’s…
At first I don’t understand what I am seeing. My brain takes a moment to catch up—sluggish, processing through thick confusion. And my view, so obstructed! I could be wrong. Then everything goes too fast: my breathing, my heart, my thoughts. All jumbled, slamming into each other ‘til I feel dizzy.
Vola’s head is bent over something. I watch as she lifts her hand again, and again, and again. She’s hitting something. A pillow, I tell mysel
f. She had a fight with Mo, and she’s hitting a pillow. I’ve done that, exacting revenge on a pillow in the name of a school bully or my mother. Beating and beating until my knuckles were tender and my anger felt dry. But I know it’s not true, because I can’t see the baby through the slats in his crib. Vola leans back suddenly, and I can see Little Mo. He’s lying on his stomach, his head lifted, his face red from the screaming, wet from his tears. He cries so hard that he exhausts himself and stops crying, resting his head on its side and closing his eyes, his little back moving up and down as he takes big, gasping breaths.
As soon as his eyes close, Vola reaches out a hand and pinches him on the leg so hard, I flinch. His head rears up, and he starts again, his face shiny and swollen. I am frozen. I watch as Vola lifts a pillow and slams it into his head. His face bounces off the sheet, and he jerks up, his belly carrying the weight as his head and feet lift. He is shaking, and she is so calm. I don’t understand. I feel as if I am missing something, but there is nothing to miss. I am witness to something sinister. As soon as Little Mo has recovered from the pillow, Vola slaps him again, this time with so much force he rolls onto his back.
I can’t … I can’t…
I fall back from the window, gasping, my heart struggling behind my ribcage like a wounded animal. I hear a noise, and look up, trying to regulate my breathing. A crow is perched on the roof of the house just above my head. Its oiled feathers melt into the darkness of the sky, but I can see its outline, the sharpness of its curved beak. It’s looking at me, cocking its head this way then that. It caws at me as if to tell me something, then lifts its wings and flies away.
My soul reacts. It’s a deep awakening of something I thought was dead. My brain says: You’re going to lose control. You’re going to lose control. You’re going to lose control. And my brain may be right, but what do I care? How has keeping control ever benefitted me? Something else is speaking too. There is another voice—primitive, soft, foreign. The words don’t make sense, but then they also do. Go, go, go. It says. Do, do, do. Soul speak. I look for the crow to see what he says, but he is long gone. The longer I linger out here, the more she hurts Mo.