Thank You for All Things Page 28

  For the last hour or so—since I wrote the scene above—I’ve been sitting here, my body feeling too heavy to make it up the stairs to go to bed, even though sitting here means listening to Dad gasping for breaths. Breaths that sound like he was punched in the guts. It is a sickening sound, this sound of Ma’s karma.

  When I finish reading Mom’s journal entry, I wrench the memory stick out of my laptop. I wrap it in a wad of Kleenex and throw it in the trash, promising myself that I’ll never read it again. Even if that means never learning about my father.

  chapter

  TWENTY-THREE

  WHEN I get downstairs on Saturday morning, Oma is in the kitchen, talking to someone on the phone. As I’m sitting down to pour milk into my already filled cereal bowl—not filled with something good like Cap’n Crunch or Lucky Charms but some whole-grain stuff that tastes like leaves, with dried strips of fruit that chew like shoelaces—I realize that she’s talking about Grandpa Sam and that the voice at the other end is the county nurse, Barbara. She’s been making increasingly frequent stops at our house over the last two weeks. I glance in the driveway and Roger’s car is gone, which means Mom left before I woke up again.

  “I did take it,” Oma is saying. “It was one-oh-three last night. This morning he feels clammy and downright cold. I don’t know if he has a virus, or … Oh, uh-huh … Yes, I did that last night too. The top number was almost one-fifty, and this morning it’s at about forty-five. His blood pressure’s all over the place.”

  I wag my spoon in my bowl, clearing the flakes to the side until I form a little pool of milk, then scoop at it with my spoon. The little pool doesn’t empty though, of course.

  No longer hungry, I let my spoon rest against the side of the bowl and start paging through Oma’s Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is sitting on the table.

  “Okay. I’d appreciate that,” Oma finally says, then hangs up.

  Oma tugs the hem of her sky-blue tunic—as if it’s not already in place—and forces a smile. “Good morning, honey,” she says. She glances down at the page I’m reading and slips the book out from under my hand, as though she’s merely straightening up, and then she suggests that maybe I’d like to join Milo on his bike ride.

  I look up at her and see a worried half smile. She reaches down and puts her hand on my arm. “Your grandpa isn’t doing so well this morning, so Barbara is going to stop by and take a look at him. She’ll … Well, they know what signs to watch for.”

  So do I. From page five of the pamphlet from Ministry Home Care that the hospice volunteer gave us, underneath the heading: “One to Two Weeks Prior to Death.” Second paragraph: There are changes which show the physical body is losing its ability to maintain itself.

  “I think I’ll go for a ride too,” I say.

  I pee, and Oma gives me Ma’s cell phone, which Milo had forgotten to take with him. “You want to stop in and say good morning to your grandpa before you go riding?”

  I shake my head. I don’t tell her that when I see him, it’s too hard to pretend that he’s not dying.

  Milo and Feynman always go west, where there are more-challenging hills, but I’m going east, toward town.

  As I pedal, I try to think of what strategy I’ll use to get Maude Tuttle to talk. I try to think of anything but Grandpa Sam, because I don’t want to think of him anymore. I don’t want to see him either. Yesterday afternoon, while I pretended to study, Oma and Barbara wheeled the hoist out of Grandpa’s room. The contraption had him tethered around his waist and groin. His head lolled to the side, his arms hanging limply. He looked like Sammy, with no one manning the strings. As they made a wide circle around the couch, he lifted his head some, but I looked away. Mom says it’s okay if I don’t want to sit with him anymore, but it doesn’t feel okay to me.

  I find Maude Tuttle’s house easily, and I’m only a little nervous when I rap on her door. Hard, in case she’s half deaf, because she’s old enough to need a hoist too.

  It seems to take forever, but finally the curtain stretched tight over the long glass portion of her door slips to the side, and her wrinkled eye appears.

  She opens the door about six inches, as far as the chain hook will allow. Not enough for me to slip through, but wide enough that I can see that she’s not wearing any makeup. Her whole face looks like the wadded knot of Clay’s T-shirt that Mom helped me vividly see with her words.

  “I don’t want any Girl Scout cookies, and, no, I’m not buying any chocolate bars so your band can go to Timfuck tu to march in some ball game, so go away.”

  I put up my hand to keep the door from shutting. “No, no. That’s not why I’m here.”

  She peers closer, her faded eye studying me. “I’m Lucy McGowan,” I tell her. “Sam McGowan’s granddaughter. I saw you in Coffee Beans, remember?”

  “What do you want?”

  The plan I came up with just four blocks ago to woo her into talking suddenly seems lame, so I toss it out and just say it like it is—I’m convinced this is the best approach to take with someone like Maude Tuttle. “I want to ask you some things about my family, because when you’re a kid, nobody tells you anything, even if it’s stuff you have a right to know. I figure you might know something and that anybody bold enough to flip off Connie Olinger is probably bold enough to tell me.”

  Her wrinkly lids squint as she studies me.

  “Please, Miss Tuttle. I’m trying to learn something about my father. You’ve been in this town forever, so you probably know my family’s history. And no disrespect, but I figure that someone who once ran a house of ill repute is probably not going to worry much about telling the truth to a girl who’s already getting cramps because she’s old enough to get her period any day now.”

  Maude Tuttle opens the door and lets me in. The big deep-red hair she wore in the restaurant was obviously a wig, because all that’s on the top of her head is a tuft of frail white hair that looks like a dandelion gone to seed, floating above pink turf. “Yeah, yeah,” she says as she leads me across the living room. “I know I look like hell, but stop staring.”

  “I—I’m not staring,” I lie.

  “Of course you are,” she says. “What did you say your name was again?”

  “Lucy. Lucy McGowan. My grandfather is Sam McGowan. My grandmother’s name is Lillian and my mother’s name is Tess.”

  On the outside, Maude Tuttle is stark and bawdy, but her house is the exact opposite: soft-colored, refined, and classy. She shuffles her slippered feet to a rose flowered chair, where a white poodle with drip stains under his eyes is sleeping. She cracks her hands together, right next to the dog’s head, and he leaps down. “Dog’s half deaf,” she says.

  She sits down, not bothering to close her satin robe, even though her legs are naked, the skin puckered and hanging. She doesn’t invite me to take a seat.

  She watches me from the corner of her eye. “And just why should I tell you anything—if I knew something?”

  I shrug. “No reason, I guess. But I’m hoping you will.” I want to sound hard, like Maude herself, but there’s nothing hard in me now. Not after reading what I read or seeing what I saw yesterday afternoon.

  I take a deep breath, hoping I don’t cry. “I’ve been looking for my father forever, but nobody will tell me anything. Everybody tries to protect me because I’m a kid. I didn’t even know my grandpa Sam until we came here. And while I’m not thrilled with everything I’ve learned about him, at least now I know him. I want to know about my father too, and I figure you’re the person to ask. It seems to me like you don’t care much what you say to people.”

  “Sit down,” Maude says, and I take a matching chair on the other side of the end table that holds her ashtray and coffee cup.

  “I’d offer you something, but all I keep in the house is coffee and gin.”

  “That’s okay. I didn’t come here for refreshments.”

  Maude looks off in the distance, and I’m hoping she doesn’t fade off like Nordine Bickett. “Did yo
u know my family well? Or at least know of them?”

  “I knew your grandpa well, once. I saw your grandma around town now and then and heard bits of gossip about her. That’s about it.”

  “Did you know that my grandpa Sam used to be mean? Or did you only know the nice part of him, like everybody else here in town?”

  Maude laughs, her voice raspy. She reaches down and grabs a red box with the words Swisher Sweets on the front, and she pulls out a brown cigar, skinny like a cigarette, and lights it. Her mouth and cheeks fold into even deeper wrinkles as she draws on it until the tip turns orange. “Honey,” she says, after she exhales, “you ever hear it said that a bartender and a hairdresser hear it all? Well, they might hear some things, but they don’t hear shit compared to what someone like me hears.”

  She lifts her hand to make room for the old tabby cat that leaps onto her lap. She strokes her with long swipes and ruffles her hand after each caress to free the hair that’s clinging to her fingers. “I always said that my bedroom heard more secrets than Father O’Reilly’s confessional booth. Ha!” she says with a laugh, then adds, “Even after I got out of the business, some still came to me to purge themselves of their sins. I suppose they felt safe telling me their secrets, knowing I had no room to judge.”

  She looks from the cat to me. “Your grandpa told me himself about his temper. Cried like a baby each time he told me about his latest tantrum. Said he was going to stop. That he didn’t want to become—he actually said ‘become’—like his old man. Course, a couple months down the road, he’d be back again, crying the same old tune. That’s people for you.”

  “His dad beat him too when he was young, didn’t he?”

  “Yep,” Maude says, taking another pull from her cigar. “Sam got the shit beat out of him every day of his life, except for that year he was gone. Right up until the day his daddy died.”

  “Even when he was an adult?” I ask, baffled that any grown man would let his dad beat him.

  “Not with his fists anymore,” Maude says. “But there’s more ways to beat someone than with your fist.”

  “True,” I say.

  “That old man of his was mean to the crotch. He went through three wives, you know. His old man beat the first two down until they probably welcomed that heart attack and cancer. Course, neither of them had a bit of backbone. That third time he met his match, though. The one he took after Sam was grown. A real junkyard dog, that one! Oh, he could still bad-mouth his son with the best of them, but when he got home to his woman, he was as docile as a starved kitten.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope. I don’t kid, kid. It didn’t surprise me, though. Those who get into doing the mean-dance, sometimes they like to lead, sometimes they like to follow.” She clears her throat and crosses her legs. “Well, anyway, you didn’t come here to learn what you already know, and you already know that your grandpa was a mean son of a bitch in his day, now, don’tcha?”

  “Yes. I came here to learn anything you could tell me about my father.”

  “Your daddy,” she says, lifting her chin as she takes another pull from her cigar, which is filling the room (and no doubt every fiber of my clothing) with smoke.

  “I’ve been asking everybody I meet here if they ever met my father, Howard Smith. I pumped the Olingers for information, and I went to see Nordine Bickett, but her mind’s too gone to tell me anything. She gave me a puppet my grandpa carved, though. Well, she sort of gave it to me. Anyway, did you know my father, Howard Smith, or anything about him?”

  “Nordine Bickett!” Maude says with a surprisingly gentle laugh. “Ha! Now there’s a gal for you—poor woman. That little thing came into this world with angel wings. Born to a preacher and a woman who buttoned her dresses up to her eyes. Nordine. Always did the right thing yet ended up in a spicy love affair that was so hot her undies almost melted.

  “She might have been known for her goodness, and I might have been known as the devil’s whore, but that sweetheart is the only woman in this town that ever gave me the time of day. Once, when—well, doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she befriended me and defended me. Not that I needed defending, mind you. I took care of myself. But her trying just kind of warmed my heart, you know?

  “She was the first and only friend I ever had, outside of my girls. Nordine didn’t care if that weasel she was married to bitched at her for the company she kept. And if the president of the Lutheran Ladies Circle was at her table having coffee when I showed up, she’d just get out another cup and tell me to sit down. Course, I could have used one of the cups her uppity friends left on the table when they ran out the second I came through the door—acting as if they’d get the clap just by sharing the same table with me.”

  I don’t know what “the clap” is, but I suspect it’s one of those STDs that Mrs. Olinger fears Lizzie might give to Barry. And although I can’t see what would be funny about having one, I laugh along with her, just to let her know that I’m on her side.

  “I never forget someone who’s good to me. Not ever. I still slip over to see Nordine now and then, even though she doesn’t know the difference between me and her chair at this point. I pretty her up—fix her hair a little, put some makeup on her. Some people just deserve some pretty in their lives, you know?”

  The cell in my pocket pulsates against my hip, and I fidget, grateful that I at least had the sense to set it on vibrate.

  “And my dad …” I say. “What about him? What kind of things did he deserve?”

  One of Maude Tuttle’s sparse eyebrows lifts. “Impatient little thing, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I’m not supposed to ride my bike all the way to town anymore, so I can’t stay too long.”

  “Fair enough,” Maude says. “And if your ma knew where you were, I suppose you’d be in deep shit. Ha! I admire scrappy little girls.

  “I didn’t know your dad,” she says abruptly, as if she wants to get the act of disappointing me out of the way. “I know what happened, though,” she adds quickly.

  “I was years out of the business by then, but even before I was, I didn’t give Sam McGowan anything but a glass of gin and tonic and an ear, once I became friends with Nordine. Hell, he only wanted me back then because I belonged to a Millard, anyway. Still, through the years, after I left the business, some of the old regulars came by—just for a drink and a purging of their sins. They’d tell me that no one mixes up a gin and tonic like me, but, hell, that’s not why they came. They always left a nice tip on the coffee table afterward too—the high price they were willing to pay to be able to leave their sins behind when they went.”

  Maude Tuttle turns and looks me square in the face. “Be careful what you ask for,” she says sharply.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, sounding as dumb, I suppose, as someone who asks if Milo and I are identical twins.

  “You ever go snooping around for information, then afterward felt sorry you found it?”

  I think of all that I’ve learned from Ma’s journals, and I nod my head.

  “Yet you still want to know, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  Maude rolls the tip of her cigar around the bottom of the ashtray and watches the ash peel off. “Funny how family secrets can’t stay buried forever. Sooner or later, they come out. Sometimes it’s because somebody like you goes snooping around. And sometimes they come out without anybody digging for them at all.”

  Maude’s index finger busies itself outlining a pale flower on the arm of her chair. She looks out the window again.

  “Mrs. Olivia Morgan and her husband, Russell. That’s the couple who adopted me. They dressed me in finery and paraded me around town as their little darling. I had no reason to believe I wasn’t either—and, oh, how sweet life might have been if that secret could have stayed buried forever. But it didn’t, of course. I turned twelve, started sprouting a pair of perky tits, and Russell Morgan decided that I didn’t look so much like a daughter anymore. That’s w
hen the truth came out. And it knocked me right on my ass.”

  “What truth?” I ask.

  “That my mother was a hooker, and not a high-class one either. Who knows who my daddy was. Could have been any son of a bitch in a hundred-mile radius of that town. My mother gave me up right after I was born. Sold me for the price of a week’s worth of tricks to Mr. Morgan, a man desperate to replace his wife’s dead baby girl so she’d stop acting crazy and get on with her wifely duties, no doubt. He told Olivia that I was born to a young bride who died during childbirth and that the father, only a boy, wasn’t equipped to raise a kid on his own. That’s the story she knew, up until Russell decided to have his way with me. He turned the blame on me, telling Olivia where I came from and ranting on about how the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I learned both stories then, right before they threw me out on my ass, to stand on the street in my nightie with nowhere to go.”

  Maude leans over and nuzzles her cat’s head a bit, and the cat begins to vibrate like the cell phone in my pocket. “She had two other daughters by that time, so I guess I was just to tide her over until she could have her own.”

  She stubs out her half-smoked cigar and leaves it waiting at the edge of the ashtray. “Lots of times, through the years, I’ve wondered about that apple-not-falling-far-from-the-tree thing. I suppose if I’d ever been blessed—or cursed—with children, I would have found out for sure, but my guess is, had I had a daughter, she would have lain down for money too. And if I’d had a son, he would have fallen in love with a whore he could never marry no matter how much he cared. Who the hell knows. But what I do know for sure is that nothing could have hurt me more than being lied to for all those years. I would have been better off knowing that I was born to a whore from day one.”

  Miss Tuttle looks at me hard. “You know what I’m getting at here?”

  I’m tempted to counter Miss Tuttle’s conclusions with what I know about nurture versus nature, but I don’t want to sidetrack her any more than she’s already sidetracking herself.